Reading Copy – Do Not Cite
Ransom as a Model of Magnanimity in Perelandra
paper given at the Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature, Houston Baptist
University,
September 21, 2013
Laura A. Smit, Calvin College
In February of 1943, C. S. Lewis delivered the lectures later published as The Abolition of
Man, arguing that contemporary education produces people who lack the integrating virtue of
magnanimity to unite intellect and appetite. Quoting the 12th-century monk Alain de Lille,
Lewis says, “The head rules the belly through the chest.” Our intellect or reason governs our
appetites by means of disciplined, stable, ordered emotion or desire. Though Lewis does not say
this explicitly, it is my premise that the disciplining and ordering of emotion and desire is
primarily an aesthetic act. The object of desire is the beautiful. The classic definition of beauty
is that which attracts or draws us. So getting our desires properly aligned means training our
aesthetic sense, which then allows our reason to control our animal appetites. That is to say, our
desires are trained by means of the imagination, which Lewis calls “the organ of meaning.”1 Our
intellect is the organ of truth, but truth needs to be imaginatively appropriated in order to control
our appetites and actions. This is the function of magnanimity, the chest.
Lewis deliberately focused his next novel, That Hideous Strength, on the ideas he had
explored in The Abolition of Man. He tells us this in the preface to that novel. Various scholars
have therefore explored the connections between That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of
Man. What has not been explored as far as I can discover is the way in which Perelandra, the
novel that Lewis was finishing as he prepared his 1943 lectures, explores the same theme of
1 “Bluspels and Flanlansferes,” Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 265.
magnanimity, especially in the character of Ransom. It is the lack of magnanimity that
“unmans” Weston, because magnanimity is the essential human virtue that sets human beings
above animals. Ransom confronts and defeats Weston by instantiating a Christian version of
Aristotle's magnanimous man. Whereas in That Hideous Strength the theological ideas from The
Abolition of Man control and shape the story, in Perelandra, the story is an imaginative
experiment for the discovery of these theological ideas. (I suspect that this is one reason
Perelandra is a stronger novel than That Hideous Strength, though defending that thesis is
beyond this paper.)
In order to see magnanimity at play in Perelandra we first need some understanding of
just what this virtue is. Magnanimity – or “great-souledness” - is a central virtue in Aristotle's
ethics, but Aristotle's portrayal of magnanimity strikes most western people as less-thanobviously virtuous. Magnanimity in Aristotle is “the virtue of claiming the greatest of honors
when one rightly judges oneself deserving of them.”2 The magnanimous person is not
concerned with small things, like possessions, but only with deserving and receiving the highest
honor, and yet honor cannot really please or satisfy the magnanimous person because it is
necessarily being offered by inferior people. The magnanimous person longs for selfsufficiency, yet is completely dependent on the admiration of others. Mary Keys summarizes
what she calls
three tensions inherent in Aristotle's account of [magnanimity]: (1) between love of self,
or rather of one's superiority, and love of nobility or virtue as such, as a good that can be
common at least among friends; (2) between a focus on honor and a contempt for it; and
(3) between a longing to accomplish the greatest deeds and a bittersweet sense that in
human life nothing is truly great.3
For modern people in the west, people who have been shaped – whether we recognize it or not –
2 Mary Keys, Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 144
3 Keys, p. 147
by a Christian understanding of virtue, Aristotle's magnanimous man sounds like a narcissistic
jerk, a man trying to pass himself off as divine, lacking in all awareness of his own creaturely
status.
In another yet-to-be-written paper, I hope to explore the history of how Aristotelian
magnanimity was transformed throughout the medieval and early modern period into an
appropriately Christian virtue. For now, a quick look at Aquinas must suffice.
In the Seconda-Secundae of his Summa Theologica, Aquinas relocates magnanimity as a
subset of the virtue of fortitude. It is our desire for greatness, or what Lewis will later explore as
our desire for glory, that stirs up the soul to courageous behavior. Aquinas modifies Aristotle's
account of magnanimity in three ways. First, he rejects the idea that a virtuous person is in any
sense self-sufficient. Aseity is an incommunicable divine attribute to which we ought not aspire.
Human beings are meant to depend on one another, to live in mutuality. Aquinas is a Dominican
and a mendicant; the idea of dependence is central to his concept of virtue. Second, he adds
gratitude to his picture of magnanimity. Aristotle's magnanimous man is uncomfortable being
indebted and so chooses never to focus on what he has received from others. But Aquinas insists
that being grateful for what we have received is a mark of magnanimity. And third, he explicitly
pairs magnanimity with humility. This makes no sense at all on the Aristotelian account, but for
Aquinas magnanimity is always about the pursuit of a common good, which turns out to be
glorifying God rather than the self.
The vice that Aquinas contrasts with magnanimity is pussilanimity, “a shrinking of soul
and a narrowing of aspirations.”4 Pussilanimity can take the appearance of virtue, claiming to be
prudence or wisdom or humility, but in fact it is a willingness to settle for being much less than
we could be. To put this in terms that contemporary American Christians might understand,
4 Keys, p. 153
saying “I'm not perfect, just forgiven” is a good example of pussilanimity. Although it sounds
humble, such a statement is actually a narrowing of aspiration, a surrender to mediocrity or even
to vice, a decision not even to try pursuing the virtuous life.
Now although Lewis sometimes credits Aristotle for his idea of magnanimity, in practice
his use of the term is shaped by the Christian reception of Aristotle. Following Aquinas as well
as other Christian thinkers, Lewis presents true magnanimity as connected to humility.
Magnanimity is the virtue of desiring and deserving the highest honor; but Lewis – like most
Christians – holds that the highest honor is God's approval, which we deserve only as a result of
God's gracious work of transformation in our lives. In his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis
points out that in the Bible both God's approval and this transformation of our nature are called
“glory.” He likens our desire for God's approval to the desire a child has to please her parent.
Childlike humility is the necessary prerequisite for receiving both God's approval and His
transforming work.
In his Oxford History of the English Language volume, Lewis criticizes early 16thcentury writers, such as Sidney, for being excessively influenced by Aristotle's portrait of the
Magnanimous Man without retaining the corrections of the medieval Christian reception. So
Lewis speaks of the “astonishing absence of humility” in both Sidney and Spenser.5 Earlier in
that volume, he offers this critique:
Elevation and gravity of language are admirable, or even tolerable, only when they grow
from elevation and gravity of thought. To imitate them directly is to manufacture a
symptom. The trouble is not that such manufacture is impossible. It is only too possible:
even now any clever boy can be taught to write Ciceronian prose. The gesture and
accents of magnanimity, laboriously reproduced by little men, clever, meticulous, . . .
nervously avoiding what is 'low', make an ugly spectacle.6
5
6
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. III
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 53. Hereafter OHEL.
OHEL, p. 24.
This faux-magnanimity seems to be what Aquinas calls pussilanimity, but Lewis gives it another
name. He calls it “vulgarity.”
Now – on to Perelandra. Ransom is challenged to display magnanimity already in his
journey to Perelandra. Lewis-the-narrator asks him how he feels about being packed in a coffinlike box and sent sailing through the heavens to Perelandra. Ransom answers that while his
reason accepts the Oyarsa's ability to conduct him safely on this journey, his “nerves and
imagination” are not quite so convinced. Ransom has enough faith, enough training in stable
emotion and desire, to get into the box. But he will need a good deal more to face the challenges
of the UnMan.
One of the first things that happens to Ransom in Perelandra is a remaking of his powers
of desire. Since magnanimity is the ordering, disciplining, structuring of our desires so that what
we desire most is the highest good, the journey toward being a magnanimous person starts when
one's desires are lifted to a new height.
The smells in the forest were beyond all that he had ever conceived. To say that they
made him feel hungry and thirsty would be misleading; almost, they created a new kind
of hunger and thirst, a longing that seemed to flow over from the body into the soul and
which was a heaven to feel. Again and again he stood still, clinging to some branch to
steady himself, and breathed it all in, as if breathing had become a kind of ritual.7
Desire flows between body and soul, mediated by the breath, that is, the chest.
This activation of the chest, of the power of magnanimity, allows Ransom to pass his first
test. He tastes a fruit that introduces him to a new understanding of taste:
[I]t was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at
all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of
among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draft of this on Earth
wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified.8
So this is a very powerful experience of appetite. Having tasted this intoxicating fruit, Ransom
7
8
Perelandra, (Macmillan, 1975), chap. 3
Perelandra, chap. 3.
naturally and quite unthinkingly begins to reach for a second. But then something stops him.
[I]t came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a
pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or
what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favor of tasting this
miracle again.... Yet something seemed opposed to this “reason.” It is difficult to
suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much
deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again.
Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity – like
asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day. . . . [H]e stood pondering over this and
wondering how often in his life on Earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire,
but in the teeth of desire and in obedience to a spurious rationalism. . . .9
In this little episode we have an imperative appetite being restrained by a strange desire that
corrects a faulty operation of reason. Reason alone would be seduced by appetite into condoning
indulgence, which Lewis here labels as “vulgarity,” the same label he gives to fauxmagnanimity. Indeed, Ransom remembers that this has often happened to him before. He has
been living a vulgar life, making gestures that look like magnanimity, but are not. This strange
new quality of desire now intervenes to change his practice. This new desire reveals the
“spurious” nature of his reasoning – that it is not in fact rooted in truth – and so restrains the
appetite. The head alone cannot rule the belly. The head rules the belly through the chest.
This experience seems small at the moment, but it is the basis for much of what follows
in the novel. Tinidril later elaborates on a similar experience, of going in search of one joy and
refusing the joy that is found.
One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before: that at
the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting
aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And
if you wished – if it were possible to wish – you could keep it there. You could send your
soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You
could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the
other.10
Here too, in order for the appetite to be properly satisfied, desire must be properly ordered.
9
10
Perelandra, chap. 3.
Perelandra, chap. 5.
There is a discipline to that ordering, a discipline that comes so naturally to the unfallen Lady
that it is almost impossible for her to imagine being without it. Still she recognizes that there is a
moment of choice governing the orientation of her desire. Choice always involves imagination,
since imagination is the organ of potentiality. We can only explore what is potential via
imagination. So Tinidril's choice takes place in the imagination, with two possibilities being
presented, and one being chosen.
Ransom's next lesson in magnanimity is through his growing awareness of “being in
Someone's Presence.”11 On Perelandra, the presence of Maleldil is experienced as a sort of
“crowding” or “fullness” that is at first very unpleasant. But over time Ransom learns to
experience this presence as
a sort of splendor as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you
and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it
suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum.12
This is very similar to the description of glory in “The Weight of Glory.” Ransom is learning to
desire and enjoy the glory of God. The difference between the wrong way and the right way of
experiencing this glory is connected to the “assertion of independence” or a desire to be on one's
own. This sort of assertion is at the heart of an Aristotelian understanding of magnanimity, but it
is rejected by the Thomistic understanding, which links magnanimity to creaturely humility. It is
just such an awareness of creatureliness that Lewis is describing here.
Ransom is now ready to face the challenge for which he has been brought into
Perelandra. He now encounters Weston. Initially, Weston is presented as almost comically
vulgar. He has taken on the trappings of religious language, the elevated gestures of
magnanimity. Indeed, the word “magnanimous” is used ironically to describe him. And yet
11
12
Perelandra, chap. 6.
Perelandra, chap. 6.
there is no magnanimous content behind the gestures. His desires are as poorly ordered as ever.
He explains to Ransom:
To do myself justice, I should make it clear that the false humanist ideal of knowledge as
an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve
utility.13
Weston appears completely unaware that this statement is profoundly disordered, but it is just the
sort of utilitarian approach to truth that characterizes the Green Book in The Abolition of Man.
Over the course of the novel, Weston's vulgarity becomes more and more evident as he makes
less effort to conceal it – showing itself in crude language and childish acts of vandalism.
Weston's primary mode of temptation against Tinidril is to awaken a desire for a twisted
form of honor. He suggests to her that she should bear the burden of disobedience in order to
lead her husband and her children into freedom. He offers her disobedience under the cloak of
faux-magnanimity.
The whole point of her action – the whole grandeur – would lie in taking it without the
King's knowledge, in leaving him utterly free to repudiate it, so that all the benefits
should be his, and all the risks hers, and with the risk, of course, all the magnanimity, the
pathos, the tragedy, and the originality.14
The temptation is being offered to her imagination, not to her reason. Ransom worries that the
argument is making progress when he sees
her progressive disregard of the plain intellectual bones of the problem. It became harder
to recall her mind to the data – a command from Maleldil, a complete uncertainty about
the results of breaking it, and a present happiness so great that hardly any change could
be for the better. The turgid swell of indistinctly splendid images which the Unman
aroused, and the trasncedent important of the central image, carried all this away. She
was still in her innocence. No evil intention had been formed in her mind. But if her will
was uncorrupted, half her imagination was already filled with bright poisonous shapes.
“This can't go on,” thought Ransom. . . 15
It can't go on because reason cannot long restrain the appetite when once the imagination fails.
13
14
15
Perelandra, chap. 7.
Perelandra, chap. 10.
Perelandra, chap. 10.
Resistance to such an attack cannot be in the realm of argument.
By the time Ransom must resist, his own training in magnanimity has reached the stage
that he can indeed rule his own appetites – in this case the natural desires to avoid conflict and
pain, to run from danger, to seek his own safety.... Here again, Lewis seems to follow Aquinas
rather than Aristotle. Disciplined imagination, rightly ordered desires, and stable emotions
empower fortitude.
By the end of the book, the chestless Weston has been consumed. He has no resources to
defend his humanity against the encroaching power of the demonic. In contrast, Ransom is
recognized as an equal by the great Father King and Mother Queen who represent what human
beings were always meant to be. Their highest desire is to live within the will of Maleldil,
something that they pursue not individually but together in community. Together the three of
them experience a prolonged time of imaginative immersion in the glory of Maleldil, something
that is only possible for magnanimous people with well-developed chests.