Blessed aliens in C.S. Lewis and G.W. Leibniz, or the problem of the fragility of the unfallen world

I finally read in audiobook C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. They are, in order, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945) I am a big C.S. Lewis fan. I read almost all his books (Miracles, Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Narnia chronicles, Surprised by Joy, Great Divorce, Til we have Faces, A Grief Observed, Discarded Image, etc).

The space trilogy is a rather obscure work in his oeuvre, and not many people have read it. I think this is undeserved. It's such a rich series with beautiful world building (don't expect hard SF but more baroque space fantasy), and with rich explorations about virtue, character, gender, academic politics, longtermist and eugenicist delusions, and the Fall.

Since it would take too long a post to discuss all of it, let's focus on the topic of the Fall, which forms the main focus of the second book, Perelandra, which plays on Venus. Some spoilers are inevitable.

The space trilogy's first two books follow a Cambridge philologist, Elwin Ransom, who is loosely based on C.S. Lewis's friend, JRR Tolkien. Ransom is kidnapped while he is strolling in the countryside by a former classmate, who wishes to sacrifice him to the Oyarsa (which we later learn is a kind of presiding angel) of Mars. But good things begin to happen, and Ransom learns that our planet (called “the silent planet” for this reason) has fallen, but the other planets did not.

CS Lewis's work connects to a thorny issue in Christian theology. On standard accounts of evil in the western Christian tradition, death, disease and our separateness from God are not caused by God but by us. We humans have, through the Fall, brought all our misery upon ourselves (and upon the cosmos). According to Augustine we were prideful and thought we knew better, so we disobeyed God. In this way, God is completely off the hook—it's our free will that caused it. But then is the question: Why did God make such a fragile world, with creatures likely to be tempted, a tempter (snake) to lure them, and a universe that is so unstable that it gets completely upset by this one momentous act? You could imagine a more robust system than what Christian theologians envisage our universe is like.

The way my co-author Johan De Smedt and I pose this problem in our short monograph The Challenge of Evolution to Religion is as follows:

Suppose that an engineer designed a faulty machine. The machine is complex, capable of performing complicated sequences of actions and making sound decisions, but it cannot but make particular errors in certain situations. A technician causes serious harm while operating this machine out of his own free will. Would not both technician (who committed the harm) and engineer (who designed the machine) appear in a court of law?

Even if we are responsible, is God not at least equally responsible? For making Eve gullible, or prideful? To make a world with creatures that are bound to fail?

Maybe the problem becomes somewhat mitigated when we consider that our planet is likely not the only one with life. And this is exactly what C.S. Lewis does in the Space Trilogy. To flesh out an idea of the Fall and to think about sin and evil but then with the broader lens of alien life.

C.S. Lewis was not the first to imagine this. An early example can be found in Leibniz's Theodicy (1710). Leibniz argues that we live in the best of all possible worlds. In this world, we live in a harmony that is pre-established by God. We could not do otherwise, because it is the best harmony, willed by God, but we do freely choose (so he is a compatibilist). But if you look around you, you will see plenty of horrors: death, serious disease, wars, murders, etc. And if we say that God ordained all of this, it seems to stretch credulity to call ours the best of all possible worlds (as Voltaire satirized in his Candide).

Leibniz thinking about aliens, by Sofia Jeppson

However, Leibniz has an important consideration. Maybe we are just stuck on a very sucky planet. Maybe Earth is just uniquely bad in that we fell there, but there are plenty of blessed space aliens who never fell and who all enjoy salvation (compared to our earth, where it seems most people are damned). C.S. Lewis develops exactly this idea. Here it is in Leibniz's words:

[T]here is an infinite number of globes, as great as and greater than ours, which have as much right as it to hold rational inhabitants, though it follows not at all that they are human. It is only one planet, that is to say one of the six principal satellites of our sun; and as all fixed stars are suns also, we see how small a thing our earth is in relation to visible things, since it is only an appendix of one amongst them. It may be that all suns are peopled only by blessed creatures, and nothing constrains us to think that many are damned, for few instances or few samples suffice to show the advantage which good extracts from evil.

Leibniz also considers that we don't even know how big the universe is and just how many inhabited worlds could be out there, and then it may be possible our earth and all its evils is a particularly unfortunate outlier in all the goodness that abounds in God's creation.

Thus since the proportion of that part of the universe which we know is almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown, and which we yet have cause to assume, and since all the evils that may be raised in objection before us are in this near nothingness, haply it may be that all evils are almost nothingness in comparison with the good things which are in the universe.

So, it's okay. If you are suffering in a war situation or from some potentially fatal disease, just think of all those blessed aliens. William James thought very little of this, and sneered in his Pragmatism (1907)

Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of 'samples' of the genus 'lost-soul' whom God throws as a sop to the eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded is the glory of the blest. What he gives us is a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm.

Now, C.S. Lewis exactly undertakes this task in Perelandra (though also in the other installments of the trilogy, but more in the background). As mentioned earlier, Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has fallen creatures. Our hapless philologist Ransom is sent to Perelandra on a mission. He soon discovers what it is: in the incarnation of Weston (his former kidnapper) Satan has set foot on Perelandra and tries to tempt the first woman (the green-skinned “Eve”) of that planet to disobey God, which would be to set foot on the fixed earth.

Ransom tries to convince the Lady not to do it, but the un-man (Satan) goes on without relenting. Every day is a series of verbal assaults and cajoling. Satan even resorts to whispering feminist ideas (of which C.S. Lewis was no fan) in her ear, fills her mind with ideas of glory, ideas about how disobeying God is actually obeying him, vanity, etc. Ransom is close to despair, thinking “This can't go on.” The woman holds fast, but it's clear she will eventually give in. So there's nothing for Ransom to do but to physically fight his opponent, a struggle between two middle-aged untrained men.

What struck me, reading this imaginative account, is how fragile creation still seems to be. The moment the possibility of Fall presents itself, humanity (or whatever rational creature) is susceptible to it. Now, interestingly, C.S. Lewis's theology of the Fall here (and in Narnia) harkens back to old theological ideas, of the early church father Irenaeus. Namely, the Fall is because of human innocence, and because humans were deceived by the devil. The atonement, in C.S. Lewis's view, is modeled not on Anselm's penal substitution (where Jesus suffers just punishment on our behalf) but rather Christus Victor. This model of the Atonement emphasizes Christ's victory over evil and over the devil. We see it also in Narnia.

Ransom then becomes a kind of Christ-figure (as we can read, “‘My name also is Ransom,’said the Voice”). But crucially, while he suffers in this ordeal of physical struggle, he doesn't die. He's not injured except for a wound at his foot that would continue to plague him throughout book three.

So you get the intriguing idea that a fallen creature, a human being, can help to redeem an unfallen world, which I think is really neat and sends theological tinkling down my spine. As Ransom relates the Fall on Earth to the Lady “He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good, and what they lost we have not seen.” Crucially, though, good can be made of a crooked, bad situation.

William James thought that Leibniz's claim of blessed aliens was ridiculous and unfeeling (“a cold literary exercise"). In Perelandra we get instead a hot literary exercise: hot because we are on Venus, and because it's a passionately written story. I think this lays some of James's objections to rest about blessed aliens, but the worry remains: the cosmos still seems fragile in its susceptibility to evil

I think (and have argued in print, e.g., here) that suffering pervades our cosmos, that sin can come into being whenever you have rational creatures (and not through some historical Fall). Our universe is beautiful, but still fragile, not to one momentous Fall (I think) but rather, to the many instances of harm and suffering we can see around us and experience ourselves, and that we can safely extrapolate to other planets. Thus, the problem of constructing a credible theodicy for theists remains.