March 26, 2011

C. S. Lewis paints an interesting picture of evil in Perelandra. The villain of the story, Weston, is a bad guy to begin with and harbors strange spiritual ideas. When the hero, Ransom, refuses to adopt Weston's beliefs, Weston calls on the spirits that have been teaching him to enter his body and becomes possessed by the Devil himself or a demon of some kind (we are never sure which). A man we already thought to be evil is replaced by something even worse, something as close to pure evil as Lewis can get it. This being is called the Un-man by Ransom and is used to show Lewis' ideas of evil. I think Lewis' description of evil is very accurate.

First, the essence of evil is nothingness. If God is good, then everything He created must also be good. Evil is, therefore, the absence of good. The closest thing to true evil that exists is a twisted perversion of good. When Ransom sees the Un-man smile for the first time ever, he describes it as "not [defying] goodness, [but ignoring] it to the point of annihilation" (Lewis 95). This description rings true for me because the idea of evil being created by a good God is contradictory. Lewis' description makes sense: everything, including the Devil, was good in the beginning; evil came into the world when the Devil perverted his own goodness. Any good thing can become evil upon twisting. Take, for instance, parental love. A mother's love for her son is a good thing. However, if that son commits murder, it would be evil of the mother to try to keep him from the consequences for his wrongdoing.

The second characteristic of the essence of evil ties into the first: evil is mindless and empty. Take, for example, reason: reason is a good thing created by God. Therefore, evil, being the absence of good, is also the absence of reason. Ransom notes this when he says that the Un-man "regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon... It assumed reason as externally and inorganically as it had assumed Weston's body. The moment the Lady [Perelandra's Eve] was out of sight it seemed to relapse" (Lewis 110). Ransom also describes the Un-man as a "mechanised corpse" (Lewis 110). It has no sense of rhyme or reason when it is not busy trying to tempt the Lady to disobey Maleldil (God), wandering at random around the island. This takes me back to Mere Christianity, where Lewis talks about the reason and logic behind the idea of morality. If belief in God is reasonable, then disbelief in Him (an absence of good) is evil.

The third characteristic of the essence of evil is torture. The Un-man speaks Ransom's name over and over again, just to bother him, although it never actually attacks him. If Ransom answers, the Un-man replies with, "'Nothing'" (Lewis 105). Ransom quickly realizes that there is no use in replying and decides that "if he must hear either the word Ransom or the word Nothing a million times, he would prefer the name Ransom" (Lewis 106). The Un-man is clearly trying to frustrate and wear Ransom down at this point. Even so early in the game, it knows that Ransom is a threat and it is trying to get rid of him.

If his own torture were not enough, Ransom must constantly follow the Un-man around to prevent it from hurting every living thing it can get its hands on. It starts with the island's frogs, "quietly and almost surgically inserting his forefinger, with its long sharp nail, under the skin behind the creature's head and ripping it open" (Lewis 94). When it is not tempting the Lady, it wanders the island "[grabbing] at any beast or bird within its reach and [pulling] out some fur or feathers" (Lewis 110). As the Un-man states in one conversation with the Lady, "'...[It] is for this that I came here, that you may have Death in abundance'" (Lewis 98). Evil's goal is not to spread itself—to do so would be a form of reproduction, which was created to be a good thing, and would also require some reasoning and intelligence, which evil lacks. Its only goal is to eradicate good and the life it imbues. Pure evil cannot have life and so tries to destroy that which does.

I think the closest thing to an Un-man that we have seen here on Earth is a serial killer. An interesting thing about most serial killers is that they started their careers with animal abuse. However they start, the research I have done into real-life serial killers and even the way cop shows portray their fictional serial killers generally show a clear psychopath with fairly standard characteristics. In the space most people have a soul, serial killers seem to have nothingness. Although their attacks may be carefully planned out, the destruction they cause is often mindless when it comes to reasons and consequences for their actions. Torture is also pretty common among serial killers, as if they see something in others that they lack in themselves and, in retaliation against the life they see, they must cause pain and death. This is probably the main reason why the government-sanctioned use of torture is so contentious: torture is linked with evil, and it is hard to justify its use when people view torture as a tool of the enemy. Not only is torture stooping to the enemy's level, but it is an evil act no matter how evil the person on whom it is used.

The fourth characteristic of the essence of evil is deception. As stated already, the Un-man puts on a nice façade of reason when it is around the Lady. It employs the classic temptation techniques the serpent used on Eve in its attempts to repeat Earth's fall of man on Perelandra. It starts with a statement to cause confusion: "'...He [Maleldil] has not forbidden you to think about [disobeying His command]'" (Lewis 89). He then moves into a half-truth: "'...Maleldil has sent you other men whom it had never entered your mind to think of and they have told you things the King [Perelandra's Adam] himself could not know'" (Lewis 90). He then puts out a blatant lie: "'[The women of Earth] are, as it were, little Maleldils. And because of their wisdom, their beauty is...much greater than yours...'" (Lewis 91).

The Un-man even employs deception against Ransom, who alone is allowed to see what the Un-man truly is. On occasion, "it allowed Weston to come back into its countenance. ... Ransom never could make up his mind whether it was a trick or whether a decaying psychic energy that had once been Weston were indeed fitfully and miserably alive within the body that sat there beside him" (Lewis 111). It is entirely likely that the Un-man is just playing with Ransom's mind, as when it repeats his name over and over, in an attempt to frustrate and confuse Ransom into a helpless and (to the Lady) less than helpful state. Even though Ransom knows this, the attack is so clever and pointed that he is thrown off guard.

Lewis' description of evil seems to me to be very accurate. It is deceptive, as seen in the Garden of Eden and most people's lives; it is torturous, tormenting, and destructive; it is mindless; and, first and foremost, it is nothing in its purest form. A lot of people like to envision evil as the reasonable opposite to good, romanticizing to the point of almost worshiping it. If they understood evil as Lewis did, and see through the mask as Ransom does, perhaps they would be in for a bit of a shock. Whether it is diluted by popular notions or stripped of all fantasy by those such as Lewis, I find that it is probably wiser just to stay away.

Works Cited

1. Lewis, C. S. Perelandra: a Novel. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.