Pagan Mythology in Lewis - Jacob (Blog Post 2)

One of my favorite things about Lewis, and the Space Trilogy in particular, is the new life breathed into pagan mythology. There is a fiction, I am careful not to use the word myth, that when Europe was inculcated by Christianity, paganism was completely wiped out. Lewis, being a medieval scholar, knew enough to know that the pagan myths continued to have life within a Christian context. One can see this very clearly in Dante. The pagan past is not rejected. Rather, it finds its center in Christ. One of my favorite parts from Perelandra was when Ransom sees the gods Venus and Mars. “Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on jungle of filth and imbecility” (Lewis 173). The two planetary archons are the gods the pagan poets of old. However, the reception of these gods was not pure. Because earth is in a state of corruption, the gods were distorted. Still, the pagan poets were not speaking satanic nonsense, but really attested to something divine. Tolkien describes a similar process in “On Fairie Stories.” The imagination, like any human faculty, has been tainted by the fall. Yet, given it’s divine origin, it still glimpses at genuine divinity.  

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