Boethius and the Unman in Perelandra

I have been spending a fair bit of time with Boethius and Saint Augustine lately. No, really that's okay. My next book will begin with quite a lengthy analysis of "The Music of the Ainur" from Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales. Having walked carefully through the text and studied, among other things, how it shows Melko's descent into evil, I am now looking into Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, and Augustine's The City of God and On Free Will. The connections of these authors and works to evil as portrayed in Tolkien has long been discussed by scholars, but those discussion have focussed largely on evil in The Lord of the Rings. 

"The Music of the Ainur" and The Lord of the Rings, however, are two very different kinds of text. The one is creation myth, told by Rúmil, the elf, to Eriol, the man, and based upon an account which Manwë, the Vala, gave to Rúmil's ancestors (LT I 52). The other, as the text itself claims, is the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo and what hobbits did in the War of the Ring (RK 6.ix.1027). From its own perspective then, The Lord of the Rings is a work of history, not mythology. So what these two works have to say about evil will be said differently. 

Not only that. When he wrote The Book of Lost Tales Tolkien was a young man trying to use fairy-stories to make sense of how he felt about the fair and foul of the Great War, a task he began while the war was still going on. When he wrote The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was a middle-aged man with sons of his own facing the evils of their own great war. Indeed, citing his own experience, he told his son, Christopher, in 1944 that maybe he should also try writing as a way to understand his own experience (Letters no. 66 p. 78). We can't assume that the younger Tolkien thought exactly the same thing as the older Tolkien. Anyone who has gone from youth to middle age without changing his opinions any number of times has not been paying attention.

Be that as it may, I have also been re-reading Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, just because it's been too long. While there are many passages in Lewis's works which jump up and down and shout "Boethius" at me, I ran across one this morning that not only shouted, but pointed quite obviously to a specific passage in The Consolation of Philosophy. First, here's the passage from Book Four, chapter Two of Boethius in the original and my translation. The italics in the translation are mine:

Nam uti cadaver hominem mortuum dixeris, simpliciter vero hominem appellare non possis, ita vitiosos malos quidem esse concesserim, sed esse absolute nequeam confiteri. Est enim, quod ordinem retinet servatque naturam; quod vero ab hac deficit, esse etiam, quod in sua natura situm est, derelinquit.

For just as you might say that a corpse is a dead man, but you could not simply call it a man, so I would grant that the wicked are evil indeed, but I could not allow that they are in absolute terms. For a thing which does not let go of its place and preserves its nature is. But a thing which forsakes its nature has also abandoned the being which depends on its nature.

4.2.33-36.

 Another passage further on explains what he means when he says that evil is nothing, that is, that evil has no independent existence of its own:

hoc igitur modo quicquid a bono deficit esse desistit. quo fit ut mali desinant esse quod fuerant. sed fuisse homines adhuc ipsa humani corporis reliqua species ostentat: quare uersi in malitiam humanam quoque amisere naturam.

Therefore anything which abandons the good in this manner ceases to be. Because of which it comes about that the evil cease to be what they had been – but their appearance, their human body, still remains and shows that they had been humans – and so when they turned to wickedness they also let go of their human nature.

4.3.15

Now here's what Lewis writes in chapter 9 of Perelandra:

Ransom kept his eyes fixed upon the enemy, but it took no notice of him. Its eyes moved like the eyes of a living man but it was hard to be sure what it was looking at, or whether it really used the eyes as organs of vision at all. One got the impression of a force that cleverly kept the pupils of those eyes fixed in a suitable direction while the mouth talked but which, for its own purpose, used wholly different modes of perception. The thing sat down close to the Lady’s head on the far side of her from Ransom. If you could call it sitting down. The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely nonhuman. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with— the managed corpse, the bogey, the Unman.

Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 9, pp. 104-05 

Now the analogy is by no means perfect, but its imperfection makes it that much more illustrative, as the following quote from the same chapter of Perelandra shows. Here the corpse of Weston (Ransom's human enemy) has been possessed and reanimated by a demon, but the descent from Weston to Unman is summed up eloquently in that last sentence. Weston 'did not defy goodness,' he 'ignored it to the point of annihilation.' His own. He has ceased to be what he was and has become the Unman. What Weston's possession and reanimation by the demon allows us to see more clearly is how both Weston and the demon have become non-existent in the way Boethius described.

[Ransom] saw a man who was certainly not ill .... He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. [His] face ... had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” It was this that kept Ransom speechless. What could you say— what appeal or threat could have any meaning— to that? And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in Perelandra by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone. 

It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken— Ransom himself had often spoken— of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.

Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 9, p. 95

I would be surprised if no one else had noticed this Boethian moment in Perelandra, but I wanted to share it. It makes such perfect sense that Lewis would have found the animation of Boethius' image of the dead man, which you could no longer call simply a man, to be just what he needed to convey what is at stake at this moment as the Unman tempts the Green Lady to defy the good.