Did C.S. Lewis believe that everything has some hidden meaning or purpose?
**
Is that what he’s hinting at in this passage from Perelandra?**
“It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,’ said the Voice. And he knew it was no fancy of his own. He knew it for a ver curious reason–because he had known for many years that his surname was not derived from ransom but from Ranolf’s son. It would never have occurred thus to associate the two words. to connect the name ransome with the act of ransoming would have been for him a mere pun … All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed… was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can… Before his Mother had borne him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name for a payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their coming together in just this fashion.” (Pg. 125.)
Lewis also seems to have said something like this in “God on the Dock.”
“**These things are no accidents. With Him there are no accidents. When He created the vegetable world He knew already what dreams the annual death and resurrection of the corn would cause to stir in pious Pagan minds, He knew already that He Himself must so die and live again and in what sense, including and far transcending the old religions of the Corn King. He would say ‘This is my Body.’ **Common bread, miraculous bread, sacramental bread – these three are distinct, but not to be separated. Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another.”
So would Lewis have believed in “The Bible Codes” if he were alive today?
I don’t think that CSL would have taken bible codes seriously by the time he was writing, even though there is evidence that in his youth he passed through (as I did) an occult phase. The support for this idea is mainly in “Surprised by Joy”.
What I think he is getting at is that the relationship of choice and time is more complicated than it appears at first sight.
If you allow the possibility that God is outside time, and can see our entire timeline in one go, a lot of the difficulties in understanding our relationship with God simply evaporate. On the other hand a fresh lot appear, mainly to do with God taking action based on completely free decisions that we haven’t yet made.
Now with my other hat on, as an SF writer, this is really fertile ground for growing stories. If you’ll allow I’ll quote from something that I’ve just written and am currently trying to sell to a publisher I’ll try to explain. Dan is a human schoolkid, Tom is an alien time traveller. They are on a spaceship that neither of them knows how to fly, but they have set up an orbit that will, in about six hours time, smash into the bad guys’ ship, kill everyone on both ships but save the human race:
The point is that the universe is something that happens exactly once, there is only one set of events, and somehow our decisions, God’s actions and what we call chance all join up to make the one whole. The difference between the planned and the accidental disappears when God is involved.
Thank you, but if “The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed” is an earthly illusion (as per the quote from Perelandra), wouldn’t that mean that there are no coincidences?
And if Lewis held that view when he was writing Perelandra, how could he avoid the view that there’s some hidden, occult meaning in everything?
I mean if Ransom’s insights were true, wouldn’t any patterns found in the Bible,or Moby Dick, or the outworkings of history have to be designed?
Take “Ronald Wilson Reagan” for example.
His mother chose to give him a first name with six letters, and a middle name with six letters, and his father gave him a surname with six letters, and he became the strong leader of the United States at a critical time in world history.
Some of us yanks think he was a good president.
I voted for him.
But if what C. S. Lewis seems to be saying here in Perelandra is true, wouldn’t his name’s connection to 666 have to be designed?
Wouldn’t he have to be some kind of type or forerunner of the antiChrist?
Or take Pres. Barack Obama (his political polar opposite.)
Wouldn’t the fact that he was senator of Illinois before he was elected president, and that the Illinois pick three state lottery was 666 the night following the election (the first time he was elected president) have to be designed?
Then wouldn’t your username here (and your replying to this post on C.S. Lewis) have to be designed?
Wasn’t wormwood the name of the apprentice demon in “The Screwtape Letters” (by C.S. Lewis)?
Is your choosing that user name here designed to tell us something about you (or to tell you something about yourself), or was Lewis just all wrong when he wrote Perelandra (or is there a third alternative I haven’t thought of)?
Thanks for your comments, I think I understand better wher you are coming from now.
Taking your last point first, yes, my username is chosen partly as a tribute to CSL and is the name of the recipient of the Screwtape letters. The other reason for choosing it is that the word means “bitterness”, and I recognise the bitterness of a heaven and hell theology, which I have come here to escape.
However with the rest of the argument I think there are two separate points. Quite rightly you say that everything is interconnected, nothing is truly accidental, because once you step outside time everything is known. Where I think this falls down is if you then try to read a usable message from the accidental. Yes, the digits 666 turn up in all sorts of places, that is no accident. However if God knows everything in advance he also knows about our attempts to decode the accidental and can arrange that they fail. You can’t get a move in ahead of the transtemporal, because the transtemporal can always go back and get there first.
It’s a bit like Douglas Adams’ Milliways. You can only get there by time travel, so you can always turn up without a reservation and get a table, then go back in time to before they were full and make the booking.
So my answer is this: Are these things connected? Yes. Can you get useful information from these patterns? Sorry, no.
i thank you for your comments, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.
But what purpose would there be in these interconnections if they weren’t meant to convey anything?
Taking the Bible codes as an example (and you just said “nothing is truly accidental”), what would be the purpose of embedding the names of the Jewish sages, and their birth dates, and the dates of their deaths, into the early chapters of Genesis if no one was supposed to notice it and extract some kind of message?
I’m not following you here.
If the places the digits show up aren’t accidental, aren’t they purposely designed?
It sounds like your saying God purposely designed such things only to thwart human attempts at decoding their meaning.
Why would He do that?
I could see the 666 connections to Reagan and Obama being meant to warn people against the extreme right and the extreme left (although I never really considered Reagan extreme right), but (given the negative associations in the Bible) how could they be meant to convey anything good, and how could they be intentionally designed without being intended to convey something to someone somewhere ?
It seems to me that saying that such things aren’t intended to mean anything is the same as saying they’re accidental, and that’s why it seems to me that you’re contradicting yourself when you say
Now take your username.
You say
That was your reason for taking that name, but isn’t Lewis saying that God always has His own reason for such things here?
(Perelandra, pgs. 125, 127.)
And isn’t he saying that such things are meant to convey some message to someone here?
(pg. 125.)
(As anyone who’s read Perelandra knows, the voice of Christ went on to say “my name is Ransom too,” and it all came together to convey the message to Ransom that if he ran from his duty there, Christ would have to come to that world to die a second time.)
Now here’s an unpleasant thought.
What message would God be most likely to convey to a devote Evangelical or Catholic Christian visiting this site by a universalist using the name of the fictional demon “wormwood” (especially if he’s read the Screwtape Letters)?
And if Lewis is really saying that there are no accidents (and if he’s right about that), wouldn’t your username be meant (by God) to convey some kind of negative message to someone about you, this board, or UR?
And if God doesn’t lie, wouldn’t it follow that He doesn’t arrange circumstances to convey wholly misleading messages?
Of course the name “Benedict” means blessed, and the name of “Benedict Arnold” has lived in infamy for over two hundred years.
And I believe Judah (or Judas, the name of the most infamous traitor in history) means “praise,” or “thanks.”
I can think of many reasons everything can’t be intended to have some meaning, but is the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th saying they do in these passages?
Let’s start with the fairly trivial. My login name is meant to convey the fact that I have a sense of humour, nothing else.
There are three separate points that I am making. The first is that to someone outside time, most of all God, but we can play with time travellers to illustrate the idea, there is nothing truly accidental. This is true. If you discover a pattern in the bible, or even in Moby Dick (cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html) you haven’t surprised God, who knew about it already.
Secondly God can make use of patterns that are to us random coincidences. There are more anecdotes of this sort of thing happening than I can shake a stick at. This is what Lewis was using in Perelandra, something where the raw data is known all along, but its significance only becomes known after the event.
My third point is that I don’t think God wants us to go trawling through scripture looking for patterns as a way of getting useful real-world information. I don’t think he intends this to work, so it probably won’t, and getting into a prediction interpreting contest with someone who is outside time is likely to do you as much good as having a breath-holding contest with a fish. Secondly as the scans of Moby Dick indicate you can get false hits from anything.
Going from “I’ve found a pattern in the bible that looks a bit like a message” to “I have a message from God” is to my mind a completely unwarrented leap. Yes, the pattern is there. Yes, God knew about it and everything that would come of it. No, it doesn’t mean you can use it to second-guess God. He never meant it that way.
But isn’t saying that there are no such things as accidents (or that “there is no such thing as chance or fortune beyond the Moon”) saying the opposite?
Isn’t Lewis saying that God intended everything per se?
(i.e. That He not only knew every pattern that’s there, and everything that would come of it, but intended everything that would come of it, and every message that might be read into it for the very purpose of conveying that message.)
So whatever you intended by your username, wouldn’t a passage like this imply that (contrary to Aquinas btw) your username was designed by God to stir any associations it might stir in a visitor to this forum for that very purpose?
(Perelandra, pgs. 125,127.)
It seems to me (even if it throws Augustine under the bus, and isn’t exactly what I’d expect from Lewis) that Lewis is saying that any patterns that exist were purposely intended (per se) to say whatever it is they may say (and not simply allowed, per accidens, to be capable of some unintended interpretation.)
I’m asking you what you take Lewis to mean here, and you seem to contradict yourself.
On the one hand, you seem anxious to say "yes, he’s saying there are no accidents (which I take to mean nothing is willed “per accidens”), every pattern in the Bible and Moby Dick, and anything that follows from them (including any message that anyone might extract from them) is intended by God (which I take to mean intended “per se.”)
On the other, you seem to want to say that Lewis isn’t implying that everything has some God-intended encoded meaning (i.e. that some things are only willed by God “per accidens.”)
This contradiction is why I’m having trouble understanding you.
Please clarify what you mean, and what you think Lewis is really saying.
I think the killer line in Perelandra is “At this point”. Yes, God had set it up from all eternity that at that moment in time Ransom realised what was going on and what he had to do. Yes, everything is charged with meaning.
The meaning only becomes clear at this point. It is only when Ransom is battling the remains of Weston that he realises the significance of his name. If, in the cottage, Lewis had asked him, or made a pun turning on the word “Ransom”, he would not have got the point.
The way I see it nothing is accidental, but the sort of heavy significance in the quotation is only visible at the exact moment when it matters. Trawling through the bible looking for that sort of significance in advance won’t work.
What I think is far more important to me is that the whole mechanism has woken a sensitivity in you. There is a tear in my eye as I type this because I can see in you myself over forty years ago, filling page after page with calcuations looking for the significance that eluded me. It took me time to realise exactly what was happening, and it was a few years later that I understood.
I had read in an astronomy textbook that the star Arcturus was, under magnification, a lovely orange-red colour. I borrowed my father’s field glasses and had a look on a warm summer night. For the first time I saw what I now call “The Titian Light”. Then I almost howled. In cosmic terms that star is almost next door, but there was no real chance of anyone building a ship that could make the journey in my lifetime.
But there was one way of getting there. I gave the field glasses back and borrowed his typewriter. In than moment an SF writer was born.
I think the way you have reacted to the story may well mean that you too have an imagination that is woken by these things. If I’m right you may have a future in which you can tell stories that will proclaim the truth to the world. I hope I’m right, and I pray God will spare me long enough to read them.
For the benefit of anyone else who may have been troubled by my quotes from Lewis, I’d like to post some feedback I got from a priest here.
Dear Mike,
…Either CSL is wrong, since his mere assertion contradicts good arguments that give contrary conclusions (and which are also consistent with the mainstream Christian tradition!) OR he is making a valid point in imprecise language…
If one were to assume CSL was not saying that “every coincidence that a mind could possibly perceive was a coded message from God” or “every naturally per accidens property-overlap between facts, without exception, is designed to have a specific meaning by God”, what might he have meant? Well…in saying that there are no “accidents” and that every “connection” is designed, he could have simply meant that all events, including their property interconnections, are part of God’s providential ordering, such that striking “coincidences” that a mind could conceive as divine “signs” can be so legitimately, even if no miracle is involved.
This is not the same as saying that that all “coincidences” are necessarily divine signs, nor is it the same as saying that absolutely all property-overlaps must be, not only intended providentially, but intended per se (as coded messages) rather than per accidens by God. And it certainly does not mean that any connection or interpretation that a human mind can construct based on property-overlaps must be intended by God to be a sign. To put it more concretely, with an example, CSL perceived the confluence of some aspects of pagan myths and symbols with Christian themes and sacraments to be clearly Providential and no accident. He would not have believed that every time any number contains within it the digital series 666 it is a sign to avoid the thing/person associated with that number as evil. His whole approach to Christianity and life shows us this, so exegeting and extrapolating small portions of his writing to say what he would have considered silly is not sensible. He was an Anglican, also, and Anglicans have always valued common-sensical moderation. He would have told you to read his own works in that light.
Isn’t this “reading into” stuff possibly harmful? I had a cashier at my work that would literally freak out and think the customer was the devil in disguise because the total on the register would come to $6.66. Was this helpful? NO.
IMO, this is a little like, when Jesus said, “the people are always looking for a sign”
Don’t forget Jesus adds but NO SIGN shall be given them(except Jonah)
It also reminds me of the painter that had a patron come in and start raving about a wondrous painting that was so full of deep meaning and passion and creativity. It turns out it was just a canvass the artist used to remove excess paint from his brush as he worked on a “real” painting that was ignored by the patron.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”
Er, yes. Since a cup of tea and a pain au chocolat used to be £3.34 on Reading station it often amused me to pay with a £10, but that’s another story.
This is the point I have been trying to make: even if everything is interconnected and nothing is an accident to God, that doesn’t mean we can extract useful information.
In another UR forum, there is a chap that is very big on the supposed mathematical codes that predict future events and all sorts of stuff like the “divine number” (Fibonacci) and all. “I have enogh trouble doing the things I do understand the Bible says, I’m not going to look for more stuff in the parts I don’t.” - Jeff Smith
As I said before the problem is that, because God is transtemporal, if he doesn’t want you to know in advance you won’t even if the prediction is there, because he can always go back to a time before you guessed and fix things so that you don’t spot it.
Don’t get into a breath-holding contest with a fish, particularly underwater.
I’ve discovered that Lewis wrote a whole chapter (“A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary,” in his book “Miracles,” which was written after Perelandra) that tends to put the Perelandra quotes in a slightly different context.
(Still not quite sure what he’s saying in either place, but his view seems more complicated then a simple reading of Ransom’s words might indicate.)