In what follows, I will look briefly at theological poetics, then show how the image of perichoresis in Perelandra is an example of the deployment of theological poetics. I will conclude by tracing some of the payoff of this approach.

  I would take the relevant principles not to be, in the first instance, anything discursive. This rules out literary techniques as readily as it rules out philosophical suppositions. Both of these are tools that may be deployed in the service of a poetics, but they are not its principles. Rather, the principles are what I would call poetic vision.

  Poetic vision describes a peculiar (and therefore unique) way of looking at the world. It is an expression of the fact that a certain person sees the world in a certain way. Just as cultural vision modulates the way we look at the world, such that the same things do not mean the same thing for individuals of different places and times, so poetic vision marks off a very specific and individual outlook on things. It is the very this-ness of reflective experience. And it must be reflective: not just any vision is poetic vision. Poiesis is making, and so there has to be the deployment of ars in the broadest sense: a skill applied to bring order, to synthesize or systematize. Poetic vision both begins in and aims at an intuition of the whole. Gestalt is as indispensable to poetic vision as it is to systematic theology; only, the type of whole that will satisfy us is different in the two instances.

  If poetic visions guide the principles for poetics, then poetics turns out to be the art of adequating those visions to particular forms and contents, the deployment of appropriate structures to give those visions space to breathe, and the assessing of the congruity of concrete artistic impositions to the vision that is to be expressed through them. Poetics is, in a word, the wisdom of making.

  Given this, it is clear that poetry is but one possible form through which poetic vision may be expressed. Visual art is another, music still another; and, far from being excluded, prose has many qualities to recommend it as the medium for the expression of the poetic vision. And so, a poetics of prose will be the wisdom of using the specific and peculiar characteristics of prose to express a particular poetic vision.

  Theological poetics, then, is a wisdom of making that is grounded in the vision of the world as it is described in theology. It is not simply to treat the topics of theology in a poetic way, or to employ theological modes in making; it is to think the world through the categories of theology, and therefore, to have a poetic vision that is fundamentally shaped by the contours of the divine revelation and economy. And a theological poetics of prose will work this out in ways that take advantage of the unique strengths (and, perhaps, weaknesses) of prose.

  A truly theological poetics is one that is theological in its very inner logic, in the structure of how it reasons, including what it takes to be the beautiful, and in how it witnesses to that beauty. To be theological, a poetics has to be such that it could not survive the excision of the theological element. The structure would collapse, and be in no meaningful way what it was before. To be sure, a poetics might remain: but it would be as different from the poetics that came before it as faith is different from optimism.

  Given all that has been said, it should be clear that the theopoetical task in writing Perelandra is the adequation of the particularities of Lewis’ vision of the world as suspended in the grace and love of God to a science fiction setting. There are a variety of commitments that Lewis carries over into this fictional world that become rules that guide the way he imagines this world. Some of these are:

1. The Incarnation of Christ is not just historically decisive, it is cosmically decisive.
2. God’s creative work is progressive and proceeds to this very day.
3. Angels and demons are very active in the created world.
4. Sin is not just an internal inclination; it is something that is urged upon us by our external world.

Each of these become guiding considerations for concrete choices made about the characters, setting, and plot. But they are not sectioned off from one another: there is an interpenetration of these considerations, a clustering around various aspects of the story.

  Thus, for example, when Ransom arrives on Perelandra, he discovers that the rational creatures (hnau) there are humans. This was not how it was on Malacandra, where there were three species of hnau as different from one another as they were from humanity. Before Christ had become a creature, there were many possible ways for hnau to image him. But the cosmic nature of the Incarnation means that from now on, the possible forms have been constrained: not just to humanoid forms, but to actual humans. And so the hnau on Perelandra must take human form (commitment 1).²

  But this is also due to the progressive nature of God’s creative work (commitment 2). Though Malacandra, Perelandra, and Thulcandra (Earth) likely formed as planets around the same time in Lewis’ fictional setting, they developed at very different rates. Civilization was already thriving on Malacandra when Adam and Eve came to be on Thulcandra, and it is only in the twentieth century after the Incarnation that hnau appear on Perelandra. It is the fact that it underwent a different and longer path of development that governs the fact that when its hnau at last came forth, they would have to be human. Were creation not progressive, or were they to have come about 2,500 Earth years sooner, they could have taken another form.

  In the gap between when hnau appeared on Malacandra and when they appeared on Perelandra (the earliest and latest hnau we know about in the trilogy), the celestial being (eldil) responsible for Perelandra was shepherding and nourishing the planet and its life, bringing it to the point where it could bring forth hnau (commitment 3).³ It was part of the means by which the progressive creation of Perelandran hnau, which must now be human in form, is accomplished. And because Ransom takes less occasion to sin from the sinfulness of the world around him (commitment 4), he is able to converse with the woman in perfect mutual nudity without the least shadow of sexual longing.⁴

  The layering of these commitments and their interaction to produce the story in all of its particulars is evidence of the fact that the theological elements are not accidental to the story’s conception, or to the poetic in accordance with which the story was produced. Their interaction shows a sort of meta-commitment that informs the poetic at the deepest levels: perichoresis.

  Theologically speaking, this is a trinitarian feature. Whether Lewis arrived at the idea through the theologians of the Orthodox tradition or through another path, it is a trinitarian theme for him as well. From the doctrine of the Trinity Lewis learned about a kind of distinction in unity that he had seen gestured towards in the myths he so loved, but that could not be resolved within the bounds of the rationalistic philosophy in which he was trained (and of which the science of his day could give no least intimation). The logic of this interpenetration and radical mutuality is woven throughout his works, both fiction and nonfiction. But it is nowhere more overt or dazzling than at the end of Perelandra in the hymn to the Great Dance.

  This hymn both formally and materially concretizes the overarching commitment to an interpenetrative perichoresis. The formal aspect comes to the fore in the dissolution of the ability to distinguish subject from object, speaker from hearer:

“The voice that spoke next seemed to be that of Mars, but Ransom was not certain. And who spoke after that, he does not know at all. For in the conversation that followed—if it can be called a conversation—though he believes that he himself was sometimes the speaker, he never knew which words were his or another’s, or even when a man or an eldil was talking. The speeches follow one another—if, indeed, they did not all take place at the same time—like the parts of a music into which all five of them had entered as instruments or like a wind blowing through five trees that stand together on a hilltop.”⁵

We are stripped of the knowledge of which of the five characters says which of the following things, and so we are stripped of perspective: the individuality that each could bring from his or her own experiences is suppressed; or rather, superseded. For it is not that perspective is lacking; it is rather that it is common. All five have come to a place from which they can view the universe with the same vision. The final image, of the wind in the trees, makes that clear. For though perhaps the first association at the mention of the wind blowing is of the Spirit that blows where it will⁶ and is the one giver of diverse gifts,⁷ yet the image goes on to indicate trees swaying together under the same wind: You could no more distinguish the rustling of the one from another. They have all come to one hill, one outlook, and from there they are blown by one spirit into one vision of the workings of God. Even the distinction between angel and human, between celestial and mundane perspective, breaks down here. Humanity has been elevated to the level of the angels (a major theme of this last chapter), and can speak with them as equals: not just “with them” in the sense of speaking to them, but also in the sense of speaking alongside them.

  The material aspect of perichoresis is the Great Dance itself, which is the subject of this hymnodic collective discourse. It is a dance because of the never-ending mutual ceding of every element within it to every other. Consider a few examples

• “He dwells (all of Him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him.”⁸
• “As in the circle to the sphere, so are the ancient worlds that needed no redemption to that world wherein He was born and died. As is a point to a line, so is that world to the far-off fruits of its redeeming. Yet the circle is not less round than the sphere, and the sphere is the home and fatherland of circles. Infinite multitudes of circles lie enclosed in every sphere, and if they spoke they would say, For us were spheres created.”
• “The ancient worlds are the centre.”
• “All which is not itself the Great Dance was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the Dust and made it glorious for ever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the world where this was enacted is the centre of worlds.”
• “The Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the centre.”⁹

  Each element steps forward to take center stage only to bow and step back to make room for the next. And each thing that was central yields its centrality to the next without ceasing to be central, and in so doing is revealed to be central according to yet another facet of its being. And yet it is not true to say that all is center and there is no periphery: that kind of collapse would destroy the Dance, because it would render the whole thing static. No, in order for it to be a dance, there must be this ebb and flow, this advancing and ceding (cession), a ceding that is not directionless, but always aimed at something (in-cession), something around which it orbits even as that thing orbits around it and mutually cedes in the direction of the first (circumincession). It of course hardly needs to be pointed out that the literal description of this mutual aroundness (peri-) is a dance (choresis), and so what is said metaphorically of the Trinity is made literal in the Creation that images it.

  Perelandra thus provides us with a practical instance of the working of theopoetics. But it also demonstrates what is perhaps the most valuable aspect of theopoetics in any age, and certainly in our age. Lewis himself named it in speaking of Narnia: it can sneak past watchful dragons.¹⁰ There is an apologetic trajectory of theopoetics that can reach into places where theology as a discipline cannot, and can touch places that theology also can touch, but in ways that theology cannot.

  One challenge to faith is plausibility: for under normal circumstances the human mind will only with difficulty assent to what it judges implausible, and will in no way assent to what it judges impossible. Yet to many, the doctrines of faith seem implausible at best, and sometimes even impossible. Theopoetics is able to meet this challenge by displaying what the reader will judge to be a plausible impossibility. For fiction divorces plausibility from possibility. That which I find in no way plausible in the news I might find exceedingly plausible in Wonderland or Narnia (nothing is more likely!). The relocating of a theological dynamic from our world to a fictional setting by the working of the theopoetical imagination may allow me to see for the first time the plausibility of it. Now, it is true that I do not go immediately from plausibility to possibility. The plausibility of Jewel the unicorn does not lead me to the possibility of Jewel the unicorn in our world. But this is because what makes Jewel plausible in Narnia is a feature that is not common to our world and Narnia. But what if the feature were common? I may find the notion that humans are the lords of creation implausible and impossible; but then I see it imaged in the Lady Tinidril of Perelandra, and how, in an unfallen world, she uses this to elevate the animals, possibly all the way to the point of being themselves hnau (and why not?). And then I realize that if we apply this to our world, the only change required is the removal of sin: without sin, nothing more would need to be adjusted to render this possible. In that case, I am perhaps prepared to alter my sense of its impossibility: it is impossible under present conditions, but not impossible simpliciter. In this way theopoetics can work to build bridges to faith.

  Theopoetics also has an internal apologetic value, functioning to welcome those who are put off by the precision and technicality of philosophical theology into the mysteries the technical language is meant to facilitate reflection on. We have already seen a good example of this: Perichoresis might be a concept that causes people to want to shut down, and there is no shortage of evidence that trinitarian theology is a field into which the layman steps only with great trepidation and no small amount of urging. And yet the hymn to the Great Dance, which is essentially doing the same thing, does not trigger the intellectual flight response. Rather, by presenting the mystery in terms of compelling imagery that promises immediate understanding without also offering anything like ultimacy or total comprehension, it draws the mind into the mysteries as mysteries.

  The list of theological and philosophical loci that are thus presented in just the last chapter of Perelandra is mind-boggling: idolatry and iconology, the nature of beauty, the image of God, the union of the spiritual and the physical, the nature of evil, the powers of unfallen human nature, the value of hierarchy, the nature of wholeness, the nature of spatial dimensionality and its relationships, original intentions and redemption, supralapsarianism, the ability of all creatures to praise God, the dynamics of divine grace, trinitarian processions, mutual belonging, and philosophy of time. Many of these are speculative topics (and those that are not inherently speculative are here presented in a speculative vein) that the non-theologian would normally steer clear of. But theopoetics makes them not only accessible, but desirable. It is easy to come away from that last chapter wanting to know more.

  I will go one step further and say that it does not only do this for the lay person. Many a theologian, myself among them, have been and may be inspired and illuminated by the results of the theopoetic imagination. Indeed, that even theologians are drawn to and adore theopoetics underscores a final aspect of it that must be made clear: that it is a mode of thinking that differs from the one native to theology. It is not the case that theopoetics can say things theology cannot; but it can say them in a way theology cannot, and that is precisely because of the modal difference between the two. Theopoetics has different rules, different criteria for evaluation, and different methods of proceeding. For that reason, not every theologian is capable of writing imaginatively, and not every literary writer is capable of writing theologically.

  But the best of either can do both, and Lewis is an example of that. This is because, while theopoetics is discourse in a distinct mode, it is not therefore external to theology: it is a way of doing theology, which a Christian poetics of prose would affirm. I ought not, then, to be opposing theopoetics to theology, but rather to philosophical theology. If this is true, then theopoetics provides a suitable front porch to the study of theology generally and philosophical theology more specifically: before one knows how much one likes it, or even how much of it one is prepared to believe, one can encounter it as rich, vibrant, and delightful. In a culture increasingly suspicious of many of the traditional grounding apologetics of the study of theology, theopoetics has offered and remains a resilient entry point.

  Among its many virtues, then, we may add that Perelandra offers a powerful example of what can be achieved when theological poetics is deployed in the service of giving flesh to revealed truths in the medium of prose.

A version of this paper was originally delivered at a symposium called “Still Speaking: C.S. Lewis as Theologian for the Third Millennium” at Virginia Theological Seminary on April 24, 2023.

¹ All references to The Cosmic Trilogy are from C.S. Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London: The Bodley Head, 1990).
² Perelandra, 198.
³ Perelandra, 323.
⁴ Perelandra, 196.
⁵ Perelandra, 340.
⁶ John 3:8
⁷ 1 Corinthians 12:4
⁸ Perelandra, 341.
⁹ Perelandra, 342.
¹⁰ “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could” C.S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1966), 37.