Tool Alpha
C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
Perelandra, an unfallen world
A second Eve on a world of floating islands, with one command: do not stay overnight on the Fixed Land.
Genesis 2:16-17, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what would the Genesis 3 temptation look like if it happened somewhere else, and could it go the other way? Same test, different house rule. In Eden it was one tree. On Perelandra it is one kind of ground. Lewis asks what a first pair would do with a small command and nobody explaining it.
The Green Lady, the first woman of Perelandra, lives on floating islands. Maleldil allows her and the King to land on the Fixed Land and walk on it, but not to dwell there, to sleep and wake there. She is surprised to learn that on Earth people live on fixed land and Maleldil has never forbidden it, and concludes there can be different laws in different worlds.
Genesis 2 gives one prohibition, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with no reason attached. Genesis 3 is the story of that one command being reframed until it looks unreasonable.
The shape is Genesis 2-3. The planet, the islands and the specific command are Lewis's own.
The whole premise is speculation: another world, another first pair, another test. Lewis also lets this one end differently.
Not an allegory of Eden. Lewis is not retelling Genesis; he is asking what an unfallen obedience would look like from the inside.
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/divine-council-index\/genesis-3-1-15\/","n":"Genesis 3:1-15","s":"The nachash in the garden, and the sentence passed on it.","r":"Genesis 3:1-15"}
- Lewis, Perelandra (1943), ch. 6
