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.
Maleldil the Young and the Old One
On Mars the creatures know who made the world: Maleldil the Young, who lives with the Old One. The Earthman is the one who needs the catechism.
Colossians 1:15-17, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: who is Maleldil, and why does Lewis give God a new name? A familiar word can stop you seeing. Call God by a strange name in a strange place and you hear what is being said about him again. Lewis's Maleldil the Young is the Son, the maker and ruler of the world, and he lives with the Old One.
When Ransom asks the hrossa whether their Oyarsa made the world, they almost bark in denial: everyone knows Maleldil the Young made it and still rules it, and that he lives with the Old One, who is not the sort that has to live anywhere. Ransom, who had been wondering whether to give them religious instruction, finds himself treated as the savage and given what Lewis calls a first sketch of civilized religion.
John 1 and Colossians 1 say all things were made through the Son and hold together in him. Hebrews 1 says God made the world through the Son and appointed him heir of all things. The Old One who does not have to live anywhere matches the God whom the highest heaven cannot contain.
The theology is orthodox Christian teaching on the Son as agent of creation. The names are Lewis's invention.
Lewis keeps the Spirit nearly offstage in Out of the Silent Planet. The hrossa's catechism has the Father and the Son, and the trilogy brings the rest in later.
Not a different god. Maleldil is the Christian God renamed so a reader meets him fresh.
- Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), ch. 11
