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.
My name also is Ransom
On Perelandra, when Ransom realizes he may have to fight, the Voice tells him the name he bears is also the name of the one who paid the price for his own world.
Mark 10:45, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: why is the hero of the trilogy called Ransom? His name was on the check before he knew what it paid for. Lewis's hero carries the name of what Christ did. On Perelandra he learns that the name was not a coincidence.
Ransom is fighting the conviction that he must physically stop the tempter. He reflects that before his ancestors were called Ransom, before ransom was the name for a payment that delivers, all of it stood together in eternity. Then the Voice says, "My name also is Ransom." He understands that Maleldil was the world's ransom, and that if he fails now, this world too would need redeeming.
Jesus says the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). Paul calls Christ the one mediator who gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Timothy 2:5-6).
The theology is the New Testament's. The use of a character's surname as a sign is Lewis's own device, and in the same chapter he has Ransom realize that the line between accident and design, like the line between fact and myth, is purely terrestrial.
Lewis puts a man in a place where his obedience protects a whole unfallen world. The New Testament gives that role to Christ alone. Lewis is careful: Ransom is not a second redeemer, he is sent so that a second fall does not need one.
Not a claim that Ransom saves anyone. The point of the scene is that he is being asked to prevent a fall, not to undo one.
- Lewis, Perelandra (Bodley Head, 1943), ch. 11
