The Devil Went Down to Venus

Lessons from the Unman

I’ve contributed an essay to a forthcoming anthology on C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (otherwise known as the Space Trilogy), a somewhat underdiscussed corner of his bibliography. My editor, Rhys Laverty, told me that everyone wanted to write something about That Hideous Strength, but he wanted me to develop an idea from the middle book, Perelandra. Specifically, he wanted me to talk about its villain, the dreaded Unman. What follows is a lightly adapted excerpt from the essay. If this gives you a taste for more, you can now pre-order the whole collection and browse table of contents here.

The Unman is not Lewis’s only Satanic villain, nor his most popular. That distinction would easily go to Jadis, the Witch-Queen who invades Narnia at its genesis and plays Satan to Aslan’s Christ. Unlike the Unman, she is beautiful, majestic, and other-worldly. Yet that other-worldliness places her at a remove from the reader, in the “once upon a time” realm of fairytale. The villains of the Ransom Trilogy lack this quality, though in their rhetoric they share some of the same delusions of grandeur. They are politicians, scientists, scholars, all too disturbingly this-worldly. Their philosophical arguments, as Ransom thinks to himself in Perelandra, “might just as well have occurred in a Cambridge combination room.” This makes their descent into demonic possession all the more chilling to watch. But the most frightening of them all is the Unman, formerly known as Professor Edward Rolles Weston.

When we first meet Weston in Out of the Silent Planet, he is fulsomely introduced to our hero, Professor Ransom, as “the Weston,” the “great physicist” who “has Einstein on toast and drinks a pint of Schrodinger’s blood for breakfast.” His nefarious intentions are quickly established as he kidnaps Ransom on a ship bound for Mars (Malacandra in the book). Weston has grand visions for the future of mankind, and he intends to be the visionary who will realize said future, no matter how many eggs he has to break along the way. But we lose him by the end of book one. Not to worry—he’s back in book two, in far more terrifying form, as he and Ransom duke it out for the future of a parallel universe Garden of Eden on the planet Venus (Perelandra).

Ransom doesn’t yet understand what he’s dealing with as he attempts to set robust Christian theology against the professor’s (literally) devilish nonsense. Weston dismisses it all as “the old accursed dualism,” where God and the Devil are two separate entities. But doesn’t Ransom know that God and the Devil are one?