Deeper Heaven Quotes

“And those who have read the trilogy tend to number it among the unapproachables—just some of those books that are simply too strange and fantastical and, well, weird to really like. I love this series deeply, but I still relate to those people. On the surface, the Ransom Trilogy bears the marks of a sci-fi adventure. But then there are all those philosophical passages, and there’s an awful lot of time spent just talking on Perelandra, and then Merlin (of all people!) shows up and don’t even get started on Mr. Bultitude… It is for these people—indeed, for my former self—that I have written this book.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“To think of the Heavens as the great outer darkness (as our modern minds often do) is to replace Heaven with Hell. Thinking this way restructures the imaginative layout of the cosmos and changes the way we look up at the sky at night. It rejects the view of thousands of years of prophets and poets in favor of listening to science, without entertaining the idea that perhaps there are realities that are deeper than the material and that we are not yet real enough to see them.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“If we see the cosmos as we ought, then we will see a place teeming with life and light and love, all things moving because of the love of the great Mover. All things are joined together in the Great Dance, praising their Creator and serving Him by doing what they were created to do. Because of the Fall, we have faltered and are out of step. We are out of tune with the Great Song. Through repentance and salvation and sanctification, we will slowly relearn the steps that we have forgotten, and we will remember the tune that echoes in the back of our memories so that we can rejoin the Dance and the Song. This world, the Silent Planet, the one that has been cut off from the rest of the cosmos because of our sin and rebellion, will be silent no longer.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“not know about them, connaître not savoir.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“But the word person, however, is considered synonymous with human.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“Ransom goes through Hell on Mars, Purgatory on Venus, and, at the last, rather than travel to the deepest parts of heaven himself, he himself is the bridge whereby Deep Heaven descends to Earth, the Silent Planet.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“While we moderns think that centrality equates importance, the medievals saw centrality as an indication of unimportance.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“Michael Ward adopts this word donegality from the above quote and uses it as a technical term to refer to this phenomenon—atmosphere, the qualitative sense of place within certain books.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“breath”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“The planetary personalities work in the same way, but because they exist in the unfallen, translunar realm, their personalities have an influence so strong that they can pierce the boundary of the Moon and make their presence known even on the sealed-off, silent planet of Earth.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“Like the Copernican revolution itself, Ward’s discoveries regarding the “secret” behind the Narnia books has reordered the entire universe of the study of Lewis’s works. The value of Planet Narnia and the debt we owe to Ward cannot be overstated.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“But beyond this, these planetary characters teach us about the one true God.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“The physical luminous body in the night sky, the god or goddess of ancient Greece or Rome (with all of its attendant mythologies and quirks), and the planetary being itself (with its influential personality) were all one and the same.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“where Heaven has infiltrated Earth and where God has become flesh, it becomes less a question of “which is it?” and more a matter of “how does each one intersect and relate?”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“thought about everything was contained in what he said about anything.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“empyrean”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy

“what we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.43 Lewis makes it clear that a desire for this recovery motivated his writing of the Ransom Trilogy—a recovery of an “old mode” of looking at the cosmos. He wrote to one reader that “the substitution of heaven for space…is my favourite idea in the book.”44 Lewis saw that the modern scientific cosmos had led to a loss of essential imaginative and emotional experiences that were the strongest features of the Medieval Model. No, we don’t need to accept the old science. Lewis isn’t arguing that we reject everything we have learned about what space actually is like. Rather, he wants us to recover the image of the cosmos as living, breathing, Word-spoken. In our reduction of the cosmos to the material, we no longer experience wonder, awe, praise, or the bottom-heavy security of those who look up into a vast well of starlight. And it is this sense that he seeks to reawaken.”
― Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide to C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy