C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier (Hardcover)

Hardcover. C.S. Lewis's celebrated Space Trilogy - Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength - was completed over sixty years ago and has remained in print ever since. In this groundbreaking study, Sanford Schwartz offers a new reading that challenges the conventional view of these novels as portraying a clear-cut struggle between a pre-modern cosmology and the modern scientific paradigm that supplantedit.Schwartz situates Lewis's work in the context of modern intellectual, cultural, and political history. He shows that Lewis does not simply dismiss the modern "evolutionary model," but discriminates carefully among differentkinds of evolutionary theory-"mechanistic" in Out of the Silent Planet, "vitalist" in Perelandra, and "spiritual" in That Hideous Strength-and their distinctive views of human nature, society, and religious belief. Schwartz also shows that in each book the conflict between Christian and "developmental" viewpoints is far more complex than is generally assumed. In line with the Augustinian understanding that "bad things are good things perverted," Lewis constructs each of histhree "beatific" communities-the "unfallen" worlds on Mars and Venus and the terrestrial remnant at St. Anne's-not as the sheer antithesis but rather as the transfiguration or "raising up" of the particularevolutionary doctrine that is targeted in the novel. In this respect, Lewis is more deeply engaged with the main currents of modern thought than his own self-styled image as an intellectual "dinosaur" might lead us to believe. He is also far more prepared to explore the possibilities for reshaping the evolutionary model in a manner that is simultaneously compatible with traditional Christian doctrine and committed to addressing the distinctive concerns of modernexistence.C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier highlights the enduring relevance of Lewis's fiction to contemporary concerns on a wide variety of issues, including the ethical problems surrounding bio-technologyand the battle between religious and naturalistic worldviews in the twenty-first century. Far from offering a black and white contrast between an old-fashioned Christian humanism and a newfangled heresy, the Space Trilogy should be seen as a modern religious apologist's searching effort to enrich the former through critical engagement with the latter. C.S. Lewis's space trilogy - Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), That Hideous Strength (1945) - has been both admired and dismissed for its staging of a sharply defined struggle between religious and naturalistic points of view. Proceeding from Mars and Venus to a final showdown on our own planet, each installment takes up another facet of the seemingly impassable conflict between Christianity and the tendencies of modern thought that arose in the wake of the Darwinian revolution in biology. In Out of the Silent Planet, the target is evolutionary naturalism, primarily as it appears in the science fiction of H.G. Wells. In Perelandra, it is the alluring but perilous doctrine of "creative" evolution inaugurated by Henri Bergson. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis depicts an insidious organization - the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments - whose friendly acronym, NICE, belies its pursuit of a eugenically inspired program to assume control over the evolutionary process and thereby achieve everlasting dominion over the planet. Taken together, these seemingly clear-cut confrontations between Christian tradition and modern apostasy reinforce the image of Lewis as the voice of an endangered heritage, a self-styled "dinosaur" waging spiritual warfare against the corruption and confusions of his age. Sanford Schwartz here offers a new reading of the trilogy that challenges the prevailing view of Lewis, shared by advocates and adversaries alike, as champion of the "discarded image" of p Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…