WATCH: My lecture on C.S. Lewis, sensory pleasure, and the eschaton

From C.S. Lewis Institute NI's 2024 "Lewis and Last Things" symposium

Back in November, I had the pleasure of presenting my first ever academic paper at the C.S. Lewis Institute of Northern Ireland’s symposium on “Lewis and Last Things.” It was held at Union Theological College, and was a great day of lectures and discussion on Lewis’ thoughts on “last things”—eschatology, heaven, death, and more.

My paper was entitled “On Being Engulfed: Sensory Pleasure and the Eschaton in Perelandra and ‘Transposition’”, and the recording is now available on YouTube!

The paper picked up a line of thinking I wanted to develop whilst I wrote my chapter on Perelandra for my recently edited book Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy.

The paper brings together Perelandra, set on a planet which has never experienced the Fall, with Lewis’ little-known sermon “Transposition” (available in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses). I make the argument that the latter serves as an interpretative key for the former, and that together the two serve as Lewis’ apologia for the compatibility of two Christian eschatological doctrines that can seem hard to reconcile: the Beatific Vision and the bodily resurrection.

An extract:

What continuity can there be between natural things and spiritual things? Why would supposedly spiritual things manifest to us via means of the natural?

The answer lies in what Lewis calls “Transposition”. This, for Lewis, is a movement between two mediums, one higher and one lower. Stepping away from the relation of natural to spiritual, he considers the relation of sensual to emotional. Why can emotional experiences as disparate as falling in love, being unwell, and enjoying the sound of wind music produce exactly the same sensual experience in the pit of one’s stomach? This, says Lewis, is because our emotional life is “higher” than the life of our sensations—“not, of course, morally higher, but richer, more varied, more subtle.” The lower medium has fewer tools at its disposal than the higher, and so when it is called on to express the higher medium, it must make use of the same things twice. Lewis gives the examples of an alphabet with many letters translating into one with relatively few, or a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra. I can’t help but think of it like the BBC props department, which does the best with what it has.

I hope you enjoy! And, Lord willing, my paper and others from the symposium may be available in print some time in the near future.