Perelandra: Re-awakening the Spiritual Imagination

by David C. Downing
Perelandra is the first book I read by C. S. Lewis, and the encounter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. I was a freshman in college, and I was wrestling mightily with all the usual questions so many Christians ponder: how could a good God create a world in which there is so much suffering and injustice? How could people be consigned to eternal damnation who had never heard the Gospel? Why should all of humanity be blighted by the disobedience of two humans thousands of years ago? Friends and family members gave me books and tracts to read on these topics, but I seldom found them helpful.

When I first picked up Perelandra, I knew the story had to do with interplanetary travel, so I was expecting a bit of “high brow” science fiction along the lines of H. G. Wells or Isaac Asimov. What I wasn’t expecting was a novel that would challenge me to re-imagine my faith, that would tackle head-on some of the very questions that I had been grappling with since my early teens. Instead of finding something to wile away a few idle hours, I had stumbled across a book that turned my world upside down (or, more accurately, turned it back right side up).

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