Remember the other day when I said I would further explore why sex is such a big deal to Christians, and why we think it’s so important to reserve sex for marriage? Well, here you go!
Everybody knows that my favourite author in the whole wide world is C. S. Lewis. If you didn’t know that, evidently you have never had a conversation with me.
If you’re not familiar with C. S. Lewis, at the very least you probably know that he wrote the Narnia Chronicles, as well as a number of very popular theological books. But my very favourite of Lewis’s writings is a series that not many people know about. It’s a trilogy of adult science fiction novels, often called the Cosmic Trilogy, which were written in the 1940’s – a good decade before he wrote his famous children’s stories.
I want to draw your attention to one of my favourite scenes in the second of the space stories, entitled Perelandra, in order to illustrate some of my thoughts on the sanctity of sex.
In the novel, the hero, Ransom, has been summoned and transported to Venus (or Perelandra, as it is called by its inhabitants) by the planet’s guiding spirit to help save it from following Earth into the grip of Evil. Lewis reimagines Perelandra as a richly inhabited paradise with floating organic islands and an opaque golden sky. For the first little while, Ransom doesn’t exactly understand what his role is supposed to be in all of it, so he spends his first few days exploring the luxuriant planet with its tropical golden seas and trees that produce giant glittering bubbles. Finding himself hungry one morning, he comes across a gourd which is filled with a liquid and he hesitantly decides to taste it. His experience is so unexpected and intense that it transforms the way he understands pleasure: “It was so different from every other taste [he’d ever experienced] that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant” (p. 46).
The story continues:
“As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason . . . was all in favour of tasting this miracle again. . . . Yet something seemed opposed to this ‘reason.’” (p. 46)
This is where it gets interesting for me:
“It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity – like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day” (p. 46).
Ransom experiences this same feeling a number of times on Perelandra: the marvels and pleasures of the planet are so perfect and complete that he dares not repeat them beyond necessity. To grasp for more would cheapen the exquisiteness of the experience. Ransom later wonders whether the root of all evil stems from the natural urge to repeat pleasures beyond their natural duration.
I think that this scene relates to all areas and pleasures of life. But I think it is particularly illustrative of the Christian understanding of sex.
We believe that there should be a restraint on sexual experience not because it is bad, ugly, or dirty, but because it is so utterly exquisite and profound that to pursue it unrestrainedly would be an insult to its beauty.
As I explained in my last post, sex is a union so powerful that it is intended to take place only within the context of a whole-life union. It is meant to be shared between two people only when they are willing to share everything else simultaneously: all material wealth, all troubles and joys, all dreams and days and nights and struggles. To demand or pursue sex outside of this whole-life union is an affront to its immeasurable worth.
And so that’s why sex is such a big deal to Christians, and to me.
What do you think? Does this illustration work? Do you agree with what Lewis is getting at here? Don’t you totally want to buy the book now? You can!
Text and cover image from Perelandra by C. S. Lewis. 1943. Harper Collins, 2005.
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I can’t really speak for your other questions, but yes, I do totally want to buy the book. I’ve been wanting to read the series for a while actually, since you’ve mentioned them before. Luckily enough, my birthday is coming up, so maybe I can point a certain someone to that link….
What a great illustration! I do agree with Lewis’s concept, “too much of a good thing.”
“…to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do…”
To me the greatest tragedy is that so many will never experience sex as intensely pleasurable or remotely spiritual. For any combination many reasons, most of us have lost the ability to “taste” what sex is supposed to be. It is bland – it may fill our hunger, but there is no joy, no pleasure, and no connection.
Sad deeply sad.
Paul
WOW, yes,…what a great illustration! What a wonderful way to picture sex and pleasure.
CS Lewis is truly one of the greatest Christian writers of all time. But if we as Christians are going to “make such a big deal out of sex within marriage” than I have to take many of my Christian brothers and sisters “to the woodshed” for FAILING on the sex within marriage is GOOD part.
Truth is, whether you want to hear it or not, many many Christians are just “down” on sex. Period.
When was the last time YOU saw a Sunday School curriculum (especially for senior high) that quoted from Song of Solomon? Did you know that many so-called Christian “resources” for kids won’t even tell you what “circumcision” is? Do we want young people to wait for sex until marriage or do we really want them to delay marriage altogether until they finish college and grad school, get a great job and big income, a house, etc. first too???
Read this Christian’s rants on the subject at
http://godgunsglutesgraphs.blogspot.com/2010/05/are-christians-against-sex.html .
Great post! Even though I don’t really see it the same way, you have got me swept up in the beautiful idea of it.