Linguistics, Ordinance, and Doubt in the Space Trilogy

In C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, a section I found particularly interesting was the end of chapter 9, when Ransom meets a creature identified as a hross and begins to interact with it. I was so intrigued by the way Lewis describes Ransom’s thought processes in understanding the linguistics of an entirely different language. It’s absolutely fascinating to me to read about a character’s thought process, in a language that isn’t even nearly human. I find learning languages in general to be quite fascinating, and really enjoyed the struggle of learning French when I had to take it in high school and college. The passage makes me wonder if Lewis specifically wrote Ransom as a philologist to ordain the language-learning - that seems like something Lewis would do. Is there any other purpose to his philology in the novel?

The last paragraph of chapter 9 was another part of this passage that I found particularly interesting to dwell on. I think the Space Trilogy really successfully uses myth to point to Christian theology in the Bible and understand certain Bible verses in an applicable way. Lewis writes about Ransom’s means of dealing with being hit by sudden fears and feelings of being threatened by the unknown creature before him: “They arose when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man....It all depended on the point of view”(59). This paragraph calls to mind 2 Corinthians 5:16: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” The Space Trilogy as a whole deals with the spirituality dilemma of being called to look at the world around us with a mindset that is different from what our human eyes, experiences, and emotions imply. Ransom deals with a micro-version of this with the hross; if he begins to regard it as human, he begins to see it as fearsome, but if he allows himself to regard it as foreign and new and beyond what he can perceive, he isn’t overcome by fear and doubt.