Regan Flieg: Love, Joy, and Suffering from Out of the Silent Planet to Shadowlands

When we watched Shadowlands in class, I was struck by the theme of the relationship between joy and suffering. For Lewis (at least as he was portrayed in the film), the ending of his time with Joy Davidman and the suffering it caused was a part of the joy.  For me this called to mind several ideas from other things we’ve read and discussed in class, including Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Chesterton’s “The Ethics of Elfland.”  Additionally, Lewis’s development of this idea of related suffering and joy demonstrates his model of understanding proposed in “Myth Became Fact.”

The scene from the Space Trilogy that Shadowlands initially called to mind for me is found in Out of the Silent Planet when Hyoi explains to Ransom the hross approach to love (83-84).   For the hross, the act of love takes up his whole life and is “full grown only when it is remembered” (84).  This joy and cherishing of a once-experienced love is reminiscent of Chesterton’s proclamation that, for him, “Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that i could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once” (103).  A similar notion is echoed in Perelandra when, after tasting the fruit on Perelandra, Ransom feels against all reason that he should not do so again despite the intensity of the pleasure because “perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity” (43).  This idea expressed in Lewis’s and Chesterton’s writing that love or other experiences of intense joy are more profound when experienced only once is harmonious with Lewis’s later ideas depicted in Shadowlands that the suffering, end, and finite nature of his encounter of love with Joy helped make it good.  What makes this harmony of ideas more interesting is  that Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy before even meeting Joy and that he was able to portray these ideas in his fiction before realizing them fully in knowledge demonstrates what he argued in “Myth Became Fact” that one cannot experience and know a thing at the same time (65).  Lewis developed an abstract understanding of this idea after his depiction of it in fiction and his concrete experience of it with Joy.


Chesterton, Gilbert K. “The Ethics of Elfland.”  Orthodoxy, John Lane Company, 1908, pp. 81-118.

Lewis, C. S. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 63-67.  

Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet.  1938.  Pan Books, 1952.

Lewis, C. S. Perelandra. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996.

Shadowlands. Directed byRichard Attenborough, performances by Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger, and Julian Fellowes, Savory Pictures, 1993.

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