When Elwin Ransom finds himself alone on the strange world of ‘Malacandra’ in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, he is running from wicked men, from monstrous beasts in the water, and from elongated ogrish creatures called ‘sorns’.
Amid all the fear, the nervous running, the panting breaths, something marvelous unfolds: a renewed affection, a love lost long ago, for his own body. He begins to feel “a strange affection towards himself” so much so that he has to check “himself on the point of saying, ‘We’ll stick to one another’” (49).
‘Alienation’ names the process of sin which produces estrangement. One of the first fruits of The Fall is alienation from the body, they feel shame over their nakedness (Ge. 3:7). The flight to stitch fig leaves together is not an impulse of a new-found modesty, it is a result of a kind of inward revulsion over the body God created in His Image.
While all humans struggle with the basic kind of body-alienation resultant from The Fall some cultures work to acerbate the problem; some cultures thrive on making the problem worse. The Enlightenment had such an effect on our shame about the body. The exaltation of the intellect, and the dislocation of the soul from the body, resulted in a devaluation of the body in modern society. With one impulse we both idolize the body and disparage it. Like Aristophanes, idolaters always satirize the things they deify.
What Ransom experiences in the forests of ‘Malacandra’ is an inward renewal, a proper care and regard for the body God made in His Image. Scared, thirsty, and alone, he curls up beside a host spring to sleep. The position of his slumber is important: “He drew his knees up and hugged himself” (51). He feels in that moment “a sort of physical, almost filial, love for his own body” (51).
He is descending from the lifeless heights of instrumentalized reason and down into his embodied glory. This is what Rowan Williams has called “the body’s grace.” The awakening from illusion and falsehood into understanding our body as a gift. It brings to Ransom a kindness and a rekindled humanity. He speaks to himself with the gentleness of a parent: “‘We’ll look after you, Ransom… we’ll stick together, old man’” (51).
He is, in sum, awakening to the truth that the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body (cf. 1 Cor. 6:13-14).