Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine.

At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. One could try–Ransom has tried a hundred times–to put it into words. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. Here’s an example from near the end of Perelandra, the second book of the Space Trilogy:īoth the bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. I always see the world anew and afresh, larger and more glorious whenever I read Lewis. A festschrift for him could be entitled, Through New Eyes. That depth of thought allows him to see larger forests and additional trees that most folks miss at least I know I often miss them. While Lewis had many distinguishing characteristics that were and remain outstanding from his and our contemporaries, one that always brings me back to reading more and more of his work is simply his ability to think. Lewis’ Space Trilogy should be required reading, at least twice through, before graduating high school.

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis