The Queer Vision of C.S. Lewis
The Great Dance
“I’m just so weird”
It’s a refrain that was overfamiliar to me as a high school teacher in the late 2000s. An emo or scene student with the inevitable Invader Zim hoodie, black jeans, and sharpie-graffitied chucks would announce it with the pride-with-a-veneer-of-confession that we would all eventually learn to call a “humble-brag”. And of course, they were weird—sort of. “Weird” meant that they didn’t fit a particular mold; that they deviated from a given stereotype of American highschooler-hood. But then of course, they all do.
And they genuinely were proud of it. And they were ashamed at the same time. Being a teenager is hard OK? You are supposed to be figuring out who you are and that means you are also figuring out what the world expects you to be—sometimes who the world demands that you be—and my gosh you can’t stand the thought of being left on your own and abandoned by your friends and also you can’t stand the idea of blending in and not being seen for who you are.
And so there you stand in the Nightmare Before Christmas beanie you got from hot topic and your black nail polish and you tell a teacher that you are weird. And of course the teacher knows the script. She smiles widely and chuckles, “Sweet! Weird people are awesome” validating both your individuality and your belonging. Because of course, at the end of the day, the great secret is that we are all weird. Or, to use an erstwhile synonym, the great secret is that we are all somewhat queer.
But I apologize; that was a little too much of a “gotcha” and honestly, I do not count myself among those who hold that there is not really such thing as a straight, cis, allosexual, so please allow me to develop my ideas as I go along in this essay and, for the time being, try to forget that I said that. This essay is about queerness but I meant to ease into it so maybe I had better start again.
That Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the centre. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or or hands handled it, to be itself a strength and splendour of Maleldil. … He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, if it spoke, would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it.
Lewis scholars and Lewis fans like to argue over what should be considered his best work but the fact of the matter is that the last chapter of Perelandra: the second book in his Space Trilogy is by far the most mystically profound writing he ever managed1. In it he stole shamelessly from medieval mystics, theorists, and cosmologists from Boethius, to Dante, to Bernardus Sylvestris and beyond and I am convinced that in it he was attempting to supply a mystic cosmology that might excite the belief of the modern world in the face of the modern worldview. The section as a whole is called The Great Dance or The Great Game and it is presented as a series of speeches made to the Ransom (the novel’s protagonist) by Angels (“Oyarsas” in the language of the novel) about the story of being and everything and God’s project in creation.
It would nearly constitute a copyright violation to quote the chapter in full and I would likely lose too many of my readers in any case if I did but my point here cannot be made without this one extended quote from the very heart of the passage:
And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity—only to itself be entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could also see (but the word “seeing” is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells—peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences, and the like—ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were tings of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities.
…
Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call short-lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some were universal truths or universal qualities.
All is at the center and all is marginal decoration to all else which is at the center and in neither position is is either made to be lesser or dispossessed of it’s worth. Each grain, if it spoke, would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. I want to underline that one million times over. C.S. Lewis’ most profound image of the nature of created Reality is one in which a profound equality of value and dignity extends to each and every facet. Where all are at the center and yet distinct; and where all participate in magnifying the glory of all others. The dance is for each dancer and each dancer is for every other dancer and none are the same and all are at the center.
This vision of Reality is one Lewis got from the medieval scholars, writers, and poets whom he deeply appreciated. It is not an accident that it is beautiful.
And Lewis got much of this from Dante’s Paradiso and was likely trying his own hand at an image similar to what Dante manages throughout the Divine Comedy but most especially in the Paradiso—an image of reality (Lewis has more fun with time and timelessness than Dante does, fitting all of being throughout time into the Dance) where everything is moved by Love and where the concepts of periphery and center are very much in flux. In Canto 28 of the Paradiso the entire Cosmos seems to invert either totally or in the eye of Love and what was at the extreme margin—God—becomes suddenly the mathematical point at the perfect center, whose Love is the force that causes all movement, being, and life throughout the ever expanding and increasingly peripheral cosmos of Reality. All are rightly and truly at the center and all are marginal to the center which is fully and rightly occupied by all others within the Dance.
This is all very Christian: God delights in all that God has made; all that God has made has infinite worth both because God has made it and because “of infinite worth” describes the sorts of things God makes. That which is at the center is also at the periphery of all else which is at the center and it is somehow more magnificent for it’s magnification of the other than it is even in it’s own centrality. The God who is maker of all is glorious in emptying Himself of divinity and taking a place on the utter margins of human existence and as a result of becoming lowest now has a Name which is Above every name. And we are all called to follow in that dance that leads through lowness and death into Life and Glory.
And this is all also so very queer. Queer theorists are forever decentering things: heterosexuality, cissexuality, cisgender-ness, allosexuality2, whiteness, abled-ness and so forth. The goal of course is not only to decenter those things—to remove their status as something inherently more privileged than the alternatives—but to denaturalize them as well. The goal is something like a world in which straightness is no more or less “natural” or “the norm” than gayness, bi-ness, or pan-ness; where cis-ness is no more or less natural or the norm than transness, non-binary-ness and the like; where being allo is no more or less natural than being demi or ace; and generally a world where queer identities are no less at the center than are non-queer identities. To work towards a world like that is to engage in queering the world. To queer a thing is, after all, to make it different, odd, marginal. The Queer is the already decentered and denaturalized. Queerness is, in another idiom, the term we now use for the absolute beatific glory of of the marginal.
There has, unfortunately, been somewhat less attention given to what such a world would look like but I would submit that in fact if we work through the implications of denaturalizing hegemonic3 forces and identities while simultaneously holding to a liberationist conviction that God is on the side of the oppressed and that all are of infinite worth in the eyes of love we will find ourselves—to the likely chagrin of both liberal queer theologians and stodgy Lewis scholars alike—confronted with something functionally identical to The Great Dance. What Lewis arrived at through his love of medieval theology, philosophy, and myth, we find ourselves approaching once more through a commitment to the liberatory values of queer theology. What Lewis climbs to through near endless lists of ordering, and categories arranged into ever finer and more stifling hierarchies before emerging unexpectedly into a space where all hierarchies invert and the motive power of all existence turns out to be only Love as Real, Cosmic, and Eternal, the queer liberationist enters through explanation of the unique and central glory of all things playfully and now beautifully interacting in what—the moment we step back and look—resolves into a great dance.
Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest [angel], is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him.
Almost comically throughout, Lewis reaches for the hierarchy though which he first approached the Dance only to find it again and again resolving into an equality as each thing in reality proves to be of infinite value and worth as the sole instantiation of it’s glorious particularity. Conversely we find contemporary queer and liberationist theorists and theologians trying to hold to the vision of deep equality that has pointed them to this vision of playful glory only to find themselves confronted in the end with an interdependent order of glorious differents establishing itself out of deep equality.
And I think the reason for this strange meeting of the ordered and the weird, the decentered centering center, the equal hierarchies of infinite particular worth and liberation can be found in the particular image Lewis found himself drawn to: The Dance.
What stands out about the Dance is that it is rooted not in power but in beauty and in play. Hierarchy and hegemony can only exist within the Dance as ephemeral things—a spotlight that shifts always to another for the glory of each and of all.
The trick, I think, is in the movement beyond what any given school of thought is quite able to manage on it’s own. In describing the medieval thinker Lewis claim in The Discarded Image
At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight. … There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
I want to posit that when someone with such a disposition pushes as hard as she can on the limits of such a tendency in good faith, determined to make the finite system encompass reality she will ultimately push through all of that order and categorization in to something beyond either order or chaos: a Dance in which all are dancers and each dances their own steps and remains somehow central always to the dance itself. The Categories divide and sub-divide and until each is only itself while at the same time, with each division categories multiply and are established across individuals where were never before seen to associate. Or put another way:
In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed.
But hierarchy cannot be abandoned by these folks until they are ready to abandon any an all claim to a place at the center. It is a fairly commonplace observance among those of us with variously marginalized identities that people with privilege—those our society places at the center—,even when they are genuinely committed to liberation and disrupting oppressive systems, tend to carry a lot of anxiety around the possibility of losing their position at the center. They do not want to be marginalized. For them that last push through into the beyond from power plays and oppression is going to take their realization that there is already no less glory at the margins than there is in the center. Their worth is independent of centrality or marginality. We cannot dance while we are looking at our feet.
Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty.
Meanwhile those of us who are in marginalized positions need also to learn that our value, our worth, is not at all diminished by our marginalized identities. I am beyond blessed and glorious because I am a transgender lesbian and so long as my goal is to gain a place at the center I will remain trapped in a system that has a fixed center. At most I will find some way to re-position my identity as a central one by shifting some other identities to the margins and in so doing I will neither achieve liberation or the playful Joy of the dance. I must wake up to the fact that, here at the margin I too am ultimately and perfectly necessary to the Dance of Being. Until I and everyone else can recognize that, we will not be dancing.
Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely necessary to you and for your delight I was made.
None of that though, diminishes for a second the necessity of deconstructing the oppressive structures and systems of this world. As queer theologian Marcella Althous-Reid put it
Liberation theology needs to be understood as a continuing process of recontextualization, a permanent exercise of serious doubting in theology.
It is a matter of some frustration to a lot of thinkers—especially those more skeptical towards queer theology—that the goal is described as a process, in this case “a continuing process of recontextualization” and for someone whose idea of a goal is something static or given that frustration makes sense. But if we shift our vision to one of a Dance—a thing of play and beauty—where centrality is passed around like a ball in a game for reasons that transcend rules or power and focus instead on Goodness and the Beauty of the Game itself, “a continuing process of recontextualization” suddenly seems exactly right. In the end the apparent contradictions in Lewi’s Great Dance are not marks of inconsistence but of playful Goodness, dynamic beauty, and deep Truth. Until the center is everywhere we are only ever going to be standing around.
I am prepared to consider arguments that it is rivaled by the last chapter of Till We Have Faces.
“Allosexual” is the counterpart to “asexual” in the same way that “cisgender” is the counterpart to “transgender” and “heterosexual” is a counterpart to “homosexual”. I imagine my ace (asexual) friends are a little frustrated that I have had to define this where I did not define the others and my sympathies are all with them. Let us work towards a future where the beauty and dignity of our ace and aro siblings are as well recognized at least as that of our trans, gay, lesbian, bi, pan, and intersex siblings.
At this juncture I want to make it a point to remind the wary conservative reader that “hegemonic” here is a term I am using based on the actual text of Perelandra and not from a “liberal gender studies textbook”. “ …and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good”
Beautiful! It draws me to want to read that trilogy. 💜