C.S. Lewis was an influential voice in modern Christianity. He was a classical "Oxford don" who wrote pedantic studies of medieval literature. He also wrote the Narnia children's stories--for which, curiously, he may be best known. He wrote several fantasy, "mystical sci-fi," novels. Perelandra is a parable about the nature of "original sin" and mystical consciousness; it tells of a Bristish college professor who is whisked off by angelic-like beings to act as "God"'s spokesman when the Adam and Eve of Venus, "Perelandra" in their language, are being tempted by the devil--who appears in the form of an Earth scientist and technocrat. It is a beautiful tale of the conquest of goodness. Most interestingly, Lewis devises a mythic cosmology of light beings and guardians spirits; Earth mythologies, he proposes, are erroneous attempts to grasp this cosmology.

As we know from the play and movie, Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis was a "bachelor," living with his brother most of his life, living as a sort of celibate cleric of academe. He certainly wasn't a modern gay man, but he was one of us, I think.

In his mystical fiction, he spoke raptuously about a transcendent vision of the whole cosmos as a living being textured of light and energy, far beyond the naive personal God of popular Christianity. From him comes the sentence: "Wel ive in an environment of mind as wwell as of space."

Here's a brief excerpt from Perelandra:

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. In these seas there are islands where the hairs of the turf are so fine and so closely woven together that unless a man looked long at them he would see neither hairs nor weaving at all, but only the same and the flat. So with the Great Dance. Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He!"

"Yet this seeming also is the end and final cause for which He spreads out Time so long and Heaven so deep; lest if we never met the dark, and the road that leads nowhither, and the question to which no answer is imaginable, we should have in our minds no likeness of the Abyss of the Father, into which if a creature drop down his thoughts for ever he shall hear no echo return to him. Blessed, blessed, blessed be He!"