Colonising Eden, in the name of Universal Spirit In Perelandra, the sudden arrival of Weston's spaceship on Venus is a great surprise to the self-doubting Ransom, who himself has been sent by an oyarsa to counter a mysterious threat to the Lady, the new Eve of Venus . Weston has undergone a philosophical conversion since his near-death in returning from Mars: he considers his former devotion to the human race as "a mere prejudice", and now wishes to spread "Spirit ... the blind, inarticulate purposiveness" which drives emergent evolution. In his personal theology, Weston has come to the fatal misunderstanding that God and the Devil are one, and that his great work is guided by this syncretic Spirit. Indeed, Weston calls Ransom to joint him, since "nothing now divides you and me except a few outworn theological technicalities with which organised religion has unhappily allowed itself to get incrusted. But I have penetrated that crust." But under Ransom's probing, Weston's new philosophy proves as self-aggrandizing as the old: "In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it ... I, Weston, am your God and Devil. I call that Force into me completely ...." As he opens his soul, Weston is possessed by the Devil and lost as an independent personality, his frozen features suggesting that "either he was in no pain or in a pain beyond all human comprehension." Ransom leaves to look for the Lady  , and when he returns Weston is gone. Weston's end When Ransom finds him again, surrounded by ripped-apart frogs, Weston is no longer human: He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one.The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.... It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile... The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.The evil spirit possessing Weston works to corrupt the newly created race,  tempting the Lady of Perelandra (the new Eve) into disobeying the commands of Maleldil (God), while Ransom pleads with her to resist the Un-man (Ransom's name for the possessed Weston). Eventually Ransom, realizing that he cannot defeat the Un-man with argument — and prompted by Maleldil — physically attacks the Un-man, and both are badly wounded in the ensuing fight, but neither can prevail. In an interlude, Weston's consciousness appears to resurface, dismaying Ransom with the confused horror of Hell: [Death] is the real universe.... That’s what it all means.... That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now—a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then—the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre—to live one week, one day, one half-hour longer—that’s the only thing that matters.... Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside.... We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe ... from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was.... Reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe.... You try to connect things and can't. They take your head off...and you can't even look back on what life was like...because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.However, it is impossible to distinguish whether anything he says is Weston or the Devil working through him. Indeed, Ransom concludes:
Colonising Eden, in the name of Universal Spirit In Perelandra, the sudden arrival of Weston's spaceship on Venus is a great surprise to the self-doubting Ransom, who himself has been sent by an oyarsa to counter a mysterious threat . Weston has undergone a philosophical conversion since his near-death in returning from Mars: he considers his former devotion to the human race as "a mere prejudice", and now wishes to spread "Spirit ... the blind, inarticulate purposiveness" which drives emergent evolution. In his personal theology, Weston has come to the fatal misunderstanding that God and the Devil are one, and that his great work is guided by this syncretic Spirit. Indeed, Weston calls Ransom to joint him, since "nothing now divides you and me except a few outworn theological technicalities with which organised religion has unhappily allowed itself to get incrusted. But I have penetrated that crust." But under Ransom's probing, Weston's new philosophy proves as self-aggrandizing as the old: "In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it ... I, Weston, am your God and Devil. I call that Force into me completely ...." As he opens his soul, Weston is possessed by the Devil and lost as an independent personality, his frozen features suggesting that "either he was in no pain or in a pain beyond all human comprehension." Ransom leaves to look for the Lady of Perelandra , and when he returns Weston is gone. Weston's end When Ransom finds him again, surrounded by ripped-apart frogs, Weston is no longer human: He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one.The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.... It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile... The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.The evil spirit possessing Weston works to corrupt the newly created race, subtly tempting the Lady of Perelandra (the new Eve) into disobeying the commands of Maleldil (God), while Ransom pleads with her to resist the Un-man (Ransom's name for the possessed Weston). Eventually Ransom, realizing that he cannot defeat the Un-man with argument — and prompted by Maleldil — physically attacks the Un-man, and both are badly wounded in the ensuing fight, but neither can prevail. In an interlude, Weston's consciousness appears to resurface, dismaying Ransom with the confused horror of Hell: [Death] is the real universe.... That’s what it all means.... That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now—a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then—the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre—to live one week, one day, one half-hour longer—that’s the only thing that matters.... Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside.... We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe ... from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was.... Reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe.... You try to connect things and can't. They take your head off...and you can't even look back on what life was like...because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.However, it is impossible to distinguish whether anything he says is Weston or the Devil working through him. Indeed, Ransom concludes:
D
to the Lady, the new Eve of Venus
A
of Perelandra
A
subtly