Perelandra Notes

> Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of
both from fact was purely terrestrial--was part and parcel of that unhappy division
between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on Earth the sacraments
existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final.
The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would
have no meaning at all.
> The thing still seemed impossible. But gradually something happened to him which
had happened to him only twice before in his life... In both cases the thing had
seemed a sheer impossibility: he had not thought but known that, being what he was,
he was psychologically incapable of doing it, and then, without any apparent
movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there
had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge that 'about this time
tomorrow you will have done the impossible.' The same thing happened now. His fear,
his shame, his love, all his arguments, were not altered in the least. The thing
was neither more nor less dreadful than it had been before. The only different was
that he knew--almost as a historical proposition--that it was going to be done...
The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been mo moment of
victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set
aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might
say that he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged
into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see any
difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently
identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on
this subject.

In self-surrender, predestination and free will meet their consummation.