Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)
And one other thought:
Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”
More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”
Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”
From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Your correspondent is a tad down today. Translation work has been slow (read nonexistent), and it snowed and snowed for days and days. Stopped today, and we should be safe for a while according to the forecasts. But it’s… full out there. Chock full. This is one of those years when we don’t know what to do with all the accumulation. The piles along the driveway are nearly as tall as we are.
Of course my neighbor clears the snow for me with a machine, but it’s guilt-inducing to watch him at it.
The news is depressing too. I think I’m going to turn off talk radio again for a while (except for some hours of Prager). Listen to Pandora instead. Confession: I’d like to see my party, you know, pulling together. But I’m afraid that if I say that I’ll be accused of being a RINO. The arguments in favor of the Twenty make some sense to me, but I don’t like watching friends turn into enemies. Simple soul that I am, I don’t think that really helps in the long run.
Above, maintaining the theme of love for That Hideous Strength I’ve been proclaiming all week, here’s Andrew Klavan talking about it. Some of this is a little hard to understand (how can anybody not love Narnia? How can anybody read THS with ease the first time through?), but his opinions on the meaning of the book are spot on. They get him the all-important Walker endorsement, which is nice.
And mixed with this was the sense that she had been maneuvered into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their gray formalized one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like.
The time has come to review C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, and how am I to do that? I think a scholar could devote his whole career to this one. It’s packed full of good stuff. All that stuff doesn’t always work together as you might wish, but even the “failings” look different once you’ve grasped the grand design. Or (perhaps better put) designs.
The setup, in case you’ve never read the book, is that this is the third novel about Prof. Elwin Ransom of Cambridge University, who traveled, first to Mars, and then to Venus, in the previous novels, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There he found the universe and its inhabitants to be very different from what he expected – more on the lines of medieval cosmology than anything imagined by H. G. Wells.
But in this third book, Ransom himself doesn’t appear until well along in the story. We first meet Jane Studdock, educated young wife of a fellow at Bracton College of the (fictional) University of Edgestowe. Jane has been having troubling dreams of a disembodied head, connected by tubes to some kind of mechanism. She confides her fears to “Mother” Dimble, wife of an older faculty member, which leads her gradually into the orbit of an eccentric community of Christians who live in the nearby village of St. Anne’s.
Meanwhile, her husband Mark is excited to be gaining entrée into the “inner ring” at Bracton – the young, “dynamic” men who know the important people and are poised to sweep the old traditions away. But soon he gets a chance to join an even more exclusive ring – the men of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which is acquiring the college property. Mark’s new duties, should he agree to take the post with N.I.C.E., are a little vague, but they clearly involve ethical compromises. And he cannot guess N.I.C.E.’s true goal – the extinction of all life on earth.
If you’ve read Perelandra, you’ll recall how the narrator, as he approaches Ransom’s cottage at the beginning, has to struggle against a “barrier” – a spiritual blockade of sorts. Readers approaching That Hideous Strength have to pass a barrier too. Ironically, this barrier exists because the author did such a good job of realizing his narrative goals.
The problem with the first half of That Hideous Strength is that the passages set at Belbury (the headquarters of N.I.C.E.) are highly effective in portraying the worst aspects of bureaucracy, as Lewis had come to know (and loathe) it. His hatreds of petty ambition, of envy, of snobbery, of fuzzy thinking, of officiousness, of chronological snobbery and moral relativism spring into sight here – not in vivid, but in muted, colors. The satire is biting. But it makes for rather dreary reading. It’s like a breath of country air when we switch to the scenes at St. Anne’s, where the breeze is fresh and there are friendly people (and animals).
Somebody said (it might have been Dale Nelson; it might have been in the comments here) that That Hideous Strength is Lewis’ catch-all book, the book where he threw in everything he wanted to say all at once. Perhaps it would have worked better artistically if he’d practiced more restraint. But it wouldn’t be what it is – a book you could study all your life.
What themes are we dealing with here? The Abolition of Man. The whole nightmare of Belbury is a vision of a new world order based on subjective values – in which all the things that make our lives worth living are dismissed as chemical accidents, reducing humanity itself to raw material for working experiments on. The “humanitarian” theory of punishment, in which the prisoner’s rights are swept away on the pretext of “treating” him. The lure of the “inner ring,” where a man sells his soul by stages for rewards of diminishing happiness. The values of hierarchy and subordination, including in marriage. The mythopoeic fantasies of Tolkien, which Lewis weds to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain. The “spiritual thriller” genre written so well by Lewis’ friend Charles Williams.
There’s something strangely familiar about Belbury to the modern reader, although the parallel isn’t apparent at first. The great goal of the N.I.C.E. is to utterly wipe out organic life, leaving only Mind (ostensibly human, but in fact diabolical). That seems like the opposite of the dominant movement of our own world, a Nature worship that seems poised to embrace human extinction.
But it seems to me the two things aren’t that far apart. Both the Greta Thunberg cult and N.I.C.E. are hostile to human procreation. Today’s progressives, though “sex-positive” in theory, in fact despise any human sexual activity that could produce natural offspring (like the inhabitants of the moon described in this book, “their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”).
I could go on and on. That Hideous Strength occupies a very special place in my heart. Every time I read it, it moves me and teaches me. It brings me to tears. I recommend it highly, but I warn you it requires a little work.
I’m still working away at That Hideous Strength. My slow progress shouldn’t be taken as a sign of disinterest; I’m enjoying it quite a lot. I just have things I’ve got to do, and I’m moving slow because of the fall I took. So I don’t anticipate a review until next week.
Above, a very short clip from 9 years ago, of the mathematician John Lennox reminiscing about listening to Lewis lecturing at Cambridge. This was actually the very last lecture series Lewis ever delivered, before ill health forced his retirement. His eccentric lecturing “style” is well documented from several sources, though others report that Lewis actually starting lecturing out in the hallway before even entering the classroom. His voice carried well.
Still reading That Hideous Strength, so what shall I blog about? Are you interested in the fact that I fell down the basement stairs the other day? Moving too fast for a man my age; I’d just come inside and my rubber shoe soles were wet. One of them slipped on a stair tread, because I took it too close to the edge, and I went down a few steps.
No major damage that I could tell. Nothing seems to be broken. I can’t even see any bruises; maybe they’re in back, out of my view in the mirror. But I assume there’s a muscle bruise in one of the stabilizing muscles on the left side of my trunk. Walking’s a little painful, but it’s getting up and sitting down that hurt most. Today I did some shopping, and I took my cane. It helped. Surprisingly, I’ve been feeling a little better each day (isn’t the third day supposed to be the worst?), so I expect I’ll be fairly mobile by the weekend.
I did some noodling on the internet and found the “trailer” above – a fake somebody mugged up. I like it, though I can’t endorse all the casting. Hopkins is way too old to play Ransom, and where’s the sweeping golden beard? Gielgud is dead, always an inconvenience. I used to dream of doing a film of the book myself – even had the first shots planned out. I wanted Orson Welles as Merlin – he’d have done it too, if we’d had the money; he’d take any role at the end. I’m glad other people feel the same way about THS; I’m always surprised when anybody likes the book – I’ve encountered so much hostility to it over the years.
Reader’s impressions: First of all, we’re told that Jane Studdock’s maiden name was Tudor. That’s significant for any Arthurian – the Tudors were the dynasty that really promoted the revival of the Arthurian legend in the late Middle Ages. As a Welsh family, and thus Celtic/British, they claimed through Arthur a prior right of sovereignty over the upstart Normans.
I expect it’s the character of Jane that offends people the most in our time – the idea that she’s missed her true vocation by refusing to bear children. But in the context of the book, Jane is far less in the wrong than her husband Mark. She’s merely petty; Mark runs the danger of genuine corruption, becoming part of something worse than the Nazis.
That Hideous Strength is the third of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the first two books being Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. One of my friends recommended it as a suitable stand-alone, and we read it together as a group. I have since listened to Out of the Silent Planet and understand the gist of Perelandra, but while they expand and explain That Hideous Strength, they each have somewhat self-contained stories. In fact, one of us noted you could strip this story of its fantasy gods and planetary symbolism and it would remain intact, lacking only a magical framework for the weird stuff. That framework is explored in the first two books and brought to bear in the third.
The story develops slowly to give us time to understand our central characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, both educated, progressively minded people. Mark wants to be an insider, an opinion-maker or influential voice within Bracton College. Jane wants to be her own woman–married, of course, but equal to and independent of her husband. In chapter one, we see her chafe at what her life, marriage, and career had become. Mark doesn’t begin to chafe at his circumstances until much later, when it appears his wife is a hinderance to his career as a high ranking official of the NICE (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments).
If you know anything about the story, you know something of the trouble caused by NICE. They aim to rewrite the world. They bring Mark in initially to write stories for distribution in diverse publications in order to smooth the way for them, and it takes him a while to understand the point.
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
In his preface, Lewis frames his story as a “fairy tale,” and “a ‘tall story’ about devilry”–a fictional take on the thinking that went into another of his books, The Abolition of Man. If you have not read that book, taking it up before reading That Hideous Strength will likely help draw out its meaning and dramatic imagery.
You could say this book is about marriage, because that tension between Mark and Jane runs throughout. You could say it’s a book on the gloriously mythological roots of Great Britain; Arthur, Merlin, and Atlantis all figure in heavily. But the main theme begins with the quote above–that educated people will believe anything.
Experts, who may be rather immature human beings while still highly skilled in their field, can and do cause great harm to society. They acquire authority and use it for their own ends, perhaps compassionately to a point, perhaps with good intentions, but those ‘who know best’ will eventually force the best down our throats in the name of progress.
This danger could come from many sides; many people and institutions undermine the values they profess. Every one of us must seek the light while it can still be found.
I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength with friends over the last few weeks. We came to an appropriately seasonal chapter this week. The plans of both heroes and enemies are being revealed, and the theologically minded villain says, “The Head has sent for you. Do you understand–the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: to-night you shall see what it symbolised. This is real Man at last.”
The kingdom of God is of this earth, the man says in another place, and we will bring it about in this generation by pursuing this counterfeit Christ called the Head, the first artificial man.
I won’t reveal the particulars of this grotesque evil, in case you haven’t read this one yet, and it doesn’t matter for my point. This is a creative effort of anti-humanist planners who carry on the tradition of the best eugenicists. They wish to remake man in their own image and call him God Almighty.
The creation of divine counterfeits occurs in every generation. Some of them run like a bad sequel; some make even Christ’s followers comfortable.
Of very great importance, in order to do the work that Christ did, is that we take heed that the religion we promote be that same religion that Christ taught and promoted, and not any of its counterfeits and delusive appearances, or anything substituted by the subtle devices of Satan, or vain imaginations of men, in lieu of it. If we are zealous and very diligent to promote religion, but do not take good care to distinguish true from false religion, we shall be in danger of doing much more hurt than good with all our zeal and activity.
edited from “Christ the Example of Ministers,” John 13: 15-16
Calvin apparently thought it easy to raise up ourselves even though we intend to raise up Christ, easy to be conformed to the world and call it conforming to Christ.
And didn’t Christ Jesus say, “See that you are not led astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them” (Lk 21:8 ESV).
Dale Nelson drew my attention to this book offering at AbeBooks.com. It’s an original review copy of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (one of my favorite novels in the world), autographed by the author himself to George Orwell and his wife.
Posted price: $30,000.
I’m sure some of our elite blog readers are in a position to purchase this book, and then donate it to the Marion Wade Center or some other worthy institution.
I wish we had a referral arrangement with AbeBooks, as we do with Amazon, so we could get a piece of that action.
In case you’re wondering what Orwell thought of the book, he called it “worth reading,” but was not in love with it.
If you’re on a budget, you can get the book slightly more inexpensively here. We do get some of that.
“Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” (Proverbs 25:25, ESV)
There is good news, folks, even now, especially if you’re a C. S. Lewis fan.
There are “new” recordings of C. S. Lewis reading his own work and Chaucer, available from the Rabbit Room Store. That’s surprising in itself, but the source of the recordings is even more remarkable.
In August of 1960, C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy Davidman had been dead for about a month. At that time her ex-husband, William Gresham, traveled to England to see his sons, Douglas and David. It must have been an awkward reunion. Bill Gresham tried hard to get custody of his sons, but “Jack” Lewis strenuously opposed him, winning custody for himself. (According to Joy Davidman’s biographer, she may have exaggerated her stories of Bill’s neglect and abuse. However, it is indisputable that he was an alcoholic.)
However he felt, Bill was gracious enough to ask Jack to read some of his work into the new tape recorder he’d brought along. Jack did so, reading excerpts from Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and then reading (or reciting) part of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in flawless Middle English.
I haven’t bought my copy yet, mostly out of laziness, but I’m going to. I can’t complain about the price – three bucks for the whole caboodle.
Proceeds go to benefit the Marion E. Wade Center, which owns the rights.
I’ve taken to meeting with a small group of Bible school students for lunch once a week. We talk about writing, and stories, and the Inklings, etc.
Two weeks ago I talked about the difficulty we all have in writing plainly.
I’m inclined to think that it’s evidence of original sin that writing plainly is so hard.
Objectively, what should be easier than writing down exactly what you mean? It’s your own meaning. Just put it in words.
But it turns out to be one of the hardest things in the world.
We write a sentence, or a story, or a book, and then we look at it. We say, “No, that wasn’t what I really meant. It’s not quite right.” So we change some words.
But that wasn’t quite what we really meant either.
And so we go through revision after revision, deleting and adding words, replacing words, altering sentence length, breaking up and combining paragraphs. Until we finally hammer out something that seems to say (kind of) what we want.
But even when it’s done – even after it’s published (if we’re so lucky) there’s a lingering doubt. “Was that really what I meant to say? Could I have said it better? How would Phil Wade have put it?”
I think the reason is original sin. We’re so perverted in our nature, so blind to our own hearts, that saying what we mean is nearly the hardest thing we can do. (C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces has this idea as a central theme.)
Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, “Lo, this only I have found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.”
I’m going to post this now, though I probably could have put it better.
