Reverend Brian McGreevy continues his series, Not as Unwise but as Wise: Reflections from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength on Living Christianly in a Post-Christian World. This is available as a podcast on iTunes.
Not as Unwise but as Wise: Reflections from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength on Living Christianly in a Post-Christian World.The Abolition of Man has been named by the National Review as one of the ten most important books of the 20th century, and Lewis expressed the same tenets fictionally in That Hideous Strength. In this episode, we will explore how C.S. Lewis came to write these two books, what was the context at the time, and how the two books are connected. In this series. we will seek to unpack the meaning of Lewis’s works, explore their remarkable relevance for today, and consider how we can respond with practices of Hope and Wisdom rooted in the Scriptures.
Week 1: How did C.S. Lewis come to write these two books, what was the context, and how are these two books connected?
A. C.S. Lewis and how his background prepared him for writing these books: Lewis grew into a brilliant, proud, and aggressive atheist after a difficult childhood. He achieved a brilliant Triple First in Moderations (Greek and Latin Literature), Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History), and English (like graduating Summa cum Laude in each of three majors. He was appointed to teach Philosophy at Oxford and knew worldly success at a very young age, being elected a Fellow of Magdalen College in 1925 and with his publication of “Spirits in Bondage” and “Dymer.” Through his friendship with fellow professor J.R.R. Tolkien and others, Lewis became enchanted with the idea of True Myth and was converted to Christianity in 1931.
B. Formation of the Inklings:The Inklings were a group that gathered around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien beginning in the 1930s and lasting for several decades, defined by Lewis as “…an informal club, whose qualifications are a tendency to write, and Christianity.” Composed mostly of Oxford academics, they generally met on Tuesday mornings at the “Eagle and Child” (which they called the “Bird and Baby” or just the “Bird”) and at Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday evenings over the course of many years and engaged in deep discussions of philosophy and theology while sharing their works in progress with one another. Building upon a deep Christian faith and a recovery of the transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, the Inklings were unafraid to boldly engage the culture and mounted a counter-cultural offensive about how to live and think Christianly in a post-Christian world.C. The role of the Inklings and Tolkien in conceiving these books:
Following Lewis’s conversion to the Christian faith in the early 1930s, Lewis turned his considerable gifts towards writing works that would point to the truth of the Gospel. Tolkien and Lewis challenged each other around 1935 to create deep and hopeful works of the imagination. After a wager where they flipped a coin, the two men agreed that Lewis would write on space travel while Tolkien would deal with time travel. Tolkien remembered this episode as follows:
L. [Lewis] said to me one day: ‘Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.’ We agreed that he should try ‘space-travel’, and I should try ‘time-travel’. His result is well known. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry: it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend. The final scene survives as The Downfall of Númenor.
D. Context: England in the dark days of World War II:
It is almost impossible for us to understand the fear and dread and sheer difficulty of life in England during this period, but getting a sense of that is vital to understanding how both these books came to be written. Ultimate questions (Is there a God? What is the meaning of life? What happens when I die?) were on everyone’s mind, forced by the awareness that death was raining from the skies and that tomorrow might not come or might mean Nazi rule. It was virtually impossible to be alive without facing these issues. It was an apocalyptic atmosphere:
“I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”—Winston Churchill to House of Commons and on BBC, June 18, 1940
E. The Lectures that gave rise to The Abolition of Man and That Hideous StrengthFirst delivered as the scholarly Riddell Memorial Lectures on February 24 to 26, 1943, in King’s Hall at King’s College, Newcastle (part of Durham University), The Abolition of Man was published later that same year, just after Lewis had finished Perelandra and was conceiving That Hideous Strength.
F. Connections between the two books:Convinced of the crucial importance of the themes in The Abolition of Man, Lewis decided to portray them in the form of a story for the last volume in the Ransom trilogy, which he entitled That Hideous Strength. The title comes from a line in a poem by Sir David Lyndsay called “Ane Dialog” (1555) in which Lyndsay was describing the biblical Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9): “The shadow of that hideous strength, Six miles and more it is of length.” In the preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis states, “This is a ‘tall story‘ [pun probably intended] about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”
G. Reception and Importance of The Abolition of ManLater in life, Lewis wrote that The Abolition of Man “is almost my favourite among my books, but in general has been almost totally ignored by the public.” Despite Lewis’s assessment that Abolition had been ignored, it has proven to be one of the most important things Lewis ever wrote. The Intercollegiate Review named it one of the five nonfiction books of the 20th century. The National Review ranks it seventh on its list of the top nonfiction books of the 20th century. Professor Alasdair McIntyre, perhaps the most eminent philosopher of this era, was hugely influenced by this work via Elizabeth Anscombe in his seminal volume After Virtue. Ayn Rand certainly didn’t ignore it, though she didn’t much like it–calling it “abysmal scum” and a “cheap, awful, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity.” Viewed by many scholars as one of Lewis’s most important books, it is widely regarded as even more relevant today than when it was written.
A video clip from the Imperial War Museum in London showing poignantly what it was like in England during WWII:
