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.
Episode 9: 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
After a recap of the main themes of The Abolition of Man, we move on to set the stage for That Hideous Strength, looking at the cosmology of Deep Heaven, the characters who appear in the first chapter of the book, and some themes from The Abolition of Man that begin to emerge even in the first chapter of the last of the Ransom trilogy, including an exploration of Lewis’s under-appreciated essay, “The Inner Ring.”
“The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length”
(Sir David Lyndsay: from “Ane Dialog,” describing the Tower of Babel)
“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 realizable”
[“The Scientist Takes Over”, Review of C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945) by George Orwell, Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945]
PREFACE
I called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who is likes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why — intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels — I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters, and petty kings with which a fairytale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers, whereas I have never, in any university, come across a college like Bracton.
This is a “tall story” about devilry, though it has behind it a serious “point” which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man. In the story, the outer rim of that devilry had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. I selected my own profession, not, of course, because I think fellows of colleges more likely to be thus corrupted than anyone else, but because my own is the only profession I know well enough tA very small university is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham — a university with which the only connection I have had was entirely pleasant.
I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr. Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow. Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien.
The period of this story is vaguely “after the war.” It concludes the Trilogy of which Out of the Silent Planet was the first part, and Perelandra the second, but can be read on its own.
C.S. Lewis
Magdalen College, Oxford
Christmas Eve, 1943o write about.
CHARACTERS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Jane (Tudor) Studdock “She had not been to church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married.” Jane married Mark six months before the story begins, leaving behind a career she enjoyed. Since then, she works on her doctoral thesis on John Donne, but makes no progress. Before marriage, they had endless talks, but since marriage, she feels alone in solitary confinement. She does not wish for children, as they would impede her career as a scholar. She has nightmares of a man beheaded by having his head twisted off by some other men speaking French. She is disturbed when she sees a picture in a newspaper of precisely what she dreamed. Her dream also includes an ancient bearded Druidical man.
Francois Alcasan – An Arabian radiologist who poisoned his wife. He was beheaded for this crime. However, before his execution, Jane sees him in a dream being beheaded by twisting his head off. Jane saw in a man in a dream approach him and speak with him in French (which she did not understand).
Merlin – the ancient Druidical bearded man in a mantle from Arthurian days who also appears in Jane’s dream. Merlin has a pagan past but has also been deeply influenced by early British Christianity.
Mark (Gainsby) Studdock – A Fellow in Sociology for 5 years at Bracton College. He talks with Sub-Warden Curry and discovers, to his delight, he is now part of the inner circle, the “progressive element.” He married his wife Jane six months ago, and they are drifting apart. Mark learns that Lord Feverstone influenced Mark’s appointment to Bracton.
Sub-Warden Curry – Curry serves as the effective head of Bracton College, who thinks the NICE “marks the beginning of a new era – the really scientific era.” Curry wants to cultivate Mark to use him to support his agenda for the college that he is working on with Lord Feverstone.
Lord Feverstone – His real name is Dick Divine, who has appeared in the prior stories of the Space Trilogy as a villain. Mark discovers Feverstone as the person responsible for getting his position at Bracton College over another prospect, Denniston. Once Curry and Busby, the Bursar, leave, Mark discovers Feverstone holds them in disdain, but finds them useful in running He joins in cultivating Mark as part of the inner circle of the “progressive element” in the college.
Arthur Denniston – an old friend of Mark’s from university who is also a sociologist and Mark’s professional rival. When explaining to Mark why they chose him over Denniston, Sub-Warden Curry says, “One sees now that Denniston would never have done. Most emphatically not. A brilliant man at that time, of course, but he seems to have gone quite off the rails since then with all his Distributivism and what not. They tell me he’s likely to end up in a monastery.”
SUMMARY OF SECTIONS 1 AND 2 OF CHAPTER 1, “SALE OF COLLEGE PROPERTY”
Adapted from scholar Rudolf Rentzel
Jane married Mark Studdock six months ago, and things are not what she imagined they would be. Before they married, they had endless talks. Now she feels like she is in solitary confinement. Mark claims either sleepiness or tends to intellectual preoccupation. Mark works as a Fellow at Bracton College (which has no students – a sort of think tank). She wonders what happened to the “mutual society, help, and comfort” the minister at their marriage spoke about. They have no children so Jane can remain independent and pursue her work, though she left the job she enjoyed.
After marriage, Jane wants to work on her doctoral thesis about Donne (John Donne, the 17th Century poet and cleric who focused on metaphysics and love), or at least intends to, but seems to make no progress.
Jane sees a picture she sees in the newspaper, which immediately reminds her of a recent dream she had that turned into a nightmare which terrorized her. The newspaper reported about the execution of Alcasan, an Arabian radiologist who poisoned his wife and was executed by beheading for his crime. In her dream, Jane saw Alcasan (not knowing who he was) being beheaded by twisting his head off. Then Jane saw a different head of an ancient British, druidical man being dug up in a churchyard. Jane thought he was dead, but she then saw him come to life and begin talking in something that sounded vaguely like Spanish to her. Terrified, Jane woke up and could not sleep any further.
Meanwhile, Mark, now a Fellow for five years at Bracton College at Edgestow, talks with Sub-Warden Curry. Mark delights to find that he is now part of the inner circle, the “progressive element”– something he has desired for quite some time. However, Mark also discovers that his appointment as a Fellow at the college had to do with the considerable influence of Lord Feverstone, someone who spends most of his time in London. Apparently, Mark learns, without Feverstone’s influence, many favored another scholar named Denniston. Until now, Mark imagined he was selected on his own merits, and it disturbs him to discover otherwise. (Feverstone’s name is Dick Devine, a name from the first book in the trilogy where he appears as a villainy character.)
NOTES AND THEMES
–The Disembodied Head (no Chest)
–Sociology and “Real” Science
–Gender Roles (Platonic v. Corporeal notions of Love)
–The Inner Ring
C.S. LEWIS AND THE INNER RING—EXCERPTS FROM THE 1944 ESSAY
“I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable.
“I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction?”
“And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
“And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
“That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.’”
“My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule.
“Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.”
“The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow…
“If in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.”
Practices of Hope and of Wisdom
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.—Philippians 4:8-9
1.Meditate on Psalm 1 as an antidote to the desire for the Inner Ring.
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
4 The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
2.Pray for, practice, and cultivate Friendship:
“If in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.”
3. Pursue Advent disciplines
–Advent wreath
–Advent devotions
–Advent hymns
–Trinity College Advent Sunday service
–Go to church!
