by C.S. Lewis

Discussion Prompt #1 by Eric Martin:

After taking us to the heavens in the first two books of his Ransom trilogy, CS Lewis returns to the silent planet, Thulcandra, to close out our time in the Field of Arbol. While less concerned with fantastical beasts like Hrossa, Seroni, and dragons, we are instead treated to what seems to be a mundane story set in a typical post war English university. But what unfolds from that point is a story that wrestles with the ideas of a divided country, what the end result of “objectivity” really could be, and how scary it would be to encounter Merlin if he wasn’t just the old wizard we saw in The Sword and the Stone.

Lewis has the ability to deeply understand the human condition and communicate his understanding to us as readers in a way greater than any author since his death. One cannot read the story he has spun for us in this trilogy and not immediately begin to see how it parallels the modern human story we are living in. But instead of just providing us a mirror with which to examine the way our current age is devolving and could eventually collapse, he instead provides us with hope.

We see hope in the rescue of humanity by those at St. Anne’s who patiently waited for the movement of forces greater than themselves. We see hope in the conversion of both Mark and Jane Studdock, who for various reasons in their life, rejected faith when it was presented to them throughout their lives. We see hope in what we are led to believe is the ascension of Dr. Ransom in a way that is similar to that of Enoch and Elijah, as he is able to return to the place where his heart lives, Perelandra.

It’s a nice thing to be hopeful in this day and age. And even though That Hideous Strength could be fairly criticized for a number of choices the author made, it is in the end a book that helps us see the beauty of the universe that God created. For that hope that Lewis reminds us of, that ultimately we find in Christ, I raise my glass.

Cheers!

Discussion Prompt #2 by Tony Groesbeck:

This mythological science-fiction romance hits readers somewhere between the heart, the soul, and uh… The Head.

Subtitled by the author as a “modern fairy-tale for grown ups,” That Hideous Strength lives up to Lewis’s ambition to use the means of literature to sneak around the modern man’s propensity to drop the portcullis of intellectual defense when anything threatens to challenge our spiritual posture. To a long time acquaintance, he once wrote: “Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” (C. S. Lewis, 9 August 1939, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.) The book, and the trilogy as a whole, is rife with theological treatise, but it also works well as simply a fairy tale. Of course, what are fairy tales if not a simple story hiding a deeper truth like a smuggler’s pocket hides contraband?

That Hideous Strength is the third and concluding volume of the Space Trilogy (or Cosmic Trilogy) in which Lewis casts Elwin Ransom, a bookish philologist, as the humble but wildly successful hero of an interplanetary adventure; (perhaps this is why Lewis described the book as a “fairy-tale”… after all, Lewis was a bookish philologist himself.) This unlikely protagonist is central to a story that spans not only the millions of miles between planets, but the thousands of years between civilizations on Earth.

In the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars where he is exposed to a wider view of reality, including the fact that there is actually no distinction between what we call the “natural” and the “supernatural” worlds other than those which we construct ourselves in order to quarantine off those truths that would inconvenience our attempts to pursue a mediocre and meaningless existence. In the second book, Perelandra, Ransom willingly obeys a call from the forces of good to travel to Venus to help defend the burgeoning people of that world from the forces of evil who would defile the purity given them by their Creator. In this third book, Ransom gets to stay on his home planet, nursing a wound he received on Venus, while he directs a seemingly arbitrary collection of scholars, housewives, and a bear (yes, a bear) in a strangely tranquil resistance to the cold, violent, and insidious march of Scientism which seeks to dehumanize humanity and destroy the world as we know it.

In this book, Lewis seems to be writing to a pair of potential audiences: either (1) the disaffected adherents to the incongruous supposition that belief in scientific advancement precludes and makes ridiculous any kind of spiritual existence, or (2) the spiritual (specifically Christian) citizen of western civilization who has found himself lost in an ennui of bloodless liturgical and/or devotional faith practices but has lost his fervent love for the persons of the Trinity that first gave life to these practices. Happily, while these may have been the intended audiences (or possibly “targets”) of the Space Trilogy, these are not the only readers who can benefit from and enjoy reading it.

In That Hideous Strength, readers are invited commiserate with one of two characters– Jane Studdock, a “modern” educated woman who is newly married to (and already stifled by) Mark Studdock who is desperately pursuing advancement among his undistinguished and ridiculously self-important colleagues at the middling Bracton College. Jane’s frustratingly uninspiring vision of marriage, love, and identity is only exceeded in lameness by her husband’s pathetic desire to be accepted and esteemed by the deplorable characters he finds himself stepping over to move deeper and deeper into the diabolical N.I.C.E., a bureaucratic nightmare seeking to manipulate the public with the explicit goal of deconstructing the fundamental principles of western human existence while unwittingly being itself manipulated by demonic powers to destroy humanity in ipsa re (in actual fact); Lewis’s mid-century answer to Dante’s Inferno.

While there are plenty of terrifying images, motifs, and images present in the book, the most horrifically chilling element of all is how easy it is to relate to the most vile parts of Mark Studdock’s contemptible character. This feature of the novel is another testament to Lewis’s compositional genius as he created a central character who readers are able to despise almost immediately because in him, we recognize the same disgusting desires that we often contend with in ourselves. As Lewis wrote in hisExperiment in Criticism, “… in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” Perhaps in reading about Mark Studdock, we can transcend ourselves to become “more ourselves.”

Indeed, Lewis offers hope for the rescue of the Studdocks from their own self-labelled “progressive” worldviews by having Ransom introduce Jane to something truly revolutionary: love. Ransom tells Jane that “…you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.” This position, one can imagine, has to be even less popular now than it was in 1945 when Lewis published the book. However, Mark does not get away without a reality check about his own position at the end of the novel when he sees himself as the undeserving and unworthy idiot that he actually is when he escapes the “hell” of N.I.C.E. and goes to meet his wife at Ransom’s house.

There is also a strong inference made that Jane and Mark’s “meeting” may produce the mythically- prophesied return of King Arthur and the kingdom of Logres. Oh yeah, Merlin shows up, too. (Yep, that Merlin.)

Forgive the unfocused treatment of this remarkable book, but after all, this is just an introduction to a discussion. There is much more to be said about this novel, so in true Ink and Stone tradition, let’s raise a glass to Lewis, and remember that John Locke said, “Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.”