BATTLE BEGUN 

Overview Question

In this chapter, Belbury and St. Anne’s are both seeking to strengthen their sources of strategic knowledge (“military intelligence” one might say) in order to undermine and defeat the other side. Belbury hopes to capture Jane and make use of her clairvoyance to reveal the plans of their as yet unlocated and unidentified enemies. St. Anne’s hopes to find Merlin in case he will be on their side, but also to try to stop him from helping the NICE if that is his inclination. Neither side is omniscient; but each uses very different methods to try to achieve their goals. Overview Question:

Based on what you already know about these two groups of people, as well as what you learn in this chapter (especially Frost’s speech to Wither toward the end of Part 2), how would you characterize the different goals of each group, and how are these goals consistent with the very different methods that each group uses?

The following quotation from Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (Letter VIII) should also help with considering this question in greater depth. (Screwtape, the senior devil, is speaking to Wormwood, his understudy.)  

“To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the enemy demands of men is quite a different thing . . . He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of himself . . . not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.” (emphasis added)

DEEPER-DIVE QUESTIONS

1. As Jane, Dr. Dimble, and Arthur Denniston look for Merlin in the fields and woods at night, each of them begins to realize that, up to now, their ideas and beliefs about Merlin, or King Arthur, or the ancient Druids, or even about the Christian God and religion in the modern world, have often been either theoretical and abstract (Dimble) or shallow and poorly informed (Jane). Now they are about to encounter something in person, and it all looks very different. What parallels can you find in the culture wars of America today among some groups or individuals for this kind of awakening to the deeper reality and seriousness of faith and religion, and to the possibility that one might have to sacrifice something, even to give one’s life, in order truly to serve the good cause of God? Have you yourself felt or experienced this kind of sharpening of religious focus? 

2. Continuing a theme that we saw in Chapter 10, the leaders at Belbury believe they can use coercive techniques to manipulate Mark into doing their will (to bring Jane to Belbury). And yet there are signs of a kind of myopia or blindness built into their worldview, in particular their view of “man” (in this case Mark and others). What signs of this blindness can you detect in the chapter, and why do you think these types of ideological blindness are particularly endemic to the modern worldview?

3. In Part 3, after being arrested, Mark goes through another series of realizations and reactions about himself and Belbury; but he seems unable to sort it all out. As the narrator informs us, Mark is a materialist. He has no absolute reference point for moral judgement; and yet his conscience is still functioning at a level high enough to allow him to realize that he has been a fool to trust the people of NICE (Wither, Feverstone, Curry, Frost). He even has a momentary picture of his own corruption and villainy in the ways he has treated Jane and other friends from the past. According to the narrator, what is missing from Mark’s worldview that might have allowed him to understand his own foolish behavior more fully, more deeply? What is it in his current lifeworld that has blocked him from acquiring these other insights?