That Hideous Strength (THS) by C.S. Lewis (1945), is an amazing and multilayered story about spiritual and cultural warfare in the modern world.1 Set in the fictional college town of Edgestow in mid-twentieth-century England, the story portrays events that presage the troubles and traumas of American society today. Anyone reading the story in the United States today will surely discover many alarming and revealing parallels. This should not surprise us, however, for the forces that are at war in America today have their roots in movements that have been trying to reshape both England and America since at least the early twentieth century.2 Lewis was aware of these forces.
The “Big Picture.”
In his preface to THS, Lewis says that his book is a “fairy-tale” with a “serious point,” a point that he has tried to make elsewhere in The Abolition of Man (TAM). In TAM, Lewis also describes a cultural war: a war between the modern post-enlightenment worldview (or life-world), with its exaltation of so-called “objective” or “scientific” knowledge, and the traditional worldview (or life-world) that reaches back through the Middle Ages to the Bible, with its emphasis on spiritual values and virtues that shape every part of human life in obedience to God.3 According to Lewis, the shift toward the modern life-world, especially in the institutions of modern British education, has resulted in “men without chests,” that is, people without training in the kinds of virtues and values that build strong families, congregations, communities, nations, and a healthy interaction with nature. These are, indeed, the themes of THS as well, though in THS they appear in a fictional story of dramatic detail with an unfolding narrative of personal struggle.
Thus, the conflict between the modern worldview and that of the biblical tradition through the Middle Ages is the “big picture” within which the story of THS is set. In a way, it is a story about the conflict between two big pictures, two life-worlds.
Major Corporate Characters of THS: The NICE at Belbury and St. Anne’s on the Hill
There are two primary institutional “characters” in THS, and each represents one of the life-worlds in question. At Belbury, we find the organization known as the N.I.C.E. (the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments). This group promotes the modern worldview, where all moral and religious values are considered subjective and relative, and where the primary goal is to create an administrative state, led by scientific elites who will manage and control the lives, the work, the futures, and even the sexuality of the common people. Sound familiar?
In this way, the NICE embrace, in a fairly straightforward manner, the modern post-enlightenment worldview. It is a world in which “nature” includes everything in the universe in a vast cause-and-effect system; and man is free to experiment on nature guided only by his own reason. As such, the NICE are also in league with what is called in THS the “progressive” element at the local Bracton College where, once again, the goal is to move the college away from its older scholars who represent the traditions of classical learning (Prof. Jewell) and even away from basic, “hard,” laboratory science (Prof. Hingest).
On the other side of this spiritual and cultural battle, we have the group that lives together at St. Anne’s on the Hill. This group, which is really more of a community—with marriages and families, gardens and animals—is led by Dr. Ransom, who is also variously called the “Director” and the “Pendragon” (the latter is a link to the medieval Arthurian legend).4 The plot thickens at this point, note well, for where the NICE are in league with the progressive element at Bracton, the community at St. Anne’s is in communication through Ransom with a group of “angelic” beings known as the Eldil. These angelic messengers, or Eldils, are guiding the people at St. Anne’s in their efforts to defeat the demoralizing influence of the NICE and to restore what is truly good, natural, and normal to the people of England.5
In this way, the life-world at St. Anne’s is open to many things that are simply unthinkable at Belbury. For at St. Anne’s, nature is not a vast cause-effect machine, ruled only by human reason. Rather, it is a living organon in which the power of God and of other spiritual forces are at work. Within this world, moreover, and shaped as it is in Lewis’s story by the medieval tradition, human beings are guided above all by their obedience to God and their submission to the living order of creation itself which God sustains. Their practices of marriage, prayer, and care for creation, for example, are inherent in how they view and value the world.
Major Individual Characters: Jane and Mark Studdock, and Merlin
Among all of the characters in THS, both at Belbury and at St. Anne’s—all of whom carry in some way the weight of their group and its life-world—there are three characters whose roles deserve special attention now. The first two are married to each other, Mark and Jane Studdock. They are a young professional couple. She is a feminist who wants an academic career rather than a family. He is an ambitious young professor who wants, above all, to climb the ladder of success. One might look at them in the story or in a real-life situation and say, “My, what a fine young couple.” But Mark’s and Jane’s marriage is in trouble. She wonders if she has made a mistake. They do not share deeply with each other about anything.
As the story progresses, furthermore, Mark and Jane move in opposite directions; one toward Belbury, and the other toward St. Anne’s. But in neither case are their movements streamlined or seamless. Both wrestle a lot with how to understand themselves, and with how to understand what is happening to them in these very different settings. Indeed, with Mark and Jane, we are given a personal life, two lives in a personal relationship with each other, as the canvas upon which to discover what is really at stake in the life-worlds and the worldviews that they (and we) embrace.
And then there is Merlin. Part of the medieval worldview that Lewis loved was the Arthurian legend. In THS, in this regard, both Dr. Dimble and Dr. Ransom are character types of Lewis himself. Both are Arthurian scholars, and both are aware that the NICE are trying to unearth the legendary grave of Merlin at Bragdon Wood. As a result, Dimble and Ransom are concerned about what this blending of modern atheistic science with ancient “magic” may portend for the spiritual battle ahead. In the end, Merlin—back from the dead after 1,500 years—plays a critical role in the defeat of the dark powers at Belbury. But he also presents one of the greatest challenges for us in trying to figure out how the fictional battle of THS may also apply to our own situation in America today.
Some Contemporary Concepts to Keep in Mind
As we work through the story, reading about both the individual characters and the corporate ones, each of us will, I believe, notice parallels, analogies, and echoes between what is going on in the story and what seems to be going on in America today. I want to encourage you to take note of these parallels and, indeed, some of my questions will ask you to name and list the parallels that you discover. In addition, I want to offer three major conceptual tools that I believe will help you to interpret what these parallels signify, both in our time and at the time of Lewis’s story. Keeping these in mind as you read may help you to make sense of the sometimes-chaotic strands of Lewis’s story, a kind of chaos that I believe we also encounter as we try to understand the strange and nonsensical things that are taking place today.
- The Four Stages of Cultural Revolution – As described by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov in the 1970s, these are the stages by which Russian agents worked to infiltrate and undermine America and other western societies. 1. Demoralization – using pornography and other methods through media, entertainment, education, etc., to break down the moral courage of the people. 2. Destabilization – By undermining police, courts, borders, etc., to overwhelm public safety and further demoralize the people. 3. Crisis – Build 1 and 2 to the point of a crisis where people resort to rioting or to civil war. 4. New Normal – Declare emergency powers and install the administrative state as a solution for all of the problems which the revolutionary forces have themselves caused.6
- The Long March through the Institutions – This is a central concept of cultural Marxism, (see endnote 2). It concerns the strategy of neo-Marxists in America and in other Western societies to overcome the resistance of successful middle-class cultures to the Marxist rhetoric of revolution. Middle-class people tend to be somewhat satisfied with their lives and tolerant of income differences with others. Cultural Marxists therefore target all of the institutions of middle-class society—church, family, public education, media, the press, entertainment, business, academia, science, law, etc.—in order to create the problems and crises that lead to the imposition of emergency powers and the administrative state.
- Mass Formation – This is an academic concept that has been used for many years to try to understand the mass psychology that appears to be at work in societies like Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China, where thousands of ordinary citizens either turned a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow citizens or, in some cases, joined the forces that shamed and tortured them. The process is based on fear and the desire to survive or escape the threat of suffering. Under these conditions, “normal” people may become callous to the suffering of others. They “go along to get along.” But the result is a complete collapse of genuine religious and moral civilization.7
A Coherent Picture?
Using these conceptual tools, and others that come in along the way, I believe our reading of That Hideous Strength will provide numerous insights into the troubles—cultural, political, and spiritual—that we are facing in America today. And, since the conclusion of Lewis’s story involves a time of reflection by the people of St. Anne’s on what has happened and what may be expected to happen in their future, the story also gives us an opportunity to consider what kind of strategy and what view of our future we should take if we are to embrace the traditional worldview, at least as C. S. Lewis understood it. My hope is that our reading of THS will enable us to make a more informed response to these kinds of issues for the sake of our own time, for the sake of our own country, for the sake of our own “great heartedness.”
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1. That Hideous Strength (1945) is the third volume in Lewis’s famous space trilogy. The first two volumes are Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1944). All three are connected by their main character, Dr. Elwin Ransom, Cambridge philologist and space traveler. But each can be read separately as a story in itself.
2. I am thinking of the movement known as “cultural Marxism” or “Neo-Marxism” which began in Europe in the 1920s when Antonio Gramsci and the early members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in Germany launched their plan to revitalize the forces of Russian Marxism in America and in Europe by engaging in what they called “the long march through the institutions.” This involved infiltrating and undermining the traditional institutions of Western culture—such as the church, the family, education, the media, entertainment, the courts and police, etc.—in order to create an administrative state by which to manage and control society. See, for example, Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.
3. As this paragraph already suggests, and as the story of THS shows, a worldview is more than simply a set of beliefs, ideas, or first principles. It is also a way of life that people live out in various ways because they look at the world the way they do. For example, we only pray in a world where we believe God listens. For this reason, I will also use the term “life-world” interchangeably with “worldview” to indicate the kind of consequential process that I believe Lewis himself has in mind.
4. In the Arthurian legendarium, King Arthur’s father was Uther Pendragon, and “Pendragon” became one of the names for the line of kings that later descended from Arthur himself. Thus, Ransom is identified as one of these descendants.
5. The traditional worldview, as I am using this term, includes both the biblical worldview and that of the Middle Ages as both of these influence Lewis’s story. His portrayal in THS of the angelic eldil, in relation to the planets, for example, is borrowed from the medieval tradition. In this regard, Lewis brings into his story not only the biblical references to angels, powers, and principalities, and the like (Col. 1:16; Eph. 6:12); he also articulates this in terms of the medieval analysis of the major virtues (angels) and vices (fallen angels) that were metaphorically associated with the planets. Thus, the power of love, Venus, can become the fallen power of unbridled passion. And the power of courage, Mars, can become the fallen power of coercion, the bully. Or, yet again, the power of language and intelligence, Mercury, when it is warped by fallen power becomes the confusion of Babble. Lewis gives an extended description of the medieval worldview in his book, The Discarded Image.
6. You can still find videos online of Yuri Bezmenov giving lectures to Canadian and American audiences on these topics. He often remarks how easy it was to influence the American public by these methods.
7. See Matthias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. According to Desmet, in a totalitarian society, three groups emerge: 1. Those who support the totalitarian power, usually a minority. 2. Those who resist it. Also, a minority. And 3. Those in the middle who swing toward whichever side seems to offer safety and security, usually a majority. Against this backdrop, one can see why the great freedom fighters of history, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, speak of the importance of faith in God in order to follow conscience and “live not by lies.” Desmet himself appears to hope for a resolution based on human reason alone (the modern worldview). So, though his analysis of the problem is helpful as far as it goes, he doesn’t seem to understand the spiritual depths of the problem of evil or its resolution in obedience to God’s guidance and power as portrayed in THS.
Faith and the Arts 