C.S. Lewis Returns to Earth

Mr Pearce examines the last book of Lewis's "Space Trilogy", That Hideous Strength.  He calls it "one of the finest and wisest novels of the twentieth century", with which I agree.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

“That Hideous Strength” is, without doubt, one of the finest and wisest novels of the twentieth century, deserving its place in the canon of Great Books and contributing to the Great Conversation and the goodness, truth, and beauty of Christian Civilization.

 

Over the past few weeks, in my two most recent essays for this illustrious journal, we’ve been going on adventures into space. In “C.S. Lewis Goes to Mars” and “C.S. Lewis Goes to Venus” we focused on Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra respectively, the first two books in Lewis’s trilogy of science-fiction novels. Now we’re returning to Earth with the final book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which was written in 1943 and published in 1945.

In this third novel in what is sometimes known as the Ransom Trilogy, the character of Elwin Ransom, who had been the principal protagonist in the two previous books, takes a back seat. The back seat is, however, the high seat, almost a throne, because he is revered by those who have joined him in the community at the manor house of St. Anne’s. He communicates with the angelic eldila and is now known as the Pendragon or the Fisher-King, connecting him to Arthurian legend. He is, therefore, in mystical communion with both the heavens and the mythical past.

The community at St. Anne’s, surrounded as it is by a heavenly aura, stands in stark contrast to the demonic darkness that descends on Bracton College at which the sinister National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments is based. As the plot unfolds and thickens, it becomes clear that the “science” and progressivism of the N.I.C.E. is at the service of demonic forces. The novel can be seen, therefore, to operate on two distinct moral planes. St. Anne’s can be likened to Augustine’s City of God and Bracton College to the City of Man. In formal structure, if not in theme, it resembles The Merchant of Venice in which the action oscillates between Belmont and Venice, the former being the “beautiful mountain” which is the mystically harmonious home of the “heavenly” Portia, and the latter being the place of conflict in which men turn against each other in enmity and envy.

The difference in spirit between the community at St. Anne’s and the elitist coterie at the N.I.C.E. is evident in Lewis’s delineation of character.

Apart from Ransom, those associated with St. Anne’s include several academics who have not conformed to the prevalent progressivism. These include Arthur Denniston, who advocates “distributivism”, the political philosophy, rooted in Catholic social teaching, which was championed by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton; Cecil Dimble, an Arthurian scholar; Grace Ironwood, a psychologist; and Andrew McPhee, a morally upright scientist and rationalist sceptic, who does not allow his philosophical doubt to cloud his moral judgment; and, last but indubitably not least, are Mother Dimble and Mrs. Maggs, who incarnate maternal sensibility and feminine wisdom.

The characters associated with the N.I.C.E. are either diabolists or dupes. John Wither’s long association with the demonic “macrobes” has withered his mind and gollumized his soul. As demonic possession proceeds, his mind recedes into a state of permanent distraction and incoherence. He is the antitype of Ransom who grows in wisdom and perceptivity as he communes with the angelic eldila.

If Wither lives up to his name, so does Professor Frost. He is coldhearted, clinically rational and devoid of all emotion, an intellect severed from any semblance of feeling, a head severed from the heart. He is the antitype to McPhee.

Miss “Fairy” Hardcastle is the sexually and psychologically perverse head of the N.I.C.E.’s Police who derives sadistic pleasure in the torturing of female “suspects”. She is the antitype of the maternal and feminine figures of Mother Dimble and Mrs. Maggs.

Dr. Filostrato, is the male equivalent of Fairy Hardcastle. Like her, he is sexually and psychologically inverted. An obese Italian eunuch, he has an obsessive and morbid disgust of the human body and all organic life, seeking to sever the mind from the body. His antitypes are the authentically masculine father figures at St. Anne’s, such as Dr. Dimble, Dr. Denniston and Ransom himself.

Other figures associated with the N.I.C.E are Lord Feverstone, a cynically self-serving politician and entrepreneur; Reverend Straik, a manically modernist and progressive Anglican clergyman, who conflates progressivist Machiavellian power politics with the manifestation of God’s power; and Horace Jules, a Cockney novelist and pseudo-scientific journalist, who was probably modelled on the real-life figure of H. G. Wells, with a deferential nod in the direction of Jules Verne for good measure.

If H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are allusively present, so is G. K. Chesterton in the form of the distributist philosophy which he espoused. The “distributivism” of Denniston has already been mentioned but it is also evident in another character, William Hingest, a scientist recruited by the N.I.C.E. who resigns when he perceives the Institute’s evil intentions and goals. “I came here because I thought it had something to do with science,” he says. “Now that I find it’s something more like a political conspiracy, I shall go home…. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn’t wear corsets and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I’d let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again.”

Although the novel oscillates between the community at St. Anne’s and the N.I.C.E. conspiracy at Bracton College, and although it is set against a supernatural backdrop of angels and demons, the two principal protagonists of the novel are none of the aforementioned characters.

At the novel’s heart are the hearts of a newly married couple, Mark and Jane Studdock. Mark is a sociologist whose worldly ambition leads him to become a willing dupe of the N.I.C.E. Meanwhile, Jane is struggling to finish her doctoral dissertation on the metaphysical poet John Donne and is frustrated at the loneliness of life as a stay-at-home housewife. She has no desire to become a stay-at-home mother because she and Mark have chosen the path of contraception as a means of avoiding the inconvenience of children.

As Mark gets deeper involved with the N.I.C.E. until he finds himself out of his depth, Jane finds herself interacting with the community of St. Anne’s. Their marriage is strained to breaking point as Mark seems hellbent on pursuing worldly “success” while Jane finds herself increasingly attracted, reluctantly at first, to the spirit of St. Anne’s in general and to the charismatic character of Ransom in particular. The ultimate success or failure of their marriage represents the struggle between good and evil in the microcosmic sense, even as the battle between the angelic St. Anne’s and the demonic N.I.C.E. represents the same battle in a macrocosmic sense.

That Hideous Strength is longer than the two other novels in the trilogy and is much more ambitious and convoluted in terms of its scope and the number of characters contributing to the plot. As a work of fiction, it is probably Lewis’s greatest achievement with the arguable exception of his late masterpiece, Till We Have Faces. It is, without doubt, one of the finest and wisest novels of the twentieth century, deserving its place in the canon of Great Books and contributing to the Great Conversation and the goodness, truth and beauty of Christian Civilization.

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The featured image is “A view of most of North America taken from a low orbit of about 826 km altitude,” and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.