Quality and Aim
C.S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy - That Hdeous Strength
That Hideous Strength is very different in style and tempo than Perelandra or Out of the Silent Planet. It’s substantially longer than both and the action unfolds exclusively on Earth rather than Mars or Venus or elsewhere in the Field of Arbol.
It was published in 1945, so it’s no surprise that themes of totalitarianism and individual freedom are front and centre throughout. How and to what extent can we effectively combat evil without falling into its superficially effective yet intrinsically anti-human methods? As Ransom tells Jane Studdock, the novel’s central female protagonist, ‘I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies - breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity and the remote future.’
What we also find is the marked influence of Lewis’s fellow-Inkling, Charles Williams, especially his two volumes of Arthurian poetry, Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). One of Williams’s key motifs, which Lewis develops in That Hideous Strength, is the idea of ‘Logres’ as England’s Platonic, spiritual essence - the country’s true, deep nature - and ‘Britain’ as the profane shadow-side that constantly seeks to pull down and undermine anything that smacks of a national sacred vocation.
This God-given mission, in Williams’s Arthuriad, is for Logres to become a pure and holy realm, fertile ground for the return of the Holy Grail and, greater still, the Second Coming of the Lord. Success of a sort is achieved, but only partially and very much ‘between the lines.’ Britain always finds ways of biting back and distracting and disarming Logres and making her less than the sum of her parts. By the same token, however, the light of Logres, because it comes from Heaven, can never be extinguished and a remnant always remains to guide, direct, and inspire the men and women of the island. This is the role played by Ransom and his Company at the manor house of St. Anne’s on the Hill, near the university town of Edgestow and the headquarters of the demonic ‘National Institute of Coordinated Experiments’ (NICE). The Company are few in number yet bold in spirit, and Ransom is their chief, their Director, and also their Pendragon, the anointed successor of Arthur himself. As Dr. Dimble, the Company’s resident scholar, explains:
‘It was long afterwards,’ he said, ‘after the Director had returned from the Third Heaven (Venus), that we were told a little more … Ransom was summoned to the bedside of an old man then dying in Cumberland. His name would mean nothing to you if I told it. That man was the Pendragon, the successor of Arthur and Uther and Cassibelaun. Then we learned the truth. There has been a secret Logres in the very heart of Britain all these years; an unbroken succession of Pendragons. That old man was the seventy-eighth from Arthur: our Director received from him the office and the blessings … Some of the Pendragons are well known to history, though not under that name. Others you have never heard of. But in every age they and the little Logres which gathered around them have been the fingers which gave the tiny shove or the almost imperceptible pull, to prod England out of the drunken sleep or to draw her back from the final outrage into which Britain tempted her.’
Ransom has grown used to fighting fallen eldila on other planets, but what he’s wrestling with now is a full-scale assault on Earth itself, an attempt to corral the whole world into a totalitarian grid of power and control. The vehicle is the NICE, which is presented glowingly to the public as an attempt to kick-start post-war society along rational, fair, and scientific lines. But it’s all a front and a lie. The deeper we go into the heart of the organisation, towards the innermost of ‘inner rings’ that runs things, we see that ultimately it isn’t even about power and control. It’s nihilism pure and simple that’s at the core of the NICE - demonically motivated evil, yes, but evil that has no point and purpose, just sheer negation and inversion of the good. This is what Mark Studdock, Jane’s husband, learns during his abortive initiation into the NICE and his experience of the ‘Objective Room’ with its subtly twisted paintings:
He turned his back on the pictures and sat down. He understood the whole business now. Frost was not trying to make him insane; at least not in the sense Mark had hitherto given to the word “insanity.” Frost had meant what he said. To sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity - the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes. Higher degrees in the aestheticism of anti-Nature would doubtless follow: the eating of abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated obscenities. They were, in a sense, playing quite fair with him - offering him the very same initiation through which they themselves had passed and which had divided them from humanity, distending and dissipating Wither into a shapeless ruin while it condensed and sharpened Frost into the hard, bright, little needle that he now was.
This is perfectly horrendous, of course, and it could well be that this is what our world is truly like at bottom. The Devil, after all, is the ‘prince of this world.’ But thinking about our lives today, I feel it’s more on a day to day basis that the malignancy of the NICE weighs us down. We live nowadays - increasingly, it seems - in an NICE-shaped world: systems, bureaucracy, spreadsheets, digital forms, automation, AI, etc. - a complex, confusing, technocratic network, where everything’s to do with contracts, procedures, and technical ability, and nothing about heart or soul, or spiritual and intellectual vision. It’s a world where you turn up for work to support your family and find people talking like this:
‘That’s just it,’ he was saying. ‘As I told him, it makes no difference to me which way they settle it. I’ve no objection to the LJP people taking over the whole thing if that’s what the DD wants but what I dislike is one man being responsible for it when half the work is being done by someone else. As I said to him, you’ve now got three HD’s all tumbling over one another about some job that could really be done by a clerk. It’s becoming ridiculous. Look at what happened this morning.’
That’s one of the employees of the NICE. Lewis understood it all as long ago as 1945. He saw that wickedness mestastasizes all the way down, from top to bottom, from inner to outer, from boardroom to shop floor. Because it is wickedness to speak like this. It’s an abuse of language and a waste of human potential - this jargon, this ‘shop’ - a trivialisation of God’s gifts of personhood and speech and a hallmark of the corrosion and de-spiritualisation of the West. The ultimate downfall of the NICE is triggered through this abuse of language, which they maul in other ways as well, such as fabricating press reports and basically calling evil good and good evil. Mercury, the Lord of Language, cannot and will not tolerate such falsity and vengeance will be meted out at the appointed time.
But he can’t do it on his own. None of the gods can. Only Maleldil can, but as Ransom knows, He likes to delegate these tasks to ourselves as much as possible. That’s how much He trusts and values us. But what are we to do in the face of this towering evil - this Hideous Strength - that infects our lives, homes, and workplaces? How do we play our part in what Kathleen Raine called the ‘Great Battle’ and help the gods out in their ongoing war against the forces of dissolution? Such is the structure of the cosmos that it’s a war that cannot be won without a human contribution. We stand at the centre of the Great Chain of Being and God Himself became one of us. ‘You have never seen a mere mortal,’ as Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory. Like it or not, much as we might want to keep our heads down (like Ransom in Out of the Silent Planet) and let the unpleasantness pass by, there’s a job of work for us to do.
That doesn’t mean though that the work will be glamorous or action-packed. Sometimes it might, but not necessarily or always. As Andrew McPhee, the Company’s good-hearted sceptic, enquires at the end when everyone’s congratulating themselves on a job well done, ‘I’d be greatly obliged if any one would tell me what we have done - always apart from feeding the pigs and raising some very decent vegetables.’ Ransom responds, ‘You have done what was required of you. You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that. As one of the modern authors has told us, the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else.’
This is true; not just for MacPhee and the rest but for Ransom too. Whereas in Perelandra, he had a pro-active, dynamic role, this time it’s more a case of watching and waiting. Camilla and Arthur Denniston, also members of the Company, explain the background to Ransom’s mission to Jane:
‘He had a married sister in India, a Mrs. Fisher King … She was a remarkable woman in her way; a friend of the great native Christian mystic whom you may have heard of - the Sura. And that’s the point. The Sura had reason to believe, or thought he had reason to believe, that a great danger was hanging over the human race. And just before the end - just before he disappeared - he became convinced that it would actually come to a head in this island. And after he’d gone -’
‘Is he dead?’ asked Jane.
‘That we don’t know,’ answered Denniston. ‘Some people think he’s alive, others not. At any rate he disappeared. And Mrs. Fisher-King more or less handed over the problem to her brother, to our chief. That in fact was why she gave him the money. He was to collect a company around him to watch the danger, and to strike when it came.’
Except that when it comes to it, there isn’t all that much striking to be done. Ransom has to put on his thinking cap occasionally and the others muck in with a bit of detective work, but it’s the gods - the eldila, the planetary intelligences - who do the actual work. Ransom is the conduit through which they act, while the Company watch, wait, and help when they can. But in Maleldil’s eyes, this is enough, and more than enough, and that’s the crucial point.
There’s a lot for us to chew on and work with here. The fact that it’s God’s will for the Company to simply watch and wait can help release us in our own lives of the pressure we feel to be acting and doing all the time and to always have a plan and to execute that perfectly and then once that’s done then on to the next one, and so on. But God didn’t make us this way, and real life seldom works in this linear, ‘line go up’ fashion. Hence the dysfunction and dissonance we so often feel. Our non-stop activity ‘should’ be bearing fruit and our lives consequently ‘should’ be getting better. We’re doing ‘all the right things’, after all. But too often it doesn’t feel like this. Quite the reverse.
We can then slide into times and seasons where we feel so broken, pulverised and lost that we can’t ‘do’ anything at all save carry on breathing and living from one moment to the next. But even here, Maleldil is present, because this is where Christ is on Holy Saturday, except that He went one step further and stopped living and breathing altogether. Down there in the tomb he isn’t preaching or healing or gathering disciples or anything. He’s dead. Just that. Dead. Yet it’s there, perhaps more than anywhere else, that His most essential work is done. It’s an act of identification and solidarity with you and me and everyone else in our most dark and awful moments. There can be no resurrection without this descent to the nether pit of negation and despair. But with this downgoing, our story can begin again in a transfigured, numinous key.
One of the greatest and most easily forgotten laws of life is that nothing stays the same forever. Good times, bad times - they come and go in their own way and time. Like clouds in the sky. It’s hard, especially when we’re going through a rough patch, to believe that anything will ever change. It seems clear and obvious at these times that we’re going to be locked in like this until we die. It’s tempting then to reach out, grasp, and tear at the net, as if the act of doing something - anything - might turbocharge us out of our malaise. This is the advice that the world likes to offer - ‘try this’, ‘have a go at that’ - and what we hardly ever hear is what we need the most - ‘Wait, be patient, endure, keep looking up, this too will pass.’
If we can internalise and inhabit this ‘waiting game’ mindset and resist the temptation to come down from the cross, then the turnaround, when it comes, might well be of a qualitatively different order to anything we’ve previously imagined or conceived. The Resurrection is like this. So too is the climax of That Hideous Strength. What we are looking at here is an irruption of the Divine into 1940s England and into the heart of our lives as readers, and the results are sobering, shocking, spectacular, and sublime.
This epiphany announces itself in different ways to different people according to their level of consciousness and the extent to which they are aligned to either light or darkness. To those who have chosen evil, assembled in pomp at the NICE Banqueting Hall, the sacred appears in forms of terror and violence. Mercury infects their language, and they all they start talking nonsense - a bunch of babbling buffoons - and no-one is able to communicate or make sense. Then the animals who the NICE have been experimenting on are released into the Hall where blood-spattered mayhem ensues:
The animals did not stop to eat what they killed, or not more than to take one lick of blood. There were dead and dying bodies everywhere by now, for the scrum was by this time killing as many as the beasts. And always from all sides went up the voices trying to shout to those beyond the door. As if in imitation a great gorilla leaped on the table where Jules had sat and began drumming on its chest. Then, with a roar, it jumped down into the crowd.
Meanwhile at St. Anne’s, Mercury makes his presence felt to the Company, gathered together in the kitchen, in a much more exciting and dynamic way:
A stranger coming into the kitchen would have thought they were drunk, not suddenly but gaily drunk: they would have seen heads bent close together, eyes dancing, an excited wealth of gesture … Mother Dimble always remembered Denniston and her husband as they had stood, one on each side of the fireplace, in a gay intellectual duel, each capping the other, each rising above the other, up and up, like birds or aeroplanes in combat. If only one could have remembered what they said! For never in her life had she heard such talk - such eloquence, such melody (song could have added nothing to it), such melody (song could have added nothing to it), such toppling structures of double meaning, such sky-rockets of metaphor and allusion.
Mercury is not the only god who descends. Upstairs in the Blue Room, Ransom and the resuscitated Merlin experience the arrival of Jove as nothing less than a baptism and initiation into a higher level of being:
It was like a long sunlit wave, creamy-crested and arched with emerald, that comes on nine feet tall, with roaring and terror and unquenchable laughter. It was like the first beginning of music in the halls of some King so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor akin to fear runs through young hears when they hear it. For this was great Glund-Oyarsa, King of Kings … known to men in old times as Jove, and under that name, by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker - so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him.
The Good is not some piece of lightweight fluff to be played around with as a thing of little or no consequence. It is potent beyond measure - no sentimentality, no ‘nicey-nice’ - demanding and precise in its insistence on what’s real and true. But there’s another side to this great glory. It isn’t a mindless force. It’s not blind or insensitive. It’ll give us what we need from where we are, so long as we’re longing for what’s good, even if we’re trapped in its opposite, and calling to it from the deepest corners of our hearts. It takes our fallibility and weakness into account. So when Mark escapes from the NICE, the Good is kind and gentle to him and brings him back to his innocent childhood self:
Mark went into the little hotel and found a kind elderly landlady. He had a hot bath and a capital breakfast and then went to sleep in a chair before a roaring fire. He did not wake till about four. He reckoned he was only a few miles from St. Anne’s, and decided to have tea before he set out … Two shelves in the little sitting room were filled with bound volumes of The Strand. In one of these he found a serial children’s story which he had begun to read as a child but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half way through it and he was ashamed to read it after that. Now, he chased it from volume to volume till he had finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish.
These three aspects of the Good - wrathful, glorious, gentle - show the degree to which our experience of the Divine is filtered through our state of mind. Heidegger’s concept of The Event (Das Ereignis) springs to mind here - the clearing that’s fashioned for the gods to act in; the lightning by which we see them strike. We’re either ready for this moment of confrontation and revelation - this Apocalypse, this unveiling - or we’re not. The good news is that we aren’t talking about achievement, efficiency, results, or anything of that quantitative, bureaucratic order. All this melts away in the light and clarity of The Event. At this level, it’s about quality and aim. Are we orientated towards the Real or towards illusion? One way or another, as with Jane, when she first meets Ransom, our world will be unmade:
Pain came and went in his face: sudden jabs of sickening and burning pain. But as lightning goes through the darkness and the darkness closes up again and shows no trace, so the tranquility of his countenance swallowed up each shock of torture … For the first time in all these years she tasted the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. At that moment, as her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house. It was, of course, only for a flash. Next moment she was once again the ordinary social Jane, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely (at least she hoped that rudeness would be the main impression produced) at a total stranger. But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now.
I’ll be back in a week or so with the concluding part of the series. If you like what we do here, please feel free to 'buy me a coffee' as caffeine ☕ will help me get over the line! Thank you 👍
http://beezone.com/baptism-of-immortal-happiness
http://beezone.com/adida/god-is-not-elsewhere.html
http://beezone.com/current/whenbodyfulllight.html When the Body is Full of Light