| Date: 14 April 2011, 09:53
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Having enjoyed this novel again and again for a generation, I believe that it is prophetic and even more relevant today than when it was written. Now that recent filmings of Lord of the Ring and the first Narnia book have delighted critics and the public alike, is it too much to hope for a high-quality cinematic version someday of _That Hideous Strength_? Lewis would be most pleased, I daresay, if any such adaptation were set in our own time, because we need its messsage now.
By the time Mark Studdock arrives at Belbury, he is a confirmed brown-nose with considerable experience in pursuing his life's ambition: joining the esoteric Inner Circle of whatever. It is striking, then, how much difficulty he has in the NICE even determining who is in this group. Feverstone, Filostrato, Hardcastle, and Straik, for instance, all confide to him that their own respective purviews are of the institute's essence, while various other departments are peripheral or merely for public consumption. By the end of the book, the chaos proclaims that none of these figures, nor anyone else, is effectively in charge.
In this respect, Lewis brilliantly anticipated insights that the late William Stringfellow would articulate in the 1960s and 70s: that institutions are among the contemporary world's most characteristic manifestations of the demonic "powers and principalities" mentioned in the Bible. They inevitably take on lives of their own and go off the rails. Eventually they justify any and all means towards the end of their own survival and hegemony. They enslave and "deplete the personhood of" every human being involved with them-- even (and perhaps especially) those who imagine that they are in control.
Of course, the church as an institution being hardly exempt from these problems, clergy would react to Stringfellow's analysis with hostility proportionate to their power. Ironically, the works of this theologian long lay in unread obscurity in seminary: while students in, of all places, law school continued to turn to them when they wanted to learn how corporate structures really operate. As we 21st-century Americans find ourselves steeped in the waking nightmare of an unfolding vindication of Stringfellow's prophetic thought, it is heartening at least to see a growing interest in it-- books lately republished and his ideas taken up and further developed e.g. by Walter Wink. For an illustrative novel, however, _That Hideous Strength_, written by C.S. Lewis some 25 years earlier, may yet be unsurpasssed.
Some commentators have incomprehensibly indicated that the NICE people were materialists. Pas du tout. They are probably ex-materialists, but by the time we meet them are devotees of the occult. The reader grasps the inevitability of this progression. As Muggeridge (and perhaps Chesterton earlier) observed, those who cease to believe in God don't believe in nothing. Rather, before long they'll believe in anything. Lewis must have been aware of the occult dabbling practiced by high-level Nazi figures. While there are always atheistic individuals, it is unlikely, despite their best efforts, that their grandchildren will inherit a trait that requires so much mental assiduity to maintain. There have been no viable large atheistic societies. The Belburians, however, present themselves as materialists and are not prepared, and would probably never be prepared, to publicize their real allegiance: it is esoteric, elite, and exclusive by its very nature, not to be shared by the likes of you and me.
Sitting in the garden, one of them exclaims, "Bloody racket those birds make!" Such a sentiment is revealing and chacteristic of one who, as the novel describes in detail, far from being a materialist, has cultivated a disgust for all things physical and who dreams of transcending it. Add this trait to a quest for esoteric knowledge and we have the two most classic marks of the gnostic.
I have no doubt that Lewis intended the book partly as a warning against this mode of thought, which Christian orthodoxy has found profoundly and decisively incompatible. He illustrates what kind of people are tempted to take it up, why they do so, and to what bad ends it will lead. Since Lewis's death, it has become fashionable among post-modernists and certain feminists to express their pique and scorn for Christianity by affecting a sympathetic reconsideration of gnosticism, suggesting that its eclipse was only an historical accident or the effect of a political power play. We could do with this book as an antidote.
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