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The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Totalitarian Novels: That Hideous Strength and Faith
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- [00:00]
Dr. Larry Arnn
Foreign.
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Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan.
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Juan Davalos
And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with totalitarian novels lecture seven, that Hideous Strength Faith.
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Jeremiah Regan
So here we have Dr. Arne providing a plot summary and analysis of our fourth totalitarian novel, that Hideous Strength by C.S. lewis. This. This book's very interesting. Describe the setting briefly. In contrast to The Other Books, 1984 takes place in the near future. Brave New World takes place in the distant future. Darkness at Noon takes place in current day in a real regime. And that Hideous Strength takes place in the very near future as a totalitarian regime is trying to. To get started. So it's the only one in which the regime has not become totalitarian. You're seeing its genesis and ultimately, and if you listen to the episode, sorry, this won't be a spoiler by the end of it, but it fails, so makes it the only totalitarian novel with a truly happy ending.
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Juan Davalos
And it's a book by C.S. lewis, which is interesting because, you know, for all of those CS Lewis fans out there, you've heard of Narnia, you've heard of Abolition of Man, you've probably read Mere Christianity, right? Mere Christianity till we have Faces, all of the most famous C.S. lewis books. But I feel like the Space Trilogy is one that is less well known. But everybody that has read it typically likes it more than any of the other C.S. lewis books.
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Jeremiah Regan
It's one of my favorite series, it's some of my favorite works of Lewis. And as a note, it's best to read all three because Lewis is brilliant and they're beautiful. But you can read that Hideous Strength as a standalone book. It's the least science fictiony and the most political of all of them. And he really wrote it as a fictional companion piece to the Abolition of Man and says as much in the preface. Now, George Orwell had criticisms of this book. He said Lewis cheated because he brings in God and that's how you get your happy ending. So on the face of it, that Hideous Strength has, you know, has fantasy elements, it has science fiction, it has a lot of speculative and strange stuff. But I argue that it is the most realistic because our other works don't have God in them, but God is real and he does produce justice, whether it's now or in the future or the next life. That means Lewis's book, it's the most hopeful, it's the only one with a happy ending, and it's the most realistic because we know we win in the end. It gives hope and it encourages bravery and fortitude.
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Juan Davalos
And the realness of God is seen all throughout Lewis's works. And we have a course dedicated to that called C.S. lewis on Christianity. You can take that course by going to Hillsdale. Edu course. That's Hillsdale. Edu course. Dr. Michael Ward goes through several of the most important themes that we wrestle with as Christians, such as good and evil, conversion and new life. Lewis's views on prayer and the Bible. Why is there suffering? How do we deal with suffering when there's a good God or. All of these questions are answered by CS Lewis in different works that he's written, and you can access them in our course, C.S. lewis on Christianity by going to Hillsdale. Edu course.
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Jeremiah Regan
Now let's turn back to Dr. Arne with lecture seven of totalitarian novels, that Hideous Strength Faith.
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Dr. Larry Arnn
In this course on totalitarian novels, we're going to take up CS Lewis. He's a different sort of fellow than the others. He's much the most learned among the people here. And the novel we're going to read, that Hideous Strength is cosmic in its reach. It means that there's more to deal with, and there's an argument about whether it's even right to deal with that or not. First, let me explain that this novel is connected directly to three other books. It's the third in a space Trilogy of C.S. lewis. In the first one, the hero, a man named Ransom, goes to Mars, and in the second one, he goes to Venus. And in the third one, he stays here on Earth. What he confronts here on Earth is the same thing that he confronts on those other two planets, because on those two planets a scientist named Weston, who represents the impulse behind totalitarianism, goes to those planets with him and they have battles. Then he comes back. Weston is dead now, but his friends are institutionalized and busy. Those are two of the three novels, the one about Mars and the one about Venus. The third one is a treatise he wrote, which he says in the preface to that Hideous Strength, that what he does is take that treatise and put it to motion, drama, fiction, in that hideous strength, and that is called the Abolition of Man. It's a very powerful book, and I'll talk about it a little bit. This does require us to go up to the cosmos. I've made the point before that all these authors of these novels knew each other and they were contemporaries. And George Orwell wrote a review of this book, that Hideous Strength, and he liked parts of it, but he also said, no fear God coming in, because all the drama is over when that happens, which from one point of view, is true. If you think that God is going to make all things right in the end, then you think they're all going to come right in the end. But the Christian God, as Lewis understands him, and for that matter, as I understand him, doesn't really invite us to think quite that way. We're supposed to be his instruments. Lewis, I think, on the other hand, he believes that God and the devil come in to this story of good and evil that is presented by totalitarianism. They're there. Doesn't matter if you bring them in or not. They're there. In order to simplify, I've thought of the idea of beginning spatially. Think of three places on earth. These are the three places where this novel takes place. Chiefly in the middle place. It's the place that's contended for by the other two places. There's a well, there's a little walled garden around the well. Around the little walled garden is a little college. And around the little college is little town. Town's called Edgestow and the college called Bracton. And the well is called Merlin's well. I'll have to explain why Merlin is to say the magician, I guess he was, who was a counselor to King Arthur, is in this novel in a big way. There's a reason why he has to be. That's the first place. And then there are two groups fighting for that well. Gonna take it away from the college and use it for opposite devices. One of them is a place called the nice. The National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. Isn't that a great name? Do you ever go around Washington, D.C. if you look at a really beautiful building, it means that what happens in it is constitutional. And if you look at a really ugly building, those are the modern buildings. And it means that probably what's going on in there is unconstitutional. The NICE has laboratories, scientists, social scientists, and they're busy arranging the world. Also, they have a police force and they have judges. Except they don't really use the judges. They just make up their mind what they want to do with people. They have a prison. They do lots of experiments on animals. And they sort of live beyond the law. They have all the money they want. They can override the local police. And so that's a. You know, if you just think about the administrative agencies in America, they're supposed to be, to a considerable extent, are limited by the subject matters they deal with. But they do have their own courts and their own law enforcement and their own. Many of them, SWAT teams. And so they're making the laws. Most laws in America are made by those agencies now. And they're enforcing the laws and they're judging cases that arise under the laws. That's what the Nice does on the opposite side. The novel is not specific about places exactly, but both of the other two places outside Bracton College and the well are a train ride away from the college. I think this Nice is a longer train ride away. St. Anne's the other place named after a saint. It's up on a hill. It's a shorter train ride. The people who live there are gathered under this man, Ransom, who's been taken to Mars and then to Venus and fought against a representative of the devil. That's what Weston was. He's a scientist who perfected space travel so they could go. He's got a little group there, and they are doing what they're told by angels, I guess you'd call them. But there we have to stop a minute and we have to talk about the cosmos. I want to emphasize, by the way, that the Nice, that's just like the Ministry of Truth or the Ministry of Love in 1984. And those people who run those, they have really great names. One of them's called Wither, One of them is called Frost. And Frost is described as being very arctic. And Wither is vague. But both of them are like o' Brien very much. And they can do terrible cruelties, and they do. Now I gotta talk about the planets. C.S. lewis draws a world for us. And I said before, C is a very learned man, very learned man. And he knows Renaissance literature the best. He knows a lot about the classics, too. And he writes a lovely thing called the Discarded Image, which is taken out of his Oxford History of 16th century English literature. And he describes the universe as it appears to the medievals and the ancients too, but especially the medievals and the Renaissance. What Lewis says is they didn't think the world was flat. And they also didn't think that we were at the center of the universe. We were at the bottom of it, looking up at a great and mighty structure. And this is sort of like the end of Aristotle's Metaphysics, which is a wonderful book where he describes God and he describes this universe of which we're at the bottom. And when we look up, we see the planets. They're the prime movers, much more important even than they. And they're eternal beings, and they go around and they're in motion, but the motions are fixed above them. Is the unmoved mover God? The prime movers move in relation to God, and we are heavily influenced by the planets. That's why Lewis, in this argument, explains that the word influenza comes from the idea that Saturn, when it was close to us, it's closer, closer sometimes and farther away others, that makes us ill. The influence of Saturn upon us is negative. So we have influenza. Well, he takes that in these three science fiction novels, and he ascribes to these planets, angels that work for God and move the planets around and influence us. And they have the characteristics that they're famous for from Greek mythology, if not before Aries or Mars is war and Venus is love and Mercury is language. Mercury is a messenger God. And so these planets that. To which Ransom visits, they're involved in this dispute over Merlin, over Merlin's. Well, and these totalitarians, o' Brien and his friends, their names are Wither and Frost and others, they're talking to demons all the time. And they have a plan in place. And if you listen to their conversations, which are related in the novel powerfully, they have all the plans of the inner party in 1984. They're going to dominate everything, indeed even plants. They want to dominate nature so much that even plants will be made out of metal or made by us. And birds will be mechanically birds, mechanical birds that we will make. And they will do what we tell them to, and we will do what we tell them to. But this thing, the nice, is so powerful that they're never able to conceive a way to defeat it, except with the help of God. And that means these angels are going to come down and give some powers to some people or one person. But they pick Merlin, because Merlin was a magician. And C.S. lewis is very interested in magic. He writes quite a lot about it. And he says that when the impulse in science, which comes from. He writes this in many places, the impulse of science, which comes from the Latin word to know, starts getting interested in manipulating nature, torturing nature to find out its secrets and change it. They tried magic for a long time. They thought Faust in Goethe's novel is interested in stuff like that, right? He wants to manipulate nature more than he wants to know it. We do have to manipulate nature. We till the ground, we pick cotton and turn it into shirts. And, you know, we have to do that, right? But is it our interest to change more than to understand? Because if you elevate that, it will compromise your understanding and it will make you much more interested in power than anything else. And that's a somewhat contradictory position because power is only. It only raises the question, what do you do with it? And this nice is bidding to be as powerful as the inner party was powerful in 1984. So Ransom, first of all, he's a Christian hero. He's a very heroic man, by the way, very brave. He has an amazing battle in the Trip to Venus, the novel, it's called Perelandra. But also he's trust to God. And so he doesn't think it all depends on him. He thinks he has to be obedient as well as bold, as well as brave as well as inventive. CS Lewis was very taken with knighthood. He wrote quite a lot about that and the virtue of gallantry. Knights were obedient and the gallant. We try to teach young men here to be gallant. They should be protectors of anyone weaker than they. And they should be protectors of women, although women, of course, they're more resilient than men, but they do need protection. So the disposition of the novel is like that, and you should know that it is. Jesus is not mentioned in the novel, but it's a Christian cosmos he describes. That's what Orwell objects to. But mark this point is a very important point, Lewis thinks, because, you know, Lewis was a very learned Christian. He had faith. But then also he thought along with the classics, he thought, if you think that some things are better than others do those things that are better, are they perfect? How do we know they're better? Whatever is the standard that tells us they're better suggests that there might be something perfect. Lewis likes to make this argument. He makes it many places in mere Christianity. He says this, for example. He says we have evidence of a more perfect being by looking at our own selves, because some parts of us are better than others. Some parts of us separate us from the animals in some parts that are just like the animals. But then we know that these things, these parts that are better, our reason, our understanding, our language, they are in us, imperfect. The reason we all get tired when we learn is because we go from thing to thing to thing, and it takes energy and time and we have limited amounts of both. Imagine a being that wasn't subject to all that, a more perfect being. The implications of it being in us, we can see, gosh, this is good, that I can do this. First of all, good, a very fundamental word. We wouldn't even know how to use the word if we couldn't do it. What if we could do it better? And that means then that if there's an attempt to revolutionize everything in the world so that we dominate everything in the world. We are the beings that ask, is that right? Can we be trusted with the powers of God? In o', Brien, which is what he lusted for and persuaded himself that he had in 1984 in O', Brien, is he worthy to exercise such power? He's cruel.
- [19:05]
Podcast Announcer
This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to Podcast Hillsdale. Ed that's Podcast Hillsdale Edu. Subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale. Eduardo that's podcast Hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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Dr. Larry Arnn
Is cruelty good? Only good for the one who gets to be God? And so Lewis's argument is you're making assertions about God when you try to replace him, but you're not God. Would the real God be concerned about that? Lewis believes in a God and argues for a God that would. In the action of the novel, there are some very powerful characters. You know Addie by now, one of the students in the class, and you know that she's very contrary and she doesn't like this novel because she doesn't think it gives a sufficient account of marriage. Eddie is also impulsive. We'll see how she does when we all get together and talk. I'm picking a fight with her, which I can tell you from experience is not difficult to do. And she thinks that the marriage accounts in here are not right. I think they are right. The main one that's explored, that's between a man named Mark and his wife named Jane. They have to learn how to be married, and marriage is a giving to each other. It's not a taking. I've discovered in my own life that I have the best wife anybody ever had, and she's a giver and I try to be, and we get on. So that's marriage. And there is, in the novel, I submit, Andy disagrees with me. The Stutticks, their last names are Studdick. They figure out how to do that, and they're not happy until they do. And they're important in the novel because Mark is a social scientist and he falls in with these people at the Nice and they almost kill him. But for a time he joins in their effort to reduce everything to their power. And he's quite taken with it for a while. And then he has a reaction. The reaction comes because they're doing experiments on him to desensitize him from all sense of the good. And they have various artful ways they try to do that. The one that he rebels against is there's a baroque cross lying on the floor with Jesus on it. Baroque, I mean, ornate, gruesome. And he's asked to insult it in various ways. And he's not a Christian. The implication is, toward the end, that he becomes so. But he's. He rebels against that. That is the moment of his rebellion. And why he says, look at that guy. He's suffering and I'm asked to abuse him. This is what these people do. That means in the novel. There's a comparison you can make readily, not only with O' Brien in 1984, but with the torturers of Jesus. Something in the human capacity lets us do that. Something else in the human capacity makes us rebel against it too. Therein lies the test. I'm going to make the argument from Abolition of Man because it's implicit, running right through this. And I think I can make it simply. I'll try. It opens with this. It's a treatise. It's very tight, it's very powerful. It's in three chapters, not that long. Some people see a waterfall and somebody says, the waterfall is sublime. And somebody else says, it's pretty. Coleridge is supposed to have been at the waterfall. Coleridge is a poet. Coleridge approves of the term sublime and disapproves of the term pretty. Oh, that's pretty, you know. I mean, you've ever stood near a big waterfall because they're mighty and there's wonderful motion in them. Then Lewis quotes from an English book textbook for boys or for a boy's school. That's where it's being used. And it says that both pretty and sublime are not descriptions of the waterfall. They're only Descriptions of our own feelings. So in other words, our own feelings. If you just extend that argument a little bit, the waterfall doesn't exist. Need not exist for sure, because it's just our feelings about it, right? And that means they would both be right. One of my favorite arguments around here is that freshmen especially, they have to be. We have to take this out of them. If you ask them what something is, they start telling you their opinions about it. Well, to me it means I had this happen in the dining hall just the other day, and all the upper class students who were sitting at the table. So as soon as he said to me, they all said, don't say that because they've learned, you know. And I said, well, you know, I didn't ask anything about you. I wondered what that thing is. What is it? What's the truth of the matter? What does it mean? And he soon got the point that if psychology is something to him, something else to me, then it isn't anything. Whereas if it is something, wouldn't it be interesting to know what it is? Arouses the curiosity in the student. We do that here all the time. In other words, your opinions are not sovereign. What is the thing? Go look at the thing. Aristotle says, the source of knowledge of a thing is in the thing. The source of the mightiness and the beauty and the sublimity and the prettiness in the waterfall is in the waterfall. In the rest of the book, Lewis draws out, what does it do to us if we go down that line and just start thinking that way all the time. And the title of the book is the Abolition of Man, and it abolishes us. But to see why that is, and it's clear, you just have to know what we are, right? Because what we are is dogs that talk and reason. And that means we need things like the dogs, and we got to get them or we get hungry or have to sleep. But also this rational sense that we have, it lets us know that there's this rich world outside of us and it sits in judgment on us all the time. And so we're always asking the question, was that good? Was the description of the waterfall proper ordinate? Lewis likes that word. Was it ordinate to the waterfall to call it sublime, or was it ordinate to the waterfall to call it pretty? And he says, college is right, it's sublime. And that's not what we think it is. Look at it, that thing, right? And if we stop doing that, then the only thing that's left in us Is our will just what we assert, what we say? O', Brien, I have to be torturing you to make sure that you are obeying me and not doing something that you want. See, that's the argument. And he thinks. O' Brien thinks God's like that, which is, you know, false. I mean, there are people who think that way today. And there always have been. There's always been tyrants. Today they're totalitarians. But it doesn't work, right? Because if you look at the classical account of God, God is a person who's so elevated that he doesn't even think about anything below him. He wouldn't take any pleasure from torturing some little thing like us. And if you look at the Christian God, he's related to that God. The account of him is that he abounds with love and it pours over into us. And both of those things can claim to be perfect. Whereas a thing that just works its will upon other things all the time, that person is also a victim of those other things. O' Brien is a slave. He actually destroys himself. In conversation with Winston, he says, you're thinking that I'm old, Winston, and I will die, but the party will live on forever. O' Brien, with that sentence, abolishes himself. And in the name of that self, abolition. He works unspeakable cruelty all the time as the activity of his life. That's not God. That's also not even a man. He has abolished man. Lewis argument is that's what happens. I'll just tell you the conclusion quickly, because I've been giving away the plots. And so these planets come down to St. Anne's and invest Merlin with certain powers. The argument is that they can do it to Maryland, because Merlin has been sort of kept in storage for centuries, millennia. And because he had dabbled in magic, you know, which was that early effort to conquer nature, he was soiled a bit, but also he was a believer, and so it would be right for God. One of Lewis best arguments, in my opinion, is, is that God can't violate the law of contradiction. God can't both be and not be. Nothing can. And so God, being benevolent, wouldn't ruin somebody by giving him all these powers. So he brings in Merlin, who's just right because he's a Christian, but he's been messing around in ways that he shouldn't have been a long time ago. And they invest him in all these powers and he goes out there to the nice. And I won't tell you what the scene is like but it's hilarious, it's thrilling, great, triumphant. And when these gods come down and they only talk to Ranson, they picked him. And these are angels, not gods. When they come down, they only appear at ransom. And there's an accident out of the solid planet that makes that okay. Lewis, he brings to this. He has great sense of drama, but he also has deep learning of a classical, philosophic, literary and theological kind. And he deploys that through this novel. And I promise you, it's very exciting. So it's a thrilling novel and I'm going to make this point finally. I've been asked many times, why do I like these novels? Do you see what they make you think about? In other words, I'm on Lewis's side in the argument. Why would you import God? You can't. He's already in there. Just when you think, think about right and wrong, it leads right up there, right? 1984 contains a description of God. And then O' Brien and his kind. That can't be God. That's not even big enough to be free of the necessity to attend nervously, constantly to the actions of Winston Smith, who really just wants to be left alone. That's not God. And then he criticizes CS Lewis for bringing in God, real God. God you can make an argument for, God you can believe in. And so these novels invite you to do that. And I think when you do that, it gives you comfort. Comfort when you read things to worry about in the newspaper, and courage to confront those things.
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Juan Davalos
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