The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
What is That Hideous Strength REALLY about? w/ Dr Michael Ward
What a treat! James gets to geek about CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man - with the world's leading expert on all things Inkling, Dr Michael Ward! Why should we NEVER call his science fiction books 'The Space Trilogy'? And is The Magician's Nephew actually going to be good? Enjoy!
After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man by Dr Michael Ward
Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy - featuring an essay by Dr Michael Ward
Further reading by Ward in First Things on Matrimony
The God Particle Streaming MP4
The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (Catholic Ideas for a Secular World)
Norm MacDonald on Germany going to war with The World.
Clip from The Princess Bride by William Goldman
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Hello, change, can we stand up till you can be strengthened? And this episode isn't on the cooking. And I'm going to go through that we can speaking to the load leading exponent and three kilometers. And he has phone on figuring out 3 kilometers really. And it could be him. Technically, match money. What's the difference? Let's get into it. Here we go. Michael, welcome to the Stand-Up Theologian podcast. Thank you, James. Glad to be with you. We met many years ago at the Greenbelt Festival. You've met a lot of people since then, so you may well have no memory of this. When you were telling people about your wonderful eye-opening book, Planet Narnia. At the time I had only read Narnia, so half of this wonderful book was lost on me. And I have since read the cosmic trilogy, the third of which is the subject of today's episode, That Hideous Strength, published by C.S. Lewis in 1945. Probably my favourite novel of all time. Knocking out even the 39 Steps by John Bucken, would you believe? I've read it at least twice to myself and once out loud to my kids. And I plan to read it again very soon, not least because I've just realized an idea I've had is basically exactly the same premise. So I should both learn from it and then try to avoid it. But why don't you tell us a little bit about your history with this particular book? Obviously, the Lewis affair, Lewis Sphere is very familiar to you. But when was your first encounter with this book, which most of us come to later?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, I probably read it in my mid-teens. I was introduced to Narnia like most people are as a child, uh, and then got into his other fiction, like The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, and then moved on to the trilogy, which you call a cosmic trilogy, and that's fine. Some people call it the ransom trilogy, that's fine. But one must never call it the space trilogy. Yes. That's an absolute bugbear in my book, um, though nearly everybody does call it the space trilogy.
SPEAKER_04:It it shows that you haven't understood it, doesn't it? And and so why should you not call this the space trilogy?
SPEAKER_05:Because of what happens in the first book, uh, which is in fact repeated in the second and third books, um, where Ransom, the protagonist, is kidnapped and taken to Mars, and he on his way to Mars, he looks out the window of his spaceship and he marvels at the what he calls the empire and ocean of radiance in which he finds himself swimming. Uh, he could not call it empty space, he could not call it dead. Life seemed to pour into him from it every moment. Uh older thinkers had been wiser than when they called it not space, which was a blasphemous libel, but rather the heavens, the heavens that are telling the glory of God. Space is the wrong word, he says. And at the end of the book, in dialogue with the narrator, Ransom says, if we could effect in only 10% of your readers uh a change from the use of the word space to the use of the word heavens, we would have made a start. Yes. And that, as I say, is repeated in the second and third volumes. And yet, publishers publish it as the space trilogy, indicating they haven't read the thing they're publishing.
SPEAKER_04:Infuriating. But also it does show a really deep, almost willful misunderstanding of the actual of this body of you know this trilogy. I mean, can can you remember it having any effect on you first time around other than thinking, oh, this isn't this isn't like the first two, is it? Uh I mean the first one is is is exciting. It's it is a space adventure, uh, and it's all recognizably early science fiction. The second book, if I'm honest, I nearly bailed on halfway through because I thought I I'm not enjoying this. But by the end, I'm I thought this is more insightful than virtually any Bible commentary on Genesis I think I've ever read. And then the third one was tremendous, although it has some difficult passages. What effect did it have on you when you were reading it? And you know, did did you when did you come back to it?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, I can't remember how soon I came back, but I do remember in my first go through the trilogy, I I was a little bit non-plussed, to be honest, because the books are well, first of all, they're very different from each other, and they they don't they don't seem to comprise a uh a single imaginative vision, at least not at first sight. I think there is actually a very profound vision running through all three books, and we may come onto that. But but they are very different. As you say, the first book is is very much like sort of H. G. Wells' kind of space fiction when when he goes to Mars. Second book, yeah, the first I'm as it happens, I just coincidentally I'm rereading Peralandra at the moment, and I am reminded, especially in the first half, that it's there's not much going on. He arrives on the planet Venus, spends a lot of time talking to a lady that he meets there, and not much occurs at all of any dramatic import in the first half of the novel. And even in the second half, it's um it's mostly uh just um a sort of standoff between him and the villain. But as you said, by the end of the book, you feel you have experienced an absolute whopper of a novel because it gets transcendently, ecstatically rapturous and rhapsodic in the in the second half, in the in the in the final quarter in particular. And Lewis regarded it as one of the best things he ever wrote. He said, you know, um, Peralandra is worth 20 screw tapes.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And like well, like every writer, they always rate most highly the thing that other people find obscure or difficult. I mean, that's uh that's that's not very unusual. And then would you mind for the benefit of our readers who incredibly some of whom have not read that hideous strength, which seems bizarre to me, he says, not talking to his his self from uh a couple of decades ago. Do you want to just explain very roughly what happens in the book?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, well, it will have to be very rough because it a lot happens in the third book. The first book, as I said, was set on Mars, the second book is set on Venus, and the third book begins with the word matrimony. So the masculine and feminine principles that have been outlined in the first two volumes are now brought down to Earth very literally in this mundane marriage of two young people called Mark and Jane Studdock, and they are unhappily married. Um, and the story is really about how their marriage is healed, but it's healed only after they've gone through some major adventures and vicissitudes and perils. Mark being ensnared by this villainous, technocratic, sort of dystopian bureaucracy, he called them Nice, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, who are trying to take over England. And Jane falling in with a different set of people who turn out to be the heroes of the piece. They live at a manor called St. Anne's on the hill.
SPEAKER_04:And um they are often described as a ragtag bunch, aren't they? They are very much the resistance who look very unlikely.
SPEAKER_05:Exactly. And they but they are led by Ransom, who we have met in the first two novels. He's now confined to a couch. He's he's an invalid. Um, he's immensely strong with golden hair and a big beard, um, and his shoulders look like they could support the entire house because he's gained all this strength and all this divinity from his travels in space. Uh in the heavens, I should say.
SPEAKER_04:Um yes, shame on you. The estate will be in touch very soon.
SPEAKER_05:He has collected around him, as you say, a ragtag collection of unlikely people, uh, a couple of academics um and their wives, uh, his char lady who's called Ivy Maggs, a skeptic, a Scottish sceptic called Andrew McPhee.
SPEAKER_04:Um yes, and the bear, Mr. Bultitude. And I met someone with a surname Bultitude in the last couple of years, and of course, I couldn't not mention Mr. Bultitude. And he seemed rather bemused by this because I think people mentioned to this to him very, very infrequently. And I how can you have a surname of Bultitude and not have people bound up to you and wax lyrical about the bear in one of C.S. Lewis's greatest works? Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_05:Um Mr. Bultitude is, yeah, he's a tame bear. He's not the only important animal at Sundance, actually. It it turns out at the end of the story that the house has you know a piggery and there are their hedgehogs, and there are even elephants escaping from a local zoo. And um, well, I say a zoo, it's actually uh the the vivisection uh laboratory of the gneiss where all these caged animals who are being experimented upon have escaped in the grand denouement of the story, and they all turn up at St. Anne's and they trample through the rosebuds and they eat all the celery and but they go and make love. Uh the animals go off two by two, and so do the human couple the couples, the married couples at St. Anne's, they all go off and make love, and that's what the whole trilogy has been leading to. Masculinity and femininity finally are united in the marital embrace, and that's where the whole thing is um has been directed.
SPEAKER_04:Well, let's just go back then and examine that word matrimony, and what is important about matrimony as opposed to the word marriage, of course, the word marriage is very memorably said by Peter Cook in Princess Bride.
SPEAKER_02:Marriage. Marriage is what wins us to get about.
SPEAKER_04:But actually, it begins with matrimony, which is not quite the same thing. And the Church of England has been ripping itself to bits over what holy matrimony is as opposed to marriage, and they should have just consulted C.S. Lewis, you would think, but unwilling to do that, or the Bible, it would seem. But um why don't you say a little bit about the difference between matrimony and marriage?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, well, matrimony literally, so etymologically, if you look at the form of the word, means the marriage the the mother state or the mother condition. So matri as in, you know, matrimony uh as in matrilineal or or maternal or or patriarchal, uh, and money meaning a a condition or a state. Um so the the marriage relationship is that relationship which is designed to make women into mothers. That's you know the technical purpose of marriage. And indeed, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that Lewis was raised on and and knew intimately and used every Sunday at church, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in the marriage service, there are three purposes of marriage listed, and and the first of them is um the procreation of children. In other words, the the making of the woman into the mother. And then there are other two other relic uh purposes of marriage. One is for the avoidance of sin. Brute lusts uh should should not be should be hallowed aright. And then the third purpose is the the mutual um now I'm quoting from that hideous strength. So here is the very first paragraph. Matrimony was ordained, thirdly, said Jane Studdock to herself, for the mutual society help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other. She had not been to church since her school days until she went there six months ago to be married, and the words of the service had stuck in her mind. So that's how Lewis opens the book. She's uh a newly married woman and she's already unhappy in her marriage uh because Mark, her husband, has said we mustn't have any children. Uh but and he doesn't want to in former times, when they were dating, when they were courting, uh she says uh it looked like you know all eternity would not be long enough to to it contain all that they had to say to each other. And now Mark is so tired when he comes home from work each day that uh nothing seems to keep him awake for long. In fact, only one thing, and that not for very long.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_05:In other words, they're having a quickie before they fall asleep, but they're contracepting their relationship because they've decided they have what what the narrator calls a laboratory outlook on love. They've decided not to have children, or not for a long time yet. That's what one of the main themes of the novel, that it might be wise to uh space your children and and to you know control the size of your family, but as has always been, you know, the the tradition of Christian teaching, you do that through self-control, not through reaching for drugs or devices or or methods which interfere with the integrity of your physiology.
SPEAKER_04:I was fascinated by the fact that your in your chapter that you wrote uh for that book, that the Church of England's teaching only really changed on this in 1930. So that is within 10, 15 years of the book being written and published, up until that point, what Anglicans would say the Catholic view of contraception is, what it sounds like was the norm. This to us is shocking as we look back on it because contraception is so normal, and in British society, at least, the Catholic insistence on no contraception just seems rather old-fashioned and strange. But actually, Lewis had no problem with it. Although he never sort of boldly states it in any roundabout way. And I is it partly because he's sort of slightly cagey that as a lay bachelor, it's not that it's none of his business, but that it he sort of uh is aware of how that might land.
SPEAKER_05:Absolutely, yeah. He says publicly in the preface to Mere Christianity that he has deliberately chosen not to say anything about birth control. And he gives as his reason the fact that he is not a woman, nor even a married man. As a bachelor, he is he is spared all the dangers and the expenses of of parenthood, and he's not therefore gonna to say anything about it, because he remembers all too well when he was in the army in the First World War how um, you know, the generals at head safe at army headquarters away from the front line, they'd issue their commands to the poor bloody infantry on the front line, um, without a second thought about what it really meant for these poor men facing up German barrage. And so Lewis doesn't want to fall into the same trap of being a sort of armchair general, issuing edict to young married couples about what they should or shouldn't do. But that was in mere Christianity. That was where he was advocating for the faith. Whereas in that hideous strength, he's operating as a novelist, not as a Christian apologist. And so he can explore moral themes much more sort of loosely and and suggestively. You know, he's not actively preaching a message, but he's depicting what he thinks is is the likely effect of contraception on on your average marriage.
SPEAKER_04:I think Jane Studdock is one of his great characters in all of his uh all of his creations. She's up there with Puddleglum, really, who has to be the other astonishing character, because she to me seems like a comic character. I know I'm a sitcom writer, so I find many things funny. But she is in that sort of impossible situation of being, she sort of deeply resents being tricked into marrying Mark, essentially, and now being dependent on him. But also she resents this sexual element to it, but also becoming pregnant would would also be awful because she would have to stop her studies on John Donne, you know, it's just like well, I think I think Christendom could probably manage without her take. Uh but she's such a vivid character, and I was interested that you also mentioned the fact that she was kind of based on someone. I don't know how they felt about that or whether they knew they were the inspiration. But I thought, oh, I bet Lewis must have known half a dozen James Debdocks, probably.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, well, though there is one particular woman that Lewis knew, um, and he we we know about this because he wrote letters to her, and her name was Mary Mary Naylan, that's right. And Mary Naylon had been a student of Lewis's at Oxford, and she herself, Mary Naylon, was very put out by the ordering of the purposes of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer, because she said, Well, shouldn't the mutual society comfort and support that the one ought to have of the other be the first purpose of marriage? You know, the the the the uh the companion companionship and the friendship and the love, you know, of between marriage between married persons, not necessarily the fruit fruit of their loins. Um and Lewis wrote to Mary Nalen and said, uh let me quote you what he said, because it's quite interesting. He says, um, what is there to object to in the order in which these three purposes are put? Good sense demands that the biological aspect be listed first, Lewis argued, because now I quote, no one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents. Your descendants may be alive a million years hence and may number tens of thousands. In this regard, marriages are the fountains of history. Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism. So, you know, Lewis is very much on the side of the Book of Common Prayer. He thinks, yeah, the the distinguishing feature of marriage is that it is a relationship which produces or is open to producing children. And it's important to include that qualification open to producing, because of course not all marriages do result in offspring. Some couples are tragically infertile or sterile, and and that they cannot produce uh a second generation. Um, and it's often a great tragedy for such couples. Um, but in in principle, a marriage should be, in Lewis's view, open to procreation.
SPEAKER_04:Just interrupting to say, well, firstly, I hope you're enjoying this episode with pretty much the world's leading scholar on C.S. Lewis. And also to say that there's a slightly extended version of this podcast available for paid subscribers to the weeklift papers, which is my weekly funny newsletter from me and the standard theologian. And then that comes out on the list today, and you can get that for free if you just go over to the weeklift papers, and then if you upgrade to paid. On Saturday morning to get an extra bonus installment, which often contains a sneaky headline episode of the Stanley Legend podcast, which is often extended as well. So that is a way even to pull the show and also have a joke. As we go. In the show notes, you'll also find a link to the thing I wrote called the Code Political, which is a play about science and religion, and it was inspired partly by C.S. Lewis and the hero of the story, Dr. Gilbert Selwyn Romans, who is actually a um local Paris priest. Selwyn Roman? Does that remind you of Elwyn Ransom? Yes, maybe a little bit. It's a slightly strange tale, but it's funny, and I often say it is the best thing I've ever written, and it was filmed in front of an audience. And you can get hold of that by going to the link in the show notes. And maybe that's something to watch over Christmas. It's uh really funny, I'm really proud of it. And again, it's another way of supporting this podcast. Okay, enough blather for me, let's get back to it. Now, this is part of something, I think, even deeper. I mean, although in one sense, how could anything be more fundamental than the than the procreation of the human race? And there is plenty of begatting in scripture, uh, and it really is extremely important. But I was wondering, there's a but both this and on the question of you know magic and and demons, where is Lewis getting this from? Because obviously he's getting an awful lot from 16th century literature, but I was just trying to think what he's writing, even at the time, is deeply unpopular, I would imagine, among the Jane Studdocks of this world who whose time is coming, as it were. And of course, you know, the pejorative terms like the blue stockings and all those sorts of things. And I'm wondering if to some extent his influence of GK Chesterton and and and Chesterton's own reaction to the eugenics movements and those sorts of things, and of course Chesterton himself, who was so full of life, who I believe was also unable to have children. I don't think he and his wife had had children, and and nor did Lewis. And so I'm just wondering, you know, what do you think, why do you think Lewis was particularly exercised by this beyond an existential threat to the human race?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, well, it's interesting that in the first quarter of the you know, first third of the 20th century, contraception was the hot topic. Everybody was talking about it. It was at least as hot a topic then as, say, transgenderism is now for us. And so you had the different sides drawn up. You had people like H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley who were saying, Oh, of course we should have contraception, and the more the better. And yes, it it f tr phased into eugenics. Um and then you had people like G.K. Chesterton and interestingly G George Orwell. On the other side, Orwell, one of Orwell's novels that keep the Aspagistra flying, is largely about contraception and about how it's actually just a device used by the rich to control the poor. Because of course, if you're a businessman in charge of a large company, uh who would you rather have to pay? A man with no children or a man with ten children? And of course, you'd go for the person with the fewer children. That's so that's a sort of economic argument, but it brings uh to bear on the subject. Whereas Chesterton and Lewis are much more concerned with with the spiritual, moral, and to a certain extent psychological um impact of a contracepted marriage. But it deserves repeating that until 1930, no Protestant, mainstream Protestant denomination officially taught that contraception was okay. Until 1930, basically adopted the traditional Christian view that marriage is for is to be open to procreation. That's that's the distinctive nature of the relationship. Because men and women can be friends, but they don't once they start having sexual intercourse with each other, then that is obviously that brings a whole new dimension to the relationship. And that's what makes it into a marriage.
SPEAKER_02:Marriage, that blessing arrangement.
SPEAKER_05:And unless they're married, it's fornication. And so, you know, going back into the mists of time, if you want to trace, you know, some of the biblical origins of this view, you it would go straight back to Genesis, of course, and the first command to Adam and Eve be uh uh go go forth, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. And you you just you know, in the in the grand sweep of biblical history, you find any number of women, barren women, who praise the Lord when he opens their womb. You know, think of Hannah in the Old Testament and and Elizabeth in the New Testament, the mother of John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, no, you're right. It is a re it's a very regular theme. And I think, again, the Lewis themes just keep coming back. There is a book I've I'm aware of, I've not yet read, called The Dignity of Dependence, written by a former uh secular Jew turned uh Roman Catholic from New York, you know, about as sophisticated as they come. And lots lots of folks like that are sort of suddenly realizing uh that maybe their their great-grandparents weren't wrong about everything. And she's speaking more broadly about the idea that as a society we loathe the idea of dependence and being dependent on others, and of course, for Jane Studdock, being having a child suddenly makes you vulnerable and dependent uh on others, and having someone dependent on you, and she spends an awful lot of energy trying to do the opposite of what her husband is doing, which is he's trying to get in and she's trying to get out, uh, and there's this extraordinary kind of mirroring that's going on. And what's fascinating to me, there's um there's a very interesting fellow called Peter Zean, who is a big geopolitics guy, and he's already saying, Oh, the population problems are absolutely gigantic, and they're all going down. And we have, you know, China is already in a tailspin because of its childlessness, and actually, all almost all major economies, with the possible exception of France, has a serious demographical problem because they don't have enough children. Yeah. And what do you know? It's like, well, Lewis had this one in about 1945.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, absolutely. We're we're facing a a demographic a demographic um abyss. Yes. We're falling off a cliff in terms of our ability to reproduce ourselves. Yeah. Um and you know, hence the solution to some people, but also to other people the problem, yeah, the additional new complication of of um immigration to solve the demographic abid. We haven't got enough people to you know look after the aging population. Well, we better get them from somewhere. So, well, let's import them from overseas.
SPEAKER_04:And and stuff the country they've come from. So we'll have all we'll I mean, it's it's in one sense, it's a terrible form of colonialism, which is oh, we're happy to gut any country that wants to send their young people over here. Um, I believe Germany, in order to retain its current average age, needs to import uh two million people a year um uh for uh from from immigration. And so, yeah, it's this is partly why why we are where we are, uh regardless of one's views on how exciting that is. The upside is someone's much more likely to become a Christian in England than in Pakistan, uh, where it's very difficult uh to become a Christian. So there are some roundabouts uh to go with the swings, or or vice versa. Well, the other solution, moving us on to the the second part, uh is robots. Uh so Elon Musk is busy developing robots, and it looks like don't worry, all the old people will be looked looked after by robots. Uh what what's not to like? Well, I sort of don't even know how to begin to answer that question. Um, which kind of takes us on to the to the other aspect, which was initially the more interesting one to me. But as you've said, you know, your your argument about matrimony is like, well, this is what the book is really about. But in one sense, they're two sides of the same coin. But the thing that's particularly of interest to me is the fact that you've got technology, you've got transhumanism, and you've now got AI, and there are people with very serious reservations about what's really going on with AI, and some of them are exaggerated, but some of them are also naive, you know, in terms of what you know, the spiritual realities. And so that's the other sort of big theme of the book. And again, I'm wondering why don't you just say a little bit about how that emerges in the book? And then I'd be interested to know again, where is Lewis getting that from? Because it does seem to be very insightful, but not necessarily what you would expect.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, well, it's interesting that that hideous strength is the fictional counterpart of another book that Lewis wrote, The Abolition of Man. And that's his shortest, densest, and most philosophical work, The Abolition of Man. It originated as three philosophy lectures that he gave during the Second World War. Uh, and in the introduction to the abolition of man, Lewis says that the book has behind it sorry, in the introduction to that hideous strength, he says that it has behind it a serious point which I have tried to make in my so Lewis draws our own attention to the link between the two books. Um and The Abolition of Man is a philosophical work. It's not a theological work. Uh the arguments there don't depend on Lewis's Christian commitments. Uh he says that explicitly at one point. Um that's one of the reasons why the abolition of man is is found to be difficult by many readers, because they assume it's going to be another work of explicit Christian apologetics. But it's Lewis working in philosophical mode, not theological mode. He began his career at Oxford teaching philosophy. Um and he was particularly interested in the question of whether value was objective or not. You know, when we say something is good or true or beautiful, are we saying that it is that the goodness, truth, and beauty inhere in the object, and we are just recognizing it? Or are we saying it is good because I say it is good, it's true because I wish it to be true. It is beautiful because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there's nothing objective about beauty. Um and that's the position, the subjectivist position that Lewis is wanting to take on and and defeat. And he says, if you insist on asserting your own subjectivist view of reality, then what you're doing is basically saying, my will is more important than reality. What I say goes. Might is right. The world is as I declare it to be. And that is obviously uh uh all around us today, but it was it was gaining strength uh even back then in the 30s and forties when Lewis was developing these ideas. And he thought that if you uh take that subjectivist view, you're on a short route to dim to demolishing your own humanity. That's why he calls the book the abolition of burnt. If might is right, if only power matters, whoever has the power to say this is good, that is true, that is beautiful, well then we're in the lore of the jungle. In the animal kingdom, p you nature is red in tooth and claw, and the strongest prevails, you know, the Darwinian survival of the fittest. But humans are better than that. Uh humans can care and they can be gentle, and they can support the weak, and they can take care of the needy. That is one of the proofs of our humanity. Um but if everything is about strength, why would you care for the weak? You know, they're losers. Losers and suckers. Yeah. Um and, you know, hence the connection with the eugenics movement, because eugenics is all about breeding out the undesirables in order to strengthen the race. Um, so you see there's a a clear connection between those who advocate contraception and those who advocate eugenics.
SPEAKER_04:Which is then exploited in the 1930s. Countries in certain countries in Europe, which then sort of declare war on every country going. Because the weak otherwise will kill us. They will hold us back because pity and mercy are lethal, they're not even luxuries, they are undesirable in and of themselves.
SPEAKER_05:Yes, absolutely. Inferior races need to be exterminated. Yeah. Uh and who who did who gets to determine who are the inferior races? Yeah. The master race. Whoever can be strong enough to declare himself the ubermensch, well, then it whatever he says goes. And, you know, devil take the hindmost.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And you're right, the abolition of man, I think, is is really hard. And you I think it does take you by surprise. Could you think, oh, this is a short book, this is a bit like mere Christianity? And it's like, whoa, no, very much. The first one I think is the first lecture, I think, is very clear and okay. And I think I think a lot of people run out of puff probably halfway through the second one. Uh, and you have very helpfully written a commentary on these, uh, which it would be uh willfully negligent of me not to mention, After Humanity, a guide to C.S. Lewis's Abolition of Man, which are available in all of the usual places. And it's a very helpful background, and then actually kind of almost not quite line by line, but just like this is referring to that, and this is referring to this and referring to that. Because it it does require unpacking, doesn't it? To which I would just say, particularly as a storyteller, well, just read that hideous strength. It's it's a lot more fun. And there's a bear, so why why would you not why would you not just read the novel?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting that Lewis does twice, just twice in the Abolition of Man mention briefly contraception. It's not the focus of his argument by any means, but he does touch upon it briefly. And it's part of his basic argument in the Abolition of Man that for the wise men of old, he says, the cardinal problem, the chief problem in the spiritual and moral life had been how to subdue the soul to reality. And the solution had been knowledge and uh virtue and self-discipline. The cardinal problem for the modern man, he says, is how to subdue reality to the wishes of us. And the solution is a technique. You now, if you have sufficient power, control reality. You bend it to your will, and you don't have to respect the innate integrity, the intrinsic value of either nature as a whole or your own human nature. Let alone the human nature of every other human being. Uh it can be whatever you want it to be. Uh you just find some technique, some technol technological solution to any given problem, say the problem of fertility. Because we want to have lots of sex, but we don't want to have lots of babies, but neither do we want to exert self-control. So, ah, if we took a drug, we could have as many sexual partners as we wanted, and we men could abuse women all the more thoroughly without having to worry about making them into unwed mothers. How convenient. So you can see how contraception is a gift to licentious and domineering men. It enables them to exploit women all the more fully. Those on the progressive side of the spectrum on the left, on in the liberal left, who you know very much.
SPEAKER_04:Who stopped listening 20 minutes ago?
SPEAKER_05:Probably they did, but you know, this is an argument from a feminist point of view against contraception. I mean, Lewis is not usually thought of as a feminist, but here he's speaking, I think, very much in the capacity of someone who has women's interests in mind.
SPEAKER_04:I think there is a modern equivalent to this argument, which is embodied in Louise Perry, who is a writer formerly of uh maybe she still writes for The New Statesman. She has a podcast called Maiden Mother Matriarch, and she is she wrote a book about uh the case against the sexual revolution where she basically said the asymmetry of how this fell on women is has completely passed everybody by, and she has, I think, made a journey into the Christian faith herself as well. So I think this would resonate with her. But obviously, Lewis is talking in the terms of the 1930s and 40s, which obviously seems very different from ours, but is essentially on the same spectrum of that debate, isn't it? It's just he's saying, I think once you're open to technology, well, there's no end. Um and so, but then the other thing I was hoping to just touch on a little bit is is that supernatural element which is strange and creepy, and yet we know there's something in it. And I think what people don't tend to realise is that the whole scientific movement rested on alchemists who were keen to, you know, the Royal Society was stuffed full of esoteric believers in all kinds of early kinds of Freemasonry, summoning angels in order to achieve alchemy and those sorts of things. We like to think that, you know, Newton was this great early rational person and showed the way for hundreds of years. I think Lewis kind of blows the lid on that. But the way he does it is so brilliant and revealed very slowly that there's something very sinister here. I don't, in a way, I think that's a such a helpful sense of that this is a spiritual thing, and I think people are blind to it. And I'm just wondering, reading it now, you just think he must have known something. He must have known. So I have grave concerns about HG Wells, for example. I I think there's some pretty pretty murky stuff floating around in various societies that he was a member of and stuff. Do you think Lewis knew stuff or knew people who might have known who who basically would have read the his book and just gone, oh yeah, that's basically what we're doing and we're fine with it?
SPEAKER_05:Absolutely. I think there were some of his colleagues at Oxford uh who are very much the you know, the sort of prototypes, the the real life rough sketches for the full-blown villains who appear in that hideous strength. Um, you know, it was because Lewis butted up against their arguments in real life that that he was so alarmed by by the prospects held out by the By the long-term implications of their views. But not just that. That makes it all sound too immediate and contemporary, but Lewis's suite is pretty um comprehensive. He's a literary historian as well as a literary critic. And his the biggest book he ever wrote was his magisterial English literature in the 16th century, excluding drama.
SPEAKER_04:I love the exclusion of drama, it always makes me laugh.
SPEAKER_05:And that's a 700-page book, longest book he ever wrote. And interestingly, it opens with a long discussion of the new astronomy that came in in the 16th century. This brings us back to our opening discussion about space and the heavens. So in the 16th century, astronomy was revolutionized with Copernicus's theory of the G of the heliocentric cosmos, which was later verified by Kepler and Galileo in the early 17th century when the telescope was invented. And so Lewis is wanting to understand how these changes in the scientific outlook affected the literature of the 16th century. That's why he starts with this. And he doesn't just talk about changes in astronomy, he's talking about alchemy and astrology. And you're quite right, uh Isaac Newton wrote much more about alchemy than he wrote about gravity. And so Lewis knows about all this from uh from the point of view of a literary historian. He he writes about people like you know Paracelsus and Pico Mirandola and Agrippa and all these other folks uh who whose whose names are you know just names to me. I've never read these guys, but Lewis had, and he saw the implications of of what they were doing. He so he says in The Abolition of Man that uh science and magic are born of the same impulse. And by magic he's here meaning basically dark magic, uh you know, controlling nature, casting spells to make nature do what you want it to do. They were born in the same hour, in the same neighborhood. Uh they were twins. But uh alchemy, magic, uh, was sickly and died, whereas science was healthy and throve. It grew and it became absolutely dominant. But they were born of the same impulse, Lewis says, of of with wanting to control nature, make nature serve our desires.
SPEAKER_04:Um on a basic level, for example, turning base metal into gold, that's like which is a profoundly unnatural thing to do, and therefore against natural law or however one might might put it.
SPEAKER_05:Yes, absolutely. So you you've got people like you know, Dr. Faustus, um Marlowe, you know, making a pact with the devil. You've got and then a bit later, you know, 19th century, you have Frankenstein um uh doing uh doing things to to the human body which were previously regarded as impious and disgusting, you know, like digging up dead bodies and doing experiments on them and chopping them into pieces and sewing them together like Frankenstein does in Mary Shelley's novel. It's interesting that we're we're now getting a new film version of that. It's in one sense very timely, I think. So the point is that in that idea of strength, the villains of the piece, the members of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, they exhibit exactly these traits, these these viewpoints, that they just they see no inherent or objective value in nature, either, you know, the environment or or space or or their own or animals or their own human nature. It's just so much raw material to be cut up and repurposed for whatever desires happen to occur to them at any given moment.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:You know, this is the abolition of man in in essence. That's where it all leads to a uh destruction of our own humanity. That's the title of my book, After Humanity.
SPEAKER_04:Yes, indeed. Well, um, we're we've nearly exhausted our time, and you mentioned a new film, but there is another new film which we should probably just briefly touch on, The Magician's Nephew, which about which you, via email to me at least, were cautiously optimistic. I suspect many are many of us have been hurt by Hollywood too many times. Well, what is the grounds for your confidence that this new magician's nephew movie won't be anything but an abomination?
SPEAKER_05:Well, I wouldn't put it as strong as saying I'm confident. Okay. Hopefully. Cautiously optimistic. Yes. And the grounds for that uh are that the director, Greta Gerwig, did a fantastic adaptation, in my view, of Little Women back in 2019. And in an interview, I have seen her say on record that when she was a girl growing up, she was constantly reading and rereading two works, and they were Little Women and The Chronicles of Narnia. So if she is able to do for Narnia as good a job as she did for Little Women, then we we're in for a treat. It could be great. Yeah. It could be a work of genius. Because I think Little Women is a superb movie. But there's many a slip twixt cup and lip. It's interesting, by the way, that the magician's nephew uh features a magician. So Uncle Andrew, who is the magician in question, he he's a sort of uh a more sort of child-friendly example, you might say, of the villains of the nice in that hideous thing. Yes. Uncle Andrew is as well is doing experiments on guinea pigs. Yes. And he's he's he's and he eventually starts experimenting on Holly and Diggory, the young children, getting them to serve his own malicious evil ends. Um and he says, you know, my mine is a high and noble destiny, destiny. I I'm not subject to little laws. Uh they're they're all very well for children and women, he says. Um and he's just basically saying to himself, I'm entitled to do whatever I like in order to get whatever I want. Um, so here again we see in in the in the in one of the Narnia chronicles an outworking of exactly the same set of ideas that you see in that string.
SPEAKER_04:Yes. Very last question. Is there a particular new uh work of Lewis that you've not written about much before that you're getting very excited about, or a much neglected uh and I've just got this awful feeling you're about to say Till We Have Faces, which is the one that so people like me who start out with Narnia, you get you you get to the cosmic trilogy, and then people get there, they go, Oh yeah, but you've not read Till We Have Faces, and you're like, oh, or the discarded image, which frankly I couldn't make head or tail of because I just haven't done the reading, if you know what I mean. But is there any any particular favourite of yours you're thinking about?
SPEAKER_05:Well, I I'm not particularly thinking about it, I'm not working on it, but you're quite right, Till We Have Faces is the novel that everybody should eventually read by C.S. Lewis. It's usually the last one that they read, and it was in fact the last one that he wrote. But he regarded it as easily his best work, uh, better even than Paralandra, I think. Um, and it is a fantastic work, um, but very mysterious, quite difficult in some ways. Uh, but it's the one book by Lewis I've read more often than any other. And that's partly because it's so brilliant, profound, moving, challenging, but also because it's rather difficult. And you can't easily understand it except by just rereading it. Yes.
SPEAKER_04:Well, except, yes, you've got form on cracking codes when it comes to C.S. Lewis. So I I wonder if subconsciously you're thinking, ah, I think I see. We're all we're all rather hoping that you will. So if you could see your way clear to one of those, that would be uh that would be most helpful. Um you've been so generous with your time. Thanks ever so much indeed. Um, thank you for being on the Stand Up Theologian podcast. Thank you, James. Well, that was fun, wasn't it? I hope you found that fascinating. And I did. There are links to lots of the things that we talked about in the show notes, including Dr. Michael Wood's excellent books and fascinating for any fan of CS Literature. You really don't open things up and help you see things even more clearly. And if you want to hear the page in which we talk about how the CS Louis took down how it's done, then you'll need the extended version for that. That's available to Loyal Lola Latino and paid subscribers to the weekly papers. Anyway, that's the end of this episode. Is this how it ends? Yeah.