On That Hideous Strength

The Abolition of Man and the New Tower of Babel

[Greetings, friends, from Pella, Iowa! This week, I finished working through the third book in C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy: That Hideous Strength. It comes after Out of the Silent Planet (covered in On the Silent Planet) and Perelandra (covered in On Perelandra), and got me thinking about how science, technology, and artificial intelligence resemble a New Babel (more on this later).

To summarize the story briefly: That Hideous Strength follows Dr. Ransom and the dark forces repelled in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra as the battle moves from the Deep Heavens to Earth. Ransom is now the Director at St. Anne’s Manor, and Divine (now Lord Feverstone, the co-antagonist in Out of the Silent Planet opposite Weston, whom Ransom vanquished in Perelandra), is an influential member of N.I.C.E.—the National Institute for Co-Ordinated Experiments.

But these two familiar figures are not the story’s main characters… that role is reserved for the married Mark and Jane Studdock, as their diverging paths lead them into the heart of dualing organizations. Mark, an ambitious sociologist with aspirations of reaching the “inner ring” of his profession,¹ is invited to accept a post at N.I.C.E. on the recommendation of Lord Feverstone, and Jane, a PhD candidate and closet clairvoyant, is led to St. Anne’s Manor after revealing her dreams to a friend.

As the plot progresses, it is slowly revealed that St. Anne’s and N.I.C.E. are engaged in an eternal battle of good and evil. St. Anne’s is under the orders of Maleldil (Christ in this universe) and is something like a modern King Arthur’s court (Logres), with Ransom as the new Pendragon; by contrast, N.I.C.E. is a sinister technocratic organization (obliviously) under demonic influence and bent on asserting its will through Europe with a plan to “recondition” society under the leadership of the Head—which turns out to literally be the severed head of a recently guillotined French scientist and criminal, François Alcasan, whom the scientists of N.I.C.E. believe they have restored to life using regular infusions of blood when, in reality, it is a communication tool of the Macrobes (i.e., demons) who despise mankind and Earth.

The first 200 pages are relatively slow, but the plot quickens when Jane dreams of people digging up the empty grave of a long-buried man, Ransom concludes that N.I.C.E. is after the magician Merlin, the timeless citizen of Atlantis and Numinor,² and the race to recruit the great wizard to their cause is on. As the hunt heats up, Jane and Mark continue their initiations into their respective organizations—Jane having mystical experiences that lead her upward and Mark being slowly nudged down and away from the light as the tension builds (though Mark rebels just in time).

The plot comes to its climax when Merlin arrives at St. Anne’s and, with the help of Ransom, calls the powers of the Oyeresu³ (Aphrodite, Hermes, Mars, Cronus, and Zeus, or Venus, Mercury, Ares, Saturn, and Jupiter) into his being before bringing down divine wrath on the fellows of N.I.C.E. by unleashing the curse of Babel upon an assembly of N.I.C.E. leaders. The curse has three consequences: (1) it causes all present to begin speaking gibberish, (2) the animals N.I.C.E. experimented on are released and go on a killing spree, and (3) an earthquake swallows the corrupt and compromised city where the whole operation was situated (the town of Edgestow).

As chaos ensues, Merlin identifies Mark and sends him back to St. Anne’s, where Venus (Aphrodite) awaits him. The story closes with Mark reuniting with his estranged wife, Jane, and Ransom transported back to Perelandra.

Of the many themes that run through That Hideous Strength, the one that consumes it all, is how the pursuit of power and knowledge by those who believe they can supplant God ends, as it always ends, in destruction. This theme is what Lewis had in mind when he selected the title of the work, taking a line from a poem by Sir David Lyndsay describing the biblical Tower of Babel:

Until his chronicle writes thus;
That when the sun is at the height,
At noon, when it shines most bright,
The shadow of that hideous strength
Six mile and the more it is of length…⁴

It is to That Hideous Strength, its story, and the shadow of Babel in which we now stand that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]

Figure: The Tower of Babel by Bruegel the Elder (1563)

One of the things I admire most about C.S. Lewis (and there are many) is the way that he addressed the same philosophical and theological issues from two angles: fiction and nonfiction. He had a remarkable way of displaying in fiction and fantasy what he wrote about in philosophy. Probably the greatest (though certainly not the only) and clearest example of this comes from a connection drawn by Lewis himself, who considered That Hideous Strength a fictionalized version of the philosophies outlined in Abolition of Man: “[That Hideous Strength] is a tall story about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”⁵

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis outlines, with reference to a school textbook he calls The Green Book,⁶ how the ideologies and education of his day were producing what he called Men Without Chests—that is, scientists who worshipped only the quantitative and measurable aspects of being and intellectuals who wanted everyone to believe that all statements of value (e.g., the waterfall is beautiful) were merely statements about individual feelings and say nothing about the object itself. This, argued Lewis, leaves man with an undeveloped soul (and thus, an undeveloped Chest) as his ability to recognize and appreciate objective Beauty is stripped. Without the trunk (the Chest) that unites intellectual man (the Head) with visceral man (the Belly), man becomes unman… the branch that rebels against the tree.

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element.’ The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests.⁷

Lewis concludes The Abolition of Man with a chapter describing the consequences of a society where this radical moral subjectivism carries the day, imagining a world where the morals of the majority are dictated by a small group of technocrats (the Conditioners) who believe they can replace what they see as old and outdated value systems but end up casting us into the abyss.

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask. Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?' But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean... It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man…⁸

In That Hideous Strength, we see these themes illustrated, with the scientists of N.I.C.E. representing the intelligentsia criticized in The Abolition of Man. Bent on educating objectivity out of the population, the N.I.C.E. antagonists despise the human body and see all organic life as frail, corrupted, and unworthy of a pure mind. Like modern transhumanists, they believe humanity can be perfected by migrating out of flesh and blood.

At one point, the scientist Frost reveals to Mark the plans of N.I.C.E. to reduce the population to its essentials:

[E]very advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligble population is now becoming dead weight… The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technology and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will not be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.⁹

Throughout the book, Lewis explores the questions: What happens when society falls into the hands and under the ideology of people who reject the idea of objectivity and embrace strict moral relativism? What are the consequences of a world without values? How does that play out? How do people (like Mark Studdock) who desire only to be in the inner circle end up (unwittingly) participating in the slow decay of society?

How an organization like the Conditioners outlined in The Abolition of Man might effect its aims is highlighted in the strange initiation process that Professor Frost leads Mark through at N.I.C.E. It is a training intended to cultivate absolute objectivity by relegating emotion to the status of a chemical phenomenon. Much of the progressively subversive protocol takes place in the Objectivity Room—a room where every feature, from paintings to its structure, is intended to disrupt the natural human instinct to order and beauty by exposure to increasingly objectionable material in gradual degrees. Mark first encounters its bizarre pictures:

At first, most of [the pictures] seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details—something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between Christ and Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the Table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium? When once these questions had been raised apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace—like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece or architetcture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which withered the mind. Compared with these the other, surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of ‘things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate,’ and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew… Higher degrees in the asceticism of anti-Nature would doubtless follow: the eating of abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual performances of calculated obscenities.¹⁰

Later, Mark is taken back into the Objectivity Room and a mural of Christ is revealed on the ground. Professor Frost beckons Mark to trample the figure and break his relationship with all “superstition.” (A command that Mark, to his redemption, resists.)

What we see in Mark’s character and the inner workings of N.I.C.E. is an inside look at what a descent into a dystopian nightmare might look like for an “ordinary” person.

It is here that Lewis introduces the “devilry” of N.I.C.E. and the spiritual warning of the story. By rejecting God and His order, and with their monstrous dreams of power, they deliver themselves into the dominion of the very demons whose existence they would deny. N.I.C.E. believes that they have discovered “forces” they call Macrobes, beyond good and evil, communicating orders about what’s best for humanity through the severed but sustained Head of Alcasan.

The N.I.C.E., of course, is an organization that echoes the totalitarian nightmares of the Nazis and Bolsheviks that lived in Lewis’s time. When George Orwell, who reviewed That Hideous Strength for the Manchester Evening News two years before publishing 1984 and shortly after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he noted that “[p]lenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters [the N.I.C.E. scientists], and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realizable.”

Behind N.I.C.E. and its efforts is the same titanic pride and lust for power that sunk Babel and its builders. People who thought they had no need for God. Lewis makes this connection between N.I.C.E. and the Tower of Babel explicit not only in the title but when Ransom tells Merlin that it is the “‘Hideous Strength [that] confronts us, and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.’” ¹¹

Our Babel Moment

When N.I.C.E. is finally defeated, it is by a spell from Merlin that causes confusion of speech between an assembly at a banquet... like God, when seeing the Babel builders’ attempts to reach “the heavens, so that [they might] make a name for [themselves]” says “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” ¹² When the curse of Babel comes over the members of N.I.C.E., it causes each speaker to know what they want to say, but their speech becomes incomprehensible to others as soon as it leaves their mouth.

The Deputy Director could not understand this, for to him his own voice seemed to be uttering the speech he had resolved to make. But the audience heard him saying, ‘Tidies and fugleman—I sheel foor that we all-er—most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory, Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving. It would—ah—be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture… a fresh gibberish in a great variety of tones rang out from several places at once.¹³

Thus the pursuits of N.I.C.E. are instantly thwarted as Nimrod’s plans were thwarted when people of Babel could no longer understand each other. Yet there also seems to be a deeper truth about Being itself at work here as the story points to a pattern that not only has happened in the past but is always happening: prideful pursuits always end in the dissolution of what binds us together. (Remember: the word religion comes from the Latin religare, which means “to re-bind.”)

Perhaps the inability to communicate in the Tower of Babel is more than mere punishment of the divine; perhaps it is the natural consequence of unbridled independence in the world as God ordered it. The Tower was a project of pride, just as the pursuits of N.I.C.E. were. And pride naturally separates us from one another, making it harder and harder to connect or share things in common.  

As our technological and material pursuits push us further and further away from objective value and closer and closer to totally subjective worlds of our own making, we lose touch with a shared reality, making it harder and harder to communicate with each other until we no longer understand each other at all.

Consider the current culture war, with its constant gaslighting and propaganda. Technology, misinformation, and artificial intelligence have made it harder and harder to discern what’s real from what’s fabricated. We have no idea who to trust, so we trust nobody. Curated algorithms feed us different facts until we live in entirely different worlds. Add this to the AI deep-fakes now possible and it’s nearly impossible nowadays to discern what’s real from what’s fabricated.

We can’t even argue productively because we can’t agree on the facts. Posts get scrubbed, articles retitled and rewritten, tweets deleted, pictures altered, and we’re left wondering: “Wait… did I see that? Somebody must have a screenshot somewhere… or maybe they photoshopped it?” Disoriented and blind, we’re asked to take stances with the half-truths available, and by the time we have a moment to catch our breath, the Hydra sends us ten more heads to deal with.

All of this serves to separate us from each other, slowly making us into islands of one.

We are, once again, standing in the shadows of Babel. This is why we are finding it harder and harder to understand each other and communicate with one another. The Hideous Strength that believes it can replace God is growing.

But our Babel moment is also an opportunity to root ourselves in what is eternal, remove what is irrelevant, and for leaders who love the discarded with all their hearts to preserve the fire.

The Tower always falls. And what comes after that is up to us.

The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating the ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China—why, then it will be spring. (That Hideous Strength, p. 369)

1. See On the Inner Ring.

2. In the preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis makes an explicit reference to Tolkien’s Númenor (which Lewis spelled “Numinor” and called the True West because he had only heard Tolkien talk about it) and paints the wizard Merlin as one of the magical refugees who arrived in prehistoric Britain from the sunk Númenor/Atlantis. Tolkien spoke to this in a Letter to Lewis’s biographer Roger Lancelyn Green: “Numinor was his version of a name he had never seen written (Númenor), and no doubt was influenced by numinous.” Fans of this Substack might recognize the connection here between the Lumenorean and Merlin in their status as refugees from a sunken Atlantis.

3. As a reminder, the Oyéresu are high-class eldila (or angels) given lordship over planets. Lewis imagined a cosmos where the Greek gods where real but that the Greeks were wrong to worship them as gods… they were, instead, creations of the one true God and stewards of the universe.

4. Sir David Lyndsay, Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour.

5. C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (“Hideous Strength”), Preface.

6. The Green Book by “Gaius and Titius” was really The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, published in 1939 by Alexander King and Martin Ketley. Lewis criticizes the authors for advocating that students set aside all statements of value (such as “this waterfall is sublime”) because they are simply statements about the speaker’s feelings and say nothing about the object.

7. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (“Abolition of Man”), Ch. 1.

8. Abolition of Man, Ch. 3.

9. Hideous Strength, p. 256.

10. Hideous Strength, p. 295-296.

11. Hideous Strength, p. 285.

12. Genesis 11:1-7.

13. Hideous Strength, p. 343.