All good sci-fi series have at their heart some unique observation about man and his place in the cosmos.  Whether it be the swashbuckling defense of humanity in a James Tiberius Kirk, the divide between reason and emotion of a Commander Spock, or the youth and innocence of a Will Robinson, space seems to (rather oddly) bring out the humanity in its explorers.  C. S. Lewis’s ill-named Space Trilogy[1] [2] [3] (‘ill-named’ for reasons that will soon be made apparent) is no exception in this sense.  Set in a series of planetary explorations – the masculine-themed Mars or Malacandra in Out of the Silent Planet, the feminine Venus or Perelandra in Perelandra, and the finale on Earth, Thulcandra or the Silent Planet, in That Hideous Strength, where marriage of the masculine and feminine is examined – the series has at its heart a singular observation, which can be found in Lewis’s own spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Lewis describes his resistance to yielding to God with the attitude “I had wanted (mad wish) ‘to call my soul my own’ “[4]

 

This key insight is perhaps surprisingly complimentary to his famous essay on cynical, secular education and its consequences for humanity, The Abolition of Man, [5]  as failure to yield to universal law, the Tao,  fundamentally stems from this assertion of self, this lack of humility and obedience to the Tao Giver.  And throughout the entire Space Trilogy, this inherent selfishness plays out in the loss of humanity at the personal level, in the vacuous and predatory principles of societal organization, and in the relation between the sexes.  But it is with the finale, That Hideous Strength, where we can see most directly how this lack of proper humility before one’s Creator and His law that the humanity of men, women and society at large is abolished.

How well does That Hideous Strength serve as the fictional counterpart to The Abolition of Man? (being mindful of the overall apologetic significance) was the essay prompt that gave birth to this essay-turned-blog.

In The Abolition of Man (AoM), Lewis proposes a tripartite division of the soul in the form of the body: the head (reason), the stomach (appetites), and the chest (‘Magnanimity – Sentiment … the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.”[6]).  This division is in fact reflected in the races inhabiting Malacandra – with the rational Sorn, the craftsmen and working class Pfifltriggi, and the poetically inclined Hrossa embodying the head/stomach/chest metaphor.  But it is in Lewis’s description of an enduring and eternal nature of gender – the masculine and feminine, transcending their mere embodiment in the sexes of the male and female – where the differences between reason and sentiment approach those between the genders.  In Perelandra, Ransom observes in the guiding planetary spirits, or ‘Oyarsa,’ of Mars and Venus this fundamental distinction, like that between rhythm and melody, a spear and open  hands,[7] or, following the Sorn and Hossa, one might propose prose (or calculation) and poetry.  Lewis’s tracing of The Abolition of Man in the Space Trilogy can thus be seen as both an “Abolition of Man” and an “Abolition of Women;” while the masculine Malacandra (Mars) and the feminine Perelandra (Venus) are unfallen planets in OSP and PER, respectively, the struggling marriage of Mark and Jane Studdock in THS demonstrate how the sexes, and their marriage(s), can go wrong when they serve only themselves and not the eternal law that shows itself in the laws Lewis argues so eloquently for as ‘the Tao’ in AoM.  But in talking of marriages and gender we get a little bit ahead of ourselves – it is the way the fundamental argument of AoM is illustrated in THS that illustrates Lewis’s crucial insights into how our humanity is saved by obedience to God’s law, and destroyed when we fail to obey.

Lewis indicts modern education texts for not properly promoting the love of the virtues, in Abolition of Man

Abolition of Man Rehash: 

A. Irrigating Jungles, lest we have Men without Chests

Joy and desire – hallmarks of Lewis’s unique approach to apologetics – lay the foundation for Lewis’s argument in the  Abolition of Man. “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us … we are far too easily pleased”[8] argues Lewis for the validation of our longings.  But these longings were in danger of being manipulated by propagandists, so said the authors of The Green Book, due to wartime propaganda while England and all of Europe were occupied with the Nazis (in 1943 when AoM was written); the specters of a Marxism claiming scientific validity as well as other evolutionary thought also loomed large at the time.  Hence The Green Book (a fictional name given to what Lewis claimed was a very real book) was written, though its sloppiness in seeking to debunk manipulative appeals put at risk, claimed Lewis, our very ability to properly fight for the values we hold dear.  Our problem is not “a weak excess of sentimentality” but “the slumber of cold vulgarity,” Lewis argues, continuing “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts,” providing a “defence against false sentiments” by “inculcat(ing) just sentiments.”[9]  These sentiments are properly located as an intermediary between our sense of reason and our pleasure-seeing appetites.  Lewis uses Plato’s anthropomorphic explanation of the state – a body in which the head (reason or rulers) and stomach (appetites or working classes) are moderated by the chest (sentiment or the warrior class) – to argue for the essential roles of both reason and sentiment in morality.  The chest, or traditional moral sentiments, help to enforce the dictates of reason on the often warring and pleasure-seeking appetites, serving as “indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.”[10]  This proper alignment produces the virtuous behavior that Lewis argues Ancients and Moderns alike have promoted. Mess with this, remove the sentiments (creating what Lewis phrases “men without chests”), and dysfunction ensues: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”[11]

 

B. (AoM Rehash) To Tao or not To Tao

The corpus of such time-honored, virtuous behavior Lewis calls the Tao.  Virtues such as self-sacrifice, mercy, justice and duty to children and elders are traced across cultures such as the Greeks, Norse, Hindu, Australian Aborigine, Judeo-Christian, Chinese, Babylonian and Egyptian.  Ideological Innovators, or even simple skeptics, of such sentimental, traditional morality pose a constant threat to mankind.  In seeking to go beyond this Tao of universally accepted morality,  they cannot find any new basis outside of the Tao on which to stake their claims, so they must instead look underneath the Tao for something more basic, often instinctual, to claim.  Such instincts they find, such as the preservation of the species, prove problematic.  Firstly, if it were an ingrained instinct, then why do we need to be instructed to follow it? But beyond that, such proposed instincts – in particular this ‘preservation of the species’ (which does show up in Lewis’s Space Trilogy) – in fact are much more akin to someone’s stated programmatic goal rather than a sentiment one finds within oneself in daily living.  For that, the sentiments promoted by the Tao suffice quite well, thank you, as for instance, the natural familiar or maternal love of child has proved an effective deterrent to proposed schemes

C. (AoM Rehash) Its Man Exploiting Man. Or maybe the other way around

Instead of suggesting truly novel bases for behavior and morality, moral and ideological innovators instead do one of two very perverse things: they distort the Tao or they simply deny it.  By stressing and promoting some particular virtue at the expense of others, such as equality by the Communists or cultural homogeneity by the Nazis, they necessarily trample some if not all of the rest of the virtues found within the Tao.  But just as common, and insidious, is the hijacking of what would appear to be noble goals by the oldest perverse game in the book – the domination of man over man.  The conquest of Man over Nature often amounts to the conquests of science at the disposal of a privileged minority of mankind, and then deployed over their imperial minions who constitute the remainder of mankind.  Lewis cites such breakthroughs as the airplane, wireless communications and contraception is examples of such domination, the airplane as a machine of war, communications as a tool for propagandists, and contraception as a domination of the current generation over a future one.

 

But perhaps the most dangerous innovation is the conquest of the nature of humanity itself.  Such programs (see Nazis and Communists above) simply reduce to, once again, the conditioning of a large portion of humanity for the sake of a smaller.  Just as “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man”[12] holds for Nature-conquering-Man, even more does it become a case of Man-conquering-Man for those who would remake man in their own image.  The whole theme of domination is reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “One ring of power” from his The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series; just as Lewis recommended waiting for Tolkien’s manuscripts revealing the nature of Numinor and the True West in his preface to That Hideous Strength, it appears that the Lewis’s THS provides the explanation of the human mechanism of domination that is otherwise depicted by Orcs and the like in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

            Lewis’s Anti-Space Trilogy and THS in Particular

 

Space Trilogy (finally): Jungles A-Plenty, and Domination

The themes of AoM – the rejection of natural, revealed morality in favor of a man-made one, the proposed domination of the many by the few, and the sacrifice of humanity for such ‘accomplishments’ – are entertainingly on display in the entire Space Trilogy.  In Out of the Silent Planet (OSP), the scientist of imperialist bent, Weston, most directly represents all that AoM warned about. When Weston states “To you I may seem a vulgar robber,but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race,” it gets translated tellingly as “there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnau‘s food and – and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind. He says that what he does now will make very different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born.”[13]  His morality is thus shown for the lack of morality that it is – “stepping outside of the Tao, they have stepped into the void”[14] as Lewis states in AoM.  And the virtue for which it is performed – simple domination – in this case, of those not yet born, and later in the speech, of the hnau of Malacandra themselves: “Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower life” becomes “because of all this … it would not be the  act of a bent people if our people killed all your people.”[15]  Lewis thus perfectly illustrates his argument from AoM with the dialogue from THS, in a straightforward and even entertaining fashion.

At some point, it is essential to explain why the moniker ‘The Space Trilogy’ is so ill-suited to the theme of the series – and here is as good a place as any, though perhaps a bit late.  Just as Perelandra was shown to be brimming with life (and pleasure – Ransom describes his first drink while on Perelandra as “almost like meeting Pleasure for the very first time”[16] ) – so does Lewis very early on state his objection to the term “space … the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness … the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam.”[17]  Instead, Lewis cites “older thinkers (who) had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory …”[18] of God, as the Psalmist penned.[19]  “Space was the wrong name.”[20] This conception of the lively heavens rather than the cold, lifeless space fits in with the natural harmony between Creator and created that obedience to the Tao implies.  By contrast, Innovators throughout (what has been suggested its proper name) The Ransom Trilogy (named after the protagonist, the meaning of which term is perhaps made more clear by considering his evil counterpart, the cultural imperialist Weston, as an antagonist), aka The Cosmic Trilogy, constantly suggests some artificial life-force as a pale substitute.  Whether an impersonal elan vital or life-force, or the lifeless, disembodied head of reason divorced from the fullness of humanity – they all pale next to the lively source, and what we will soon see as the eternal masculine to our feminine – that Other which must be obeyed.

 

Perelandra (Book 2): Tao in the Jungle

Perelandra also directly illustrates AoM‘s arguments, particularly about obedience to the Tao.  It is perhaps curious that the races on the unfallen Malacandra, in OSP the first book in the Space Trilogy, embody the aspects of the psyche or soul – reason, sentiment and appetites – described in the first of three chapters in AoM,“Men Without Chests.”  Similarly the sequel Perelandra illustrates obedience to the  Tao, described in the second chapter of AoM, “The Way.”  But Lewis, perhaps a (non-perverse) innovator of his own, plumbs the familiar concept of law and presents a unique insight on it.  Whereas the dysfunction of following false laws, pseudo-Tao as it were, is shown in AoM, in Perelandra Lewis presents the fundamental law of Perelandra as beyond the category of something that is merely good for us.  The fundamental law of Perelandra (akin to that singular law in the Garden of Eden) – that no one is to spend the night, or sleep, on the solid ground – Lewis suggests is given solely for the sake, and joy of obedience, and not ‘for our own good’ at all.  “Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His will is the only reason?”[21] Tinidril tells Ransom.  This obedience counters Lewis’s old unrepentant self who desired “to call my soul my own:” instead, Tinidril explains how, “we cannot walk out of Maleldil’s will: but He has given us a way to walk out of our will.”[22]  Later, as Queen, she states how the Fixed Land itself was but a symbol of self-will: “why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure – to be able to one day command where I should be be the next and what should happen to me? It ws to reject the wave – to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s.”[23]

 

That Hideous Strength (Book 3) : “Not to Tao” Option chosen

But it is in That Hideous Strength (THS) that the themes of domination and of the erosion of humanity are most clearly presented (as if Weston’s speech in OSP were not quite enough!)  The disembodied head of Alcasan is perhaps the most direct symbol of the Belbury Innovators attempt to remake humanity itself.  It goes beyond an AoM – esque “Men without Chests” – it is the epitome of lifelessness itself: “They have cleansed their world, broken free (almost) from the organic … they are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord”[24] Filostrato explains.

The agenda of Belbury nearly reads directly from AoM: “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest”[25] Feverstone explains to the new initiate, Mark Studdock.  Then the real predation begins: “”sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of the backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding”[26] Feverstone continues.  Later,  Filostrata apes AoM just as explicitly: “You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man – it is a word. There are only men.”[27]  Thus does the dehumanization, the abolition of men, come to fruition.  Instead of following the Tao – the law made for man (preserving his very humanity) – and not the other way around – the Belbury Innovators seek the destruction of men, and lots of them. In so doing, they reap the bonus, as it were, of losing their own humanity.  And the only man left standing is not even human, as Filostrato continues: “No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our first Head, is the first sketch of it.”[28]  The domination of the few over the many, and the abolition of man – these are illustrated perfectly in THS.

 

The Tao and Surrender – Bonfire of the Genders (Natural AND Supernatural)

           Finally, the fundamental principle of AoM, the yielding of oneself to the great Other, the Tao Giver, is strikingly illustrated  through gender.  The entire trilogy is thick with it,[29] as the masculine Mars (OSP), the feminine Venus (PER) and their marriage on Earth (THS, “Matrimony” being the opening word and final scene) is a significant theme of the trilogy.  Whereas the most memorable highlight of OSP was arguably Weston’s speech as decoded by the unbent hnau, for PER that moment might likely be Ransom’s contemplation on eternal gender, the eternal masculine and feminine.  Beyond the mere sexes, male and female, these complements nevertheless underlie the sexes, and much of what we consider masculine and feminine in general.  Complementary as rhythm and melody, a spear or a welcoming, open hand, and initiator and a recipient, the genders reflect, or embody, ultimately the masculine and feminine aspect of the Creator-created relation, respectively.  Just as Mark learns that his love for Jane had only been for what he could obtain from her and not for her alone, so does Jane learn that her wish to “call her soul her own” likewise violated the humility of true love.  That “equality is not the deepest thing,”[30] as Ransom the Director instructs Jane, is the antidote to Tinidril’s temptations in PER to become the tragic, self-possessed woman, disregarding her husband’s roles, and with the world on her shoulders.  The cost of such sole possession of soul is in fact the love which sustains it:  “you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience”[31] Ransom advises Jane.  In fact for the sake of her marriage, and that of the eternal feminine to the eternal masculine, Ransom further advises that “no one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity.”[32]

While the Apostle Paul and Solomon would be challenged to combine their thoughts on such topics so powerfully, the story does not stop with man and wife: it is symbolic of a greater humility, that between created and Creator.  We are feminine to the eternal masculine: “but the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly”[33] Ransom the Director advises Jane.  Fittingly, Jane continues “Then I had better become a Christian?” to which Ransom responds “It looks like it.”[34] And Jane’s Tinidrilesque temptation, to allay her “haunting female fear” and become “her true self (and) soar upwards and expand in some freer and purer world” in fact gave way to her molding by the (eternal masculine) “strong, skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy.”[35]  These work of these hands would act according to a demand “not … like any other demand” but the  demand which “was the origin of all right demands and contained them,” in which “light you cold understand them, but apart from them you could know nothing of it.”[36] And finally, not just hands and demands, but a person was who lie behind this all, “made to please Another and in Him to please all others.”[37]

 

As perhaps a side note to the above, the dynamics of the male-female relationship mirrors truths of the masculine-feminine, and ultimately created – Creator relationship.  Just as Jane is advised that “her beauty is not for her own sake,” so is Mark reminded neither is his masculinity or what turns out to be his own self-serving love.  At the gender level, thus is the eternal feminine a beauty to be shared and enjoyed by others, or particularly, her significant Other.  Tinidril’s Eve-like Garden of Eden’s temptation in PER is to become someone tragic (bearing both her own and a pirated share of her husband’s importance, due to a temptation to misunderstand and minimize his masculinity) and hence enjoy being “important and interesting;” to this the Lewis suggests that her essence and greatest personal enjoyment is to be   Similarly, in THS Jane comes to realize she might be “a thing after all – (but) a thing designed and invented by Someone Else” and for qualities different than she had might have imagined.  Jane admits that perhaps others had been right who  “had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them also to find her interesting and important.”^[38] She has not thus forfeited all of her humanity or even femininity, but does revel in her share of the particularly and eternal feminine.

In Perelandra, Lewis gives an insightful lecture on the deeper significance of gender.Two great creatures, “two images of Maleldil” (the ruling spirit in the trilogy, in short God) are revealed, with shapes at once both like giving, overflowing waterfalls and also like flames of eternal, divine truth.[39] Without further ado:

“At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the world. Still less is gender  an extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor female attenuated female…. All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes. The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence danger came long ago. … But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, “My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.” “[40]

Finale: Relations and Nations as They Were Meant T(a)o Be

Jane’s husband Mark does not undergo such a temptation, though the temptation implicit to the male and the masculine is implicit in the masculine exploration of the trilogy, the first book, Out of the Silent Planet.  Weston’s speech about his vague and ultimately empty and domineering vision to further the fate of the human species, at whatever cost to others and hence to himself, suffices as the male analog to the temptation of Tinidril, the Green lady of Perelandra. But the positive dynamics of the masculine – feminine relation is at least equally important.  As Mark can perhaps be inspired by Jane’s sharing of her essentially feminine beauty (as THS ends with the implied sharing of masculine and feminine, male and female, of several couples in the final chapter), he finds that he reciprocates in both directions.  His coming-of-age masculinity consists, as discussed previously, in sharing the love-for-her-own-sake with his wife Jane, but it also works upward, as he yields his won masculinity – his vision and work in the world – as the essentially feminine to ultimately Masculine, an act of submission, humility and letting go of the “mad desire to call one’s soul one’s own” to the Creator.  Thus are the parallel tracks of submission by both genders, both sexes, rendered complete.

 

The lesson of the Abolition of Man thus lies in not just the Tao, nor in how its violation destroys humanity, Man, and the society of men, but in this fundamental relation: that of our role as the eternal feminine to the Tao giver’s masculine, our reception to His initiation, and our obedience to find His love. The moral codes of ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans thus come to life in the Empire of the Eternal King. As Mother Dimble puts it:

“Of course there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, tow angels. The whole work of healing Tellus [earth] depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that 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.”[39]

And it is this lesson, of our need to yield to the Tao and its Giver, thereby preserving our own humanity, that is the lesson of The Abolition of Man, as fully fleshed out in The Space Trilogy and in That Hideous Strength in particular.

 

[1]    C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 2003).

[2]    C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003).

[3]    C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Scribner, 2003).

[4]    C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Glasgow: Collins, 1986), 182.

[5]    C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Collier, 1986).

[6]    Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 34.

[7]    Lewis, Perelandra, 171.

[8]    C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper, (New York: Collier,1980), 4.

[9]    Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 24.

[10]  Ibid., 34.

[11]  Ibid., 35.

[12]  Ibid., 80.

[13]  Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 134.

[14]  Lewis, Abolition of Man, 77.

[15]  Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 134-5.

[16]  Lewis, Perelandra, 32.

[17]  Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 14.

[18]  Ibid., 34.

[19]  Psalms 19:1.

[20]  Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 34.

[21]  Lewis, Perelandra, 101.

[22]  Ibid., 102.

[23]  Ibid., 179.

[24]  Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 173.

[25]  Ibid., 40.

[26]  Ibid.

[27]  Ibid., 175.

[28]  Ibid.

[29]  As an Orc might say of fear, but that is the final unit.

[30]  Ibid., 145.

[31]  Ibid.

[32]  Ibid., 146.

[33]  Ibid., 313.

[34]  Ibid.

[35]  Ibid., 315.

[36]  Ibid.

[37]  Ibid., 315.

[38]  Ibid.,  316.

[39] C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, 169-170.

[40]  Ibid., 171-172.

[41]  C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 369.