Truth Unites - This C.S. Lewis Book Predicted the 21st Century

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

In this episode I share about why I love C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength, and why it is a helpful and important book for Christians today. C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength: https://www.amazon.com/That-Hideous-Strength-Space-Trilogy/dp/0743234928/truthunites-20 Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Triumph-Modern-Self-Individualism/dp/1433556332/truthunites-20 My article on That Hideous Strength: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/conversion-in-c-s-lewis-that-hideous-strength/ My video on Till We Have Faces: https://youtu.be/aDyg7KN_Fcg Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

All right, let's talk about C.S. Lewis a little bit. I have two favorite books that I listen to over and over again. Both are by C.S. Lewis. He's my favorite writer. I love C.S. Louis. Can't wait to get to heaven and talk to C.S. Louis about my best books. And, you know, I just can't imagine. Oh, it'll be great. Till We Have Faces is one of them. I've already made a video about that one. By the way, I'm talking with a friend about editing, doing a book where we edit a series of things until we have faces. So I'll keep you posted on that. I'm excited about that. We just had a first planning session yesterday about that. The other is called That Hidious Strength. By the way, until we have faces, I already did a video. I'll link to that in the description if you're interested in that book. I want to explain in this video why I think this is such a cool book and such a helpful book.

It's not been as well received critically. And at the popular level, this book is definitely seen as one of his most bizarre and kind of unwieldy books. People just don't know what to do with this. But I want to work through and just explain. why I think this book is so fantastic and so helpful. So I'm going to, this, this will have four sections to this video. It'll be a longer video before I even get to explain the table of contents for this video. Let me just explain why I think there's value in works of fiction like this.

I think that in our setting in the modern West, literature and just the arts, more generally, can play a really helpful role in the re-Christianization and re-enchantment of our world. This is one of my great passions in terms of apologetics, and it's an area that I'm working on right now. There's a really loud plane flying by right now, and it's shaking my office, so hopefully that won't affect the audio too much. But just to explain this point, because I'm working on, in fact, I just finished an article that will go up for the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics in a couple of weeks. So if you're interested in that, I'll put that up when it comes out in my community tab on YouTube. you can see my article, the fuller case, basically, I just think, you know, to state the experience before the theory, many, many people become a Christian partly through the influence of reading

the Lord of the Rings. Has anyone else noticed that? It's pretty fascinating. So then you say, okay, why does that happen? And I think, basically, to state it briefly, the arts can provide a sense of transcendence and glory which awakens the appetite to that which the gospel fulfills. And there's plenty of people in our culture right now who will scoff at the idea of heaven or God or miracles, and they may bristle or take offense at the notion of sin or divine judgment. But when they're reading the Lord of the Rings, or when they're reading the Chronicles of Narnia, or when they're reading about the manner at St. Anne's that we'll talk about, they find a beauty and a transcendence and a glory that can't be accounted for within the limits of

their worldview. And that gives you an opportunity for the gospel right there. So I think books like this are really fun. Getting lost in a great book is so much fun. It's one of the great joys of life. But I also think books like this are useful for us in the broader work of apologetics that I'm interested in. I know many of you who watch my videos are as well. Here's the four sections of this video. First, a general introduction to the book working through some of the criticisms of the book, particularly. Second, an analysis of what I take to be the central point of the book, namely a critique of modernity, a social critique. Thirdly, I want to talk through what drives the plot of the book, namely the conversion to Christianity or toward

Christianity, in one case, of these two main characters in the book. Just describe that. And then lastly, draw lessons for the church today in terms of evangelism, apologetics, etc. There will be spoilers, none that are so terrible that it would ruin the experience of reading the book, though. But if you don't want any spoilers, don't watch this video. And if you stick around to the very end, I'll read you my favorite passage in the whole book. Before I dive in, I'm trying to do more book recommendations. And Carl Truman's book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, came to my mind when I was thinking about doing this video because it intersects with some of the same themes of Lewis's book, namely just a criticism of modernity.

and his book is very helpful. Basically, what he's talking about is kind of the confusion about sexuality in the modern Western culture. And he's saying that's more of a symptom than a cause. And he's talking about the modern West's search for identity. And I think, you know, so he'll talk about things like transgenderism and so forth. But he's saying, how did we get here? You know, what are the dominoes that started falling?

And he's going back to like, you know, literary movements like, William Wordsworth and romanticism and stuff like this, but also philosophy and other things. And he's telling the story of how you get up to the present moment in the progress of modernity. But what is so helpful with that is also you start to see the strangeness of the modern West and how the things we take for granted. And over and over, this is what comes up is as Christians, we can be tempted to be tempted to be kind of triumphalist and our opposition to culture. I think we need to be reminded to be humble and realize the culture affects us. And we need to consider how much of modernity has gotten in us, you know.

So anyway, so this is a really helpful book for understanding the process of the modern period and how we got to the present moment. He also has good practical suggestions at the end. In the final page and a half of the book, he suggests that the church today is in a position like the second century, like we were in the second century. Absolutely fascinating. So it's a pretty thick read about 400 pages. It'll challenge you, but it'll help you as well.

I highly recommend it. Check it out in the video description. Very relevant to what we're going to talk about in this video. All right. First section of the video, let's just do a general introduction. What is going on with this book? Lots of people. I've come back.

You know, people, I just listen to it over and over on my phone when I'm doing hikes. And people, I say, oh, good. I think a lot of people think, oh, cool. I want to check it out. it must be really good. And they've read the Chronicles of Narnia, so they think, oh, this will just be like an adult version of the Chronicles of Narnia. And it is not.

So I want to allay those expectations because people get into it and they're kind of lost. It's a lengthy and strange and dark book. It's the third book in what is called the Space Trilogy. It was published in 1945 right at the end of World War II. And let me say a couple of things I do like about the book. and then I'll explain why it generates such strange reactions. One of the things that's cool is if you love CS Lewis, as I do, it does actually provide a lot of unique contributions to understanding his thought.

So there's all kinds of topics in this book that either aren't addressed at all elsewhere or are not addressed as much elsewhere in everything that he wrote, everything that he wrote. I would even say including like his letters, for example, and his essays and those, you know, his academic works, those things that get neglected. So his views of gender, masculinity and femininity, that is addressed in this book, as we'll see. It's actually really controversial. His views of criminal justice, you know, should it be punitive? His views of English history and English identity and, you know, the Arthurian legend plays a key part of the story.

And there's conversations where they're talking about what makes England unique and things like this. That's huge. His view of animals, you know, do animals. animals have consciousness. All that comes up big time. His view of angels, that's big. So, you know, you'll get a lot of CS Lewis. You don't get elsewhere in this book.

That's one cool thing. But let me say my favorite thing about the book is the characters. It is so creative, especially the evil characters. He's kind of mocking evil and at the same time showing how terrible evil is. I wrote a blog post once, maybe I'll try to link to it if I can remember, called if I were casting that hideous strength. If they made this book into a movie, which I almost don't want them to because it'd be extremely hard to do and it probably wouldn't be done very well.

They'd have to change it so much. But if they did, it'd be interesting to say, which actors would you cast for these characters? And there's so many characters. The main characters are Mark and Jane, this married couple. Mark represents the inner circle syndrome. If you've read Lewis's little essay on that, always wanting to be in the inner circle.

We'll talk more about that. Jane, he's like a young academic. Jane represents independence. And basically how Lewis felt before his conversion of just stay away, stay out, you know, leave me to myself. And so they're both really fascinating characters and the way that gets unraveled throughout the events of the plot. But what really is just amazing,

is the evil characters, okay? The upper members of this organization called the N ICE, the names in this book are so funny. That stands for the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, I think, and it's this just bizarre. It's basically the headquarters for a group that is doing what Lewis warned about in the abolition of man. They're basically seeking the destruction of humanity. So it's like exceedingly evil. And yet he's kind of making fun of the characters because they're also unique and different. Like, the heads of this group that are trying to destroy humanity are so bizarre. So one of them, the head of the whole institution is a person named Wither. All of the names are significant.

All of the names. Sometimes you're not sure how, but all of them are. Wither is this, how do you describe him? Always vague, always distant, always polite. You can tell there's like malice and evil beneath the surface, but he's constantly diplomatic to a fault and overly deferential in his mannerisms. And he's constantly talking and he's constantly using language to say nothing. So this is one of the contrasts between him and Ransom, the head of the good guys.

We'll talk about how much parallelism between good and evil there is in a little bit. Because Ransom is a philologist, meaning someone who studies language, and basically Wither is constantly using language contrary to its intention of communicating, of communicating, basically to just obfuscate and make things murky. And it really is comical, you know, he'll just constantly be interrupting himself with these unnecessary qualifications and so forth. And he's very polite and deferential all the while. It's like the epitome of somebody who goes on and on and on and on and on, but never really says anything. And it is kind of funny. Okay. Then the next major bad guy, though he comes in later in the book, is a character.

character named Frost, again, significant name there. He's a very icy personality. He represents objectivity, which is this idea that, you know, values like love and any sort of humanitarian values, he thinks of as chemical phenomena that we need to get rid of in the pursuit of progress. And so he gives himself to that philosophy to the point where basically there's devils involved in the NICE running it, basically, and he just gets to a point where he obeyed. them instinctively, without even thinking about it, because anything else wouldn't be objective, according to him. And so he and Wither are almost polar opposites, and yet they're united in their evil aims. And it's so interesting. And then you throw in all these other bizarre characters.

There's Strake. He's a retired minister who's constantly reinterpreting biblical prophecies in terms of the aims of the NICE. So Christ didn't really rise from the dead, but the true meaning of the resurrection is, you know, are what we're accomplishing by, and I won't tell you too much about what they're doing. But, you know, it's like classical, like hardcore theological liberalism, just recasting Christianity and Christian terms for a different system. And I wouldn't even go on. I'll just mention some of their names. Look them up in the book, Ferry Hardcastle, Philistrato, these other evil characters. What's so powerful about it, is he's making fun of evil while at the same time showing you how truly shiveringly terrible it is.

And like here's an example. I'll just give one example. I can't help myself from quoting some of the book here. At one point, they're trying to put Mark through the process of gaining objectivity. And this is actually my favorite scene in the whole book. I use this over and over in my apologetics work to get into the moral argument because Mark experiences the existential implications of the moral argument. He comes into contact with morality, and it's not, you know, I love it because it helps you feel why the moral argument is so powerful. It's getting into kind of, it's not just the logic of it. It's how it hits your heart and your real life. And so anyway, through that process of torture, it says, 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, because this is what they're doing. They're trying to break him down into, quote, unquote objectivity through psychological torture and just bombard him with weirdness basically. Then he says they were in a sense playing quite fair with him, offering him the same initiation through which they themselves had passed and which divided them from humanity, distending and dissipating wither into a shapeless ruin while it condensed and hardened frost into the hard, bright little needle that he now was. There you see the frost and wither and these, you know, and just I love the creative explanation of evil and how it sort of unmakes our very humanity,

but how it plays out in different ways for different people. And so it's very well done. Then there's lots of other characters. There's a character named McPhee, who's with the good guys, but he's a rationalist and a skeptic. So he's a really interesting person to be participating in those conversations because they're waiting for the help of angels, and yet he doesn't believe in angels. And so there's those debates. That's interesting. That character is based upon C.S. Lewis's tutor, William Kirkpatrick, called The Old Knock or the Great Knock or something like that, and surprised by joy. There's a hilarious scene and surprised by joy where Lewis recounts what it was like to meet him. So he's a fascinating character. There's all kinds of others. I won't know one have gone too long. So I love the literary creativity, the depiction of good and evil, and these characters. But what people really struggle with about this book, I would say, three things. Number one would be the mood of the book. It's incredibly dark and dystopian.

Second of all, the plot, it's very slow. It's just kind of slowly building. And then thirdly, here, thirdly would be the kind of, I don't know how else to put this, the mixture of the mundane and miraculous. So basically the way supernatural events keep, bursting in in the middle of everyday life. People criticize this. The way I put it in my article that I wrote on this, which I'll link to in the video description as well, is the three main criticisms are, number one,

the dark mood, number two, the slow plot, and three, the overt supernaturalism that seems to break in disruptively against both mood and plot. Okay, that's how I put it in the book. Now, what can I say about, well, let me document that. When the book first came out, George Orwell, of all people, wrote a review.

And he criticized, he gave what would become a common criticism of that hideous strength. He said, one could recommend the book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. And then he's going on giving examples of this, Marlon. So this is one of the weird things in the book. Merlin, there's time travel. Merlin comes back to life, as in like the, from the Arthurian legend, ransom, the main good, the leader of the good group of human beings is perpetually young. Jane has these clairvoyant dreams, angels coming in to fix things at the end.

And he basically says all of this abrupt supernatural activity causes it to be the case that the book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed. What he's talking about with the bloodshed there, is this another thing that's really odd. You know, seemingly odd is basically the way most of the evil characters die is by animals destroying them or mauling them. There's an elephant that's loose. You'll see why, what the animals are doing there if you read the book. There's a bear that like mauls several of the evil characters. And this really, people don't know what to do with this. Rowan Williams, if you know him, he's a theologian. He wrote on this topic. And he says, over the top, I think, is the only expression

one can use for this. I think it's when the elephant breaks loose and comes into the dining room and begins trampling people to death that I feel something has snapped in the authorial psyche. So it is, I mean, you know, it's a, here's what I would say. It's a strange book for sure. But The strange features do serve a purpose. They're not random. The dark mood is because basically, and there's a book by a scholar named Schwartz, the title is C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier, he basically shows that Lewis was copying Charles Williams style.

And Charles Williams' style, in turn, was really influenced by 18th century Gothic romance books. So that's kind of weird. But because, you know, Charles Williams is one of the inklings, kind of an interesting person. But it looks like Lewis was imitating his style. So, you know, that mood was deliberately chosen by Lewis. And it serves a point in terms of the overall plot. Another thing that people puzzle over is, what is Arthur? Or, excuse me, Merlin doing in this book.

And the Arthurian legend plays a key part of the book. But there's reasons for these things. So Lewis began the space trilogy because of an agreement with his friend J.R. Tolkien that basically they wanted to write the books they wanted to write and no one else was writing. So Lewis was assigned to write a space travel story, which became out of the silent planet, the first book in this trilogy, and Tolkien was assigned to write a time travel story, which he tried to with a book called The Lost Road, but it didn't get finished. And so people think that, you know, Lewis is basically making up for his friend's failure to complete his end of the bargain.

So he put time travel in. But beyond that, as we'll see, there's a purpose for that. He's making a criticism of modernity, so we'll get into that. But let me just say one other thing, and that's on this third and most common critique that the kind of the supernatural and the mundane are kind of haphazardly thrown together in this book, I think that was an intentional part of the message of the book. And you can tell from the subtitle of the book, a modern fairy tale for grownups, as well as the first few sentences of the preface of the book,

that Lewis is intentionally trying to do that, and he is a purpose for that. Here's how he put it in a 1945 letter to Dorothy Sayers, where basically, in response to several negative reviews early on, he said, apparently reviewers will not tolerate a mixture of the realistic and the supernatural, which is a pity because, A, it's just the mixture I like, and B, we have to put up with it in real life. He thinks that that's an authentic expression of what life is actually like. That's part of the message of the book. and other reviewers have noticed that.

One of the early reviews from August of 1945 said, it is Mr. Lewis's triumph to have shown with shattering credibility how the pitiful little souls of Jane and Mark Studdock become the apocalyptic battlefield of heaven and hell. Now, there's other strange features of the book, too, but let me dive in and explain the main idea of the book. This will be the second section of the video, and this might start to help us understand

why the book is the way it is. and why it's so prophetic, frankly, for our culture today. It's basically a work of social criticism. It's basically a work of critiquing the modern West. And so he, you know, for example, at the very beginning, like a couple sentences into the preface right out of the gate, he says, this is a tall story about devilry, though it has behind it a serious point, which I've tried to make in my abolition of man. Now, that book was written two years earlier.

But if you ever have a work of fiction where the author tells you in the first few sentences, here's the point of this book, this is going to be really useful for interpreting the book. And what Lewis is doing in the abolition of man is he's defending objective morality, and then he's giving a warning about modernity's desire to have power over nature through technology. And he's basically saying that's like what for pre-modern culture's magic was. And he's saying this is very dangerous. We need to instead accept our limitation and our place within nature rather than try to have power over nature. And basically what he's showing is to have power over nature is ultimately to have nature having power over us.

Because it's not going to be a universal progress of all human beings having power over nature. It will only be some human beings, a very small minority. And that will result of some human beings having power over the rest. and those small human beings who've stepped away from objective morality and are just obeying their natural impulses for progression, it's basically going to be nature having power over humanity through them, through these dehumanized few human beings. I don't know if you followed that or not. I'm condensing a lot down because I have going on a date with my daughter in about 30 minutes from the moment right now. So, but the basic point is this social warning that Lewis is giving about the dangers of technology

and our use of it in the modern era, that's what's going on in that hideous strength. But it's so much more powerful to see it dramatized, I think, and it's so prophetic for the modern world. So one of the ways that you get this is basically the book, I think a good way to summarize the whole idea of the book is Lewis is contrasting medievalism with modernism. And Lewis, you know, Lewis was a medievalist. He loved the medieval world. You see that in so many ways. Michael Ward has shown us how basically the medieval cosmology is how the Narnia books are organized. It's amazing. And basically, I think what Lewis is trying to do is to kind of discard this modern myth that the medieval world was filled with superstition and modernity came along and gave us reason and tolerance and so forth. And the way you see this is like, this. There's basically two plot lines happening in the book. Okay. One is represented by the NICE. This is the evil characters. That's where Mark ends up as he's going through his spiritual transformation. The other is this place where the good guys are and that's the manor at St. Anne's. And that's where

Jane ends up. And she goes through her spiritual transformation. We'll talk about their different experiences there. But basically the NICE represents modernity and the manner at St. Anns, the good place, represents the medieval world. And so the NICE is very kind of mechanical and cold, whereas the Manor at St. Anne's is very natural and organic. It's a contrast between utility versus beauty. And basically the message, I think, and I've written about this more in my article, is that the medieval world represented by the Manor at St. Anne's, this is portraying. the ultimate aim of humanity is love and obedience to God. For the NICE, the ultimate aim is progress and evolution.

Keep going forward, you know. And so one of the ways you see that is the NICE is always, there's always this divorce from our finitude and our humanity and even our embodied existence. Whither, for example, never sleeps. He never sleeps or hardly ever. He takes a pill when it's necessary for him to, but mainly he just spaces out all the time. And Lewis describes it as like the cord that connects him to his embodied existence is tiny now.

And he's like his mental, his rationality is way out there, barely connected to his body anymore. And you see this in many other ways, whereas at the manner in St. Anne's, there's an affirmation of our sort of human physical existence. In fact, the whole book ends with, can I say, the whole book ends with, this is going to sound so weird unless you follow along the plot, but basically Mark and, it ends with sex, okay, Mark and Jane, it's not like pornographic or something, but it ends with an aff, and that fits in, so people look at that and they're like, what is going on? But it fits in with this affirmation of our embodied existence as human beings and the way God created us. I know it can seem weird.

but if you understand the historical contrast he's trying to make. Now let me give some evidence for this. Lewis wrote that hideous strength at the same time that he was working on one of his academic works, English literature in the 16th century. Okay. Between his popular, people don't know his academic works as well, but they're really good. There's often a kind of cross-pollinization between the academic and the popular level stuff. So for example, Perilondra, written at the same time as his preface to a,

Paradise Lost has a lot of the themes of John Milton's work. In this case, I think that it can't be a coincidence that when you open up the academic book, English literature in the 16th century, the whole book opens by arguing against this common story of modernity as emancipation from the magic of the past. And he's basically saying, no, the modern world is using technology in the way the pre-modern world used magic to basically uproot ourselves from our human condition and kind of twist nature to serve us. And the great analog for this is the Tower of Babel. Okay. And that there's lots of reasons to think of the NICE as a kind of second Tower of Babel. Okay. So if you're lost in this, the basic point is that think of it like this.

In the first two books in the space trilogy, especially the first one, he's trying to invert a modern cosmology. And he's trying to say, no, no, no, no. Space out there is not cold and empty, but full of life. We are the ones where we're silent. In this one in the space trilogy, he's trying to invert a modern view of time. And he's saying, no, no, no, no. The medieval world is not the one that is dark and superfluous. superstitious. It's the modern world. And the basic point about how we use technology to turn away from our humanity, rather than what Christianity would call us toward to accept our creaturely placement in the world. That is relevant today.

You could think of it. The more you think about it, and if you think about it thoughtfully while reading the book, the more it brings things up. It will shed light on every everything from the larger social issues of the day like transgenderism to the daily decisions we make about how we use our iPhones. When I'm at the doctor's office and I'm bored, do I pull up my phone and just mindlessly scroll through social media or do I not? And am I aware of the effect it's having upon me? Again, we don't want to be negative about our culture in a way that is just attacking out there. We want to be humble enough to see how it affects us.

I mean, I'm at a point where I honestly wonder whether I should have a smartphone because I see the effect it has. It's really sobering. So I think that's the overarching big picture message of the book. And there's so much more to unpack about that and I get into it more in the article. But within that, Lewis describes, there's these two plot lines where these two characters kind of move toward Christianity. And I want to talk about that now in this third section of the video because I think this is a part of that larger message. And the reason for that is these two characters who are converting to Christianity represent modern people. They're kind of quintessentially modern people.

You see that in their names, Mark and Jane, these very prosaic names. When Lewis talks in the abolition of man about being a man of straw, that's Mark. Mark Stuttach, this character. At one point, for example, he talks about Mark's modern education, which has made him basically like this, that in Mark's mind, hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or pagan had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical, merely modern. Okay, so Mark is almost like, he doesn't have anything solid that he stands up for or believes

in. He's just very empty. And so their conversions, in other words, are portrayed. is like out of modernity. But what's interesting about it is how different they are. And many of the interpreters of this book, there's not a lot of literature on it, but what is out there I've canvassed. And this is something that comes up a lot. What people notice is you've got these two different plot lines, Mark and Jane, and they're structurally opposite from each other. So they have similar sequencing, but diametrically opposite results. So both are,

swept up into a supernatural community. One is angelic because there's angels in the house at the manner of St. Anne's and the other is demonic because it's demons who are running the NICE. Both Mark and Jane meet the head of that order, Ransom and Wither. Ransom uses language to clarify, Wither uses language to confuse. And the result of those meetings have this profound emotional impact. It results in joy for Jane and horror for Mark. Both have a an experience after that, the next part of the process, where they face the prospect of death. They think they might die. And that leads them both to have a sort of religious identity crisis, sort of existential crisis, but in different ways. For Jane, it opens her up to the wildness

and excitement of the supernatural. Like maybe there's a world beyond nature. For Mark, it makes him look back on how boring his life has been. And then after that, both of them, them, this is all in sequence. So the intentionality of Lewis's writing is amazing. You don't necessarily see it when you're reading it through. But as you think about it, it's just like the Narnia books. There's so much there. They're not just good children's stories, though they are that. There's a lot to them. So the next thing is they both have this experience that produces multiple selves and all squabbling with each other. So there's like four different pieces of them all fighting with each other and then one of them wins out. Okay. Then there's other things as well toward the end

that are similar. So I'll come back to those differences toward the end of this as we talk about implications. But let me just give a brief sketch of each conversion. Okay. This will help us, I think, and it's really interesting. So Jane, the defining characteristic of her life is independence. Early on she has a nightmare and she runs to Mark for comfort after the nightmare. And then she resents herself the next morning for the collapse that had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested, the fluttering, tearful little woman of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms. And basically, there's a lot of evidence for this early on in the book. Her fundamental drive is stay out. You know, I don't, I don't want to get drawn into something.

I just want to be left alone. She's setting up walls around herself and so forth. I have so many examples from my article. I'll just give one here. Early on, she meets the Deniston's. These are some of the good characters at the manner at St. Anne's. And it says her habitual inner prompter was whispering, take care, don't get drawn in, don't commit yourself to anything. You've got to live. You've got your own life to live. And it's constantly like that for her. Now, critics often say that Lewis is being condescending and chauvinistic to Jane. And we'll see why, because Lewis does portray this independence and fear of submission along the lines of gender. And it plays out to her husband Mark. But it's not fair to Lewis sometimes the way we do this. It's helpful to see this is the

exact same thing that Lewis saw as his own struggle before his own conversion. So it's not just about gender. For example, in Surprised by Joy, he says, I had always wanted above all things not to be interfered with, I had wanted Mad Wish to call my soul my own. That's the exact position of Jane. And just like Mark and Jane go through this sequential process of their defenses getting broken down in these different ways. So also Lewis talks about his conversion is kind of a slow piece by piece loss of a chess match. Okay. So, you know, I won't go through the full process with Jane. There's several different episodes. The first one is when she meets the director of the manor at St. Anne's. That's Ransom. And she's struck by his kingliness. And Lewis describes she has this experience of

hugeness. Then there's several other episodes, which I think I mentioned just a moment ago, but the checkmate for her comes toward the end of the book when basically she realizes that her view of spiritual reality was egalitarian and democratic. She just basically wants to, thought that ultimately at the top of all things, there must be equality. And she realizes, for the first time, there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer at every rung of the ascent. The director is confronting her about her pride and her unwillingness to submit to God. And he says, your trouble has been what the old poets called D'angier, or Dengier. We call it pride. You are offended by the masculine,

itself, the loud, eruptive, possessive thing, the gold lion, the bearded bowl, the male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine, none of us can escape what is beyond, above and beyond all things, is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. Now, you can see how this will earn Lewis a lot of criticism from egalitarian and feminist scholars, and even his admirers are often embarrassed by these passages. But I think, you know, you have to remember, if Lewis is half as condescending to Jane as he's depicted as, it's curious that he describes his own conversion in the exact same way. I think Lewis's ultimate point is about submission to God.

And yes, he does have a traditionalist view of gender, but don't filter everything through just the statements about, there's a deeper point here. The ultimate point is not an egalitarian view of gender, but her egalitarian view of the universe. It's not just that she doesn't submit to her husband, though that is a problem. It's that she doesn't submit to God. And basically, here's the turning point that is so beautiful. She finally discovers that ultimate spiritual reality is not there to affirm her in her self-chosen identity. Rather, it is about submission and obedience and change and surrender.

Heaven is not a democracy. Heaven is a supreme monarchy. But that's good news. And there's a moment where she's walking in the garden. And she says, supposing one were a thing, after all, a thing designed and invented by someone else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self. And she's offended and she thinks maybe God will never understand me, you know? And then the penny drops. And she realizes the demand which pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand,

it was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them. But from them you could know nothing of it. In this height and depth and breadth, the little idea of herself, which she had hitherto called me, dropped down and vanished, unfluttering into bottomless distance like a bird in space without air. To sum it up, she realizes in this spiritual experience, and this is why I'm going to talk about implications, we have to pray for spiritual experiences in our non-Christian friends to be awakened to spiritual reality. This is not a mechanical math process when people come alive to God.

But in that context of that spiritual experience, she realizes, oh, this is unlike the other kinds of submission I've been afraid of. This is a happy submission. Heaven is a monarchy, but it's a happy monarchy. God is a king, but he's not like a human tyrant. Conversion is submission, but it's a happy submission to joy and change and life itself. Now, I'm nearing the time for it to go home with my daughter, so I won't go into Mark's conversion as much. I've gone into great detail of this in my apologetics book because it's so useful in the context of a moral argument. But let me just say briefly, it's the exact opposite from Jane's.

Here's how I put it. In my article, I say, Jane's deepest fear is being taken in. Mark's is being shut out. She fears intrusion. He fears exclusion. She's always building defensive walls. He is perpetually climbing and then discarding ladders. So Mark, so Mark is personifies what Lewis calls the inner ring syndrome. He's, you know, at one point you get a glance into his basic psychology when he's trying to just, himself with some with the thought of partaking in this propaganda and he says well at least nobody will ever have the right to consider me a non-entity and so he wants to be somebody he doesn't want to be cast out you know and basically all by the way there's some experiences in lewis's own life especially at oxford that i think play into how he understands this i go into that in the article but basically he has these pre-conversion experiences and it slowly opens him up and it's the

exact opposite as Jains. Okay, so, you know, whereas she, he, she, it's, for her, it's joy, for him, it's suffering. For her, it's transcendence, for him, it's morality. And I just talk, and I go through the, and explain in the article how these are too different, but here's what's so interesting is they, and here's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's dive into the implications of this, so the final section of the video. There's two things about these conversion processes that I think are so helpful as we think about evangelism and commending the gospel today. The first is it occurs through a complicated sequential process, just like Lewis. You know, it was a long, slow chess match, losing peace after piece after piece before checkmate

comes and he submits to God. And even that is just his conversion to theism in 1929. It's not until 1931 that Lewis becomes a Christian. Well, I think in a post-Christian culture, we're going to see conversions that are more like that. It's not going to be overnight as much. That can happen sometimes. So it's really helpful to think about what are those pre-conversion experiences and insights that our non-Christian friends might go through, that get them to that point of conversion? It could be 20 years, you know? The second thing that's so interesting is that it's different for each character. Jane's isolationism is dismantled by what Lewis calls with a capital H hugeness.

Mark's inner circleism is dismantled by what he experienced, by his experience of morality, what Lewis calls with the capital N the normal. Okay. And I go into this in the book, or in my article, the way I say it is, Mark must suffer torture and defeat before he can stand up with a constant. Jane must taste in rapturing joy before bowing down in submission. So you see the idea here? Not only is it a process before they can come to Christianity, but it's different for them.

It's a different process for each one. And you feel the intensity of the struggle for them. And so here's the thing that is helpful to see is if you just go to Mark or Jane or C.S. Lewis in the year 1925 and you just give them a gospel track. That's not going to help them because they're not really ready for that. They still need to be broken down in their defenses and in their alternative idols and worldview. And similarly, as we interact with people around us in an increasingly post-Christian culture, there's going to be this process for a lot of people.

Conversion involves both a death and a resurrection, both a disconnection and a reattachment. and it can be a long, messy process. By the way, this is totally true to church history. Another example, St. Augustine. St. Augustine became a Manichian for about 10 years, and he came back to Christianity through Platonism. So the breaking down process was, it took some time, and Platonism kind of loosened him up to prepare him for Christianity.

I know that seems weird, but I think that's going to happen a lot, where people, it takes some time for people to get there, you know, because it's, you're stepping out of something, even as you're stepping into something. And so while the ultimate need of the human soul does not change, one of the things that I really learned from that hideous strength is that the way we all experience the gospel sometimes differs a little bit, that that ultimate need is for God and for therefore forgiveness of sins, life in Christ, et cetera. But the process of getting there is different for different people. Think of church history. Think of Kierkegaard versus Augustine versus Luther. Okay. They all have a different crisis. You know, Luther's wracked with guilt. Augustine is basically doesn't want to give up

hedonistic pleasures and ambition and so forth. Kierkegaard has this kind of crisis of angst and selfhood. They're all, and all of us have probably known people where their journey to Christ looks different. And so when we think about bringing the gospel to people, we need to ask, where are they in that process? And for a lot of people, they won't even be to the point where they're ready to understand the basic gospel message, because we have to start further back with concepts like God and morality and repentance and all these things. You know, you can't assume these things in a post-Christian culture. And if you, you know, if you just go to Mark Studic, well, before he goes through this like five-stage process, or Jane or C.S. Louis, and you just say

Jesus died for your sins, that won't be as intelligible to them. You need to start further back, just like the Apostle Paul does in Acts 17, and build a foundation of God, sin, and so, creation, and so forth. So I say more about that in the article. All right, hope that video is helpful or interesting. If nothing else, I know I'm just scratching the surface here. There's so much to it. But if nothing else, maybe it would just be of interest to make somebody pick up and give the book a try. Be patient. It's not a page turner. It's not like watching a Mission Impossible movie. It's not going to grab your attention right out of the gate. It might. I mean, it might. The beginning of the book is about, again, here's the mixture of the mundane and the miraculous. The book ends with like

Jane and Mark having marriage struggles and, you know, their academic, ambition, Mark's academic ambition. Jane can't write her dissertation. It's just very mundane. And the end of the book is like the animals trampling people, the angels coming down and destroying, you know. So it takes a while. It's slow, but you get there. It is, and it is a fascinating book. And the literary quality of it is so good. So to that end, let me finish with my favorite passage. Have you ever come across a passage that was so well written that you'd rather have written that one passage than everything else you've ever written. I'm not sure, but if there's a passage that's close, it might be this one. Mark is wondering, Mark is going through his conversion process and he's realizing he's experiencing what we call conviction of sin, but it's taking so long

to get there. And basically at one point, he's wondering, how do other people enjoy life so easily? They laugh, they're comfortable in their own skin, whereas I'm always postured and maneuvering and calculating. How are people so relaxed in social situations? How do they do that? And he says, how did other people? People like Deniston or Dimble find it so easy to saunter through the world with all their muscles relaxed and a careless eye roving the horizon, bubbling over with fancy and humor, sensitive to beauty, not continually on their guard and not needing to be?

what was the secret of that fine, easy laughter which he could not, by any efforts, imitate? Everything about them was different. They could not even fling themselves into chairs without suggesting by the very posture of their limbs a certain lordliness, a Leonine indolence. There was elbow room in their lives, as there had never been in his. They were hearts. He was only a spade. Now, just beyond the literary craft, because when he says Leonine indolence, which I had not. to look up, Leonine being an adjective to the noun lion. Okay? It's just so, but here's the thing about Lewis. When he writes like this, he's not trying to show off.

I really believe he's just writing. That's just his natural authorial style because he read so much and he was so brilliant. And so his, the quality, the literary quality is really solid. Even if you don't like the plot and tone of the book or you think it's too weird, you can't deny it's well written. But what I love about this is with Mark is the aroma of the joy of repentance. This is what you'd get, you know, with Mark and with Jane in his own books, even with the title surprised by joy.

This, you get in Lewis this feeling like, oh, repenting and submitting to God is wonderful beyond your wildest dreams. There's joy in that that is literally like heaven, it's. self. It is like the sun rising in your heart. It is like the windows opening and the light flooding into your soul. That is what it feels like to read a C.S. Lewis book because his experience of that was so profound that it leaks out into everything he wrote. You see it in Eustace Clarence Scrubb in the Voyage of the Don Treter. You see it in Oral until we have faces. All of these people who come to understand that repentance and self-denial is actually the pathway to joy. And that's, of course,

what the gospel teaches us, right? Whoever loses his life for the sake of Christ will find it. So that's what I love most about Lewis. All right, hope that's helpful to you all. Let me know what you think in the comments. Leave a comment. I love reading through the comments. I respond when I can. I would really love to know what you think of it. Have you read this book? Are you interested in this book? What are your thoughts about it? Please let me know. I'll be fascinated to read. Thanks for watching. This is just a fun video. Hope you all enjoy it. Take care.