In the final book of the Ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 1945), C.S. Lewis presents his readers with a stark contrast between two communities: the residents of St. Anne’s on the Hill and the conspirators of the N.I.C.E. in Belbury. In doing so, Lewis offers two pictures of humanity. One is characterized by relationship, nature, and beauty, while the other is marked by bureaucracy, cold rationality, and deception. 

To explore these contrasting visions, Lewis follows Mark and Jane, a married couple, in their individual journeys for meaning, belonging, and ultimately, redemption. Mark is a trained sociologist and fellow at the fictitious Bracton College. Despite his marriage to Jane and successful academic career, Mark is lonely and unfulfilled. In the opening pages, he takes immense pleasure in simply being included in a clique. Meanwhile, Jane, an academic herself, regrets the toll her marriage has taken on her academic career, and the current state of her and Mark’s relationship. She is bitter, hopeless, and discontent with the cards life has dealt her. 

In this article, I want to briefly sketch out some pivotal moments in the novel and then offer some insights for educators today. For while this story’s plot is thick enough to stand on its own, Lewis shares in the preface that there is more to the story, so to speak. He writes, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (7). Let us proceed with seeking to uncover this “point” to see what Lewis what might teach us.

Surprised by Joy

Early in the novel, Mark is brought into an exclusive group of the college, the Progressive Element, and eventually invited to join the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) itself. Through this process, his desire for belonging is quenched, though never fully, as he makes his way further and further into the inner circle. Still, it is a painful process. Despite repeated attempts to understand his job description and the reporting structure of the institution, his requests are constantly pushed aside. The deputy director John Wither is evasive and dismissive, despite regularly referring to the N.I.C.E. as a family. 

Meanwhile, Jane finds herself being drawn to a very different kind of community. Despite the men and women at St. Anne’s on the Hill referring to themselves as a “company” and “army,” they live together in a beautiful and spacious manor, fulfilling the vision of family that the N.I.C.E. allegedly claimed to be. In her first visit to the manor at St. Anne’s, she walks through a beautiful garden, teeming with life and beauty. Later, she meets with the director of the community, Dr. Ransom, and leaves overflowing with joy (149). 

Interestingly, the source of her joy when meeting with Dr. Ransom was not the conversation they shared together, but the transcendent experience of encountering his divine and royal aura. For the first time, her soul had touched the heavens, as it were, awakening in her a desire for beauty that had grown dormant over the course of her life. Suddenly she gained new eyes for the beauty of nature, from rays of sunlight to grazing wildlife. She longed to hear the chorales of Bach again and read the sonnets of Shakespeare afresh. She cherished the speech of her cabinmates in the train and rejoiced in her hunger and thirst for buttered toast and tea. Her conversion had begun.

Isolation and Objectivity

In contrast, Mark’s progress through concentric circles of exclusivity in Belbury finally leads to his own isolation as he sits alone in a cell awaiting his training in “objectivity.” Professor Augustus Frost, a leader in the innermost circle of the N.I.C.E., shares with Mark his vision for humanity as a race of pure mind and liberated of emotional preference. He desires to destroy all human instincts for what is right, noble, and beautiful. Interestingly, Mark’s training takes place in a room of disproportion with a ceiling covered in specks at irregular intervals. On the walls of the room are pictures, many of them with scriptural themes, yet each of them distorted through bizarre elements of horror and strangeness. Professor Frost’s goal is clear: destroy all of Mark’s intuitions for what is natural, normal, and right. 

To Frost’s surprise, however, the room soon began to have the reverse effect. The striking abnormality and ugliness of the room engendered in Mark a longing for the straight, whole, and normal. The narrator Lewis writes, “As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else–something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’–apparently existed” (296). In the end, Mark finds himself choosing a side, aligning himself with the mountainous pull towards the moral universe, and rejecting Professor Frost’s vision for objectivity untethered from objective value.

And yet, the ultimate test was yet to come. For, in a pivotal moment of the training in the objective room, Professor Frost, with demonic calculation, instructs Mark to trample on a full-sized crucifix and insult it. Unlike the moral defense against the other exercises that had risen inside of Mark, this was different. There was nothing about the wooden figure nailed to the cross that was inherently straight and normal. Though Mark is not a Christian, his conversation was already underway, and he realizes that the crucifix is…”what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight–what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross” (333). In this decisive moment, this test of tests, Mark refused to desecrate the image.

Hope for Redemption

In the end, both characters encounter elements of redemption, not only for their marriage, but for their moral and spiritual salvation.

Jane’s struggle with pride, most visibly manifested in the novel through her repudiation of traditional gender norms, is overcome as she realizes the goodness of being a creature under the authority and care of God. And yet the divine goodness she accepts comes at a high price: control. She must give up herself to another, to God himself, and let him mold her as he sees fit (316). The universe now appears to her much larger than she imagined. It is massive, stormy, beautiful, and unbending, existing independently of any human emotion or idea. She must embrace the truth that this reality is greater than herself by recognizing she is a creature of God.

Mark’s conversion is different. Though he exhibits the moral courage to resist Professor Frost’s training in objectivity, he has not had the benefit of being formed by the community at St. Anne’s. Only in the end does he begin to recognize his own shortcomings as a husband and lover. His fear is that it is too late, that what would be best for Jane at this point is to move on. But then, in the last available moment, love strikes him as only the goddess Venus can, and his soul is saved.

Insights for Schools Today

There are so many layers to this story, from the redemption of Mark and Jane to the heavenly presence of Dr. Ransom to the demonic nature of the N.I.C.E. It truly is a battle for the abolition of humanity.

In The Abolition of Man (Harper Collins, 1971), Lewis warns against a dystopian future in which humanity abandons traditional moral values in the name of scientific progress. Though he is clear that his argument is not against science itself, in his context he can see that the many successes of modern science have created a lure to conquer nature completely. In the end, all that will be left is to conquer human nature. He writes, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won” (59).

Inspired by That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, I will conclude this article by offering three suggestions for schools in order to resist the coming abolition.

1. Create communities of joy and hospitality.

One of the most endearing elements of the story is the community of St. Anne’s. While I did not focus on the themes of comradeship and belonging so much in this article, it is well worth study and imitation. It can be easy to think that the abolition of man is ultimately a philosophical debate and therefore will take place at an intellectual level. But the reality is that strongest way we can retain our humanity and moral values is through creating beautiful spaces of belonging for learning to occur. From filling our schools with beautiful art and nature to building time for deep relationships to thrive, our schools can become their own manifestations of the idyllic St. Anne’s community.

2. Champion the reality of objective moral values.

Certainly Lewis’ greatest warning in The Abolition of Man, manifested in the N.I.C.E. at Belbury in That Hideous Strength, is the rejection of traditional moral values, what Lewis calls the Tao (pronounced “Dao”). As Alasdair MacIntyre addresses at great length in After Virtue, the modern West has traded out objective moral belief for mere emotional preferences. Ideas of virtue and duty have been reduced to mere subjective responses that cannot be used for moral evaluation. In this framework, a solder sacrificing his life to save his squadron is a story that can engender emotions of high praise, but it is not representative of a deeper truth that we are morally obligated to imitate.

But as Lewis argues through different means in both books, moral truth, goodness, and beauty does exist independently of human perception. In their own journeys, Mark and Jane encountered what Lewis described as a mountain–an entity that existed apart from themselves that is firm, immovable, and embedded in the universe itself. This is natural law, or what Mark experienced as the Straight and Normal.

Our schools need to cling to and proclaim the reality of objective goodness, truth, and beauty, for the future of humanity is at stake.

3. Connect the study of science to worship of our Creator.

There is a warning in both books regarding the dangers that emerge when modern science, or any discipline for that matter, is untethered from moral and biblical truth. In the case of Belbury, the scientific activity literally became demonic. While it is important to equip our students with understanding of the scientific method, steps for conducting a successful lab experiment, and other elements of modern science, we should regularly connect our study of creation to worship of our Creator. For scripture commands us to subdue and cultivate creation, not conquer it out of human arrogance and pride.

It is this temptation toward human arrogance and pride that is the “hideous strength” of which Lewis warns. As the inhabitants of Shinar sought to make a name for themselves through erecting a great tower at Babel, so the temptation to be our own gods resided in Mark and Jane, as well as in us today.

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