That Hideous Strength is a good book, but it's just bizarre compared to the previous two books in the trilogy (and admittedly Perelandra gets pretty bizarre in the final 20% or so of the book). But my favorite lesson is from Perelandra: Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death.
There is a discontinuity between the books because he started writing it as SF, realised it was a mistake, and then switched to pure fantasy.
Like many of his books this series is misunderstood, I think deliberately. A lot of people (including Brian Aldis, and BBC continuity announcers) think the first book is anti-science because the two baddies are scientists. In fact the one who invents the new kind of spacecraft is a physicist (which is necessary) but the other (the worse one) is "something in the City" (i.e. a banker, broker, or possibly businessman depending on whether usage had shifted at the time he wrote it) and later becomes a politician.
It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists - the sociologist in the That Hideous Strength is gullible because of the nature of his "glib" subject unlike people who study humanities and hard sciences!
> Sometimes you can't beat the devil in a battle of wits, sometimes you just gotta beat him to death.
I like that too. It gives it a lot of visceral impact.
CS Lewis wrote a letter to Arthur C Clarke in which he said:
I don't of course think that at any moment many scientists are hidding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston's is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane's Rosetta Worlds and Waddington's Science & Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of it own forces & technology with complete indifference to either does seem to me a cancer in the universe.
I suppose he actually means "Star Maker". I'm not sure what he means by devil worship, though. And given how irrational I find his Christian apologetics to be, I'm not sure I care to find out.
I haven't read the book Lewis is talking about so I have little to say about what exactly he means by devil worship, however as someone quite familiar with his work, though long since having left religion myself, I can say that he is not one use a phrase like that merely out of petty spite or to be pejorative, but rather because he thinks it's the best technical description, at least that would fit into two or three words, that reflects this is analysis of the book's themes. Lewis was a medieval and renaissance English scholar before he was a Christian, and his professional work is far the greater portion of his writing and bears at leaat as much on his thinking as did his popular apologetics.
Lewis's model devil, both by his own description and by its depiction when he uses such a character in his fiction, is a kind of well mannered bureaucrat who just happens to be made of such a nature that his sustenance must come from feasting on human souls, and the more miserable his victims are by the experience of being utterly deprived of their individuality by complete and permanent dissolution into the self of this demon, the more pleasure it derives from consuming them. It is essentially inhuman but has no connection with the conventional idea of a monstrous man-bat scampering around with pitchforks and goat themed headgear. Lewis even pointed out, in case anyone missed the allusion, that selfishness of this complete and all-encompassing sort is a territory adjacent to that of sexual desire and conquest, and shares some of its traits. Love becomes a demon when he becomes a god, etc.
The reason this is worth pointing out is that Lewis is reliably consistent with his basic criticism of the modern world as tending toward an excessive and unhealthy elevation of monumental individuality, to the point that some individuals who are in advantaged circumstances to assert their individuality at the expense of others', by outright dominating them, or depriving them of opportunity, happiness, or satisfaction, will certainly do so. and if unchecked will grow just like a cancer, for that's what they are: apex parasites grooming their hosts, suppressing their spirit(ual) energies and curiosity by anesthetizing them with banal distractions this decade, only to drive them into bloody trenches the next. All so that a few can live impossible, unsustainable existences at the pinnacle of human society, of a culture they literally cultivate to keep themselves in rareified and thoroughly selfish power. The portrait Lewis draws of Mr Savage in the Pilgrim's regress is probably the most thorough exploration of this idea, and Lewis in the voice of a character (drudge) who is given one of the more sympathetic, clear eyed and and omniscient perspectives (i.e. the authors own voice) in the book, speaks of him with admiration and even goes off to join his massing armies of Swastici and Marxomanni, "who are all alike vassals of Cruelty."
I didn't mean to imply that Lewis would speak out of "petty spite". Rather that his ability to reason appears to be clouded by his convictions about God and Christianity. For example, the "Trilemma" argument is full of holes and somewhat circular.
I'm still struggling to see how this notion of "devil" relates to the plot (specifically the ending) of Star Maker though. I googled around and did find a Reddit thread which raises the same question and describes the book's ending very well:
> The narrator comes into contact with a Creator of immense power who relates to our universe (and to several other universes that it has created) in the same way that an artist relates to a piece of art, without regard for the suffering of its inhabitants. The Creator is also depicted as pleasantly surprised that its newer universes have begun to exhibit emergent behaviours that were not intended at their conception. At the same time though the Creator is described this way...
> "Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. ... Love was not absolute; contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit's temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passions, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit's temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation."
Perhaps Lewis interprets the idea that love is not absolute, or that the universe's creator is not a loving being, as being tantamount to "devil worship" ?
>It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists
This also seems correct going by a couple of his current issues essays. Two spring to mind: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, where he says something like "Only the expert Penologist, let barbarous things have barbarous names, can tell us if a punishment is useful to deter", and Vivisection, which ends something like "[So it is up to us to make the difficult distinction of what laboratory animal suffering is necessary and what is excessive to improve human life], but it is up to the Police to determine what is presently being done.", though I haven't read either of these in a while. He's also rather sour on the time's study of people in general, and the psychotherapy in particular, in both HumanTheory and sections of his three part Abolition of Man, although the second gets much more abstractly philosophical.
No you're absolutely correct. His criticism of Freud anticipated Murray Gell-Mann, or rather his eponymous amnesia effect, by at least a generation.
It's been quite a few years so the exact phrasing escapes me now, but was something to the effect that Freud demonstrated a pattern of confidently talking well past his own level of understanding of certain topics even in the company of actual experts in the material, And thus although Lewis couldn't judge to what extent this was a factor in Freud's own claimed area of expertise, he observed that when Freud ventured to hold forth on something CS Lewis did know quite a lot about, namely, languages, he found him to be quite the amateur. Freud is somewhat obliquely caricatured thrpuhh the character of Sigismund, a personifcation of the more cargo cultish, callous and anti-humanist excesses of self-indulgent charlatanry marring the then-nascent psychotherapy movement as a whole.
I question the wisdom of belief in the existence of the devil - at least in a form that can be beaten to death. "Ultimate evil" and "susceptibility to haymakers" seem mutually exclusive. This sounds more like the confluence of blind hope that cosmically-horrifying things can be defeated and rationalizing murdering another person.
In the particular case of Perelandra, without too many spoilers, the devil possessed a man from Earth and was using him to try and tempt the Venutian equivalent of Eve into causing another Fall. How sometimes killing evil instead of arguing with it might apply to more practical religious and moral situations in real life is left as an exercise to the reader.
I thought Perelandra was bizarre, almost hallucinogenic towards the end. And the bit with the devil could be read as “He’s right, so I have to resort to physical violence to win.” I found it funny, but a strange take for an author known for making intellectual arguments for Christianity.
Perelandra's devil – the Un-Man – struck me on first reading as an excellent early depiction of a hostile, alien form of intelligence, superior but purely instrumental. Lewis was very early in working out the implications of that – nowadays the Rationalists and a lot of others would agree that there can be entities with superhuman intelligence that don't intrinsically value their intelligence, and that such beings would have almost irresistible persuasive ability if given the opportunity. (Lewis differs in also giving the Un-Man genuinely supernatural abilities with which it attempts to overawe the protagonist.)
"it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon… Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason… externally and inorganically…"
Ransom doesn't concede the Un-man is right. Rather, he concedes that the Un-man has unlimited intellectual stamina, so in any debate with a human, the human eventually succumbs to his persuasion because humans reason imperfectly.
Published in 1943, when the cultural milieu of Britain had had to process the results of appeasement and was forced to fight Hitler - a leader many of them actually not-so-secretly admired. For British intellectuals, WWII in many ways meant conceding an ideological point to Nazism (when chips are down, all that matters is actual raw strength, rather than the post-WWI rhetoric of peace) while fighting to defeat it.