C. S. lewis, That Hideous Stregth

 As a Christian controversalist Lewis on the airways, Lewis in Mere Christianity lends the most rhetorical backbone to the evangelization of the intellect and can be read there and in his Problem of Pain, Reflections on Psalms and on, but in his fiction and the penultimate, where Arthurian legend, scientific transhumanism run paganism amok, Stonehenge, Merlin and planetary intelligences all come to bear, we find him at his eloquent self speculating and entertaining.

We are all of us such a wondrous matter of contradiction in the midst to growth it is no wonder we may look back at earlier states of thought in letters and journals and find ourselves perplexed. So when we come to judge others it is of ourselves we find written large in the contradiction so we do sweep ours under and theirs over if we find them wanting and not ourselves. If we are all wanting that tends to breed some compassion for our frailty and so in this sense, to deliberate on the vastness of contradiction of thought and word as it mirrors in literate society we have to go to a time when such society existed in situ, in location and not online, which doesn’t count even if we think it does. Letters go to persons with whom we have to do. Emails and texts go to unformed faceless integers to and from and may be bots depending. We all know this state was fully achieved by 2020 and such a nice round figure, while artificial, makes a stopping starting place. Of course the stop off was long before, and if we judge it by the life and death of our Oxford don and confident Jac C.S. Lewis, who corresponded at length, wrote brilliantly, and walked the countryside consistently to take the air, when he was not at pubs or chat with the literate of the land, all of whom we have heard and with some have had to do, let us take 1963, as arbitrary as 2020 for sure, but and Nov 22, the death of Jack, of JFK and Aldous Huxley so it was a busy time.

Criticism comes to Lewis Hideous Strength ascribing the title king of kings to the appearance of the planetary spirits in the upper room retreat with the revived Merlin, when in fact this is not a title of Jove Jupiter at all, but of the One True High King of Kings title is biblically reserved for Jesus Christ (Revelation 17:14, 19:16). Lewis’s syncretism of Christian and mythological elements of Neoplatonic and medieval traditions, such as those in Dante or Pseudo-Dionysius(5th–6th century), his Celestial Hierarchy. Celestial Hierarchy, Ch. 15). “divine intelligences… take on forms suited to our understanding, as when angels appear in human likeness” (Ch. 2). Origen (184–253 A.D.): In On First Principles (Book I, Ch. 7) speculates that angels may govern celestial bodies, that stars and planets could have “rational beings” (intelligences) associated with them, but not autonomous earthly “avatars.”
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 A.D.): In Summa Theologica (I, Q. 55–60), connects angels to planet or star as a medieval synthesis of Aristotle’s “intelligences”. Medieval Ptolemaic cosmology in Albertus Magnus, assigned each planetary sphere an angelic intelligence, drawing on Dionysiusian hierarchy and Aristotelian metaphysics. Syncretism draws from sources like Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Cicero’s De Natura. Plotinus and Proclus, described a cosmic hierarchy of divine emanations, including celestial intelligence. Closer to home “Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth / Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep” (Paradise Lost, Book IV, 677–678)
that pagan myths contain “good dreams” of divine truth (Letters to Malcolm, Letter 22) in Christian Reflections (ed. Walter Hooper, 1981): where “The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils… But I think God meant them to be seen as good dreams of the truth” (“Christianity and Literature,” 1959). Lewis reimagines planetary (e.g., Jove) as angelic beings retaining their mythological grandeur. Their descent to earth in That Hideous Strength think mythic archetypes can manifest pagan deities like Jove/Jupiter) vs. the divine sovereignty of Christ.

When we come to read Acts with Revelation and find the episode of Great is Diana of the Ephesians, where the town clerk brings peace by declaring it of the image which fell down from Jupiter, So if Lewis’ narrator will allow the title King of Kings to Jupiter, and in its idol image in that parlance to possess of Merlin, he may not be excused for his having given in to such, for he has previously said one can be pagan or Christian, eat with fingers or fork, or not at all, this, like shamanizing on DMT, or his imitators who tell us al they know of the little crocodiles and bugs of their afterlife after, and subsequent doubts widely dispersed that they now know the true reality none can find, for they have found with McKenna’s wonder talk and smooth trips, even if they die a little young. Lewis died a little young too, as Charles Williams and in the same sacrificial mode as he gave his live for Joy’s ( ). . not that he does come by his romance of myth honestly as he tells in his Boxen of youth constructs in Ireland, but in the possession of Merlin mysticism he who disdains Dee’s dabbling with Madimi and superfluous Kelley, did not escape the million spirits of Milton or Paracelsus or Agrippa in this and what good did it do?

The beginning of the 16th century discovers all this as if it were for the first or second or third time as is well recounted by Lewis in his standard work, to savor Platonic theology, “a deliberate syncretism based on the conviction that all the sages of antiquity shared a common wisdom and that this wisdom can be reconciled with Christianity (10). Our author literally wrote th book on this. “anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonials, a festival not a machine. (4). But as Lewis admits, and which has drawn minds to it ever since, even in our own time,, “I do not claim to know why there were man men of genius at that time” which it may be any particular moment might declaim, but” fantasy, conceit, paradox, color incantation return. Youth returns The fine frenzies of ideal love and ideal war”,(1) We and all who have tasted this know it well, so all the more when displayed in such splendor in this fiction. with many sources so you can read it there. His own criticism of dr. dee however imperil the matter, and the trips to the royal courts of Poland and with the royal s of Europe who sought the fruit of alchemy and knowledge second hand with Dee, so not only Queen E his confident, so if we look into Dee has a near avatar of that time we find::: but with the caveat, that what was fun in the 16th is dire strait in the 21st. as one has written, Whether you go to the future of the golden age promised, or back to past myths of Enoch and Gilgamesh before the Flood, or anywhere in between the precessions, collisions and calendar shifts of the age, on the day that myths turn fact and the images on shirts of the Seven Fold Avenger actually come to your door, keep down. All the neighbors will be firing guns. They think they have a cure for the minotaur (A Bloody Theory of Divine Light0.

To what extent Lewis eschews OT supernaturalism, the falling of Sargon off his altar, losing his head, and the insistence that nothing lies behind the image but devils who cannot move, the material is married to Arthurian romance and Christian humanism in all its parts so that we may not think the author of Mere Christianity ‘s preeminence of Christ, whose title in Revelations as King of Kings embroidered on his garment, is quite sufficient when attached to Jove Jupiter in his sphere come down to Ransom’s attic and there ascribed that title.
This is what I mean about catching ourselves in the act of contradiction. Written in 43 o so, for in 1923 (7 July) he had written in his journal of Rudolph Steiner,
‘ the spiritual forces which Steiner found everywhere were either shamelessly mythological people or else no-one-knows-what…I also protested that Pagan animism was an anthropomorphic failure of imagination and that we should prefer a knowledge of the real unhuman life which is in the trees etc…the best thing about Steiner seems to be the Goetheanum which he built up in the Alps…Unfortunately the building has been burned down the Catholics….”
So when Lewis pours the power of the planets into his resuscitated Merlin to harness the planets to the stars to defeat the conspiracy on the earth here below, it was all began in the Silent Planet when in 1939, “a pupil of mind took all that dream of interplanetary colonization quite seriously, and the realization that thoughts of people in one way and another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human race for the whole meaning of the universe—that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity…. (9 July)
That in his enthusiasm to set right his reverie of prose, ephebe become enamored by the very thing it opposed, chalk up to overflow if you like, or experience, say that of meeting Yeats in situ, a Merlin figure before the fact in 1921, who appeared ‘in the presence chamber, lit by tall candles, with orange colored curtains and full of things I can’t describe because I don’t know their names. The poet was very big, about sixty years of age; ‘aweful’ as Borzy says. When he first began to speak I would have though him French, but the Irish sounds through after a time.” (letter 14 March 1921)Sounds rather like Merlin at the door and thereafter a while, until tamed, an audience accompanied by a priest who feeds judicious questions to the mage Yeats, which is how Merlin as translator camouflages, “Finally we were given sherry or vermouth in long curiously shaped glasses, except the priest who had whiskey out of an even longer and more curiously shaped glass.” You may doubt all you like that Yeats is Merlin revisited, that is your right, even as much as the delightful suggestion that you might also like to burn Chas Williams at the stake as To His brother 5 November 1939 “Wrenn expressed almost seriously a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people.’ This in debate over the adage -narrow is the way and few they be that find it.” Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to our ideas of goodness or not, and it was at this stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves…”
Not to regress, but if Yeats as Merlin, what about Blake, but we are assured along the way, where “Mozart had remained a boy of six all his life, Coghill also delivered, ‘that Blake was really inspired. I was beginning to say, ‘In a sense----’ when he said ‘in the same sense as Joan of Arc.’” (Letter, 4 February 1923). So Blake as Joan of Arc and Yeats as Merlin so seem to populate the air with Steiner’s spiritual forces, in abstentia, cascading back and forth over Jack like this only shows the pretext of our own vagaries we contend, but reserve also our suspicion that a man is over board and we might break out a life boat for him, not that it matters, for he is in better hands