That Hideous Strength Chapters 9-12 Revisited

Hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging

Mar 05, 2025

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

Welcome friends, a good Ash Wednesday to you.

I hope your day has been empty, and hungry, and quiet.
And welcome to the other side of That Hideous Strength. We have made it through the lowest point, and things, perhaps, begin to look up.

Central Things Central

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 16

I have not forgotten about structure. Let us begin, therefore, with the first chapter we read this week, the central chapter of this novel, which is broken into 5 parts:

Chapter 9
Part 1 - Jane retells her dream of the N.I.C.E. Head.
Part 2 - Mark awakes after seeing the Head, tries to write to Jane in order to bring her to Belbury, & tries to leave N.I.C.E. but Whither stops him
Part 3 - Mr. MacPhee gives an “objective” account of Ransom’s history to Jane
Part 4 - Members of St. Anne’s on-the-Hill discuss the Head of the N.I.C.E.
Part 5 - Ransom thinks about Merlin’s power married to the N.I.C.E.’s power

Two initial reactions:

I am surprised that the reveal of who the evil Head of the N.IC.E. is, is not the central part, but instead MacPhee’s conversation is (there must be something here…);
I am surprised by Lewis’ kindness as an author, in that he filters the evil reveal of the N.I.C.E. Head through the medium of Jane’s dream. Our perspective on evil is provided by the good guys, not the bad guys.

In the next section, I will focus upon Mark (because this dude is lame to the point of aggravation and self-examination).

But first, we must linger upon Mr. MacPhee’s “brief, objective outline of the situation” (186).

Jane asks MacPhee if he has seen the eldils, he responds:

“That’s not a question to be answered Aye or No. I’ve seen a good many things in my time that weren’t there or weren’t what they were letting on to be: rainbows and reflections and sunsets, not to mention dreams. And there’s heterosuggestion too. I will not deny that I have observed a class of phenomena in this house that I have not yet fully accounted for. But they never occurred at a moment when I had a notebook handy or any facilities for verification” (190).

I can’t help but think of Chesterton’s objections to MacPhee’s objections:

One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for “scientific conditions” in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living soul it is ludicrous to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other. The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the existence of love…It is just as unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise. It is as if I said that I could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.
(G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 145)

It’s a pleasure for me to imagine Chesterton in the back of Lewis’ head as he wrote MacPhee’s passage. But not in a way that would discredit the mental capacity of a man like MacPhee, just in a loving, “I wish I could show you…” way.

I read the character of MacPhee like I read the other non-Christian elements of this story (like Merlin, and the pagan myths, and Socrates, and the ancient Logres) as Lewis pulling into his story things he can’t help but love, and so wishes to baptize. Baptize not in the sense that they become less of themselves, but in the sense that their goodness, though pre-Christian, becomes a force for the good of Christendom. Perhaps I especially read MacPhee this way, because his Socratic method feels like a nod to Lewis’ own former tutor the “Great Knock,” Mr. William T. Kirkpatrick.1

To return to my main question: why is this the center?

The clue I have chosen to follow resides in the juxtaposition at the end of this part. As Jane and Camilla leave MacPhee’s office, they are already quoting poetry about the Logres. Then they walk to the top of the garden, to see the wild, pagan face of the huntress moon. They’ve left the cold facts of the study, and have entered the wild enclosed world of a hortus conclusus. There’s something here reaching back to old Britain, reaching towards gapped, poetic words, reaching into things that do not claim clear premises and therefore cannot claim clear answers, in order to find answers deeper and bigger than words.

Do you see where I’m headed with these thoughts?

I’m wondering if this central part of this central chapter is seeking to demonstrate that though some part of Truth may be found in tight, demonstrative Socratic syllogisms, other aspects of Truth are only revealed through the medium of imitative story-telling? Are we getting back to a theme we discussed last time, in that all men are required to make a leap of faith? That no side does not require it. That even MacPhee’s iron-hold on observable facts requires him to assume, through a leap of faith, that there is nothing outside of the observable world.2

Why the leap of faith? Why—the logic-bound man cries—why can’t I just know? Why do there have to be gaps?

Because, in the gap is everything. The gap is freedom. Without the gap, we are forced down a direct, flat road, force-marched to the dry altar of Truth, without a pebble in the way. With the gap, with the leap, with the Bridge of Christ spanning the gap for us, we are given freedom, the choice to choose, the agency to move, the ability to stand before Him as His.

Story enfleshes Truth. Story is an incarnational bridge over which Man may cross from the material to the numinous.

Without Art and A Leap of Faith…Man is a Noodle

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 9

Remaining in chapter 9, the worst part of this book, for me, is part 2 of chapter 9, when Mark is scrabbling to figure out a way to bring Jane to the N.I.C.E.

Meantime he must get up. He must do something about Jane. Apparently he would have to bring her to Belbury. His mind had made this decision for him at some moment he did not remember. He must get her, to save his life (182).

This lamest of lame, limp-noodle-armed man is willing to sacrifice his wife for his own survival, but he wouldn’t put it in just that way...

“The moment of Mark’s decision had passed by him without his noticing it” (207).

And that is the problem.

Let’s contextualize this moment with a excerpt from part 3 of chapter 6 (the central part of that chapter), when Fairy Hardcastle has tasked Mark to write propaganda articles about an N.I.C.E. orchestrated riot:

This was the first thing Mark has been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very a bad man (127).

Indeed, as a reader, I was slow to see just how bad of a man Mark was becoming, like the proverbial boiled frog, until Cecil Dimble removed the subterfuge and evasive terms:

“Have you the means to bring [Fairy Hardcastle] to book?” he said. “Are you already so near the centre of Belbury as that? If so, then you have consented in the murder of Hingest, the murder of Compton. If so, it was by your orders that Mary Prescott was raped and battered to death in the sheds behind the station. It is with your approval that criminals—honest criminals whose hands you are unfit to touch—are being taken from the jails to which British judges sent them on the conviction of British juries and packed off to Belbury to undergo for an indefinite period, out of reach of the law, whatever tortures and assaults on personal identity you call Remedial Treatment. It is you who have driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester. It is you who can tell us why Place and Rowley and Cunningham (at eighty years of age) have been arrested, and where they are. And if you are as deeply in it as that, not only will I not deliver Jane into your hands, but I would not deliver my dog” (217-18).

Suddenly, the fake film men spread over evil events, in order to disguise those events from themselves and others as “not that bad,” is ripped off.

We knew the N.I.C.E was bad because their theoretical arguments and philosophical conversations gave us chills, but now we are shown, through physical events, that they are evil. Theology of the Body and Art work both ways. They reveal what is good, and also what is evil.

Now the question Lewis raises in me, is this: is it only in modern times that men like Mark are no longer given the physical, literal warning signs which Macbeth and Julius Caesar benefitted from, in that there are now no physical witches or rivers in order to demarcate good from evil?

Is it possible to lay the blame solely on the doorstep of our particular age, because it has banished the education of virtue and vice from the public sphere?

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian of Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical — merely “Modern” (182).

I do believe, especially with one of the lessons of Othello fresh in our minds, that men are better able to be better in better societies.

But, I reject the full cop out. I squirm against the ease of fully blaming modernity.

Let me paint you another scene:

It’s night. Men and some women stand around a fire, to warm themselves against the early Spring and late hour chill. They’re talking about a man who is under arrest for treason. Suddenly, one of the men becomes distinct from the rest of the groups, as talk and eyes shift in his direction. He has an accent like the convicted man inside. One woman asks, “Do you know the guy inside? Aren’t you one of his friends?” “No,” says the man, his accent thickly betraying him. “No,” he repeats three times, “I don’t know that man.”

Sound familiar? Yup. 1st century AD. Peter. Not exactly a modern man.

Thus, I’ll wager that what Lewis is also doing with this reference to Macbeth and Julius Caesar, is pointing towards the power and purpose of Art—of story—and its ability to show to Man the reality of the very life he is living.

Perhaps if MacBeth or Julius Caesar had been able to watch their own plays, they would have chosen differently. Is this the gift Hamlet is trying to give his mother? I digress…

All this to say, mimetic art, art which shows, and, by a physically gapped distance, displays before man himself, can help a man realize reality so that he doesn’t slowly stumble into murderous death.

So yes, this is a tale as old as time and a modern story.

We are modern men, and if Lewis wished to show us to us ourselves, this story had to be particularly modern.

All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 46

Memento Mori

So Lewis—we ask him—how will this modern man be saved from himself? Where do we find any hope for Mark?

In death.

Well, to be more precise: in Mark remembering that he will die.

Last time, when considering Filostrato’s clean wasteland everlasting alternative, we discovered that death is a gift.

At the end of chapter 9, Ransom/the Pendragon/Fisher-King reflects thus:

There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If he succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits (201).

Mark is saved, or at least we have hope that he will be saved, by the merciful memory of death, which allows him the gap he needs to see himself for the first time:

He had a picture of himself, the odious little outsider wanting to be an insider (243).

Death is an artful gift to Mark. But Lewis, ever truthful and joyful, reminds us that Death need not remain merely a gift which causes fear and metanoia. It can also be fully redeemed into calm and objective hope:

“Don’t be cast down, Margaret,” [Ransom} said. “If they kill Cecil, we shall none of us be let live many hours after him. It will be a shorter separation than you could have hoped for in the course of Nature. And now, gentlemen,” he said, “you would like some time, to say your prayers, and to say goodbye to your wives. It is eight now, as near as makes not matter. Suppose you all re-assemble here at ten past eight, ready to start?” (226)

The Numinous & the Incarnation

A good and benevolent perspective on Death is perhaps our best transition to another redeeming perspective shift:

“Do you know,” said Ivy in a low voice, “that’s a thing I don’t quite understand. They’re so eerie, these ones that come to visit you. I wouldn’t go near that part of the house if I thought there was anything there, not if you paid me a hundred pounds. But I don’t feel like that about God. But He ought to be worse, if you see what I mean.”
“He was, once,” said the Director. “You are quite right about the Powers. Angels in general are not good company for men in general, even when they are good angels and good men. It’s all in St. Paul. But as for Maleldil Himself, all that has changed: it was changed by what happened in Bethlehem” (259).

The incarnation did something. God becoming Man forever changed everything. (Is there anyway to say these truths without extreme understatement?) He bridged a gap that we could not bridge, and forever brought us into relationship with something that was entirely other from us. We are Body Souls, little imitations of Christ, little bridges between matter and spirit, little climbers into the infinite heavens.

Anti-Incarnation

As we saw with the Un-Man in Perelandra, evil can only twist, uncreate, and cruelly mimic, it cannot create. The entangling scene at the end of part two of chapter 11 between Frost and Whither is similar to a scene in Inferno where Dante witnesses the strange metamorphoses of two thieves:

I held my eyebrows raised to look their way,
and there! a snake with six feet flings itself
and clings to one of them with all his length.
It strapped the belly with the middle feet
and clutched the arms by the anterior,
then sank its fangs to bite through either cheek;

It stretched its hind feet straight along the thighs
and flipped its tail between them and on up
the sinner’s loins to clamp behind his back.
No ivy ever gripped its barbs about
a tree so tightly as that horrible beast
twisted the other’s members with its own.
They glued and fused together, as if formed
out of hot wax, and saw their colors melt
so neither one seemed what it was before,
As when a flame is set below a scrap
of parchment, and a brownish hue appears,
which, while the white is dying, is not black.
The other two cried out as they looked on:
“Alas, Agnel, how you have changed yourself!
Already, see, you’re neither two nor one!”
Already indeed their two heads had formed one,
and there appeared two figures mingled in
one face, where the two faces had been lost.
Out of four bands of flesh they formed two arms;
the thighs and calves, the belly and the chest
made members that no man has ever seen.
Each former countenance was canceled out;
the image in perversion seemed both two
and nothing—and as such it slunk away.
(Inferno XXV.49-78)

Two becoming one is beautiful in marriage, it’s even more profound in the hypostatic union, in the gap-spanning Christ.

Two devolving into less than one, into “an interpenetration of personalities so close, so irrevocable” (240) as occurs in the Inferno-esque Whither-Frost grapple, is strange, disordered, chaotic, and disconcerting in a way that is hard to put into words.

Perhaps this is where our hope against the N.I.C.E. can lie? In evil eating itself, Screwtape Letter style.

Miscellany & Questions

How will the Anti-Man theme be defeated? Does the Incarnation give us a clue? Do the grand machinations of organizations against individual men, and “for” humanity, end up thwarted by a poor man? This is a leading question, because I’m leading towards thoughts on the man in the bed who Whither and Frost are serving.
Scene with this man in the bed at N.I.C.E. and Whither and Frost talking to him, is another scene of identity and language confusion, like the old hrossa with Weston and “ventriloquism” (263).
MacPhee is said to be based off of C.S. Lewis’ tutor, “The Great Knock.” Will we see MacPhee learn to have an imagination, and open his mind to things outside of facts?
Mark seems to idealize Jane in these chapters, does she deserve this idealization? If not, does this question distract us from some other question we should ask?
Does everyone agree that Whither, like Weston in Perelandra, must be a possessed man? Another Un-Man? A man becoming less of himself, losing his identity.
Microbes and Macrobes, and the scientification (and therefore obfuscation) of religious terms.
Now onto chapters 13-17!

Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

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March

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

April

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

May

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

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Further bolstering this connection between MacPhee and KirkPatrick is the frequency with which MacPhee is called, “the Ulsterman,” and the biographical detail that Kirkpatrick was born in County Down, one of the nine counties of Ulster.

The thoughts in this paragraph, and this footnote, all benefit greatly from

DANIEL McINERNY

’s book Beauty and Imitation (pages 72-94):

There are multiple ways of knowing something. Syllogisms are a demonstrative argument, and as long as you understand the meaning of the two premises, you must assent to the conclusion.

Poetic arguments, by contrast are not demonstrative. The do not produce anything close to logical certitude.

This makes me understand why Jesus, the consummate gentleman, chose story to teach us. He left our will free. If He had chosen to present all Truth in a syllogism, it would have forced consent. His premises cannot help but be true. Therefore, if He were to lay the Truth before us, in that instant, we would have to accept, or commit to a full illogical implosion, and cease to exist.

But Christ is a gentleman. He shows, He does not force. He gives us story. And this can be incredibly frustrating for a man like MacPhee.