Review of That Hideous Strength @ Goodreads

 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, Hideous Strength, where Arthurian legend, scientific transhumanism run pagan amok with Stonehenge, Merlin and planetary intelligences we find him at his eloquent self, speculating and entertaining. We look back with affection at earlier states of thought in his letters and journals in literate society that existed then. We all know this state has been fully abrogated by 2020, for the death of our Oxford don 1963 was Nov 22, 1963, the death of Jack Lewis, of JFK and Aldous Huxley on the same day .

But what I want to know is how Lewis can ascribe the title, King of Kings, to Jupiter, when in fact this is not a title of Jove Jupiter at all, but of the One True High King of Kings, biblically reserved for Jesus Christ (Revelation 17:14, 19:16). and a sticking point if it comes to that at the appearance of the planetary spirits in the upper room retreat with the revived Merlin: "For this was great Glund-Oyarasa, King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across the fields of Arbol, known to men in old times as Jove by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker--so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him"( Ch. 15, The Descent of the Gods. p. 403 Bodley Head, 1949). So the critique is, if we are to take seriously the biblical claim that the name “King of Kings” belongs to Messiah alone as a name above every name, then even a literary transference of that title to a planetary spirit—however benign—compromises the singular glory of Christ. Even with all his learned hedging—“by fatal but not inexplicable misprision... so little did they dream...” etc.— blurs the line between Creator and creature, precisely at a moment that Scripture (Revelation 19:16) intends to make that line blindingly clear. Jupiter is "king" among gods, but never titled “King of Kings”in the Greco-Roman religion. The imperial title “King of Kings” appears only in Mesopotamian.

The term misprision here in its older sense of “misunderstanding” or “mistaken identity” is softened by the acknowledgment that it had a kind of tragic logic, conflated with divinity. “So little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him”—emphasizes that even a being as exalted as Glund-Oyarasa (Jupiter) is still vastly below the Creator. The “stair” here suggests the Great Chain of Being, where each rung ascends through created order toward the uncreated. So, the passage may both honor the majesty of Jupiter and insists on the infinite qualitative distinction between Creator and creation, unless you consider Jupiter illegit. Which compounds with Lewis' wider view of redemptive syncretism—a harmonizing recovery of ancient cosmology within a Christian framework to rescue the logos in the pagan cosmos without falling into idolatry, But if “King of Kings” is a name revealed and reserved in the apocalypse of John for Christ alone, then applying it to Jupiter, even within a reconciliatory system, softens the apocalyptic edge—the very edge by which Christianity exposes and condemns all rival metaphysical claims, whether pagan, imperial, or angelic, diluting the Name, collapsing distinction into hierarchy—what the biblical witness refuses to allow, a return to the many, when Revelation insists on the One?

Tolkien balked between Lewis’s baptized Platonism and his more incarnational imagination. The kingdom of Logres, as Charles Williams dreamed it—and Lewis inherited it—of an inner spiritual Britain, mystical realm of true kingship, spiritual order, and Platonic form behind appearance, leans heavily into a Platonism worldwide that turns the Gospel into a system of ascent rather than descent, even if Lewis walks that stair beautifully, and softens the radical scandal of Jesus as God in flesh crucified, not idea, Platonic defense mechanisms against the flesh!

When we read Acts with Revelation and hear the town clerk declare "the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the Great Diana and of the image which fell down from Jupiter," (Acts 19.35) who brings peace by this declaration, we compare Lewis’ narrator allowing the title King of Kings to Jupiter, and in the parlance of that  idol image possess Merlin, whe that narrator has previously said, one can be pagan or Christian, eat with fingers or fork, or not at all, it smacks of  shamanizing wonder talk that occupied the beginning of the 16th century and contnued, as is well recounted by Lewis in his standard work of the Sixteenth Century, 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 the book on this. “anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonials, a festival not a machine. (4). But as Lewis admits, and which has drawn minds to it even in our own time, "fantasy, conceit, paradox, color incantation return. Youth returns The fine frenzies of ideal love and ideal war” (1) displayed in such splendor in this fiction. with many sources so you can read it there.

His own criticism of Dr. Dee however imperils 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 the caveat, that what was fun in the 16th is dire strait in the 21st. "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 Light).

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.

So when Lewis pours the power of the planets into his resuscitated Merlin to harness the planets to the stars to defeat the conspiracy of transhumanism 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…. That in his enthusiasm to set right his reverie of prose enamored by the very thing it opposed, chalked up to overflow if you like, or experience, is further exposed in his meeting Yeats in situ, 1921, a Merlin figure before the fact, 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, which 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. In the Yeats audience, “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.” 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) 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, 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.

This is what I mean about catching ourselves in the act of contradiction. Hideous Strength was written in '43 or so, but in 1923 (7 July) Lewis 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….” 

In the end I don't know who was the more naive. I had hired Kim KIeubel to work at the Drug Garden in he late 70's. He brought his Banisteropsis to work and and let it live in our greenhouse, to take the air as it were, and it did all right, no like the way too leggy, Salvia divina the assistant had in the botany greehouse on campus, starved for light. In the coursee of work on the beds of henbane and hemlock Kim was prone to mouth these God curses, jst in genral, presumably at things he could see or feel or couldn't see or feel. to these I objected that they were uncalled for, a verbal pollution in the air as if speech were a pollutant like aluminium or barium. H replied what did I care since he wasn't impugning any god in particular. I that there being only one God any such was a derricliction of the One. He was amzed I saw the manyin the one. I was amazed he could not see the One was undivided and everywhere.. This was not resolved. I think he thought it a punishment thought that I would not let him store his lunch in the refrigerator, but context explains the reason, for at that time I also had a part time sinicure  at teh Clayton foundatnon on campus and it was of much import to me when the post docs told me never to open the refriegerator in  one lab because it was radioactive. It sat there and irradiated, for those labs were filled with radiation, added to by the need discovered that in ordeer to save cost of buying new little one ounce lab bottles that the contents within were to be emptied out and washed from their radioactive zyelene, which economy was designated to the dish washer, moi, bo empty and wash, but with the windorw in the lab open a litle. The nosebleeds from this were likely involved in roping off the Grrden fridg. An excessive measure we may think but not know, for radioactive at low levels builds slowly in the body to its own climax,  So let it be said to prevent the same bili rueben test I took after the nosebleeds, and the workman's comp case it spawned to pay for it, these matters in those days were carefully pushed aside. Indeed it reminded me then of the rabbit the same post doc kept in the basement which he asked me to feed whthen he was away once. the rabbit was in cage in the dark corner. I moved th room around and put the cage below the only window in the liht. Later the post doc moved it back. that is sthe story of life. hook line and sinker. None of these poeple survived. The whole Exp Science bldg is gone. The Drug Garden is gone.  Flora Petit is gone. Dr Lester Reed is gone. Bill Lee  just disappeared. Kim went decades ago. It is 2025 in this tale.