That Hideous Strength, Chs. 14-17

I don’t know what it is but I always like the darker stuff of trilogies. For me, Empire was the best of the original Star Wars movies. I prefer Inferno to the rest of the Divine Comedy. Hamlet gets top spot over The Taming of the Shrew. And the third of C S Lewis’ Space [...]

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That Hideous Strength, Chs. 10-13

“I mean this,” said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. “If you dip ainto any college, or schoool, or parish, or family–anything you like–at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite [...]

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That Hideous Strength, Chs. 5-9

This passage, in which Mark is asked to write fictitious news articles to mold and shape public opinion toward favoring N.I.C.E. (shades of the New York Times!), was striking, and carries the theme from last week’s entry: This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, [...]

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That Hideous Strength, Preface-Ch. 4

Oh the many things I love about That Hideous Strength: set in a college atmosphere, exposes the power-hungry agenda of modernist progressivism, the cosmic backdrop of ageless spiritual warfare . . . So many things. I found two things of interest to me this week. The first involved the living reality of Jesus’ words about [...]

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Perelandra, Chs. 14-17

This week’s reading for Perelandra was an ambivalent one for me. It’s not that there wasn’t a bunch of meaty theology. There certainly was that. And it wasn’t that the richness of Dante’s Divine Comedy was called to mind with Ransom’s emergence in the darkened underwater cave of another Fixed Land, through dimly-lit mountain, to [...]

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Perelandra, Chs. 9-13

The battles between the Bent One (Satan) and Maleldil (God) reaches high gear, though not yet the climax, in this week’s chapters. The first battle is not a physical encounter, but the encounter between seduction and purity. The Bent One would tempt the Green Lady to a romantic role of tragedy: she’s is a victim [...]

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Perelandra, Chs. 5-8

Last week, we began Perelandra with Life as freedom and grace. This week’s reading reveals a contrast of life as determinism and force. One is the Life received from Maleldil and which proceeds from each good to another good; or, as the Gospel writer John says, from grace to grace. The other life is that [...]

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Perelandra, Chs. 1-4

“On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language” (p. 33). I find it interesting that our present understanding of the relative indeterminacy of language is so exactly opposite of the viewpoint expressed by Lewis here (and one may say [...]

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Out of the Silent Planet, Chs. 18-Postscript

It was actually semi-sweet to say goodbye to Out of the Silent Planet this week. In the final denouement we were treated to the foundational theology that will undergird Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Each planet is ruled by a particular eldil, or angel. In the case of Malacandra (Mars), on which this adventure takes [...]

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Out of the Silent Planet, Chs. 12-17

This week’s installment was rich. Much good commentary on language, work and productivity, knowledge, and, mostly, angelology. But what I found most intriguing was Hyoi’s account of pleasure and memory. In a passage worthy of consideration alongside Aristotle’s De Anima, Bk Gamma, Lewis writes of a conversation between Ransom and Hyoi. Ransom begins: ‘If a [...]

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