The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. Complete with loveable bears and very adult problems, That Hideous Strength exists in a universe far removed from Narnia. The King Arthur of our era leads a desperately small group of believers to resurrect Merlin, not knowing if he remained Pagan, and, if so, the good or bad kind of Pagan, to challenge the N.I.C.E. The third of the Ransom/Space trilogy, That Hideous Strength imagines a British college coopted by vast forces of evil (wittingly and unwittingly working for the devil), calling themselves the N.I.C.E., the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments. If The Abolition of Man was Lewis’s greatest work (and I’m reticent to proclaim it as such, but it is good-really good) of nonfiction, his greatest work of fiction was its expression in novel form, 1945’s That Hideous Strength. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race.
If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. If any value is retained, it is retained.
If it is rejected, all value is rejected. It is the sole source of all value judgements.
#CS LEWIS MOST FAMOUS BOOKS SERIES#
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value.
Here’s a small sampling from this profound book: Given the recent advances (make that leaps and leaps) in genetic engineering, Lewis was deeply prophetic in this. It can accomplish this, Lewis worries, mostly through birth control and eugenics. In it, Lewis takes on the very real possibility that any one single generation might attempt to remove itself from the necessary continuity of generations, proclaim itself superior to all that came before, and-even without necessarily meaning to-establish itself as the authority of all that will come after it. Many regard Lewis’s 1943 book, The Abolition of Man, to be his greatest work. While all his books are, of course, worth reading, here are the ten that every imaginative conservative should read. Yet, Lewis’s corpus is so extensive that even his most ardent admirers are unsure where to start-or where to go or where to end-with his written works. Surely, we can do better than the atheists. Even atheists read Lewis’s Christian books, if only for the art of them. While all three wrote voluminously, Lewis’s books had the broadest appeal. Lewis was the last century’s greatest Christian apologist, rivaled only by G.K.
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