SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ESCHATOLOGY OF C.S. LEWIS PT 2
"A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divoirce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past." C.S. Lewis, 1954 Inaugural Lecture as Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University
As we come to part two of this little series on the eschatology of C.S. Lewis, I need to pause and make an essential clarification, lest what follows here and in the next parts be misunderstood. I do not mean to convey the idea that Lewis had his own eschatological doctrine other than that of what we may call the "credal church", i.e., those articles of the Nicene creed which, as an Anglican (with very strong Eastern Orthodox leanings, as we shall see in a subsequent section), he heard every Sunday at mass, namely, the section that covers Christ with the words, "And he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; Whose kingdom, shall have no end." What is noticeable about this statement is that it does not commit itself to any of the current "dispensationalisms" or "millenialisms", and as will be seen, Lewis follows this mindset quite rigorously, and to some unusual results when considered in juxtaposition with those millenialisms. In short, the Nicene creed makes no mention of a "time limit" or "millenial reign" of Christ, whether a-, pre-, or post-. It is merely a kingdom without end. But more of this later. The other thing I mean to convey is that, while Lewis has no commitment to any millenialist or dispensationalist doctrine whatsoever, he does set eschatology within a wider cultural and spiritual diagnosis which we might go so far as to call a "theological pathology." This pathology he intimates in the seventh chapter of his well-known fictionlized "advice letters" from Screwtape, a "senior devil" in the "lowerarchy" of Hell, issuing his advice to his nephew Wormwood on how to tempt his human "charge" into everlasting Hell. One sure-fire method is to get humans to worship - even without knowing that they are - the "grand abstractions", life forces, and "the Christ spirit" and so on:
"The 'Life Force' , the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work - the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls 'Forces' while denying the existence of 'spirits' - then the end of the war will be in sight. (Emphasis added)
It is this theme of the "Materialist Magician" that one encounters again and again in Lewis' work, and
particularly in his works that deal with apocalyptic subjects and themes, That Hideous Strength, and the last of the Narnian Chronicles, The Last Battle. It is to be noted that Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength in 1945, eleven years before finished the last of the Narnian Chronicles, The Last Battle. I do not think this was accidental, nor do I think that Lewis in a certain sense could have written The Last Battle without having laid a thorough groundwork in That Hideous Strength, and in some of his other writings that deal with the Materialist Magician.The Materialist Magician, or the Scientific Magician, the type of characters that Lewis also called "men without chests," men wholly given over to the process of science with little to no regard for the morality either of the process nor its outcome is the main type of character encountered in That Hideous Strength. These "men without chests," however, are not merely materialists, but rather, true Baconians: they are interested in the pursuit of any technique that will confer unlimited, godlike, power to them, including immortality. Thus, they pursue both science and magic (in the "traditional" sense) as a means to that power. They are not interested in science or magic as true or systems of truth, as ends in themselves, but rather as mere means to the end, which is their own untrammeled and unlimited power. They are "men without chests". Were we to use the contemporary term, we would describe them as transhumanists, and Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength as perhaps the world's first "transhumanist warning fiction" in a way that even Percy Shelley's Frankenstein was not (and yes, I said Percy Shelley, not Mary Shelley, q.v. Scott DeHart's Shelley Unbound). This type of individual, and the character of the "science" he advocates has even informed my own writing, as, for example, in the opening paragraph of my book The Grid of the Gods:
Modern science is but a technique of the imagination to bring into reality the operations of the magical intellect and the mythologies of the ancients, with consistent and predictable regularity. This implies, therefore, that the magical intellect encountered so often in ancient texts, myths, and monuments is, in fact, the product of a decayed science, but a science nonetheless. Much of modern physics may be viewed as but Hermetic metaphysics with "topological" equations, and by a similar process of examination, much of modern genetics may be viewed as but the myths of Sumer, Babylon, and even the Mayans, given flesh by the techniques of genetic engineering.(Joseph P. Farrell, The Grid of the Gods, p. iii.)
By the phrase "decayed science" I was attempting to convey not merely a decline in scientific progress and technique into the realm of myth and fantasy, but also a moral and spiritual decay that this type of science represents.
In Lewis this decay is represented by the four antagonists or villains of the Space Trilogy, and especially in the last book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, the physicist Weston, the neuro-scientist Filostrato, the coldly calculating and materialist "psycho-analyst" or psychiatrist Frost and his prince-nez spectacles which always seem to catch the light in just the right way so as to obscure his eyes, and the Deputy Director of the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments(N.I.C.E.), Wither. Even that institution becomes, in its own twisted caricature of the communio sanctorum, a character of its own, a kind of mutiply-schizoid personality of various villains, each at their own stage of "development" in the narcissistic quest for power, a DARPA-like entity filled with people of similar outlook and mentality, topped by those four villains. The physicist Weston, who appears in the first two novels of the trilogy, is the materialist-magician in pursuit of power through the colonization and conquest of space, and willing to wantonly destroy any life forms he encounters along the way to do it.
Filostrato is the truly mad scientist who quests for a pure transhumanist world freed of nasty organic "messes", as his following discourse on life and vegetation from That Hideous Strength reveals:
"Oh, yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the brier. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilized tree in Persia. It was a French attache who had it because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."
"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.
"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muss and mess."
From here the conversation degenerates as Filostrato outlines his vision for a perfectly hygienic world, absent of trees and other organic life, concluding with the observation that "In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life... all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it." Filostrato is thus the quintessential "man without a chest," without a heart, the man who mistakes reason for mere ratiocination, with no place for the emotions. It is telling that in the novel, Filostrato is the scientist tasked with keeping "alive" the head and brain of a guillotined murderer from France; the head resting on a pedestal in a special room that is temperature controlled, and with hoses supplying oxygen and liquids to keep its brain - which the N.I.C.E. has stimulated and enlarged by some kind of growth hormone - alive. With Filostrato, the transhumanist quest for immortality via technology has seemingly been achieved.
But it was Frost - the man with the reflecting prince nez glasses - that talked the execution victim into allowing the experiment (to the victim's own apparent horror), and it is Frost who thinks that, rather than enabling the continued existence of the severed "brain" and its erstwhile owner, that "the Head" became the means of some entirely different entity to enter our world, an entity that he and the higher initiates of the N.I.C.E. call "macrobes", or large intelligent life forms, forms which both the materialist and the magicians at the institute know to be quite old, and from High Antiquity, the real sources of science and sorcery. He is aided in this quest by an apostate clergyman (yet another lesser villain and yet another type of a "man without a chest" or a materialist magician), and by the Deputy Director of the N.I.C.E., the character Wither. Wither is the quintessential man without a chest, for years of "meditation" and "astral projection" have completely diffused his personality to the point that he is never completely present, anywhere, and "projections" of him can be seen wandering all over the institution's grounds in bewildering "speed", appearing first here, then there, beyond the ability of any human to move by merely bodily means. Wither, in short, is the magician part of the Institute, the part dabbling in "occult practices", and, like the classical occultist, speaking a kind of politically correct bureaucratese that commits to nothing, while managing to sound like something, and concealing much. In these speeches Lewis is at his writing best, managing to convey the character of the man (such as it is), through a kind of memorable writing and diction made all the more memorable because nothing specific that Wither ever says manages to stick in the readers' minds!
All of these characters have, of course, their "good" foils, with the two leading characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, underscoring other themes that one encounters in Lewis' eschatology, two of the most important of which are (In Jane's case) that not all prescient dreams or visions are of the devil, but merely a natural part of human nature that some (the N.I.C.E.) would seek to use for ill, and others (the "good guys") would seek to use for good. The second theme is that evil can be resisted, and indeed, must be resisted even, if necessary, unto death, in Mark's case.
There one final and necessary character of the story, and in a transhumanist warning eschatological novel, it is fitting that this character becomes the Elijah of the story, the prophet taken up to heaven, only to be returned to Earth much later than the time he left it, in order to "prophecy" to the final generation; this is the Druidic magician Ambrosius Merlinus, or simply, Merlin, who unlike the materialist magicians of the N.I.C.E., is the real thing, a real magician, able to work real spells, without the accoutrements of severed heads in hermetically sealed rooms with hoses for air and liquid, without the use of rockets and particle accelerators, and who, unlike Filostrato, glories in nature and is unwilling to vivisect it. He represents that ancient magic from High Antiquity, when there was no dividing line between "science" and "magic". There was only "wisdom", saptientia and scientia in the older senses.
Merlin brings the whole effort of N.I.C.E. crashing down by casting a Babel spell, and confusing the language of all the transhumanist technocrats of the N.I.C.E., and apt and ironic punishment for a institution filled with bureaucrats and technocrats, each speaking their own increasingly specialized language, and trying to "co-ordinate" with each other (a co-ordination, let it be noted, that Lewis says is possible by a machine that does it all!). In some of the more amusing scenes of the novel, people start talking gibberish at a banquet in honour of the N.I.C.E. and its newly-acquired sovereign status. Thanks to Merlinus' intervention, the apocalypse is averted as the N.I.C.E. falls apart, its leaders die, and with it and them, its designs collapse. And with that, Lewis's space trilogy eucatastrophe comes to its happy end.
The lesson behind all of this, however, may be missed, until one juxtaposes what has happened with the millenialist dispensationalist systems known as post-millenialism, for what Filostrato, Frost, Wither and their associates were trying to do was usher in a "millenium", a golden age kingdom where they would be the gods, by means of technocracy - applied science and magic - all while maintaining a public posture that there was no such thing as "milleniums" at all (which is of course the doctrine of a-millenialism). In the process, they committed horrors and crimes that are scarcely imaginable, as most post-millenial systems from the Inquisition to the New England radical abolitionists usually do.
But what happens when the efforts to resist all of this prove unsuccessful, and when there is no apparent intervention and everything seems truly, genuinely, utterly and completely, hopeless?
See you on the flip side...
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