This paper was written in partial fulfillment of English 401, C. S. Lewis: the Legacy of His Poetic Impulse, at Montreat College in Spring 1997. Ashley Eckler retains copyright privileges; those wishing to use material from this essay may do so as long as Ashley Eckler is given appropriate recognition.

C. S. Lewis

Dr. King

May 2, 1997

Ashley Eckler

Wobbling crazily across treacherous twigs while balancing his six spindly legs on the narrow needles, the cockroach traversed through the misty night. The mud was damp and cold and water clung to the air like dew to a spider-web in the early morning. Suddenly the little insect collided with a big black wall. Its antennas flung wildly back and forth seeking a way of escape, but found none. Suddenly one of its little hair-like projections slid into a groove in the wall. What luck! Slowly it climbed the obstacle, passing from hard leather to cloth stiffened by mud and rain. Out of nowhere a whirring of wind rushed toward the unsuspecting bug knocking it ten feet back into the mesh of twigs and rocks. Undaunted the little roach repeated its perilous journey.

"Darn bugs." The soldier, hunched over in the fox-hole where he had been crouching for days, peeked over the rim of the pit. The crisp crackling of gun-shot was about to drive him insane. Month after month, day after day, hour after hour, would it never end? A pale orange glow the size of a baseball illuminated the horizon for a millisecond. All was quiet now. The world resumed its monotonous cycle and nothing was changed. Nothing that is except that the body hunched in the fox-hole would never peek over the rim of the pit again.

Physical war is something every human can identify with. The harsh, fragile life of a soldier certainly holds a severe honorableness. Yet, when transferred to another dimension, one in which the soldiers do not carry guns or drive tanks, are not shootable or even visible, suddenly a great cloud covers man's understanding. There is no air space hosting a fighter jet invasion. There is no oceanic territory trespassed by war ships. There are no camofloughed warriors sneaking across enemy lines. It is hard to imagine such a realm and what the implications of that kind of world might be. Yet the Bible portrays this scenario as reality. Ephesians 6:10 states, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

The great twentieth century British writer, C. S. Lewis, tackles such a concept in his works, The Screwtape Letters and his Space Trilogy. Walsh explains that in Screwtape, "As the reader progresses through this short book, his imagination awakes; he begins to wonder if a strictly humanistic viewpoint is adequate. Life appears to be set in a supernatural framework. Decisions about the most ordinary things are no longer purely human decisions. Nothing is merely human" (30). Again Walsh states,

None of Lewis's narratives is straightforward realism. They may contain highly realistic elements, like the faculty meeting depicted in That Hideous Strength, but the mythic, super-natural, or preternatural always figures also. True, he could discipline himself to write expository books like Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man, but these are not his central achievements. At the heart of his work are the fantasies. (12)

Lewis takes very seriously the nature of the spiritual dimension and its role in the lives of Christians. Bishop of Oxford University, Richard Harries, explains:

Then the war came and many who, horrified by the carnage of the First World War, had been pacifists, reluctantly saw that evil was abroad and that it had to be fought. In a similar way many who had been carried along in the agnosticism of the time began to wonder whether there might not be something ultimate at stake in human life. It was to this new religious seriousness that Lewis spoke. And he spoke about the reality of evil: but in a new way. (36)

Lewis's apologetic works testify to his belief in a creator God, yet Lewis strongly believed in other heavenly, as well as demonic, forces. He was concerned with the fact that, "science has helped to do away with a belief in devils, and although all the evidence is to the contrary, modern man prefers to relegate these noxious beings to medieval times" (Willis 127). To Lewis, the spiritual realm was alive and well in the current century and a force to be reckoned with.

Lewis uses these "other worldly" concepts in writing his highly imaginative Space Trilogy and Screwtape. In the writing process of these works, he is influenced by some very prominent authors who also venture into cosmic places. As Walsh states,

Certainly, he shows the traces of Charles William's presence, sometimes in a diffused way, sometimes specifically, as in his use of the Arthurian legend in That Hideous Strength... He may also have owed to Williams the insight that cosmic adventures can take place on earth as well as on Malacandra and Perelandra. Lewis's psychological and spiritual insights were deepened by Williams... (13)

George MacDonald as well lends his views to Lewis's concept of hell. The Scottish mentor tries to warn Lewis against feeling sorry for those whose fate is eternal damnation. "All hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World" (Willis 128). Screwtape also culminates out of writings by Valdemar Adolph in Letters from Hell, Stephen McKenna in Confessions of a Well - Meaning Woman, and David Linsay in Voyage to Arcturus. These books help shape the content of one of Lewis's most popular works and influence his decision to tackle such an overlooked Biblical concept.

In these wonderfully insightful stories, Lewis clearly defined his views of spiritual beings. Satan, in Lewis's mind, was not a force in equality to God. He could not be that powerful or the world would be subjected to two opposing factions of good and evil. C. S. Kilby explains:

Like most theologians, he regards evil not as a thing-in-itself but rather the absence of good. Lewis says that he believes in devils because he believes in angels, for a devil is simply a corrupted angel. Both good and bad angels are pure spirits but the latter have abused the free will given them of God and thus become what they are. (43)

Lewis describes his views on the nature of Satan in A Preface To Paradise Lost, where he states,

…a creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers - including even his power to revolt. Hence the strife is most accurately described as 'Heav'n ruining from Heav'n'… for only in so far as he also is 'Heaven - diseased, perverted, twisted, but still a native of Heaven - does Satan exist at all. It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower. (96-97)

Thus, Satan is only a creature trying to combat the ruler and creator of the universe. Though a powerful force, he is no match for the King.

Hell, as portrayed in The Screwtape Letters, is the antithesis of all that is good and heavenly. Though it does not go into great detail about the actual appearance of hell, the book does offer some symbolism that defines what demonic dwellings look like. For instance, Screwtape mentions the "light" which seems to stab at the devils, "The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives" (Screwtape, 26). Another symbol is that of the cloud of God's grace that the demons cannot penetrate. It surrounds believers creating a protective covering against outside invaders, even though the Christian is totally unaware of such a phenomenon. Lewis contrasts as well the music of heaven to the noise of hell. Screwtape loves noise. However, "the most consistent symbol, and the one that runs through the book, is that of eating. Satan is looking for food, the strong will consuming lesser wills. God, by contrast, seeks free fellowship with his creatures" (Walsh 32). This attitude of selfish consumption portrays itself in the relationship between Screwtape and Wormwood. Screwtape is not at all concerned for Wormwoods welfare. He cares only about how Wormwood conducts himself in strategizing the downfall of the human victim. There is a complete absence of mercy between the two. The only thing that matters is the advancement made for the legions of hell, no matter who is destroyed in the process. In fact, the more destruction, the better. For example, when commenting on marriage, Screwtape explains, "The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self... for us, [absorption] means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. 'To be' means 'to be in competition'" (92). Another example of this attitude shows itself in the way Screwtape expresses himself to Wormwood. When the protégé demon fumbles, Screwtape rebukes him in a degrading tone, "You shall pay for that as well as your other blunders. Meanwhile I enclose a little booklet, just issued, on the new House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters. It is profusely illustrated and you will not find a dull page in it" (111).

One of the most convincing themes of the book portrays a view of the world as pictured solely through the eyes of hell. "Hell's Intelligence Department, though it has worked hard to do so, has never been able to discover one great fact about God, that is, His disinterested love for verminous man and His wish to make every man more individual, more himself in the right sense, rather than, as is the custom in hell, simply to absorb him" (Kilby 40). The legions of Hell could care less about the human race. They seek solely to destroy man in order to get at the "Enemy." Satan manages to distort every truth that heaven puts forth. When God seeks to fill man with His spirit, Screwtape totally misses the point. He sees it as an opportunity to detach man from reality. In his explanation to Wormwood, he states,

Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so. (68)

In every act of God, Hell steps in to twist and destroy. They consume the life that God seeks to give.

Screwtape is not the only book that portrays these hellish creatures and attitudes. The Space Trilogy as well contains elements of the supernatural. Besides the science fiction plot throughout the series, Lewis creates supernatural creatures that correlate with Biblical truth. These creatures represent the Christian myth of devils and angels. Hell is represented by "the bent ones" in Out of the Silent Planet, the "Un-man" in Perelandra, and the great Oyarsa in That Hideous Strength.

Lewis first introduces the "devil" in Out of the Silent Planet. He is the bent Oyarsa that governs the earth. "[Lewis] pictures the desecration of the planet and the loss of most of its atmosphere not as an inevitable geophysical process, but as the doing of the "bent" Oyarsa, the angelic viceroy who had once been God's appointed governor to rule the earth" (Walsh 85). In fact, the fallen Oyarsa is the reason that Thulcandra is the "silent planet." None of the other Oyarsas will allow any contact with Thulcandra because of its fallen state. The Oyarsa of Malacandra explains this to Ransom:

Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world - he was brighter and greater than I - and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent. That was before any life came on your world. Those were the Bent Years of which we still speak in the heavens, when he was not yet bound to Thulcandra but free like us. It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own. He smote your moon with his left hand and with his right he brought the cold death on my harandra before its time; if by my arm Maleldil had not opened the handramits and let out the hot springs, my world would have been un-peopled. We did not leave him so at large for long. There was great war, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own world as Maleldil taught us. (120-121)

Weston and Devine, the greedy gold-seeker and the half-demented scientist, are used as tools of this "bent one" on Malacandra. They try to carry out the evil plans of this Oyarsa in order to control the planet.

Perelandra weaves a slightly different tale. It is the retelling of the creation story, or myth as Lewis would call it,

By an act of imagination, both probing and soaring, Lewis has created a world in which goodness is at least as convincing as evil, and where the very taste of water and fruits is the objective correlative of the newly minted goodness of the planet. To read the book and then return in thought and activity to this planet is to see the familiar world in a very unfamiliar light. Perelandra leaves one the taste of sheer goodness, and that it is a rare and unsettling flavor. (Walsh 109)

Paradise is still in existence on this beautiful planet, yet Satan comes ready to destroy that utopia by tempting the Queen, the Eve of the planet. Again he is represented by Weston from Thulcandra, the silent planet. Ransom is sent to Perelandra to try to prevent this from happening. After his initial beating by the "thing" he realizes this purpose,

When he was able, he got up and set out to search for the thing. He must either try to prevent it from meeting the Lady or at least be present when they met. What he could do, he did not know; but it was clear beyond all evasion that this was what he had been sent for. Weston's body, traveling in a space-ship, had been the bridge by which something else had invaded Perelandra - whether that supreme and original evil whom in Mars they call The Bent One, or one of his lesser followers, made no difference. (111-112)

The description Lewis writes of Weston's metamorphosis into the "Un-man" clearly parallels the description of demon possession described in the Bible. Interestingly enough, it is directly after Weston declares himself god, "Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil." that he goes into a convulsion that throws him to the ground (96). At one point in the seizures, Weston, the man, cries out, "Ransom, Ransom! For Christ's sake don't let them----" and then he falls to the earth (96). From that point on, he has no power over his own body. In Luke 8, Jesus heals a demon-possessed man who had been chained and had broken free, being driven by the power of the demon and not able to control his own actions. He did not wear clothes and lived in caves or other solitary places. Weston, once possessed by the Un-man, was also a controlled man. Brown describes it this way:

Thoroughly possessed by servants of the bent eldil, he [Weston] is little more than a hollow shell through which its power has gained access to Perelandra and by means of which it moves about and speaks. Hence Ransom regards the animated Weston body as an "Un-man." The "Un-man" is exceedingly clever, patient and devious, though beneath its superficial guile lurks a mindless destructiveness and yawns a gulf of emptiness. (60)

He goes on to describe the supernatural power of this being. The Un-man can go for days without rest seeking to fulfill his one goal, to win the mind of the Green Lady. Just as Satan tried to seduce Eve in the Garden of Eden, so this evil creature continually attempts to win the heart and soul of a perfect creature so unaware of evil. Ransom almost loses his life trying to save her. "The cave where Ransom slays the Unman evokes all sights and horrors." (Walsh 108). It is here that he slays forever the awful presence of evil on Perelandra. A fiery decent into the pit definitely signifies a description of hell in the Bible, and Lewis makes an obvious parallel to it. Evil is cast down and good is the victor.

Moving on to That Hideous Strength, Lewis brings his story back to Thulcandra, "the anti-utopia of a planet-wide machine sterile of all organic life" (Kreeft 39). Again, the supernatural plays a very important role in the plot. The high echelons working at the N.I.C.E. are thoroughly evil, seeking to become the gods that control the planet. Mark Studdock, the innocent protégé in all of this, is horrified as Straik explains to him, "Don't you see that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty?" (That Hideous Strength, 179). Their evil schemes are portrayed through the "head" that they are attempting to clone. This hideous "thing" with brains spilling out its top represents the result of man's heart abandoned to evil.

As a result of engaging the evil forces of the planet to empower them, the "scientists" at the N.I.C.E. also unwillingly call down all the Oyarsas of the universe. Lewis writes an interesting portrayal of these supernatural beings:

Then of the sun's dying, the Earth gripped, suffocated, in airless cold, the black sky lit only with stars. And then, not even stars: the heat-death of the universe, utter and final blackness of non-entity from which Nature knows no return. Another life?... But the old life gone, all its times, all its hours and days, gone. Can even Omnipotence bring back? Where do years go, and why? Man would never understand it. The misgiving deepened. Perhaps there was nothing to be understood. Saturn, whose name in the heavens is Lurga, stood in the Blue Room. His spirit lay upon the house, or even on the whole earth, with a cold pressure such as might flatten the very orb of Tellus to a wafer. (That Hideous Strength, 325-326)

It is a mysterious tale that Lewis weaves. As evil confronts good, the hideousness of evil is truly represented by descriptions of the rooms and activity at the N.I.C.E.

Lewis not only writes of supernatural beings, but sets his tales in indefinite time periods as well. Time is portrayed in an eternal format. As Stewart explains,

Lewis's time frame postulates, on the one hand, human history, planetary evolution, and divine chronology; and on the other, a perfection of these three into the future. Man is always located between infinite antiquity and infinite futurity. This is why the pace at St. Anne's is leisurely. The urgency of life has to do not with tomorrow, but with eternity. This perhaps explains why Lewis is so cavalier about "clock time" in That Hideous Strength but so precise about setting. You can draw an accurate map of Edgestow; you cannot diagram the time scheme with comparable precision. (254)

The contrast between good and evil is brought out in all of the four books. However, one cannot grasp the full impact of evil without considering what forces are on the side of God. In That Hideous Strength, a sharp distinction is made between the side of good and the side of evil. The whole atmosphere at the N.I.C.E. is representative of the effects of evil. The room that Mark Studdock is forced to enter for his initiation is decorated with irritating circles all over the ceiling, symbolizing the confusing chaos of a hellish environment. As he himself describes,

A man of trained sensibility would have seen at once that the room was ill-proportioned, not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike. It was too high and too narrow... The point of the arch was not in the center: the whole thing was lop-sided... Then he noticed the spots on the ceiling. They were not mere specks of dirt or discolouration. They were deliberately painted on: little round black spots placed at irregular intervals on the pale mustard-coloured surface. (297)

On the other hand, the calm, peacefulness of St. Anne's is a delightful picture of how God orders things in His universe. Ransom himself is a type of Christ figure who can even tame the wildest of animals, as seen in the example of Mr. Bultitude. Ivy Maggs very patiently explains this to Jane Studdock after the appearance of Mr. Bultitude which causes quite some shock. She politely exclaims, "Mrs. Studdock... if the Director wanted to have a tiger about the house it would be safe. That's the way he has with animals. There isn't a creature in the place that would go for another or for us once he's had his little talk with them. Just the same as he does with us. You'll see" (164).

Of course, the ultimate form of good is Maleldil, who represents Christ. Ransom first comes to recognize this divine being while traveling to Malacandra. Walsh explains: "God is not absent from space; indeed, if the mode of His presence varies from one place to another, he is especially present in "empty space." The reader also recognizes that the war between good and evil is cosmic. Mars is merely one battlefront" (92).

Just as Maleldil represents Christ, so the eldil are representative of heavenly angels. They serve to communicate messages between man and Maleldil and they protect humans from harm. The Psalmist says in Psalm 91:11, "For He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone." As Ransom returns to Thulcandra in Out of the Silent Planet, the eldila are sent to guide and protect him in much the same way as heavenly angels protect humans today. Walsh explains, "Invisible eldila share the voyage to protect him, and the craft barely reaches earth before a Malacandran self-destruct device reduces it to nothing visible" (91).

Ransom is at first unsure of the eldils existence. Finally, a sorn explains it to him in Malacandra:

Body is movement. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge - the last we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His "light" is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in - even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. (Out of the Silent Planet, 94)

Lewis himself eloquently verbalizes a description of angels in his poem On Being Human,

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence

Behold the Forms of nature. They discern

Unerringly the Archetypes, all the verities

Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.

Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,

Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,

High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal

Huge Principles appear. (Poems 34)

In Perelandra, Ransom becomes very frustrated that he cannot seem to communicate effectively the danger of the Un-man to the Green Lady's uncorrupted mind. She has no concept of what evil is like. In this world, brilliantly portrayed as untainted by sin, everything lives in harmony, grace, and beauty. The minds of the King and Queen of this paradise are "young" as the Green Lady defines it, because they have no concept of doing wrong:

Sweetly and gently this time Maleldil makes me older. He shows me all the natures of these blessed creatures... That very ancient world to which you journeyed was put under the eldila. In your own world also they ruled once: but not since our beloved became a Man. In your world they linger still. But in our world, which is the first of worlds to wake after the great change, they have no power. There is nothing now between us and Him. They have grown less and we have increased. And now Maleldil puts it into my mind that this is their glory and their joy. (Perelandra, 82)

Moving on to The Screwtape Letters, Lewis gives one of his most moving descriptions of heaven. Here all the riches of God's grace and mercy are revealed. Screwtape laments to Wormwood that the death of the man is the end of their career. One almost feels sorry for the demons who will never experience the glory of God.

As he saw you, he also saw Them.... He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not "Who are you?" but "So it was you all the time…" He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man. You would like, if you could, to interpret the patient's prostration in the Presence, his self-abhorrence and utter knowledge of his sins (yes, Wormwood, a clearer knowledge even than yours) on the analogy of your own choking and paralyzing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that breathes from the heart of Heaven. But it's all nonsense. Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains. They would not barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a rattled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. He is caught up into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values. (Screwtape Letters, 158-160)

So far, an examination of these three books have revealed Lewis's view on the spiritual dimension of the universe. However, one must now study the implications of this dimension. It is not enough just to know that these beings exist, one must work out how they affect every day life. The Screwtape Letters was written for this very purpose. As human beings, man sees only the physical world around him; he does not realize that a whole other world influences him every day. Grabbing for his mind are two opposing forces; one which seeks to destroy and one which seeks to give an eternity of truthful life.

The plot of the book itself contains a typical human being who leads a normal life and wants to get to heaven. He is not conspicuous to anyone else, but his life is worth much in the eyes of demonic angels. They track him like a hawk after dinner trying to capture his soul and thus get at God. As the spiritual beings, in this case Screwtape and Wormwood, track this little life, they are concerned, not with the big events, but with the little everyday occurrences. Screwtape knows that hell and heaven, God and Christ, are ultimate reality. There is a war waging for the soul of this puny human life of which the man has no concept. It is up to Wormwood to keep him in darkness forever, literally. Walsh again points out:

This point of view directs a powerful beam into all sorts of odd corners of human life, revealing issues of life and spiritual death. Newspaper headlines sink in importance. Although the book is set in World War II, Screwtape declares that war is neither favorable nor unfavorable to the purposes of Hell. On the other hand, an aggrieved feeling , "I ought to have sometime for myself," may be the thin entering wedge for self-pity and incomplete obedience to God proving in the long run far more perilous than pulling the trigger on a machine gun. Screwtape's angle of vision has an immense simplicity and clarity. The only question he asks of any human deed is whether it leads the soul closer to God or farther from Him. (22)

As Wormwood learns, there are different strategies with which the demons keep man in deception to the truth. One of these is to make him give up what he delights in in order to gain what is considered the "right thing," whether it be people, possessions, food, or principles. Walsh comments that, "Hell gets one of its greatest satisfactions from hearing a patient say on its arrival there, 'I now see that I spent most of life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked'" (42).

There are other options open to Wormwood as well. The feat of deluding his victim into thinking that there is no ultimate reality or objective truth is an effective tool. As long as Wormwood can keep the humans from discussing together their struggles in an honest way and therefore discovering the grace and mercy of an infinite God, he can control the man's life. Secluded self-righteousness is always a helpful tactic. In all of these pride can easily sneak in unobtrusively and snag the man's heart for evil.

Screwtape prides himself on the fact that he understands all the facets of human society and therefore knows best how to achieve his goal of human domination. He acts as a sociologist. One of the greatest examples of this is the relationship between the man and his mother. Here Screwtape shows himself an expert on the parent/child relationship. He suggests that Wormwood use four different methods of keeping dissension between the two. First of all, the son should be focused on his inner thoughts. He should build up slight irritations with his mother in his mind and never out in the open. Secondly, he should keep his prayers for her on a high spiritual level, focused on her sins and not on asking for practical help with her physical conditions. Her "soul" will eventually become a second person of which he knows little about and his prayers will be ineffective. Third, Wormwood should build up the slight expressions and mannerisms that each hate in the other and magnify them. Fourthly,

In civilized life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose [the mother's guardian demon] must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words. while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. (22-23)

In such a way, Screwtape proves himself a brilliant strategist on the human psyche and how it functions in society. Screwtape, however is not the only one with this classification. Walsh points out "It is interesting that the weak, ambitious young don of That Hideous Strength will also be a sociologist. Sociologists were evidently no favorites of Lewis's" (25).

Another major strategy of hell is to keep the victim from acknowledging and acting on any amount of truth. As the "Enemy" enlightens his heart with truthful insight into reality, Hell strives to callous his heart to such feelings until he becomes immune to them and is no longer capable to act upon them. The more he sees truth, yet never does anything about it, the more he will not be able to act out his passions. In Screwtape, Wormwood is severely rebuked for allowing his man to experience real pleasure by a walk in the woods and reading a book in which he found enjoyment. Screwtape reminds him that his goal is to detach the victim from the "Enemy" by first detaching him from himself. To accomplish this, he must be detached from real experiences in life. The senior demon goes on to describe how God also wants this man to lose himself. But, this is meant to be an un-selfish move of letting go of his will so that God can fill him with His Spirit. Screwtape, of course an expert on how that human heart works, seeks to distort this method by perverting it into a letting go of all that the man likes and desires. "The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained..." (68). To remedy the situation that Wormwood has so foolishly allowed his victim to encounter (that of real pleasure), Screwtape counsels him to

prevent his [the man] doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. (69-70)

Wither, in That Hideous Strength, is a similar example of a man who, even at the end of all scheming, cannot feel outside himself any longer. While escaping from his own banquet at the N.I.C.E., after the animals had been let loose by Merlin's supernatural powers, his mind operated as a machine, devoid of human emotion:

It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. (That Hideous Strength, 353)

The final result of a life-time of giving in to the devil, or as man would reason - to himself, is a hideous detachment to all that is good and real and truthful. As the light of God is slowly pushed out, so the darkness comes in stealthily, not in any way alarming. One day the soul wakes up and finds that his heart is hard and he has no recollection of how it got that way. Lewis is trying to warn Christians of this danger through Screwtape and his science fiction novels. Every thought, every action, every reaction counts for eternity. If one does not believe in a spiritual world, this realization will come too late. As Lewis so eloquently expresses in his sermon The Weight of Glory:

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still - just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif of a prig - the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we" - and at the "we always do." And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. (62-63)

In the Space Trilogy, Lewis weaves the implications of the spiritual world through different complex plots. In Out of the Silent Planet, he sends Ransom out to another world where the philologist finds the reality of a spirit world and an ultimate creator God. It is here in Malacandra that Ransom is subtly attacked by the bent Oyarsa as he travels through the forest in search of escape from the sorns and Weston and Devine. The enemy puts questioning thoughts in his mind of the futility of going on. As he walks for the first time across the forest of the Malacandran landscape, he experiences weird sensations in which he finds himself thinking about his own body in the third person. "The delusions recurred every few minutes as long as this stage of the journey lasted. He learned to stand still mentally, as it were, and let them roll over his mind. It was no good bothering about them. When they were gone you could resume sanity again" (Out of the Silent Planet, 51). Ransom however is encouraged and helped by the eldils.

In Perelandra, these spirit powers assign Ransom a specific job to do. It is here that he realizes the perilous strategy of Satan against man. It is up to Ransom to save a young world suddenly tormented by the bent one who seeks to destroy its paradise. The Un-man must claim victory over the Green Lady. "Weston's task is to make what she clearly knows is contrary to Maleldil's command seem to her nevertheless good. That accomplished… it would then be a simple matter for him to nudge her over the line so that she actually wills to do it, and then she and her world would be fallen" (Brown 61). The Un-man tries to persuade the Green Lady that Maleldil has created the prohibition in the hopes that his creation will show their free will and disobey. Then she and her King will not be young anymore. Weston also tries to set her up as a tragic heroine who has to overcome the lack of imagination of her husband and dare him to go farther than the boundaries set up for them. She is even drawn to wear clothes at one point. However, all this she rejects, largely due to the persistent warning of Ransom. Here God is again leaving the decision either to obey Him or unleash evil up to mankind. "On Malacandra life exists at a low level of moral risk; no serious rebellion against Oyarsa has any chance of success. By contrast, Perelandra is as vulnerable to ruin as it is beautiful; there are no angelic powers instructed to save it from itself" (Walsh 107).

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis brings those heavenly powers home to Thulcandra, a setting in which modern man can identify. Futuristic science and the danger of giving the human race over to powers of darkness if not handled carefully definitely forms a theme of this book. That Hideous Strength examines more closely how man is affected by demonic powers. It seeks to retell the Tower of Babel myth from the Bible. Just as wicked men from Old Testament times attempted to build an edifice reaching to the sky, so the intellectuals at Bracton College sought to design a building that "was one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of New York" (That Hideous Strength, 23). Their plans were foiled, however, for the gods responded much in the same way as they did in the Bible. Genesis 11:5 states, "But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." The gods at the N.I.C.E. acted in exactly the same manner, so that "fresh gibberish in a great variety of tones rang out from several places at once" (That Hideous Strength, 346). The world around them disintegrates at an alarming rate. Chaos, disorganization, panic, and fear all take hold. The result of giving themselves over to the powers of darkness produces death. This scene in the banquet hall is the culmination of a period of time of giving themselves over to the prompting of the demonic forces. Howard says: "The only trouble is that the drama in this tale happens to disclose for us the diabolical horrors that stand at the far end of the disjuncture of mind and body... In our human and mortal realm here, words without meaning, idea without action, mind without body, all turn out to be chaos" (126).

Lewis eloquently paints a picture depicting the reality of the horrors and glories of this unseen world. It is much easier for Christians, or anyone, to imagine a battle such as the scene described in the beginning of this paper, however, it is just such a clear picture that Screwtape and his forces of evil want to keep out of human minds. If spiritual warfare were to become such a universal truth, Satan's job would increase greatly.

Lewis uses fiction to depict a very serious subject in Christian theology. He desires Christians to be aware of spiritual beings and their effect on everyday life. This realization leads to a stronger development of the believers faith and a more victorious life-style. It also causes the Christian to become more dependent on God as he lives out his faith. The Screwtape Letters, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength seek to display, in an incredibly imaginative manner, the concept of spiritual warfare and its implications on the human heart.

Though the human soul is sought after by heavenly beings far more powerful than it, it is mankind which experiences God's grace and love in a way angels and demons will never know. Lewis eloquently puts it like this:

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery

Guards us, like air, from heavens too big to see;

Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity

And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.

Yet here, within this tiny, charm'd interior,

This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares

With living men some secrets in a privacy

Forever ours, not theirs. (Poems 35).

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