“Several scholars were interviewed for the film, including Jay Richards, Angus Menuge, Victor Reppert, John West, and Michael Aeschliman. Scientism is the idea that science is the ultimate path to knowledge and wisdom — the only sure path — and that the spiritual realm is a mirage. Lewis never criticized science, only scientism, the abuse of science that bears an unexpected twinship with magic. — Evolution News

“… in that momentous year 1945, C. S. Lewis published the third and final volume in his series of three space-fiction, mythopoeic, dystopian novels, That Hideous Strength.The novels are hard to categorize and have never reached the levels of popularity of his Narnia chronicles and satirical and apologetic works, but their over-arching philosophical project entails a profound meditation on the  character of Western and world history over the previous 150 years but especially during the catastrophic, apocalyptic period 1914-1945.

The novel deserves comparison with the more famous dystopias such as the Russian Evgeny Zamyatin’s We(1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World(1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and also the English Catholic-convert Msgr. R.H. Benson’s apocalyptic fantasy Lord of the World(1907); but it even merits comparisons with first-order philosophical-historical writing in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1839) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1974) and with the history and philosophy of science as conveyed by Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Duhem, and the great Hungarian refugee scholars Michael Polanyi and Stanley L. Jaki. The very width of its inter-disciplinary scope and depth of its philosophical-ethical penetration make it a hard book to categorize but are also characteristics of its  importance and power as a work of metaphysical fiction.

Himself a wounded veteran of World War I, Lewis delivered in 1943, in the middle of a second, even vaster and more destructive world war, a series of invited university lectures in the north of England that were published by Oxford University Press later that year as The Abolition of Man, a dystopian title with an innocuous-sounding, specialist subtitle, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. High claims continue to be made for this short, dense, lucid expository essay; the outstanding Oxford literary scholar A. D. Nuttall (1937-2007), author of one of the finest books of the last fifty years on Shakespeare, wrote of it:

“The argument as it unfolds is dazzling. It is in a way odd that a work which so thoroughly routs whole volumes of Nietzsche and Sartre is not more widely admired, especially as the style in which it is presented is brilliantly lucid.” — Technocracy News

That Hideous Strength

“Written during the dark hours immediately before and during World War II, C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, of which That Hideous Strength is the third and final volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus’s The Plague and George Orwell’s 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of its moral concerns.

Lewis wrote. “You will understand that my (atheism) was inevitably based on what I believed to be the findings of the sciences; and those findings, not being a scientist, I had to take on trust—in fact, on authority.”

” If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels.” — The New Yorker

“Lewis, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century writer, forced those who listened to him and read his works to come to terms with their own philosophical presuppositions.” — Los Angeles Times

About the Author

C.S. Lewis was a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge universities who wrote more than thirty books in his lifetime. He died in 1963.