#461: Reviving Nature

Merlin in C.S. Lewis's *That Hideous Strength*

Why does Merlin appear in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength? Lewis tells us he is following the pattern of the traditional fairy-tale. Literary considerations aside, Merlin is the linchpin of the spiritual drama: he is the one on whom appropriate resistance to the powers of ‘That Hideous Strength’ turns. 

The conflict between the N.I.C.E. and the merrie band at St. Anne’s on the Hill centers on the status of nature—where “nature” means both the basis and grounds of the objective moral order as Lewis explains in The Abolition of Man, and the rocks, trees and flowers that we often associate with the term. The N.I.C.E. follows “Masters” who have turned away from the organic in favor of “hygiene.” They are opposed to organisms, and seek to free humanity from the three things that “most offend the dignity of man,” namely, “birth and breeding and death.” 

As often happens, such an anti-natural philosophy bifurcates into a materialism on one side and a spiritualism on the other. As Mr. Dimble says at one point, “minds get more and more spiritual, matter gets more and more material.” The anti-natural materialism of the N.I.C.E. wants to purge the earth of its offending messiness, while manipulating matter for its own ends. They have taken over the strict materialism of the moderns by adding spiritualism to it, in order to both preserve the benefits of materialism while going beyond it.