“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour, / England hath need of thee, she is a fen / of stagnant waters” begins a famous sonnet by William Wordsworth about the spiritual troubles of two hundred years back. Of course, things seem just as catastrophic today as they did in 1802. After the English people voted for Brexit, the elites of England seem to have declared war on the country’s culture and liberties. They are swiftly bankrupting the country and breaking its party system; they make a mockery of the established Christian religion while the king celebrates Muslim holidays; they have invited into the country uncounted millions of strangers, many of whom have no idea what British civilization means, while arresting law-abiding citizens for wrong-think and releasing horrible criminals from jail.

　　The English people tell pollsters and anyone who will listen that this is miserable stuff, that they hate their elites, who among other things censor these complaints, and that their confidence is about to break. We commiserate with them, but from a certain distance. I’ve noticed that some of my English friends have moved from a moderate, cosmopolitan libertarianism to full-blown patriotism that we might recognize ourselves—“for England, Harry, and St. George.”

　　We can ask ourselves, how did the mother of Parliaments, the origin of modern liberty fall into despotism? We are used to thinking about Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when we try to understand such horror. The disfiguring power of the modern state, with technology and ideology, war and poverty, aided by fanatical young radicals—that’s the minimum necessary to exercise tyranny, according to Orwell’s description. But what is tyranny like in its first moment, rather than its full expression? For that, like Orwell, we should turn to C. S. Lewis.

　　This is the 80th anniversary of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the third in a trilogy of science fiction novels that describe the modern condition. In America, we sometimes joke that men are from Mars, while women are from Venus. To Lewis, these are myths worth expounding on a large scale, as pagan and Christian, as war and the garden of Eden, in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. He returns to Earth for the finale, to England and, possibly, the end of the world.

　　The England Lewis describes in That Hideous Strength (the title is a reference to the Tower of Babel, from a sixteenth-century poem) is deeply progressive, indeed. The woman at the center of the story, Jane, makes every effort to not think of herself as her husband Mark’s wife, so that she can have her own identity—she would like to be known for a PhD instead. Meanwhile, England is coming under the power of an elite that centers on an institution called the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, or NICE, a mix of every evil known to man, which ensnares Mark with offers of prestige. The end of the world seems imminent, since neither the natural partnership to which man is inclined nor the greatest partnership of which man is capable makes sense anymore.

　　Mark leaves his boring, provincial, old-fashioned Bracton College for the allure of NICE, because he thinks of himself as Progressive. This has not made him a good friend, a good husband, or a good scholar in sociology, but he perseveres—his motives are largely outlined in Lewiss previous 1944 lecture, “The Inner Ring.” Fashionable people, ideas, and cliques have replaced for him anything he can call his own; glamour has replaced experience; he is not even aware that he is a disappointment to his wife, who is considering her situation, not to say her options.

　　Every step Mark takes on the path to damnation is a nightmare to Jane, who thus becomes aware of herself, and, one almost wants to say, becomes a woman. In her newfound fear, weakness, uncertainty—Lewis doesn’t expect that being a woman is easy—she seeks comfort, help, not from her husband, nor from modern psychology, but from an older woman who sends her to a very old source of wisdom rather like the literature on which she failed to write her dissertation. Jane’s predicament, now becomes existential, completes or replaces her education. It leads to history, myth, and theology, to Merlin and to Christ.

　　Comparatively, Mark is a shallow creature, a conformist. He becomes interesting as he suffers, selling his soul. The shame of being unfashionable, not an insider, the fear of losing his career or livelihood, eventually fear for his freedom and life. These dangers wake him up gradually to the fact that he’s the prized victim of the experiments conducted at NICE, which seemed, to begin with, to only be experiments in reorganizing English society, whether it be the education, the media, or the policing. NICE is a prophetic embodiment of what we now call “the deep state.”

　　A return to That Hideous Strength could show us to ourselves with a clarity Orwell never achieved, and we might learn from Lewis’s humanity.

　　As a couple, Jane and Mark are as self-important and lacking in self-knowledge as you and I might be. Individually, alone, vulnerable, they find in their suffering what they stand to lose—their souls. As the author, Lewis is, like a priest, their constant companion, he knows them better than they know themselves, and he has a startling honest way of piercing their illusions and encouraging the readers to enter into their drama as well as to apply the moral lessons of his scrutiny to themselves.

　　The strongest part of the story is the discovery that these Progressive protagonists are Christians in waiting. They are believers—but faith has been laughed out of court, so far as they can tell, by the England that made them who they are. Atheism is a strong word, perhaps not respectable, but it’s the air intelligent or ambitious people breathe. It weakens them to the point that they cannot be friends, much less married, but it weakens the elites of England to the point that no one will act against obvious wickedness; nor can the people cry out to God against their oppression when the violence begins.

　　The novel is too full of references, notes, and suggestions about modern life to summarize, all I can do in a brief review is to show its four major parts, for readers to see their way through and enjoy Lewis’s erudition. First, there is the dystopia—the sketch of an England taken over by what we call “scientism,” a cruel, mediocre, immodest vision of power that lacks any kind of moderation and would therefore tyrannize people, indeed the world. This is the part Orwell liked. It is realistic, which might mean ruthless; it is strange, however, to think that that is what decent, yet sophisticated people believe in—doom.

　　Second, there are Mark and Jane. Here, the themes are love and women, so internal monologue matters a great deal. In this Lewis follows the path of the modern novel as it developed everywhere but in America. Compare the female novelists in England, or Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, with the male-dominated American novels. Lewis shows great confidence in turning female insecurity, as people might now say, into tenderness. In restoring something sacramental to marriage, he allows his readers to see how much more love is like surrender to a woman than a man, who is possessive.

　　Third, there is the element of fantasy that Orwell so disliked, but which modern audiences have loved so much for so long, going back to Romanticism. Putting together technical institutions and feminine longings is difficult enough by itself; Lewis therefore uses something like counterpoint and hyperbole to alternate those stories—but he eventually brings them together in an even more surprising way, in a mythological account of the transformation of paganism into Christianity. That’s his alternative to Progress and it involves the vision of a benevolent monarchy ruled by the major figure in his trilogy, a Mr. Elwin Ransom.

　　Finally, the college, the only other vision of a community, an attempt to mix “town and gown,” or the moral and intellectual demands of civilization. Lewis gives least attention to this aspect, partly because the story depends on the failure of the college community. But it may be the most important for us. We’re not only trying to defend civilization, but we’re somehow caught up in Enlightenment. Lewis announces its failure, which justifies his recourse to mythology. We’re now living out the consequences of that failure, so we might take seriously his prophetic or prescient vision.

　　Higher education is a source of the intellectual and moral corruption that leads to tyranny. Lewis, however, isn’t primarily worried about ideology, but about its moral origins. Atheism is one part of it; pride is another; combined in NICE, they create a cruel intelligence that seeks to prove its superiority by inflicting torture. Modern art is involved, as well as desecration. One could say of NICE that lawlessness is its only law. Power to improve life and the belief that life is worthless are the means and end of this vision—rather like the progressive who think humanity is a cancer on the earth, but that we should be kind in affirming people’s identities.

　　Confronted with this pathology politicized, mythology might seem a paltry defense. I’m not sure I can defend Lewis as an artist—but has he not seen us as we are? Is it not true that the decent people facing up to tyranny in our times are mostly fans of Tolkien and Lewis? Do we not encourage our children to read their books in the secret hope that they will give them faith, strength, and a kind of reverence or awe? Is that not what we want out of beauty? A return to That Hideous Strength in this spirit could show us to ourselves with a clarity Orwell never achieved, and we might learn from Lewis’s humanity.

　　The educated reader cannot help but compare Lewis’s That Hideous Strength to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The “trilogy” as a whole suggests it, but the culmination of it, especially, since it considers the path to Paradise in the case of Venus and Mars, the Hell on Earth made by the scientists with NICE, and perhaps a Purgatory, too, in the moral concern for family, community, and one’s own soul. Lewis wants to follow Dante in thinking that being human is the key to understanding the cosmos. If we have any way out of the crisis Lewis described, it’s following that path.