The “Great Permanent Mainspring”: C.S. Lewis on The Inner Ring
May I read you a few lines from Lewis's That Hideous Strength?
You would never have guessed from the tone of Studdock's reply what intense pleasure he derived from Curry's use of the pronoun “we”. So very recently he had been an outsider, watching the proceedings of what he then called “Curry and his gang” with awe and with little understanding ... Now he was inside and “Curry and his gang” had become “we” or “the Progressive Element in College”. It had all happened quite suddenly and was still sweet in the mouth.
... He did not like things which reminded him that he had once been not only outside the Progressive Element but even outside the College. He did not always like Curry either. His pleasure in being with him was not that sort of pleasure.1
No discussion of Lewis can be complete, I believe, without consideration of what he called “one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action”. I raise it at the conference because I don't think it is possible to understand either Lewis the man, nor Lewis the thinker, without reference to it. Likewise, Lewis would probably raise it at this conference because he would contend, I believe, that it is integral to a proper understanding of ourselves. At a conference considering “C.S. Lewis Today”, this mainspring, at least, remains the same as always.
Studdock is the rather servile sociologist in Lewis's third science fiction novel. We meet Studdock as an earnest, insecure young man at the beginning of his career at Bracton College. By the end of the tale, he has been a major player in the near-successful attempt by the National Institute for Controlled Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to mount a scientific and sociological takeover, first, of Britain, and beyond that, the globe. His entanglement erodes his professional and moral standards, it loses him his friends and his ability to think straight, and it almost loses him his wife.2 But these things become eroded, not by N.I.C.E's fascism, but by his own enslaved need to be on the “inside”.
“Of all the passions,” says Lewis, “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”3 Lewis describes the nature of this Inner Ring in an address of the same name, delivered in 1944 to young graduates who, like Studdock, are also at the beginning of their careers. Although they are exclusively men, the essay clearly also retains deep applicability and relevance for women. It is one of Lewis's most brilliant pieces of prose. The twenty minutes it cost to read it changed my life, and it has done the same for many others. I can hardly do justice to it, and will unashamedly include lengthy quotations from it. I will then go on to put it in the context of Lewis's other writings and his Christian faith.
In a passage from Tolstoi, a captain and a lieutenant talk together in such a way as to leave a general feeling excluded. Although generals are supposed to be at the top of the pecking order, the young lieutenant has discovered that armies have a visible and an invisible order of things.
The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. There are what correspond to passwords, but they too are spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.4
But it is no constant thing. You cannot say, at a given moment, who is “in” and who is “out”. Some are obviously in, some are obviously out, and always some are borderline. If you returned six weeks later, you might find it all quite different, even though no one has been formally admitted or expelled. Indeed, people can still think they are in after they have actually been pushed out. And the most amusing sight for those who are really on the inside is when someone who has never been allowed in thinks they are “in”.
Inner Rings are found not just in armies, but everywhere. They do not usually have a name; “the only certain rule is that the insiders and the outsiders call it by different names”. Insiders might just call it “you and Tony and me”. Stable and secure Inner Rings call themselves, “we” or, in an emergency, “all us sensible people”. But outsiders, particularly those who have despaired of getting in, call it “that gang” or “so-and-so and his set”. We could multiply modern examples beyond those Lewis gives: “Gemma's clique”, “the Mafia” or just plain “they”. But tellingly, what do we call it when we are on the way in?
If you are a candidate for admission you probably don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention it in talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.5
If we enter a Ring, we then discover the way each Ring has others within it.
You discovered [an Inner Ring] in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the Ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the School Ring was almost in touch with a Masters' Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the onion.6
I will return to the public school origins of Lewis's example in a moment. In Studdock's case, the urbane Lord Feverstone, whom he first thought to be a member of Curry's gang, in fact despises Curry and turns out to be the gateway into another Ring further in. Feverstone offers Studdock an introduction to the Deputy Director at N.I.C.E.
“I've read everything you've written since you were in for your fellowship. That's what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Mark was silent. The giddy sensation of being suddenly whirled up from one place to another ... prevented him from speaking.7
Even though Feverstone lays out the N.I.C.E. agenda at the outset—sterilisation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, re-education8—Studdock's eagerness to move inward makes him wilfully blind. As Lewis put it to the King's College students,
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 colors. 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, or 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 public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “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. It would be so terrible to see the other man's face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.9
And so a scoundrel Studdock became. I am reminded here of Hannah Arendt's famous experience of the Eichmann trial, which she attended in order to discover where the heart of evil might lie. What would make a man so efficiently able to timetable trains that bore tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths? To her horror and amazement, Eichmann's reasons were as facile as those of Studdock: he wanted to belong, impress his friends and advance in his career. She journeys into the heart of darkness to discover that nothing real is there, just a corrupted preoccupation with the same social impulse that drives us all. That shocking discovery generates her famous concluding description, of “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil”.10
This drive may turn Studdock, and us, into scoundrels, yet even then, it delivers no peace. The siren voices of Inner Rings lure us, but the “onion” effect enslaves us to a cycle of perpetual envy, anxiety, exultation and disappointment. When Studdock is motivated to enter simply for entry's sake, not because of what is there, his membership has no real content.
You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. ... The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic. Once the first novelty is worn off the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. ... You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow's end will still be ahead of you. The old Ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.11
Studdock's dislike and eventual contempt of Curry highlights the way Inner Rings are essentially a negating form of social intercourse. The rainbow's end is always ahead. There is no real belonging here:
You yourself once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. ... [Y]our genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There'd be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence.12
It is clear enough that Lewis was profoundly informed by the public school of his own boyhood, which he called “Wyvern”. He went to Wyvern prepared to do a form of worship there.
[T]he Bloods, the adored athletes and prefects, were an embodiment of all worldly pomp, power, and glory. ... [W]hat is a Master compared with a Blood? ... He is a member of the school aristocracy [which] has nothing whatsoever to do with the social position of the boys in the outer world. ... A wise candidate for Bloodery will wear the right clothes, use the right slang, admire the right things, laugh at the right jokes.13
In this most painful chapter of his autobiography, Lewis describes the endless machinations of boys positioning themselves against each other, within Houses, and within the wider College, and their willingness to give even their bodies as free labour, or in sexual servitude, to find the good graces of a Blood. Sport was a central component of this system:
[T]he whole structure of Bloodery would collapse if the Bloods played in the spirit of play ... For boys who were not yet Bloods but who had some athletic promise ... went to the playing fields ... racked with dazzling hopes and sickening fears, never in peace of mind till they had won some notice which would set their feet on the first rung of the social ladder. And then not a peace either, for not to advance is to fall back.14
Spiritually speaking, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. ... And from it, at school and in the world, all sorts of meanness flow; the syncophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friends that will not help the upward path, the readiness to join the cry against the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action.15
If this experience was formative of Lewis's conception of the Inner Ring, it is not hard to spot other experiences that may also have contributed to it. We know that he saw this impulse easily enough in himself: when at Wyvern, he delightedly took the “we” of “Priggishness”, so finding a ground for retaliation against the Bloods and their Prefects.16 Perhaps uncharitably, A.N. Wilson wonders whether 25 years later, The Inklings may have instantiated an Inner Ring, although he is quick to point to its willingness to include a non-literary general practitioner among its number. Wilson is more disturbed by The Inklings' role, led by Lewis, successfully to elevate the poetically untalented chaplain of Magdalen College, Adam Fox, to Oxford's Chair of Poetry in 1938. Their campaign opposed a more gifted candidate who had the support of Oxford's religiously hostile literary elite. According to Wilson, “By his campaign for Fox, Lewis probably destroyed his own chances of promotion in the University, even though he was very obviously the most distinguished member of the English Faculty”.17 Did Lewis perhaps look with regret upon a drivenness in himself, acting from a misplaced loyalty to his group, to boost its member to prominence?
Lewis's knowledge of the inevitable British Inner Ringism awaiting the King's London graduates, which is based precisely upon one's educational pedigree, seems to have motivated Lewis to prepare them for an Oxbridge-dominated world (remembering that King's London is well down this educational pecking order). But he knew firsthand, of course, that not even membership of an Oxbridge college would suffice to protect them from the ravages of Inner Ringism: “A distinguished literary atheist to whom I am introduced mutters, looks away, and walks swiftly to the far end of the room.”18 Even in the heart of Oxford, he was often an outsider looking in, excluded as a Christian from Rings where he might have found professional advancement.
Were Lewis here today, he would rebuke as folly any claim that either Australian egalitarianism, or Christian culture, offered any protection. I am currently an ordained person in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, and a member of the Moore College faculty. For a small handful of people, that is an enviable position. Yet along the way, I have felt, and have perhaps seen in others, both the lust for the next Ring and the onion effect. To be invited into the Ministry Training Scheme (MTS); to be accepted to Moore College; to be accepted as a candidate for ordination by the Diocese; to become a Senior Student there; to land the coveted Department of Evangelism traineeship (a kind of “knighthood” in my tribe); to become ordained; to be approved by the Anglican Church League (a group of church-political activists); the Archdeaconry; the Episcopacy ... all of these offer, in their own way, the lure of the Inner Ring. Indeed, my having named them here as such will probably elicit the same kind of shocked denials that, according to Lewis, typify such Rings.
But even if my current position is enviable to that small handful, they need to know that the onions has endless layers, that the sieve can never be filled with water, that the horizon always recedes. And to the vast majority who have no interest in Sydney Anglicanism, Lewis will note that there are as many forms of this longing as there are groupings of people. Invitations from duchesses might mean nothing to you, but you are devoured by the desire to join some fledgling rock band in the back of some beautiful yet forbidden garage; or to play golf with that Saturday morning crew; or get your child into that private school across town. You long for that sacred garage, or clubhouse, or tea-room, and “the delicious knowledge that we, we four or five huddled here, are the people who know”.19 Indeed the desire diabolically conceals itself: the company accountant pulls you aside and whispers, “Listen mate, John and I saw at once that we must get you onto our committee.” That would be such a bore. “It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons; but to have them free because you don't matter—that is much worse.“20
My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man.21
One of the most dominant elements in all our lives is the desire to be inside such local “Rings”, and the terror of being left outside. He suspects that this drive even trumps our desire for sex: “I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For, of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated.”22
But could it be that our age is unsurprised by this drive to climb the social ladder? Do 21st-century people understand better than Lewis that within every human breast is Nietzsche's will-to-power? Perhaps this age has come to accept it as normal that human affairs are constructed of the ceaseless quest for power over one another. Perhaps it is merely illusory to expect anything else, so that to operate according to deconstructionist suspicion is always and forever the best way to decode human affairs. According to this view, the regular Christian bleat that “there should be no cliques among us” makes as little sense as to command each other to give up our slavish dependence upon oxygen.
It is at this point that Lewis surprises both Christian and Nietzschean.
To the Christian who insists that there should be no “cliques”, Lewis would reply that there is of course a place for friendship, for shared tasks and for circles of common interest. Inner Rings are not evil simply because they exist. Of course, there must be confidential discussions. It is good when people work together and friendships grow. Informal “networks” simply develop while people work on projects or just “hang around” together. There's nothing wrong with that. “Inner Rings” are necessary, and we should not even think of them as a necessary “evil”. They are an unavoidable, innocent feature of life. The structures of Sydney Anglicanism are not, in themselves, an evil.23 Nor should the little knots of people who like each other be blasted as mere “cliques”.
To the Nietzschean, Lewis insists that the world is not finally an invisible mesh of power-relations: people can be enjoyed in and of themselves. There are any number of things in others that can draw us to them—virtue, kindness, loyalty, humour, learning, wit. Likewise, whatever works of craftsmanship that bring us together can be enjoyed as well. “If, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it”.24 His target is not the Rings themselves. If it were, then all we would be left with is an undifferentiated collective, or thousands of unconnected individuals. He doesn't really like what he takes to be a modern tendency to eradicate solitude and gather people into crowds.25 But although his natural bent was toward solitude, unconnected individualism made no sense to him either. He describes the way he bonded with others, particularly his brother Warnie, in early childhood adversity:
To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which “we two” or “we few” (and in a sense “we happy few”) stand together against something stronger and larger. England's position in 1940 was to me no surprise; it was the sort of thing I always expect. Hence while friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot understand why a man should wish to know more people that he can make real friends of. Hence, too, a very defective perhaps culpably defective, interest in impersonal movements, causes and the like.26
It is not, then, the natural human interest in social relationship that he attacks. If it were, he would be trying to overturn that astonishing declaration of God to Adam—made even when Adam was in harmonious relationship with God himself—that “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Humanity needs human company. But the “great permanent mainspring” to which he refers is a disordering of our proper desire for human relationship, expressed as the longing to have it, the anguish when we are excluded, the dark side of that “delicious sense of secret intimacy” that inclusion gives us,27 and the pleasure of excluding others in their turn.
Lewis's stark, final diagnosis has stayed with me ever since I first read this essay: that “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it”.28 “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”29 The stark humanity of this diagnosis repeats Augustine's pained recollection of himself, made 1500 years earlier: that “there is a ... kind of temptation which, I fear, has not passed from me. Can it ever pass from me in all this life? It is the desire to be feared or loved by other men, simply for the pleasure that it gives me, though in such pleasure there is no true joy”.30 Augustine's insight, that “no true joy” can result from abandoning ourselves to this drive, prefigures Lewis's own lifelong preoccupation with the pursuit of joy and with an account of what brings it. The architectonics of Lewis's quest for joy and his theological account of it also structures his account of our other desires, including our desire for social inclusion. I will return to this connection in a moment.
Lewis ends his address with a promise of sorts: that to break this drive will free us to enjoy our work, and will free us to enjoy the friendships that happen upon us.
[Y]ou will ... find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. ... It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.31
Yet, although ending upon this tantalising note, Lewis says nothing in the address at King's College about how to conquer this fear and break this quest. All he will say is that “the true road lies in quite another direction”, with a cryptic little mention of the Christian Scriptures.32
Looking then to his other writings, we find Lewis contemplating an odd paradox: that we cannot find shelter from this storm by joining a herd, whether large or small. He knows that various large groupings are necessary, but they are transient and are limited to short-term goals. He has no confidence that our longing to belong will be met by membership in some human movement or cause.33 But what about that other kind of shelter that most people in out world turn to in order to find a home—the solace of family? The problem, Lewis says, with the supposed shelter of family is that we pretend that we can rest easy there, and “be ourselves”. Sadly though “there is nowhere this side of heaven where one can safely lay the reins on the horse's neck. It will never be lawful simply to ‘be ourselves’ until ‘ourselves’ have become sons of God. ... [H]ome life has its own rule of courtesy—a code more intimate, more subtle, more sensitive, and, therefore, in some ways more difficult, than that of the outer world.”34 The family home has its pitfalls, and the problem of the Inner Ring can be at its most acute in a family. So if these herds cannot help us, what can?
This conundrum instantiates a persistent theme in Lewis's thought: that all our desires are dim anticipations of what was always finally intended for us by God.35 (If such a conception has Platonic overtones, Lewis was well aware of them, consciously subscribing as he did to a form of philosophical idealism.36) He spoke often of those fleeting, aching moments of joy which keep pointing beyond themselves to something more. Something similar is at work in our unquenchable and unrequited longings to belong. Lewis describes the way that in a universe where we are constantly treated as strangers, “we pine”, “longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm”.37 Whether we realise it or not, our hunger is for “acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things”. With God, he says, “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last”,38 and in the presence God we find the home we have always sought.
Lewis is equally cognisant of the obverse truth: that so also must we reckon with the threat of banishment from God's presence, “left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored”.39 If the longing for the Inner Ring is a harbinger of Heaven, the terror of exclusion is equally a glimpse of Hell.
In the here and now then, the life we are beckoned to is a mode of life well beyond the herd—and well beyond solitude also, even though Lewis speaks very highly of the good of solitude. Lewis speaks here of a mode of life that begins to quell our heavenly longings and our hellish fears—of the offer, open to all, to membership in the Body of Christ. “We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator”.40 Lewis rediscovers what Augustine knew of human sociality: that stitched into our very marrow is the ultimate purpose of our existence—to rest in a “perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God”.41
The Bible is of course replete with this way of seeing, and its entire direction nails Inner Ring-ism at core. When we believe that an Almighty God has made us, and made us well; when we believe that in redeeming us from sin and punishment we find no greater statement of love; when we know that we journey here as “exiles” toward another, final “home”—then are we freed from the emptiness of Inner Ring-ism. Three biblical examples must suffice.
- I think of a series of confrontations with Ahab, the most powerful tyrant ancient Israel ever saw, where the lone figure of Elijah twice declares, “As the LORD the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand ...” (1 Kings 17:1 & 18:15). Perhaps “before whom I stand” is just a turn of phrase for “whom I serve” (NIV). But it seems to be more: despite Ahab's awful power, Elijah “stands before” the massive bulk of Almighty God. Any temptation to envy the “Inner Ring” of Ahab's court is neutralised by this God's “backing”.
- NT writers feel the weight of this divine backing this with even greater force when they consider what Christ's death must imply. After Paul's long exploration of it in Romans 1-8, the astounding conclusion:
If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ... neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:31-39)
The force of Paul's argument obviously calls upon us to accept this relationship rather than avoiding it—but having accepted it, then to settle, once and for all, whether the excluding sneers of any Inner Ringer can be any threat whatsoever. For no human condemnation can find any point of attachment to the person whom God has forgiven and approved. - Likewise, in the letter to the Colossians, Paul addresses himself to a situation where esoteric insiders leverage the desire for the Inner Ring, torturing vulgar outsiders with tales about how they have seen angels, or sustain strict adherence to food laws, or strictly observe religious festivals. But in a brilliantly unanticipated manoeuvre, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ]” (Col 1:19). “All the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” in this Christ (2:9)—and breathtakingly, Paul can declare to these vulgar Colossian outsiders that in reality, “you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the Head over every power and authority” (2:10). To be with Christ in this way is to be at the centre; in fact it is the Colossian Inner Ringers who have “lost connection with the Head” (2:19). Their aloofness to Christ puts them, by their own choice, on the outside.
I am reminded of the inaugural address to the Anglican Diocese of Sydney by its new Archbishop, Dr Peter Jensen. He addressed the general perception of some powerful Diocesan “centre”, and spoke to those who perceived themselves as isolated, marginal, and forgotten by it. Jensen disavowed the view that the episcopacy, the denomination's structure, or the Diocesan head office constituted such a “centre”, since, “our true centre is in heaven; we march to the beat of His drum”.42 This view of social reality is unusual for an organisation's most senior official, and starkly counterpoints that of Studdock, Feverstone, the deputy director of N.I.C.E., and Tolstoi's general. Christian theology shapes a powerful alternative vision of true “belonging”, and in this respect, Lewis's King's College address is, I believe, a deliberate “appetite-whetter” for Christianity.
Those who won't accept Christianity as the best account of how to break the longing of the Inner Ring could of course try to break it through their “inner strength”, or their “belief in themselves”. With Lewis, I remain pessimistic about my own chances of finding success by that strategy. His comments in another context on a related matter give some clues, I think, about how on a daily basis he went about being released of his chains:
... I am not in despair. At this point I become what some would call very Evangelical; at any rate very un-Pelagian. I do not think any efforts of my own will can end once and for all this craving ... Only God can. I have good faith and hope he will. Of course, I don't mean that I can therefore, as they say, “sit back”. What God does for us, He does in us. The process of doing it will appear to me (and not falsely) to be the daily or hourly repeated excercises of my own will renouncing this attitude, especially each morning, for it grows all over me like a new shell each night. Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal ... We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day.43
Footnotes
1 C.S. Lewis, “That Hideous Strength”, in The Cosmic Trilogy, (London: Pan, 1990), 359-60, 361; chapter 1, 2.
2 I first discovered Studdock's story in W. Jay Wood, Epistemology: becoming intellectually virtuous (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1998), 22-23. His treatment uses Studdock to illustrate the way emotional investments skew cognitive processing, and suggests that a commitment to “intellectual virtue” is a necessary corrective to this very human trait.
3 C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring”, in Essay Collection, ed. Lesley Walmsley, (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 319. The address can also be found in C.S. Lewis, Transposition and other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 55-64; C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (Glasgow: Collins/Fount, 1977), 28-40; and in C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976); online: http://faculty.millikin.edu/~moconner/in150/lewis2.html and http://www.geocities.com/bigcslewisfan (accessed 24th April 2006). Page references in this paper will be to the most recent version, edited by Walmsley.
4 Lewis, “Ring”, 314.
5 Ibid., 315.
6 Ibid.
7 Lewis, “Hideous”, 384.
8 Ibid., 387.
9 Lewis, “Ring”, 318-19.
10 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Revised and Enlarged) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977; originally published New York: Viking Press, 1964), 252.
11 Lewis, “Ring”, 319.
12 Ibid., 319-20.
13 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 95, 96.
14 Ibid., 112-13.
15 Ibid., 125.
16 Ibid., 120-21.
17 A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1990), 158.
18 C.S. Lewis, “Revival or decay?”, in Undeceptions, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 209.
19 Lewis, “Ring”, 316.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 318.
22 Ibid., 316.
23 “[I]t is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organization should quite coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people invariably held the highest posts, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. In that way the second, unwritten system is bound to grow up. It is necessary; and perhaps it is not a necessary evil.” (Ibid.). Of course I realise that Lewis spoke here of Anglicanism in general, hardly that of Sydney; of particular Sydney “deadweights”, the most salient example is myself every day before midday. Yet Feverstone's comment to Studdock about N.I.C.E. does somehow remind me of my own situation: “Isn't it a little naïve to suppose that being in on a thing involves any distinct knowledge of its official programme?” (Lewis, “Hideous”, 381-82.)
24 Lewis, “Ring”, 319.
25 C.S. Lewis, “Membership”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976), 159, 163.
26 Lewis, Surprised, 35.
27 Lewis, “Ring”, 317.
28 Ibid., 320.
29 Ibid., 319.
30 Augustine, Confessions tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Classics edition, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 244 (X.36).
31 Lewis, “Ring”, 320.
32 Ibid.
33 Lewis, “Membership”, 159, 163.
34 C.S. Lewis, “The Sermon and the Lunch”, in Undeceptions, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 236-37.
35 “I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to himself.” Lewis, Surprised, 88. ”Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” [C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976), 16.]
36 Lewis, Surprised, 258-59.
37 Lewis, “Glory”, 40.
38 Ibid., 41.
39 Ibid.
40 Lewis, “Membership”, 166.
41 Or near equivalent—twice in De civ. Dei XIX.13 and once in XIX.17. (Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans tr. R.W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)) Cf. Oliver M.T. O“Donovan, ”Augustinian Ethics,“ in A New Dictionary of Christian Ethics, eds James F. Childress and John Macquarrie, (London: SCM, 1986); and Oliver M.T. O”Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 25.
42 Peter F. Jensen, “Presidential Address”, in Yearbook of the Diocese of Sydney, (Sydney: St Andrews House, 2002), 383 (delivered 26th October 2001).
43 C.S. Lewis, “A Slip of the Tongue”, in The Weight of Glory, ed. Walter Hooper, (London: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976), 191-92.
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