The War for the Human Soul: Five Lessons from C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy

A forgotten masterpiece and what it teaches the modern man.

Eve of Perelandra, by James Lewicki

Most people know C.S. Lewis as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia or through his various non-fiction books like The Abolition of Man or Mere Christianity. There is, however, a fictional trilogy that most readers don’t know about and that it’s arguably his most prophetic work.

Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy between 1938 and 1945, in the middle of WWII, and it’s quite impressive how he managed to predict so accurately what our very own postmodern ideological landscape would look like: the technocratic elimination of the human, the corruption of institutions by soft totalitarianism, the war against transcendence and meaning disguised as “progress”, and the specific attack on masculine virtue as the first line of that war.

In the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, we are told about Dr. Elwin Ransom’s journey to Mars, where he discovers that Earth has been cut off from the rest of creation by the rebellion of its own angelic governor. The second, Perelandra, sees Ransom travel to a young Venus to prevent a demonic tempter from corrupting that world as Earth was corrupted. The third, That Hideous Strength, takes place on Earth, where a young couple are caught between a demonic technocratic institution and a small community of resistance.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 5 lessons that the Space Trilogy teaches us about the spiritual war, and about our duty as Christian men to hold the line against the forces of confusion and chaos:

Lesson #5: The Earth Is a Battleground

Out of the Silent Planet is the first book in the trilogy, and in it, Lewis presents Earth as the “silent planet”, the one planet in the solar system that has been cut off from the rest of creation by the presence of evil. Every other planet is properly ordered and exists in perfect harmony with God. Earth, however, is contested between the forces of good and evil. Masterfully, Lewis reminds us that our world is a fallen one, in which fighting will always be a necessity. This is an important reminder for us, because forgetting the truth of the earth as a battleground will make us more liable to fall into nihilism, despair, or pleasure-seeking.

It might be painful to realize there is no complete peace to be found on earth, but it’s necessary if we are to face the challenges that we’ll encounter being fully aware of their transcendental nature. When we realize that there are actual forces of good and evil we will not be surprised by the resistance we encounter along the way, or lose our faith due to the world’s hostility, which will allow us to persevere until the end.

The lesson for us then, is that discomfort, resistance, and cultural hostility are the expected conditions of a fallen world in which we’ve chosen to reject God. While this might be a tough pill to swallow, doing so will allow us to fight the battles we’re called to fight with full awareness and deeper faith, maintaining our gaze set on eternity.

Lesson #4: Evil Often Hides Behind “Progress”

This lesson comes primarily from That Hideous Strength, the third and most explicitly political novel of the trilogy, in which Lewis makes concrete what the first two books had started to imply: that the war between good and evil doesn’t stay in the spiritual realm, but moves over into institutions, bureaucracies, and the souls of ordinary men who have stopped asking about the deeper meanings of their actions and decisions.

The main institutional enemy in the third book of the trilogy is the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments). The N.I.C.E. is Lewis’s portrait of institutional evil, as a bureaucratic, well-funded, and respectable entity that claims to seek progress, science, and the betterment of mankind. Mark Studdock, who is the novel’s protagonist, is drawn into it almost by inertia, simply out of an innocent desire to belong to an important , prestigious group. Lewis suggests that the N.I.C.E. does not recruit monsters but rather hollow men, men who have been educated in nothing but the “Modern,” stripped of both classical formation and genuine virtue, and thus available to be shaped by whatever institution offers them status and belonging.

“His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

There are a number of quotes that seem too contemporary to have been written in the 1940s, such as:

“Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's done properly, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us - to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're nonpolitical. The real power always is.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

There are two lessons for us here: One, that organizations can very well be infiltrated by evil on an institutional level, and two, that their evil ways are designed to be invisible to those who are inside. A man who cannot recognize the spirit of the N.I.C.E. in its contemporary forms (corporations, universities, media organizations, cultural movements, Hollywood), is a man who will serve it without ever knowing what he’s doing or understanding why it’s wrong.