Hey, Mythic Mind listener.

After I recorded the intro and outro to this episode, I realized I was having some recording issues with the video as well.

As you can know, some of the sounds a little bit off, and so if you're watching on YouTube, there aren't going any visuals for the intro and the outro, but the main portion of this episode should be fine.

All right, let's get to it.

Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom on the path between primary secondary worlds.

I'm doctor Andrew Snyder.

And I'm glad that you're here.

Hey, then, welcome back as we continue through the fictional philosophy of C.

S.

Lewis, which was a course that I ran in the summer of twenty twenty four.

We've been working on the Ransom series recently the so called Space Trilogy, and now we are going to be wrapping up the last few chapters of that Hedeous Strength.

I hope you enjoy.

Hello, Welcome back as we wrap up that Hideous Strength.

Now, I can tell you with certainty that this has been the most difficult presentation for me to put together so far, and that's just because there is so much that's happening in this final sequence of this book.

So many crazy things happening plot wise and philosophically.

There's so much to dwell on.

I mentioned on Twitter, and I feel pretty certain that I wanted to do this at some point.

I would love to take an entire course something like twelve weeks and just devote it to that hideous strength and use that as a core text, and then do all kinds of side studies and primary sources dealing with the ideas that Lewis is drawing from the ideas that he's commending to us well as the ideas that he's commending.

And so basically what this would be is a kind of general philosophy course that allows us to dig into some relevant texts from Plato and other figures from the classical world, as well as the modern ideas that he is refuting.

I think that'd be really useful.

But anyways, for our purposes today, I hope that as I kind of jump around and pull out some of these major themes here, dig into the areas that I think are most worthwhile for us, I hope that you're able to more clearly see in order that you're able to more clearly engage in the great dance that rises up from these pages and joins us into even greater realities than we're able to comprehend.

I initially had well over one hundred slides for this presentation.

I managed to cut it down, and so I hope that this is going to be profitable for you.

Now let's start where we left off.

And so last time we left off with Mark was imprisoned at Belbury, and now he is going to have this conversation with Frost, and from this conversation up through Mark's journey existentially in the objectivity room, Frost is trying to solidify Mark's status as a manage out a chest.

He's trying to remove from him any sense of value, any sense of loyalty to a metaphysical ideal.

He's trying to make him entirely objective, to remove him from himself and simply view himself as a cog in the machine.

You know that there's nothing special about humanity, and there's nothing special about humanity, and they can't really be anything special about your individual human experience.

And so, as Frost says, resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena.

Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena.

Social relations are chemical relations.

You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner, do not let them distract your attention from the facts.

And so in saying this, Frost sounds a lot like Ludwig Wittckenstein, who I recommended to you in this supplementary reading.

In that lecture on ethics that Vitckenstein gives us, he says that if we were to take every fact that there could be, and by that means an empirical fact, something that we can scientifically verify, if we were to take every objective fact and put it into a book, so this book contains all possible objective facts, he said, you would not get one statement of absolute value, and so there'd be nothing from this giving any kind of prescription as to how we ought to live.

You would get a massive, a comprehensive collection of his statements, but you would never get anything telling you what should be.

You would never get any kind of prescription.

You'd only get description.

And that's exactly what Frost is saying here, and so he's trying to completely eliminate metaphysical reality.

He's trying to completely eliminate the idea of ethics.

He's trying to eliminate anything that cannot be scientifically verified, and so if anything falls outside of this domain of what is scientifically verifiable, he's going to discount it as mere sentiment, which is exactly what Wittckenstein does.

He says that whenever we're using the language of morality or the ethical should kind of language, he says that really what we're doing is just emoting sentiment.

We're not actually using language to communicate anything actually meaningful.

And so that's the position that Frost is taking here, and you can find a very similar position in Ajair, who is also so when I recommend it to you in his language truth in logic.

And I've mentioned in another video that Ajair was actually a contemporary of Lewis.

They both taught at Oxford at the same time, and apparently they even had a debate with each other, which I really wishing to recording of that, but unfortunately we do not.

But nonetheless, these are the ideas that we're very much alive and working right within the vicinity that Lewis was working in, and so he is very much coming into direct competition with these ideas here by giving us this villain Frost.

And then Frost talks a little bit about the macrobes, or as we might want to call him, the dark Eldells, or maybe even the demons, and he says that their effect on human history has been far greater than that of the microbes, though of course equally unrecognized.

In light of what we now know, all history will have to be rewritten.

Their real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to historians.

That indeed, is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science.

And so here we get this mergering of a spirituality into a what is essentially a naturalistic worldview.

And so these macrobes, these demons are treated within the same material plane that we operated, right, they're bringing being brought into this scientific worldview.

And this gets to what Lewis talked about in especially the Abolition of Man, and he also hint said this in Screwtape, this idea that the scientific worldview, not just science, but like science as worldview, has the same roots, that has the same basic impulse that you find in sorcery.

It's a desire to transcend your current reality through higher knowledge that allows you to manipulate the world, to conform it into the image that you want to conform it into.

And then in Screwtape, you know, he says that he looks forward to when the demons are able to successfully mythologize our science, and by that he means we get this reassociation of science and spirituality of science in witchcraft, really, and so we see that kind of evolving here through the character of Frost.

On one hand, he is an empiricist, he is likely a logical positivist.

He is going to discount anything that can't be empirically verified.

But at the same time he is bringing in these realities, as he calls them, macrobes, which are really spiritual realities, even though he's addressing them in fairly scientific terminology.

And now, how do we transcend our current situation and how do we join up with these macrobes?

How do we join up with these higher realities?

Well, Frost says that the first step towards intercourse with the macrobes is a realization that one must go outside the whole world of our subjective emotions.

It is only as you begin to do so that you discover how much of what you mistook for your thoughts was merely a byproduct of your blood and nervous tissues.

And so the way to transcend ourselves is to entirely forget ourselves as selves.

And so we want to get beyond with he calls subjective emotions.

And remember by that idea of subjective emotions, he doesn't just mean you know that you're happy or sad, or you know those kinds of emotions.

When this type of philosopher uses that phrase subjective emotions, he's including in that any kind of statement of value.

Remember Abolition of man Guysantitis say that it is a misuse of language when we treat esthetics as something real, and when we say that it is right for us to have a particular response to a particular event.

And so it's a misuse of language to say that the waterfall is sublime, because they say, no, what you really mean is you have this emotional, subjective reaction to the waterfall.

But there's nothing normative here, there's nothing prescriptive, there's nothing that ought to be experienced.

You simply have your experience, and subjective experience doesn't actually tell us anything about the real world.

Right the way that you learn about the real world from this worldview is through empirical verification, through scientific study.

And so Frost here is not just saying you need to be a stoic and you need to let go of your emotional sentiment.

He's saying you need to let go of your attachment to that idea of value, because all statements of value are subjective emotions, which are merely a byproduct of your blood and your nervous issues.

And so one hand, Frost recognizes something that Bitckenstein recognized as well, and that is that you can never derive an aught from and is.

But where he goes wrong it's in saying that these descriptive IS statements are the only statements that are legitimate.

And we talked about in the Abolition of Man, that this is actually irrational.

Right, It's a self contradicting philosophy, because as soon as Frost says to Mark, you should adopt this way of thinking, well, now he's stepped outside of the descriptive, and now he's moved into the prescriptive.

He's essentially saying that Mark, you have an obligation posed upon you by a reason that transcends both of us and this reason is compelling you to adopt this particular line of thinking.

And so on one hand he's saying that there are no values, but in defending this position and on commending it to Mark, he is in fact implicitly stating that there are values, that there are some ways of thinking that are actually good and should be adopted, there are some ways of thinking that are bad, that are illegitimate, and that should be rejected.

And so by implying that there is a common reality that they live in that gives merit to a particular path, he is actually reintroducing metaphysics, but he's just refusing to actually look at it.

And so he's reintroducing a religious reality here that he's refusing to actually look at, and so it's compelling him not through reason, but really against his reason.

This feeds right into his screwtape.

Was saying about trying to mythologize their science and in so doing turn it into a kind of sorcery, even under the guise of naturalism.

And yeah, here it is.

Heck, she forgot, I included it.

I have a great hope that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is in effect belief in us, though not under that name, will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the enemy.

And so there it is.

That's very much what we see playing out through Frost here, and here we again see ablistion of man playing out when Frost says, you are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and look emotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contain them are no longer necessary.

That large bodies therefore to disappear, only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain.

The individual is to become all head.

The human race is to become all technocracy.

And so this speaks to the idea that we see in the Abolition of Man that this kind of technocratic progressivism is not really centered on the ennobling of man as such.

One thing that's philosophically impossible given their worldview, because they don't believe in metaphysical realities, and there are no metaphysical realities, and there is no idea of man itself.

All.

There are particular men or religious particular arrangements of matter that are subject to stronger particular arrangements of matter.

The very idea of humanity religious falls apart, and so what we get here is not the ennoblement of man, not the progress of man.

What we see is the strengthening power of one man, or more likely the relatively few men who happen to have power, who happen to have the ability to impose their will on lesser wills.

And we're told from screwtape that this is how the demonic lower archy works, That all of the demons seek to consume each other, and they're ultimately all consumed by Satan, and so too, the demons seek to consume the weaker wills of mortals, and so they're all trying to just consume each other.

And this plays out in their mortal counterparts in human society as those who give themselves over to this really the satanic progressivism into the void.

Well, they take this model where they're simply seeking to impose their will in other people, they're trying to consume them.

It's not a matter of securing justice, because again, there is no justice in this worldview that would fall under the category of emotional sentiment, which is something that they're discounting altogether.

And so what you have here is a scientifically minded technocracy rising to the top that's able to impose its will on those.

Who have less power.

And so it all comes down to this kind of radical philosophical Darwinism.

But fortunately Mark at this point had already arrived at a resolution not to trust Frost, despite the fact that not long ago, I think he said into last chapter that hours ago he would have longed for the approval of somebody like Frost.

But now he has utter distrust for these men.

However, he still finds himself getting lured in here, recognizing that there is a great secret here, There is a kind of center, a supreme power.

This is very close to the inner ring that Mark thinks he's been searching for his whole life.

Yet nonetheless he stands strong in his resolution not to trust Frost.

He stands strong in his resistance.

And so we see this growing martial spirit in Mark, and that he's able to assert himself against the moving forces around him, whether that turn into his victory or, as he really expects this point, his martyrdom.

Either way, whether he's able to successfully defeat Frost and Wither and the forces of Belbury.

Or he's given over as a martyr and can even see that word mars in martyr right.

Even still, he is gaining a healthy relationship with the martial influence.

He is starting to appropriate the masculine ideal.

He is able to assert himself against the forces that come around him.

However, there are still some temptations at play there as he starts to get proud of this new found steadfastness.

The approval of one's own conscience is a very beady draft, especially for those who are not accustomed to it.

Within two minutes, Mark passed from that first involuntary sense of liberation to a conscious attitude of courage and thence into unrestrained heroics.

The picture of himself as hero and martyr, as Jack the Giant Killer, still coolly playing his hand even in the giant's kitchen, rose up before him, promising that it could have blot out forever those other and unendurable pictures of himself which had haunted him for the last few hours.

It wasn't everyone, after all, who had resisted an invitation like Frost, and so he goes from having courage from having a courage of conscience, approval of conscience, which is not something that he had perhaps ever known, or at least not known for a very long time.

But now he starts to get this inflated view of himself as this great hero, as somebody far stronger than he actually is.

And this reminds me of this idea that we see a few times in Screwtape, where you know Screwtape says that if your patient starts to gain genuine humility, then get him to start reflecting on how humble he is.

You know, when your patient starts to give himself over to a life of prayer, get him thinking about how great his prayer life is.

And so get him to keep focusing on himself.

Keep focusing on himself, let every virtue turn into an extension of the vice of pride, and so keep him self referential as much as possible.

Don't let him get beyond himself.

Don't let him give himself away in love within a broader context.

Don't let him find meaning within a broader context.

But make everything self referential.

And so he begins by moving in the right direction, then that becomes self referential.

His context closes in on himself, where no longer is he courageous for that which is good.

Well, now he's courageous because well, he's just such a courageous person.

And so the dark Eldos that the demons that are still in the cell are starting to try to turn him back into himself.

But fortunately he is really just pulled in the right direction into these temptations, despite the fact that you know, he might entertain them for a little bit, they don't stand.

And we really do get the sense, especially in light of who Mark has been up to this point, that it's not just Mark kind of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, right, It's not Mark just suddenly developing out of nowhere, this courage just resistance to temptation, this movement in towards the straight line.

No, we really get this idea here that he's just being pulled somewhere.

He is being transformed far more than he is transforming himself.

And this is the theme that we've seen throughout the Ransom series already that even Ransom going back to out of the side of the planet to Perilandra, we don't get this sense that Ransom is really in control of his story.

From one step to the next.

He is just being pulled along by forces that are largely outside of his control.

And this speaks to something that I've talked about before that for Lewis, his conversion stories are not really stories about characters converting or transforming.

His stories are really more about his characters being converted or being transformed, which speaks to his own experience of conversion to Christianity that we get in surprise by Joy when he describes himself as the most reluctant confort because really it's not like we see this slow progression from unbelief to faith.

I mean, surely once he was on the side of faith, he could look back and see the hand of providence that brought him there.

But as far as his experience of salvation goes, it's really just something that happened where he didn't believe and then he did.

You know.

He describes it as God reaching down and just pulling him up, and I think that's what we see happening in Mark here, that he is being converted.

He is being transformed more than he is transforming.

But that doesn't mean this is going to be an easy process for him.

He continues to face what are explicitly described as spiritual attacks.

And so suddenly, like a thing that leaped to him across infinite distances with a speed of light, desire, salt, black, ravenous, unanswerable desire took him by the throat.

For like lust, it disenchants the whole universe, everything else that Mark had ever felt.

Love, ambition, hunger, lust itself appear to have been mere milk and water, toys for children, not worth one throb of the nerves.

And so the demons here are trying to compel him with this philosophy that Frost has already embraced, this idea that all of his curve right, his desire to do what is good, his desire to pursue the strait.

He's starting to feel like these things are just childish ambitions.

But there's nothing real there, right, There's nothing grown up.

And that's the theme that, of course, we see throughout lewis that the desire to be very much grown up often demonstrates that you're actually not grown up at all, that you are actually immature, and that you've traded true maturity for this faux version.

And I like how he says that lust disenchants the whole universe.

Because this goes back to this idea of everything being self referential.

Right, lust seeks to consume.

Instead of giving itself a way towards that which is lovely, It instead seeks to bring everything into its own orbit.

It seeks to make everything self referential, and in so doing it cuts you off from the true enchantment of the universe.

The luminosity of being itself that, if followed back to its origin, is going to leave you, lead you to the beatific vision of who God is in his glorious trinitarian love.

And so LUs robs you of the true being of the universe, the purpose, the direction.

It keeps you from seeing the great dance that you can only join in as you give yourself away.

But less instead seeks to bring everything back to you.

You hold everything with an open hand, and so doing you don't actually get to hold anything at all.

And so the dark Eldo they breathe death on the human race and all joy.

They do this precisely by making everything about the human race.

By making everything about the human race, they rob the human race of its context, and so it's unable to embrace the true joy and glory that awaits it when it is rightly itself.

And then I like this one of those good little philosophical insights.

It gets us here.

Though he Mark was theoretically materialist, he had all his life believed, quite inconsistently and even carelessly, in the freedom of his own way.

He had seldom made a moral resolution, and when he had resolved some hours ago to trust Belbery Crew no further, he had taken it for granted that he would be able to do what he resolved.

And so he was theoretically a materialist.

Right he believed with Frost that he was just matter in motion.

Yet he still believed that he had some kind of direction in his life, that his choices matter.

However, in a materialist worldview, there is no freedom of the will.

There really is no will itself right what we see as the will, what we see as consciousness, would be nothing more than the objective projection of objective realities.

That there is no you.

All there is is a collection of matter that is acting according to the laws of physics.

There would be no more will in you than there is will in a boulder.

Rolling down a mountain is simply the operation of physical necessity and in a materialist worldview, well that's all that we are.

Consciousness is an illusion, and that's exactly what Frost's point is.

And so we see here that Mark is now starting to be awakened to his heart, he's starting to be awakened to the idea of virtue, he's starting to gain a chest.

However, it doesn't yet have a context within his mind, within his philosophy.

And I think this is an important point here.

You know, I teach on campus in a public university, and a lot of students adopt the perspective that all value is entirely subjective, that it's never based in anything real, that we really don't have a common world that we share with each other.

It's all just determined, it's all just created, it in nothing by the individual.

And so there is no value, there is no good, there is no evil, it's all just perspective.

At the same time, whenever I ask him questions like how many of you intend to vote in November, most of them raise their hands, because you know, young people, college students, they tend to be very politically motivated.

Well, the same time, saying there's no such thing as good and the worst thing you can do is to force your beliefs on some somebody else.

So then I ask them why do you intend to vote?

And really what it comes down to is they believe a particular ideology is better than another, that it's more just, that it's more good, that it's more compassionate, that's more tolerant, it's more whatever.

And so that allows me to help them understand that they actually do believe in value.

Now maybe we do, maybe we don't agree on what is valuable and what is not valuable, but everybody believes in value.

And when I'm able to help them understand the inconsistency in their worldview that one hand, the will say value is entirely subjective, but then also that there are some values that we should pursue and that we should even impose on society.

When they're left with that inconsistency and they have to choose, do I choose the value that my heart compels me to follow, or do I reject that in favor of my confessional relativism.

Almost every time they choose the path of value right, the heart wents out over the mind.

When they're brought into direct competition.

And then we finally have something to work with because now recognizing that they're going to prioritize their heart, they're going to prioritize value.

Well, now we can talk about the right context that makes sense of that value, and so that can provide a very helpful avenue for taking the conversation from there.

And so this inconsistency that Marcus starting to discover between his a valued materialism and his insistence that there is value and that he has made meaningful choices, well, that's the beginning of something important here.

It's the beginning of something productive in his journey.

And then he starts thinking about Jane in her company as a foil to where he is, and so he's starting to reject everything that he's made his life out to be up to this point, and then he's left looking toward the positive what could have been, what should have been.

And so he wanted Jane, he wanted missus Dimple, he wanted to Niston, he wanted somebody or something.

Oh don't, don't let me go back into it, he said, And then louder don't don't all that could in any sense be called himself went into that cry, and the dreadful consciousness of having played his last card, began to turn slowly into a sort of peace.

There was nothing more to be done.

Unconsciously, he allowed his muscles to relax.

His young body was very tired by this time, and even the hard floor was grateful to it.

The cell also seemed to be somehow emptied and purged, as if it too were tired after the conflicts that had witnessed, Emptied like a sky after rain, tired like a child after weeping.

This is a critically important passage here because Mark is now coming to the end of his own vein strivings, his own vein ambitions.

He's recognizing that he does not have in himself the strength to what he now desires to be, and so he is really dying to himself that he might live now.

He doesn't necessarily have the full context work out at this point as to what's happening, but that doesn't really matter.

Remember, Lewis says that images come before words, and so to experience is more real than rational formulation, and so real transformation begins in the heart and then works its way up to the mind, and so what we have here is reality itself.

He is looking along the beam, and he is recognizing the fact that he does not have in himself that which he desires.

And this is something that Kirkygard talks a lot about.

You know, I've often thought that some significant things could happen here if Lewis gave Carekeyguard more attention.

Unfortunately, he only references him once in one of his letters that I can remember.

But Kirkyar talks about how the path toward transformation into and being integratedself means that you first have to despair of yourself.

You have to despair of your desire to be everything that you need.

You have to despair of your ability to create your own life.

You have to despair of your own ability to create reality, to do all of the things that postmodernism wants you to do.

You have to despair of these realities and you instead have to cast yourself wholly on the grace of God.

And in so doing you become reconnected with your purpose, and you become reconnected with the broader world because now you have a context that is infinitely greater than yourself.

And so because you have despaired of yourself, well, now you find true peace, You find true hope in casting yourself in love toward that grace which beckons to us from every corner of the cosmos.

And so that's exactly what we see playing out here with Mark, because he is giving himself away entirely.

Well, now he's gained peace.

Now he's able to embrace grace that is being offered to him.

Now let's go ahead and jump over to say Ans.

Now Dimple leads a conversation I think does some significant things here.

He says, have you ever noticed that the universe, and every little bit of the universe is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point.

Good is always getting better, and bad is always getting worse.

The possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.

The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.

And this says an idea that we've seen play out even in that hideous strength that towards the beginning of the story, things are very confusing.

I mean, on Jane's side, she's getting these weird dreams, and she's getting these invitations from Mother Dimble, and she's invited to Saint Anne's but doesn't really know what to expect there, and she's so confused the whole time, even though she gains clarity over time, things are very confusing for her, and then even more so for Mark.

Right he's stumbling around edge Stow, he just kind of finds himself in the progressive circle, and then he finds himself at Bellbury, but he doesn't really know what he's doing there, and things are really confusing.

He doesn't even know if he formally has a position, and so it's just not really clear across the board what's happening.

Things are very much they're foggy, they're not precise, they're low resolution.

But throughout the story we see things becoming more and more and more clear.

And then if you go back and read the story again for a second or a third time, then those beginning stages of the story are read in relation to their conclusion, and so on one hand, things are getting sharper and harder over time, but on the other hand we see that looking back, things are pretty sharp and hard from the beginning once you have that context.

And that makes me think of this passage from the Great Divorce, in which the George McDonald character says, son, he said, you cannot in your present state, understand eternity.

That is what mortals misunderstand.

They see if sometimes poral suffering, no future bliss can make up for it, not knowing that heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

And if some sinful pleasure, they say, let me have but this, and I'll take the consequences, little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.

Both processes begin even before death.

The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of heaven.

The bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.

And that is why the blessed will say, we have never lived anywhere except in heaven, and the lost we were always in hell, And both will speak truly.

And so on one hand, it seems like things are moving toward their destination across time, but that's not really how things are actually working.

What we see is that eternal conclusions are the context for each temporal act that's moved in that direction, and so hell is very much present in the day to day unrepentant sins, just as Heaven is present in the day to day forgiveness of sins and achievement of true virtue.

And so there is this hardening, there is this coming to a point.

But really that's just the revelation in time of that which is eternal.

And that which is eternal doesn't happen over time.

It always is, always has been, always will be.

And to this point, Dimble says some interesting things about Merlin.

He says that Merdlin is the reverse of Bellbury.

He's at the opposite extreme.

He is the last vestige of an order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused.

For him, every operation on nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one's horse.

After him came the modern man, to whom nature is something dead, a machine to be worked and taken to bits if it won't work the way he pleases.

Finally come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase the power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits, extranatural anti natural spirits.

Of course, they hope to have it both ways, and so Merlin represents an older, relational side of nature, and so Merlin's interested really in not magic so much as enchantment.

And the difference here is that enchantment and I'm kind of using Tolkien's framing here, but enchantment is a means of bringing out of nature qualities that were always there in potential, and so it's kind of like cultivation almost.

You're revealing potential that was not yet actualized.

And that's the idea of enchantment.

In many ways, you're making nature more of what it is, as opposed to what Belbury is doing in trying to impose its own spirit on nature.

And actually, to keep the talking theme, what Belber is doing is essentially what the Wich King of Mombar did in the creation of the baro Whites, in summoning evil spirits and then imposing them on nature, right on the corpses of the slain.

And so he's taking spirits and imposing them upon nature.

And I think that Luc had really given us the commentary here, not just on the open satanism of Belbury, right, I mean, most of these progressive scientism types, these naturalists aren't going to openly appeal to demonic spiritualities like we get in Belbury.

But what Lewis is doing here is demonstrating the fact that the scientific naturalist is being led, is being compelled by forces that it cannot account for.

Right, It's being compelled by a metaphysical structure that cannot be found within nature.

And so what it's doing is it's imposing anti natural spirits onto nature in order to accomplish its ends.

And so even if the naturalist progressive scientists is not necessarily try trying to summon forth spiritual realities, in effect, that is exactly what it's doing.

It is imposing anti natural spirits onto nature by using science, by using the means of nature to prescribe that which nature itself is not fit to prescribe.

And so the progressive naturalist scientists is very much doing what Belbury is doing, is trying to take extra anti natural spirits and impose them upon the natural world.

Now, the response to the sorcery of Belbury, coming from Ransom and his masters is to actually kind of do what Merlin's doing, but even more so in that we actually are going to actualize the potential of nature But the way that we're going to do that is by bringing it into its larger cosmic context.

And this leads to an important conversation between Ransom and Merlin, who has not yet learned to appeal to the right level of authority, because Merlins can suggest that he uses his old form of enchantment to fight the Belbury.

But Ransom is going to say that, no, that's not enough, and it might not even be appropriate within this age.

No, said the director in a still louder voice.

That cannot be done any longer.

The soul has gone out of wood and water.

Oh I dare say you could awake them a little, but it would not be enough.

A storm or even a river flood would be of little avail against our present enemy.

Your weapon would break in your hands for the hideous strength confronts us.

And it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.

So here we get the Babel imagery brought clearly to the forefront, which is obviously going to be very significant for the judgment brought against Belbury at the banquet.

What Ransom is saying here is that we need the same judgment to come against Belbury that came against the tower at Babel, and that is not a judgment wrought by human hands.

It is a divine judgment.

We need the heavens to open up and to smash the pride of man.

And so here we see this idea that we've seen from out of the silent planet on that those who most reach up for transcendence are ultimately pulled down into the earth.

And so Bellbury has been building up its tower, trying to reach into the heavens, trying to uh to grasp for that which is not theirs by nature.

And so the true powers of nature are going to use nature to reach up and to pull Babbel back down into the ground.

Those who most grasp for transcendents are ultimately brought down into the depths.

This is the story of Numanor which Lewis references in that hideous strength, that they sought transcendence, They sought to assault the undying lands and seize immortality for themselves, but in so doing they're pulled down into the sea.

This is what we saw with Weston.

He saw progress, He sought to expand into the heavens.

He sought the advancement of man.

But in looking for transcendence he had pulled down into Hell.

This is what we see with Mark that he is looking for transcendent.

He is looking for the inner ring.

He's trying to get to the seat of power, where the secrets are held and where power and sovereignty are exerted.

But in his pursuit of the center, what he finds is the center of earth, which is Hell.

And so those who most grasp for transcendents are pulled down, those who most grasp for power are grasped by power and consumed by their master Satan.

And so a response to the excesses of nature is going to be a correction from SuperNature.

Ransom goes on to say, greater spirits than Malachandra and Pera Lantra will descend this time.

We are in God's hands.

It may unmake us both.

There is no promise that either you or I will save our lives or our reason.

I do not know how we can dare to look upon their faces, but I know we cannot dare to look upon God's if we refuse this enterprise.

It reminds me of a quote from Augustine when he says, even if I die, let me see thy face lest I die.

And what we see here is that Ransom and Merdlin, through association with Ransom, are committed to giving the selves over entirely to God's hands, and so as a opposing movement to Belbury, which is all about putting everything in their hands.

Right, They're trying to be God.

They're trying to fashion the world to be what they want it to be.

They're trying to control, to dominate everything.

Ransom is giving himself over entirely in faith.

He is placing himself in the hands of God.

But Merlin doesn't quite get it yet.

And so this leads to what I find to be just a really gripping conversation.

Merlin says, this Saxon, king of yours, who sits at Windsor now, is there no help in him?

He has no power in this matter?

Then is he not weak enough to be overthrown?

I have no wish to overthrow him.

He is the king.

He was crowned and anointed by the Archbishop in the Order of Laggers.

I may be Pendragon, but the Order of Britain I am the King's man?

Is it?

Then?

His great men, the counts and leggates and bishops who do the evil, and he does not know of it.

It is though they are not exactly the sort of great men you have in mind, and are we not big enough to meet them in plain battle?

We are four men, some women and a bear.

I saw the time when Laggers was only myself and one man and two boys, and one of those was a churl.

Yet we conquered.

It cannot be done.

Now they have an engine called the press, whereby the people are deceived.

We should die without even being heard of.

But what of the true clerks?

Is there no help in them?

It cannot be that all your priests and bishops are corrupted.

The faith itself is torn in pieces since your day and speaks with a divided voice.

Even if it were made whole, the Christians are but a tenth of the people.

There is no help there.

Then let us seek help from over the sea.

Is there no Christian prince in Nursera, or Ireland or Benwick who would come in and cleanse Britain if you were called?

There is no Christian prince left.

These other countries are, even as Britain or else, sunk deeper still in the disease.

Though we must go higher, We must go to him whose office it is to put down tyrants and give life to dying kingdoms.

We must call on the emperor.

There is no emperor, no emperor, began Merlin, and then his voice died away.

This entire sequence as Merlin is looking for traditional places of Christian power to bring about restitution.

But Ransom just again and again says no, that's not an option.

That is not an option.

That is not an option.

We're not going to We're not going to be able to pragmatize a solution here.

Ransom shook his head.

You do not understand, he said, The poison was brewed in these westlands, but has spat itself everywhere.

By now, however far you went, you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds.

Men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshiping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from earth, their mother, and front the Father in heaven.

And that is just a brutally pen trading statement right there.

And so is it the end, asked Merlin.

And this said Ransom, ignoring the question, is why we have no way left at all save the one I told you.

And so just as Mark despaired of his own abilities in the face of that hideous strength, so too Ransom and now Merlin with him, are surrendering any attempts at pragmatism.

They're surrendering any confidence in their own intrinsic abilities.

Right, Merlin says, is it then the end?

And from a human perspective, from an earthly minded perspective, yes it is the end.

But fortunately the Earth is contextualized within a broader reality here and this whole sequence very much reminds me of the scene from the Silver Chair.

So sorry for getting ahead, but I'm going to assume that most of the people who sign up for a Lewis course are pretty familiar with Narnia, And so this is a scene between Jill and Aslan.

Are you not thirsty?

Said the lion.

I am dying of thirst said Jill.

Then drink, said the lion.

May I could I would you mind going away while I do?

Said Jill.

The lion answered this only by a look in a very low growl, and as Jill gazed at his motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.

The delicious, rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.

Will you promise not to do anything to me if I do come, said Jill.

I make no promise, said the lion.

Jill was so thirsty now that without noticing it, she had come as stuff nearer.

Do you eat girls?

She said?

I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms, said the lion.

I didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry.

It just said it.

I daren't come and drink, said Jill.

Then you will die of thirst, said the lion.

Oh dear, said Jill, coming another stuff nearer.

I suppose I must go look for another stream.

Then there is no other stream, said the lion.

And so too we have Merlin, who is looking for other streams.

Right, Ransom already said what's going to happen?

That the forces of the heavens are going to descend, And he doesn't know if it's going to cost them their life or not.

He doesn't know if it's going to cost them their reason or not.

Don't know if they'll be driven mad.

But nonetheless, this is what's going to happen.

This is what he has.

This is the reality that Ransom has embraced.

And so Merlin says, ah, I don't know about this, and he starts trying to look for all these other streams, and Ransom says, no, there is no other stream.

Either we will be consumed by God or we will have victory.

Those are our only options.

It's a very similar idea here between Jill and Asland as we're getting with Merlin and Ransom, and now we jump back to Mark at Belbury, and Mark is a continuing to grow and resolve.

As he could say, clear picture of the evil in Frost's face, The knowledge that his own assumptions led to frost position, combined with what he saw in Frost's face and what he experienced in this very cel affected a complete conversion.

All the philosophers and evangelists in the world might not have done the job so neatly.

Sometimes I think Hell is easier to see than Heaven.

You know, it's not hard to look around the world and see that there is suffering.

It's not hard to look around the world and see that there is evil that is done.

You know, even those who claim to take the relativist approach or some kind of naturalists anti metaphysical approach and say that there's no such thing as good and evil, no one actually believes that.

And we've talked about that quite a bit.

Most almost all people, right, when you bring up cases like genocide or rape or murder or child abuse, right, they're going to say that all these things are wrong and they need to be stopped.

And so people are able to recognize evil, But perhaps even more imminent, people recognize pain, right, people recognize suffering because that's something that we inevitably experience in this life.

And so because is so obvious, it's not hard to be convinced of the reality of hell.

Well, if there's hell, then maybe even if we don't yet have a vision for what heaven is, we can at least consider that heaven might be whatever isn't hell, right, whatever the opposite of that is.

And so even people who don't yet have a theological framework worked out for what good and evil mean, if they're able to recognize evil, and they're able to recognize suffering, then maybe the good is whatever moves in the opposite direction, and so right now he sees hell in frost face, right he sees evil, and that allows him to start moving even more steadfastly in the opposite direction.

And Mark is brought into this room where nothing's quite right.

The aesthetic dimensions are all off.

Right there, these irregularly plays spots, and you know, the door frames not quite right, and it's not placed in the right part of the wall.

Everything is just a little bit off.

And this is part of his training.

It's a way of wearing down his sense of aesthetics, letting him think that there is no straight path, that everything is crooked.

But it has the opposite effect because the more that he gets the sense of the crooked, well, the more he recognizes that in order for something to be crooked, there has to be something like straight, there has to be a straight line.

So too, if there is such a thing as evil, there has to be something like good.

And so by looking toward despair, he's starting to gain hope as he recognizes that what he wants is whatever the opposite of this is.

And likewise he sees all this art that's just grotesque and it's meant to smash his idea of the beautiful, but it's having the opposite result.

He's seeing the ugly, and that the fact that he's recognizing in it as ugly, he is leading him to a greater conviction that there is such a thing as beauty, that aesthetics is real, and that there is an appropriate response to things.

And skip it over some of this, but I do think I need to read this fairly long passage here so significant.

But after an hour or so, this long high coffin of a room began to produce on mark an effect which his instructor had probably not anticipated.

There was no return of the attack which he had suffered the last night in the cell, whether because he had already survived that attack, or because the imminence of death had drawn the tooth of his lifelong desire for the esoteric, or because he had, in a fashion called very urgently for help.

The built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware, as he had never been aware before, of this room's opposite.

As the desert first teaches men to love water, where as absence first reveals affection.

There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the strait.

Something else, something he vaguely called the normal, apparently existed.

He had never thought about it before, but there it was, solid, massive, with the shape of its own, almost like something you could touch or eat or fall in love with.

It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the Rooks calling at Keir Hardy and thought that somewhere outside daylight was going on at that moment.

He was not thinking in moral terms at all, or else what is much the same thing.

He was having his first deeply moral experience.

He was choosing a side the normal.

All that, as he called it, was what he chose.

If the scientific point of view led away from all that, then be damned to the scientific point of view.

The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away.

He had not had such a sensation before.

And I love that that he wasn't thinking in moral terms.

He was having a moral experience.

And in other words, he was learning to not be quite so objectively minded.

He was learning not to objectively study the beam of light, but he was learning to look along the beam of light.

He was learning not to study morality, to analyze morality.

He was learning to be moral.

He was learning to see the good, not just to think about the good from a hypothetical point of view.

He was becoming a man with a chest.

He was becoming somebody integrated with the very fibers of existence.

In other words, he was being awakened to God.

He was being awakened to what it means to be human.

And welcome back to Mark again just a little bit.

And so Jane has this weird vision here.

He sees this giant, this creature, this woman who is kind of like Mother Dimble, but not exactly.

I'm gonna be told in a little bit that this is Venus, or at least the earthly wraith of Venus.

And so she's coming to terms with the feminine, even as she's about to come to terms more directly with the masculine through a conversation with Ransom.

And so she's getting this direct relation between the Venusian and the martial influence.

But in her contact with Venus, or at least the raith of Venus, she sees something like what Mother Dimble represents here, but not exactly like Mother Dimple.

She is more frightening.

She is more haunting, and Ransom will talk about that in just a little bit, and I hear it is so Rainsom says, you said she was a little like Mother Dimple.

So she is, but mother Dimple with something left out.

Mother Dimble is friends with all that world, as merlinis is friends with the woods and rivers, but he isn't a wood or a river himself.

She has not rejected it, but she has baptized it.

She is a Christian wife, and you, you know, are not neither are you a virgin.

You have put yourself where you must meet that old woman, and you've rejected all that has happened to her since Maleldo came to earth.

So you got her raw, not stronger than Mother Dimple would find her, but untransformed to moniac and you don't like it.

Hasn't that been the history of your life?

And so all her life she has been fleeing Venus, She has been fleeing Perlandra, She has been fleeing the feminine.

Remember back at the beginning of the story when she's distraught and she goes out and buys a hat, and we're told that that's the kind of thing that she always had disdain for women for doing, because, I mean, such a stereotypically feminine thing to do.

And she doesn't want to be a stereotypical feminine.

She wants to be a professional woman who has control over her life.

And so you know, she is steadfast and she is hard when she should have been soft and welcoming and embodying the beauty that she began to embrace on that train ride after first meeting Ransom.

And so she's been fleeing from the feminine.

She's been trying to be this modern woman all her life, and so now the femine approaches her, not rightly contextualized, not even really welcoming, but approaches her as a demon, as something to fear, as an imposing force upon her that is haunting her, rather than beckoning her, rather than bringing her into a proper relationship with herself and with the ideal.

It hasn't that been the history of her life.

She has been running.

She has been running from herself, running from her true nature.

In fact, she's been running from nature itself really, as she's built up these artificial constructs that would likely make the forces of Belbury proud and not only has she been fleeing from the feminine, but she's also been fleeing from the masculine.

But she had been conceiving this world as spiritual in the negative sense, as some neutral or democratic vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended, but simply taken away.

Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences in contrast all the way up richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent.

How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest and first and the easiest form of some shocking contact with the reality, which would have to be repeated, but in even larger and more disturbing modes on the highest levels of all.

Remember back in Perilandra, when Ransom recognizes that gender is a higher reality than biological sex, and that biological sex is simply the organic and stantiation of gender, of the relationship between the mass and the feminine, between Mars and Venus, Malachandra and Perilandrum.

And so we see that the gender relationship involves the masculine asserting itself and really giving itself over in service in marshal combative service to the feminine who receives the martial spirit.

And through this great dance new life is brought forth.

And we see that this instantiates itself with an organic life through the masculine asserting itself, the feminine receiving the masculine, and then that produces new life.

I mean, if you don't know where babies came from.

And I'll try not be more explicit than what I just laid out here, but what we see is in the organic process of the male and female coming together and producing new life, what we see is a more metaphysical reality is played out even above the organic level.

In other words, the gendered relationships between the sexes are actually more real than we recognize.

And so in our naturalistic progressivism, we might be prone to say that the idea of gender sprung up from biological realities, and that, you know, maybe we can control over those biological realities and then rework the ideas of gender.

But no, what Lewis is telling us is that gender is actually more real than biology.

It begins, It doesn't rise up from the bottom, It comes down from the top, a trickle down through this cosmic dance that actually begins on the most basic levels of reality.

And so now Jane is starting to recognize that what you don't get in the spiritual realm is this democratic vacuum where everything is flattened out.

No, you actually see that things get more particular, and the gender actually becomes more real the higher up you go.

And so this is not something that we can easily dismiss, despite what our modern culture might tell us.

And then Rainsom gives us this.

You are offended by the masculine itself, the loud, eruptive, possessive thing, the gold lion, the bearded bowl, which breaks through the hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your prim as the dwarf scattered the carefully made bed.

The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level.

But the masculine, none of us can escape.

What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.

You had better agree with your adversary quickly.

You mean, I shall have to become a Christian, said Jane.

It looks like it, said the director.

And so the masculine, none of us can escape.

What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.

And so one hand we get this great dance.

Here we see that through the earthly, the biological male and female, we see a certain relationship that, when it takes the appropriate order, finds itself brought up in the Great Dance to a higher spiritual, metaphysical reality.

Right, you move from the relationship between the male and the female, you move up to the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, the Venusian and the marshal, And then as those get related, you move up into a higher order, and then a higher order higher order to eventually you get to God himself.

Who is that which asserts himself?

Right, he is the most stable reality, the most rock hard reality.

It is God who asserts himself in the nothingness, or another way of saying, that is God who asserts himself in the potential, which receives that assertion and then bears new life.

And so God is the ultimate masculine.

He is that which asserts itself, and then that into which he asserts himself is that which receives God in ordered submission.

This is why the church is the bride of Christ, which you know, if you don't understand what's going on here, you know, it sounds kind of weird if you're a man saying that you are part of the bride of Christ.

But that's because you know, we take this feminine role in receiving Christ, who has the initiative.

This is very important, especially for a lot of medieval spirituality, this relationship between the masculine and feminine, recognizing that compared to God, we are all feminine because you know, we all have an obligation to receive that which God asserts, and in recognizing her place, well, this is when Jane starts to experience conversion.

For still, she thought that religion was a kind of exaltation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from the specially gifted souls toward a receptive heaven.

Then, quite sharply it occurred to her that the director never talked about religion, nor did the Dimples nor Camilla.

They talked about God they had no picture in their minds of some mysts steaming upward, rather strong, skillful hands thrust down to make and mend, perhaps even to destroy.

And so news she had considered that we had a masculine role in reaching up toward a recepti of heaven.

In other words, she saw us as the humans having a masculine role compared to a feminine god, a feminine heaven.

But no, it's exactly the opposite, does not we who assert ourselves toward heaven.

It's Heaven that it SERTs itself toward us.

And so she's getting this role reversal fixed in her mind, and this is when she experiences conversion.

For one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness.

And so again she was taking this masculine role in asserting herself.

Then at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came.

What awaited her there was serious, to the degree of sorrow, and beyond there was no form nor sound.

The mold under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border were not visibly changed, but they were changed.

A boundary had been crossed.

She had come into a world, or into a person, or into the presence of a person.

And so in recognizing that it's not we who assert ourselves in religion, but that it is rather a God who asserts himself in us, she was able to receive.

Remember us, Tours says to Ransom something like he lays no merit upon you.

Receive and be glad.

And so Jane is learning to baptize the Venusian influence.

She is able to receive that which God asserts, and in so doing new life is springing up within her right now, jumping back to Belbury, Meanwhile, in the Objective room, something like a crisis had developed between Mark and Professor Frost.

As soon as they arrived there, Mark saw the table had been drawn back.

On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic.

We have half an hour to pursue our exercises, said Frost, looking at his watch.

Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways.

And so Frost is continuing to put Mark these exercises to make him objective, to free him from emotional sentiment, to free him from any recognition of absolute value that transcends mere sentiment.

He wants to remove Mark away from metaphysics, to grant him purely in the material, purely in the objective, just as he laid out this philosophy directly back in back in Mark's prison cell, right where he explains to him objectivity.

He explains to him that all of his pursuit of value has been an illusion that is not real.

Real life is material, Real life is that which can be empirically verified.

And so now he's been walking Mark through this process of trying to disrupt his sense of aesthetics, to get him to stop thinking that there is such a thing as the normal, such a thing as the real, as that which is actually valuable, and that which is not valuable or perhaps even damaging to the world of value.

And so while he's trying to Ridmark up all of this through these exercises, is having the opposite result, where Mark is increasingly getting a sense of the normal and increasingly getting a sense of the way that things should be.

Well now in this objective room, Frost wants to have Mark trample on this image of Christ on the floor, and he makes it clear that you know, he doesn't think there's anything particularly significant about this image of Christ.

He says that, you know, if we were in a different culture, then there would be a different test here.

But because this represents the prevailing myth, the prevailing superstition of our culture, well, this is what he needs to reject.

However, it's again going to have the opposite effect that Frost is intending.

Mark was well aware of the rising danger.

Obviously, if he disobeyed, his last chance of getting out of Belbury alive might be gone.

Even of getting out of this room, the smothering sensation once again attacked him.

He was himself.

He felt as helpless as the wood in Christ.

As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way, neither as a piece of wood, nor as a monument of superstition, but as a bit of history.

Christianity was nonsense, But one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days, And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Strait or normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury.

It was a picture of what happened when the strait met the crooked, a picture of what the crooked did to this strait, what it would do to him if he remained straight.

It was in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood Across and so on this cross he finds himself at a crossroads.

And so in looking at the disgusting at that which was esthetically off, he started to develop a sense of the strait, of the right way of things.

Well, now looking at the cross he obviously sees not the way that things should be.

What he sees is what happens when the strait meets with the crooked, and what the crooked does to the strait.

And so now he develops an identification with Christ.

Even though at this point he doesn't have any clear theology in his mind.

He's not thinking abstractly, he's not thinking philosophically.

What he's recognizing is that right now Belbury poses the same threat to Mark as the Belbury of christ Day posts to Christ.

And so he's identifying with Christ in his unjust suffering at the hands of those who are unjust and so just as he's been increasingly getting a vision of the Strait, now he's getting increase seeing identification with this strait.

And he recognizes that identification with the Strait very well may not go well for him.

However, supposing the Strait was utterly powerless, always everywhere, certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the crooked what then, why not go down with the ship?

He began to be frightened by the very fact that his fears seemed to have momentarily vanished.

They had been a safeguard.

They'd prevented him all his life from making mad decisions like that which he was now making.

As he turned to Frost and said, it's all bloody nonsense, and I'm damned if I do any such thing.

And so he's getting to the point where he is not at all interested in self preservation.

He's not looking out for himself.

What he wants to do is identify with that which is good, regardless of the consequences.

And down the end of this passage here we see Lewis being very intentional with his word choices, as he always is.

Right, it's all bloody nonsense, and I'm damned if I do any such thing.

And that's exactly right, that if he did what Frost wanted to do, then he would be just that he would be damned.

So Mark is making a selfless moral stand.

He is embodying the martial influence that stands against external forces, that asserts itself even to the point of martyrdom and again mars martyrdom.

And so he is willing to stand against villainy, to stand against the fog, to stand against the void, with the assertion of being.

He's willing to choose the good, the normal, the right, the strait.

And sorry for getting ahead again, but I'm going to connect this to the Silver Chair, and that what Mark's doing here reminds me very much of Puddleglum speech in the Silver Chair.

And of course we'll talk about some of the broader context of what's happening here when we actually get to the story, but for our current purposes, we'll jump right in here.

Suppose we have only dreamed or made up all those things trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.

Suppose we have, then all I can say is that in that case, the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.

Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world, well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.

And that's a funny thing when you come to think of it.

We're just babies making up a game.

If you're right before, babies playing the game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow.

And that's why I'm going to stand by the playworld.

I'm on Aslan's side, even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it.

I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn't any Narnia.

And I think it's exactly what we see Mark doing that he is going to follow Asland even if there isn't an Asland to follow, because he would rather choose a made up good than the obviously real evil before him.

Now, jumping over from Frost to Wither, we get I think he's just a penetratingly profound philosophical insight here as Lewis gives us his history of thought.

And this is just one of the sections that I love when Lewis does this, how he just in her weaves narrative with philosophical commentary so seamlessly, like very few authors can get away with doing.

Lewis says that would have been in Withers far off you merely esthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar had deepened and darkened year after year into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself.

He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through pragmatism, and thence through logical positivism, and out at last into the complete void.

And so what we see here is that he begins with a distaste for that which should be distasteful.

He begins with a merely esthetic repugnance realities that were crude or vulgar.

However, his rejection of the vulgar didn't lead him to embrace the good and the true and the beautiful.

No, his rejection of the vulgar, I mean, really led him to reject the concept of vulgarity.

It led him to reject the very reality of esthetics.

And so he passes from Hegel.

And Hegel believed that everything is one thing, that everything is essentially God.

He was a kind of pantheist that simplifies things a little bit, but I don't want to get too offstrack here.

But Hegel believed that everything is one thing, and really that one thing is God, God coming to sort of develop and to understand himself across time.

This is very much the philosophy that we get in Weston before he goes full on obviously demonic on Perilandra.

Right.

He's given that speech about how everything is one and everything's connected and that there is this cosmic spirit moving in the development of progress and evolution, and even identifies that with the Holy Spirit.

And Hegel himself uses some Christian language to communicate this very Unchristian philosophy, the idea that progress itself is a revelation of God.

However, because all things are God, Hegel really doesn't have a good way to divide out good from evil because it's all just one thing.

There's nothing that can really stand judgment against another in this sort of pantheist or panentheist of worldview.

And Lewis talks a good bit about pantheism and his writings mere Christianity is a good place to go for that.

But he goes from Hegel into Hume.

Hume, who is well known for his empiricism, he believed that the only things that we can be certain of are those which we can know through sense experience, and so he's going to really discount metaphysics in a really significant way.

All we can know is what we gain through sense experience.

And the tradition of Hume gives rise to pragmatism, which is this idea that only the practical, only that which works it matters, as well as logical positivism, which goes back to Guys and Titus of the abolishraive Man, who say that language can never meaningfully be used to communicate metaphysical, non empirical realities.

And so he moves from Hegel saying that everything is one, and so there is no really clear difference between good and evil, even beautiful and not beautiful, because all these get conflated into the one.

And then that moves into Hume, who says that all we have are our sense perceptions, and so we're getting even further removed from a broader context in which we might possibly find some legitimate meaning, some legitimate value.

And then so too we're moved into pragmatism, where we're just seeing kind of what works without having any criteria for judging what should be, what is it that we should be working toward, and then logical positivism, which just continues that trajectory further, removing him further further for the many broader contexts, and just isolating him in nothingness, making him entirely self referential.

And this is when he then steps out into the complete void.

And so in Lewis's reckoning, this is a seamless transition from hegel to the void.

And we saw this play out in a concentrated form in Weston in Perilandra how he goes from this kind of cosmic working toward progress into the openly demonic and nihilistic, and then speaking of stepping out into the void, we get this incredible sequence of the banquet at Belbury.

And I'm not going to follow the various plot elements of that, because I mean, you can read it for yourself, and you probably have read it by the time you're watching this.

But I think this is a good summary statement here that we get from Ransom.

In fighting those who serve devils, one always has this in one side.

Their masters hate them as much as they hate us.

The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to hell their own masters finish the work for us.

They break their tools, and so the curse of Babbel is wrought against Belbury, the great babbel Builders.

Right, they're trying to build themselves up toward God that they're trying to essentially conquer heaven, and in so doing they're going to bring their own judgment against them.

They're trying to build themselves up in a god less context, and in so doing they lose their context for orienting themselves in any given direction, right, And so they think that they're ascending upward, But as Nietzsche tells us, with the death of God, there is no upward, there is no downward, there's no left, there is no right.

You're simply flowing in a void.

And so they're trying to build themselves up, but in so doing they're actually tear themselves down from having any kind of meaningful sense of direction at all.

And so they are pursuing reason, they're pursuing order, they're pursuing they're pursuing divinity, but in so doing they're going to be brought low, brought down into the earth.

And so we just get that great scene at that banquet where their speech just starts to fall apart and they can't communicate with each other because they don't have a shared reality.

Right.

This is a good indictment of the postmodern linguistic environment where everybody is an island, right, where we tell everybody that they get to determine their own truth, that there's nobody who can judge them, that there's nobody who can tell them what their authentic self looks like.

That's just something that everyone needs to embrace.

And so because everybody has their own authority over everything, right, everyone gets to be their own little oyarsa.

Well, we no longer have a shared reality, and so we lose any ability to meaningfully meet with each other and engage in real communication.

And so, on one hand, this curse that's being brought against them is a judgment from deep heaven.

But it's also a judgment that they have wrought on themselves.

It is the bringing to light that which they have already done in the darkness.

I think two things interesting here that at the same time that Belbury is falling apart in the Curse of Babble over at Saint Anne's, we see a kind of Pentecost taking place as all of these different heavenly intelligences descend on Saint Anne's and they start getting enraptured in the spiritual influence that is allowing them to be more themselves.

In fact, then the ladies are in that room trying on all the dresses and whatnot, and you know, kind of getting glorified really in this attire that they're putting on and recognizing and embracing each other's beauty.

We're even told that this looks like an upper room of a store, and I'm sure that when Lewis uses that language of it looks like they were in an upper room.

Right, This is connecting them to Pentecost.

And so over at Saint Anne's we see we see Pentecost, which reunites humanity around a common understanding source in God, sourced in the divine.

And so in Saint Ann's we see a kind of Pentecost as everybody is increasingly coming together, they're being reunited through this divine influence.

Well, now over at Belbury we see babble taking place, which is the anti Pentecost, as everyone's being divided up.

And so just as we've seen these trajectories between Jane and Mark all along.

Now we see these trajectories of Saint Anne's moving toward this idea of the United Church, and then we see Belbury moving toward greater disunity as we move further away from that which provides unity, and so as the nice falls apart, well, now the devils just begin to consume their disabled ponds, right, and this is why they're told to start chopping off heads, and Frost dies recognizing that he's made the wrong choice, but he's unable to do anything with it, and so really they just start to get consumed by Hell and the speak to the Dante and image of Satan consuming the corpses of the damned, and we see this in Screwtape proposes to Toast as well, right when when they talk about the fine vintage of the Pharisees and how they haven't had any really great sinatars to dian On recently, but they just had good quantity.

And so that speaks again to this idea that Satan is interested in consuming his followers.

And so we see that thing brilliant played out and horrifically played out through the scene following the banquet of Belbury.

But while everything is quite literally going to hell.

Marlin gives Mark a note and tells him to get out of there, and so Mark is able to leave, and then he really starts to rediscover himself.

He goes to this little inn, it's really just fairytale cottage, and in one of these bookshelves he found a serial children's story which he had begun to read as a child, but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half away through it, and he was ashamed to read it after that.

Now he chased it from volume to volume till he had finished it.

It was good.

The grown up.

Stories to which after his tenth birth that he had turned instead of it now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish.

And so he is stripping himself of this artificial image that he's made, of these artificial standards, the artificial goals that he's been pursued doing his entire life.

And this connects very well with was probably one of the most popular CS.

Lewis quotes.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so.

Now that I'm fifty, I read them openly.

When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

And so he's learning how to be a child without being childish, which I remember has been an important theme for Mark.

Back towards the beginning of the story, we see that Jane takes on a child like demeanor as she's increasingly moving towards Saint Anne's.

She's learning to trust, to open herself up.

She's learning to look for comfort and look for a context beyond herself, whereas Mark at the beginning of the story is very childish, which is why he's drawn in by Feverstone and his faux masculinity and his faux strength and his faux appearance as being somebody who's very grown up.

And so Mark is constantly trying to look very grown up.

But now he's finally dismissing the artificial.

He's becoming natural, coming real, and so he's embracing the things that he wants to embrace.

He's rediscovering the fairy tale as he rediscovers himself.

Member Screwtape says that one of the worst things that the patient can do is just to read a book that he enjoys, because the more that somebody authentically enjoys something, the more direct they are toward that which they're most going to authentically enjoy.

All good stories are an echo of the story that pervades the cosmos and is achieved in history for our utmost consolation and joy.

And for more on that, take a look at his essay.

Myth became fact and then refreshed for the journey.

Mark continues on his way because he is not saved for himself in a very important sense.

He is saved for Jane, and so he leaves us in and heads towards Saint Anne's, and he continues to have these reflections for now.

He thought that with all his lifelong eagerness to reach an inner circle, he had chosen the wrong circle.

Jane was where he belonged.

He was going to be admitted only out of kindness, because Jane had been fool enough to marry him.

And so there it is.

He's been chasing the inner circle his entire life, but he is pursuing the wrong goal, the wrong circle.

As I've mentioned many times now, the inner circle from the medieval or at least the Dante in point of view, the inner circle is Earth, and the inner circle of Earth is hell.

That's what you find at the inner circle of the cosmos, you find Hell.

And he thought that he was pursuing a seat of power, as a seat of influence, but in reality he was pursuing a counterfeit power, which really is not power at all.

It is privation.

It is the devolution of form, not the evolution of progress.

And so now his trajectory is getting reworked.

Here.

Now he's going to start moving further up and further in.

He's going to start moving outward.

He's going to start moving into or at least toward the true circle, which in its utmost is God himself.

But where he is in the Great Dance, what it looks like is moving toward Jane.

That his responsibility to her and her role as the beautiful is what he needs to learn how to engage with appropriately, and in so doing, he's joining up in this great dance.

And like we've seen with Jane, her responsibility toward Mark is not even just analogous toward her responsibility toward God.

Or maybe another way of saying this is that God's love for Jane and Jane's love for God is not simply analogous to her marital love.

It is an extension of the same reality.

And so as Mark moves toward Jane, moving in the upward direction right he's rightly oriented, he is also moving toward God.

Remorpher lewis, the most important thing is not just where you're situated, it's the direction that you're headed.

And so now Mark is absolutely moving in the right direction, moving toward Jane, and recognizing that any admittance to the circles that she runs in is going to be by grace, not by conniving, and not by sophistry, but by grace alone.

And he continues along this thought.

When she first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind had habited, she had been like a spring shower, and opening himself to it, he had not been mistaken.

He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage by itself gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness.

As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.

And so this is where he went wrong, not in opening himself up to her beauty, but in seeking to subdue it rather than give himself over to it in love, in service, and in strength.

And so just as her beauty was not her own but was for others, and especially for Mark, so too Mark's strength was not for himself, but was for others, and especially Jane.

And so he is to use his strength in service to her, helping her to secure her virtue, helping her to be more herself, just as she is to do for Mark in giving herself over to him in a kind of loving submission that helps him to be more himself.

And so what we see is that both Mark and Jane are learning how to be more themselves them as they should be, as they always should have been.

And in becoming more of themselves and actualizing their respective ideals, they're now better situated to relate to each other.

And I think this is just great marriage advice here that they and we've talked about this in some of the Zoom meetings, that the solution to their metal problems is not in trying to fix their spouse to fix the other.

It's not even just in praying that the other will get over their problems.

No, they both need to take care of their respective problems.

And in taking care of their problems, they become better situated to legitimately take care of one another.

And then I've already referenced this that the women who are in this room, we are putting on all these extravagant, beautiful clothings, which really serves to just highlight their own beauty.

And that's really the point that the outer adornment is symbolic, or it has this enchanting effect of bringing out the beauty that is take within them by virtue of their placed within the Great Dance.

And I can't help but point out the fact that this room, or rather the top floor of this wing of the room, is called the wardrobe.

And we're told that for a moment it looked like they were not in a room at all, but some kind of forests.

And so we get a forest here in a wardrobe, and obviously that's gonna have some thematic connection later on when we get to Narnia.

And then also I said, it looks like they were in the upper rooms of a big shop, and I think that significance of upper rooms here connects to that Pentecost imagery.

And then as Ransom prepares to go back to Perlandra, he says, my dear, what else is there to do?

I've not grown a day or an hour since I came back from Perilandra.

There is no natural death to look forward to.

The wound will only be healed in the world where it was got.

And this reminded me very much of Tolkien of Frodo, as he's returning back to the Shire, but he has this wound here.

He's encouraged so much suffering that there really is no going home for him.

And so we get this exchange between Gandalf and Frodo.

Alas there's some wounds that cannot be wholly cured, said Gandalf.

I fear it may be so with mine, said Frodo.

There is no real going back.

Though it may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same, for I shall not be the same.

I am wounded with knife, sting and tooth and a long burden.

Where shall I find rest?

And so all this suffering that Fredo had incurred prepared him for a different home.

It prepared him for another place.

And that place is the undying land of valin Ore.

And I think that what Lewis gives us.

I think what Tolkien gives us is a pretty significant theology of suffering.

It has a role in our ultimate pilgrimage, as a role in helping us to yes, we embrace the comforts and the joys that we experience in this earth, but pain, the right kind of suffering, helps to cleave us from an over association with the earth, with this current life, and it prepares us for life to come.

It gives us a sense of longing for a home that we have not yet experienced, but that we know we belong to.

And this is going to be an ongoing theme in Lewis So too.

Ransom suffering prepares him to go back to Perlandra, back to the land of love and life, where he can meet up with the Pendragon and Melchizedek and Enoch and whoever else.

And then we get the most direct differentiation between Britain and Laggers.

And so Laggers is something like the true England, right, This is the enchanted version.

This is the version that's lost through all the earthly mechanations of Britain.

And so the earthly Britain is always haunted by the spiritual reality, just as Jane, we're told, was always haunted by Venus, by this wraith of Venus at least that wasn't properly integrated into her life, into herself.

So what haunting, said Camilla, how something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call laggers.

Having you noticed that we are two countries after every Arthur and Mordred, behind every Milton, a Cromwell, a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers, the home of Sydney, and a cecil Rhodes.

Is it my wonder they cause hypocrites.

But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between laggers and Britain.

And this isn't just true of Britain.

That thee was going to go on to say that every people have their own version of laggers, that which is something like their ideal spirit, that which they are naturally drawn to, and when they are rightly oriented, that which they embrace.

And so is right for males to associate themselves with the masculine influence, just that is the right for females to associate themselves with the feminine influence.

So too is right for these people to associate themselves with the spirit of laggers.

Just it is right for France to associate itself with reason, and in China with the order of heaven.

Everybody, every people have their own spirit that they ought to integrate into themselves, and in being more themselves, they become more united with each other, going up in the great dance toward a common order and ultimate toward a common source, a common energy, a common divine reality.

And so just as individuals we've already seen become more themselves and more united as they go upward on the heavenward path, so to even peoples have a kind of particularity to them that they ought to embrace, and in embracing their particularity in the right way, they actually gain more unity with each other.

And I think this gives us a pretty good vision of what we get in scripture regarding you know, what we expect in the escaton, that we have diverse peoples, that we have diverse languages, at the same time we all fully understand each other as we're moving in the right direction and united by the same spirit.

But perhaps even that can play out in the here and now.

I think that's what Dimple is telling us.

And now there's a lot happening here, So I know kind of jumping around here, but there's a few things I want to hit on.

And so they celebrate their victory and McPhee says, we didn't really do anything, you know, we spend our time just kind of gardening and not really doing anything, and then victory came about.

And so mcfee's not really clear about the role that he had to play in this, or that any of them really had to play in this.

And so McPhee says, I'd be greatly oblige if anyone would tell me what we have done apart from feeding the pigs and raising some very decent vegetables.

You have done what was required of you, said the director.

You've obeyed and waited.

It will often happen like that.

As one of the modern authors has told us, the altar must be built in one place in order that fire from heaven may descend somewhere else.

And so Ransom is making this profound point here that we all have a role to play that, you know, as Tolkien says, it's very often the small and the unknown that move the wheels of the world.

You might not feel like you have some great cosmic significance in the things that you do right in your workplace.

Some days it might not feel like you're doing significant work.

Or I know that one temptation that a lot of women experience when they see home with their kids is that, you know, they feel like they're not accomplishing anything, despite the fact that day in and day out, you are directly influencing the trajectory of immortals.

And I don't know that there can be a higher vocation than that.

And so we get the sense that we're just doing mundane things, they're keeping us from the really important work.

But very often it is those mundane things that are the really important work, even if in the moment we're not able to see where the fire is going to fall.

The altar that we're building plays a significant role in that conclusion.

And so don't despise the ordinary, don't despise the loathly.

It very well may be that in your right engagement with the lowly, you are participating in the workings of deep heaven.

And then right toward the end, their continuing to just reflect on kind of how we got here, and they start talking about Edgestow, and somebody says that, you know, do those people at the university kind of really know what was going on here, what they were participating in.

You know, maybe we should cut them some slack.

They didn't really have an understanding.

And then Dennison says, but all the same, was there a single doctrine practice at Belbury which hadn't been preached by some lecturer at Edgetoe.

Oh of course, they never thought that anyone would act on their theories.

No one was more astonished than they when what they'd been talking of for years suddenly took on reality.

But it was their own child coming back home.

And so, as Lewis often does the end of the Ransom books, he really brings us to a appointed indictment of academia that we've been teaching this idea that there is no value, that goodness is all just power, dynamics or perspective or opinion, nothing is actually intrinsically valuable, That there's no one path, or even not even a set of paths that's intrinsically better than another.

All we have is your truth and my truth, your good and my good.

We all just need to be authentic to ourselves, and you know, not force our beliefs on other people.

As I teach in a state university, I am surrounded by this kind of ideology, and then we're suddenly shocked when we look around our culture and we find that everything is falling apart, that we have no real cohesion, that people are becoming increasingly isolated from each other, that communities are becoming increasingly isolated from each other.

And that's because we've been forcing everybody into these little islands or at the very best, these little archipelagoes of meaning, these little archipelagoes of subjective reason.

And so whether you are radically isolated as an individual or a community, and even then community is going to be superficial and kind of an illusion in itself, because again, if there's no such thing as human nature, then we really don't have anything in common whatsoever.

We're all just particular things amongst a bunch of other particular things, and it's really nothing that makes anybody human, let alone share in the same kind of humanity.

And so we've been teaching this explicitly through academia, right through our philosophy classes, through our literature classes, through our English classes.

We've seen this throughout our culture.

We see this in just about every show and movie that's made today.

It's all pushing this idea that what we need is freedom from all restraints so that we can just be ourselves.

And then again we look around to recognize that we have no cohesion, that everything is falling apart.

That we see radically increased statistics regarding chronic anxiety disorders and depression and suicide, especially amongst the youth.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not providing some kind of holistic psychiatric theory here.

All I'm saying is that the more that we tell people that they are their own context, that all of reality is self referential to the individual or even to the community, the more we're going to find people falling into claustrophobic despair because they have nowhere to look up to.

They've lost the ability to look up at the night sky and see the heavens.

They only see space, they see emptiness, they see nihilism.

And so in light that the idea is that we as people have been pushing, it should be no surprise when we look at when we see the results that are coming out of that it was their own child coming back home as Venus, as Perlandra really enraptures Saint Anne's all these animals show up and they started getting together and mating, and some of them are a little bit put off by this is kind of weird.

It just kind of scandalous.

And McPhee says something about how it's all distasteful or disordered or something like that he sees chaos around him, but Rainsom says, no, this is actually true order She Perlandra comes more near the Earth than she was wont to to make Earth sane.

Perlandra, it's all about us, and man is no longer isolated, and that's been such an important focus this whole time, of not being isolated, of joining the greater context of the heavens.

Man is no longer isolated.

We are now as we ought to be, between the angels who are elder brothers and the beast who are our jesters, servants and playfellows.

And so humans occupy this pretty unique role in that we have bodies that have much in common with the animals.

To use the language of the classical thinkers, we have an animal soul, but we also have a rational soul, and maybe we might prefer the language of saying that we have a spiritual and so we ourselves play this kind of bridge between material creation and spiritual realities.

We stand between the angels who are our jesters, servants and playfellows, and the angels who are our elder brothers.

And so that is our place in the order, and we play a unique role in maintaining order, because I mean, without a bridge, what you have is separation.

And so we play an important role in that hierarchy of bringing the material up into the spiritual.

Just as in Perilandra torn Tendral had a responsibility to nurture and to cultivate the beasts of their planet so that they would at least nearly become Now because again we get this idea that the dance pulls everything upward when it embraces the right harmony, So too, creation is redeemed by man, especially as we participate in relationship with the true man Christ, which connects us back to the importance that we see in the incarn especially in Perlandro.

And now continuing with this Paralandrian influence, here, Ransom is going to prepare Jane to go meet with Mark.

Your husband is waiting for you in the lodge.

It was your own marriage chamber that you prepared.

Should you not go to him, must I go now?

If you leave the decision with me, it is now that I would send you, then I will go, sir, But am I a bear or a hedgehog?

More but not less?

Go in obedience and you will find love.

You will have no more dreams, have children instead.

You're rendy Meleldel.

And so she is being sent to consummate their relationship, and obviously that's connected with the consummation that we've seen with all of the animal life in this scene.

And so she thinks that she's being sent just as an animal to copulate like the other animals, and Ransom says, no, I mean you are biological, right, you do have a relationship with the animals, but you are more than that that the biological is being brought up into the spiritual, and so doing it becomes spiritual, right, it becomes or I guess the better way saying that it becomes spiritually significant.

And so what we see playing out here is we can see a right relationship between the biological female with the feminine as well as with mark, the biological male with the masculine.

Remember in Perilhandra, we're told that sex, that the male and female are biological appropriations of these higher realities of the masculine and the feminine.

And so Jane here is having this integration take place between the female and the feminine, just as markets between the male and the masculine, and in their right relationship with each other, we see that new life is born.

And you know, I've talked to us many times now that this is a very important theme here that when the when the feminine rightly receives the masculine, which rightly asserts itself for the good of the feminine, we see it the masculine really ends up using its strength, using its power to lay down into the feminine, which receives the masculine, and in this receiving gives rise to new life.

We saw this cosmically on a planetary level with Perilandra, and now we see this play out on a particular and human level between Mark and Jane.

But even in this human relating we see something more cosmic happening in this relationship.

Now we jump back to Mark with March approaching this house.

Suddenly the diffuse light brightened and flushed.

He looked up and perceived a great lady standing by a doorway in a wall.

It was not Jane, not like Jane.

It was larger, almost gigantic.

It was not human, though it was like a woman, divinely tall, part naked, part wrapped in a flame colored robe.

Light came from it.

The face was enigmatic, ruthless, he thought, inhumanly beautiful.

It was opening the door for him.

He did not dare disobey.

Surely, he thought, I must have died.

And he went in found himself in some place of sweet smells and bright fires, with food and wine and a rich bed.

And so again we get this image here that the masculine has to lay down its power in service for the feminine, and in so doing we're going to get new life.

And so, just as Ransom willingly laid himself down beneath the soil of Perilandra in order to give rise to new life.

And of course Ransom here being a stand in for Malacandra, for the martial spirit, so too now we have Mark rightly integrated with his respective influence.

He's integrated with his namesake, with Mars.

And because he's rightly related with Mars, he's willing to lay himself down as a loving martyr for the feminine, which then receives him.

And in receiving him, he is able to be more himself, an even stronger version of himself.

Right.

This is why this is where we get resurrection.

And so he willingly lays himself down in the right way, so that he might pick himself up again in right relationship with the feminine, and so doing be more quintessentially himself, even as she is more contessentially herself.

And as they are themselves, they find an even greater unity in the life that they produce, namely the child that they are to have.

And so Lewis is just doing some absolutely beautiful things in these stories regarding the relationship between the male and the female, metaphysics, beauty, love, strength, the Christian idea of death and resurrection, and remember in myth became fact.

Lewis says that the historical gospel, the death and resurrection of Christ, is the historical instantiation of that which is more vaguely embedded in the very fibers of reality, the very fibers of the cosmos.

And so this idea that the masculine Christ would lay himself down into the earth that would receive him, and in this right relationship of the masculine and feminine we get a even harder, a more solid form of the masculine as well as the feminine, and we get new life coming out of this.

That this idea of the Gospel is just embedded throughout the cosmos, and very much in our relationships with one another.

And so all these things are connected.

Like I said a little bit ago, that marital love is not just analogous for the love between God and man, but that it is an extension of the very same love.

All these things are connected.

We don't have great dances.

We have a great dance that leads from where we are in the particular all the way up to the very top.

And as we are rightly oriented moving in this heavenward path, Heaven works its way backwards to where we are in the here and now.

And so now with Mark and the house, uh Jane approaches it.

First she thought of the director.

Then she thought of Meleldeal.

Then she thought of her obedience, and the setting of each foot before the other became a kind of sacrificial ceremony.

And she thought of children, and of pain and death.

And now she was halfway to the lodge and thought of Mark and all his sufferings.

Obviously, it was high time she went in.

And this just again speaks beautifully to that idea that her obedience, that her right relation to Mark, it's directly tied to her relationship to Ransom as the director.

This jovial influence is directly tied to her connection to Maleldal, her connection to God.

And so this final scene here, the reunion of Mark and Jane, is the conclusion or perhaps a continuation of the same idea that we see in the Heavens between Malacandra and Perlandra.

That we get the masculine and feminine relating themselves in Perilandra and Malacandra, and now we see that same relation playing out in Mark and Jane.

And so Heaven is connected down to Earth, and Earth into the heaven things are brought into the right context.

And I think that this is just a beautiful way for Lewis to end this series.

And I'm tempted to end the presentation there as well, but I want to end actually with this passage from a compass for Deep Heaven, and this comes from the essay called Ransoming Bloggers.

Belbury is just good and true enough to be horrifically destructive, but just evil enough to be boring, hollow and ultimately reduced to nothing but a bloody mush on the floor of a banquet hall.

Laggers, on the other hand, shines as a beautiful bash of hierarchy, grace, and clarity of rolls.

Ransom is the resplendent head of Saint Anne's, and everyone submits readily to his good rule.

Miss Ironwood curtsies politely before him, and the otherwise obstinate Merlin bows to him when he learns that he is the Pendragon of Laggers.

When Ransom is dressed in his blue rope and standing mysteriously at the top of the stairs, Jane's doubts verge on feelings of betrayal, which only prove her usual trust and loyalty toward him.

Unlike the empty center at Belbury, Laggers restores relationships between people by allowing them to share the common delight of submission to a good sovereign.

Furthermore, while Belbury is built on a system of striving, Laggers is built on a foundation of grace.

At Belbury, no one is even given the dignity of admission, only threats at the prospect of leaving.

At Laggers, however, admission is a great moment and privilege, and no one is under fear of expulsion.

Missus Maggs is as much a member as Great Ironwood, for they are all the Director's charities.

In fact, Lewis's description of Laggers is like his depiction of heaven in The Great Divorce.

During one of the dialogues in Network, a ghost indignantly remarks, I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity, and a solid person replies, ask for the bleeding charity.

Everything here is for the asking, and nothing can be bought.

Rainsom might no longer be in Perilantra, but he certainly brings back to Earth the attitude inculcated in him during the coronation of Torrentindrel all is gift.

Laggers is a symbol of restored relationships between humans, for it sets all its members on a foundation of grace.

It brings all people to the level ground that is the foot of the cross.

And so in conclusion, be comforted, small one in your smallness.

He lays no merit on.

You receive and be glad until next time, God speak.

All right, thank you for listening or watching.

If you're over on YouTube, I hope you enjoyed that.

I hope that it was meaningful to you, as that material is certainly meaningful to me.

It's the kind of thing that you need to just return to again and again.

Not necessarily these episodes, although I mean maybe that's helpful to you, but I mean the text itself is something worth returning to again and again.

In fact, I would argue that these three books are some of the most valuable resources for understanding the times in which we live, understanding the philosophies in which we live in what is driving those philosophies.

Well, moving forward will be heading into one of my all time favorite novels till we have Faces.

That's what's going to be coming up next.

But for now, I do want to remind you that we do have three Mythic Mind podcasts right now.

We have this one, which is obviously working through the Lewis material, and we include some other things here and there as well well.

And then there's also Mythic Mind movies and shows where we're currently working through a Star Wars series, although we weren't able to record something for the last episode and so over there, I included a previously recorded episode of a discussion that I had on the War of the Row herem the Jackson animated film that came out last I think last year.

And then we also have Mythic Mind Games where we just started a Final Fantasy series and so this upcoming Friday will be providing a discussion on Final Fantasy one through three.

You can already find the intro to the series they're already now.

Instead of subscribing to all three podcasts, you could also become a patron over at patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind.

Becoming patron any level of support, even five dollars a month, that's going to provide you with all three podcasts early in ad free delivered through a single patron feed.

Now, I know that the auto populated ads in these episodes can get kind of annoying the way that they just get in it's persontimes, middle sentences, just the way that they get thrown in there, and so if you want to avoid that, become a patron again.

Just five dollars a month gets you all three podcasts early in ad free in a single feed.

And then, of course high levels of support, we'll do other things for you.

For example, become a Tier two patron you get access to my new Intro to Philosophy course if that's something to interests you.

And then if you become an annual Tier three patron, you get access to, or you get enrollment rather in all courses, all of my courses that begin within that yearly term.

So if you enroll as a Tier three annual patron soon, then that will include the Elder Scrolls in Philosophy, which begins next month, the similarly end which begins at the beginning of twenty twenty six, and then next spring we're doing the psychology of Staring Caerekedguard and there may be another course before this yearly term ends.

I'm not certain yet, but they'll at least be those three.

And so whether you want to become an active participant, you know you want to be part of the courses, you want to join these podcast conversations, you want to join our discord server with a full access to that, then head over to patreon dot com slash mythic Mind.

Now, if you just want to keep listening to the free bee feeds and you know, working through those ads, then well that's fine too, and I appreciate you coming along with us.

Maybe you could at least head over to Spotify or the Apple Store and leave us a five star review.

Maybe I have a positive comment wherever you can do that that would be helpful.

All right, Well, before we go, I do want to think by name all Tier three patrons and higher.

So many thanks to Mark, William, Paul Clinton, Jamie, Aaron, Christopher Justin, Aaron Chaz Evy, Kyle Tyler, Chase, David, Amanda Justin, Roger Jack Ross, Don, Adam kitt and Andrew.

All of you just go above and beyond in helping me to go further up and further in in the various ways that Mythic Mind is going.

But that's it for now.

As I said, the next thing to come out here will be either it will be over a Mythic Mind Games with the final Fantasy episode, or I might really I'm putting together a special bonus episode of Mythic Mind for this podcast that is going to provide us Lewisian take on some current event issues, some things that I feel like I have some things to share, some things of value, and I'm trying to get that out this week.

But if not, I'll be out at some point in the near future.

And so just make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it.

But that's it for now, until next time.

Gods.

The Elder Scrolls in Philosophy a new course beginning in October, led by doctor Andrew Snyder.

I played a lot of video games in my youth, perhaps more than I should have.

But as I got older, got married, had kids, and completed a PhD on the Danish philosopher Soaring Kirky Guard, I almost entirely stopped playing games.

However, there were certain titles that stayed with me during this time, at the very least in my mind.

In fact, looking back, I now realize that most games of my youth were not entirely frivolous, but the instead served quasi literary roles, fueling my imagination, intellectual curiosity, in my appreciation for wonder.

Chief among these titles are the mainline games of the Elder Scrolls, and in particular Moro Wind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.

And I know that I am not alone in this, as the wild success of the recent Oblivion remaster would indicate.

Now, in addition to teaching university courses in philosophy and religion, I've also started offering independent courses to anyone who has to come along with me and with the community in pursuit of wisdom through primary and secondary worlds.

So far, these independent courses have been literature based, such as the fiction and philosophy of C.

S.

Lewis, Life, Death and Meaning with Beowulf and Boethius, The Lord of the Rings, A Brief History of Ideas, and Plato's stoicism until we have Faces.

However, I've recently been leading the Mythic Mind Fellowship into popular media well, such as movies and games, and it did not take me many steps in this direction to decide that I wanted to do something with the Elder Scrolls.

During this six week study the Philosophy of the Elder Scrolls, We're going to go deep into various aspects of Morow and Oblivion and Skyrim to better understand the driving forces of the subcreated world and our movements within it.

Among others, We'll be asking questions like what is the creation mythos of the Elder Scrolls and how does this relate to primary world ideas?

What are the thirty six Lessons of Evek and where do they direct us?

What is unique about the hero of Kavaca's particular kind of heroism.

What does the Oblivion Crisis reveal about the nature of evil in relation to societal institutions.

Why are dragons so prolific in our fantastical imaginations?

What unique opportunities for existential exploration are made available in open world games.

Join this community as we enter Taminal with the purpose of learning more about our place within our own world.

Each week will include ongoing discord conversation, at least one or two asynchronous videos to watch whenever you want to, and live discussions which will be recorded and made available.

If you're not able to participate, you can purchase enrollment in the shop over at patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind, or become a Tier three annual patron to get access to all courses that begin within your yearly term.

This course begins in October, so go ahead and make it happen, and I hope to see you there.