The title of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength comes from a line by Sir David Lyndsay describing the biblical Tower of Babel. It thus sets Babel and, by consequence, the call of Abram as a kind of illuminating flambeau by which we can enter the story. This is, in other words, a story about the dream of Babel and all of the ways in which ‘Babel’ (in all its permutations) twists the real hope of humanity:
Babels promise to unite humanity, but to unite it against God, not with Him.
Babels promise eternal life, but eternal life that rises again, but life that clutches to sheer biological continuance —life that is not really everlasting but rather undead.
Babels promise to end violence and promote peace, but only by maintaining a monopoly on legitimized violence.
Babels want to reach heaven, but not by way of the Cross (the only true ladder to heaven). Instead Babels aim to reach heaven by works of our hands; all that bitumen and brick amounts, in the final analysis, only to so many fig leaves stacked to cover our nakedness.
But it is also about God’s covenant community. Just as Abram is called from the ziggurats of Ur, so also characters in That Hideous Strength will be called to “leave their fathers’ house” and follow Yahweh’s promises. Those who do this will become a little kingdom, a renewed Britton, a redemption people. Just as Yahweh will eventually rename Abram by breathing his own name into him —ha— and making him Abraham, so also God will breathe his name into the community that he gathers in That Hideous Strength and make them more than just a people, they will be his people. They will bear his name.
C.S. Lewis’ preface to That Hideous Strength explains why it is called “a fairy-tale for grown-ups.” It is because true fairy-tales begin with and are chiefly concerned with the mundane and the commonplace. Wells, forests, cottages, step-mothers, over-taxing lords, may seem to us to be the stuff of myth, but to the Brothers Grimm and those who composed what we call fairy-tales, they are just as mundane and commonplace as the kitchen sink, the culvert behind the Long’s Drugstore, a suburban home in Palolo, and, well, contemporary step-mothers or contemporary over-taxing lords.
That Hideous Strength follows the previous book in the Ransom Trilogy, which ended on a paradisial Venus in cosmic glory, and shows us that “these things” of our daily living (tea towels, buses, busines meetings, collapsing marriages, etc.) participate as much in the dance of deep heaven as angels, devils, and space-ships.
All of our moments come into conflict with a thousand shadows of Babel. After all, there is no part of the cosmos that is not cosmic.