C.S. Lewis and the fiction of science

In preparation for the Science vs Religion in Dystopia panel at Convergeance, I’ve been reviewing the stories of C.S. Lewis.

It seems to me like the common impression of Lewis is that he wrote speculative fiction with heavy Christian themes in part due to his own conversion from agnosticism. Nobody preaches the gospel like a former doubter or “methinks the preacher doth protest too much”.

As with almost everything, the closer you look, the more complicated the story is.

Lewis’ conversion was not form agnosticism directly to the Episcopal church, at least not in his writings. If you take a look at Out of the Silent Planet, what we get is not Christianity, but one of the great heresies: Manichaeism. Or something similar to Manichaeism. Lewis build a universe in which every world has its own divine ruler with (at least) one ruler over them and a hierarchy of lesser beings reporting to them, ending with the mundane inhabitants of the worlds.

Our world is the Silent Planet, because our world-god rebelled and we have been cut off from the eternal light which is all that is good and divine. This ties pretty well with the general definition of Manichaeism – “Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness”.

Lewis develops the theme of a battle between the word of the divine and the world of the material in the next two books of the trilogy, commonly called the Ransom Trilogy after the eponymous main character. The third book, That Hideous Strength, takes Manichaeism to the institutional level, pitting the gentle folk of St. Anne’s (with a veneer of Arthurian titles and symbolism) against the degenerates at The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). And it has Merlin. Not a reincarnation or a code-named character, but the actual Druidic magician revived from his slumber. And he’s great. It’s worth reading the series just so you can see Merlin give his smackdown.

C.S. Lewis was not a simple writer of Christian allegory. He was a writer who spent the last half of his life trying to figure out a spiritual approach to the world. The Narnia books are clearly religious and, at the end of his life, Lewis said that he was leaning very heavily toward Catholicism. At different points in his life, his struggle with religion was reflected in his books.

So what was his beef with science? After all, science is clearly the bad guy in the Ransom Trilogy. In The Magician’s Nephew, it is Uncle Andrew, in his attempt to combine the scientific method with magic to give him access to other realms, who risks the lives of Polly and Diggory and ultimately brings evil to the pristine creation of Narnia. Why did Lewis use science as the exclusive tool of evil in his fiction?

It seems that Lewis was writing primarily in reaction to two things, a romanticized view of science as a tool of manifest destiny and the very real technological terrors of World War I.

Scientific and technological advancement beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing through the 1930s when Lewis began the Ransom series gave Europe and North American an advantage over the rest of the world and the ability to press that advantage. Many voices were celebrating science as both a means to conquer and colonize other nations but also a sign of that rich white people had an obligation to do so. This is the position of the villainous scientist and businessman in Out of the Silent Planet when they encountered native Martians. And some voices were attempting to turn science inward to change societies – in much the same way that the social engineers at N.I.C.E. were proposing in That Hideous Strength.

At the same time, the very advances that were celebrated as a sign of divine favor were producing a complete and terrible change in warfare. World War One saw the introduction of airplanes, submarines, tanks, modern artillery, and poison gas. In the Franco-Prussian war, a total of just over a million troops were mobilized. In the 5 months of fighting during World War I, over 1.6 million people were killed. More people were killed in 5 months in World War I than fought in the previous European War. By the end of the War over 10 million members of the military and 7 million civilians were dead. And they died horribly. Oftentimes because of some technological advance.

Against those two factors, Lewis argued that science is not a civilizing force, but rather it is a brutal tool of domination. When you look at the battle between science and religion that he sets up, that is what you are seeing. Not an argument about whether it is better to discover the secrets of the universe, but an argument about whether a better understanding and better tools give people the right to oppress others.

Science and religion are not the real factors in C.S. Lewis’ books. They are strawmen who stand in for a wider cultural question about how we treat other people.