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# From Babel to Belonging: C. S. Lewis’s Fairy-Tale Cure for the Modern Machine
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/from-babel-to-belonging-c-s-lewiss-fairy-tale-cure-for-the-modern-machine/
- Published: 2026-09-08T11:00:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T11:00:19.000Z
- Description: 'That Hideous Strength' is a story about how to live with faith and hope in a world threatened by chaos and tyranny.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Annie Crawford, Journal, Summer 2026, Formation, Culture

In 2026, we clearly live at the end of a world. While it may not be the end of *the* world, the massive technological and social changes moving through the West are quickly dissolving the old order and ushering in something whose exact contours remain to be seen. Rapid advancements in AI, declining trust in institutions, social polarization, and the collapse of family structures drive widespread alienation, mental illness, and addiction, unraveling the social fabric and fueling fear of an apocalyptic future. 

Our predicament is not exactly new. Like Yeats’s beast slouching slowly toward Bethlehem to be born, the modern Machine has been remaking the world into its own image for hundreds of years now. In the name of advancing rational enlightenment and personal autonomy, our lives have been slowly wired into the structures of what E. M. Forster, Paul Kingsnorth, and others have called “The Machine,” a massive, emergent techno-industrialist globalism that controls modern life through its Kafkaesque systems of bureaucratic state power. This system, as Lewis Mumford observed, transforms the world into “an archetypal machine made of human parts,” reducing communally integrated persons into isolated, interchangeable cogs. 

Ironically, every bit of independence we think we gain from nature is in reality a little bit of dependence we have given to the Machine. When you no longer depend upon the sun or woodfire for warmth, you have not become personally independent of nature; you have become dependent on the energy company. Robert Nisbet, in *The Quest for Community*, diagnoses the unintended consequences of this shift: “Individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living.” We think our technology liberates us from the limits of nature, but the techno-industrialist machine actually re-organizes our lives toward dissipation so our attention and energy can feed the Machine. The Machine’s fuel, as Paul Kingsnorth starkly notes, is life itself: “The fuel is nature... The fuel is you.” In the 21st century, we have clearly moved across a kind of tipping point where industry no longer serves the genuine interests of man; man now serves the interests of the Machine.

The industrial strength horrors of the World Wars began to awaken the West to the Faustian bargain she had made with technology. Post-war writers like C. S. Lewis, E. M. Forster, and Robert Nisbet worked to understand how the Machine dissolves the fundamental structures of a humane community and to explore paradigms for its recovery. The alienation, disintegration, and spiritual anxiety created by life in the modern ouroborosian Machine led to a renewed search for the roots of genuine human community. Many find themselves longing for the renewal of embodied local relationship and a connection to nature. Nisbet again observes the trend: “In our own time we are confronted by the spectacle of innumerable individuals seeking escape from the very processes of individualism and impersonality which the nineteenth-century rationalist hailed as the very condition of progress.” In this post-human, techno-bureaucratic world, we find ourselves desperate to recover coherent communities that can provide a sense of personal agency, identity, meaning, and value. 

Yet, ironically, as a people well-catechized by the technopoly, we automatically look for technological solutions to our technological problems. We try to resolve the problem of unprecedented power with more power. Like Boromir, we put our hope in finding the One Machine to rule them all. Concerned about the existential dangers of AI, we rush to create more AI. We look for solutions from the very Machine that erodes coherent forms of embodied relationship with each other and with the created order. 

In his masterful sci-fi dystopian novel, *That Hideous Strength*, C. S. Lewis suggests that the answer to our predicament lies not in direct confrontation with our Techno-industrial Tower of Babel, but at the subversive level of personal community where we can know and be known. As Lewis warns in *The Abolition of Man* and illustrates in *That Hideous Strength*, those who live by the manipulation of nature will die by the manipulation of nature, for the inexorable logic of The Machine will digest, corrode, and assimilate everything that adopts as fundamental its structures and methods. Lewis shows that the restoration of localized husbandry as distinct from mass-scale manipulation is essential to the survival of man, if not physically then essentially and spiritually. Through an ironic contrast between the apocalyptic imagery of judgement and the symbolic structures of community life, C. S. Lewis offers us a map out of the Machine and back into the membership of humane communities. 

In *That Hideous Strength*, C. S. Lewis dramatizes both the breakdown of humane social bonds and the search for a renewed community. It is a story about how to live with faith and hope in a world threatened by chaos and tyranny. It is a story for such a time as this. On the title page, Lewis indicates that his novel is both a “Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups” and a modern dystopia about the rebuilding of Babel, similar in theme and style to *1984* or *Brave New World*. *That Hideous Strength* is dystopian in that it shows how the rationalist values and scientistic institutions of the modern world are pulling us into a totalitarian nightmare, yet it is unlike the other great dystopian novels of the 20th century in that it promises a happy ending and a fairy-tale counterpoint to the shadow of Babel.

The symbolism of Babel is central to Lewis’s novel, for it serves as the archetypal model of human history, thereby giving us the key to our future through an understanding of our past. The story of Babel reveals that God created our world to be ordered according to a sacred structure, but we repeatedly rebel against the natural order and try to replace sacred structures with technological structures. Throughout Scripture beginning with Genesis, and all throughout the history of empire, we see rebellious men attempt to overcome the curse of sin and death through technological control rather than obedience to the kingdom of God. This is what the Tower of Babel symbolizes: the human attempt to build independent kingdoms patterned not by the temple of God but by the temple of the self. 

Set in post-World War II England, *That Hideous Strength* juxtaposes the traditional English village of St. Anne’s with the institutional life of the new National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), a quasi-governmental organization ostensibly devoted to progress and human betterment through scientific and social engineering. For Lewis, the community of St. Anne’s symbolizes life lived according to the sacred structures of nature, while the NICE symbolizes the modern Tower of Babel, the technological city of man that works to gain power over nature. Mark Studdock, the main protagonist in the novel, becomes entangled with the NICE, drawn in by ambition and a desire to belong. As Mark rises in the ranks, he discovers the organization’s true aim: a transhuman utopia where individuality, morality, and freedom are sacrificed to overcome death through technologies created by transhuman intelligences which Lewis calls “Macrobes.” 

## The Futility of Direct Resistance

As the plot progresses, Lewis portrays direct confrontation with the Machine as futile. Ransom, the leader of St. Anne’s, explains, “The poison was brewed in these West lands but it 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, worshipping the iron works of their own hands.” The omnipresence of the globalist Machine upon which our livelihood now depends renders human strategies for escape impotent, and to fight technological control with more technological control is simply to accelerate the very power that dehumanizes us and degrades our social structures. As Lewis reminds us in *The Abolition of Man*, “Man’s conquest of nature … means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.”Moreover, as finite, temporal creatures, humans will never be in an epistemological position to master nature or control history, no matter how advanced our AI tools. We cannot see the whole causal landscape of the past, present, or future, much less see into the hearts of men or the purposes of God. Rescue from the Machine will not be engineered by greater control over the Machine; victory lies in a renewed obedience to the created order, not greater dominion over it. 

In *That Hideous Strength,* the resistance community at St. Anne’s does not develop their own technology or form a political action network; rather they wait in prayer, seek the truth, build relationships of trust, grow a garden, tend the animals, and break bread together. They refuse to live by lies or participate in corruption. They discover harmony, stability, and strength through obedience to God’s created order. In short, they resist the Machine by remaining stubbornly human. In “On Living in an Atomic Age,” Lewis argues that when faced with apocalyptic crisis 

“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” 

When faced with an anti-human enemy, the community at St. Anne’s fights by returning to the fundamentally human things. The great question that differentiates those who live in the City of God from the City of Babel is this: will we conform our will to the good and beautiful order of nature or will we try to conform nature to the pleasures of our will? The key to victory over the Machine is to be a certain kind of people who live a certain way, a way that obediently conforms to the divine order of the world.

When the resident skeptic MacPhee wonders “how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears,” Ransom replies, “You have done what was required of you… You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that.” In Lewis’s novel, those on the side of humanity *are* given their providential, practical tasks to complete, but those tasks are revealed to them through the demands of virtue particular to situations as they arise, not through grand schemes for taking control. 

Lewis is not suggesting that we withdraw into our caves and retreat from responsibility, waiting idly for the Lord’s trumpet to sound. Rather, Lewis’s fairy-tale calls for a transformation of the way in which we live in the world and build our communities; he bids us reject the modern desire to “subdue reality to the wishes of men” and return to the paradigm of “wise men of old \[for whom\] the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality.” At some point this transformative return will require a refusal to participate in institutions or systems so compromised by the values of the Machine that they actively war against the Kingdom of God. In *That Hideous Strength,* neitherMark nor any person of integrity could work for the NICE and still retain their soul, but Mark’s rejection of the NICE is not a withdrawal from society *per se;* the Studdock’s move to St. Anne’s is a re-rooting into the kind of rightly-ordered community that can build and sustain a genuine society. 

**Bacchanalian Judgment and the Fall of Belbury**

At the end of *That Hideous Strength*, it is not the stratagems or efforts of men but the supernatural working of Providence that brings down the NICE and ends the tyranny of Babel. Through the narrative juxtaposition of the NICE and St. Anne’s, Lewis reveals the eucatastrophic irony in Babel’s fall: the very powers that destroy the Machine are also those that restore the natural community. The waters that flood the Tower of Babel also water the garden of God. This double-aspect of the prophetic tradition is developed through Lewis’s use of both Biblical and Bacchanalian imagery in the climactic scenes of *That Hideous Strength*. 

Seen most clearly in Isaiah, Joel, Amos, and Zechariah, the prophetic tradition of Israel continually presents the Day of the Lord as simultaneously both a day of judgement and a day of blessing. The exile from Eden, the Flood of Genesis, the scattering of Babel – all these are examples of the Day of the Lord, that day when the Lord calls a people to account, that day when a man or nation reaps what it has sown. As Obadiah tells us, “The day of the Lord is near for all nations. As you have done, it will be done to you; your deeds will return upon your own head.” Ultimately, there will be a great and final day of the Lord, when the whole cosmos is brought to account, every man and nation is judged, and the true Kingdom of God is revealed, but meanwhile we see all throughout Scripture and human history many “local” days of judgement.

Saint John the Apostle condenses this tradition in Revelation 19, which tells us that the Beast of Babylon will fall on the great Day of the Lord when the King returns with his white robed army to judge and make war. Surprisingly, Revelation first describes this day of destruction as the marriage supper of the Lamb, a day of great rejoicing and exultation. However, when the Bridegroom arrives for the feast, His first task is to lead the armies of heaven and strike down the rebellious nations. An angel calls “to all the birds that fly overhead, ‘Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.’” This strange mingling of feast and slaughter reveals the paradox of divine judgement: the same event that destroys Babylon renews creation. For those who serve the Beast, the feast is ruin; for those who serve the Lamb, it is wedding joy. 

Greco-Roman traditions also suggest a polyvalent understanding of civilizational judgement. In *The Bacchae* by Euripides, we see that the rites of Dionysus also suggests the dual nature of feasting: the god brings wine to Thebes to celebrate his divinity, yet he destroys King Pentheus for rejecting it, rousing the Maenads to tear him apart in ecstatic frenzy. At the climactic turn of *The* *Odyssey*, Homer sets the hero’s violent judgement over the invading suitors in the context of a feast. The moment before he begins his deadly vengeance, Odysseus cries, “Now is the time for their dinner to be served!” and as the first suitor falls, Homer describes the goblet of wine slipping from his hand while blood bursts from his face. Prepared for a banquet, the suitors find destruction instead. Throughout the ancient myths, wine is both the joyful gift of civilization and a potent image of violence; it symbolizes both the human and divine, the rational and ecstatic, and the civilized and primal. 

Lewis draws upon this ancient symbolism in his own mythic worlds. At the end of *Prince Caspian*, a story with many parallels to *That Hideous Strength*, Lewis evokes this Bacchanalian imagery to depict the renewal of Narnia through the divine judgment of Aslan. Like Ransom, the hidden King Caspian leads a resistance movement against the usurping tyrant Miraz who, like the NICE, desires to control nature and eradicate the common folk of Narnia. When Aslan returns to free the Narnians of Telmarine control, all of true Narnia breaks out into a Bacchinalian feast; trees and fairy folk dance as grape vines grow over all the land. Under Aslan’s rule, Bacchus, Silvanus, and their retinue bring life and joy back to Old Narnia, yet for the tyrant and the faithless, the renewal of nature brings dethronement and destruction. Lewis again draws from this same Bacchanalian duality to structure the climax of *That Hideous Strength.* Lewisends his novel with a tale of two banquets, one at Belbury Manor for the leaders, funders, and administrators of the NICE and another for the resistance community living at St. Anne’s. 

Judgment day for the NICE thus begins with the banquet at Belbury where the leaders of the Macrobe-controlled technopoly gather to celebrate their recent triumph over Bracton College. The wine flows freely—symbolizing both the gifts of civilization and its penchant for violence, both the gladness of genuine community and the chaos of dissipation. Like Pentheus who rejects wine and the divine rites of Dionysius, the people of Belbury discover that the power which is a drink of joy to those who honor the gods is the blood of violence for those who reject them. Lewis mirrors this Janus-faced quality of wine when the same drink that fosters joy among the faithful at St. Anne’s turns to the blood of violence for those who scorn nature and nature’s God at Belbury. 

As the men of the NICE unknowingly drink to their own demise, judgement unfolds through the collapse of language—the curse of Babel returned. Having long abused words, filled the world with lies, and obfuscated the truth, the ability of members at the NICE to communicate collapses entirely. As one character declares, “*Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis*”: They that have despised the word of God, from them also shall the word of man be taken away! As the curse of Babel descends, language turns to nonsense and panic fills the halls of Belbury—a name whose very syllables foretell its judgment. Belbury, from the Anglo-Saxon *bealu* meaning bane and *burh* meaning fortress, has become the ‘evil stronghold’, the Tower of Babel rebuilt in modern England. 

The collapse of language leads to the second stage of judgment: having rejected moral law for the sake of technological power, all sense of restraint or duty fails, and the intoxicated people of Belbury turn on one another in violence. Fairy Hardcastle shoots Jules, the public frontman for the NICE, unleashing a stampede of “kicking, struggling, leaping on tables and under tables, pressing on and pulling back, screams, \[and\] breaking of glass.”As the prophet Zechariah warned, "on that day a great panic from the Lord shall fall on them, so that each will seize the hand of another, and the hand of the one will be raised against the hand of the other.” With apocalyptic frenzy, language and law alike collapse under the weight of Belbury’s institutionalized deceit. 

Yet meanwhile, far from the pandemonium of Belbury, a very different feast begins. At St. Anne’s—where no lies were admitted—language serves as a medium for wisdom and camaraderie, binding the community together rather than tearing it apart. In *That Hideous Strength,* Lewis imagines the medieval planets as angelic beings who descend upon Earth to wage war against the evil powers controlling the NICE. When Mercury, the Lord of Language, descends upon Belbury, words fail those who live in rebellion against the Created order of God, yet at St. Anne’s, where Ransom and his friends live in obedience to the divine *Logos*, Mercury’s descent inspires such a celebration of language as even Shakespeare himself would rejoice to hear. Lewis, a great lover of words, takes time to describe the sheer joy of good conversation:

“If not plays upon words, yet certainly plays upon thoughts, paradoxes, fancies, anecdotes, theories laughingly advanced yet well worth taking seriously, had flowed from them and over them with dazzling prodigality... never in her life had she heard such talk—such eloquence, such melody (song could have added nothing to it), such toppling structures of double meaning, such skyrockets of metaphor and allusion.”

When the Lord of Language descends on the wicked, babbling men of the NICE, their speech is confused and reduced to nonsense; when the same Lord of Language descends on the faithful people of St. Anne’s, their speech is enlivened and elevated. The same spirit of judgement that is chaos to the wicked is life to the faithful. 

Ultimately, the breakdown of language and moral order at Belbury summons the final reckoning of nature and nature’s God. As Saint Paul tells us in Galatians 6, the Lord of Heaven and Earth is not mocked and a man will one day reap what he sows. Though wicked men attempt to twist, suppress, and overcome the natural order, inevitably it rebounds and reasserts itself. Animals liberated from the experimental laboratories of the NICE invade the banquet hall and devour their tormentors. Evoking Bacchus’s beastly retinue together with Revelation’s “winepress of the fury of the wrath of God,” Lewis describes a tiger hunting her prey and a huge elephant trampling “like a girl treading grapes, heavily and soon wetly tramping in a pash of blood and bones, of flesh, wine, fruit, and sodden tablecloth.” Even Mr. Bultitude, the pet bear of St. Anne’s, joins the fray and eats the very head of the NICE, performing what Lewis calls "the best deed that any bear had done in Britain.”

In the ruins of Belbury, nature becomes the instrument of judgement, yet in the village of St. Anne’s, it becomes a servant of grace. At St. Anne’s, nature is not foe but friend. Unlike Belbury’s exploited beasts, St. Anne’s menagerie lives in harmony with humans—providing help, companionship, and cheer. The Director is able to tame all manner of creatures, from the mice to the jackdaw to the lumbering bear who naps on the bathroom floor and begs for treats in the kitchen. Lewis gives his bear, Mr. Bultitude, a key role in the climactic resolution to his novel. Like Bacchus himself, whose presence joins terror and delight, Ransom’s bear embodies not only the dangerous strength, ferocity, and wildness of nature but also its maternal, affectionate, and protective aspects. Mr. Bultitude not only kills the great enemy, he also plays an important role in St. Anne’s redemptive symbolism. Ransom, we discover, is a descendent of King Arthur and inheritor of the title Pendragon, ruler of Logres. Mr. Bultitude thus provides a proper mascot for this Arthurian household, for Arthur’s name is connected to the old Celtic word for bear (*Artio*). He is the Bear King whose dual nature as beast in war and angel at table made him a bulwark in ancient Britain against the dark agents of chaos. King Arthur stood as a fierce, protective wall between the chaos of invading darkness and the light of Christian community. So too, Ransom’s kitchen companion, Mr. Bultitude, leads the revenge of nature in his own day to keep the hideous shadow of Babel at bay one generation more. 

In the last stage of judgement, even the earth itself rebels against the Machine—floods, quakes, and fires destroy all the buildings under the control of the NICE. The fundamental powers of nature—language, morality, and natural law—arrogantly denied by the progressive ideology of the NICE, now exact their retribution, toppling the hideous strength of Babel. Yet in the order of divine justice, destruction and renewal arrive together. As Belbury falls, the membership at St. Anne’s feasts in Arthurian splendor—robes, crowns, table, and dance all foreshadowing the marriage supper of the Lamb. The same forces of nature that demolished the NICE—the Lord of Language, the King of Beasts, the Goddess of Desire—also strengthen and rejoice the hearts of virtuous men. At St. Anne’s, for those who remain human to the end, wine gladdens rather than curses, language binds rather than breaks, and nature serves rather than devours. 

This double-edged eucatastrophe at the end of *That Hideous Strength* exposes the self-destructive logic at the heart of The Machine. The world turns according to the eternal nature of the *Logos*, and the created order cannot be undone by the machinations of those within it and dependent upon it. Babel, Belbury, and all those who rebel against the goodness and beauty of creation ultimately only fuel their own demise. As Ransom concludes in the last chapter, “Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.” Mother nature will have her revenge. 

Finally, for Lewis, and the symbolic tradition on which he stands, the essential key to remaining human is to remember our nature as male and female made together to image the glory of God. Marriage is the inescapable foundation for a proper connection to the created order. *That Hideous Strength* begins with the word matrimony, which literally means mother-making, and the story ends with the restored and repentant Mark finally making a mother of his wife, Jane. The fruitful union of man and wife, symbolic of the marriage between heaven and earth, is the means by which the world is reborn. The abolition of marriage is the abolition of Man, but the renewal of marriage is the restoration of Man. Mother-making marriage is both the origin and the goal of human life, for it is by the marriage of heaven and earth that we are created and it is *for* the free, conscious, consummation of this marriage that we are destined. This is Lewis’s fairy-tale ending: not technological liberation from nature, but loving harmony with nature and nature’s God through the faithful marriage of heaven and earth. Only through obedience to the order of creation are we essentially joined to the Creator of that order. 

Through the perennial symbolism of the apocalyptic tradition, *That Hideous Strength* charts a path out of the modern Machine and back into human community. The vision Lewis gives us is no passive, fearful retreat but a radical reaffirmation of our fundamental humanity against the anti-humanism of the Machine. Those who steward creation according to natural law will endure when judgment falls while those who rebel against the created order pull down Deep Heaven upon their heads. Nations rise and nations fall, but the truly human—prayer, work, friendship, love—abides. More technology cannot redeem us from technology’s curse; greater control cannot rescue us from tyranny; only faithful husbandry in obedience to the created order can—by God’s grace—renew our world.