Beware the Inner Ring

Near the end of his essay “The Inner Ring,” C.S. Lewis says, “To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of ‘insides,’ full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and the desire to enter them. But if he follows that desire, he will reach no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching.”

In the 1944 Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, C.S. Lewis said, “I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings, what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.” “The Inner Ring” is not just the title of this now-famous lecture, but a literary device used in That Hideous Strength, the climatic finale of The Space Trilogy and one of the lesser-known dystopian novels of the 20^th century. The main character, Mark Studdock, represents the result of what Lewis described as the desire to be a part of the Inner Ring. When desire is unchecked, misguided, or in a sense replaces virtue, it runs the risk of “making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” To the Class of 2026, well done, but I would like to warn you about the desire to be accepted to the Inner Rings of society. I felt it too. So may I, for the time, share a little bit about Mark Studdock and the danger of desire.

Mark is an ambitious young scholar. He is invited to join the staff at the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), a new scientific research center outside of his university town. He meets the leadership, the Inner Ring of the story. They give him the impression that they are interested in his scholarly work, but they have an ulterior, malicious agenda. The reader knows this. Mark does not. He senses the leadership are in on a great secret, and he wants to know what it is. His intentions are pure, even innocently curious. He wants to do good work and believes he will be rewarded for doing so. Slowly though, one moment at a time, Mark compromises. His desire begins to overrule reason and virtue.

The leadership asks Mark to fill in as a journalist. They want him to write newspaper articles under a pseudonym supporting the institute. Strange, he thinks. He is a sociologist, not a journalist. He was not expecting to do this. Stranger is that he cannot put his name on these articles. He shares with the leadership, “I don’t want to become a journalist at all, and if I did, I should like to be an honest journalist.” The leadership tell him they are disappointed to hear this. Mark then faces a great moral dilemma: Leave the institute or write the articles. One way is honest and true, and the other is dishonest and deceptive. However, Mark faces exclusion. He will not be admitted to the Inner Ring. Desire is ever present and he compromises. He retracts his statement. Just this once, he tells himself, he will make an exception. It will not happen again. The narrator goes on to say, “The citizen and honest man which had been awakened in Mark by the conversation, quailed a little; his other and far stronger self, the self that was anxious at all costs not to be placed among the outsiders, leaped up, fully alarmed.” Suddenly, an honest man became a dishonest man, and Mark wrote many more than one anonymous article praising the institute.

The leadership invite Mark inside the institute’s library for a drink, quite literally the physical space of the Inner Ring. They ask him to write more articles but this time calling for the organization to be given law enforcement capabilities, an odd request for a scientific research institute. The narrator says, “This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal….but, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals.” Mark’s actions shift from dishonest to outright illegal. The draw of the Inner Ring, the desire that led him to the library, the twisted inner sanctum, grew greater than virtue. The leadership did not care about the legality or morality of their request. If they did not, neither should Mark. If anything, they would protect him. That is what friends and colleagues do for each other, or so he thought.

The leadership reveal their hand and demand that Mark bring his wife to them. They want to exploit her supernatural abilities. He refuses and is framed for the murder of a former N.I.C.E. scientist. They throw him in a makeshift jail cell and prepare to kidnap his wife. As he sits there, alone, isolated, and unable to protect his wife, he thinks about the choices he has made. The narrator says, “When had he ever done what he wanted? Mixed with the people whom he liked? He was aware….that it was he himself that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.” Desiring the Inner Ring as an end in itself left Mark with nothing. Deceived by dangerous people, intentions corrupted by the supernatural, Mark is truly alone. And here in this moment he is deprived of what Lewis called the rarest of the four loves, friendship (philia), the voluntary love that connects people who share the same interest.

Near the end of “The Inner Ring,” Lewis says, “To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of ‘insides,’ full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and the desire to enter them. But if he follows that desire, he will reach no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching.” Mark, ultimately, reaches the Inner Ring only to discover he is not surrounded by friends. His story is a reminder that desire misguided is fleeting. Desire guided by virtue is holy and rewarding. The reader sees there are spiritual forces pulling the strings: God, the devil, angels, and demons. These forces influence Mark’s decisions and the leadership’s, though even in the face of temptation, the choice was theirs. The choice is ours too. We are endowed with free will, and the enemy of old does not make us do anything. We must be prepared for spiritual warfare. Scripture reaffirms that our adversary is looking to deceive us. His methods are subtle and the words he whispers are lies. Mark wanted to join the Inner Ring desperately. The ancient enemy will recognize our desperation and use it against us. As Saint Peter warns, the devil prowls around like a lion ready to pounce. Moment by moment, Mark let his guard down, and the ugly face of distorted desire put on a mask and smiled back at him.

I will not spoil the ending of That Hideous Strength and the conclusion of Mark’s story. I insist you read the novel yourself and “The Inner Ring.’ But rest easy and know Lewis’s stories, like those of the Bible, abound with God’s grace. Christ is King and has the final victory already in this world and the world of That Hideous Strength. (Spoiler Alert: The setting is Earth, technically. It is a fictional university town in England). And so, as you step away from your last homely house, remain watchful, desire the good life, and choose wisely. 

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The featured image, uploaded by Storeydefghij, is “The Conspirators” (2012), hoto of an original oil painting on canvas by David Storey. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.