Tool Alpha
C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
That hideous strength and Babel
The title comes from a sixteenth-century poem about the Tower of Babel, and the novel ends with Belbury's leaders speaking gibberish at a banquet.
Genesis 11:1-9, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: why does a 1945 novel about a research institute take its title from the Tower of Babel? A building can be a statement. Lewis put a sixteenth-century poem about Babel at the front of the book. How far the story follows Genesis 11 is the question.
The epigraph quotes Sir David Lindsay's Ane Dialog on the Tower of Babel: "The Shadow of that hyddeous strength / Sax myle and more it is of length." At the banquet at Belbury the speeches dissolve into gibberish, the leaders cannot understand one another, and the room descends into chaos.
In Genesis 11 the builders want to make a name for themselves and God confuses their language so they cannot understand one another. The Divine Council Index reads Babel as the moment the nations were divided and allotted.
The Babel framing is announced in the epigraph. The confusion of tongues at the banquet follows Genesis 11 directly.
In Lewis the confusion comes through Merlin, empowered by the planetary powers. In Genesis it comes from God.
Not an attack on science. Lewis's preface says the serious point behind the story is the one he made in The Abolition of Man.
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- Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945), epigraph, preface and ch. 16
- Sir David Lindsay, Ane Dialog, as quoted in Lewis's epigraph
