Chapters 7-11 of That Hideous Strength force the fork: Jane finds St. Anne’s and begins to learn obedience in love, while Mark sinks deeper into Belbury’s hollow inside. Two households, two cities, one marriage under judgment.

In this Mythic Mind lecture from the Fiction and Philosophy of C.S. Lewis course, Dr. Andrew Snyder (professor of philosophy and theology) reads the middle stretch: Dimble’s claim that good grows better and bad grows worse, equality raised into an idol, and Ransom’s counsel that you cannot stand until you learn to kneel.

Topics include Jane’s conversion toward ordered love, Mark’s shrinking hell of self-regard, and why Lewis’s fairy-tale for grown-ups will not stay neutral.