The Mystic Scientist

Introduction: A Confession

I have to begin with a confession. For years now, I’ve been living with That Hideous Strength—not just reading it, but living with it. I return to it over and over, sometimes because I want to, and sometimes because I need to. It’s become one of those rare books that keeps working on me long after I put it down, a companion that does not let go.

In spite of all this familiarity, I continue to find something different. What seemed minor before suddenly stands out in clear view. What I once skimmed past now stays in my imagination. And more than once, I’ve been surprised by how much this book written by someone born in the late 1800s seems to know about us, our evasions, our habits of thought, our ways of avoiding what is too real or too close for comfort. Not just us, me.

The passage I want to reflect on here is only one example. It’s pressed on me in recent days. It speaks about Mark¹, but in its strange way it’s been speaking about me too. And so, instead of a detached analysis, I want to share what I am learning through it—because this is one of those valuable places where Lewis, through Mark, keeps drawing me back, asking me to see myself.

“They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy.
They saw the recalcitrant and backward laborer and heard his views on the weather.
They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman.
It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it.
It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward laborer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear.
The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person.
All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.
Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, plowman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow.
Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations:” for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”

1. The Education of Abstraction

Lewis shows us Mark as a man hollowed out by his education. He is not cruel, not even particularly hardened; he is simply shaped by a system that has taught him to prefer the statistic over the person. “Things that he read and wrote were more real to him than things he saw.”

That is not just a description of Mark. It is a description of modern life. How easily we live by roles, categories, or data points rather than by faces and names, the person in front of us. And Lewis’s irony is sharp: the supposed “scientific realist” turns out to be living in a dream world of abstractions, while avoiding the stubborn reality of flesh and blood.

2. The Mystic Scientist

This is the paradox. Mark is, in his way, a mystic. He believes in the reality of what is unseen. But unlike the saints, whose unseen is God’s presence, Mark’s unseen is the statistical curve and the vocational group. He has faith—just badly misplaced faith.

Lewis wants us to see that science can also become a dream world. Data can be as unreal as fantasy if it blinds us to the personal. And I have to admit: this cuts close. How often do I retreat to the safety of tidy concepts over the unpredictability of real people? It is easier to live in the safety of “groups” or “types” than to risk seeing the person who might make a claim on me.

3. Abstraction as Avoidance

This, I think, is why Mark resists the pull of presence. He notices the worker’s voice, the resemblance of Aunt Gilly—but quickly brushes the impressions aside. To linger would mean to feel. And to feel would mean responsibility.

That is the hidden cost of abstraction: it lets us avoid risk. It shields us from compassion. And Lewis knew this was not just Mark’s temptation. It is ours. To live in ideas, diagnoses, categories, and statistics is easier than the mess of love and suffering and relationship.

In Things I Used to Know, I once wrote about the danger of being “too much in your head” and not enough in your world. Mark is a vivid embodiment of that warning. His abstractions protect him, but they also imprison him.

4. The Return of Presence

And yet—even in Mark, presence breaks through. He cannot help noticing the worker’s voice, the face that stirs memory. It is not enough to change him, not yet, but it is a crack in the wall.

That encourages me. Because if even Mark, immersed in Belbury, can still be interrupted by presence, then no one is beyond hope. Presence has a way of breaking through. A laugh, a hand, a resemblance—these are shafts of light that remind us what is real.

The question is whether we allow them to matter.

5. Belbury and Logres: The Larger Conflict

It helps to place Mark’s struggle in the larger arc of the Ransom Trilogy. Lewis frames the story as a battle between Belbury and Logres, between a world of abstraction and a world of presence.

Belbury—the N.I.C.E.—is obsessed with control, efficiency, and disembodied planning. It is the kingdom of statistics, where populations matter but persons do not. Its dream is the abolition of the human in favor of the calculable.

Logres², by contrast, is grounded in the sacramental vision of creation. It is about embodied presence: meals shared, gardens tended, people loved. It is untidy, unplanned, but deeply real.

Mark’s education makes him a child of Belbury, but his soul is still tugged toward Logres. That tug shows itself in his fleeting recognition of the worker’s voice and his aunt’s face. For a moment, he feels the warmth of the real—and that is Lewis’s way of saying that Logres is always within reach, even for those who have been long trained to prefer Belbury.

6. The Digital Belbury We Live In

Reading this now, in our own digital world, I can’t help but feel the weight of Lewis’s warning. Because we, too, live with a Belbury of sorts: a system where metrics, feeds, and algorithms often feel more real than the people behind them.

Think about it. We scroll through newsfeeds where faces and names blur into categories—likes, follows, demographics. We count clicks and views, and these numbers begin to feel weightier than the actual human beings who made them. The unseen abstractions—data, trends, metrics—become the “real,” while the persons are reduced to shadows.

That is Mark’s mistake replayed on a global scale. We become mystics of the digital, giving faith to the unseen architecture of the algorithm rather than to the presence of our neighbor.

And yet—just as in Mark’s case—there are interruptions. A message from a friend that cuts through the noise. A voice note that carries warmth. A photo that does not reduce someone to a statistic but calls us to remember a whole story. These are cracks in our own digital Belbury. They remind us that presence is still real, still waiting, still pressing in.

7. The Call to See Like a True Mystic

This is where Lewis’s story lands for me. The question is not whether we will believe in unseen realities—we already do. The question is which unseen realities we will trust.

Belbury trains us to trust abstractions: categories, numbers, metrics. Logres calls us to trust presence: the sacramental reality of God, the irreducible worth of each person.

To see like a true mystic is to believe that the unseen that matters most is not the algorithm but the Spirit, not the metric but the mystery of love. And that requires courage. Because presence will always make demands on us. It will always call us to risk love.

Conclusion: Beyond Mark’s Shadow, Beyond Our Own

Mark’s story is cautionary, but it is also hopeful. Even in the middle of Belbury, he could not quite escape the tug of presence. And neither can we.

So perhaps the invitation is this: resist the digital Belbury. Notice the face. Listen to the voice. Allow yourself to be interrupted by the personal, the unmeasured, the inconvenient.

Because in the end, the statistics will fade. The metrics will blur. But the persons remain. And the presence of God remains.

That is the surprising reality. That is the deeper truth.