C.S. Lewis Reading Week: The Inner Ring and Friendship

“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elemnts is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”^⁠1

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Since this year’s C.S. Lewis Reading Day theme is friendship, I thought I would end the week with two posts on that theme. Today, I want to look at Lewis’s essay “The Inner Ring.”

The essay started life as the annual “Commemoration Oration” given at King’s College, University of Longdon, on December 14, 1944. As a graduation address, Lewis perhaps could not have chosen a better theme. The essay, which I don’t intend to review, exactly, but to connect with other ideas, is about that desire we all feel to be part of “them.” Today, with the rise of conspiracy theories, there is much distrust of “them”. But what most conspiracy theorists don’t realize is that they belong to a “them” as well. They are awake while the rest of us sleep. They have been red-pilled while the rest of us have been blue-pilled. They are Alphas while the rest of us are betas (or sigmas or omegas which I understand to be lower groupings). We all want to belong.

Lewis clearly understood this longing better than most. His book That Hideous Strength shows us two characters, a husband and a wife, who find themselves on the edge of inner rings. The difference is that one desperately wants to be inside, the other would prefer to be left alone. What’s interesting is that both are wrong. Mark Studdock, who begins the novel inside one Inner Ring only to discover another one he wants to be inside of more, spends the whole novel longing, but never happy with what he has. Once he realizes there is a group behind the group, he longs for that deeper group instead. Jane, on the other hand, discovers a group who want her to join them and at first she resists. Then when she starts to make her way inside, she begins to fear that she not only does not belong, but that she can’t.

Lewis notes that Inner Rings are neutral, they are a given part of life. “There must be confidential discussions,” he says, “and it is not only not a bad thing, it is (in itself_ a good thing that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together.”^⁠2 You can see that he has professional life primarily in view here. But this applies elsewhere as well. He gives the example of a musical society. A person might choose to join it simply because they like music. And if so, that is a good thing.^⁠3 He notes, however, that these groups will also, naturally, exclude some people. In the case of the musical society it will, naturally, exclude the unmusical, or those who don’t like the kind of music the group wishes to perform. Jane finds herself in a similar situation. Once she does desire to be part of the group at St. Anne’s, she realizes she may not be able to. Why? Because they are all Christians and she is not. Because they live life in a way that she is, at that point in the story, unwilling to follow. The group longs for her to join for them, but like all groups, they cannot change the fundamentals of who they are.

Mark, on the other hand, keeps trying to find his way deeper. He begins with the Progessive Element at his college. This pushes him into the orbit of the N.I.C.E. Once there he struggles to discover who the really in people are. He discovers, as often happens, that people he believed in were peripheral at best. And so when he gets in behind them he is elated. But that pleasure is short-lived. Lewis compares it to peeling an onion. The seeker of the true or final Inner Ring keeps peeling back layers, but eventually they will find they are left with nothing. This happens to Mark as well as he discovers that the heart of the Inner Rings he has been penetrating is the devil and the devil is about the closest thing to nothing that has ever existed.

So what do we do? How do we solve the riddle of our desire for the Inner Ring? Lewis tells us first not to let that desire rule us. This, of course, is excellent advice for all of our appetites. When we put them in the driver’s seat we become people ruled by their stomachs. But the second thing he suggests is to aim ourselves at good ends. Since he is speaking to graduates, he gives this advice about the professional life:

“If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape the professional policy […] But it will do those things which professions exist to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.”^⁠4

So the first thing is do good work. It may not come with the prestige that seeking the Inner Ring will bring, but it also will not bring scandal or heartache. You will be a craftsman and on the professional side, that should be enough. But Lewis does not want to leave his audience with the purely professional. No, part of the solution is also in our personal or private lives. Here, he tells us, the answer is friendship.

“And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will find again that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of sometime which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.”^⁠5

Friendship, real friendship, is what cures the desire for the Inner Ring. Jane discovers that and so eventually allows herself to join by finding that she does like to do what the others are doing (in this case Christianity). Mark too finds it by looking back at old friendships and discovering that he cast them off not because he did not like them, but because he had allowed his desire for the esoteric, to be part of something secret and important, drove him away from things he actually liked.

For us now, I think this is an important lesson. In The Four Loves, Lewis tells us that friendship is the forgotten or lost love. That is we have forgotten that it is a kind of love. By forgetting that we have replaced it with the desire for the Inner Ring. What we really long for is belonging, is home, but a home that isn’t just made up of our biological or legal family, but of others who like at least some of the things we like. I think it likely that a return to real friendship, and recognizing that one can have different friend groups dependent on different interests could go a long way toward healing the divides we are experiencing now. I think also it would go a long way to advancing the Good News. But that is a subject I shall have to leave for another time.

¹ C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” The Weight of Glory, 146.

² C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” The Weight of Glory, 148.

³ C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” The Weight of Glory, 154-155.

⁴ C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” The Weight of Glory, 156.

⁵ C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” The Weight of Glory, 157.