Lecture 1 · Manuscript
That Hideous Lecture: The Severed Head
The term 'hierarchy' is one that our generation handles with reluctance. We distrust it, we feel guilty about it, and we tear it down every time we come across it — and then we are surprised that no one looks after anyone else.
Tonight we are removing the word from quarantine and examining it in the open: what the old catechisms meant by superiors, inferiors, and equals; what the apostles meant by the head and the body; what occurs in a college, a country, or a marriage when the head resigns, and what takes place when a usurper occupies that position.
The book we have chosen for the evening is a novel — the final one in C. S. Lewis's science-fiction trilogy, namely That Hideous Strength, which, despite all its machinery, is in fact about precisely this matter – and let the older voices – the catechism, the prophets, the apostles and the Puritans – contribute their various embellishments.
Lewis's Youth & Early Headship Encounters
Lewis grew up in Belfast in a society where hierarchy was built on top of hierarchy, the foundation of this being the almost sacred divide between men who had attended the right schools and those who had not. For a family such as his (one without hereditary status), education was the only means of climbing the social ladder and it was the father who decided which ladder to take.
When Lewis was nine his mother died, and because he was grieved and anxious and not a cruel man, his father decided matters concerning the boys' education in the way that grieving and anxious men frequently do—quickly and without giving the extra thought that a child's entire development merits. Although many children have suffered because of a father's malice, a greater number have been harmed by a father's laziness and lack of willingness to think carefully about their situation.
After just a few weeks had passed since he had lost his mother, the boy was sent across the water to a small English boarding school of which the headmaster was a clergyman called Capron — a man whose mental condition, it turned out later, was deteriorating. At the school, cruelty was meted out arbitrarily from a desk. There was a head in the most formal sense — a reverend, dressed in robes, and officially appointed — yet he had in fact ceased to be a head in any real way. The children were not looked after, not provided for, and not taught. Lewis carried the effects of that schoolroom with him for the rest of his life.
So Lewis's first two encounters with headship involved hardships that came not from cool men but from weak men.
When Lewis was just entering young adulthood, he came across a man whom both he and his brother believed had saved their minds. This man's name was Kirkpatrick—he had previously been a headmaster and had once taught Lewis's father—and after retiring he took boys in to live with him as private tutors. He had prepared Lewis's older brother for his exams, and when Lewis's own education reached a difficult point, his father's simplest and most sensible choice was to send the younger boy to the same man. Lewis had expected to meet a sentimental, silver-haired schoolmaster like the one you would find in a storybook.
He got off the train, made a casual comment concerning the wildness of the landscape — but the old man stopped him and picked the remark to pieces. What on earth did he mean by 'wildness'? On what basis had he expected anything different? Had he ever seen a map of the county? By the end of the walk the boy realized that he hadn't actually been making an observation; he had merely been making a noise.
For years Kirkpatrick never did anything else — he always questioned, separated the facts and demanded reasons — since he was interested in the truth and thought that you were too. After that the brothers held him in the highest regard and referred to him as the Great Knock. He was the one who brought their minds under control. And I want to make this clear, for the entire evening turns on this point: he was not nice, rather he was kind. These are two different things, and that distinction is one of the most important lessons Lewis ever acquired. Many years later, when he wrote his children's stories, he incorporated that difference into the very lion at the heart of them: the talking animals say that the word 'safe' is altogether the wrong one to use about him, instead they say he is good.
A defective one and a genuine one. Lewis had come across both of them before he reached seventeen. Now let us clarify the grammar—the old system of grammar in terms of order which Lewis took on and never gave up.
More than two and a half centuries before Lewis was born, a group of English and Scottish divines gathered at Westminster and set down in the form of questions and answers what they believed the Scriptures taught. Regarding the commandment concerning the duty of honouring one's father and mother, they did something which no generation of our own would have the courage to do: they omitted the entire social order from it, without making any apology. Listen first to the commandment.
From the book of Exodus
[Exodus 20:12] Honour both your father and your mother that your days may be long on the land which the LORD your God gives you.
And now the catechism — the Westminster Larger Catechism, seventeenth century. Asked who is meant by father and mother in that commandment, it answers:
[Q. 124] By father and mother, in the fifth commandment, are meant, not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God's ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth.
Asked for the general scope of the commandment, it answers:
[Q. 126] The general scope of the fifth commandment is the performance of those duties which we mutually owe in our several relations, as inferiors, superiors, or equals.
There it is, without the slightest hesitation: inferiors, superiors, and equals. The catechism gives us a full account of social existence and is hierarchical right through to the bottom. Honor and obedience go upwards, while love and provision go downwards. Justice operates horizontally. And observe the expression 'our several relations'—the duties are owed in a specific way, not in a general way. A person's superior in one relationship may be his inferior in another and his equal in a third; the man who commands the regiment will kneel in the pew. This is the very opposite of any collectivist scheme in which people are treated as interchangeable units. In the Westminsterian world everyone is part of an interdependent network of particular privileges and obligations.
The catechism does not idealize the obligation to superior officers while neglecting that to inferior officers. Listen to what inferior officers owe:
[Q. 127] The honour which inferiors owe to their superiors is, all due reverence in heart, word, and behaviour; prayer and thanksgiving for them; imitation of their virtues and graces; willing obedience to their lawful commands and counsels… bearing with their infirmities, and covering them in love, that so they may be an honour to them and to their government.
Now hear what superiors owe — and ask yourself when you last heard authority described this way:
[Q. 129] It is required of superiors, according to that power they receive from God, and that relation wherein they stand, to love, pray for, and bless their inferiors; to instruct, counsel, and admonish them… protecting, and providing for them all things necessary for soul and body: and by grave, wise, holy, and exemplary carriage, to procure glory to God, honour to themselves, and so to preserve that authority which God hath put upon them.
To love, pray for, and bless. To protect and provide, soul and body. Superiority here is not a man who gets more so much as a man who owes more. And the divines knew exactly how heads go wrong, because they wrote the failure into the catechism too:
[Q. 130] The sins of superiors are, besides the neglect of the duties required of them, an inordinate seeking of themselves, their own glory, ease, profit, or pleasure; commanding things unlawful… careless exposing, or leaving them to wrong, temptation, and danger… or any way dishonouring themselves, or lessening their authority, by an unjust, indiscreet, rigorous, or remiss behaviour.
Careless exposing, or leaving them to wrong. Hold that clause; we will need it before the night is out. And for completeness, the duties and sins of equals:
[Q. 131-132] The duties of equals are, to regard the dignity and worth of each other, in giving honour to go one before another; and to rejoice in each other's gifts and advancement, as their own. The sins of equals are… the undervaluing of the worth, envying the gifts, grieving at the advancement or prosperity one of another; and usurping pre-eminence one over another.
Usurping pre-eminence. Hold that clause too. Abdication and usurpation — the catechism has just named the two ways a hierarchy dies, and they are the two halves of the novel we are circling.
Doesn't this constant reference to superiors and inferiors go against the principle of equality? Lewis dealt with that question directly in two essays written during the war, one titled Equality and the other Membership, and his answer is one that it would be worth keeping in mind. He maintained that he was a democrat—and then gave the most unusual reason ever advanced for being so. In his own words, "I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man." He argued that political equality is both real and necessary, but in the same way that medicine is necessary, not like food. We achieve political equality not because no one is suitable to be left in charge of his fellow men, but because no fallen man is. Equality is a treatment for our condition, not a reflection of how creation originally was. And he made this point by means of a deliberately unpleasant analogy: the desire to eliminate all hierarchy, he said, is similar to the desire which lies behind nudism—because it confuses the covering with the corruption, whereas in fact the covering is there to protect something delicate and glorious beneath. Once you remove it, you don't achieve honesty; you simply get exposure.
There is a distinction here which accounts for the rest of the evening, and the divines and Lewis were able to maintain it without any difficulty: people are of equal and infinite worth in the sight of God, but that does not mean that they are equal in authority, wisdom, capacity, or usefulness to a particular task at a given time. To bring the two together is not an act of kindness; it is a lie – and a lie which always ends up benefiting the powerful.
For consider the man the old villages called simple. In a frank hierarchy, he is somebody's charge: he is my inferior, says the farmer, of equal worth to God and to me, and therefore mine to look after. In a world that insists he is exactly as capable as every other man, no one owes him anything — he is handed responsibilities he cannot carry and left alone with them, and his life is made crueler by the compliment. Abolish hierarchy, and the people who most need looking after are precisely the ones no longer looked after.
The old commonplace books:
From William Goodell: Christianity recognizes the unity and equality of all men, and seeks to unite them on the basis of that equality and union, under the protection of the common Father of all.
And an old handbook credits Plato with this:
Plato: All men are by nature equal, all made of the same earth by one Workman; and however we may deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.
There is the equality of worth — the peasant as dear as the prince. Now the other column.
From Charles James Fox, the great English champion of liberty: I am for equality; I think men entitled to equal rights, but to unequal things.
From Samuel Johnson: So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.
Marquis de Vauvenargues: It is untrue that equality is a law of nature; nature has no equality; its sovereign law is subordination and dependence.
From the Empiricist Bishop Berkley: All men are not equal in the faculties of either body or mind; a necessity of superiority and subordination springs from the very nature which God has given us.
Equal in worth, unequal in things — both columns are true, and the whole art of a humane society is refusing to let either one eat the other. Samuel Johnson again, in a gentler mood: I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society; there is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.
And George Crabb completes the catechism's thought: it is the part of the exalted to treat the subordinate with indulgence.
As for the novel, The Hideous Strength is set in an English university town in the years following the war, and all the elements in it—the comedy, the horror, the marriage, and the magic—revolve around the issue of authority, namely, who is in charge, what is due to a head, and what happens to a body when its head fails. The book contains four hierarchies and, once these have been identified, the entire story makes sense.
Bracton
The first of these is the college — Bracton College, a small and old self-governing fellowship. Its offices are legitimate and well-ordered, yet the college is now defunct. The men who still hold the titles no longer exercise control; in reality the college is managed by a close group of administrators — a kind of deep state consisting of bureaucrats — who pass all decisions via committee while the official leaders merely doze off. The major trial arises when the college is arranged to sell its one valuable asset, the ancient wood at its core, and the sale is carried out not through open discussion but by means of procedural confusion: the agendas are set, the men are exhausted, and the real issue is never properly raised. Recall the catechism's statement — the sin of careless exposure or allowing them to go astray. Bracton is headship in name only and abdication in fact. No one takes over the college; it simply chooses not to be governed, and thus it is taken.
NICE (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments)
The second hierarchy is the one that exercises control — it is an institute, which Lewis gives an acronym for, one that happens to stand for the word 'nice' — and this institute presents itself as personification of progress: bringing about national renewal, coordinating scientific efforts, and promoting humanitarian improvement. In reality, however, it is merely a desire for power disguised as a laboratory coat, and Lewis brings out its true character with an image straight from a nightmare: the institute's hidden sanctuary, the thing which its inner circle reveres and from which it receives orders, is a severed human head — the head of a man who was executed by the guillotine and kept artificially alive using tubes and taps. This is the origin of tonight's title, and it could not be a more precise symbol: a command centre having neither a body to answer to nor a heart to guide it. Command without communion. Making all demands but providing nothing — the lower part of the catechism's duty entirely removed. If Bracton represents abdication, then this is usurpation: authority being taken by those to whom it was never given and exercised over those for whom they feel nothing.
Here Lewis pulls off a trick befitting his devil-letters: these people are awful and at the same time pleasant. The men at the institute show every sign of warmth and friendliness, using only first names, sharing jokes and offering flattery. They are nice, but not kind. Recall the case of the Great Knock, who was kind but not nice; the institute is precisely the opposite of him, and the world contains examples of both. Some of the most arrogant and deeply dismissive people currently alive have discovered that the language of humility is easy to mimic — with the soft tone, the aw-shucks kind of evasion and the vocabulary of a carefully assumed servant — even though their inner selves remain full of desire. There is a smile on the face above; the machinery is underneath.
Scripture has a portrait of this man Absalom, the king's son, wanted his father's throne, and this is how he campaigned for it.
From the book of Samuel
[2 Samuel 15:1-4] After this Absalom got himself a chariot and horses, and fifty men to run before him. And Absalom used to rise early and stand beside the way of the gate. And when any man had a dispute to come before the king for judgment, Absalom would call to him and say, "From what city are you?" And when he said, "Your servant is of such and such a tribe in Israel," Absalom would say to him, "See, your claims are good and right, but there is no man designated by the king to hear you." Then Absalom would say, "Oh that I were judge in the land! Then every man with a dispute or cause might come to me, and I would give him justice."
He goes on:
[2 Samuel 15:5-6] And whenever a man came near to pay homage to him, he would put out his hand and take hold of him and kiss him. Thus Absalom did to all of Israel who came to the king for judgment. So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.
Consider the whole arrangement. There are the chariots and fifty runners — the show put on by a leader — and then, when a man bows, there's the hand on the shoulder, the kiss, and that casual refusal of the honour for which he has been dressed: no, brother, I'm just one of you; all I want is for someone to listen to your case. It is a complete mockery of reality, with flattery going both ways — the crowd flatters him and at the same time is taught to flatter him — and in this way a kingdom is taken. The older moralists were well familiar with this sort of thing.
From Raleigh: Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors, for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing.
From William Penn: Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise; they lie to flatter, and flatter to cheat; and, which is worse, if you believe them, you cheat yourselves most dangerously.
And the proverb sits in judgment over the whole scene.
From the book of Proverbs:
[Proverbs 27:6] Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
Kirkpatrick wounded like a friend. Absalom kissed like an enemy. Nice and kind are not the same word.
Mark & Jane
The smallest of the three social levels in the novel is also the first one that the reader encounters: a marriage. Mark, a young don, and his wife Jane, who are together only for six months and are already very far apart. Lewis's assessment is entirely fair: it is a case of mutual disrespect. Mark has given up his position of leadership simply by being absent—not out of cruelty, but because he is constantly preoccupied, always on the lookout for status, for the men who are important, and for the room which he has not yet been allowed into. All the love that should be directed downwards and towards her he has quietly redirected towards his career. As for Jane, she withholds—she withholds honour, openness, and even simple attention—because she has mistaken self-sufficiency for dignity; she is determined to owe nothing and to need nothing, and she terms the resulting coldness independence. Lewis regards both of these failures as failures of love, not of etiquette. Neither person is oppressing the other; they are simply starving each other in a polite way.
St. Anne's
The fourth hierarchy is in fact the solution to the other three: it consists of a small household situated on a hill at the edge of town — the manor of St. Anne's — which surrounds a man called Ransom. The name is not intended to be subtle; rather, Lewis's hero takes on the form of Christ in the narrative. He has real authority in that house and people obey him, and all the signs of his authority are the opposite of those of the institute. His position of leadership is one of subjection: he commands not because he is above others, but because he too is subject to the Power which he serves. He has a wound that will not heal, a wound sustained in an earlier battle in an earlier book, and he bears it in the same way that the catechism's superior bears his office — as the price of defending what was his responsibility to defend. And within his household the entire structure of the catechism comes to life: each member of the household — a scholar, a sceptic who never does convert, a bear, and a charwoman — is fully recognised and given real work appropriate to who they actually are. The charwoman is not cajoled into pretending that she is a philosopher; the philosopher is not made to feel ashamed into pretending that he is a charwoman; and no one is interchangeable with anyone else. This is the only hierarchy in the book to have the duty flowing downwards intact — and it is the only place in the book where anyone is happy. That is Lewis's quiet conclusion: a hierarchy in which love remains is not the enemy of joy but is in fact the form of joy.
As for the severed head—why is it the central image? Why a head? It is because Lewis, being a Christian, is working within the framework of the way apostle Paul saw reality, a framework in which head and body is not a metaphor for management but rather the fundamental structure of the world. Listen to how the apostle sets out this idea.
From Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians (12, 14–22, 25–26)
[1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 18] For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.
He goes on:
[1 Corinthians 12:19-22, 25-26] If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
The head cannot tell the feet that it does not need them; indeed, the entire doctrine of the institute is contradicted by this one statement—since the head in the cellar is exactly one which has told every foot on the face of the earth, "I have no need of you". Moreover, it should be observed that the members do not have the same function—each eye, hand and foot being placed where God saw fit—yet the weakest are still necessary and the same care is extended to all. There is equal worth, unequal functions, and mutual need: this is the grammar of the catechism as it is Paul's grammar.
And Paul tells us where the grammar comes from.
From the epistle to the Ephesians:
[Ephesians 4:15-16] Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Christ is the head — and from the head the body is nourished, joined, and grown. Headship, in this picture, is not extraction; it is supply. And the same apostle warns what happens when the connection is cut. Of those who drift from Christ he writes:
[Colossians 2:19] And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.
Not holding the Head. A body that lets go of its head does not become free. It becomes dead. That is the theological engine under the whole novel: severance is not liberation, whichever end does the severing. And Paul dares to carry the pattern into the very room where Mark and Jane are starving each other:
Ephesians 5
[Ephesians 5:23, 25] For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.
The head of the wife — even as Christ. Which is to say: the measure of headship is not command but expenditure. He is the saviour of the body; he gave himself for it. Any man who reads that sentence as a license has not read to the end of it.
Matthew Henry, commenting on the one-body passage, puts the whole matter in a line: Christ and his church form one body, as head and members; all Christians are dependent one upon another, and the good of the whole should be the object of all.
With that engine in view, watch what the novel actually does with its two abdications — because Lewis has built them in parallel, and the parallel is the loveliest piece of architecture in the book.
Abdication, but God…
Bracton College has a wood, namely Bragdon Wood, which is older than the college and, according to legend, older than Roman Britain; at its centre there is a well that the stories connect with Merlin. It is difficult for a modern reader to grasp the sort of deep respectful admiration that people in earlier times must have had for such a place — a feeling that the college does not own the wood so much as that it maintains it, that the wood is the college's responsibility and the treasure for which it exists. The entire plot is based on this point: the evil forces assembling in the story have no desire for the college at all. Instead, they flatter the college, they enrich it, and they make the college's minor administrators feel important — all in order to obtain the wood. Indeed, they do not even ultimately want the wood; what they really want is what lies in it. The college is sought after merely because it was entrusted with guarding the treasure and has now forgotten how to appreciate it.
Now look at Mark. His wife is the novel's other Bragdon Wood. Jane is something ancient and alive and gifted — she has, without asking for it, a strange endowment: true dreams, visions of things happening far away; Lewis's way, I think, of putting feminine glory into the visible register of magic. She has been entrusted to Mark's care, and his inattention has left her exposed — exposed, as it happens, to the one power in the story that is actively hunting for exactly the gift he has never bothered to notice. For here too the enemy's courtship is misdirected on purpose: the institute recruits Mark, flatters Mark, dangles circles of importance before Mark — and the whole time it is Jane they want. In both cases the pattern is identical: the satanic strategy is affirming to the negligent steward, feeding him precisely the respect he is hungry for, in order to reach past him to the treasure behind him. The head is bought with honors so the body can be taken.
In each instance the strategy proves unsuccessful, failing in the same way—and it is here that the God of the story makes himself known. The wood's sleeper awakens and walks straight past all the parties who are plotting to reach the one genuine head in the story; he goes to St. Anne's and submits himself to Ransom. Jane's gift does exactly the same thing: her dreams themselves guide her towards St. Anne's and lead her to Ransom's door, resisting all the way. Neither of the treasures ends up in the hands of the hunters. The heads abdicated but Providence did not. The good shepherd of the story goes out and finds what the hired men had left exposed—and if you know how Lewis himself died, you will understand that he had personal reasons for believing in this pattern. He had answered by hand every letter that had ever been sent to him, thousands and thousands of them, and a large number of these had come from women who were writing to a stranger because few of their relatives were looking after them. One of those women—an astute American who had been influenced in part by his books and whose own marriage had broken down—eventually became his wife.
Aslan, you might say, keeps seeking out what the failed heads leave in the woods.
Hard vs. Soft Elitism
One final attempt at the enemy, since Lewis identifies two levels of the disease and most of us are at greater risk from the second. These can be called hard elitism and soft elitism. Hard elitism refers to the inner circle of the institute—men who have a clear and stated belief that they are the vanguard and that it is their right to remake or simply replace ordinary humanity by any means necessary. This is elitism as a metaphysical principle, the assertion of a right to rule with nothing above the rulers, neither God nor love. Such a phenomenon occurs in every age; in our age it is expressed effortlessly through the language of the modern technology world, where the deep-down statement "I know what is better for you than you do" is once again wrapped in pleasant phrases.
Inner Ring
But Mark's trouble is soft elitism, and it is the common cold of the soul: not a belief but a desire — a continual, low-level search through every room to see who is more at home than he is; a constant inability to care about what he already possesses since his attention is fixed on what he has not yet been allowed into. Lewis delivered a well-known lecture on this kind of desire during the war, and his theory of it provides the explanation for the entire course of Mark's story: he maintained that, in every institution, along with the official hierarchy there exists a second, unwritten system — a circle within a circle, a ring within a ring — and the desire to get into it is inherent in nature, because from within every ring there is always another, smaller ring. He cautions that this kind of longing is the most likely thing to lead a man who is not yet a scoundrel to carry out the actions of a scoundrel: no one ever quite decides at the outset to become corrupt; instead, he is gradually drawn, bit by bit and drink by drink, beyond boundaries he had never considered, simply for the pleasure of being drawn. That is exactly the way the institute absorbs Mark — not through argument, but by including him.
Lust for the Inner Ring
And the bitter joke of Mark's story is this: he already possessed the innermost ring in existence, and had not noticed. Jane was the prize all along — the smallest, most exclusive society he could ever belong to, membership two, and he a founding member. He could not make himself care about it, because it was already his. But the universe cared. Lewis ends the book by having Venus herself — the celestial power of love in his cosmology — descend upon that little marriage, as though all heaven took one ordinary couple's reunion with total cosmic seriousness. The ring Mark spent the novel chasing was a corridor of doors with nothing at the end; the bond he despised was the thing the stars bent low to bless.
Lewis establishes the household against the background of the ring. St. Anne's is the one that does not have the ring: it employs a charwoman (a maid) and a skeptic not in order to make them feel as if they were selected — there is in fact no sense of being an insider — but so that they may have real work which is appropriate to who they really are. True belonging is achieved through real contribution, real submission and real merit under a real leader. It is the only society in the book that functions and the only cure for ring-hunger that anyone has ever discovered.
So where does the healing come from? If the head can fail by abdication and fail by usurpation; if niceness can be a mask and independence a starvation; if even the remedy of equality can curdle into a lie — where do we look to see headship whole? The church's answer has always been: look at Christ, long enough and closely enough that the suspicion of hierarchy falls off you. And no one in the English tongue has helped more people take that long look than Jonathan Edwards, in a sermon on the Lamb who is also the Lion.
From Edwards:
John was informed about a Lion which had managed to open the book and likely anticipated seeing a lion in his vision; but as he was expecting to see one, there appeared a Lamb to open the book, a creature entirely unlike a lion. A lion is a predator, one accustomed to causing dreadful slaughter among other animals; and no creature is more easily caught as prey by it than a lamb.
He goes on:
Jesus Christ possesses a most admirable union of various excellences. Although the lion and the lamb are very different kinds of animals, each of them has its own particular merits: the lion is superior in strength and in the dignity of his look and voice, while the lamb is outstanding in meekness and patience. Yet we find in the text that Christ is compared with both of them, for the distinct excellences of each are wonderfully brought together in him.
And hear him hold the two ends of the hierarchy together in one person:
In Jesus Christ infinite greatness and infinite humility meet. Since He is God, He is infinitely great and exalted above all others. He is higher than the kings of the earth because He is King of kings and Lord of lords; so great is He that all men, all kings and princes, are like worms upon the dust before Him, and all nations are like the drop of a bucket and the light dust on the balance.
He goes on:
Yet he shows an infinite willingness to accommodate. No one is so low or inferior that Christ's act of accommodation does not enable him to take a gracious notice of them. He does not merely accommodate himself to princes and distinguished people, but also to those of the lowest rank and status, to the poor of the world; for such as are usually despised by their fellow beings, Christ does not disdain. Indeed, so great is his accommodation that it is sufficient for him to become their friend, to become their companion, to unite their souls to him in spiritual marriage; yes, even to give himself up to a shameful death on their behalf.
And then Edwards turns the blade on every one of us who has ever held a little authority:
Such a conjunction of infinite highness and low condescension, in the same person, is admirable. We see, by manifold instances, what a tendency a high station has in men, to make them of a quite contrary disposition. If one worm be a little exalted above another, by having more dust, or a bigger dunghill, how much does he make of himself! Christ condescends to wash our feet; but how would great men — or rather the bigger worms — account themselves debased by acts of far less condescension!
More dust, or a bigger dunghill. There is the institute in its cellar; there is the college in its committee room; there, if we are honest, is the scanning eye in our own heads. And against it all stands the one head who never abdicated and never usurped — whose very name in the novel is the clue, for what is a ransom? Hear the Lord himself, on the road to Jerusalem, when his own disciples were jockeying for the inner ring.
From the Gospel of Mark
[Mark 10:42-45] Then Jesus called them to Himself and said to them, 'You know that the rulers among the Gentiles exercise authority over their people and that their governors have power over them; but among you it shall not be so. Rather, whoever would be great among you must serve as a minister, and whoever would be the leader among you must be a servant to all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.'
The worthy head is the one who has shown himself willing to be under authority and to spend himself for the body — to become, himself, the ransom. And the apostle traces the whole arc, downward and then up, in the greatest hierarchy-hymn ever written.
From the epistle to the Philippians:
[Philippians 2:5-8] Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
He goes on:
[Philippians 2:9-11] Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Obedient unto death — wherefore highly exalted. Submission first, then the crown; the Lamb slain, therefore the Lion worthy. Every broken hierarchy in tonight's story is some refusal of that order: the usurper wants the exaltation without the obedience; the abdicator refuses both; and the household on the hill is simply a room where people have begun, haltingly, to practice it. The head who wears scars is the only head worth following — and, wonder of wonders, he is the one head that will never leave the body exposed.