Ch. 6: The Inner Ring

If you missed this discussion, you also missed sundaes at Margies' Candies on Western. (Let that be a lesson to you!) You also missed the induction of Dr. Robert Webber, a former professor of mine, into the Dead Theologians Society.

This chapter was a talk Lewis gave to a group of college students. He set out to tell them about the World (as opposed to the Flesh, which he felt they should understand full well already, and the Devil, whom he believed he was too closely aligned in the public eye) and focuses on the phenomena of the "Inner Ring."

This inner ring is neither good nor bad but is something we all strive for at one point or another, according to Lewis. It suggests belonging, value, possessing secret knowledge and other things. But Lewis warns at against pursuing the Inner Ring for the sake of itself and encourages a truer, more satisfying pursuit.

"The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. 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 be no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know."

He continues...

"And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something 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."