A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism In the Cataclysm of 1914–1918

by Joseph Loconte

  It is Nature’s revenge against Man: the industrialized exploitation of the physical world cannot go unpunished. This judgment against man’s assault on his environment could only have been deepened by the experience of the Great War. Never before in the history of warfare had technology wrought such physical devastation: an industrialized holocaust as terrifying in its effects on nature as on men. What a regimental historian said of the Battle of the Somme could be applied to many of the battles from 1914–18 that defaced the European landscape: “In that field of fire nothing could live.”28 Writing three years after the conclusion of the war, author Vera Brittain described the scene near Amiens, as she drove to find the grave of her fiancé. She witnessed “a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim protest against man’s ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man.”29

  THE MASTERY OF NATURE WITHOUT GOD

  As we’ll see, Tolkien and Lewis imported these images, sometimes quite directly, into their works of fiction—a quiet protest against the march of progress. Nevertheless, by the time they entered adulthood, the preindustrial past had given way to a present enthralled with science and technology. “Between 1900 and 1914, technological, social, and political advances swept Europe and America on a scale unknown in any such previous timespan,” writes historian Max Hastings, “the blink of an eye in human experience.”30

  Just consider the breakthroughs that appear at the turn of the century. In 1900, as if to symbolize man’s evolutionary ascent, Charles Seeberger invents the first modern escalator. The next year, Marconi delivers the first transatlantic radio signal, while Hubert Booth invents a compact vacuum cleaner. In 1902 there appear the first air conditioner, lie detector, and neon light. In 1903 the Wright brothers successfully test the first gas-motored and manned airplane; the first steam turbine generator appears the same year. In 1904 the tractor is invented. In 1905 Albert Einstein stuns the scientific community with his theory of relativity. Sonar is developed in 1906 and the first air-conditioned hospital appears in Boston. In 1907 color photography is invented. In 1908 Henry Ford produces 10,660 Model T automobiles in his assembly line, making cars affordable for large numbers of people. Instant coffee is invented in 1909 (modern-day coffee snobs view this as a sign of the decline of the West). In 1910 Thomas Edison unveils the first talking motion picture, while physicist Marie Curie successfully isolates radium, a feat that will make her the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize.

  All this self-generated progress, this mastery of nature, was occurring without the help of religion. For many Europeans and Americans, Christianity seemed irrelevant to the insights and blessings of the new technologies. “Using his own natural intelligence, and without the aid of Holy Scripture’s divine revelation, man had penetrated nature’s mysteries, transformed his universe, and immeasurably enhanced his existence,” writes Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind. “Man was responsible for his own earthly destiny. His own wits and will could change his world. Science gave man a new faith—not only in scientific knowledge, but in himself.”31

  The newfound faith in humanity, however, did not imply contentment with man’s place in nature. Many began to wonder if the same scientific principles that were so drastically transforming the physical world might be used to improve its most important inhabitants: the human species. If science could be so effective at probing and improving the natural world, couldn’t it do the same for human society?32

  Thus, it was not only technological innovations that were emboldening the believers in progress. Scientists and social thinkers were also transforming the way Europeans and Americans viewed human nature and the cosmos. Charles Darwin, of course, paved the way with his theory of evolution. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) seemed to explain scientifically, for the first time, how organisms change, adapt, and become more complex. It was intended as a theory of biology.

  Yet Darwin himself suggested that the idea of natural selection, the struggle for existence of the most fit and capable, might be extended to other areas. Thanks to Herbert Spencer, a British social theorist, Darwin’s theory was reinterpreted as a doctrine of unremitting progress—and applied to society at large. Every realm of human endeavor, from politics to economics to ethics, fell under its refining influence. Humankind, Spencer wrote, was in a long process of adaption and self-improvement: “And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life.”33

  The impact of Spencer on Anglo-American thought can hardly be exaggerated. In the decades leading up to the First World War, it was virtually impossible to undertake any intellectual work without mastering Spencer.34 His “towering influence” would have been inconceivable had he not arisen in an age of steel and steam engines, competition, exploitation, and struggle.35 US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes doubted that “any writer of English except Darwin has done so much to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe.”36

  Thus, Spencer’s social interpretation of Darwinian science energized the most powerful narrative at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Myth of Progress was not just one story among many. It was the story, the metanarrative of all the stories about our mortal lives, a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of human existence.

  The Myth of Progress was proclaimed from nearly every sector of society. Scientists, physicians, educators, industrialists, salesmen, politicians, preachers—they all agreed on the upward flight of humankind. Each breakthrough in medicine, science, and technology seemed to confirm the Myth. Every invention and innovation was offered up as evidence: whether it was Marconi’s radio messages or the Maxim machine gun, such advances were ordained by the gods of progress.37 Thus, what began as a theory about biological change ripened into an assumption—a dogma—about human improvement, even perfection.

  Or so it seemed to C. S. Lewis and many of his generation. “I grew up believing in this Myth and I have felt—I still feel—its almost perfect grandeur,” he wrote. “To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn into order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.”38

  The Myth of Progress proves to be irresistible, especially to those repelled by traditional Christianity and its unpleasant doctrines of guilt, judgment, and repentance. Indeed, the triumph of science and technology seemed to leave no meaningful role for religion or the supernatural. Science, not religion, was driving human achievement. Its new dominance left many believers struggling for resources with which to shore up the credibility of their faith. “Looked at with the cold eye of empiricism,” writes historian James Turner, Christianity’s claims to knowledge about the cosmos “stood naked as a babe.”39

  By the end of the nineteenth century, theologians and social reformers were frantically recasting Christianity as a “social gospel” of human advancement, perfectly in step with the zeitgeist. Although many of these efforts were laudable in their intent—programs to alleviate poverty, provide for orphans, reduce alcoholism, improve working conditions—they, too, got swept up in the Myth. Pastors such as Lyman Abbott, author of The Evolution of Christianity, predicted steady moral development: “There is a God in history, as there is a God in nature—a God who is working out some great design among men, as there is a God who is working out great designs through all material and mechanical phenomena.”40 The Christian religion, declared social gospel leader Washington Gladden, “must be a religion less concerned about getting men to heaven than about fitting them for their proper work on the earth.”41

  THE GOSPEL OF EUGENICS

  In an age of technological triumphalism, “fitting” people for their “proper work” in the world meant applying scientific methods to improve the species. In a word: eug
enics. Coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, the word comes from the Greek, meaning “good birth.”

  Speaking to a learned society in London in 1909, Galton explained how the tools of evolutionary science could be used to better the human race. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” he said. “As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.”42 Armed with statistical research documenting Britain’s genetic decline, Galton envisioned a massive societal investment in eugenics programs. “If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!” he said. “We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins.”43

  Galton’s gospel of eugenics found fertile soil in Britain, in the intellectual salons of Europe, and in the United States. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, eugenics scientists called for programs to manipulate human reproduction. They advocated for laws to segregate the so-called feebleminded into state colonies, to live out their lives in celibacy. They led the drive to restrict immigration from countries whose citizens might pollute their national gene pools. And they supported sterilization laws aimed at men and women whose “germplasm” threatened the eugenic vitality of the nation.44

  In Britain, the Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 to take up the cause. By 1913, the American Genetic Association was established in the United States to promote the doctrines of racial purity. Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities. Beginning in 1912, a series of International Eugenics Conferences were held in London and New York, creating a global venue for eugenicists and their supporters. “It [eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion,” Galton explained. “It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics cooperates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races.”45

  Religious leaders, especially those in the liberal wing of the Christian church, would answer the call. Ministers in the Church of England held a Church Congress in 1910 in Cambridge, inviting several members of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-Minded to participate. Attendees that day were treated to “brilliant” addresses urging the clergy to promote the eugenics agenda at every turn. The National Church had “a very great responsibility towards the race,” according to one speaker, and “the future belongs to those nations whose religious leaders realize this responsibility.” An American observer at the Congress concluded, with apparent envy, that the Church of England “was ready, in matters of social action, to ‘think biologically.’ ”46

  Two years later in London, the Anglican bishops of Birmingham, Oxford, and Ripon were among the vice presidents of the First International Eugenics Congress. Major Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, was the presiding officer—illustrating the intellectual bond between Darwinism and eugenics. That same year, the influential Protestant minister F. B. Meyer, author of Religion and Race-Regeneration (1912), warned that the high birthrates of Catholics, Jews, and the feebleminded presented a collective menace to society.47

  For Tolkien and Lewis, all of this represented a frontal assault on human dignity: a reduction of the individual to mere biology. In their imaginative works they invariably depict their characters as physical and spiritual beings, responsible for their souls even as they are constrained by their earthly nature. Their fictional worlds are filled with nonhuman races—elves, dwarves, hobbits, centaurs, etc.—who nonetheless all share this fundamental attribute. For each of them, virtue and corruption are equally plausible.48 As Tolkien insisted, even the dreadful orcs are presented as rational beings, “though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.”49

  This helps to explain the bitter conflict between the forces of slavery and liberty that runs through their stories: no creatures are born for captivity, and none have a birthright to oppress others. In The Lord of the Rings, the followers of Sauron, the Dark Lord, serve him out of fear; they are no more than slaves in his realm. Thus we see the use of genetic engineering—the creation of robotic orcs—to extend the dictatorship of Mordor throughout the world. At its heart, the War of the Ring is a struggle to preserve the essential freedom and humanity of the inhabitants of Middle-earth. “It would be a grievous blow to the world,” says Gandalf the Grey, “if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your kind . . . became enslaved.”50

  For his part, Lewis warned against the bondage imposed upon humanity when, under the guise of scientific progress, men and women are regarded as “patients.” In Perelandra, the second in his Space Trilogy, we meet Professor Weston, a famous physicist and devotee of the new science. Weston is an advocate of “emergent evolution,” a process by which the human species is “thrusting its way upward and ever upward” toward new heights of achievement. He boasts that his new beliefs have swept away all his old conceptions of our moral obligations to others. “Man in himself is nothing,” he explains. “The forward movement of Life—the growing spirituality—is everything.”51 Weston emerges as an essentially satanic figure.

  For both authors the “conquest of Nature” would prove catastrophic. In the name of progress, a handful of elites would dominate the lives and destinies of millions. As Tolkien wrote in Mythopoeia: “I will not walk with your progressive apes / erect and sapient. Before them gapes / the dark abyss to which their progress tends.”52 Likewise, Lewis warned that the final stage of this process would arrive when human beings achieved full mastery over themselves. Eugenics, prenatal conditioning, education, and psychology would all play a part in “the abolition of man,” the surrender of our essential humanity. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”53

  Bizarre as it may seem, the “scientific” manipulation of human beings, all under the banner of progress, became the consensus view of the academic communities in England, Germany, and the United States, just as Tolkien and Lewis were launching their careers. Serious efforts were underway to identify biological “defectives” so they could be incarcerated and sterilized. Marriage laws were seen as ineffective, while immigration restrictions couldn’t stop defective people who were already here from procreating. Incredibly, forced sterilization—considered cheap, safe, and permanent—became the stated goal of the eugenics movement. Beginning in 1907, states such as Indiana passed sterilization laws “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” The United States acquired the noxious distinction of being the first nation in the West to legalize compulsory sterilization.54

  Catholics and conservative Protestants resisted these laws, but the eugenic tide appeared to be turning against them. By the 1920s, hundreds of American churches participated in a national “eugenics sermon contest.” As the Rev. Kenneth McArthur, a winner from Sterling, Massachusetts, put it in his sermon: “If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords.”55 Oliver Wendell Holmes was an apostle for the new science, having authored the 1927 Supreme Court opinion upholding Virginia’s sterilization law. “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” he wrote. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”56

  THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT

  Here, on shameless display, is the crisis of faith at the start of the twentieth century. Historians tend to interpret Darwin’s influence as the essential solvent that destroyed belief in God: the laws of natural selection required no Law-Giver. Thus, evolution made God redundant, the Bible irrelevant, and
salvation a state of mind. The story of the decline of vital religion, however, is much more complex.

  As Darwin’s popularizer, Spencer and his allies benefited enormously from The Myth of Progress that already had captured the Western imagination. There were many secular-minded thinkers and activists in the eugenics movement, but they received great moral support from religious leaders: ministers and others who discarded the historic teachings of the church and became beguiled by the Myth. At the same time, they eagerly enlisted the Bible to portray eugenics as a mandate from heaven. “The evidence yields a clear pattern about who elected to support eugenic-style reforms and who did not,” writes Christine Rosen in Preaching Eugenics. “Religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets.”57

  This weakening of Christian belief occurred at the moment when Tolkien and Lewis were developing their own intellectual lives. They began their educations when The Myth of Progress was at a fever pitch, when it was widely believed that science—the science of eugenics—could perfect human nature and thus human societies.

  It’s important to remember that eugenicists thought of themselves as reformers, committed to improving the human condition. They endorsed the idea of state action to achieve their goals. “They were dedicated to facing head-on the challenges posed by modernity,” writes Rosen. “Doing so meant embracing scientific solutions.”58 Animated by the Myth, they emphasized the collective destiny of the human race, at the expense of the individual. The conceit of the intellectual elites of the day was that science, and the technology it underwrites, could solve the most intractable of human problems.