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

  The sheer destructive power of the war, the unimaginable number of dead and wounded, the apocalyptic hopes and claims of the participants, and the apparent futility of the outcome—all of this instigated a new season of religious doubts and experimentation.

  Indeed, it is hard to overstate the spiritual crisis that overcame many young men and women, particularly among the intellectuals, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Swiss theologian Karl Barth had been appalled at the wholehearted embrace of Germany’s war by the theologians, and at what he saw as the confusion of enlightened culture with the gospel. The Bible, Barth insisted, contained “divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God.” Barth savaged the utopian schemes of liberal Christianity in his monumental Epistle to the Romans (1921). His work “burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians.”74

  Nevertheless, Barth’s “neo-orthodoxy,” as it came to be called, was being rejected by elite opinion throughout Europe and, increasingly, the United States. It came as a thunderbolt to the literati, for example, when T. S. Eliot was baptized and confirmed into the Church of England in 1927. How could the author of The Wasteland find solace in such a primitive superstition? How could a member of the literary set, London’s Bloomsbury Group, commit such an act of intellectual betrayal?75 Virginia Woolf expressed the indignation of her peers in a letter to a friend:

  I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.76

  The obscenity of belief in God: such was the tide of elite opinion in much of postwar Europe. To many of the best and brightest, Christianity appeared to lack any explanatory power. It could neither account for the internecine conflict of the supposed Christian nations of Europe, nor offer a realistic hope of achieving a more peaceful and just global order. Rather, the church of the modern age seemed tethered to destructive doctrines and medieval superstitions.

  “We find at the present day among the educated classes . . . a great output of new and more or less fantastic superstitions drawn indifferently from the mysterious East or the neurotic West,” wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1928). “Also a large and outspoken rejection of all religion and particularly of all morality.”77 Nietzsche had hailed this latter prospect at the end of the nineteenth century: “Perhaps the most solemn concepts which have occasioned the most strife and suffering, the concepts of ‘God’ and ‘sin,’ will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child’s toy and a child’s troubles seem to an old man.”78

  THE “GREAT WAR” WITH OWEN BARFIELD

  Thus it is no surprise that postwar Oxford was becoming a hotbed of agnosticism, religious indifference, and experimentation. C. S. Lewis found himself entangled in an “unholy muddle” of competing philosophies, from psychoanalysis to rationalism. “And all the time . . . there’s the danger of falling back into the most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them.”79 As biographer George Sayer sums up the mood: “Most tutors encouraged their pupils above all to doubt.”80

  A lively specimen was Owen Barfield, a war veteran studying English literature whom Lewis met in 1919. Although Lewis agreed with Owen on almost nothing—“he has read all the right books but got the wrong thing out of every one”—a lifelong admiration and friendship began. Barfield became a devotee of “anthroposophy,” a spiritual philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner, which envisioned mankind as an integral part of the creative thought and evolution of the world. Lewis rejected Barfield’s anthroposophy as a kind of Gnosticism, and the two initiated what they called a “Great War” of intellectual debate. It was another relationship that would alter the course of Lewis’s intellectual and spiritual life:

  He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of the other’s punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him.81

  In their “perpetual dogfight”—a phrase lifted from the war, of course—Barfield influenced Lewis in at least two profoundly important ways. He persuaded Lewis to abandon his “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that the dominant intellectual fashion of the day makes every mode of thought from the past either suspect or irrelevant. This philosophical pose, given birth by the Enlightenment, grew to maturity after the conflagration of the First World War, into which so many cherished Victorian ideals had vanished.

  Barfield also challenged the scientific and materialist view of reality typical among Oxford dons. The “old beliefs” central to Christianity were languishing after a radical assault from various quarters. Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud—in one form or another they and others mocked the notion of the sacred dignity of the individual. A great many educated Europeans and Americans had come to believe that the “aesthetic” experiences—our sense of morality, the longing for joy, and the love of beauty—were essentially meaningless. Though these intellectual movements could be hostile toward one another, Lewis realized they were united in their hatred of the “immortal longings” of ordinary human beings. “These people seemed to me to be condemning what they did not understand.”82

  Barfield’s spiritualism, for all its eccentricities, appeared to offer a better explanation for these experiences than that of the materialist. He helped Lewis to consider the possibility that our moral intuitions, our aesthetic experiences, could lead us to objective truth: imagination might be as good a guide to reality as rational argument.

  In a letter dated September 25, 1920, Lewis admitted to another Oxford friend that his studies in philosophy were leading him away from dogmatic skepticism. Addressed to Leo Baker, a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the war, the letter revealed a growing frustration with purely materialistic views of the universe. “I have no business to object to the universe as long as I have nothing to offer myself,” he explained.

  You will be interested to hear that in the course of my philosophy—on the existence of matter—I have had to postulate some sort of God as the last objectionable theory: but of course we know nothing. At any rate we don’t know what the real Good is, and consequently I have stopped defying heaven: it can’t know less than I, so perhaps things really are alright. This, to you, will be old news, but perhaps you will see it in me as a sign of grace.83

  By 1925 Lewis had cast off the stern atheism of his younger days. “It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word,” he wrote, “that Darwin and Spencer, undermining ancestral beliefs, stand themselves on a foundation of sand.”84 Lewis’s postwar friendships prevented him from adopting the moral indifference—what he called the “shallow pessimisms”—so typical of his generation.85 They pressed upon him questions for which he had no credible answer. “Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly,” he wrote to Arthur Greeves. “There must be something in it: only what?”86

  WHEN MYTH BECOMES FACT

  This is the question that lies behind the famous late-night debate between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in September 1931. It was a remarkable moment: a probing discussion of ancient myths and an ancient faith, it nonetheless speaks to the mystery of the modern predicament. Their exchange—an encounter between intensely creative minds over the meaning of Christianity—s
hould be ranked as one of the most transformative conversations of the twentieth century.

  Lewis was elected as a fellow and tutor in English Language and Literature at Oxford’s Magdalen College in May 1925, the same year that Tolkien was elected a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. The two met for the first time a year later and realized that, despite their different approaches to literature, they had many shared interests and authors, including an attraction to mythologies. When Tolkien started a club among the dons to read Icelandic sagas, Lewis happily joined. It was called the Coalbiters—from the Icelandic Kolbitar—a term meaning “men who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal.”

  During the next several years, as they met together, Lewis and Tolkien realized that they shared a love for “Northernness,” the mythologies and fairy stories they had first encountered in the works of William Morris and George MacDonald and other authors.87 In a letter to Arthur Greeves dated December 3, 1929, Lewis described one of their exchanges: “I was up till 2:30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien, who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain—who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good.”

  A deep friendship was taking root. And yet for all their mutual interests in literature, the two men could not agree on the nature of myth and its relationship to belief in God. The argument came to a head on Saturday evening, September 19, 1931.

  Lewis had invited Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, to dine with him at Magdalen College. Dyson, a war veteran, had fought at the Battle of the Somme and was severely injured at the Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres. He was named a Lecturer in English at Reading University. Lewis liked him immensely at their first meeting, describing him as “a man who really loves truth: a philosopher and a religious man.”88 After the meal, Lewis took his friends to Addison’s Walk, a tree-lined footpath that snakes along the River Cherwell near Magdalen College. As they walked they discussed and debated their ideas about metaphor and myth.89

  To Lewis, myths might be beautiful, they might charm our imaginations, but they were lies: inventions that contain no objective truth about the world. This is what troubled Lewis about Christianity. It was like the Norse myth of the dying god Balder, a lovely fiction, “one mythology among many.” Here was the “recognized scientific account” of the growth of religion that Lewis had written about to Arthur Greeves. It is the idea that “most legends have a kernel of fact in them somewhere,” but enthusiasts transform the kernel into a glorified sun god, corn deity, or supernatural messiah. Lewis’s critique represented the dominant academic view of religion by the turn of the century:

  When I say “Christ” of course I mean the mythological being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination. . . . That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist: Tacitus mentions his execution in the Annals. But all the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology.90

  Tolkien’s view was exactly the opposite: myths did not originate with man, but with God. They are his means of communicating at least a portion of his truth to the world. Because men and women come from God, Tolkien argued, their highest ideals and longings come from him as well. It is not only man’s abstract reasoning, but also his imaginative inventions that find their origin in God.91 As such, they suggest an aspect of divine truth.

  Mythmaking, what Tolkien calls “mythopoeia,” is a way of fulfilling God’s purposes as the Creator. By inventing a myth—by populating a world with elves and orcs, dragons and witches, gods and goddesses—the storyteller tries to retrieve the world he knew before man’s fall from grace. “There was an Eden on this very unhappy earth,” Tolkien explained many years later. “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’ ”92 The mythmaker, fired by the sense of exile and the desire to return to his authentic home, reflects “a splintered fragment of the true light.”93

  Recounting their conversation in his poem “Mythopoeia,” Tolkien insisted that pagan myths were not simply “lies,” as Lewis claimed, but contained intimations of the truth about God and the world he has made, however disfigured:

  The heart of man is not compound of lies,

  But draws some wisdom from the only Wise

  And still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

  Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

  Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,

  And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned.94

  The friends finally returned to Lewis’s study, where they talked until 3:00 a.m. The subject was Christianity. Lewis did not understand the meaning of the central teachings of the faith: the concepts known as “the blood of the Lamb” and “the atonement.” How could the life and death of Jesus have “saved the world”? How could the sacrificial death of someone two thousand years ago help us now? It all seemed irrelevant and incomprehensible.95

  Tolkien answered him immediately, and in his answer he revealed the core of his own philosophy as a writer and as a Christian thinker.96 Yes, the story of Jesus the Christ is a kind of myth: it is the authentic story of the Dying God who returns to life to rescue his people from sin and death and bring them to “the Blessed Land,” where “though they make anew, they make no lie.”97 The difference between Christianity and all the pagan myths is that this Dying God actually entered into history, lived a real life, and died a real death.

  “Do you mean,” Lewis asked, “that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that has really happened? In that case, I begin to understand.”98

  Years later, Lewis explained that his understanding of the nature of myth was crucial to his conversion. He finally concluded that paganism was “only a prophetic dream” and perhaps one of the “good dreams” that God sends to men and women to help guide them in their quest. Lewis’s own quest would lead him back to the life of Jesus, to the Gospels, which he had begun to read regularly in their original Greek. “If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all of literature was just like this,” he wrote. “Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact.”99

  Tolkien finally excused himself to return home, while Lewis and Dyson continued to talk until 4:00 a.m. An intellectual barrier to faith had collapsed. Twelve days later Lewis confessed to Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.”100

  THE GREAT COLLABORATION

  Lewis would devote much of the rest of his professional life to explaining Christianity to an uncomprehending world. In both his fiction and prose, in works such as The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Mere Christianity, Lewis traced the movement of a human soul from doubt to belief. By his own account, there were many friendships and authors who played a part in his journey, his “Pilgrim’s Regress.”101 His conversation with Tolkien, though, was the immediate human link in the chain. It left him with no rationalizations to fall back upon. “Everything that I had labored so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends,” he wrote. “Everyone and everything had joined the other side.”102

  Lewis’s conversion was not only deep and vital, it was “the chief watershed in his life,” writes biographer Walter Hooper. “There was no nook or cranny of his being that it did not eventually reach and transform.”103 His faith was nurtured by friendship: he and Tolkien formed the nucleus of a small group of writers—nearly all of them serious Christians—who met weekly in Lewis’s r
ooms at Magdalen. They gathered to read aloud and critique each other’s works. “Theoretically to talk about literature,” Lewis explained, “but in fact nearly always to talk about something better.”104 They called themselves “the Inklings,” those who “dabble in ink.”105

  It was in this setting that Lewis tested his first effort at science fiction as a vehicle for Christian truth. A pupil of his took seriously the dream of interplanetary colonization, which Lewis saw as a scientific attempt to defeat death—and as rival to Christianity. The result was Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the first of a science-fiction trilogy awash in religious themes and imagery. Lewis had read the novel aloud to the Inklings, where, according to Tolkien, it was “highly approved.”106 The book helped to launch Lewis’s career as a popular writer. Yet without Tolkien’s letter of praise to a publisher—much of it was dismissed as “bunk” by a reader assigned to the manuscript—the story might never have seen the light of day. “I read the story in the original manuscript and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it,” Tolkien said. “I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.”107