A Shiver of Wonder

by Derick Bingham

  Above them all it was Jack who loved hearing things being read aloud. It was the poet in him. Here, Professor Tolkien first read his most famous work, The Lord of The Rings. He is on record as saying that if it were not for Jack Lewis, he would never have completed the work or offered it for publication. One can imagine the tall, domestic, family-oriented Professor, with his swept-back grey hair, reading his first volume, The Fellowship of The Ring. Beginning in 1937, he read it as he was writing it, to that eclectic group of men. Tolkien was not to know that, in the Summer of 2000, when the company producing the trilogy of The Lord of The Rings decided to release on its website a short trailer, 1.7 million people downloaded it on the first day! The Lord of the Rings has consistently been voted the finest book in English Literature in the last one hundred years. It is certainly one of the most successful books in the history of literature.

  Week after week, Tolkien introduced his friends to the story of Bilbo, who during the celebration of his birthday party announced that he was leaving the Shire to see places he had only heard and read about. Soon, Tolkien’s friends were hearing of Bilbo’s cousin Frodo, who along with three other Hobbits—Merry, Pippin, and Sam—also left the Shire, with the magic ring.

  How did The Inklings react, as they heard of the Black Riders of Mordor? What kind of feelings did they have, on hearing of the valley of Rivendell and the Council of Elrond? What counsel did they give to Professor Tolkien? There sat the frail, slight figure of Lord David Cecil, son of the fourth Marquis of Salisbury, one of the best-loved teachers in Oxford University, who had written a life of William Cowper the great evangelical poet. Lord Cecil loved The Lord of the Rings. The Inklings were not all enthusiastic about it, however. The comedian of the group was Hugo Dyson, who had played such a prominent part in Jack’s conversion. He disliked The Lord of The Rings. There, too, sat Charles Williams, lecturer and teacher of St. Hugh’s College, whose dominant personality, sadly, was to contribute to an eventual cooling of the great friendship between Tolkien and Lewis. Williams’s supernatural thriller The Place of the Lion was first published in 1931. The man from Skibbereen, Nevill Coghill, was also an Inkling. Charles Wrenn—who eventually founded the International Conference of University Professors of English, and who helped Tolkien to teach Anglo-Saxon at Oxford—heard, too, of Gandalf, Gollum, and the Orcs. Owen Barfield, with whom Jack was still fighting what he called “The Great War,” was also in attendance. Jack’s doctor, Robert Harvard, hardly ever missed a meeting.

  At their meetings in the late 1930’s, no doubt Jack’s reading of his own manuscripts caused many an argument. While, Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, headed for the vast upland kingdoms, Jack’s imagination took him on spiritual adventures in other planets. His first work of science fiction, The Silent Planet, was published in 1938. Here, for the non-Christian reader, he skillfully smuggled theology into his text. Such smuggling was to become very legitimate in Jack’s works of fantasy. The evangelist in him was rising. In The Silent Planet, he called Satan “The Bent One,” and was determined to expose his corrupt ways. Jack’s description of Ransom’s voyage through space would make even the most uninterested reader want to join him. Jack’s lifelong interest in looking at the heavens through a telescope (given to him when he was eleven years of age) had paid off.

  There is no question that God had given Jack Lewis a unique and rare gift. He was able to turn Christian doctrine into the language spoken by ordinary people in a way that would draw and hold their attention, and which they could understand. Slowly, he was becoming a very effective Christian apologist. As time progressed, he became an apologist who did not run away from the puzzling elements within Christian doctrine or from that which people found repellent. He faced those elements head on and drew out their great hidden truths for the wide, unbelieving world. He believed the truth of Christianity to be of absolute importance; and he believed that Christ was none other than the Son of God.

  The world of Magdalen College looked on with increasing scepticism as their fellow and tutor of English underwent conversion to Christ. Some found it incredible to see Jack heading daily for college chapel. In biblical terminology, it could be said that the newly emerging champion of Christian orthodoxy, while being an Oxonian was in it, but not of it. As he pointed out in his preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, the Ulsterman who had moved from popular realism, to philosophical idealism, to pantheism, to theism, to Christianity, faced agnosticism everywhere. Thinkers of the day were trying to retain Christian values without Christianity. The writer Virginia Wolff of the Bloomsbury Group described poet T. S. Eliot as “dead to us all,” because he had become a believer in God and immortality, and went to church. She believed that “there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”8

  The Inklings, sitting by Jack Lewis’s literal and spiritual fire at Magdalen College on Thursday evenings, were proving to be a deep encouragement to him. An inner circle that dominated Magdalen College often looked with a cold eye on Jack’s Christian life. Soon millions would gather around the “fire” of this yet unknown Ulsterman and find that their doubts regarding the authenticity of Christ and His teaching were melting. Here was one who would make righteousness uniquely readable and comprehensible, in a nation soon to experience the ravages of another World War.

  The Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia on 3 October 1938. On 7 October, many Jews were rounded up in Germany and expelled to Poland. On 28 October, all Jews in Germany were ordered to hand in their passports. By February 1939, England’s Home Office announced plans to provide shelters for thousands of households in districts most likely to be bombed. On 3 September 1939, as a result of Germany’s invasion of Poland, the British Prime Minster, Neville Chamberlain, declared that Britain was at war with Germany. On 30 October, the horrors of the Nazis’ horrendous concentration camps were documented in a massive Government White Paper, saying, “the treatment [of in-mates] is reminiscent of the darkest ages in the history of man.”

  In November 1939, Tolkien read a section of a new Hobbit book to The Inklings, and Charles Williams read a nativity play. Jack read the first chapter of his new book on Christian apologetics, entitled The Problem of Pain. As Europe teetered towards war, Jack’s book dealt with some formidable subjects: divine omnipotence; divine goodness; human wickedness; the fall of man; human pain; hell; animal pain; and heaven.9 As the Holocaust descended and a World War loomed, for those troubled by doubts regarding the Christian faith, a sympathetic mind and heart had emerged to affirm the truth of Christian revelation. The old maxim proved itself true: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  BEING PRESENT IN THE PRESENT

  THE TREES OF ENGLAND WERE invaded once more by autumn migrants. Up in the alder boughs, the siskins were flitting and twittering like caged canaries. The gold, fawn, and yellowish-green of their plumes flashed as they hopped from twig to twig, taking from the seed-vessels the food they loved. It was a real change for them from the fir forests of their native Norway and Sweden.

  More visitors from Norway heralded the coming of winter: the fieldfares were wheeling in large flocks about the fields. Sometimes, when a whole flock settled upon a thorn tree, they stripped it of an entire crop of haws at one meal!

  The beeches of England were in their full glory of gold, russet, and amber. Listening carefully, an observer could have heard the occasional “tchick, tchick” of the great spotted woodpecker as it busily foraged on the bark of an elm tree, tapping away with its powerful beak.

  In 1939 the oaks of England remained untouched by the fingers of autumn. The seasonal green of an oak leaf blanches only when there is severe frost and will stay until the turn of the year. The life of the oak is summed up in the foresters’ old adage: “Three hundred years to come and grow; three hundred to stand and stay; three hundred to dwine and go.”

  In The Peverel Papers Flora Thompson describes how she once saw a felled oak being hauled through the str
eets of Oxford. Its bulk was so great and the way so narrow that buses, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians all had to draw aside and wait while the traction engine that drew it negotiated a turning. She mused on how the oak had, perhaps, stood upon some height above the city and “had looked down upon the Oxford of its saplinghood, a castle town with a cluster of mud huts around; had watched spires and domes arise, where before had been green meadows and glinting waterways; and had seen those same spires and domes turn from snowy white to grey antiquity.”

  Flora mused on how Shakespeare might have halted in the shade of the oak as he rode from Stratford to London; tradition says that he always stopped in his journey at Davenant’s hostelry. She wondered if Shelley may have leaned against its trunk on one of his country walks. “Newman,” she adds, “may have paced beneath, torn by inward questionings. Who can tell?”1

  On 22 October 1939, over at the church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, a lot of inward questioning had been going on in the minds of the undergraduates who had gathered to hear Jack Lewis’s lecture “Learning in Wartime2.” He faced head on the issue that they raised: was not the pursuit of learning in wartime like fiddling while Rome burned?

  Jack argued that the important point was that Nero was not just fiddling while Rome burned; he was actually fiddling on the edge of Hell. Jack then asked whether it was right for human beings, who were at every moment advancing either to heaven or hell, to be engaged in literature, art, mathematics, or biology at all. To say that it was legitimate in that wider context, but not in wartime, was unreasonable, and giving in to nerves and emotion.

  The lecture was one of the most powerful pleas for the legitimacy of learning at any time. Jack argued that there never is a normal time for learning, due to the simple fact that life is never normal. Life is always full of crises and troubles of one kind or another. War does not increase the universal reality of death. Jack was basically arguing that nothing is big enough to be the goal of our existence but God Himself. Absorbing our whole life with a war, giving our whole attention to or living for our country or political party, or class, is giving up what belongs to God alone. So, whether we are a Beethoven or a charwoman, we must get on with our vocation. As the Bible puts it, “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”3

  Lewis argued that, if we get proud to the point that we love knowledge more than we love the thing we know, or grow to delight in our talents more than in exercising them, we must give up scholarly work. We must pluck out our proverbial right eye.

  As those undergraduates listened, they must have been comforted by Jack’s argument that it is better to leave the future in God’s hands, for He is going to maintain it whether we leave it to Him or not. We must never commit our happiness to the future. It is when we work heartily every moment as to the Lord that happy work is best done. The Bible states, “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”3 Jack argued that if we as pilgrims have been turning this life into a permanent city, war will certainly disillusion us. Humbly offered to God, learning should be an approach, Jack felt, to the divine reality and beauty which we hope to enjoy in the world to come.

  Jack Lewis was not a pacifist. He believed that Britain’s declaration of war on Germany was the right decision, and that there was no honourable alternative. He believed that the Sermon on the Mount’s teaching of “turning the other cheek,”4 was relevant to daily life, not to war. He maintained that in the New Testament Peter and Paul approved of the magistrates’ use of force, when necessary, and he pointed out that the Lord praised the Roman centurion.

  Of course, some have taken up extreme positions based on Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Martin Luther gives the illustration of “the crazy saint, who let the lice nibble at him, and refused to kill any of them on account of this text, maintaining that he had to suffer and could not resist evil!”5 The distinguished novelist Count Leo Tolstoy, on reading the Sermon on the Mount, came to believe that Christ was forbidding the human institution of any law court, arguing that the courts resist evil and even return evil for evil. He argued that the same principle applies to the police and the army.6

  Jack Lewis was arguing that the duties and functions of the State were quite different from those of the individual. Paul’s teaching in Romans 12:17-21 and Romans 13:1-4 certainly bear out his point. The Lord Jesus was not prohibiting the administration of justice; rather, He was forbidding us to take the law into our own hands. “An eye for an eye” was a principle for the law court, not for personal life; Christ was certainly not condoning retaliation.

  As a teacher at Oxford, and occupation which was counted as reserved, Jack Lewis was not called up. His brother Warren was, and he served eleven months of active duty, reaching the rank of Major. In May 1940, he took part in the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. Meanwhile, in the midst of all his university duties, Jack spent the first autumn and winter of the war writing his book The Problem of Pain. He also joined the Oxford City Home Guard Battalion.

  On 14 May 1940, Anthony Eden gave an historic radio broadcast in which he warned of the threat of invasion by means of German parachute regiments. An established fighting force, he said, would need to be in place to see off these unwanted visitors. He urged all male civilians aged seventeen to sixty-five who had, for whatever reason, not been drafted into the services to put themselves forward for the sake of their country. They were to form a new fighting force called the Local Defence Volunteers. By the following day, 250,000 had volunteered; and by the end of the month 750,000 had come forward. By the end of June, the Local Defence Volunteers exceeded 1,400,000 men.

  In July 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was responsible for changing the name from the Local Defence Volunteers (“uninspiring,” in his opinion) to the Home Guard (“much better,” he declared). It became affectionately known as Dad’s Army. This new force had to wait some time for proper weapons. While the War Office searched for suitable arms from abroad, the enthusiastic volunteers improvised with rolled umbrellas, broom handles, golf clubs, and all kinds of antique pieces, including blunderbusses, carbines, and cutlasses, which were dusted down for action. In its first summer, the Home Guard eventually received World War I rifles from the United States.

  The Home Guard was actually involved in a wide range of activities. For example, the volunteers patrolled waterways such as canals and rivers. On returning from France, Warren Lewis served during the summer months in the Sixth Oxford City Home Guard Battalion on the Thames, in his boat The Bosphorus. Other Home Guard duties included manning Aircraft Batteries—during the war, one thousand were killed while on duty at this type of post—placing obstacles in fields to prevent enemy aircraft from landing, and following air attacks searching through rubble for trapped civilians. They constructed pillar boxes, one of which still stands at the end of Portstewart beach overlooking Jack’s boyhood holiday town of Castlerock. They erected defence lines, including anti-tank obstacles and barbed-wire barriers along beaches. One Home Guard Company guarded the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace. The Home Guard practised guerrilla tactics and created special auxiliary units. If an invasion did happen, in the words of Churchill, the Guard was ready to “fight in every street of London and suburbs and devour an invading army.”

  Any German parachutist, landing in Oxford at 1.30 on a Saturday morning, would have had to face Jack Lewis munching his sandwiches on his way to the Home Guards’ meeting place. He would go on patrol with two younger men for three hours, carrying his heavy rifle, much relieved to be allowed to smoke on his tour of duty. He smoked regularly on the veranda of a college cricket pavilion. He was usually back in his bed by 5.00 a.m., on his way home enjoying the dawn rise. He was on duty one night in every nine.

  Back at The Kilns, Janie Moore had opened up her home to take in evacuee children from London and other cities. When some schoolgirls arrived, Jack adjusted to the new experience of living with children. He grew to have a great affection for t
he many children who lived at The Kilns during the war.

  Nothing happens by chance, of course. It was the very month that war was declared with Germany when, by making a simple request, one of the children was used by God to plant something in Jack’s imagination. The child asked Jack if she could go inside an old wardrobe at The Kilns. She wondered if there was anything behind it.8 Sixty-five million readers would buy The Chronicles of Narnia to find out the answer to her question. Still, it would be almost ten years before the first of The Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, would surface.

  Many have criticised the narrow confines of Jack Lewis’s domestic life, as restricting of his great talents. His friend David Bleakley told me that when he was a mature student at Oriel College he and Jack used to walk out of Oxford to The Kilns of an evening. As an undergraduate, David lived in “digs” nearby. He told me how Janie Moore would sometimes greet Jack at the door, asking him to go to a local shop on some errand or other. David described to me how Jack would get on his bicycle and bring back the potatoes, or some other purchase, in a bag attached to the handlebars. Janie would tell visitors that Jack was as good as an extra maid in the house.

  Were all the pressures of domestic life too much for him? There was quite a list of them: a certified “mentally deficient” maid called Margaret; the “hysterical” help, Muriel, who flew into rages; not to mention Warren with his worrying drinking habit. Ultimately Jack was also responsible for the care of the children, who were all over the house and grounds. He had the daily chores of putting up blackout curtains every evening and taking them down the next morning, and, in days of coal rationing, of sawing logs for the fire.

  Jack could have lived in his college, but he chose to live amidst all the pressures of The Kilns. Did his decision restrict his talent in the end? The answer is that it didn’t; it “grounded” it, making it possible for him to write about how children felt, for example, and about what domestic life entailed. His daily round put weights upon his shoulders; but those weights helped him soar intellectually.