A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War: Triumphalism Encounters Human Nature

Tolkien and Lewis were attracted to genres of myth and romance not because they sought to escape the world but because for them the real world had a mythic and heroic quality. The world is the setting for great conflicts and great quests: it creates scenes of remorseless violence, grief, and suffering as well as deep compassion, courage, and selfless sacrifice. In an era that exalted cynicism and irony, Tolkien and Lewis sought to reclaim an older tradition of the epic hero. Their depictions of the struggles of Middle-earth and Narnia do not represent a flight from reality, but rather a return to a more realistic view of the world as we actually find it.  –Joseph Loconte*

Going into WWI, each nation believed God was on its side and, therefore, it would be victorious. The mixture of nationalism (not the same thing as patriotism) and triumphalism (“We’ll win, because we are a morally superior people.”) blinded the combating nations to the reality and horrors that were to come. And how could people so “advanced” have been so blind? Because they had chosen to ignore the evil that was in their own hearts, they had not considered the evil that could be perpetuated upon the earth with their advanced machinery.

“For devoted nationalists, their patriotic faith was equivalent to membership in an alternative church. For religious believers, nationalism offered a grandiose political outlet for their faith commitments. The result was the birth of Christian nationalism, the near sanctification of the modern state.” (Loconte)

While many who survived the carnage of WWI readily rejected triumphalism, they also renounced any belief in a moral vision, of belief that a human was capable of goodness, compassion, and nobility. While Tolkien and Lewis probably rethought their views about human potential, their writings reflected “the historic Christian tradition: human nature as a tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness.” (Loconte)

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” Aslan tells Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”

(T)hese authors anchor their stories in the ancient idea of the Fall of Man: just as a force of evil entered our world in a distant past, so it inhabits and threatens the worlds of their imaginations. It is the deepest source of alienation and conflict in their stories. Even so, it cannot erase the longing for goodness and joy, so palpably alive in the best and noblest of their characters. They are haunted by the memory of Eden: take away this fundamental idea, and their moral vision collapses.” (Loconte)

Interestingly, neither Tolkien nor Lewis became pacifists. There are some evils in the world that must be defeated, militarily. Both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are filled with such battles. However, both men never framed their battle scenes as opportunities for martial glory or nationalistic conquest. They are also depicted realistically, as you would expect from soldiers who fought in the Great War. We see the “military blunders, the fruitless acts of bravery, the bone-chilling rain, the meager rations: there were many days and nights just like these along the Western Front.” (Loconte) However, we also are shown acts of compassion and valor, self-sacrifice and honor, and, yes, even glimpses of beauty and joy. The “tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness” are always present.

The stories of Tolkien and Lewis demonstrate that moral heroism is possible because, through God’s grace and love, we are capable of great victories against the wretchedness that is in the world and in us. Of course, such moral heroism presupposes that there is a moral vision, that there are objective moral standards whereby we know what is noble and what is wretched. And yet—

We see no triumphalism in these stories. Knowing that we are always at war against our own capacity for behaving wretchedly, there can be no sense that our victories were inevitable because we are a superior nation, a superior people, or superior individuals. After all, the “tragic mix” is part of the human condition.

Next Post: “A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War”: Heroic Quests

* “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,” Nelson Books, 2015

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

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“A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War”

Thus the crisis of faith in postwar Europe was multilayered. There was an erosion of what might be called civilizational confidence, a widespread disillusionment with the West and its supposed cultural achievements. Liberal democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, progressivism—all seemed in a state of near collapse …. Since Christianity was considered integral to Europe’s political and economic system, the perceived failure of that system was a spiritual failure as well.

  

-Joseph Loconte*

Setting the frame for the history of Tolkien and Lewis’ friendship and the writing of their most famous tales, Joseph Loconte points to one of the Great Illusions leading up to the Great War: The Myth of Progress. Given the massive leaps in technological progress, scientific discoveries, and the near unanimous acceptance of 18^th century Enlightenment thought and Darwinism, the soul of Western civilization was anchored in the belief that progress was inevitable. “Western civilization was marching inexorably forward, that humanity itself was maturing, evolving, advancing—that new vistas of political, cultural, and spiritual advancement were within reach.” (Loconte)

Of course, to help insure this inexorable “advancement,” eugenics was all the rage … because nothing says “Utopia” like killing off blacks, cripples, and those whom The Powers That Be deem unfit.

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerating offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” So wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice, upholding Virginia’s sterilization law, supported by many of the cultural leaders of the times, including ministers. (Loconte)

When the First War erupted, national leaders on both sides of the conflict ran headlong into the fray, claiming the God of the Bible was on its side; that this war-to-end-all-wars was a Holy War. In Britain, “Clergymen dressed Jesus in khaki and had him firing machine guns.” (Loconte) When the war ended, more than nine million soldiers lay dead and roughly thirty-seven million wounded. The aftermath was a world awash in despair, disillusionment, and the rejection of religion.

With the Myth of Progress being exposed as an illusion, hundreds of novels were published in the 20s and 30s punctuating the futility of life, depicting existential angst as the new norm, and belief in God as “an attempt to protect against suffering, ‘a delusional remodeling of reality.’” (Freud, cited by Loconte)

Pacifism replaced patriotism, and the ancient virtues were scorned.

“For the intellectual class as well as the ordinary man on the street, the Great War had defamed the values of the Old World, along with the religious doctrines that helped to underwrite them. Moral advancement, even the idea of morality itself, seemed an illusion.” (Loconte)

So, how is it that given the depth of despair, the wholesale rejection of the values upon which Western civilization had been built, and the widespread jettisoning of religion and belief in (any) “God,” that the books of JRR Tolkien (A Hobbit) and CS Lewis (A Wardrobe) not only made it past editors, but went on to garner both men worldwide acclaim? How is it that stories extolling the ancient virtues of goodness, beauty, and faith, as well as advocating valor in battles against evil, captured the imagination of those who were convinced that despair, amorality, and hedonism, were the only honest responses to what the world had just suffered during the Great War?

The Power of Stories

“It seems that Tolkien, even in the throes of combat, consciously sought to retrieve a martial tradition that would become a casualty alongside all the other casualties of the First War. Already he was constructing a mythology (The Silmarillion) about England meant to recall its long struggle for noble purposes. ‘I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought,’ he once explained. Thus he set out ‘to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.’” (Loconte)

For Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, myths — even Pagan ones — originated with God and were filled with splinters of true light, revealing, however shadowed, eternal realities. “They are his means of communicating at least a portion of his truth to the world.” (Loconte) It would be years later that his best friend, CSL, would begin to accept his view of myths, and a bit longer until he embraced the True Myth of Christianity.

Years after the war, Tolkien, while grading papers as an Oxford Don, scrawled on a blank piece of paper, “In a hole in the ground there lives a Hobbit.”

Anyone familiar with CS Lewis is aware of George MacDonald’s (1824-1905) influence on his life and writings. While reading GM’s Phantasies, Lewis wrote that his imagination had been “converted” and “baptized.” While not yet a Christian, a new way of looking at and interpreting the world had begun. Later, after being wounded in battle and discharged, CSL was riding a train home to London and looking at the beautiful countryside: what he saw was that, “(T)here is Something right outside time & place…and that Beauty is the call of the spirit to the spirit in us.” (Loconte) While not yet a Christian, he now accepted that there was “Something” behind the beauty of the world. He was beginning to catch “A Glimpse of Narnia.” (Loconte)

George MacDonald wrote, “The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is – not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.” Both Tolkien and Lewis would go on to create epic stories so as to “wake up” truths that, however vehemently denied, were, nevertheless, still laying deep in the souls of their readers.

* “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,” Nelson Books, 2015

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015

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The Power of an Infinitely Expressive Communicator…In Only Two Steps!

It was his (Merlin’s) voice that fascinated me. Infinitely expressive, it served him in any manner he wished. When he lashed, it could raise welts on a stone. When he soothed, it could have shamed nightingales into silence. And when he commanded, mountains and valleys exchanged places.

--Stephen R Lawhead, Arthur

One of the differences between a decent communicator and an individual who is powerfully persuasive is found in the melody produced by their words and the tonality with which those words are spoken.

Your words have a melody. The question is this: Does this melody serve or deter from the intent of your communication?

Listen to the melody of the words of Merlin’s father, Taliesin, when he was first wooing Princess Charis

...tell me the word that will win you, and I will speak it. I will speak the stars of heaven into a crown for your head; I will speak the flowers of the field into a cloak; I will speak the racing stream into a melody for your ears and the voices of a thousand larks to sing it; I will speak the softness of night for your bed and the warmth of summer for your coverlet; I will speak the brightness of flame to light your way and the luster of gold to shine in your smile; I will speak until the hardness in you melts away and your heart is free... (Stephen R. Lawhead, Taliesin)

Taliesin’s choice of words creates pictures, feelings, and sounds, surrounding Charis’ senses with his message of love. However, what if his tonality sounded like a John Philip Sousa military march? The message would have been lost in the incongruities.

Compare this with Merlin’s words to the Knights of the Round Table when they were about to go in search of the stolen Holy Grail

Hear, Men of Britain, Valiant Ones … the Head of Wisdom speaks. Heed and take warning … the battle is joined, and every man who would achieve the quest must face many ordeals. Be not dismayed, neither be afraid, but face the trials to follow with all forbearance, for the Swift Sure Hand upholds you, and the Holy Grail awaits those who endure to the end. (Stephen R Lawhead’s, Grail)

Well chosen words: words that elicit courage, strength, and valor. However, what if the tonality of the spoken words sounded like something sung by The Carpenters?

Be not dismayed (“They long to be”) or afraid (“close to you…”)

Listen to the conversations taking place around you today. Each person’s words have a peculiar melody: some are monotone, others utilize a few notes, and others create melodies and harmonies that carry their words into the hearts and minds of their listeners. I can have all the relevant facts at hand and choose fairly precise words to convey these facts, but if the tonality conflicts with the intent and words of my message, the message is muted.

Read the following two quotes aloud.

Men speak foolishly of the beauty that slays, though I believe such a thing may exist. But there is also a beauty that heals, that restores and revives all who behold it. (Stephen R Lawhead, Merlin)

Morgian, rarest of beauty, frozen and fatal, mistress of the sweet poison, the warm kiss of death. (Merlin)

You intuitively knew that there is a specific sentiment behind each passage and changed your tonality accordingly. Now, go back, reread each passage aloud: only this time swap tonalities. You can hear the incongruity between the words and the sentiment behind the words (via tonality), can you not? You not only hear it, you feel it. So do those with whom we are communicating.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2015