Tolkien, Lewis, and Evangelization

[Music] [Music] my name is Andrew pettibran I am fellow of popular culture at the word on fire Institute incredible privilege that I get to be here uh with you and a special privilege that I get to be here with my friends Holly Ordway and father Michael Ward all three of us by the way are what is in in just sort of popular parlance called converts from anglicanism um so any other former anglicans in the room there might even be some current anglicans in the room if you are God bless you welcome we're going to talk about an Anglican today um before we go any further I'd like to just tell you a little more about Holly and father Michael so that if you're not familiar with their work you can um sit there while listening to them on your phones and Order their books one of the best things you could do with your time um Father Michael Ward is a Catholic priest of the personal ordinary of Our Lady of Walsingham and like me actually a former Anglican cleric before he was a Catholic priest he's also a member of The Faculty of Theology and religion at the University of Oxford and professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University in Texas he is author of um the Great Book Planet Narnia which I hope all of you have have read or at least intend to read and and have it on your shelf It's a Wonderful book he's also the author of after Humanity which is a book about C.S Lewis's abolition of man which was published by us Edward on fire and I'm pleased to say that Father Michael and I along with David Baird a third contributor have a book coming out this year called popcorn with the Pope which is a guide to the films on the Vatican film list so um did any of you know there was such a thing as the Vatican film list well you're going to want to buy our book I'm down for sure so welcome to Father Michael Holly is my colleague Edward on fire she's the fellow of faith and culture at the word on fire Institute and she holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst she is the author of tolkien's modern reading Middle Earth beyond the Middle Ages which is an absolutely fantastic book that you must all read um she's also the author of tales of faith and is the author of The forthcoming spiritual biography of J.R.R Tolkien which is called tolkien's Faith a spiritual biography due out later this year also from word on fire I'm told that you can pre-order that book in the United States on Amazon but not here in the UK yet so please be on the lookout for that when it when it comes out but um I'm just delighted to be able to share the stage today with Holly and with Michael so let's let's launch right in if all of you are here today I'm I'm assuming that you have some familiarity with the two uh the two authors that we're going to discuss today C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien who are two giants of 20th century literature in the English language to be sure and I can certainly speak from my own experience as somebody who's uh Faith uh was transformed and deepened by reading both of them at different times in my life and that's one of the many things that we want to get at here today so before we go any further although I'm sure you all know who each of these men uh are and what they've written at least in part let's just um have each each of our speakers just sketch briefly who each man was and uh and what his face faith was like so I think we'll start with Lewis Michael tell us about Lewis and his faith yes so um when Andrew mentioned we're going to be discussing in Anglican the Anglican we're going to be discussing is CS Lewis um I'm glad that we all this Catholic conference um spending some serious time considering uh such a figure he was born at the end of the 19th century in Belfast to an Anglican family his grandfather was an Anglican clergyman in Belfast um he was baptized as an infant brought up in the faith but then perhaps in part because of his mother's death when he was not quite 10 um in his teens Lewis turned away from his faith and then called himself an atheist for the best part of two decades um although during that period he was actually confirmed in the Church of England and he later called that one of the worst uh things he ever did being confirmed in utter disbelief he did it because it was socially expected and his father sort of required it of him but he was later very ashamed of it um Lewis fought in the first World War uh was very nearly killed um saw men die saw the battlefield littered with sitting and standing corpses as he later recalled um had a brilliant career at Oxford reading first of all classics and then English he got first class degrees in in both subjects and he then spent about 30 years as a fellow in English at Oxford before moving to The Other Place Cambridge um where he finished his career as the very first professor of medieval Renaissance English at Cambridge um as regards his faith he slowly inched his way back to first of all a belief in God a theistic belief uh in the late 1920s and then thanks in no small part to Tolkien as we will no doubt be discussing in a moment finally got his way back to Christian belief in his early 30s um and after he had returned to his his the Christian faith of his infancy um his faith life took off and he he began to become a very prominent Christian apologist um his best known work in that line is probably Mere Christianity which was based on radio broadcasts he gave during the second world war um but also of course he's he's very well known for his Christian fiction most notably The Chronicles of Narnia and works like the screwtape letters um his late life was interesting in that he in these late 50s he he finally got around to being married um he married a a divorced ex-jewish communist atheist Christian American um uh joy davidman and you may have seen the film shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger which is a beautiful though rather inaccurate telling of of that late romance in his life um which which gave rise to one of his most challenging books a short book called A grief observed in which he talks about seeing his his wife die and and the grief that it occasioned um and Lewis himself died just three years after his wife in 1963 on the very same day the very same hour but President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas that's very helpful Michael and and let's hear maybe the same kind of crazy from you Holly about about Tolkien in his life and his sort of development of faith all right so uh so Tolkien was actually born in bloemfontein South Africa um in 1892 so a little bit older than uh than Lewis and he also was born an ancient his his parents were members of the engine Church there um and so the first eight years of his life were lived as as a child in in the engine Church uh his father died um when he was a uh he was four his mother brought him back to uh him and his little brother Hillary brought him back to England um as seen now as a widow and then in 1900 she entered the Catholic church and at the time this was just a catastrophic social move she was effectively cut off by her family um they cut off financial help for her so she was then suddenly impoverished as a widow with two small boys um it was a hard thing to be a Catholic convert at that time um but she stuck with it and this this impressed Tolkien greatly he he remembered all his life for the great um cost that his mother paid for her faith and the effort she made to hand it on to him but interestingly um because he was eight uh when his mother became a Catholic he was actually past the Age of Reason past the age at which he would have been as it were grandfathered in to the Catholic church with his mother so he was considered as someone who was came into the church in his own right you know as an adult um at his confirmation and First Holy Communion which at that time took place at the same time um just before his 12th birthday so I think it's really interesting to note that Tolkien is also a convert um from anglinism to Catholicism because in that era um he had he had the opportunity to return to the faith of his his dead father um and to his his grandparents on both sides um but but chose instead to you know continue in the church that his mother had adopted um and he would have remembered his Anglican um youth because you're at eight years old he had a very strong memory and could remember things from even when he was a little child so his mother then died when he was 12 leaving him a complete orphan and he was raised then by his Guardian father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham oratory of Saint Philip Neri and this became a tremendous influence on his life the the congregation of uh of Saint Philip Neri um so he ended up falling in love with Edith Bratz who was a Protestant and and getting extremely extremely distracted from his studies so much so that his Guardian said you cannot see her again until you come of age and interestingly Tolkien accepted this so we have this sort of conventional Narrative of the you know the hard-hearted Catholic priest squashing young love but in in fact he said it was very hard and painful and bitter but he came later on to recognize that that his Guardian had been right because he had in fact failed his first entrance exam into Oxford and being poor he he had to get a scholarship where he wasn't going to go and his Guardian I think saw immediately that this was his his career his vocation to be a scholar um so he ended up getting into Oxford um and on the uh the the knights he turned 21 and was therefore free of his promise which he had kept he wrote to his uh his girlfriend Edith renewing his love and wanting to marry her and she wrote back to say that she was engaged to another man but token nothing daunted set off by train to Birmingham arrived convinced her to break off the engagement and marry him instead um and they and they did she became a Catholic um and they married um and uh he finished his degree at Oxford writes as the Great War was happening so he he he finishes the degree and he goes into this the Carnage of the Great War like like Lewis um and as Sulkin reflected later he said by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead um so he really felt that Devastation but didn't lose his faith he persisted in his faith during the war but then had a 10-year slump after it where he said I almost ceased to practice My Religion almost he didn't completely but almost ceased um he ended up coming he taught at leads he came back to Oxford where he made the acquaintance of a certain atheists some who later became a Christian C.S Lewis they became great friends um Lewis was hugely influential in his life as well and there he settled in as a professor of anglo-saxon and of English literature for the rest of his career at Oxford became a world-class philologist specialist in the history of languages of development of English and oh by the way in his spare time apart from Raising four children he wrote The Hobbit um and then he wrote a sequel to The Hobbit um which took 10 years to write and almost didn't get published um and oh this book was called something you may have heard of The Lord of the Rings um and this book he called a fundamentally religious and Catholic work which is really interesting because there's no overt religion in it it's all underneath it's all in in the foundations of it and it's for that's obviously that he's he's most well known um and he didn't do any overt sort of apologetics um we could talk more about some of these things he didn't do but his great essay on fairy stories actually contains in its epilogue quite a strong proclamation of the Gospel um so he he was actually more evangelically minded more minded towards evangelization than I think a lot of people realize a very very interesting figure and he died 50 years ago this year wow it's wonderful interesting I want to come back to unfairy stories in a minute but I I just want to stick with you for just one second to tease out his childhood at the Birmingham oratory because I know that there will be some some big fans like me of St John Henry Newman here so this is something that I never really realized until engaging with you on this question Holly that I mean he was really raised a generation removed from Saint John Henry Newman yes um so what I mean was he influenced by Newman did he know his work or was he would you consider his thought to be like Newman at all I you know I do and in my research for this this new biography I really I found that that connection is much stronger than I realized um so we we don't in the materials we have X done we don't have direct evidence that he knew specific works of of Newman's um but he did he obviously knew him his work um so his Guardian father Francis Morgan had actually been Newman's personal secretary um so this is a first-hand connection uh and and other members of the oratory where he grew up had known Newman well had been you know taught by Newman had been brought into the you know the the oratory um by them so he lived in an atmosphere that was just utterly shaped by Newman's thought um and that and it's shaped by the English oratorians of the Birmingham oratory not just father Francis but all of those oratorians many of whom became his lifelong friends not just father Francis who considered to be a second father so I think we really can see a kind of spiritual lineage uh so in terms of spiritual influence I mean father Francis Morgan he called him his second father and he had been you know brought into the the oratorian order by um by Newman so I think we can really look at Newman as a kind of spiritual grandfather to Tolkien and we really do see especially in tolkien's attitude towards ecumenism um very very close similarity to Newman's thought I think it's absolutely the case that he knew Newman's thought on these matters it's fascinating I want to come back to um ecumenism in a second but let's let's launch right into this evangelization question because that's sort of the topic that we've been given and Michael let me come back to you and just say post it this way so Lewis was somebody who was evangelized by his friends and particularly by Tolkien um in what way did he sort of grow out of that experience he had of being evangelized and think of himself as an evangelist in his literary work and maybe even his teaching career very good question um yeah Lewis was well he described himself as having passed over from atheism to Christianity um though of course as I said in the in the living sketch I gave he had been baptized and raised in the faith if his first 10 or 12 years so it's more like a a resumption of a faith that he had that he had turned his back on his brother said that it was more like a the recovery of a after a long convalescence um but he was but it wasn't just uh you know returning to um uh a cold meal warming it up again it was much more uh um are putting down of his roots much more deeply into really fertile well-watered ground and he suddenly flourished in his faith um and one man who knew him well uh Walter Hooper the late Walter Hooper who who was Lewis's editor and biographer once described Lewis as the most converted man he ever knew um there was almost nothing that that his his new found Faith did not touch um Bishop Baron was earlier talking about the responsibility of the laity to follow the the Evangelical councils of poverty Chastity and obedience and um I think a good case can be made for the fact that Lewis did follow those those councils pretty pretty Faithfully especially poverty uh he he was he was very very generous with his money he once said that unless our Charities are actually causing us to go without then we're probably not giving enough and he once got in trouble with a tax man because he he managed to he got so many royalties and then gave him away so instantly and then was landed with a huge tax bill that he couldn't pay um but to you to your point about evangelism yes he he had been evangelized he had he could remember what it was like to be outside a living faith he could remember the perplexities The Oddities the weirdness of of the faith and I think that's one of the reasons that he became such an effective apologist evangelist uh that he didn't forget it um and so he was able to to help people over the Styles and the hurdles into well first of all into into just a sort of uh preparedness to to accept Faith what Lewis calls the the preparazio Evangelical the just laying the groundwork for faith um you mentioned kindly in your introduction that I've written this guide to Lewis's book the abolition of man and the abolition of earn is not an obviously Evangelistic work it's a philosophical work it's all about objective value um but Lewis saw that before you can begin to as it were present a Christian case for how how Jesus Will Allow our Christian faith will allow us to be to be good and true and beautiful in our own way now you have to establish that goodness truth and Beauty are real qualities and not just our subjective projections upon the world um and that's what he attempts to do in the abolition of men um which I think in some ways can be regarded as the theme of his of his output as a writer and all the other works that he ever put out were sort of variations upon that theme goodness truth and Beauty are objective realities and we we need to Accord our life so that they respond to these objective realities um and interestingly in his his path back to Faith he said that in some ways he was evangelized by non-christians in that is to say null Christians who accepted the objectivity of value who were who were good chaste honest they were following the light as far as it had been granted to them and Lewis in his in his very atheistic phase had had supposed that these weren't these were voluntary subjects they weren't to be required of all candidates uh you know sobriety Chastity honesty well if you if you wanted go for it but but then these these these young men at Oxford who by the way none of them Christians he said uh by their very attempt to be virtuous evangelize Lewis which I think is a very interesting way of realizing that God's grace Works in in very mysterious ways not just through you know the professionally religious or the deliberately Evangelistic but through any number of means yeah that's that's really helpful uh I never heard that before about the you know being evangelized by these little Christian oh very wonderful um Holly just so building on what Father Michael just said just you know so in my mind I think of Lewis you know Lewis has so many tools and first of all one of the things that we've already named this but we want to highlight it a little bit more is that both Lewis and Tolkien were Layman they were lay people right which is one of the themes of course that Bishop Baron was was talking about and I think a very important aspect to both of their both of their lives and their work of evangelization but when I think of Lewis's literary output you know it's like he's got all these different tools like literary tools for evangelization right I mean there are some days when Mere Christianity just knocks it out of the part for me sorry that's an American baseball and the bishop Baron did the same thing I don't know hit with it for six right whatever he to protect exactly yes right when when when Lewis lays out just with this sort of logical Beauty the the trilemma right you know that ends with you know or you can worship him as the Lord or whatever you know I mean it just like brings tears to my eyes right but then there are times when you know more satisfying is reading the Silver Chair and and and reading the part where Jill faces Aslan at the stream and he says there is no other stream you know I mean just pulls me over now Tolkien didn't have the same kind of like he wasn't on the radio for example during World War II essentially delivering the talks that would become the most famous book of Christian apologetics in the English language right um but he had he had he had a different thing going in many respects in his life um so I guess what I'm getting at is personally they they they both have sort of different things to draw from in their in their Evangelistic Endeavors one of them that occurs to me is even though Michael you mentioned that Lewis married late in his life and he did end up becoming responsible for a couple of children right Tolkien was a family man through and through he had a whole house full of kids right and he is you know you know hiding away at night trying to write his right thing so I guess what I'm getting at is it just may be a very open-ended question back to you about sort of how is this combination of factors in his life sort of adding up to create an evangelist that's a great question and it kind of comes back to to again Bishop Baron's call earlier to the Layman to go out and and be living the faith and and living these these councils because talking did that I mean he really he really did that and we should remember that you know the lore of the Rings was published um one quite late in his life um 1954 uh you know so he had already had a long um a long career as an academic um he had retired uh so he had a little bit of Fame is from The Hobbit but of a relatively minor kind of the great Fame of The Hobbit kind of came after the Lord of the Rings we came back oh there's the other book that you wrote so for most of most of his life he was witnessing through his life through his ordinary life through Fidelity to his wife um and so that's again living out that Council of of Chastity you know as a married man being faithful to his wife um through sickness and in health of which there was quite a lot of sickness for instance Tolkien his health was really permanently damaged by his getting trenched fever in the Great War um he had it a very bad case of it and it you know damaged his health permanently um and so and they were usually short of money I mean with four children this is before the NHS he's trying to educate them in Catholic schools he's trying to provide for them and he had a job as a professor but he was also grading examination papers during the vacations for extra money um so this is a man who is just really doing what it takes to to raise up his family and provide for them but he's and he's he's living out this life as a witness to his family and he's also being very active as a layman in Oxford so he's visible as a role model to his students he was involved in a number of Catholic associations the Newman Association the Newman Society the katinians um he was really active in these organizations dedicated to strengthening the faith of Oxford students in particular and of just Oxford Ordinary People nicotinians um at a time when he had a lot of things in his place he could easily have said I'll just leave that to the to the priests you know let them let them handle the that I've got my own work to do but he but he didn't he gave him his time um and his energy when when those were really in a short supply um and I think that has a lot to do with the Catholic impact the Christian impact of The Lord of the Rings because when he is presenting his story which is a story about you know good and evil and beauty and um and virtue and suffering these are not things that are abstract to him they are realities that he has lived through his whole life um he he knows them from the inside and so when he presents them in this great story they're real so he's able to present pictures of virtue and of beauty and they're believable because he's he's really been living he's been living those Evangelical councils that's very interesting um let's let's um transition to this this big question of the fact that Tolkien was a Catholic and Lewis was an Anglican and how that the relationship to each other um as in a sense like separated brethren um what that means to each of their Evangelical I don't know their their Evangelical Evangelistic work I suppose uh Michael let me throw it back over to you and ask you the very simple question that I heard you answer for someone else a day or two ago I believe I think that the the audience would be interested to hear your answer why did Lewis never become Catholic because he didn't receive the call to become a Catholic or at least he didn't hear it um sure how about and I think that's that that is the honest answer um Jim Como who's a Lewis scholar in New York City he's written on this topic uh and points out very prudently a very wisely that Lewis was a sufficiently mature Christian to know that if he had received the kawal to enter the Catholic church and resisted it he would have known that he was in deep spiritual peril because he would have been disobeying his conscience um so we just have to accept the fact that for some reason he did not either receive it or did not hear it um Peter craved another Lewis scholar in America said that you know um Lewis would have lost large tranches of his audience um if he had become a Catholic and that you know in in the Providence of the mysterious Providence of God that that may have been as it were the the better path that Lewis you know he was a he was a baptized believer he he was in that sense uh within the household of faith um obviously a separated brother as as as Catholics would would have to say but nonetheless he had received that sacrament of initiation into the Catholic faith um and if he had gone all uh Gone Whole Hog in um he would immediately have not millions of readers uh both during his lifetime and in the decades since um it's it's a mysterious topic Lewis himself of course you know he would have said he would have advanced various reasons why he he did not regard the Catholic Church as as something he needed to um enter But and and indeed he described himself rather disingenuously actually as as a very ordinarily a very ordinary alignment of the Church of England neither especially High nor especially low nor especially anything else um which is nonsense because he was very high in Anglican um he he went to confession he fasted on Fridays he believed in purgatory he prayed for the dead he talked about the Blessed Sacrament he believed in a male only priesthood had a very high view of priesthood he doubted the virtues of the morality of contraception um he had a high view of natural theology all these very you know Catholic or Catholic friendly beliefs and practices and dispositions um and the fact that he was such close friends with with Tolkien and and various other Catholics uh indicates how very Catholic and Anglican he was um there were one or two things he just couldn't get over um to do with the Pope and what to do with the Blessed Virgin but in all these other respects he you know he was much more Catholic than many Catholics yeah I wonder if I could just follow up by by inviting you to give us your take on something that I'm sure any reader of Mere Christianity will remember which is Lewis is famous analogy at the beginning where he talks about he's about being in a hallway or something something of that a hot passageway a hallway that then leads into rooms would you what is your take on what does he mean by that yeah so in Mere Christianity this book that grew out of those radio broadcasts he gave during the second world war he has a he he assembles those talks those rather disparate talks under this umbrella term of Mere Christianity and explains what that means in a preface and he says that Mere Christianity as he's using the term it refers to the the broad Central main stream of the faith which took to which anglicans and Catholics and methodists and presbyter syrians would all ascent and indeed he sent out a draft of the book to be read by representatives of these different Traditions to see whether they thought it was acceptable and they did um so what he means by Mere Christianity is is that overlap between the various Traditions denominations ecclesial communities however you want to term them um as it's sometimes been called what has been believed by by all Christians in all places at all times um that's what he means by the hallway and that's what he's beckoning people into he's not going to tell them whether they need to become anglicans or Catholics or Presbyterians just accept this and then once you've entered the whole way then you can choose which room of the house you're going to go and spend your time in because it's in the rooms where there where there are chairs and fires and meals but the hallway is just an entrance passage where you you take off your coat and put down your umbrella um and if he can beckon anybody into that Hall he said he will have achieved what he was setting out to accomplish uh and the rest he will leave to you to sort out under your own Steam and he says the but the main thing he says is in your choice of the room to go into you must you must be motivated by questions of Truth and Holiness does true Holiness reside in this room or am I merely attracted by the by the paneling on the door or by the particular door keeper um no no that's not an adequate reason for going into the room um you must ask much more searching spiritual questions to do with with with Holiness and piety and charity in order to select your your particular room now from a Catholic point of view that this ecclesiology ecclesiological model doesn't work very well unless you sort of reinterpret the hallway as I think it can fairly legitimately be interpreted um in the sense I just mentioned to do with with the sacrament of baptism um that all Christians who have received baptism in in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit have received a valid Sacrament and the Catholic Church teaches that um so you could understand from a Catholic point of view the hallway in that sense and then I think it makes a little bit better logic yeah what we're talking make of this you know I mean what what were his feelings of the fact that Lewis didn't become Catholic and and maybe what were his sort of ecumenical what was his ecumenical theology well interestingly Tolkien was was very very accumulatively minded um and it's it was very it was very clear throughout his life that Lewis though in Anglican was a fellow Christian was it was a brother in the faith um and you know we don't have any details about what he what he thought about Lewis um becoming staying in Anglican um I mean sort of Fairly obviously he would have wished him to go on and to become a Catholic but it didn't impair their friendship at all um and he was a member of the inklings that group of Christians who met and you know socially and meant to share their their Works um read from their Works in progress of which there were a number of conflicts but mostly anglicans and I think one Presbyterian and he participated in discussions about matters of theology as well you know going at it discussing these things with his um with his separated brethren um you know in a way that was was friendly um I mean he said he said the conversation got quite Lively so that you might think as you look to the conversation that they were you know foes you know about to come to blows with each other but this was just the dynamic the dynamic enthusiasm of the conversation because they were they would you know emerge us as complete friends at the end of it um and he he said at one point um that even to love our Lord and to call him Lord is a Grace and may lead to more Graces and I think that's a fundamental sort of summary of how he viewed this that that sacrament of baptism brings all of them in um to to the church and that there's that Grace in acknowledging you know our Lord as Lord that's that is a Grace as it will bring bring more Graces and he was always I think keenly aware of of the goodness of the faith of his of his non-catholic Brethren um I mean for instance when Charles Williams one of the inklings died in 1945 um he had a mass said for him Matt Blackfriars in Oxford and served at it um which in 1945 is a you know a very ecumenical gesture to make for an Anglican um any of the same when Lewis died he had a mouse said for him um and served at it and and went to Lewis's funeral he was Anglican and the funeral and he he quoted with approval something that the Anglican Williams said that uh that's the the duty of every Christian is to tend the accredited altar even though the Holy Spirit might choose to come down in some other place so he explicitly acknowledges that there is an accredited altar in his view there is the one Church he's very clear that he believes that the Catholic church is the one Church established by Christ um but he acknowledges that Arlo is not limited he says that explicitly that our Lord is not limited by the church that he has established and can grant Graces to those who are outside of it um and I think that sort of generosity of spirit is it is so typical of Tolkien and what he's doing is he is in line with the church teaching that eventually became you know fully fully codified um in the decree on ecumenism and the second Vatican Council but Tolkien ended up living that for decades um before it became a council document that's interesting let me stay with you Holly and maybe um just pivot slightly to what Tolkien what what Tolkien sort of hoped to accomplish for the sake of Christ in the church with his writing you know when he was writing the Lord of the Rings in a way my you know I always think of it as almost a kind of um he just couldn't help himself there was this world that he just had to build and these stories just sort of came out miraculously from them but you know that's maybe overstating it a little bit but I mean did he have a sort of conscious understanding that that what he was writing could affect the hearts of people for Christ and maybe even sort of win them for the church that's that's a great question Andrew because the answer is yes but the kind of a qualified yes because he's very very clear that the Lord of the Rings is not an allegory I repeat not an allegory and he doesn't want to be interpreted as such um he and I think he he wanted to make sure people didn't make these superficial sort of equivalencies um that said I mean he he said of The Lord of the Rings he said the Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work unconsciously in the writing but consciously in the revision and he goes on to say and that is why I have cut out all references to religion in it and if you're thinking to yourself wait what no I didn't get the quote wrong um he said he he wrote it um just without without consciously thinking about it being Catholic or Christian it came from his from his deep Faith um I mean it at one point you know someone asked him like oh well who who is who is eru olubitar the god in The Lord of the Rings he says well the God you know the one Our God like there's only one and it's it's the god of Lord of the Rings is the one but then consciously he's seeing it in the revision and the polishing um making it consciously religious and Catholic and he's doing it by making sure that there are not these overt references to religion and I have puzzled over this a lot and I think it has to do with his approach to evangelization which um which is one of many that's not that this is the only way to do it it was his way which is to go kind of under the radar um to be presenting these images at the level of image these ideas the level of image of theme um where he's suggesting them um so for instance he's quite clear in his letters that lembus the way bread of the elves is the Eucharist um in so far as we can make a direct connection he's he's pretty clear that this this is a Eucharistic image um and if you go and you reread it you realize oh it really is it's this this food that is sustaining and the you know the more that you rely on it the more it sustains you um it's a it's a beautiful beautiful image but it's all the more powerful because he doesn't put it in your face um and you think about you know the the way that he unfolds the working of Providence um with with Frodo you know he's Proto was saved he's he's um he's saved from you know becoming the new Sauron and could he because Frodo fails in the quest this is an important thing to realize he gets all the way to Mountain doom and he has been broken by the ring and he seizes the ring for his own and declares that he will not fulfill the quest um and Tolkien said one of his letters that this was actually a working through of the theme of the petition and the Our Father lead us not into temptation um and so providentially Gollum seizes tries to seize the ring and fulfills the quest in that way why was Gollum there because at an earlier stage Frodo and then also Sam and then also Bilbo further back in The Hobbit had chosen to spare goal life even though he deserved death they they exercise mercy and pity and so we see the workings of Providence and Providence is actually named explicitly in in in this so this is the kind of way that he's he's working this out and I think because of that um the Lord of the Rings becomes extraordinarily effective in reaching people who perhaps would be not willing to read a book that was more explicitly Christian um and and he does another letter he says that the Lord of the Rings is an exemplary Legend in in the sense that he he intends it to be an example a picture of the virtues you should look at it and say I want to be virtuous in this way in that way but he's weaving all in so subtly that it's not it's not in your face you take it in and you think wow this is this is really beautiful I like that I want I want that where can I find that and he and he succeeded I've got a friend in Oxford who recently told me that he in in his pre-christian days read the Lord of the Rings and found it so beautiful and that he said to himself Tolkien was a Christian and anybody who can write a work that is that beautiful must be onto something which led this friend of mine to become a Christian himself that's very interesting let me let me throw the same kind of question to you Michael because where where Holly says um Tolkien was in a sense like deliberately making his work religious by removing the religion Lewis seems to be doing the exact opposite I mean the the the the the the you know Aslan is this sort of obviously this Christ figure and it sort of goes on from there I mean is he is he deliberately employing just a very different strategy from Tolkien what is your take on that yeah I think uh Tolkien was was much more naturally Mythic mythological mythropic than Lewis um and an important consideration too is that the Lord of the Rings is set in a pre-christian era I mean it's meant to be part of the history of all our world but uh long before the Incarnation so in that sense the lembas spread that sustains you it is like is not it's like a an equivalent to the manner right you know the manner itself gestures towards the Eucharist likewise the lembasim um but neither of them it should be read allegorically as such and C.S Lewis when he came to write the Narnia Chronicles was not setting his stories in a pre-christian period of this world he was he was inventing a whole other world called Narnia um which is sort of parallel to our world and and so he asked himself if if Christ having become human in our world were to become incarnate in this magical world what form would he take and how would it work and and the answer was he would take the form of a lion and and you know the rest of the story I hope um but that that's what he called us supposition let us suppose that the the Christ became incarnate in in a world where animals speak let's suppose it worked out in such and such a fashion and that's that's supposition not allegory as far as Lewis is concerned the allegory is when you you give a concrete form to uh to an abstract thing like in bunions Pilgrims Progress you have giant despair locking people up in doubting Castle um we know what those that character in that place stand for because he's named in every title despair is not a concrete thing but it's concretized in a giant and doubt is not a concrete thing but it's concretized in a castle and if you don't understand that the thing stands for the abstract term then you're not properly reading the allegory Narnia is not like that you you can read the story in its own terms and not make any equivalency with Christianity if you don't wish to and there are plenty of people who who do read it like that especially for children who have no Christian education but even some adults the illustrator of the books Pauline Baines who was a young I think 21 year old artist when she was sent the the manuscript of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to prepare her her illustrations she read the story and was profoundly moved by found herself in tears at the death of Aslan and is only when she closed the manuscript and began formulating her ideas for her pictures that it suddenly thought oh I've read a story like that somewhere else and so you don't have to force any kind of allegorical reading upon it um these parallels are more or less strong depending on well first of all your level of religious education then and second of all in in the kind of reading you bring to bear on the book um what else do you want to know I did well I'll jump into something randomly something you said I think in Planet Narnia about Lewis and Tolkien I think you before correctly you wrote we must allow the two men to write in different ways yeah and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind that they there isn't that one of them is better than the other and how they approach this this approach to evangelization in literature because they've just got different ways of doing it yeah Lewis was always he began at any rate much more interested in allegory from a literary point of view indeed he wrote a very learned study of medieval allegory called the allegory of love that's how he made his academic reputation and the first book that he published after he became a Christian an adult Christian was was a reworking of the Pilgrim's Progress entitled The Pilgrim's regress um so he had a strong academic interest in allegory as such um but I think you can see as his writing career progresses that he he finds it actually more advantageous more judicious to adopt more more subtle correspondences between the story world and and the world of of of of real life Christianity so that Narnia is as I say more suppositional than allegorical and then the last novel Lewis wrote was um a retelling of a classical myth the myth of cupid and psyche and the subtitle of that novel till we have faces is a myth retold um so he's he's as it were I think being gradually dragged in a in a tolkenian direction uh as his writing career unfolds that's that's interesting I don't know if literary Scholars might say you know maybe it's the difference between like an early medievalist and a late medievalist or something you know but anyway in the in the minutes that remain I want to I want to just kind of move towards this like the vision of hope that that both that both of the authors um project um but also the the realism the you know there there it's not it's not optimism right it's it's it's joy in Lewis's terms or hope we can maybe use both words but I'm thinking Holly about how in in Tolkien if you read the silmarillion he tells us the story of the end of the world twice at least right at the end of the first age at the end of the second age and then in The Lord of the Rings we get this end of an age story that is full of really disturbing stuff right like the return of this darkness and then this character of Saruman who I don't know if anyone anyone here like me sort of identifies him as this sort of you know this this this this awful kind of modern character you know who wants to kind of brutalize Nature and reduce everything into you know these sort of um I I don't know to sort of take everything out of the realm of the of the pure and beautiful and and that sort of thing right and and and uh and adulterate it or something like that so but ultimately the Lord of the Rings is you know just an incredibly inspiring story and and a Triumph of Hope but I don't know just want to throw it to you in an open-ended way like is that your reading of Tolkien I mean how does that play do you think you know for us as evangelists to kind of champion his work well I think again this is a great question because tolkien's work is deeply infused with hope and with joy but but in a very a very deeply realistic way I mean this is a man who knew suffering he was an orphan he had fought in the Great War his friends had been killed he had suffered physical illness all of his life um he had been poor he knew suffering um and so what we see in The Lord of the Rings and all of his writings is a hope that is is tempered with with realism it's it's not wish fulfillment at all it's it's a hope that's grounded in in faith um and it's a hope that does not pretend that there isn't a whole lot of suffering to endure along the way and if you think about it you know the Lord of the Rings okay Sauron is defeated Middle Earth is saved we're all rejoicing this is beautiful um but we have to remember you know Frodo has been wounded and I think one of the the saddest and most beautiful lines of the of the whole book it comes near the end when Frodo is back in the Shire um and he's he's not doing well and and he says to Sam he says well the Shire has been saved but not for me he has been wounded so deeply that he cannot be healed in this life and I think that is a pretty profound insight into our sufferings in this life he knew there are some wounds that will not be healed while we live that will only be healed um you know after after our deaths um and I think that is part of what gives his vision of Hope um such such power and I briefly alluded to the essay on fairy stories um and in that great essay in the epilogue he he makes really a proclamation of the gospel and he says that the reason that we rejoice in the happy ending of a fairy story or the happy ending of say the Lord of the Rings is in fact because these are echoes in the real world um they're Echoes of a real world Happy Ending which is the resurrection um and he coins the word you catastrophe the good catastrophe and he says that the the the resurrection is the you catastrophe of the Incarnation um which is itself the U catastrophe of the whole of human history um so it's the it's the the U catastrophe is the sudden happy ending when everything seems to be lost and you you can't have that turn for Joy unless you truly think that everything has been lost which is us that we see on Calvary right it looks like hope is utterly lost he's dead on the cross but we have the resurrection and that is that that is the cosmic happy ending that he says really happened and this is where legend and history meet and fuse because that real happy ending is what gives the power to all these fictional Happy Endings but he says that the U catastrophe does not deny the existence of this catastrophe of sorrow and suffering and he's very clear on that and I think that is a huge message for us as evangelists that we live in a world that is broken we are broken our world is broken we are all have suffered will suffer our suffering the people that we meet who need to hear the gospel are also broken and suffering and acknowledging that pain does not take away from the message of Hope in fact it gives credibility to it and I think that's part of what makes tolkien's message so powerful yeah Michael um I would say that in a couple of key works Lewis is very pessimistic um and yet hopeful and the works that I'm thinking of would be That Hideous Strength In in fiction and the abolition of man in non-fiction what do you think those Works maybe or others have to have to say sort of in the same vein as where we were going there in Holly's answer yeah I think the abolition of man is possibly Lewis's most pessimistic work I mean the very title and the abolition uh he's not painting a bright future um but that's a philosophical work and therefore Lewis is just as it were outlining forecasting the end result of a particular chain of of philosophical thought namely subjectivism the idea of of value not being objective if that's the position you adopt you'll eventually abolish yourself uh you will need yourself inhuman or sub-human so that is very pessimistic That Hideous Strength is is a is a kind of novelistic version of the abolition of man but in a in a much more of a Christian key so that that work does end uh with with some notes of Hope but but hope the Christian the theological virtue of Hope is not the same thing as optimism and interestingly Lewis wrote a review of The Lord of the Rings when it was published in the 1950s and and he said here in The Lord of the Rings uh we are released from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike uh he equates his favorite line from the novel um there was there was gathering dark there then and bravery and deeds that were not wholly vain not wholly in vain it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment he said and that's one of the things that he most admired in The Lord of the Rings which by the way without Lewis's endless encouragement driven to the point of nagging at times uh Tolkien admits he would never have completed um so Tolkien was hugely influential on Lewis becoming a Christian uh Lewis was hugely influential on Tolkien writing his and completing his Masterpiece um so they that was quite a good trade-off I think um as for uh Lewis's own presentations of theological hope yeah I'm glad the Holly that you mentioned Calvary because I mean the the the one scriptural verse that C.S Lewis refers to or alludes to more than any other I think is the Cry of dereliction a cry from the cross my God my God why have you forsaken me uh from Psalm 22 and Lewis was fascinated by this cry even before he was a theist let alone a Christian and it crops up in all these writings in one form or another um and it speaks to this very point of view catastrophe the good catastrophe depends upon a catastrophe the goodness only emerges from the the utter ruination of all your natural hopes and unless you have got to that point of despair of of achieving natural hopes uh Supernatural hope can't really land that the seed won't Sprout as it were um so in the Narnia Chronicles for instance Lewis has his own version of the uh the Apocalypse in in the last battle which is the narnian version of The Book of Revelation uh yeah where everything goes from bad to worse uh and there is a sort of non-in equivalent of of the Cry of dereliction when the narnian king despairing of saving his kingdom from the the invading hordes um cries out in the darkness he's bound to a tree significant location and he cries out in the darkness praying to the Christ like Aslam come and save us now unless and the coldness and the Darkness go on just as before we're told and then reaching down into the very roots of his of his faith as it were this fictional King says let me be killed I ask nothing for myself but come and save all known you and it's at that moment of complete self abnegation and self-gift that indeed his prayer is answered and all sorts of Aid providentially is coming to his rescue though he though he doesn't yet know it um and as a result of of this faithful obedience in the darkest hour he he does find his way through to the to the Heavenly Realms at the end of the story and and you know having gone through the the Gate of death the very first words which meet him on the other side are well done uh uh good and faithful servant who held firm in The Darkest Hour so I think Lewis liked talking having gone through so much suffering off both of them orphans as a boy both of them went through the first World War um they had wrestled with these deepest darkest questions but rather like Brendan said this morning when he was talking about the the bombing of Coventry um the bombing of Coventry could could have made his great grandfather bitter but instead it prompted him to build an altar oh to rebuild an altar um and I think in in their own literary ways Lewis and Tolkien were doing the same well thank you we are out of time but um I hope that we all uh realize that despite the fact that Lewis and Tolkien have been dead a long time they remain really just about the two best resources we have from the literary canon in in recent times for our work of evangelization so thank you so much Holly thank you so much Father Michael thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Word on Fire Institute

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Keywords: Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop Barron, bishop barron, catholic church, word on fire, catholicism in england, catholicism, christianity in the uk, religion in england, word on fire institute, Holly Ordway on Tolkien, Fr. Ward on CS Lewis, faith of tolkien and lewis, tolkien and lewis, cs lewis lecture, jrr tolkien lecture, tolkien faith, lewis faith, holly ordway, michael ward, tolkien, cs lewis, jrr tolkien, michael ward interview, tolkien christianity, cs lewis jrr tolkien

Id: UamvuEBskv8

Length: 59min 59sec (3599 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023