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Like no other force in history, the First World War permanently altered the political and cultural landscape of Europe, America, and the West. In the judgment of more than one historian, the war became “the axis on which the modern world turned.”10 Literary critic Roger Sale has called the conflict “the single event most responsible for shaping the modern idea that heroism is dead.”11 For a generation of men and women, it brought the end of innocence—and the end of faith.
“What most distinguishes the generation who have approached maturity since the debacle of idealism at the end of the War is not their rebellion against the religion and the moral code of their parents,” he wrote, “but their disillusionment with their own rebellion.”18 Part of the achievement of Tolkien and Lewis was to reintroduce into the popular imagination a Christian vision of hope in a world tortured by doubt and disillusionment.
“Take my advice,” says Mr. Beaver, “whenever you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”22
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.
“We know from the experience of the last twenty years,” wrote Lewis in 1944, “that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that lead to war.”
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all,” he explains. “But I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
anachronism,
bucolic
The act of “bulldozing the real world,” Tolkien wrote, involves “coercing other wills.”
Writing in the 1940s, Tolkien lamented “the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare.” The tragedy, as he saw it, was the attempt to use technology to actualize our desires and increase our power over the world around us—all of which leaves us unsatisfied.
care more how humanity lives than how long,” he wrote. “Progress, for me, means increasing the goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible idea.”
Both authors regarded twentieth-century modernization as a threat to human societies because they viewed the natural world as the handiwork of God and thus integral to human happiness. As such, nature was an essential ally in the struggle against these dehumanizing forces.
Every realm of human endeavor, from politics to economics to ethics, fell under its refining influence. Humankind, Spencer wrote, was in a long process of adaption and self-improvement: “And the belief in human perfectibility merely amounts to the belief that, in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life.”
The Myth of Progress was proclaimed from nearly every sector of society. Scientists, physicians, educators, industrialists, salesmen, politicians, preachers—they all agreed on the upward flight of humankind. Each breakthrough in medicine, science, and technology seemed to confirm the Myth. Every invention and innovation was offered up as evidence: whether it was Marconi’s radio messages or the Maxim machine gun, such advances were ordained by the gods of progress.37 Thus, what began as a theory about biological change ripened into an assumption—a dogma—about human improvement, even perfection.
Or so it seemed to C. S. Lewis and many of his generation. “I grew up believing in this Myth and I have felt—I still feel—its almost perfect grandeur,” he wrote. “To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn into order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.”38
applying scientific methods to improve the species. In a word: eugenics.
As Tolkien insisted, even the dreadful orcs are presented as rational beings, “though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.”49
no creatures are born for captivity, and none have a birthright to oppress others.
“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
The conceit of the intellectual elites of the day was that science, and the technology it underwrites, could solve the most intractable of human problems.
Tolkien and Lewis encountered the horrific progeny of this thinking—in the trenches and barbed wire and mortars of the Great War—and it gave them great pause about human potentiality. On the one hand, the characters in their novels possess a great nobility: creatures endowed with a unique capacity for virtue, courage, and love. Indeed, a vital theme throughout is the sacred worth of the individual soul; in Middle-earth and in Narnia, every life is of immense consequence. On the other hand, their characters are deeply flawed individuals, capable of great evil, and in desperate need of divine
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“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.”
“Progress, visible in every facet of life and ruling as the governing force behind existence, brought order to a world of change and moral purpose to a universe otherwise disturbingly random and meaningless,” writes historian Richard Gamble. “This faith in progress anchored the soul.”69 A generation later, the leaders of England and the rest of Europe assumed that their science, education, philanthropy, gentility, and religion represented the future of Western civilization. Even war would serve to advance the destiny of humanity. “Their confident belief in progress and the idea that
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Christianity and love of England went hand in hand, but the emphasis was on duty—duty to king and country—not on belief.7
The Christian nationalism that characterized the religious communities of Europe, however, only partly explains this enthusiasm. To it must be added The Myth of Progress that, as we’ve seen, functioned for many like a substitute faith. Many religious believers—especially those drifting away from historic Christianity—adopted its secular aims and assumptions. “One thing is clear: the future of the world is democratic, and nothing can stop it,” proclaimed a London minister. “Progress is by Divine authority, by Divine necessity; God is the great innovator.”
Trench fever probably spared Tolkien’s life.
We don’t know why Tolkien wrote those enigmatic words. But we do know what hobbits are like: from his own account, the character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering in that dreary “hole in the ground,” the front-line trench.
Perhaps this was Tolkien’s quiet way of suggesting that we may, in the end, owe more to these forgotten dead than our modern temperament allows. “That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall,” advises Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring. “For there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that are not wholly vain.”
What does it mean to have one’s imagination “converted” or “baptized” by a work of fantasy? In Lewis’s case, it seems that Phantastes rescued his imaginative cast of mind from its dark tendencies—made darker, perhaps, by the onset of the war—and introduced him to a “bright shadow,” a voice or force that drew him out of himself. It set before him a vision of a world that must have seemed wholly unlike his own: pure and radiant, yet morally severe.
“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.”
When Lewis personally encountered the “unskilled butchery of the first German war,” the attempt to reconcile a loving God with the problem of suffering appeared futile.
Winston Churchill was one of them. “Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes life majestic and tolerable,” he wrote. “There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life.”71
“You see the conviction is
gaining ground on me that after all Spirit does exist,” he wrote. “I fancy
that there is Something right outside time & place, which did not create matter, as the Christians say, but is matter’s great enemy: and that Beauty is the call of the spirit in that something to the spirit in us. ...
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Though sensitive to religious questions, Lewis remained uncommitted. Still a young man, he already had experienced deep sorrow and struggle, and it left him with a sober, if not gloomy, view of the world. “The early loss of my mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last war . . . had given me a pessimistic view of existence,” he wrote years later. “My atheism was based on it.”24 He turned his heart and mind to literature; academic study absorbed him. “He has read more classics than any boy I ever had,” Kirkpatrick once said of him. “He is a student who has no interest
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Many postwar thinkers and writers, in fact, were unwilling to endure the world in its new form: a kind of spiritual vertigo took hold, a frantic search for solutions to the human predicament. Freudian psychology, eugenics, socialism, spiritualism, scientism—these and other ideologies were attempts to solve, or explain away, the horrors that seemed to be hanging over the human race.
