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In the opening weeks of the war, the French lost 300,000 men. By the end of December, France and Germany had sustained combat losses of well over 600,000 soldiers, with many more wounded or missing.
By the time of the Armistice, more than nine million soldiers lay dead and roughly thirty-seven million wounded. On average, there were about 6,046 men killed every day of the war, a war that lasted 1,566 days.
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.
Tolkien and Lewis were attracted to the 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.
Tolkien and Lewis offer an understanding of the human story that is both tragic and hopeful: they suggest that war is a symptom of the ruin and wreckage of human life, but that it points the way to a life restored and transformed by grace.
“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.”31
Both authors thus reflect the historic Christian tradition: human nature as a tragic mix of nobility and wretchedness.
Tolkien wrote that the idea of “the Fall of Man” lurked behind every story, and that “all stories are ultimately about the fall.”60
Much of their literary output would be a response to the assumptions that not only made the Great War possible, but added mightily to its destructive and vindictive power. The long shadows cast by this conflict do not fail to touch the borders of the Shire and of Narnia.
“It was just as the 1914 War burst upon me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong,” he wrote later. “But a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition.”
Perhaps this was MacDonald’s intent. In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald hinted at one of his objectives in using the genre of the fairy tale. “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.”
Lewis insisted that war produced at least one benefit: it forced us to consider our own mortality.
“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.”
At the same time, the abuse of science—its capacity to dehumanize its masters as well as its victims—would also be a major theme of their works.
Rather than liberating human beings from their ancient frailties, science enslaved them.
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.
They called themselves “the Inklings,” those who “dabble in ink.”105
“They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax,” he wrote.
True Myth about the dignity of human life and its relationship to God.
As we will see, it is their moral imagination that exerts a unique power: the proposition that every person is caught up in an epic contest between Light and Darkness.
The great achievement of Tolkien and Lewis is the creation of mythic and heroic figures who nevertheless make a claim upon our concrete and ordinary lives.
Through them we are challenged to examine our deepest desires, to shake off our doubts, and to join in the struggle against evil.
The choice they face is also a summons; not a blind accident, but a Calling on their lives. One may answer the Call—or refuse it, turn away, and walk into Darkness. But indifference to the Call to struggle against evil is not an option; one must take sides. Thus, set before our imagination in the works of Tolkien and Lewis is one of the great paradoxes of our mortal lives: the mysterious intersection of providence and free will.33
Tolkien and Lewis explicitly rejected these views as an assault on human freedom.
The mental outlook of Middle-earth and Narnia could hardly be more out of step with the modern mind: here is an appeal to what might be called a “psychology of evil” as old as the story of Cain and Abel. It is the story of men and women given a birthright of freedom, but abusing their freedom for selfish ends.
The heroic ideal in their stories is not escapism, they argued, but the only realistic path available in a dangerous world.
“Friendship makes prosperity more shining,” wrote Cicero, “and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.”
The most influential Christian authors of the twentieth century believed that every human soul was caught up in a very great story: a fearsome war against a Shadow of Evil that has invaded the world to enslave the sons and daughters of Adam. Yet those who resist the Shadow are assured that they will not be left alone; they will be given the gift of friendship amid their struggle and grief. Even more, they will find the grace and strength to persevere, to play their part in the story, however long it endures and wherever it may lead them.
The present world, always in the grip of Darkness, can never evolve into an earthly paradise. Rather, it will draw to a sudden and violent close: “an extinguisher popped on the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain run down on the play.”6
Tolkien comes closer to capturing the tragedy of the human condition than any postmodern cynic. At the climax of his journey, at the fires of Mount Doom, despite all his courage and strength, Frodo fails in his quest: he chooses not to destroy the Ring, but instead succumbs to its power and places it once again on his finger.
The heroic ideal in the works of Tolkien and Lewis, however, is qualified in a much more profound way. The hero cannot, by his own efforts, prevail in the struggle against evil.
The forces arrayed against him, as well as the weakness within him, make victory impossible. The tragic nature of his quest begins to dawn on him, to oppress him, until the moment when failure seems inevitable.
This King, who brings strength and healing in his hands, will make everything sad come untrue.
