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 1914-18

by Joseph Loconte

Indeed, it is hard to overstate the spiritual crisis that overcame many young men and women, particularly among the intellectuals, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Swiss theologian Karl Barth had been appalled at the wholehearted embrace of Germany’s war by the theologians, and at what he saw as the confusion of enlightened culture with the gospel. The Bible, Barth insisted, contained “divine thoughts about men, not human thoughts about God.” Barth savaged the utopian schemes of liberal Christianity in his monumental Epistle to the Romans (1921). His work “burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians.”74 Nevertheless, Barth’s “neo-orthodoxy,” as it came to be called, was being rejected by elite opinion throughout Europe and, increasingly, the United States. It came as a thunderbolt to the literati, for example, when T. S. Eliot was baptized and confirmed into the Church of England in 1927. How could the author of The Wasteland find solace in such a primitive superstition? How could a member of the literary set, London’s Bloomsbury Group, commit such an act of intellectual betrayal?75 Virginia Woolf expressed the indignation of her peers in a letter to a friend: