Four Christian Fantasists A Study of the Fantastic Writings of George MacDonald, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (Cormare Series, No. 3)

CORMARE SERIES N O 3

RICHARD STURCH

FOUR CHRISTIAN FANTASISTS A STUDY OF THE FANTASTIC WRITINGS OF GEORGE MACDONALD CHARLES WILLIAMS C.S. LEWIS AND

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

Walking Tree Publishers Zurich and Berne 2001

Cormare Series No 3

General Editors Peter Buchs • Thomas Honegger • Andrew Moglestue

Editor responsible for this volume Thomas Honegger

ISBN: 3-9521424-3-3 Walking Tree Publishers, Zurich and Berne 2001 Printed in Switzerland

To DIANA, SARAH AND ELIZABETH

Table

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: On Christian Fantasists

l

Chapter 2 Other Worlds and Other Beings

n

Chapter 3 The Charge of Escapism

27

Chapter 4 Varieties of Symbolism

35

Chapter 5 Themes

53

Chapter 6 Apologetics

95

Appendix Three Unbaptized Imaginations

Bibliography

121

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ON CHRISTIAN FANTASISTS "Sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said." (Lewis)

In many bookshops, particularly those which specialize in paper-backs, the idle customer browsing around will find a section where the books are in some respects noticeably different from the usual run of cheap fiction. Not only do they have very lurid covers - that, of course, they share with many others but these covers do not bear the emblems one associates with such well-known genres as Whodunit, Science Fiction, or Romance. Some actually have abstract designs; among those that do not, the commonest symbol is probably the sword, yet they are clearly not historical novels, for the figures shown wielding these swords, if there are any, belong to no recognizable period of history. Dragons, too, appear quite often on these covers; yet the books are not fairy-tales, for they are in the adults' section of the shop, not the children's. Furthermore, their titles are unusual. They are apparently designed in many cases to convey a sense of the remote and mysterious: they are called things like The Wood Beyond the World, Phantastes, Thongor of Lemuria, The Last Unicorn, or The Stealer of Souls. They belong, as a matter of fact, to the class of fiction generally known as Fantasy; and it is with this class, or rather with a small sub-class within it, that the present book is concerned. These bookshops often put their 'fantasy' stock into the same shelves as their science fiction. This is quite understandable, though mistaken. The two classes share a great many readers, and indeed a number of writers: the names of Poul Andersen, for example, of Anthony Boucher, and of Piers Anthony will be found in both sections, and a few books could be classified either way. (C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, of which I shall have more to say, is an example.) Both classes, moreover, use the same basic device, that of putting their characters and plots into a world where things happen that do not happen in our own. But whereas science fiction, as its name implies, changes the world along lines that have at least something to do with science, fantasy prefers to use a more ancient tradition, and the power that transforms the world for it is not scientific but magical. To quote the late Sir Kingsley Amis, "for a

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Chapter 1

furniture of robots, space-ships, techniques and equations it substitutes elves, broomsticks, occult powers and incantations"1. In any class of fiction there is, naturally, a great variety of quality, and fantasy is no exception. It varies both in the quality of its execution and, what is more, in the quality of what is aimed at. Again this applies elsewhere. From the point of view of someone who is only interested in classification, Tolstoy's War and Peace is an historical novel set in the times of the Napoleonic wars. Many other such exist. Conan Doyle wrote a novel {Rodney Stone) set in the same period. The same applies to a number of popular romances by Georgette Heyer. But it is obvious that War and Peace is trying to do something totally different from what these other books are trying to do, and this quite apart from any question of success or failure in doing it. And the same sort of division occurs in fantasy. At one level, there is the sort of book that has been labelled 'sword-and-sorcery', on the analogy of 'blood-and-thunder' or 'cloakand-dagger'. It has no pretensions to depth of meaning or literary merit; its only object (a perfectly worthy one) is to provide entertainment for those who happen to like that sort of thing. There are others, though, which have at least a higher literary aim. The romances of William Morris were undoubtedly intended to be works of an artist and craftsman, as much as anything else that he produced. The fantasy stories of Lord Dunsany are certainly meant as pure entertainment, but the entertainment is meant to be derived, not just from the plot (indeed, 'Idle Days on the Yann', my own favourite among his stories, has no plot), but from the style and the imagination that lies behind the style. In America, James Branch Cabell avowedly intended to "write beautifully of beautiful things". Perhaps he achieved the first part of his aim more frequently than the second; he showed a distinct tendency, as indeed, to a lesser degree, did Dunsany, to write beautifully of horrible things. But novels can not only be written from the background of different purposes, they can be written from that of different philosophies and world-views, and can express these views in fictional form. It is clear, for example, that the novels of Dostoevsky spring from a Christian background, and what is more, express a Christian philosophy, in a way in which those of, say, Anthony Trollope do not. (This is not to say that Dostoevsky was himself a Christian in a way in which Trollope was not; we are considering the books, not the men.) By contrast, much of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence was intended to express views of things in general which

Intrcxluction

3

are not Christian views, and which differ from one another into the bargain. Once again, all this holds in the field of fantasy as well. Most fantasy has, undoubtedly, no particular world-view behind it. Some does. I mentioned earlier the writings of Anthony Boucher and Poul Anderson; both include stories in which some sort of expression is given to Christian beliefs (which in Boucher's case were the author's own; I do not know about Anderson). This appears, however, mostly in the 'machinery' of the stories; the stories themselves are intended simply as entertainment. In this book I shall be dealing with a group of four British writers whose fantasy fiction is permeated, deliberately, with Christian ideas and beliefs: these being George MacDonald (1824-1905), Charles Williams (1886-1945), J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), and C. S. Lewis (1898-1963). These men had more in common than the simple facts that all were Christians and all wrote fantasies; it is the purpose of this book to explore some of these common elements. George MacDonald was for a time a Congregationalist minister in Sussex. His views proved too liberal for the leaders of his congregation (he did not believe that hell was everlasting, for example), and for most of his life he earned his living by his pen. He wrote a great many novels, which I think most present-day readers would find very heavy going indeed, but which embody a great deal of wise religious insight. C. S. Lewis remarked of them that they were best when they departed most from the canons of novel-writing and turned into preaching, because the author, though a poor novelist, was a supreme preacher. He also wrote a good deal of poetry, of which much the same could be said (though I find some of the verses in Scots rather than English rather good - perhaps because of their slightly alien quality). His actual sermons were extempore, though two were taken down in shorthand by hearers and later printed; but he also published four volumes of Unspoken Sermons, which are both penetrating and challenging. But in the midst of this he also wrote a number of books that can only be called fantasy. Some were for children, using the mechanism, or at least the world, of the fairy-story. Perhaps MacDonald felt freer in this genre; certainly these books have not vanished from sight the way his novels have, and the two 'Curdie' books have remained in print most of the time since MacDonald died. One, The Princess and the Goblin, was even made into an animated film, which retained the adventure element in the story but lost most of its mystery.

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Two of his fantasies, Phantastes and Lilith, were definitely aimed at adults. In both, the narrator finds himself transported to another, magical universe; but the magic is far more important as symbolism than as mechanism. Charles Williams, like MacDonald, wrote a great deal, and for a living, though he did have full-time work as well, as an editor at the Oxford University Press. He wrote criticism, biography, poetry, theology, drama and, what matters most to us just now, seven 'fantasy' novels. In one respect they differ from most fantasies - including those of MacDonald and Tolkien and most of those of Lewis: they do not as a rule send their characters into imagined worlds, but bring the imagined worlds, or elements from them, into ours. (All Hallows' Eve is something of an exception here; two of the main characters are dead before the novel begins, and the story moves between our own world and the world of their after-life. There is also something of this in Descent into Hell.) Tolkien is of course much the best known of the four. The Lord of the Rings was voted in two British polls as the greatest book of the twentieth century. (I should have voted the same way myself, had anyone asked me!) It was really the enormous success of Tolkien's great work that produced the explosion of much lesser fantasy work that stocks the bookshelves in the shops mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Its prelude, the children's book The Hobbit, has been almost as popular, and The Silmarillion, which appeared after his death and makes explicit the background implied in the other stories, has also been much appreciated, though more perhaps by 'addicts'. Much of the preliminary work for The Lord of the Rings, as well as a number of subsequent writings linked to it, have been edited by his son Christopher and published as Unfinished Tales and the twelve-volume History of Middle Earth. C. S. Lewis is in a way the link that joins our four. He was a close personal friend of Williams and Tolkien, and a strong admirer and champion of MacDonald. Like Tolkien, he was an academic in the English Department of Oxford University, though later he taught at Cambridge. Unlike the others, he was a convert to Christianity, and became a leading apologist, in talks, in books, and on the radio. He is probably best-known of all for his seven 'Narnia' books for children. But he also wrote three connected 'interplanetary' novels for adults, which begin as science fiction and develop more and more into fantasy as the series progresses. Out of the Silent Planet is set on Mars, Perelandra on Venus, and That Hideous Strength on Earth. Lewis's other

Introduction

5

novel, Till We Have Faces, is a powerful retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius, without the original's allegorical element, but with a great deal of moral and religious insight embodied into it instead. I shall not be trying to describe the theological positions of the four, except incidentally. Tolkien was an orthodox Roman Catholic of a rather preVatican II kind, and as far as I know his views differed in no way from those of other Roman Catholics. The nearest he gets to theology is in the posthumous Morgoth's Ring, parts four and five, where he discusses the nature of death and evil in his invented world. The others were all Anglicans, though MacDonald, as I have said, began as a Congregationalist minister, and his background was that of Presbyterian Scotland. It has sometimes been suggested that they could be called Anglo-Catholics; but this would be a mistake. MacDonald habitually preached from Nonconformist pulpits, even Unitarian ones. Williams, greatly though he loved ritual, sets a vision of the Eucharist in a dingy Methodist chapel. Lewis, like MacDonald, detested denominational and party labels among Christians - what mattered to him was 'mere Christianity' - and at present his admirers are to be found in Evangelical circles just as much as in Anglo-Catholic ones. The only reason that the label could ever have been supposed appropriate is that all three had a strong sacramentalist outlook - by no means confined to the sacraments of the official lists2. They were simply Christians. MacDonald was in some ways the most 'liberal' of them, especially by the standards of his Calvinistic background. But what he revolted against was not miracles, nor Incarnation, nor the doctrine of the Trinity - the sort of thing that some people find 'inconceivable'; his liberalism was based solely on moral grounds, and consisted of little more than a rejection of eternal punishment (and, a fortiori, of double predestination) and an Abelardian understanding of atonement. He did not even reject the idea of hell, though, as I have said, he did not believe it would be eternal. There is, indeed, a striking resemblance in the thought of MacDonald, Williams and Lewis where hell is concerned. Traditional Christian teaching has supposed that it is, or would be but for our Redemption, the natural destiny of a fallen race, and that it requires a positive act of faith in Christ to escape it. The various schools disputed over the nature and origin of that act, and over whether more might not be needed too; but that much was agreed. Our writers would agree too. But they also thought that this act of faith was

6

Chapter 1

itself 'natural'; that it required a positive act of rejection to 'achieve' one's own damnation, and that without this to love and trust the Lord was the obvious thing to do. MacDonald certainly believed that such rejection could not endure for ever; Williams and Lewis, that there might come a stage where the soul had finally damned itself: but on the basic point all three were agreed. And they incorporated this into their fantastic writings, as they did a number of other themes which will be treated of later on. I shall not be much concerned, either, with the literary value of their works. For one thing, it would be only decent piety towards Lewis to fall in with his wish that there could be a moratorium on all evaluative criticism for ten or twenty years3. For another, I doubt my own competence. And for a third, there is enormous variation in quality among the four. MacDonald and Williams were both capable of writing rather badly at times. (In very different ways; MacDonald tended to err through clumsiness, and Williams through a contorted and extraordinarily mannered style.) In any case, good and bad writing may equally be used to express the Christian faith, though no doubt the good does this better; and it is with the ways in which these men's fantastic writings, whether good or bad, were used to do this that this book is intended to deal. They were not, be it noted, trying to write religious propaganda with a fictional form to sweeten the pill: it is simply that when they sat down to write fiction, what they wrote was deeply informed by what they believed. The effect is least marked in Tolkien, very marked indeed in the other three. MacDonald, for one, is recorded as having once remarked "People find this great fault with me - that I turn my stories into sermons. They forget that I have a Master to serve first before I can wait on the public"4. This does not mean that he was really turning sermons into stories: it is rather that he would have felt it a breach of integrity not to preach in his novels when the opportunity presented itself. And because he thought the way he did, in terms of Christ and Christian righteousness, the opportunity frequently did present itself. And if this applied to his 'straight' novels, still more did it apply to fantasy, where to separate story from ideas was almost an impossibility. Lewis has left it on record that all seven 'Narnia' books, and all three 'Ransom' books, began as pictures rather than as stories: pictures of, say, a Faun carrying parcels, or a floating island5. Thus Asian, the divine Lion of Narnia, did not figure in the first sketches of The Lion, the Witch and the

Introduction

7

Wardrobe (indeed, he too began as a picture); while The Dark Tower, a fourth, unfinished novel about Ransom, had no theological theme at all6. The mere fact, then, that a book carries particular religious overtones does not mean that it was written in order to carry them; only that the author was thinking along those lines anyway. The Lord of the Rings, indeed, has no religious purpose at all. "The prime motive", according to its author, "was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them"7. I have even seen one critic comment on the absence of religion from the book8. This is certainly incorrect, even allowing for the fact that The SilmariUion had not at the time appeared. It resulted perhaps from an inadequate appreciation of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism. Protestants may firmly believe in angels, but to them they are simply fellow-creatures, however much 'higher' than we are. Roman Catholics will of course agree with this: but to them angels, like saints, may legitimately be prayed to, and in this respect they are more part of the Catholic's religion than they are of the Protestant's. Now in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien's 'Valar' are specifically called "angelic powers"9; consequently, mention of the Valar must be taken as 'religious'10. And it was not open to Tolkien to include very much of his own religion. For his 'Third Age' is imagined as ending long before the Jewish and Christian revelations began; revelation proper is still to come". He cannot make his heroes pagans - the Valar would not deceive them - but he cannot make them Jews or Christians either. They can only have monotheism, natural religion if you like; and this they do in fact have. In The Lord of the Rings, the one God is in fact only mentioned in the Appendices (where we are told that He intervened when Ar-Pharazon made war on the Valar, and that He gave Men the gift of death12). The SilmariUion, though, and the Unfinished Tales contain far more, including the picture of Creation in the 'Ainulindale' and the Elvish names for God, 'Eru\ 'the One', and Tluvatar', 'Father of All' (both, of course, suitable names for a God known chiefly as Creator, not as Revealer or Redeemer). God is known to exist, but He has no direct dealings with His children - not yet, that is - and direct worship of Him is rare. The only shrine dedicated to Him that is mentioned is that in Numenor, the high place on the Meneltarma, where the first-fruits were offered, and which was neglected under Tar-Ancalimon and finally barred to all by Ar-Pharazon13. And the rites described as taking place on the Meneltarma are almost such as

8

Chapter 1

might have been devised by a gentleman of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the heyday of 'natural religion': prayer for the coming year in spring, praise in the summer, thanksgiving in the autumn, and otherwise silence14. It is interesting that in the earliest drafts of The Silmarillion, eventually published in The Book of Lost Tales, we do not have a Christian picture of the world but something much closer to a pagan one. The Valar are repeatedly called 'the Gods' (a usage found just once in LOTR, and then without the capital 'G'), and Tluvatar' is said to mean, not 'Father of All', but 'SkyFather', a good pagan notion15. But this disappeared in later versions, which, though not specifically Christian, are kept consistent with Christian truth. The absence, then, of explicit theology from The Lord of the Rings, and of explicit Christian theology from The Silmarillion, does not mean the absence of Christianity or a Christian standpoint; and we shall see that not only does Tolkien share the general Christian outlook of the other three, he also stresses a number of themes and ideas which they stress too. Some have even wanted to see them as a kind of 'school of thought' within British Christianity, and have added others to the list (Dorothy L. Sayers, for example, and G.K. Chesterton), or sought to trace the influence of one member of this 'school' on another. This is no doubt legitimate, to a certain extent. Some acknowledged such influences. We know for certain that MacDonald influenced Chesterton and Lewis, because they said so themselves. Williams's poetry, again, was at first largely derivative in style, and one of the sources from which it derived was obviously Chesterton; some of it actually appeared in Chesterton's weekly The New Witness. Both Lewis and Sayers admitted to learning from Williams; Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Christianity. But other links have been as vigorously denied. Some, I gather, tried at one time to trace the influence of MacDonald, Lewis and Williams on Tolkien. Now Tolkien had certainly read MacDonald, and he was a personal friend of both Lewis and Williams; all three were members of the group known as the 'Inklings', who met for a number of years in Lewis's rooms and to whom the first edition of The Lord of the Rings was dedicated16. But this does not mean that any of them affected Tolkien's writing. "No one", Lewis wrote to Charles Moorman, "ever influenced Tolkien; you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch"17; and Tolkien himself said that his debt to Lewis "was not 'influence' as it is

Introduction

9

ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement" . In an interview he flatly denied being influenced by either Williams or MacDonald, adding that he couldn't stand the latter's books at any price at all19. Actually, Tolkien's relationship to MacDonald was more complex than this suggests. He was certainly 'brought up on' him, and in his Andrew Lang lecture 'On Fairy Stories' he paid courteous and perceptive tribute to him, speaking of the "power and beauty" to be found in his use of the fairy story as a vehicle of mystery, praising 'The Golden Key' and Llllth, and noting, very rightly, that death was the theme that had most inspired MacDonald20. While in two passages in the Letters (pp. 31 and 178) he acknowledges indebtedness to MacDonald for elements in The Hobbit, particularly in the concept of the goblins. When, however, in 1965, he was asked to write a preface to a new edition of 'The Golden Key', he found that he now disliked it, describing it as "illwritten, incoherent, and bad, in spite of a few memorable passages"21. But his efforts (unsuccessful) at writing this preface led to the writing (successfully) of Smith of Wootton Major. And this is a curiously MacDonaldian book; in parts it reads almost like a small-scale and Tolkinian version of Phantastes. (Thus the hero of both is granted the power to enter Faerie; in both he is saved from disaster by a tree which suffers in the process; in both there is strong criticism of those who would empty the mystery from the world; and so on.) However, this is the only instance, apart from The Hobbit, in which I should suspect any 'influence', and then it was largely the influence of aversion and a desire to do the thing better22. Again, though there are striking similarities of thought between MacDonald and Williams, notably in their use of images (of which more hereafter), I have found no direct evidence that Williams had ever read a line of MacDonald's, and certainly he never mentions him. As for the other members of the 'school', only Chesterton ever wrote anything that could be called 'fantasy', and his fantastic writings are so unlike those of our four that I have not considered them here, except once or twice in passing. One writer I have been rather tempted to include is Evelyn Underhill. This may seem a little surprising, as she is best known as a writer on prayer and mysticism. But in her early days she wrote novels, and one of these, Column of Dust (incidentally the only one she wrote after becoming a Christian) reads astonishingly like a kind of rough draft for a Williams novel.

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It is, however, very definitely not a good novel, and it stands quite alone; so Evelyn Underhill is not treated of here.

0. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21

Amis, p. 22. See below, chapter 4. An Experiment in Criticism, p. 129. G. M. MacDonald(1924), p. 315. Of Other Worlds, p. 42. The Dark Tower might of course have developed one had it been completed, just as Perelatulra did. The Lord of the Rings (references throughout are to the India paper edition, London, 1969), p. 10. The title will often be abbreviated to LOTR. H. Keenan, 'The appeal of The Lord of the Rings' in Isaacs and Zimbardo, p. 65. LOTR, p. 1157. Cf. The Road Goes Ever On, p. 65. Cf. The Silmarillion, p. 265. LOTR, pp. 1074 and 1100. The Silmarillion, p. 261; Unfinished Tales, p. 166. Strictly speaking, it is not'natural religion'; knowledge of Eru was revealed by the Valar. The Book of Lost Tales, vol. 1, p. 255. For an account of this group, see H. Carpenter (1978), The Inklings. letters, p. 287. Carpenter (1978), p. 160 (letter of Tolkien to Dick Plotz). But Lewis's criticism of the 'Lav of Leithian' certainlv affected Tolkien's later versions; see The Lays of Beleriand, pp.315ff. Quoted by L. Carter (1969), pp. 19-20. Tree and Uaf, pp. 28 and 59. Carpenter (1977), p. 242. Professor Clyde Kilby (1977, p. 37) toyed with the idea that Old Nokes was intended for MacDonald. This is out of the question. Undoubtedly MacDonald's fantasy had many faults, but despising Faerie, or ignoring its deeper significance, were not among them. In fact Nokes, and the whole apparatus of Master Cook and Great Hall, seem to have been meant as a satire on the decay of the village church (Carpenter 1977, p. 243).

CHAPTER 2 OTHER WORLDS AND OTHER BEINGS "Only when we are able to compare ourselves, as men, with other intelligent beings, shall we know what we really are and on what rung of the ladder we stand." (Novalis)

"Man must have begun to think of gnomes almost as soon as he was capable of making general propositions." (J. D. Denniston)

Three of our four writers set much or most of their fantastic work in worlds other than the one we know, and even when they used our world as a setting they peopled it with beings we do not normally expect to see there. (Williams is the odd man out here: his novels are set in our world, with the possible exception of All Hallows' Eve, and introduce alien powers into it rather than alien beings, again with one possible exception, The Place of the Lion.) This alien element is part of what qualifies their books for the title 'fantasy'; is it also relevant to their thinking as Christians? That it is, is best seen in MacDonald. His 'other worlds' are not just handy settings for the fantastic, and this is perfectly obvious to the most casual reader. Technically, indeed, Phantastes is set in Fairyland (as is The Golden Key'), and some of its characters do come from the Fairyland of tradition, such as the giants whom Anodos and the princes fight, or the flower fairies he encounters near the beginning of the book. (Some might feel that the latter come from one of the less valuable parts of the tradition.) But these are unusual. Most of the figures we meet are not Fairies at all, even in the widest possible sense of that term. The mysterious library, the wolf-idol by whom Anodos is killed, and the blighting Shadow - these are not from any fairy-tale that I ever heard of. And in Lilith even the pretence of fairy-tale is dropped. Is there magic in these realms? MacDonald tends on the whole to avoid the term (as Lewis, Tolkien, and indeed Williams do not), at least in his adult fantasies. For magic, of the fairyland type anyway, is basically a supposed set of laws joining physical causes and effects, not unlike those which the scientist investigates. But MacDonald's concern is with spiritual causes and effects, not physical ones. The laws that operate in his worlds use terms like folly, repentance, courage, pride and honour. It is the folly of Anodos that leads him into the clutches first of the Alder and then of the Shadow; it is his repentance that leads him to take on the humble role of a squire and so, ultimately, to a

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Chapter 2

brave and honourable death. Even more is this true in Lilith. The links there between spiritual cause and effect are more direct. After all, folly does quite often lead people into traps even in the ordinary world, and repentance does quite often produce humility and general improvement of character. In Phantastes MacDonald had simply made the links very close, so that Anodos walks into catastrophe immediately after repeated warnings not to; but in Lilith the links become visible, even incarnate. Sorrow is personified in Mara; the evils of Vane's unconscious take shape in the monsters of the Bad Burrow; a prayer is a pigeon or a flower. Those of the dead who are ready for it lie asleep in the cold of Adam's treasure-vault; others have risen from that sleep and passed onwards; others, not yet ready, are still fighting futile wars in the Evil Wood: all in accordance with their natures and the level of their development. The sort of 'law' that operates in the world of Lilith is exemplified in a brief dialogue between Vane and Adam, who has just given him advice1: T will try to remember', I answered; ' - but I may forget!' 'Then some evil that is good for you will follow.' 'And if I remember?' 'Some evil that is not good for you, will not follow.' There are similar ideas to be found elsewhere in MacDonald: in the scene in 'The Golden Key', for example, where the Old Man of the Earth tells Tangle to cast herself down into a deep hole (an image Lewis took over in The Pilgrim's Regress). But it is in Lilith that the effect is strongest. The worlds of Tolkien, and of Lewis's books for adults, are less mysterious, in that they are all supposed to be linked in some physical or quasi-physical way with our own world. The world of Phantastes has no link at all with ours, except a magical one to get Anodos into it, and the world of Lilith is linked to ours symbolically, not physically, so that a march on the piano in the one appears as a scent among roses in the other. Tolkien's Middleearth, by contrast, is supposed to be linked to ours by time; it is our world, ages ago, and we are assured that Hobbits are still to be found in the northwest of the Old World, east of the Sea, even if nowadays they avoid Men with dismay and are becoming hard to find. At one time Tolkien planned a kind of 'time travel' story, The Lost Road', in which the narrative would move steadily back till it culminated in the fall of Numenor, though only fragments, published posthumously, were ever written, and the project was eventually abandoned2. The setting of Lewis's Till We Have Faces is contemporary with Hellenistic Greece, evidently somewhere in Central Asia. And the worlds of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are, quite simply, Mars and Venus, and are linked to ours by interplanetary space.

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13

Narnia is a different matter. It is, at first glance, an instance of a familiar science-fiction device - the parallel universe with points of access to it from ours. Such a device goes back at least to H. G. Wells (see his Men Like Gods) and has been used scores of times since: Lewis, however, has adapted the device as well as adopting it. He is writing fantasy rather than science fiction, of course, and so the transition from one world to another is effected by magic, not by rotation through the F-dimension or anything like that. He has also introduced a No-World's-Land between the parallel universes, the 'Wood between the Worlds' of The Magician's Nephew, from which one can step into Narnia, or Charn, or England. A very different link appears in The Last Battle, where the 'next world' of Narnia and of Earth is one and the same, and yet is both of them, though more real than either, and becoming still more so. This is more than just a story-teller's device; it is meant to make two very definite theological points, and does so quite brilliantly. One is the re-creation of the universe, which at present groans and travails, having been made subject to vanity; of which re-creation the resurrection of the body is only a part. (Here, of course, it is given a Platonist touch, as Lewis tells us; the re-created universe has always been, and our own world, like that of the Narnians, is but a shadow of it. One is reminded of one of MacDonald's favourite quotations from Novalis, "Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one.") The other point is that of Heaven as eternal progress "in which every chapter is better than the one before". God is infinite, and therefore there can be no limit to the knowledge or the love that a created being should have for Him, nor any end to the growth of souls in that knowledge and that love. "The beginning of greater graces is never limited", says St Gregory of Nyssa, and "The bride will always discover more and more of the incomprehensible and unhoped-for beauty of her Spouse throughout all eternity"3. Narnia itself is also a world in which many things that people have imagined are real. Not only is it inhabited by Dwarfs, Giants, Fauns, Merpeople, Ogres, Centaurs, and the like; individuals from story are to be found there too, and Asian's followers include Bacchus and Father Christmas. The world really is flat (though one of the illustrations to The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader' rashly shows a globe!); the stars are glittering people with long hair like burning silver who sing at their creation; alchemy and astrology are functioning sciences, and so is magic - though the practical part is not a proper study for princes. One is tempted to see in this the influence of the 'Discarded Image', the mediaeval and Renaissance world-view of which Lewis wrote in the book of that name4. But though there are certainly similarities, there are also differences: the mediaeval world was of course round, and many features of the Discarded Image, such as its physiology, find no mention in the chronicles of Narnia. The supernatural is more visible than it is in our world. The Fauns and Dryads, River-gods and Talking Beasts are not, of course, supernatural at all

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in Narnia, and ordinary 'white' magic, though it is present, is not very prominent. (Dr Cornelius knew a little, and the Hermit's pool of vision is no doubt another example.) What is prominent in three of the books (The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Silver Chair) is a conflict between a magical evil and the power of divine goodness, which is shown as meeting magic with another magic, a better and holier kind. Magic operates, in fact, on more than one level in Narnia. It can, presumably, be black magic, in the hands of Jadis or the Lady of the Green Kirtle; we are not told about the exact sources of their powers. It can be an ordinary power or technique, in itself indifferent to good and evil, like science. The magic of the exiled star Coriakin (in The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader') is probably of this kind, rather than proper to him as a star, for his book of spells can be used by Lucy. This instance, by the way, is instructive, for it shows us magic as the work of God - again like scientific laws in this world. When Lucy recites Coriakin's spell for rendering things visible, she finds it works on Asian himself, and when she is surprised at this he asks "Did you think I would disobey my own rules?" But there is also, beyond this, the Deep Magic of Asian's Father, the Emperor-over-Sea (that is, God the Father), which decreed death for treason, and the yet Deeper Magic whereby Asian returned from that death; and here we are dealing, not with powers created by God, but with those inherent in Him before the dawn of time. In the 'Ransom' trilogy Lewis set himself the remarkable task of borrowing several already existing 'machineries' and blending them together. There is straightforward science fiction, with such accepted conventions as the canals of Mars; this is found chiefly in Out of the Silent Planet, though there are elements of it in Perelandra too. There is the book of Genesis in Perelandra. There is the Arthurian legend in That Hideous Strength, which also contains an allusion to Tolkien's Numenor5. To this Lewis adds still further elaborations: the Oyeresu, the guardian angels of the various planets, combine Christian angelology, classical polytheism, and astrology in a way which is very complete but to me at least a little off-putting. Partly, perhaps, this is because the elaborations increase as the trilogy progresses. The influence of classical polytheism and astrology first appears in Perelandra, and is much more prominent in That Hideous Strength; and this latter also adds a new grade of interplanetary representatives or ambassadors - an earthly Mars, Venus and so on, as well as the planetary Oyeresu themselves - of which very little use is really made; Lewis seems to have introduced not just complication but unnecessary complication. But there is another factor altogether involved. Many readers, I think, have much less sympathy for classical polytheism than Lewis had, and most will either have little for astrology or treat it on the level of the daily papers' 'What The Stars Foretell For You'; so that to bring these in may actually weaken the apologetic value of the book (and, it may be, the literary as well).

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From a religious or theological point of view, naturally enough, the people of these worlds matter more than the worlds themselves. Now it might have been supposed that these 'people' would include the non-human beings of Christian tradition - the angels and demons; for our writers were all traditional enough in their Christianity to have no difficulty in believing in such. We might also expect the saints: or even God Himself. But there was one very compelling reason that told strongly against any extensive use of these beings: the fact that our writers not only believed but venerated. If you really do believe in, and honour, the Archangel Michael or the Virgin Mary, you are not very likely to use them as characters in a fantasy story; it would seem disrespectful. Hence saints do not appear, except for Mary in Williams's play The Death of Good Fortune, and even there she is more a symbol than the actual woman who gave birth to Christ, as we shall see later on6. (Mary also appears in three others of Williams's plays: The House by the Stable, Seed of Adam, and Terror of Light, but these are more closely tied in with the actual history of the Virgin and her Son, or the meaning of that history; the first two at least are certainly not 'fantasy'!) Angels, blessed or fallen, do appear in all four authors; but in each case they differ from the normal or traditional picture of such beings. The 'Oyeresu' of Lewis and the 'Valar' of Tolkien are undoubtedly angels, but they are charged with peculiar functions not usually associated with angels - the government of planets or the shaping and guardianship of the young Earth. Nor are they identified with specific named angels from Scripture or post-scriptural traditions. Lewis even inserts a passage distinguishing his 'eldila' from traditional angelology altogether; 'our' angels are at most a particular sub-class. MacDonald and Williams hardly introduce the angels of heaven at all. (There is one who appears briefly in the closing pages of Lilith.) They do bring in demonic figures - Satan and Lilith7; but then there is no need to be respectful towards theml And in actual fact Williams expresses doubts about the reality of Satan in both War in Heaven and All Hallows' Eve; elsewhere he describes him as an 'indulgence', even if real8. Does God ever appear? He is not a character in any of Williams's or MacDonald's works (though Christ appears in several of the former's plays, and a 'Flame' of the Holy Spirit in another); in Tolkien he only appears in the 'Ainulindale'. Lewis is another matter, especially the Lewis of the 'Narnia' books. In the 'Ransom' trilogy, God only figures once, when, in Perelandra, part of Ransom's thoughts takes on the form of a Voice, which at last is saying "My name too is Ransom". In Till We Have Faces, where the setting is pagan, we do find the 'god of the mountain' appearing. However, in the children's books Asian, the lion-incarnation of God, is of course the principal character. Even here it is only God incarnate who appears; Asian's Father, the Emperorover-Sea, remains offstage throughout, even at Creation and Last Judgment9. And Lewis does, of course, take considerable pains with Asian. He can be

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allowed a personality of his own - not to do so would be to fall into the ancient heresy of Apollinarianism, which denied the full humanity of Jesus! - but he cannot be made to do whatever the author wishes, only what he honestly believes God might do in such circumstances. His character is not invented for him de novo by Lewis; it must be to a great extent given. He is not, we are reminded (several times) a tame lion - neither for the other characters nor for Lewis himself. But Asian does remain the one definite case of God Himself appearing as a major character in one of our four Christian fantasists10. It is interesting to note that in Tolkien we have non-divine 'incarnations'. In some cases, this is a matter of appearance only. The Valar are capable of 'self-incarnation', of assuming various forms at will, and none of these is 'proper' to them: they assumed human forms as a rule, but could assume others, and the Elvish word for all such forms means not 'body' but 'veil'". Thus it was that the fallen Vala Morgoth could until quite late in his wickedness change his physical form or abandon it altogether, and so also with his servant the Maia Sauron, who possessed the power of living as a disembodied spirit and of assuming a body as he wished, though after the fall of Numenor this was a slow business and the result was always black and hideous12. These are all temporary 'incarnations', rather like the earlier avatars of Vishnu in Indian mythology; they are taken up and laid aside as desired, unless the spirit assuming them has fallen a long way from its original state. But Tolkien also gives us an instance of genuine incarnation. Gandalf, he told Edmund Fuller13, was an angel, who had voluntarily accepted incarnation in order to help in the struggle against Sauron; and The Silmarillion makes this more explicit. Olorin (the name Gandalf bore in his youth) was one of the Maiar, the lesser angelic spirits who accompanied the Valar, and he was sent from "the West that is forgotten", after about a thousand years of the Third Age had passed, to work against Sauron should he rise again, "and to move Elves and Men and all living things of good will to valiant deeds"14. The same holds of the other Wizards, Saruman, Radagast, Alatar and Pallando. But the point to be noted here is that this was genuine incarnation15. Although Wizards are, like Elves, immune to any natural death, and age only slowly, they are capable of dying by violence (again like the Elves), as indeed Saruman and (for a time) Gandalf actually do. Nor do they possess any power of disembodied existence, except after death in the way that human beings, or perhaps in the way that Elves, do; they cannot exist, as Sauron and the Valar can, in a disembodied form in this Middle-earth of ours. Gandalf indeed, who dies in his victory over the Balrog, returns to life later, but not by his own power; he was sent back. There is therefore no echo here of Christ's Resurrection (despite the fact that Gandalf s body, like Christ's, has after restoration to life qualities it did not possess before); and Gandalfs

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"wanderings out of thought and time" lasted nineteen days, not three. Lazarus would be closer. In MacDonald and Williams the use of invented symbolic figures as characters is much commoner than that of angels. In the former, the figure that we come across most often is that of a woman, often young in appearance but immensely old in actual years: North Wind, Irene's great-greatgrandmother in the 'Curdie' books, the Wise Woman in The Lost Princess, 'Grandmother' in The Golden Key', the woman in the cottage in Phantastes, perhaps Eve in Lilith. There is undoubtedly a good deal of variety among these figures. The first three, for instance, dominate the books in which they occur, in a way that the others do not; but in every case the figures are ones of loving yet mysterious wisdom. In Williams, the commonest of these symbolic figures is that of 'Necessity', a being who presses upon people through events until they reach whatever is needed for them - repentance, it may be, or recognition of truth. He is commonest in the plays. Examples would be Satan and Gabriel (combined) in The Rite of the PassionXb\ the Skeleton in Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, the Flame in The House of the Octopus; but he also appears in the novel War in Heaven, in the person of Prester John, the 'young man in grey'. He was also to have appeared in the Arthurian poems as the Invisible Knight, Garlon (a minor character in Malory), who is "Satan to us but the Holy Ghost to the heavenly powers"; in fact, however, the proposed poems dealing with Garlon were never written, and he is only mentioned in one line of the published ones17. The same idea of Necessity appears elsewhere unpersonified, in, for example, the conversion of Damaris Tighe in The Place of the Lion. 'Necessity' is not quite God, but very nearly; a method of God's working, perhaps. The Skeleton describes himself as "Christ's back"; Prester John as "John and Galahad and Mary [...] myself and He who sent me"; in The Death of Good Fortune the role of Necessity is played by Mary; the Flame is one of the Holy Ghost's 'tongues of fire'. And 'Necessity' can vary a good deal in character. In Judgment at Chelmsford the Accuser plays no part in the human action, he only comments on it; but then the real 'action' is taking place among those who appear to be mere commentators, especially in the relationship between the Accuser and Chelmsford herself. Both in this play and in Cranmer the figure of Necessity seems at first to be sinister but turns out to be an agent of good; the same is true of Satan in The Rite of the Passion. ('Satan', of course, means 'accuser'!) It was clearly intended that the same should be true of Garlon in the Arthurian poems. But Mary in The Death of Good Fortune, the Flame in The House of the Octopus, and Prester John in War in Heaven are unambiguously good, though their methods may not always seem so to the human characters. It has been suggested, by the way, that the Third King in Seed of Adam is yet another figure of 'Necessity'. If so, he would be a more sinister one than

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any of the others. But he does not function in this way. He is said to represent "the experience of man when man thinks he has gone beyond all hope of restoration to joy", and this can no doubt be an instrument of 'Necessity'; but in the play he is not used to bring pressure on any of the other characters, except perhaps Mary, who hardly needs 'Necessity'. He does indeed turn out to be less sinister than originally appeared; but his attendant and mother Hell needs to be converted before this can happen. Neither he nor she converts anyone else; nor, indeed, as far as we know, have any of the other characters yet 'gone beyond all hope', though they are threatened with this. War in Heaven, however, is the only one of Williams's novels to use this personification. In most of them the plot turns on the irruption into ordinary lives of a supernatural element - angelical, magical or divine in origin18. This element is withdrawn in the end, but in the meanwhile it has terribly affected the lives of those it has touched, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. Whereas MacDonald sent his characters out of this world into one where truths of the spirit and conscience could be seen more clearly, Williams brought things into this world from beyond it, and let truths of the spirit and conscience emerge in the contacts his characters had with these things. The clearest example of this is to be found in The Place of the Lion. The 'irruption' here is of the 'Angelicals' - unearthly principles of speed or strength, beauty, subtlety or intellect. Being wholly alien to this world, their appearance in it works for the world's destruction until they are brought to return again to their proper state of being. But even apart from this they have their effect on the men and women whom they encounter. The most important of these encounters is that which leads to the conversion of Damaris Tighe, which I have already mentioned, and which will be dealt with in more detail later on19. But it is not the only one. Damaris's father encounters Beauty in the form of a mysterious butterfly Angelical, and is not so much converted as overcome by it, eventually yielding up his life in a state of rapture. As for the hero, Anthony Durrant, the Eagle of intellect answers to a virtue in him. He takes on the qualities of the Eagle but is in no way overcome by it; on the contrary, he ends by asserting the power of Adam over the beasts and is able to "govern the principles of creation" and send them home to their proper place. Two other characters, members of the theosophical group whose leader had brought the Angelicals into the world in the first place (destroying himself in the process) are also overcome, but in a very different way. The powers of the Angelicals answer in them not to virtues, as with Durrant, nor to unselfish longings, as with Mr. Tighe, but to vices. The respectable businessman Foster craves power, and with the advent of the Lion is possessed, and ultimately destroyed, by violent power; the malicious subtlety of Dora Wilmot similarly allows her to be possessed and destroyed by the Serpent. They had, unconsciously at least, wished to use the 'principles of creation', not to adore

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them, like Tighe, nor to restore them to their own place, like Durrant: the result was literally fatal. Occasionally an un-Earthly element is introduced simply for the fun of it. Lewis, for instance, had no need to put an allusion to Numenor into That Hideous Strength, especially as The Lord of the Rings had not been published at the time; but he did it. Usually, however, they are more important than this, forming the world in which the human characters move and develop. Sometimes they are more even than this, the story being really about them, and only secondarily about the humans. Lilith is at least as much the principal character of MacDonald's book by that name as the human narrator Vane is; similarly, in the fantastic parts of At the Back of the North Wind, North Wind herself is often more important than Diamond. She is also, of course, a symbol: this is not made clear at first (except perhaps in so far as, like MacDonald's other 'wise women', she is a teacher), but becomes clearer when we learn more of what it is that lies 'at the back of the North Wind', and is made quite explicit in the book's closing pages. Mara in Lilith performs a similar function as a symbol, but her place in the story is noticeably smaller20; indeed, the only symbolic figure in any of the writings we are concerned with who is really comparable to North Wind in this respect is Prester John in War in Heaven. It has been suggested that the use of beings other than human can function as a kind of shorthand characterization. Dwarfs, for instance, have a definite traditional character; and Lewis says of such beings (he is referring to Tolkien's, but the same would apply to his own) that they "have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls"21. This is true. You can hardly imagine a gruff Elf or an over-refined Dwarf (though Eol in The Silmarillion comes close to the former). But this is at times a handicap rather than an advantage. When you have said that someone is a Dwarf, you have already said that he is tough, courageous, blunt, unsubtle, and so on. How then do you distinguish him from other Dwarfs in the same book, who will also have these characteristics? It is something of an achievement on Tolkien's part that some of his Dwarves are recognizable and distinguishable personalities; but he was wise to limit himself to two of them in The Lord of the Rings. (Similarly, only three or four Elves are given much prominence; whereas there are lots of Men, and of Hobbits - who of course have no traditional character, and are closely related to us.)22 The talking animals of Lewis's 'Narnia' cycle are much more usefully 'visible souls', for the simple reason that the 'Narnia' books are much shorter, and there is less room to build up characters than in the huge length of The Lord of the Rings. It is, therefore, a positive advantage here to be able to describe somebody as a Bear or a Donkey and use this to give the reader an impression of what the character will be like. In fact, Lewis enjoys Narnia too much to leave things at that all the time; he has invented one completely new

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species, the Marsh-wiggle, and given a new and ingenious twist to the already existing one of Mouse. But again we are not given close looks at more than one or two of each species; there are admittedly four or five important Dwarfs, but these are subdivided into two 'good' and three 'bad', and in any case there are never more than two in any one book. Indeed, Lewis evidently wanted to avoid character-building. His 'Narnia' books began with mental pictures which as they "sorted themselves out into events [...] seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology"23. Hence, he explained, the choice of fairytale as the form the pictures eventually took (although, indeed, to get a Faun with an umbrella into any other sort of story would be far from easy). A Christian might feel that there is a defect in this particular device, in that it deprives those with 'visible souls' of freedom. Human beings can be graceful like an Elf or gruff like a Dwarf; they may have the fierceness of a Talking Lion or the hide of a Talking Rhinoceros. But those creatures, if they existed, would not be free to change their characteristics. Is this fair on them? and if not, are they legitimate material for the Christian fantasist? Another feature of these books may be connected with this: the fact that we hardly ever see any of the events through the eyes of a non-human creature, except for Hobbits, who are closer than others to ordinary humanity. There is one passage in The Lord of the Rings where for a short time we see through the eyes of the Dwarf, Gimli; it is not to my mind very successful. And I think one reason for this may be this limited freedom. It is not in any case very easy to imagine oneself into the shoes of an alien species; it is all the more difficult when there is little room for manoeuvre in the alien's character.24 I imagine that the theological answer to this problem would be that everyone has characteristics like these, which are none of his or her deliberate making - the result of heredity or environment, of social position or psychological trauma. What matters from the Christian point of view is what we do with the material we are given. Thorin Oakenshield is a Dwarf, and it is in his nature to be blunt rather than subtle and to have a love of gold and jewels. But it rests with him whether his bluntness shall decay into rudeness or his love of gold into avarice, just as it does with a human who has these same traits of character. In fact we can actually watch this happening in the pages of The Hobbit, as Thorin does for a time succumb to the lure of the dragon's hoard and begin to devise ways of cheating the other possible claimants - only to repent when he and they are faced with a common danger, and to die reconciled with them. Freedom remains. Things are more serious when we look at some of the other species. There seem to be a number in Narnia that are evil throughout - Ogres, Hags, Spectres and the like. There is even an appearance of racism among Lewis's Dwarfs25, for it so happens that the Red Dwarfs we meet are amiable and the Black Dwarfs unpleasant. (It is only an appearance. Caspian, who would have

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nothing to do with Hags or Ogres, cheerfully accepts Black Dwarfs as allies, and we are assured that their leader Nikabrik, who goes wrong, could well have been a good Dwarf had things gone differently.) Similarly, the Ores, Trolls, Wargs and Dragons of Middle-earth are evidently bad throughout, while until The Sllmarillion appeared readers could easily have supposed Elves to be wholly good, or very nearly so. Here we have what seems like a predestination built into nature. Can this be called orthodox? Lewis's horrors are really too briefly dealt with to provide us with material for an answer. Tolkien gives us more - and with it something of an additional theological puzzle. We are told that Ores and Trolls were bred by Morgoth in the Elder Days in mockery of Elves and Ents26, and Frodo says that he did not give life to the Ores, he only ruined and twisted them27. The Silmarillion bears this out; the Elves of Eressea thought Ores descended from warped and corrupted Elves. (A later idea of Tolkien's was that they were corrupted humans2*.) Now if Ores and Trolls are actually descended from intelligent creatures with immortal souls there clearly is a difficulty, for beyond doubt they are so completely 'fallen' that there is no good in them at all (unless one counts as 'good' the moment of sentimentality which led one troll in The Hobbit to propose letting Bilbo go). Indeed, it is worse than this, for there is no record of any voluntary Fall. An Ore, if it has any soul, has a lost one - lost by the work of Morgoth, not of itself or of any Orcish Adam and Eve. It is born damned and irredeemable. Tolkien himself came eventually to see this difficulty29. There are two possibilities. One, which fits the views of the Elves of Eressea, is that in wrecking his unhappy captives, Morgoth bred from them a race without souls, though still with intelligence. (This would also apply if Ores were corrupted humans, as Tolkien seems to have decided at one stage). Hence an Ore is not born damned; death is for him the end of his misery. (But Ores are once mentioned as perhaps reaching the halls of Mandos30.) Another possibility, however, which Tolkien adopted at one time, and which I myself still have a weakness for, is suggested by some of the things we are told about Ores and Trolls in The Lord of the Rings. Neither race, it appears, had any language in its earliest days, and the Trolls at least had their wits increased with wickedness. Perhaps the creatures from which they were bred were not in fact rational beings at all, neither Elves nor Men nor Ents nor Dwarves; in the course of their shaping they acquired some intelligence indeed, but no conscience, nor a soul, nor even the possibility of either. This would fit in with the absence of any mention of an after-life, where either of these evil races is concerned, except in the context of mixed Elf/Ore ancestry31; whereas there is of course such mention for both Men and Elves, and a belief in it for Dwarves also. It might be added that Ores are clearly smaller than Elves; Elves and Men are much the same in height (the two tallest of all the Children of Iluvatar

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were both Elves), but a "huge orc-chieftain" is described as "almost manhigh"32! The Elves, on the other hand, seem to be 'unfallen', and can properly be called 'Good People'. This is not to say that they are sinless, although a casual reading of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings might give that impression. Actually, it would not be justified even on the basis of those books; they make it plain that an individual Elf may do wrong, even if this seldom happens. Thranduil, the Elf-king of northern Mirkwood, is a little self-centred, and he is certainly inconsiderate in his treatment of the Dwarves who stumbled into his feasting (though he is not cruel); and both Elrond and Galadriel refuse to take the One Ring out of fear that it could and would corrupt them. In the First Age, though, we do have a kind of Fall of the Elves - indeed, Tolkien himself uses the word33 -, though it is a Fall of individuals only, and a minority at that. Feanor and his sons are lured by their pride into the fatal oath to recover the Silmarils, and this leads them into further evils, including rebellion, treachery, and the three slayings of Elf by Elf. Other Elves sin, too, such as Eol and Maeglin his son, and even Thingol of Doriath. Usually - and this is a significant fact - they sin through pride and possessive love, whether of things, as with Feanor himself, or of persons, as with Eol and Thingol. But there is no suggestion that the whole race of Elves is affected in this way, nor that the sin of one Elf produces original sin in his or her descendants. They must choose for themselves. And that choice, at least in the years of the Elves' humbled pride depicted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is usually for the good. Their commonest fault is a desire to 'embalm' the past and their own place in it34; but this is not great wickedness. There is, however, one more thing to be said here. Some have seen original sin as kept in being, not by some sort of spiritual genetics, but by the influence one person's sin has on another. "I am mankind - England - my school - my family", wrote William Temple35,"- focussed in a point of its own history. Mankind - 'Adam' - has made me what I am. If similarly Christ makes me something else [...] then indeed there is a new creation." It is perhaps possible to see this sort of process in the way in which Feanor's pride spreads to his sons and his sons' allies, and finally to some outside his original rebellion altogether. But since the Elven sinners did not constitute their whole race, as Adam and Eve did, there was another set of influences at work besides theirs, and the infection could be, and was, eliminated, by death or repentance, without a Redemption. The sinners die, or, like Galadriel, undergo a change of heart, but they do not drag their fellows with them into sin - not without those fellows' co-operation. Elves are each of them in the position of Adam or Eve, except in this, that no race's destiny hangs on their decision, and that in fact they only rarely succumb. Unfallen creatures also appear on Lewis's Mars and Venus, with, however, notable differences between the two cases. Interestingly, the

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differences seem to reflect (whether deliberately or not I do not know) a classic dispute in Christian theology over the nature of the Fall, traditionally summed up in the question 'Did mankind, by falling, become depraved or deprived?' That is, did they lose some great excellence that would otherwise have been theirs, or did they wreck their existing nature? On Lewis's Mars, the unfallenness we find is one which has not been depraved; the rational beings of Malacandra are the natural product of their planet's evolution, just as we are of ours, only they have never been twisted and in a sense made unnatural, in the way that we have. On Perelandra, however, there has been a definite attempt by evil to bring about a Fall, which has failed, and this is perhaps why here unfallenness is depicted in terms of a nature that has not been deprived; the humans of Perelandra are more than the natural products of their planet's evolution, and now have supernatural endowments which the Malacandrians lack. Had they in fact fallen, they would no doubt have shown signs of both deprivation and depravity, but this has been averted. Tolkien's Elves do not quite fit into either of these patterns: they are of course strikingly different in other ways from any of Lewis's beings! They recognize good, and normally follow it; and some at least have superhuman endowments (though not on the Perelandrian scale) in the shape of what the hobbits call magic. It was Elves who made the Silmarils and the Seeing-stones of Numenor, and Elves who began the making of the Rings of Power, besides making three of the Great Rings and participating in the making of most of the others: and these are hardly 'natural' achievements. But they are achievements of craft and learning, like human science; whereas the humans of Perelandra have divinely bestowed authority over their whole world. Hobbits, of course, as has been said, are cousins of our own, and we should expect them to vary much as we do. And indeed there are both good and bad hobbits. But the latter are rare (Lotho Sackville-Baggins, Ted Sandyman, and of course Smeagol the Stoor being practically the only named cases); there is, we are told, hardly any need for the tiny police-force, and no murder had taken place in the whole history of the Shire. Once again one inclines to see in them an unfallen race, though not as exalted a race as that of the Elves - an equivalent on Middle-earth of the Malacandrians. An individual may fall, no doubt; yet even here the stress seems to be on folly rather than wickedness in most cases. Not even Lotho meant things to go as far as they did. The only really vicious crime among Hobbits that I can think of is Gollum's murder of Deagol, and that was under the influence of Sauron's Ring - as of course were Gollum's later misdeeds. Both Hobbits and Elves have idyllic environments, rural-agricultural and sylvan respectively. (One is tempted at times to wonder about the economics of an Elvish community; I cannot recall any instance of an Elvish farmer, though smiths, craftsmen, sailors and a butler are mentioned. Thranduil's people, we are told, "neither mined nor worked metals or jewels, nor did they bother

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much with trading or tilling the earth" 6; your typical Elf seems to be a huntergatherer. In former times there had been Elven cities, such as Gondolin; but none seems to exist in Middle-earth at the time of the Third Age except in Lothlorien.) The almost paradisal quality of the later Elf-communities confirms the suspicion that their people are unfallen, and the same goes for the Hobbits - the introduction of the very fallen 'ruffians' of Saruman into the Shire produces a sudden (though happily brief) deterioration in most of hobbit society, but this was something quite new. Doubtless it was wise of Aragorn to forbid Men to cross the borders of the Shire; and doubtless it is similar wisdom that makes present-day hobbits "avoid us with dismay". Dwarves are a different matter. They were the work neither of the One nor of the Enemy, but of the Vala Aule the Smith37; and it may be that we should regard them neither as fallen nor as basically good - merely as imperfect, spiritually as well as physically, compared with the Children of Iluvatar, Elves and Men, even though it was Iluvatar who gave them life and personality. Certainly Dwarves are capable of evil-doing38; wicked dwarves exist as well as decent enough ones like Thorin and Co. Some even served Morgoth or Sauron, and it was dwarves who murdered Thingol of Doriath. One might compare the situation of the Dwarves to that of the hominids who according to a speculation (if that is the right word) of Lewis's existed side by side with Adam and Eve and included Cain's wife39. Of these too it could be said that they were neither fallen nor good, though in their case there was presumably no question of immortal souls. (Whether Dwarves had such is debatable; they thought so.) Insofar as Lewis was putting this forward seriously, it applies of course only to beings evolved by the same process as ourselves - the idea being that at one point "Man became a living soul", immortal and responsible, while his brothers and sisters after the flesh remained, theologically speaking, animals. But Lewis also made play with the idea that these beings might include dwarfs, giants, trolls, monopods and the like. In Tolkien's Middle-earth this is actually the case (not in an evolutionary context), except that some of these at least have life beyond this one. Elves who die pass into the halls of Mandos and eventually are born into the world again; they may cease altogether when the world ends, but certainly not before then. And even then they may be given more - through their fellowship with Men40. Dwarves also, as they believe, are gathered to sit with their fathers in those halls of waiting, though they may, perhaps, not return, except for the Seven Fathers of their race41. Humans, of course, pass through the halls of Mandos and on beyond the circles of the world, but there is a Resurrection to come even after that. Finrod indeed, in the 'Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth', thinks in terms of an immortal soul leaving its physical body; but Andreth calls this "contempt of the body and a thought of the Darkness"42. Of Ents, nothing is said; Hobbits are presumably human.

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Doubtless speculation about the status in God's sight, and the eternal destiny, of creatures that never existed is of the same level of importance as the famous angels that danced on the point of a needle; but it is not without its own interest, and it is even conceivable that one day interstellar travel might make it relevant after all. Lewis has something to say about this too; we shall be considering it later on.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Chapter 18; p. 273 of the 1962 Gollancz edition of Phantasies and Lilith in one volume. Compare also the discussion of travel between worlds between the members of Tolkien's fictional 'Notion Club' m Sauron Defeated, pp. 162ff. Commentary on the 'Song of Songs' (Migne PG 44, 941c and 1037c). Cambridge, 1967. Also referred to in Lewis's poem The Last of the Wine'; on both occasions it is misspelt 'Numinor'. Judgment at Chelmsford deals with historical events, and therefore introduces historical figures who were later revered as saints, as any other play about the past might. Both appear in Lilith; Satan, though not the traditional Satan, in The Rite of the Passion (and the earlier 'Scene from a Mystery'); Lilith in Descent into Hell and a poem in Heroes and Kings. Interestingly, Lilith is also an ancestress of Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but there she is a Djinn, not an angel. He Came Down from Heaven, p. 18. Similarly, Maieldil in the 'Ransom' books is God the Son, not the Father, nor the Trinity as a whole. Walter Hooper, however, has drawn attention to Asian's threefold 'Myself in The Horse and his Boy, which does indeed look Trinitarian. (See Hooper ,1980, p. 14.) Mr. Hooper (1980, pp. 103ff.) doubts whether Asian is truly incarnate. If by this is meant that he was never, for instance, born as a Lion, this is correct; he is already a Lion at the creation of Narnia in The Magician's Nephew. But certainly Lewis did not mean this to diminish the reality of Asian's lionhood; see the words of Asian to Bree in ch. 14 of The Horse and his Boy, which Hooper himself quotes. The Silmarillion, p. 21; The Road Goes Ever On, p. 66. Cf. the forms assumed by the Oyeresu at the close of Perelandra. The Silmarillion, pp. 73, 175, 280; LOTR, p. 1074. I saacs and Zi mbardo, p. 3 5. LOTR, p. 697; The Silmarillion, pp. 30-1, 299-300. For a fuller account see Unfinished Tales, pp. 388ff. Cf. even earlier the fragmentary 'Scene from a Mystery' of 1919. See The Image of the City, pp. 174 and 178. Shadows of Ecstasy is perhaps an exception; and in Descent into Hell the natural and supernatural are too completely intermingled for 'irruption' to be an appropriate word. See below, chapter 5. Mara's part is larger than it seems, though, as the white leopard Astarte is her servant. Isaacs and Zimbardo, p. 15. Cf. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, p. 27.

26

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Chapter 2 In The Silmarillion most of the characters are Elves; but the 'chronicle' nature of much of the book eliminates nearly all 'personality' anyway. Of Other Worlds, p. 36. The Silmarillion deals of course mainly with Elves, but it is mostly written from an observer's point of view. We are seldom expected to see through Elvish eyes. Tolkien has also been accused of racism, because the dark-skinned Southrons of LOTR are on Sauron's side. This is of course absurd (consider Sam's reflections on seeing one killed (LOTR, p. 687) - they are entirely sympathetic); Tolkien's own rejection of racism is briefly but forcibly expressed in his Letters, pp. 37f. and 72. LOTR, p. 507. LOTR, p. 948. The Silmarillion, pp. 50 and 94. But this was only a theory; cf. Unfinished Tales, p. 385, n. 5; Morgoth's Ring, pp. 413-422. At this point Tolkien concluded (as noted above in the text) that Ores were probably beasts with no rational soul. But see Tolkien's Letters, p. 195, for a possibility of even Ores' being in a way redeemed, by "accepting or tolerating their making". For Tolkien's realization of the theological problem, see Morgoth's Ring, p. 409, which also raises the possibility of redemption: "unless Ores were ultimately remediable, or could be amended and 'saved'?" Morgoth 's Ring, p. 411. Morgoth's Ring, p. 411. LOTR, p. 343. Cf. Tolkien's tetters, p. 197. tetters, pp. 147-48 Temple(1924), p. 152. The Hobbit, p. 144. Among the Noldor, though, we are told that the women were usually more skilled in the tending of fields than the men {Morgoth's Ring, p. 214). The Silmarillion, pp. 43-44. In some of Tolkien's earlier drafts of what was later to become The Silmarillion, the Dwarves are definitely evil; but this idea was later abandoned. See his tetters, p. 237, and Poems, p. 43. The Silmarillion, p. 42; cf. p. 176, and the reappearance of Glorfindel in LOTR after being killed in the fall of Gondolin. For what may or may not happen at the End, see Morgoth's Ring, pp. 312 and 319. The Hobbit, p. 240; The Silmarillion, p. 44; LOTR, p. 1108. LOTR, p. 1100; The Silmarillion, p. 265. For Finrod and Andreth, see Morgoth's Ring, p. 317.

CHAPTER 3 THE CHARGE OF ESCAPISM "The pursuit of art [...) is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labelling them as 'escapism'." (Ursula K. LeGuin)

"Romance controlled the minds of men; and by creating force-producing illusions, furthered the world's betterment with the forces thus brought into being." (J. B. Cabell)

"There ought to be a place for any story, which although founded in the marvellous, is true to human nature and itself." (MacDonald)

It is obvious enough that the writers we are looking at could be accused of 'escapism' - as, of course, can anyone writing fantasy, whether or not they have the 'serious' content that our writers had. It was as obvious to them as to anyone else, and three of them actually set out to defend 'escapist' writing in general - to deny, in effect, that there was any crime to accuse them of1. I must be careful here, however. None of them would have denied that there can be evil forms of 'escapism'. But in common usage the word tends to be used only in a bad sense, as if 'mental distraction or relief from reality' (my dictionary's definition) had necessarily to be an evil. Our writers, I imagine, would have answered that it all depends on what the mind is distracted from, on where exactly it finds its relief, and on what it does afterwards when it has enjoyed its relief and distraction. In the first place, there are a number of distinctions to be drawn. There is, Lewis pointed out2, the psychological sense of 'fantasy' in which the patient suffers from actual delusions of (say) grandeur, which is obviously undesirable; and there is also another quite different sense of the word in which there is no question of delusion, the fantasiser being well aware of what is real and what is not. It is of course this second sense that concerns us now. And in this sense fantasy may be morbid, indulged in so much as to injure the fantasiser's capacity for coping with what is real; but it need not be, and as a rule is not.

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Furthermore, one can subdivide 'normal castle-building' (that is, the nonmorbid kind) into two more classes, according to whether it is egoistic or disinterested - whether, that is, the castle-builder is himself thought of as the hero of his own fantasies or not. Comparatively few fantasy books fall into the 'egoistic' category, at least of those I have read; though of course it might be possible for a reader to identify with a character in one, it is not likely to be easy unless there is a considerable coincidence of personalities (or an absence of personality in the fictional character to resist identification). It would certainly be difficult to carry out this identifying in many of the writings with which I am concerned at present. Most of the sympathetic characters in The Lord of the Rings and Out of the Silent Planet are not even human; the 'heroes' of Phantastes and Lilith behave too unheroically, indeed too foolishly, for an egoist's taste; and most of the action in Perelandra and Williams's novels takes place on such a peculiar intellectual and spiritual level that here too such identification is surely impossible. The only cases where egoistic castle-building would have much of a chance, it seems to me, are the children's books of Lewis and MacDonald. Actually, as Lewis points out, egoistic castlebuilding is more likely to be encouraged by books whose setting is apparently 'realistic', where the hero or heroine becomes rich, famous, beautiful or beloved in an apparently natural way, such as the reader might feel could happen to him- or herself too, if only things were a little bit different. There is no particular difficulty in my imagining myself to be pretty well the same old me, only a bit handsomer, wittier, richer and more important. But it is not just difficult, it is positively unpleasant to imagine oneself in the position of a fourfoot hobbit captured by ores, a black magician whose spells are collapsing at their moment of culmination, or a don finding his ambitions and anxieties manipulated by the powers of the N.I.C.E. There is, in fact, one portrait of an egoistic castle-builder in these books - that of Wentworth in Williams's Descent into Hell - and it is utterly horrible. He ends up damned. Obviously even disinterested castle-building can become an evil if taken to excess. So can practically anything. Anyone who spent their entire time daydreaming, however un-self-centredly, would be no use to God or man. Not even if their day-dreaming consisted of reading the works of MacDonald, Williams, Tolkien and Lewis. But have many such people existed? And while egoistic castle-building will all too probably corrupt the soul by leading to an egoistic life, there is no reason to suppose that the disinterested form would have such effects. Actually, it can be argued, and is (by MacDonald), that as some fantasy enters into everyone's life, we should not discourage but cultivate it. Otherwise "the power that might have gone forth in conceiving the noblest forms of action, in realizing the lives of the true-hearted, the self-forgetting, will go forth in building airy castles of vain ambition, of boundless riches, of unearned admiration. [...] Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams"3.

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Now to say that fantasy is normally harmless and in any case inevitable is not to say very much positive in its favour. But there is more than just this to be said. What exactly is the fantasy being contrasted with? If the answer is 'With facts', MacDonald points out that these alone will never get you very far. Scientists can amass facts, no doubt; but they need to use their imagination if they are ever to frame a new hypothesis or plan a new experiment. Discovery and understanding, and hence any progress in science, depend upon the use of the imagination, and then of the intellect: "the imagination", MacDonald quotes from Novalis, the German mystic, engineer and fantasist, "is the stuff of the intellect". And exactly the same applies in other fields of study. While this may be true of the imagination in general, it could still be the case that fantasy in our sense was objectionable; it forms, after all, only a very small part of the world of imagination. Perhaps the imagination should be very firmly restricted to fields in which it is directly useful? Accordingly, it becomes necessary to defend fantasy itself. Its principal champion among our four is Tolkien, who makes far the most startling claims for it; he comes close to identifying 'sub-creation' (the building of consistent and convincing 'secondary worlds') with art in general. Now since fantasy is the most difficult form of sub-creation, being less able than other forms to draw on the creation that lies before our eyes, it is "a rare achievement of Art", "indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent"4. This does seem to be overstating the case. It surely applies only to narrative art; and it does not apply even there where the narrative is designed to carry implications beyond itself. For instance, I shall have occasion later to discuss those narratives that can be called 'myths' (in a rather special sense of the word), where the power of the story to bring the hearer's mind into a 'secondary world' is only a preliminary to affecting him or her in another and a deeper way. Nevertheless, I am sure that this achievement of 'enchanting' (Tolkien's word) the reader or hearer is an achievement and an art, and can be immensely worthwhile simply as an achievement and an art; it is only to be condemned as useless if all art is to be condemned with it. Perhaps some would feel (with or without saying it) that all art was to be condemned: the 'truly serious people' mentioned by Mrs. LeGuin in the quotation prefixed to this chapter, for instance. One of the Inklings, Adam Fox, even complained that the word 'escape' was being used "to condemn art, religion, and almost anything that's pleasant, including research"5. But this is unusual. The word 'sub-creation' raises another point of considerable importance. Both Tolkien and MacDonald take quite seriously the analogy between humans' imaginative 'creation' and the real Creation that is the work of God alone. MacDonald is cautious about this. It is probably best, he says, to avoid the word 'creation' ('sub-creation' had not been coined at the time), and the artist is at least as much a 'Trouvere', a Finder, as a 'Poietes', a Maker. Lewis, in

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one of his letters6, strongly criticizes the use of 'creation' and similar words to describe the artist's work, since creation proper is de novo, while all that even the greatest of artists can do is rearrange what has already been created by God. I am told by one who knew him that Lewis in conversation was fond of using the word 'invention' instead, a word which of course, like 'trouvere', originally implied finding rather than making. Tolkien, too, spoke of himself as discovering what was going on in Middle-earth rather than inventing it in the modern sense, though he might then revise it very extensively! MacDonald does, however, see some analogy between the two uses of the word 'creation'. The imagination of man, after all, was made in the image of the Lord's. And indeed the artist's work is perhaps not so much an analogy of God's creation as an instance of it. "There is always more in a work of art [...] than the producer himself perceived while he produced it. [...] a strong reason for saying that the inspiration of the Almighty changed its ends"7. There is a rather similar idea in the lines from Tolkien's poem 'Mythopoeia' (originally addressed to Lewis) which he quotes in Tree and Leaf: although now long estranged Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed I....J Though all the crannies of the world we filled With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, And sowed the seed of dragons - 'twas our right (Used or misused). That right has not decayed, We make still by the law in which we're made. It has, of course, been quite common for theologians and philosophers to defend or illustrate the doctrine of Creation by pointing to human 'creative' work; here we have a special class of such work defended as being analogous to, or even a continuation of, the Divine creativity! But this 'sub-creative' aspect of fantasy is not its only value. Tolkien lists three other things which fairy-tales (and to some extent other kinds of fantasy) can provide: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. The last of these I shall be discussing in the next chapter; the first two need attention now. By 'Recovery' he means something like the ability to see things, especially very familiar things, as if they were new, to see them as the real wonders that they are. In this sense, Recovery was a constant theme in G. K. Chesterton's writings. The hero of Manalive went home the long way - right round the world - with the aim of Recovering his home properly at the end. The whole point of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is the Recovery of the real existence and individuality of the places people live in and the things that they do, the

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realization that the grocer really is a merchant dealing in spices from the East and sugars from the Caribbees, or the chemist a wielder of the hidden powers of the elements. And it is clear that Chesterton himself took the same approach to things in his private life. In an often-quoted letter to his fiancee he once remarked "I like the cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. [...] The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud"9. There is a similar theme in MacDonald's 'unspoken sermon' on The Truth'10: The very thought [of water] makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst. [...] this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace [...] this water is its own self its truth, and is therein a truth of God. His short story, The Day Boy and the Night Girl' is a sustained piece of pure Recovery to an extent which I have not met anywhere else; the actual story could really be said to be unimportant compared with the intensity with which the Recovered reality of night and day are pressed upon us. It is less about the two characters of its title than it is about day-ness and night-ness. And in the same author's Phantastes the most horrible thing about the Shadow which haunts the narrator is the way in which it destroys Recovery wherever it falls. An "aureole of emanating rays" around a child's head becomes a straw hat with the sun shining through it; and the instrument the child is carrying, through which the poet looks "when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered" becomes a toy kaleidoscope. And we are left in no doubt that it is the first impression that is the true one. For this anti-Recovery even applies to human beings, and in the dark of the Shadow the narrator finds that he cannot even trust those whom we know, and he knows, to be his friends11. By contrast, in the Hans Andersen-like story The Shadows' (kindly Shadows these, by the way, and in no way resembling the one in Phantastes) it is a sign that Rinkelman's vision was a true one that "instead of making common things look commonplace, as a false vision would have done, it had made common things disclose the wonderful that was in them." Now the point about fairy-tales, according to Tolkien, is that they can give us this Recovery; and more. Without some additional element from fantasy, you can only Recover something before you here and now groceries, or cyclostyle ink, or your home - and that only within the limits of your own imagination. This is good indeed; but fantasy and fairy-tale can take you further. They can give the familiar new associations. They are made out

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of the Primary World to begin with, naturally; "but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory"12. How is this done? Lewis suggests in one essay that poetic language conveys information about an object or experience by communicating to us the emotion which accompanies the object or the experience13. When Burns tells us that a woman is like a red, red rose, or Wordsworth that another is like a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye, they are enabling us to share their understanding of these women. And what they are achieving is something very close to Recovery, for, had we known the actual women, it is surely true that the poets would still have enabled us to realize more about them than we should ever, with our prosaic minds, have managed by ourselves. But Recovery seems to work more often by means of associations than by communicated emotions. (The two cannot be completely separated, of course.) Let me take as an example - all the better because it was not intended to produce Recovery - a sentence I quoted just now from Tolkien: "By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed." Now it so happens that when I read this I did not know what Gram was, or who it was who forged it. (I do now.) But I do know the effect the sentence, and especially the words 'cold iron', had on me; and it was an effect of Recovery. Iron ceases with those words to be the stuff of rusty objects that get in the way of gardening, or that one's children insist on bringing in from the road; it becomes something grim, inexorable, menacing. What is more, I can see something of the reason the words have this effect on me. It is a matter of associations, in this case at least chiefly literary associations: 'the iron entered into his soul', 'being fast bound in misery and iron', Kipling, manacles, the Iron Age, axes, the Iron Crown of Thangorodrim; the images come crowding in, all with the same sombre message; and is not the very colour of iron gloomy and threatening? It is, of course, the qualification 'cold' that does the trick14. 'Strong as iron' would have brought in quite different associations: the girders of huge cantilever bridges, the Great Iron Ship, muscles like iron bands, ironclads and Ironsides, and so on. Perhaps when God looked upon the world that he had made and saw that it was good, the goodness that He saw was what we appreciate, partially and inadequately, in Recovery. The world was new then; to the Divine Eternity no doubt it is still new and always will be: but with us this is not so, and we need some means of Recovery if we are to partake of His true vision of the reality of things. For though newness of vision is not all that Recovery can give us, it is basic to it; we cannot see the full potentialities of anything if we cannot see it anew. Such vision can perhaps be achieved by a deliberate effort of will, or by unusual sensitivity on the part of the beholder; but if a writer wishes to induce

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Recovery in others, how is he to set about it? It may well be that fantasy can help us here more than any other kind of literature except great poetry. We grow weary too easily of such things as mountains and trees: television teams bicker up the slopes of Everest; people casually chop down trees of decades' slow growth to provide sticks for tomatoes or make way for a by-pass. Then we are confronted with Caradhras or Koshtra Pivrarcha, Yggdrasil or the mallorn in the Party Field, and once again mountains and trees are mountains and trees as they were meant to be. They have lost the unhappy and degrading associations that we have come to give them, and can resume those that are proper to their real nature. But in order to lose those former associations they have to be removed for a time from the context of our ordinary life; and this can be done best by poetry or fantasy, sometimes perhaps by these alone. Can one go further yet? Lewis points out that poetic language can sometimes convey to us the quality of experiences that we have never had, or perhaps never can have - once again by communicating to us the emotion which would accompany such an experience; and he quotes examples from Shelley, Wordsworth, Marvell and Pope to illustrate the point. Can fantasy do the same? Can it induce Recovery, or an analogue of Recovery, where the original experience has never been had at all? Certainly it can give us the vision of new experiences. David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which influenced Lewis so much, does this - to those who can take that very peculiar book at all15. But Lindsay is describing experiences of the soul rather than the senses; he hurls his reader into and out of moral stances and world-views, but the only feeling one gets is that of violent spiritual disturbance. There is nothing that corresponds in the least to Pope's "die of a rose in aromatic pain" (to borrow one of Lewis's examples). The nearest to that which any fantasy writer comes, as far as I know, is in the climax of Williams's All Hallows' Eve. This again is dealing with experience of the soul, but it does so in terms of the senses. Yet even there the change in the heroine, Lester Furnivall, is not (to me) quite vivid enough to be felt, I understand, or at least I think I do, but I cannot be said to share. Perhaps one day a great poet will turn his or her hand to this kind of fantasy, and then we shall know what it is like to Recover that which has never yet been ours to lose. But in looking thus for new experiences, and still more in realizing the need to abandon old associations where these impede Recovery, I am approaching Tolkien's second heading, Escape, where he seeks to turn the critics' own weapons against them, accepting that fantasy really is a form of Escape, but claiming that this is a positive blessing and virtue. Why for goodness' sake should we not seek to escape from the 'real' world, if it is bad? "Is the world so poor?" asked MacDonald. 'The less reason, then, to be satisfied with it; the more reason to rise above it, into the region of the true, of the eternal, of things as God thinks them"16. And presumably if fantasy opens

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our eyes to some possibility better than this world, that is what it is helping us rise to. So also Tolkien: "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? [...] They are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter"17. Escape, then, is not only legitimate but desirable - provided that the escaper does not desert the cause when free. It is not absolutely impossible to work for the betterment of mankind with no ideas about what would be better; for it is possible to feel of some things that nothing whatever could be worse than they. But this is rare, and clearly can only hold with a comparatively limited number of really blatant evils; normally we react against what is bad in the hope of replacing it with what is good. Now surely any book, however fantastic its theme, which gives the reader a new vision of beauty, goodness, courage or the like, will be of help in this. It will not be enough, of course. You will have to know not only what you would like to achieve but also how far it is possible and how to set about it. 'Escapist' reading is no substitute for work. Nor is it possible to reconstruct Narnia or the Shire in present-day Britain; and we have to realize this even if we wish that it were possible. But it may still be within our powers to preserve, or even extend, those features which the present-day world still has in common with Narnia or the Shire; and a love of those countries will help us to do so. 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1 1. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

See Tolkien, 'On Fairy Tales' (the first part of Tree and Leaf); MacDonald, 'The Imagination' and 'The Fantastic Imagination' (A Dish of Orts, pp. 1-42 and 313-22); Lewis, Of Other Worlds (especially the essay 'On Science Fiction') and An Experiment in Criticism, chs. 5-7. An Experiment in Criticism, pp. 49ff. A Dish of Orts, pp. 29-30. Tree and Leaf p. 44. Poetry for Pleasure (inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry). Utters, p. 203. A Dish of Orts, p. 25. Cf. also Lewis, loc. cit. Page 49. M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, p. 97. Unspoken Sermons, series 3, p. 68. Chapter 9; pp. 66-67 of the 1962 edition. Tree and Ixaf, p. 53. Christian Reflections, pp. 132ff. ('The Language of Religion'). Compare what Tolkien says about adjectives and incantations in Tree and Leaf, p. 25. For a brief account of Lindsay, see the Appendix. A Dish of Orts, p. 27. Tree andljeaf, p. 54.

CHAPTER 4 VARIETIES OF SYMBOLISM "Une idee qui prend corps et devient vivante n'est autre chose qu'un mythe." (M. Camus)

"The act of being in love is still not in the deepest sense the Good. But it may possibly become a helpful educator." (Kierkegaard)

Any person setting out to write fantastic fiction with the intention of using it in the service of Christianity (or indeed of anything else) must obviously find some way of relating it to reality. There is perhaps a certain temptation to assume that the only way to do this is to write allegory, and as a matter of fact all four of the writers I am considering have been accused (if that is the right word) of writing allegories. Oddly enough, all four actually did so, and this is itself the clearest evidence that the rest of their writings were not allegorical: for the differences stand out a mile when you compare the genuine allegories with the others. "As if nothing but an allegory could have two meanings!"1 The actual allegories can be enumerated quite briefly. They are: MacDonald's short stories The Golden Key' and The Castle'2; Williams's Nativity plays Seed of Adam and The House by the Stable, with the latter's sequel Grab and Grace; Tolkien's short story 'Leaf by Niggle'; and Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress. And in at least two of these - The Golden Key' and 'Leaf by Niggle' - the sheer story-telling at times reduces the allegorical element to a minor role. ('Leaf by Niggle' is in any case at least as much about the relationship of the artist to his creation, in which aspect it is not allegorical, as it is about Purgatory, in which it is.) In each of these pieces, except perhaps for the two last mentioned, there is no attempt to provide a setting in 'real life' (even in a secondary world) - the setting is itself symbolic; and even in the two exceptions we very soon move out of the 'real' setting into a symbolic one. Moreover, the characters we meet symbolize - or even are explicitly called things like Faith, Hell, Pride, Wisdom, Death, and the Church. Even the human characters involved in the stories sometimes shift and change into symbols: the Emperor Augustus in Seed of Adam is also Adam himself, and a symbol (of authority), while conversely the central figure of The Pilgrim's Regress is as it were split into two, one of them being the other's conscience. Now if you look at the other writings being considered, a whole series of differences leap to the eye. First and foremost, most of the characters in them are human (or non-human) beings, and they react to 'real' (though

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improbable) surroundings as beings with that sort of character might; they do not represent Everyman, nor do their surroundings represent Purgatory, say, or Life. This means that new relationships have to be established between the stories and everyday life: of which the simplest is to take a state of affairs that the author believes in in this world and transfer it into the fantastic world he has invented. The commonest such transference is that of moral situations; but it also applies to doctrinal matters. Thus Williams did very decidedly believe in substitution and exchange: and in Descent into Hell he shows them in action. But the way they are shown acting is unexpected. Pauline Anstruther is being haunted by her own ghost or Doppelganger; her fear is borne for her at one point by Peter Stanhope; and it turns out in the end that this same fear was being borne by Pauline herself in the first place on behalf of a long-dead ancestor1. The setting is fantastic; but the idea expressed in it was very definitely believed in. A similar device is used by Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Asian allows the Witch to kill him in Edmund's place. Lewis always fought shy of 'theories of the Atonement': "any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself'4. Consequently, a whole series of questions about this 'Narnian Atonement' are left unanswered - not only because to have answered them would have cluttered up the book, but because Lewis would not presume to answer them. But the fact of the substitutionary death is indisputable. It should be noted that in neither case is the transferred situation an allegory of its original. It is, of course, in each case fictitious; but, if we forget that for a moment, it is a 'real' instance of the original. Very occasionally transference can be combined with allegory; but this is unusual. A case would be that of the repentance of Eustace in The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treadef. To some extent this is treated naturalistically - Eustace does come to realize his own character and the way he has been behaving. But he has also (as a result of this previous behaviour) become transformed into a dragon; and he cannot return to human shape without the removal of his dragon-skin by Asian; his own efforts to get rid of it strip off one skin only to reveal another underneath. This is genuine allegory, representing, of course, Eustace's inability to change himself and his character without Christ's help: but there are not many instances of such mixtures in any of our writers. When The Lord of the Rings first appeared, it was quite widely taken to be, or contain, an allegory of the atomic bomb. This had to be abandoned in the light not only of Tolkien's denials but of the fact that the idea of the Ring long antedated the Bomb. But there has been at least one later attempt to impose an allegorical interpretation on the book, by Mr. Gunnar Urang in his Shadows of Heaven5. Mr. Urang is too wary to make it all allegory, nor does

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he equate Ring with Bomb; but I think him misguided for all that. He takes the free peoples of Middle-earth to represent "the rational-moral nature of man"; thus, the Dwarves stand for man as craftsman, the Hobbits for 'ordinariness', and so on, while Gandalf, coming as he does from outside, stands for grace. The book is eschatological in theme, and Aragorn's coronation inaugurates a new, messianic age. This will not do. It derives its plausibility in large part from the use of the word 'represent' rather than the word 'are'. The Dwarves are craftsmen; the Hobbits are ordinary and apparently unheroic; Gandalf's coming was the work of grace. They no more represent human characteristics than characters in any other book who happen to be craftsmen, ordinary or gracious. While Aragorn's coronation inaugurates only a new age, not a messianic one; indeed, it will be one in some ways inferior to the one that preceded it, for the Elves are passing from Middle-earth. (Significantly, the Fourth Age did not begin with the coronation of Aragorn but with the departure of Elrond.) It is made abundantly clear that the Fourth Age will have its own troubles, as the three previous ones did; if there is eschatology involved, it is an eschatology that has been thoroughly demythologized, so that men (and hobbits) are always living in an age under attack from the Darkness6. But there are parallels, surely, with what Christians believe about this world and its history? Yes indeed; but Tolkien has not allegorized his beliefs into a story, he has given his story shape in accordance with his beliefs. He has not given us an allegory of Christian hope; he has written his imaginary history in the light of the Christian hope with which he regards real history. To call this 'allegory' is to stretch the meaning of the word beyond all reasonable limits. Much more common than allegory, in MacDonald and Williams at least, is what one can probably best call Personification (though in some cases this might be a little misleading) - the appearance in a story, most of whose characters are normal human beings, of one or more allegorical figures. (We have already seen something of this in looking at the 'machinery' of the stories.) Usually, there is only one such: a figure, like MacDonald's various wise women, or Williams's 'Necessities'. But in Judgement at Chelmsford Williams turns this kind of symbolizing inside out. The plot of the play, in so far as there is one, involves chiefly the personifications - the Accuser and the Sees, that is, Chelmsford herself and the Great Sees (Rome, Canterbury, Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem) who act as observers and commentators: the human characters only appear in brief episodes. Something of the same effect was also introduced into the much earlier The Rite of the Passion. It is arguable that MacDonald's 'fairy-story' 'The Golden Key', which I included under allegory, should really be included here, though its symbolic characters are far from mere observers. For the most part it is allegory, symbolizing the journey of the hero and heroine through life and death

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towards heaven. But the 'machinery' of the story is not easy to interpret. The couple are started on their journey by a wise woman not unlike those found elsewhere in MacDonald; and eventually they come (separately) to Death in the person of the Old Man of the Sea, "a kingly man of middle age" to those who can see him as he really is. He is not personally acquainted with their destination, though he is able to send them on towards it; and the route on which he sends Tangle, the heroine, takes her successively to the Old Man of the Earth ("a youth of marvellous beauty" gazing into a mirror in which he sometimes sees the shadows of heaven) and the Old Man of the Fire, a naked child arranging coloured balls, who does know heaven and gives her her final instructions7. I do not think that MacDonald really intended separate meanings for each of these figures; they seem rather to represent different stages in Tangle's understanding or spiritual growth. (That part of this takes place after her death is no argument against this interpretation; MacDonald strongly believed in growth, and purification, after death, and it is surely significant that at one stage Tangle has to pass through almost intolerable heat8.) Her successive guides are there to help the allegory, and the story, along, but they are not allegorical themselves. They are closer to being 'mythical' - of which more later on. We can look at these different uses of symbolism as forming a kind of sequence. In allegory proper the symbolic figures are, so to speak, puppets; what happens to them is determined by that which is being depicted in the allegory. Personifications have more of a life of their own, because the story in which they figure is not so determined. But there is a third stage in the sequence, of considerable importance in the understanding of Williams and MacDonald, which may be called that of the Image. It is not easy to pin this stage down and define it. Perhaps the best way to do this is to quote a passage from MacDonald9; in it he is attempting to define 'mysticism', and to my mind shooting very wide of the mark, but defining imagery (in the present sense of the word) rather well. "A mystical mind", he says, "is one which, having perceived that the highest expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes thought about truth so embedded by dealing with the symbols themselves after logical forms. [...] The Lord himself often employed it, as, for instance, in the whole passage ending with the words 'If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!'10" There are varying levels of complexity in the use of such images. A rather simple instance would be that of stairs in MacDonald. "I have a passion for stairs", he once wrote11, and in his writings they are a constantly recurring symbol; but they do not always recur with exactly the same meaning. Stairs do, in real life, have different effects at different times; and the same applies to stairs as an image. At the simplest level, you find the stairs inside the rainbow in 'The Golden Key', leading to heaven12. In The Princess and the Goblin and

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Lilith the point lies firstly in the fact that the stairs lead to parts of huge, half empty houses which the central characters have never yet explored. No doubt a corridor would have served as well in this particular respect, but there is obviously the additional element of the associations height has for us. A ground-level corridor would only lead to a room which might in theory have been approached by some other route, perhaps even from outside; the upper room accessible only by the stairs is a better home for mystery. And MacDonald did not choose this image because it fitted something he wanted to say in any case; it suggested things to him, and was used and developed accordingly. In the introduction to his anthology of excerpts from MacDonald, Lewis suggests that the great houses in these two books are themselves to some degree symbolic, representing the way in which a man is so much more than his own conscious self. ("The conscious self is less than the self, MacDonald wrote elsewhere13. "Your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings [...] may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased f...] now from some infant hate in your heart [...] or, it may be, now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra".) If so, of course, the stairs provide also the link between the conscious self and the 'heavenly orchestra'. Certainly the image is used to make just this point, for instance, in the poem That Holy Thing', where we find MacDonald, addressing Christ, saying My why or when thou wilt not heed But come down thine own secret stair14. This image is scattered thinly through a number of works: for a more concentrated one I might instance the figure of North Wind. In some ways, as has been said, she resembles the other young/old women in MacDonald. But this character belongs to her, in a sense, simply as being the North Wind something strong and vigorous yet as old as the earth and its air. (Actually, MacDonald's North Wind is evidently the latest of a series; she is only a few thousand years old, she says.) More than that: she carries with her a certain air of cold yet energetic clarity, of the blowing away of cobwebs and rubbish; and she has a dangerous side to her as well. All this is true enough of real north winds. Even the idea of the Earthly Paradise 'at the back of the North Wind', while doubtless not strictly true, has (as MacDonald reminds his readers in the first paragraph of the book) a very ancient tradition behind it. But these qualities and associations take on a new significance as we realize that North Wind is also Death. They remain true, but teach us something new (or something we did not altogether believe) about what North Wind symbolizes and what Death is like. I wonder, incidentally - is it coincidence that Diamond's first and last meetings with North Wind both occur in rooms over a stairway?

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In his biography of his parents ~, MacDonald's son Greville remarks that, to him, "a symbol was far more than an arbitrary outward and visible sign of an abstract conception: its high virtue lay in a common substance with the idea presented. [...] We find co-substance between the stairs of a cathedral spire and our own secret stair up to the wider vision - the faculty of defying the 'plumbline of gravity' being the common and imaginative heritage". These are not invented symbols like the plus and minus signs in arithmetic; they are things already existing in their own right, even if we do not always realize their potentialities as images. 'They may not have revealed him to us, but at least when he is revealed, they show themselves so much of his nature, that we at once use them as spiritual tokens in the commerce of the spirit"16. "The Cross", said MacDonald elsewhere17,"is an historical sign, not properly a symbol, except through the facts it reminds us of. On the other hand, baptism and the eucharist are symbols of the loftiest and profoundest kind, true to nature and all its meanings, as well as to the facts of which they remind us. They are in themselves symbols of the truths involved in the facts they commemorate." Such symbolism is not of course confined to the sacraments: "nature is brimful of symbolic and analogical parallels to the goings and comings, the growth and the changes of the highest nature in man. It could not be otherwise. For not only did they issue from the same thought, but the one is made for the other"18. MacDonald seems to have limited his use of the Image to the better understanding or communication of truth about God and "the highest nature in man". In Williams the Image is taken much further. Not only is it the key to much of his theological thought, it dominates his thought on all sorts of subjects. "A symbol", he wrote (later he came to prefer the word 'image' as more expressive of "the vivid individual existence of the lesser thing") "is rather a representative than a representation"19. It must, according to a definition of Coleridge's (i) exist in itself, (ii) derive from something greater than itself, (iii) represent in itself that greatness from which it derives20. "We have to start with figures as intensely themselves as can be managed; the less themselves they are, the less identical with the facts of another category they become. But the more themselves they are, the less 'suggestively similar' [and hence useful to the allegorist] of another kind of fact can they be"21. Thus Beatrice is not, to Dante, a useful way of depicting Theology - namely, as a woman whom he loves. She could only be that by ceasing to be the actual Beatrice whom Dante did in fact love. "[S]he is a given fact which has in two categories of experience two different names. But the fact itself is identical everywhere"22: the 'fact' being in such cases a pattern of qualities or relations that is always the same, whether we are talking about Theology or a particular young woman from Florence. It is no accident that Williams often refers to God or Christ simply as 'Love'. No doubt he felt he had scriptural justification for this, in St John's

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aphorism "God is love"; but also he clearly saw love as another fact which was identical in two categories. Already in the early poetry he is elaborating analogies between the human wife he loves and the divine Christ whom also he loves (and indeed Christ's Mother and Christ's Church as well): The titles of her Son and her From whom the fairest Love was born With a like truth but lightlier Now by thy love and thee are worn23. But the principle is not confined to this analogy of love. Perhaps the most spectacular instance in Williams's writing occurs in the poem The Departure of Dindrane'24, where the 'identity' of straightness and strength appears in nine different forms - not all, admittedly, as different from one another as the 'categories' of Beatrice and Theology. Most of the nine also appear in the earlier poems Taliessin in the School of the Poets' and The Son of Lancelot'25. Now the drawback to the use of Images in fantastic literature - or indeed in any sort of fiction - is that the writer has so much control over what he writes. Beatrice really did exist; so did the highways, octaves and measuringrods of The Departure of Dindrane'. But if you are writing a novel, you are creating what did not exist in reality, and will you not find yourself producing an allegory whether you want to or not? Williams succeeded to a certain extent in avoiding this difficulty by using (in most of his novels) symbols that already existed in the world of ideas - or indeed had at some time existed in the real world. There really was a cup used at the Last Supper (the Arthurian, legendary associations of the Grail are not utilised in War in Heaven); there was, presumably, an original set of Tarot cards. True, there was no mysterious stone in the crown of Solomon, nor a sorcerer named Simon Leclerc; but the legends of Solomon, and belief in sorcery - these are realities all right. To a certain extent, therefore, these can 'be themselves' with the intensity needed if they are to serve as proper Images. But in fact Imagery is nothing like as prominent in Williams's novels as it is in his poetry or theology: the only case in a novel in which the Image is developed to its full extent is that of the Tarots in The Greater Trumps. The whole idea of the golden figures (of which the cards are pictures) is one of an Image; there is no 'suggestive similarity' between their dance and that of creation, but there is a fact - the dance itself - which is identical in both. Moreover, with several of the cards we have the individual Images used as well, notably the Emperor. There will be more to say about him when I come to discuss the part hierarchy and order play in Williams's thought; but an instance which can be quoted here is the striking passage, describing a journey out of London by car, in which an ordinary policeman controlling traffic

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suddenly takes on the aspect of the Tarot Emperor, Image of order and law. A few moments later another, kindred Image appears, that of the Empress. Over the gate of a large hospital was a light, and under the light was a nurse holding a big key. A gate - a light - a nurse; yet one lobe of her [the heroine's] brain showed her again a semblance of one of the Tarot cards ceremonial robes, imperial headdress, cloak falling like folded wings, proud, austere face. [...] And then the car quickened again, and they were flying into the darkness, and away in the roads behind them was that sovereign figure and the sound of a suffering world coming up to it out of the night26. And again, the car in which she is travelling becomes the sixth of the Trumps, the Chariot, and a wayside crucifix the Hanged Man, the thirteenth. The sense that the Tarots really are in some way identical with the universe (yet the Universe is one of the cards too) becomes almost irresistible. But it is only the beginning. There is a vision later on of the whole planet dissolving, taking fresh shapes, rising into, changing into, the golden shapes that danced. [...] Cities leapt together, and Death came running instead; from among the Alps the Imperial cloak swept snow into itself; rivers poured into the seas and the seas into nothing, the cups received them and bearers of cups, and a swift procession of lifted chalices wound among the gathering shapes. [...] All earth had been gathered up: this was the truth of earth27. Towards the end of the book another Image becomes more and more important (not itself one of the Tarot pack, though Williams shows a link with them) - that of hands. Arm and hand were clearly Images of particular significance to Williams personally28 - though indeed the whole body was29. Hands of course appear in the Tarots whenever there are human figures depicted (which means on nearly all the Greater Trumps): sometimes they have a special significance. The Juggler's hands toss the balls that are the beginning and the continuation of the dance; the High Priestess's hand directs the flow of the waters that pour beneath her feet; the Emperor's directs the world; the Falling Tower is built out of hands that perpetually change into masonry as the Tower builds up, and are changed back as it falls apart; the hand of the Fool summons the dead out of their graves to Judgment. It is the hands of Nancy, the heroine, that are the key Image of this section of the book. They had been so busy, with one thing and another, in the world, continually shaping something. What many objects had

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rested against those palms. [...] 0, everything! and always she had had some purpose, her hands had been doing something, making something, that had never been before - not just so. They were always advancing on the void of the future, shaping her future. Then associations - hands in ritual gestures, in art, in the Tarots, the hands of whoever it was first actually fashioned the Tarots; and finally the work her hands are now to do, controlling the storm that is threatening her and those with her50. It is not now the created world which is being Imaged but the creating power that brings that world into existence and sustains it; and to be handless - like the animals on the Tarot cards of the Moon or the Fool, or the cat that Nancy's aunt has rescued from the storm - is a loss and even a horror. The cat "had no spiritual instruments of intention, only paws that patted or scratched" and were not creative. So it is that the infernal emperor 'beyond P'o-lu' in the Arthurian poems has 'indecent' hands hidden under a crimson cope: lost are the Roman hands; lost are the substantial instruments of being31. There is no question in these passages of a solemn rational argument about the nature of creativity or anything like that. What we are given instead is a vision of creativity as it exists in human hands, as an aid to a better vision of its nature in the world as a whole, the creativity of God. Ideally, we should emerge from a reading of The Greater Trumps with new ideas about, or an new outlook upon, the world and its Creator, much as we ought to emerge from the reading of Christ's discourse about the eye with a new realization of what is meant by the words 'spiritual darkness'. But there is yet another level of symbolism, beyond Allegory, Personification and Image, and far harder to describe than any of them, yet clearly of immense importance to the understanding of these writers: that which Lewis called Myth. Myth in the sense in which it is more or less identical with Legend one need not look for - except perhaps in the 'Ainulindale', the creation myth which begins The Silmarillion. Here Tolkien is giving us what corresponds, in the culture of his Elves, to the opening of Genesis in Christian culture - a narrative which may or may not have been taken literally by its composers (its Elvish composers, that is, not Tolkien himself!), which is not literally true but is meant to convey a very genuine truth about the world and its relationship to God and (in the case of the 'Ainulindale') the Valar. But this is exceptional. Even the creation scene in The Magician's Nephew is not mythical in this sense; in terms of the book, it is meant as 'literal truth'. Yet 'myth' seems far and away the best word to use for

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The Princess and the Goblin, Perelandra, or The Lord of the Rings, or at least for one element in their power - and what is one saying if one does so use it? Lewis, as a matter of fact, did make two attempts to pin the idea down, in the introduction to his MacDonald anthology and in An Experiment in Criticism', but I am not sure that these completely solve our problem. Lewis's suggestion is that the myth reaches us, not in the language of a skilled writer, but in the story itself. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice can make its impact just as well in a bald summary as in, say, Virgil; the story of the Odyssey cannot; and to make a 'bald summary' of a book like Vanity Fair is to undertake the preposterous. Again, Lewis suggests, a full reading of Kafka's The Castle really adds nothing much to the outline, if one knows that already. The point of the book lies in the Myth contained in its story, not in the writing in which the story is embodied. This is very true, as far as it goes. But the stories of Orpheus and of The Castle are not the only Myths cited by Lewis, and I am not sure that his analysis will apply to the others. Novalis, for instance, is a 'mythographer' for Lewis, and so is MacDonald. But where in their works can one find a story that can be reduced to a bald summary without losing its effect? Just possibly Novalis's story of Hyazinth and Rosenbliitchen in The Disciples at Sais might qualify; but this seems nearer to allegory than myth. And I cannot see how any of the other writings of either Novalis or MacDonald could possibly qualify. The notion of compressing Phantastes or Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen into a few pages (let alone a few paragraphs) is ridiculous. You can do it with The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien himself did it, in synopses prefaced to his second and third volumes - but the 'mythical' quality is largely lost in the process. To be fair, Lewis himself recognizes this. "Sometimes", he admits, "there is hardly any narrative element. [...] The shadow of Ragnarok is hardly a story. The Hesperides, with their apple-tree and dragon, are already a potent myth, without bringing in Herakles to steal the apples"32. Mr. Urang suggests33 that something of the 'mythic' quality in Lewis's The Great Divorce comes from what he calls 'unassigned' imagery - "imagery not required by, though consonant with, the allegory", which suggests the 'feel' of transcendent reality. This too is partially correct; but what sort of unassigned imagery will do this? Not just any imagery that is consistent with the allegory: and, of course, there need not be any allegory for it to be consistent with. I think there may be a clue towards the solution of our problem in the quotation which I prefixed to this chapter, from the introduction to a French edition of Heinrich von Ofterdingen: "An Idea which takes shape and comes to life is precisely what we mean by a Myth". Allegory and Personification, however well done, remain partly in the control of the writer, partly in that of the truth allegorized or personified. Even the Image, though it has a life of its own, is studied and worked upon by the imagist. But sometimes there comes a

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point where an idea breaks free, so to speak, from the writer whose idea it was, and becomes a living thing active in readers' minds. It remains there even when they have forgotten the words that originally embodied and conveyed it. Now such an Idea, such a Myth, might well be a story, like that of Orpheus and Eurydice. I suspect, however, that more often it is nearer a verbal picture, or a series of linked pictures. The key to the Orpheus story lies surely in two pictures - the living man singing before the God of Death with the kingdom of shades gathered round to listen, and the half-turned lover glancing back over his shoulder only to see his beloved fading away in despair. You can give this Myth in a paragraph, because you can give the two pictures in a paragraph. Ragnarok, similarly, is a picture - a short moving-picture, perhaps. But Phantasies, for example, requires a whole series of such pictures; indeed, the book consists of such a series - the threatening Ash, the wise woman in her cottage, the knight with the rusty armour, above all the blighting Shadow. Lilith is much the same, though it is more of a coherent whole than Phantastes is, and its pictures are both more sombre and more intense. We shall not find Myth in this sense in Williams, I think. He remains too much in control of his Images; he is thinking about them too much, and we are aware of this. Myths, I suspect, are not made in the intellect, even in an intellect as unconventional as was Williams's. MacDonald, we are told by his son, "was possessed by a feeling - he would hardly let me call it a conviction, I think - that [the writing of Lilith] was a mandate directly from God, for which he himself was to find form and clothing"34, and the first version was written straight down, without preliminary sketches or corrections. And it may be relevant that Lewis's stories began with mental pictures, not with plots though these pictures were not themselves of mythical quality. Tolkien's did not so begin; they began with artificial languages! But then Tolkien's appeal is not wholly 'mythical'. He did indeed originally propose to write a 'mythology for England', as The Book of Lost Tales, with its elements of paganism and its siting in a supposed past of England, not Middle-earth, shows. And his developed story is set in a world which we naturally associate with mythology - with the traditional mythology of Northern Europe in particular, and its 'machinery' of trolls, dragons and dwarves. But there are of course a number of different attractions in The Lord of the Rings, as there are in many great books. Some are attracted above all by the detailed 'subcreation' involved, and want to explore it further, just as others explore the sub-created world of Sherlock Holmes. (What became of Radagast? How long do Ores live? Did Arnor break up so soon because, unlike Gondor, it had little in the way of water-communications? and so on.) This has nothing to do with myth. Perhaps even the great theme of the story might be held to belong to epic rather than myth (though the two are not of course incompatible). We come near to myth in the picture of the Shire and its Hobbits (though some

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might feel they are too cosy and not grand enough for myth?); much nearer still in that of the Rangers, the dwindling race of heroes still keeping guard over peaceful lands that could not stand without them. I wondered at first whether this picture, and the allied one of Minas Tirith, derived in part from Byzantium, whose story has for me always been in some sense a Myth. In view of Tolkien's remarks about Byzantium in his poem on Williams35, however, this seems unlikely; he saw Byzantium as rotting within while outwardly alive, Where power corrupts and where the venal thrive, rather than as the doomed bastion of the Faith still maintaining its resistance and the ritual glory of its worship even as the tide of the enemy steadily rises36. Again, the Ringwraiths, "Mortal Men, proud and great", who have become mere shadows under the spell of the One Ring, yet still wield a terrible power and fear - these are Myth, I think, in a way in which, say, the Balrogs are not. However powerful an impact a Balrog may make on the reader, it can hardly 'come alive' in his mind, because it is in no way open to us to become Balrogs, even in the imagination. There is in each of us the germ of a Ranger, a Ringwraith, a hobbit - and indeed of an Orpheus or a K.; and therefore, if we are shown pictures of these things, there is something in us that responds. And possibly this is part of what is involved in myth. That is as may be. But it is clear, I think, that the use of Myth by a Christian fantasist must be very different from his use of Allegory, Personification, or even Image. The first two are the fantasist's servants; he invents Puritania or Giant Despair to suit his own purposes, and that is that; the only question is whether he does it well or badly, and the only limitation imposed on him is the need for his symbols to be appropriate. ("One couldn't", it has been pointed out to me, "make Despair a butterfly".) Images cannot be treated thus; they exist in the real world, and the author must explore and study them. You can allegorize or personify a falsehood; you can only misinterpret an Image. But a Myth, which is no more the author's servant than an Image, is not a thing to be studied or explored; the author may have invented it, but once he has done so he must take it or leave it. Can a myth, then, be of a falsehood? or can it be misinterpreted? Something along these lines, one way or the other, must be possible. The myth of Ragnarok, the battle of ancient Norse myth in which the gods and the giants destroy one another, and the heroes of Valhalla choose to die on the side of Father Odin, is incompatible with the myth of the Last Judgment37; at least one of them must in some sense be false. I believe in the latter; I do not believe in the former, although I'm not sure it isn't the better myth of the two from an artistic point of view. But should one say that Ragnarok is an untrue myth, or that it has been misinterpreted? The first is the more natural comment (for a Christian,

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that is), and yet there are situations, Ragnaroks in miniature, where we must say 'I will die with Odin', even if we do believe that somehow in the end Good will be victorious; the Ragnarok myth is for the moment the more helpful. At such times is it not possible to say that Ragnarok is a true myth, not a false one at all? is it perhaps only when you take it to apply to the sum of things in general that it becomes false? And this is, I suppose, a kind of misinterpretation; though I am not too happy about saying this, as surely Ragnarok, to be Ragnarok at all, must seem to be final. (It was not in fact final even in the Norse Myth.) However, it remains possible that there do exist myths that are totally untrue - myths that neither convey any truth about the universe nor have any relevance for good to the lives of men and women. Perhaps, if Christianity is true, a case in point would be the myth of 'Wellsianity' which Lewis described in his The Funeral of a Great Myth'38: roughly, the picture of the infinite void giving birth to some tiny spark of life, which evolves and builds itself up into Man, and at last, after reaching who knows what heights, dies in the final cold of an extinct universe. (Equally, of course, if this Myth is true, the Christian 'myths' are for the most part false and dangerous.) However this may be, it is clear that for the fantasist, and especially perhaps the Christian fantasist, a Myth in this sense - // he can produce one is an instrument of immense power. It is likely to be fantastic anyway, for one thing. There are of course myths which describe, or purport to describe, the real world, to be accurate history as well as myth: the 'Wellsian' one just mentioned, for example, and the life of Christ, and (for me) the Byzantine Empire; but these are unusual. Fantasists may, then, write fantasy simply because there is no other way to embody the Myth; but if they actually want to write fantasy for some other reason, the presence of a Myth to hand is obviously ideal. Moreover, if it is a good Myth it will both enchant and enlighten their readers. (I say 'enchant'; but it is worth remembering that enchantment is not always a pleasant experience. So Odysseus's sailors discovered on Circe's island; and the Myths of Kafka provide a modern example.) But Myths cannot be produced to order. Even in the works I am considering they are rare. MacDonald's two long fantasies are 'mythical', and so are some of his children's books: The Princess and the Goblin surely qualifies, though I am not sure about its sequel, The Princess and Curdie. So do some of the short stories - The Golden Key', certainly, and perhaps also The Day Boy and the Night Girl'. Perelandra, yes, though its central Myth is not of course Lewis's own; and among the Narnia stories The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treadef and The Magician's Nephew. And, as I have said, there is definitely a 'mythical' element in The Lord of the Rings. But I should personally doubt - others may disagree, both on the positive and on the negative side - whether any of the others qualify; not even Till We Have Faces, which sets out to retell a famous Myth of old. For the most part, the fantasist with a purpose must keep to the more tractable forms of symbolism -

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Allegory, Personification, and Image - and hope that, since the borderlines are not after all too sharp, some tinge of the Mythical may come and bestow extra power upon his symbols. In speaking of true myths, I have come close to a subject mentioned in the last chapter, discussion of which was there deferred: that of Consolation. One great merit of fairy-stories, Tolkien believed, was the Consolation of the Happy Ending, what he called the 'eucatastrophe', a sudden reversal of things into joy. In it, "we see in a brief vision [...] a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the world." And the supreme eucatastrophe of history is the Incarnation, and the supreme eucatastrophe of the Incarnation is the Resurrection. The mythical (Tolkien uses that word) enters the real world above all in the story of Jesus Christ. So also Lewis said that "If ever a myth had become fact, had become incarnated, it would be just like this"39. There is one last field of symbolism that must be mentioned here, because of its immense importance in the life of the Christian Church and the history of Christianity in general; and that is the symbolism of the Sacraments. And here I come up against something of a problem - the sheer lack of explicit sacramental teaching in any of our writers. In Tolkien this is not really very surprising: the sacraments did not exist in the Third Age of Middle-earth. But what of the others? Lewis makes his own position clear in Letters to Malcolm40 "You ask me why I've never written anything about the Holy Communion. For the very simple reason that I am not good enough at Theology. [...] The trouble is that people draw conclusions even from silence. Someone said in print the other day that I seemed to 'admit rather than welcome' the sacraments." The supposed 'explanations' of the sacraments seemed to him not so much mistaken as failures; they left the mystery still a mystery. We are given more of a clue in Perelandra, where Ransom, present at the temptation of the Perelandrian Eve, begins to see that he must intervene physically. His reaction is that this "would degrade the spiritual warfare to the condition of mere mythology"; but then he realizes that the distinction between myth, truth and fact are purely terrestrial and do not apply elsewhere. Even on earth they do not apply altogether - not since the Incarnation. And of this the sacraments are a permanent reminder. Sacraments only have a meaning to the fallen; in reality there are no sacraments, or everything is sacramental41. To MacDonald too this was the case - except that he did not make quite the concession to the weakness of fallen humanity that Lewis did. The sacraments are of profound value; but as isolated examples of the sacramental principle they have faded in his thought, or, rather, the principle has grown as intense as they: [...] from every clod Into thy foot-print flows the indwelling wine;

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And in my daily bread, keen-eyed I greet Its being's heart, the very body of God42. Every particle is a sacrament, just as every man is a prophet, if he and we will but see it. Williams took the idea a step further. The universal principle is there, certainly; unable to go to church because of his wife's illness, he pauses as he brings her her breakfast: [...] above the common food I sign the Cross with sanctifying hand: 'Hoc corpus meum, hie sanguis meus est'43. But this is only one of the two great Ways in imagery - the Way of the Affirmation of Images. There is also the Way of the Negation of Images: the Way of the mystics, the Way (on the whole) of Protestantism. 'This also is Thou; neither is this Thou", to use Williams's favourite maxim; the images and sacraments are images and sacraments of God, yet they are only images and sacraments of Him. You can choose either Way, as long as you do not condemn the other. The Way Williams chose himself was that of Affirmation; but due honour must be paid to the masters of Negation - pseudo-Dionysius, Kierkegaard, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Chiefly, of course, all this appears in Williams's non-fictional writings - in The Descent of the Dove in particular. But it also appears in one of the novels, The Place of the Lion, in the contrast between Anthony Durrant and the bookseller's assistant Richardson. Especially perhaps in their last conversation, before Richardson walks into the fire: 'And so', Richardson said at last, 'you think that the common things will return?' 'I'm quite certain of it', Anthony said. 'Won't He have mercy on all that He's made?' The other shook his head, and then suddenly smiled. 'Well, if you and they like it that way, there's no more to be said,' he answered. 'Myself, I think you're wasting time on the images.' 'Well, who made the images?' Anthony asked. 'You sound like a medieval monk commenting on marriage. [...] I can't see but what the images have their place. Ex umbris perhaps, but the moon has to drive the shadows away naturally, hasn't it?' The other shrugged. 'O I know', he said. 'It's all been argued a hundred times [...] But all I know is that I must make for the End when and as soon as I see it. '**

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The sacramentalist - both Durrant and Richardson use the word - is simply a special case (if that) of the Affirmer of Images. The difference between the Lord's Supper and (let us say) Beatrice, or the North Wind, lies presumably in the fact that the former is a means of union as well as of understanding. Union through understanding (of a sort) it may be: The sacred gifts, to the awakening soul, Open on Him who opens on the whole45. But the 'opening' precedes understanding; Dante's brain told him 'Behold your blessedness'in Beatrice without as yet having worked out how she could be any such thing. There are images in the creation - many of them; but the sacraments, like the Incarnation itself, are creations within the creation, with their own particular powers. They are not things the fantasist can use as he will; he can at best describe them in action. This Williams did: so we have the baptism of Betty Wallingford in All Hallows' Eve and the Eucharists in Shadows of Ecstasy and The Place of the Lion. But more than this is not possible to do.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 1 1. 12. 13. 14. 15.

MacDonald, letter to Mrs. A. J. Scott, quoted in G. M. MacDonald(1924), p. 297. I have the impression that the first, manuscript version of Lilith was much nearer allegory than the final, published one. See the synopsis in the 1924 centenary edition. Cf. the poem 'Taliessin on the Death of Virgil'; also He Came Down from Heaven, p. 88. Mere Christianity, p. 55. London, 1971, Chapter3, esp. pp. 106ff. Actually, Tolkien began a story of the resumed attack, 'The New Shadow' (published in The Peoples of Middle-Earth, pp. 409ff.) This 'shadow' was to have taken the form of corruption from within. But the story breaks off before we have any real details of the nature of the attack. MacDonald notes that this last Old Man was probably borrowed from Novalis presumably The Disciples at Sais; there has been considerable adaptation! Cf. his 'The Consuming Fire' in Unspoken Sermons. Unspoken Sermons, series 1, 'The New Name', pp. 100-01. Matthew 6:22-23. Letter to Carey Davies, quoted in G. M. MacDonald (1924), p. 530. CI. G. M. MacDonald(1924), p. 485. Unspoken Sermons, series 3, 'Freedom', p. 92. Version in G. M. MacDonald (1924), p. 481; a later version may be found in Songs of Praise, hymn 668, and MacDonald's Poetical Works, vol. 2, p. 323. Pages 481-82.

Varieties of Symbolism 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 3 1. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Unspoken Sermons, series 3, 'The Knowing of the Son', p. 32. England's Antiphon, p. 187. On the Miracles of our Lord, pp. 153-54. Christian Symbolism, by Michal Williams, p. 20. The book is by Williams's wife, but this passage is, I understand, by Williams himself. Quoted in The Figure of Beatrice, p. 7. Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind, p. 55. Ibid. 'Commentaries- IF, in Poems of Conformity, p. 56. The Region of the Summer Stars, p. 31. Taliessin through Ingres, pp. 28-29 and 55 respectively. Page 56. Page 102. See e.g., in Taliessin through Logres, 'The Coming of Palomides' and 'Bors to Elayne: on the King's Coins'; also James I, pp. 298-300; Shadows of Ecstasy, p. 56. See esp. The Image of the City, pp .80-87; and, in Taliessin through Ingres, 'The Vision of the Empire'. Pages 192ff. The passage is discussed further in ch. 5, below. Taliessin through Logres, p. 12. An Experiment in Criticism, pp. 43-44. Shadows of Heaven, p. 12. G. M. MacDonald(1924), p. 548. Given by Carpenter (1978), pp. 123-26; the lines cited here are found on page 125. Yet Tolkien was well aware of the Byzantine parallel; see his Letters, p. 157. Elsewhere, though, he suggests ancient Egypt as the nearest model (p. 281). In calling the Last Judgment a 'myth' I am thinking only of its effect when told of. This in no way implies that it is not also literally true, as the history of Byzantium was - which to me, as I have said, has the quality of Myth. I should add that, as noted in the text, the myth of Ragnarok does not end with total destruction; there is to be a restoration at last, with Balder returned to life. But there is no Judgment - except in so far as Odin and the gods themselves are judged for past oathbreaking. Christian Reflections, pp. 82ff. Cf. Screwtape Proposes a Toast, pp. 45-48; and see also S. Toulminin A. Maclntyre(1957), pp. 47ff. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, pp. 60ff., esp. pp. 62-63; Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 188. We might compare the episode described by Lewis in the same book, pp. 178-79, when a 'hard-boiled atheist' remarked to Lewis "All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once." Letter XIX, p. 103. Page 131 of the 'Pan' edition. Diary of an Old Soul, Feb. 7th. 'On the SanctissimunT (in Theology, 1941) p. 144. Pages 193-94. Theology, 1941, p. 142.

CHAPTER 5 THEMES "Man's individuality, which is, in deepest fact, his conscience." (MacDonald)

"'Providence' and natural causation are not alternatives; both determine every event because both are one." (Lewis)

"As they danced they seemed to understand what it is that makes the planets dance about the sun and the great stars keep their place in the constellations."(John Masefield)

Perhaps the best excuse of all for treating our four writers as a 'school' or 'tradition' is to be found in certain themes that are prominent in all or most of them, but not by any means necessarily in all Christian writers or theologians. One I have had occasion to mention before now, for it is the most prominent of all: what I may call, for lack of a better word, 'moralism'. Owen Barfield writes of Lewis that "he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals"1; and there is an element of this attitude running all through our four, the feeling that this is in fact what people ought to be doing. There are certain warnings that I ought to insert here about the use of this word. By 'moralism' I do not mean to imply asceticism or a neglect of pleasant things. As a matter of fact all four were rather fond of stressing the sheer goodness of the senses and (within the limits of morality) of sensuality. "It is a good thing to eat your breakfast", says the old princess to Curdie. "The thing is good - not you." And the same idea is echoed in the others. "O! water hot is a noble thing!" says a bath-song in The Lord of the Rings - and we are solemnly assured that this is only one of a number of bath-songs composed by Bilbo alone. And baths are certainly sensual pleasures. They occur again in Sybil Coningsby's thoughts in The Greater Trumps: Drinks and baths and changes were exquisite delights in themselves; part of an existence in which one beauty was always providing a reason and a place for an entirely opposite beauty. As society for solitude, and walking for sitting down, and one

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dress for another, and emotions for intellect, and snowstorms for hot drinks, and in general movement for repose, repose for movement, and even one movement for another [...]2. It is only fair to say, however, that the most prominent sensual pleasure in most contemporary writers, that of sex, is not prominent at all in any of our four. The vast majority of Tolkien's characters are male, and his few 'loveinterest' passages in The Lord of the Rings are among the weakest parts of the book3. Lewis certainly approved of sexual pleasure (within marriage, of course) intellectually, and enjoyed occasional bawdry in conversation, but he seems to have felt embarrassed about saying much on the subject of sex proper - certainly about writing on it. (It appears rather more in what he wrote after his marriage.) MacDonald, though quite willing to use imagery that suggests the erotic (for example in the relevant verses of the song with which Anodos awakens the marble lady in Phantastes) avoids the subject as much as Tolkien does. Anodos himself gets into acute difficulties in one episode, when he tries to explain human reproduction to a different race - and meets with a very chilly reception4. One of MacDonald's ballads5, indeed, does tell of a prince who needed a magical rope woven of maidens' hair, which broke at the crucial moment because one of the contributors was not a maiden - having been seduced by the prince himself; and the novel PaulFaber, Surgeon turns largely on the hypocrisy of the 'double standard': but MacDonald's concern is only with the sin involved, and the sexual episodes themselves are dismissed in a line, or over before the book begins. Williams is far and away the most explicit of the four in this respect - chiefly in his poetry, where sexual imagery is common. (Sometimes rather confusingly so - the Body/Empire of Taliessin' is clearly female, yet the section of The Vision of Empire' which deals with 'Jerusalem' (the genitals) seems to suggest masculinity instead.) But this is not prominent in the novels. Whatever their attitude towards explicit writing about sex, then, our four are not advocating asceticism. Nor does their 'moralism' imply a doctrine of 'justification by works'. MacDonald came close to this at times, but none of the others did; and even MacDonald still firmly insisted that, though we had work to do in our salvation, still Christ was his and our Saviour, and that no-one could get anywhere without the aid of God's grace. Nor, thirdly, do I mean to accuse them of any sort of 'legalism' in ethics. They do, of course, present their characters with situations that demand moral decisions; but they do not just apply 'law' to these decisions. Nor, one might add, do they apply some sort of 'situation ethics', in the sense of overruling the supposed claims of law in the name of love (though this would probably be a little nearer to their patterns of thought). What they are primarily concerned with is not the goodness or badness of the acts so much as those of the agents. "It was good men [Jesus] cared about, not notions of good things, or even good

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actions, save as the bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and came forth"6. Consequently, they are more interested in temptation, in what induces someone to go wrong (or right) than in what the objectively right or wrong action may be. In the Screwtape Letters, written during the Second World War, the tempters wonder whether to make their 'patient' into an ardent patriot or an ardent pacifist. They do not discuss which attitude is right; their interest lies in making him adopt one or the other for bad reasons, or in using it to subvert him in his other moral choices, and so ultimately get him into their clutches. (Williams, dealing with the same sort of situation, described pacifism as a 'vocation'7.) I can well imagine any of them depicting a 'legalist' who has fallen into the trap of suppressing the motions of love within himself by a rigid adherence to rules, or, conversely, as realizing the ilimsiness of rules and regulations, and coming to act with real charity. But then I can equally well imagine them depicting a 'situationist' taking the easy path, to, in the long run, someone else's and his own cost, in the face of knowledge that what he was doing was really wrong; or, conversely, overcoming such a temptation. Much the same holds good of their attitude towards repentance. It is a question of repenting the actual faults of one's character rather than past sins, or even past vices (though obviously a recognition of what these sins and vices really were is involved). You get good examples of this in the characters of Edmund and Eustace in Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treadery respectively) and of Rosamund in MacDonald (The Lost Princess)8. It is worth noting that in the first two cases at least, and perhaps in all three, the beginning of repentance is to be found in a non-moral good. Edmund, who has betrayed his family and his hosts to the White Witch, is disillusioned, no more, when he realizes he has gained nothing by his treachery; what begins his conversion is the Witch's literal petrifying of a harmless Christmas party. It is a matter of sheer sentiment - the pathetic thought of the stony figures sitting there for ever - that diverts his thoughts from his own injuries and rights. With Eustace, it is his transformation into a dragon (which naturally cuts him off from human intercourse) that makes him realize his loss, and how selfishly he has used the contacts he had before. Now neither a sense of the pathetic nor a desire for company is in any way a virtue; yet both are normally good things to have, and help to lead their possessors into a better awareness of good and evil in general, and so to repentance. To a certain extent this is also true in The Lost Princess. But the process of Rosamund's conversion is a much longer one, and there are several factors in it. A change in her circumstances suppresses some of her faults for a time, and gives her "a little quietness and order of mind, and hence a somewhat greater possibility of the first idea of right arising within it"; then a feeling of shame after outbreaks of temper (though only after them) makes an opening for actual contrition and actual attempts to govern herself. As MacDonald said

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elsewhere, "Even if the hunger after righteousness should in part spring from a desire after self-respect, it is not therefore all false. A man could not even be ashamed of himself without some 'feeling sense' of the beauty of righteousness"9. Rosamund's efforts fail, however, just like Eustace's attempts to remove his dragon-skin by himself, until, like him, she is willing to receive help, and eventually is cured. Agnes, her counterpart in the same book, is similarly brought to feel ashamed of herself, but almost at once wastes her self-knowledge: she begins to do her duty, but this only makes her pleased with herself, and "to be conceited of doing one's duty is a sign of how little one does it." The treatment is a failure, at least for the time being. The corresponding episode in Williams is, I suppose, the chapter in The Place of the Lion entitled 'The Conversion of Damans Tighe'. The 'Angelicals' - presiding spirits of intellect, beauty, strength and the like - have been loosed upon earth, where their unearthly powers do not belong. "To those who were in process of degrading intellect and spirit [...] they appeared in huge, old and violent shapes", and Damans, a research student in the history of philosophy, is in just such a process. The Eagle of intellect - the most significant of the Angelicals to her because of her occupation - is distorted into a loathsome pterodactyl creature bearing down upon her10. At the last extremity of terror she calls on her lover Anthony, and it is once more a nonmoral good, that of ordinary human love, that is the means to her repentance. Rescued, '"I've behaved very badly', Damaris said. To tell him seemed to her more important than anything else in the world could be, even the vanished monstrosity"11. The same principle of salvation comes again near the end of the book, when for a moment the old Damaris reasserts itself. 'The years of selfish toil had at any rate had this good - they had been years of toil; she had not easily abandoned any search because of difficulty, and that habit of intention, by its own power of good, offered her salvation then. The full flood receded"12. Perhaps, then, it is not quite pure moralism that one finds in these writers. There is a passionate interest in human goodness, but there is also a vivid sense of all goodness, wherever it is to be found. In the moral goodness of human beings above all, but also in other places; the key to moral goodness will itself be good, but good (very probably) in a different way. The one to whom all this applies least is presumably Tolkien. Partly this is because his principal work, The Lord of the Rings, gives us a straightforward war between Good and Evil as the theme. Even here, however, much of the story is concerned with those whose allegiance to one side or the other is not whole-hearted, and the result of whose 'moral finals' is no foregone conclusion; such as Boromir, Saruman, Denethor and Gollum. These cannot be dismissed as mere decorations to the story: the actions of Boromir and Gollum in particular are absolutely crucial, and the history of the War of the Ring would have had a very different pattern without them. What

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is true, however, is that it is their actions that are prominent in Tolkien rather than the underlying virtues and vices. It must also be said that Tolkien seems much more pessimistic about repentance than the others. Saruman, Denethor, and Gollum do not repent (Gollum is, tragically, prevented from repentance by a thoughtless intervention from Sam); Melkor only feigned it. Sauron possibly feigned it, possibly repented and relapsed; Boromir truly repents, but dies almost immediately. Indeed, in later writings Tolkien seems to have become even gloomier; Gollum would have relapsed into evil even if Sam had not blundered, and Sauron (improbably!) was actually quite good when he first started to try and influence the smiths of Eregion. The only case of a really enduring change would seem to be that of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, which appears to have been effected by her unexpected popularity on release from the Lockholes. 'Leaf by Niggle', which has no theme other than its central character's progress, is in some ways nearer the other three writers. The discussion of Niggle'scaseby the Voices13 is said to be based on 'Records', but clearly they are discussing his character as a whole; the only individual action singled out by them is cited more as evidence of his willingness to sacrifice himself than as something to be marked down to his credit as an action. Admittedly, the 'purgatory' section of 'Leaf by Niggle' is to me its least satisfactory part, simply because of the lack of connection between it and Niggle's past. Between the sins of Edmund, Eustace, Rosamund, Agnes and Damaris, and their cures, there are definite causal connections, and what one might call moral ones too; the punishment fits the crime. Edmund finds no more honour in the Witch than he had shown himself; Eustace sees himself as he really is, and is appalled by it; and so on. Niggle's purgatory, on the other hand, seems rather arbitrary; his 'Earthly Paradise' afterwards is much more appropriate. Yet it is worth noting that at least part of Niggle's salvation lies in his genuine devotion to something (non-moral) outside himself, as with Damaris Tighe; in this case, his own painting. "He took a great deal of pains with leaves, just for their own sake. But he never thought that made him important." There is a natural tendency to feel that a great emphasis on morals by a Christian is likely to go with a lighter emphasis on dogma, and even on faith: a tendency to set St James against St Paul, as it were. I have already remarked that there is an appearance of this in The Lord of the Rings, which is in reality due partly to the nature of Tolkien's material and partly to plain misunderstanding14. How far can this be seen in our other writers? In MacDonald, to be honest, quite a lot. "Nothing is so deadening to the divine", he once wrote, "as a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things"15, and there is little that can be called theology in any of his writings. When it does appear, it is usually based on moral principles. "Understanding is the reward of obedience"16 - this is a constant theme with him. It is taken up by Lewis (notably in the obedience of Digory in The Magician's Nephew and

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the flawed obedience of Jill and Eustace in The Silver Chair); and Williams quotes with evident approval a similar dictum from the Evangelical headmaster Flecker to his son17, though he seldom uses the theme himself. (The 'decision to believe' of Arglay and Chloe Burnett in Many Dimensions is fairly close.) But it occurs in lots of MacDonald's books, especially the 'straight' novels. Moreover, to him obedience is not only the key to understanding, it is often the key to what is understood. Thus, he believes strongly in the full divinity of Christ, but mentions it chiefly in order to show how the Son's will is subordinated in obedience to that of the Father18. And when he turns to the Atonement, his position is what a theologian would call Pelagian or Abelardian - for moral reasons: Justice, he says in the 'unspoken sermon' of that name19, cannot be concerned with punishment alone. If a thief steals my watch, and, repentant, tries (however inadequately) to make up my loss, the offence is removed, and nothing will be gained by jailing him as well; while if he is not repentant, jail, however necessary, will not set things right again. "Punishment of the guilty may be involved injustice, but it does not constitute the justice of God one atom more than it would constitute the justice of a man." God only punishes as a means to an end; the punishments in Dante's 'Inferno', which do but keep the wickedness of the damned alive, would be so many defeats for God. The justification of punishment can only be that sinners, "through the eye-opening power of pain, may come to see and do justice". Consequently the popular theory of the Atonement, which makes God's 'justice' require the suffering of someone who is not a wrongdoer, is an abomination; the 'satisfaction' that was needed was made in what Jesus did to make us turn from evil and go back to the Father. What is required of us is, then, repentance and righteousness; a return to God. Faith has its place, unquestionably; but not even Paul, who gloried in the Cross, trusted in it; 'He trusts in the living Christ and his living Father'. And faith to MacDonald is very nearly identical, I will not say with righteousness, but with the will to righteousness, and with trust in God to make us righteous. But MacDonald was the only one of the four explicitly to take this approach to the Atonement. Lewis, indeed, has apparently been accused of it20, but this is quite unfounded. Controversy between Christians was a thing he detested21, and he carefully avoided public adherence to any theory of the Atonement at all: 'The thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanations"22. He did make a tentative suggestion - that repentance, to the point of dying, is both a necessity and an impossibility, unless God does it in us, but that He can only do this if He becomes man: but this was tentative and no more. A 'substitution' theory, such as MacDonald repudiated, is indeed (Lewis thought) worthless, if one is thinking in terms of police-courts, but not if one is thinking in terms of debts, let alone of suffering in the course of a rescue. In the Preface to 'Paradise Lost' Lewis seems to be taking vicarious atonement for granted; and in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe one

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finds a straight substitution. If the traitor Edmund is not handed over to be killed by the Witch, Narnia will be destroyed; such was the magic built into it at its creation: but Asian offers to be killed himself in Edmund's place, and the offer is accepted. Unfortunately for the Witch (there is an echo here of patristic theories of the Atonement as a defeat of the devil when he overreached himself by taking the life of the Son of God), the substitution of a willing innocent starts death itself working backwards, and Asian rises again. However, one should probably not press this episode too closely. It is not an exact parallel to the real Atonement - Asian is only dying to save one individual - and in any case it may well be that Lewis wanted a fairly close echo of the best-known picture of the Atonement, for the sake of his readers. That Lewis should have accepted a substitutionary view is the more understandable when we remember that he acknowledged Williams as an influence as well as MacDonald. For to Williams, as I have said, substitution and exchange were absolutely central ideas. Doubtless young women are not in fact often haunted by Doppelgangers, but if one were, he really did believe that it would be possible for someone else to bear her fear. In The House of the Octopus there is more direct exchange: Anthony, the missionary, dies the martyr's death his convert Alayu had not died (she having been killed earlier in a moment of terrified apostasy); but Alayu, dead, in turn bears Anthony's fear for him. It is quite clear that Williams was not just talking in metaphors; he meant it. Evidently he also felt a little nervous about it; in a letter quoted by Mrs. Ridler23 he says "We only discovered it as an experiential fact, by chance, as it were; and I'm terrified out of my senses at the idea of going further." But it seemed that others had made the discovery too, in earlier times - a monk of the Thebaid, the Russian saint Seraphim of Sarov24; and he and some of his friends did quite definitely use this principle of exchange. A reference in the poem The Founding of the Company'25 probably reflects this; and Professor Coghill quotes an instance of it in Lewis's life26. To Williams it was only one aspect of the greater principle of coinherence, whereby the whole of creation lives, and the Creator Himself, being a Trinity, also. "Substitutions in love, exchanges in love, are a part of it; 'oneself and 'others' are only the specialized terms of the technique"27. Given this, it is natural enough that Williams could lay far more stress on the Cross than MacDonald did. This does not mean that he separated it from anything else in the Incarnation. But whereas to MacDonald the Cross was simply the supreme moment and instance of the Son's obedience and love, to Williams it really did add something to them: "a central substitution [whereby] He became everywhere the centre of, and everywhere He energized and reaffirmed, all our substitutions and exchanges. [...] What happened there the Church itself has never seen, except that in the last reaches of that living death to which we are exposed He substituted Himself for us. He submitted in our stead to the full results of the Law which is He"28.

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How does this affect Williams's novels? Directly, not very much perhaps: Jesus is not a character in any of them. The most direct appearance of the Cross is in his last novel, All Hallows' Eve29. The magician Simon is about to kill his daughter with a spell that will leave her soul his messenger and slave; but the dead Lester Furnivall receives the spell instead of her. As its deadly strength creeps over her, something else happens. "She was no longer standing. She was leaning back on something, some frame which from her buttocks to her head supported her; indeed, she could have believed, but she was not sure, that her arms, flung out on each side, held onto a part of the frame, as along a beam of wood". And the spell fails; "Lester had taken the shock of the curse no less willingly or truly that she had not known what she was doing. She had suffered instead of Betty, as Betty had once through her; but the endurance had been short and the restoration soon, so quickly had the Name which is the City sprung to the rescue of its own"30. There is also an allusion in Descent into HeW\ in the passage, already mentioned more than once, in which Stanhope takes on Pauline Anstruther's fear: "He endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom." "The idea", Williams himself commented, "doesn't take us much farther, but perhaps it does make more credible the Christ bearing the sins of the world dogma"32. Later, indeed, came the belief that perhaps even sins could in some sense be borne and exchanged among sinners; but this idea, which he learned from Evelyn Underhill33, he never amplified. It may be so; but if it is, it is so only in virtue of the central substitution which makes our lesser ones what they are. This may be granted, then, that the 'central substitution' will not itself figure largely in Williams's fantastic writings; but the doctrines that it exemplifies, of coinherence and exchange, most certainly do. When Williams is moralistic, it is with a morality of coinherence and exchange; it is the refusal of these that damns and the acceptance of them that blesses. 'Bear ye one another's burdens' and 'He saved others; himself he cannot save' are key texts; and they imply that we must let others bear our burdens at times. That was what saved Damaris Tighe - that she was at last willing to let someone else rescue her. Even Christ Himself was saved by others, from Herod the Great by those who took Him into Egypt and by those who died in His place, the Holy Innocents. 'The chastisement of His peace was upon them", he wrote34, and "they suffered unknowingly in direct substitution for Christ"35. Christ saved others; he needed others to save Him (though undoubtedly from lesser dangers than those from which He saved us). It is also possible to deny the coinherence, whether by refusing to give or refusing to take. The former is the more obvious. Simon the Clerk is in a way a kind of opposite number to Jesus, a second climax of the Jewish nation, but in the long run he is also like any other sinner: "it was fame and domination that he desired", not

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exchange. He would only take, and any giving he did would be merely incidental and contemptuous. But there is also the opposite peril, that of refusing to take. It is not so prominent as the first in Williams's writings (it is perhaps the rarer in actual life), but it exists, and he knew it. It could be said that this was the first sin of Milton's Satan; it would have been the iast sin of Damaris Tighe if she had refused to call on her lover for help. It was the sin, too, of the gentleman in Williams's pleasing 'Apologue on the Parable of the Wedding Garment'36, who, invited to a fancy-dress ball at Immanuel's palace, felt that to dress up would be beneath his dignity and arrived in his usual evening dress, only to be sent away again; for all the other guests were wearing each other's clothes and virtues: No he or she was he or she merely; no single being dared, except the Angels of the Guard, come without other kind of dress than his poor life had to profess, and yet those very robes were shown, when from preserval as his own into another's glory given, bright ambiguities of heaven [...] He had his own; his own was all but that permitted at the Ball.

CHOICE

Central, however, to any moralism whatever, whether or not it is individualistic in tone, must be the notion of choice; and over and over again the plots of the books I am considering pivot upon some character's choice. This is, maybe, most conspicuous of all in the least theological of all, The Lord of the Rings, which progresses to its climax through a long series of such choices. The series actually begins in The Hobbit, when Bilbo has the opportunity to kill his enemy Gollum, and does not do so. But it is far more noticeable in the longer work. The main adventure begins when Bilbo succeeds (and a difficult success it was!) in abandoning the Ring and going off without it. Much later, in Lorien, each of the Company is offered the possibility of giving up their task in favour of some other good, for themselves or for others; and one of them, Boromir, eventually succumbs to the temptation, trying to seize the Ring for his own glory and his city's needs, though he repents before his death. Also in Lorien, Galadriel, the Lady of that realm who had set the Company this test, is herself tested by Frodo's offer to give her the Ring and the power that it confers. Again, a little later on, Boromir's younger brother Faramir is able to pass the test his brother had failed; and one

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chapter in The Return of the King is actually entitled The Choices of Master Samwise', where he too rejects the idea of trying to use the Ring as his own. Finally, in the heart of Mount Doom, Frodo, who has come through such perils to destroy the Ring, does not do so, but claims it as his: and then the first choice of all our series becomes important once more, for it is Gollum who seizes the Ring and falls with it into the fire. Side by side with the main series there are other choices, hardly less important to the story. The chief ones are those of Denethor, Steward of Gondor (the father of Boromir and Faramir) and of Saruman, the chief of the Wizards. Denethor exemplifies the 'refusal to take' and the 'refusal to give' at one and the same time. If the war is lost, he and Gondor will be utterly destroyed; but if it is won, he, as Steward, will become subordinate to the newly-returned King, Aragorn. He is not willing either to give up his power or to accept it from another; the choice is offered him, but he refuses, and commits suicide instead (thereby, incidentally, doing that much more to weaken his country). Saruman had earlier chosen the way of treason, hoping to find and use the Ring himself, and even thinking of serving Sauron, whom he had originally been sent to combat. His armies are defeated and his plans brought to nothing; but when he is offered the chance to repent and rejoin the fight against Sauron - in a lesser capacity - he will not do so. 'Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'? but his 'reign' is only a venting of his malice in petty evils among the hobbits, until, defeated even there, he is murdered by one of his own followers. And even the appendices to the book contain choices - above all the choice of Aragorn's Queen, Arwen, to follow her ancestress Luthien and abandon her immortality. In The Silmarillion, which is far more densely packed with sheer incident than The Lord of the Rings, and has as a result less exploration of its many characters, choice is less prominent. But it is there, and it is important. It is there in the choices of Feanor and the Noldor37. Feanor chooses to retain the Silmarils, his most wonderful and cherished creation, rather than yield them up to restore the light of Valinor. The matter of his choice does not signify, as (though he does not know it) the Silmarils have already been stolen; but the effect of his refusal on himself is that when news of the theft arrives he leads the greater part of his people, the Noldor, into rebellion and exile in the hope of recovering them. The Noldor themselves have of course to choose at this point, and many refuse the rebellion or repent before it is too late; but the majority continue in spite of warnings that they cannot succeed and will only bring ruin on themselves. It is this choice that gives rise to the main theme of The Silmarillion\ but there are others. The choice of Luthien, which was later to be repeated by Arwen, is described here. It is not of course a moral choice in quite the way that most of those I have been looking at have been - Luthien can remain immortal or accept humanity without sinning either way; but her pride in

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herself and in her birth would naturally pull her the former way, and it is her love for Beren that pulls the other, so that in a sense it is a moral choice after all, between love of self and love of another. If so, she chooses well. The theme continues in the 'Akallabeth', the sequel to the 'Silmarillion' proper, with the choices of the Dunedain, and even with those of Sauron himself (though it is not clear how real his approach to repentance38 actually was). It is fascinating to compare the centrality of choice in Tolkien with its almost total absence in a non-Christian fantasist with whom he has sometimes been compared, E. R. Eddison (of whom more in the Appendix). Eddison apparently thinks of Zimiamvia (his imaginary world) as one in which free will exists, for in A Fish Dinner in Memison he has his God creating our world, by contrast, as one in which there is no such thing - only the illusion of it. Yet in fact hardly any of his characters ever chooses any action (except occasionally when it is a matter of what the wisest course may be). Only two or three weak characters ever show any hesitation over right and wrong; the rest, whether good or bad, do whatever they do unhesitatingly, without its ever occurring to them to do otherwise. Once noble, treacherous, cruel, reckless or subtle, they remain so without change or possibility of change. As for our other three authors: MacDonald does not deal with choice so often. Several times, indeed, one finds his characters making a foolish choice. Anodos in Phantastes does so more than once, in the best fairy-tale tradition of falling into the trap you have just been warned against, like Bluebeard's wife or the one-eyed prince in the Arabian Nights', and Vane in Lilith does much the same on at least one occasion, though as the result of self-will rather than plain folly. What one does find in MacDonald, though, is the choice that gives an opportunity for obedient trust, the sort of choice that faced Abraham when he was told to leave his father's house39; it is a theme found, for example, more than once in the 'Curdie' books, where trust in the old princess (or, on one occasion, in her descendant, the younger Irene) is called for even though appearances are against such trust being justified. In Williams the idea of choice is far more prominent. The most conspicuous examples are probably to be found in Many Dimensions and in Descent into Hell, but there are others in plenty (the Nativity play The House by the Stable, for instance, turns on one). The moment of choice that forms the climax of Many Dimensions is in fact rather a special case. It is not a choice in face of temptation, nor between good and evil; it is a deliberate judgment among possible goods, and is indeed entrusted to the Lord Chief Justice. The Stone of Solomon lies before him, a talisman of tremendous power. So far in the novel, most of those who have handled it have done so hoping to use it, or suppress it, for selfish ends - for money, or power, or curiosity, or vanity. But not all have taken this line, and at the climax of the story the bettermeaning characters have committed the decision to Lord Arglay, the Lord Chief Justice: should the Stone be kept as an immensely sacred relic, closely

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guarded as it had been for centuries past? or used - as it could be used - for the healing of the sick? or what? Eventually the Chief Justice chooses - or rather judges, since that is his proper function, and this is a judgment 'between God and the people': "It is a very dreadful thing to refuse health to the sick but it is more tragic still to loose upon earth that which does not belong to the earth". All that can be done is to offer the Stone to itself; and this is possible, for another character, Chloe Burnett, has already (and irrevocably, without mortal danger) submitted her will to the Will of That which is behind the Stone. In her hands the Stone flows away; "what the Stone had been she now was"; and when she dies nine months later the Stone has returned altogether to its Source. In Descent into Hell the crucial choices are those of the military historian Lawrence Wentworth; there are three, and each time he chooses the worst. A rival historian is knighted. It could be an opportunity for joy, to take it as an honour to his profession. "At least he could refuse not to enjoy. [...] With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he rejected joy instead. He instantaneously preferred anger, and it came; he invoked envy, and it obliged him." Then a girl to whom he is attracted prefers someone else, and he cannot accept this either; instead, out of his daydreams (egoistic castlebuilding!) is fashioned a succubus, a horrible parody of the girl which is in no danger of showing the independence the real girl had. Finally, he is offered a chance for professional integrity, akin to the repentance through non-moral goodness that I have already discussed. His knighted rival, we are told, is "a holy and beautiful soul who would have sacrificed reputation, income, and life, if necessary, for the discovery of one fact". Wentworth has already lost much of this integrity; but now he is given a chance to regain it. The uniforms for a play being produced by some acquaintances are historically inaccurate. He could point this out. He is actually asked to say whether they are correct or not. But he cannot be bothered; he prefers to be lost in his fantasies. And, steadily, he loses touch with reality and slides into a mindless damnation. But it is Lewis most of all who is fascinated by what one might call the mechanisms of choice. Repentance through non-moral goodness is only one such mechanism. There is also, for example, and it is a favourite with him, the mechanism of the Inner Ring. This appears several times: in an address at King's College, London, in an essay on Kipling40, most of all in the novel That Hideous Strength. There the central character, the sociologist Mark Studdock, has begun even at school to feel the lure of the charmed circle of "people who really matter", and the first part of the novel is largely concerned with the way in which this is used by the leaders of the N.I.C.E. (a kind of hell-born political conspiracy masquerading as a scientific institute) to lure him into joining the conspiracy. (The Inner Ring mechanism can of course be used for good purposes as well, but not in this particular instance.) He is brought into the fringes of one Inner Ring after another until the idea of being left out in

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the cold - very cold, as the Rings would then be working against him - is utterly appalling, the idea of being i n ' utterly absorbing. And so, when first he is asked to do something for the N.I.C.E. which he knows to be definitely dishonest, "the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; [...] it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men"41. By a touch of irony, Studdock is not himself very much wanted by the Ring; it is the clairvoyant powers of his wife that they are really interested in. He does eventually break with the N.I.C.E. and repent - partly through love of his wife, when he realizes that they wish to use her; partly through sheer revulsion at what is going on in the N.I.C.E., for "his toughness was only of the will, not of the nerves, and the virtues he had almost succeeded in banishing from his mind still lived, if only negatively and as weaknesses, in his body"42. Also partly because of their efforts to implicate him completely, which only succeed in frustrating themselves. 'The knowledge that his own assumptions led to Frost's position, combined with what he saw in Frost's face and what he had experienced [...] effected a complete conversion"43. He is rescued largely by lingering traces of moral goodness, not only in his weak nerves, but also in his ability to see that the 'Institute' is evil, at least when contrasted with his wife, even though he fails to see it when only he is involved - a queer kind of double standard. Non-moral goodness is perhaps the immediate source of his salvation, but is itself of moral origin. That Hideous Strength also includes an instance of another kind of choice, which is found in all four writers - the deliberately perverse choice. I have mentioned some examples of this already, with Saruman and Denethor in Tolkien and with Wentworth in Williams. It is less conspicuous in MacDonald. There is something of it, no doubt, in the episode (already alluded to) of Anodos's opening of the door in the ogre's house, in Phantastes\ but its clearest appearance in MacDonald is not in a work of fiction at all, but in the 'unspoken sermon' on 'Freedom': The slave in heart would immediately, with Milton's Satan, reply, that the furthest from him who made him must be the freest, thus acknowledging his very existence a slavery. [...] Being itself must, for what they call liberty, be repudiated. [...] The liberty of the God that would have his creatures free, is in contest with the slavery of the creature who would cut his own stem from his root that he might call it his own and love it. The normal sinner prefers a lesser good (presumably a selfish one) to a greater (probably an unselfish one on the face of it, though if what most religions say be true it is also better for himself in the long run), Perversity

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has got beyond this; it rejects what it knows for certain to be good in favour of something that can hardly even be called a 'lesser good'; something that resembles a genuine good but does not share its real character. Saruman had sought greatness for himself - more greatness, that is, than he had already by right; and he fell into great wickedness in doing so. Still, the thing he aimed at was good, for himself at least, and (had it come to him honestly, and had he retained his former wisdom) might have been good for others too. But in the final confrontation at Orthanc he chooses a state which resembles his goal only in its lack of dependence or subordination. It is not good for him, and he knows it; it is not good for others, and he knows that too; but it is the only course left to him that is opposed to the course he began with and rejected, and therefore he chooses it. Better be damned than change one's mind. Frost, in That Hideous Strength, is in a similar position. The N.I.C.E. is collapsing around him; one would say the cause he served was, except that he is a complete determinist, disbelieving in motives altogether, so that 'cause' is too teleological a word. In the last few minutes of his life, though, his theories really come true, in a way, and his mind really becomes a mere spectator with no control over his body. For that body is now only a puppet of hell, which has no further use for it or him and sets about to destroy them. Just before he dies, however, an opportunity is given to him. "He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. [...) With one supreme effort he flung himself back into his illusion"44. If his beliefs had been true, they would have had some value; granted that they were not true, there would still be some value in the intelligence used in coming to them, or the integrity with which they were held. But none of these now apply. The beliefs are false; it is utter stupidity, and utter intellectual dishonesty, to cling to them; but the idea of abandoning them is intolerable. Saruman will not change his will; Frost will not change his opinions; the result for both is catastrophe. Instances could be multiplied. Much of Lewis's The Great Divorce consists of a series of perverse choices, where soul after soul is offered heaven and chooses hell. But the most extended portrayal of perversity is perhaps to be found in Williams's War in Heaven, in the person of the chemist Lavrodopoulos. His original choices, indeed, are not described, but the resulting perversity is: No mortal mind could conceive a desire which was not based on a natural and right desire; even the hunger for death was but a perversion of the death which precedes all holy birth. But of every conceivable and inconceivable desire this was the negation. This was desire itself sick, but not unto death; rejection which tore all things asunder and swept them with it in its fall through the abyss45.

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The perverse choice is typically an act of pride - pride in its most extreme form - and is so depicted in all our instances except the last; Lavrodopoulos, however he may have begun, is now beyond even pride. (And Wentworth's last failure was perhaps one of sloth rather than pride.) Contemporary secular moralities tend on the whole to concentrate their attention on more spectacular sins like cruelty; but Christianity has traditionally seen the root of most sin, perhaps of all, in pride. Certainly our writers take it very seriously. "Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison", wrote Lewis46. "Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind". The Silmarillion is really about little else. Pride first rots Melkor; pride ruins Feanor, "the proudest and most self-willed" of the Eldar, and sends him out into exile. And through the story of that exile we watch pride striking down one of the heroes after another. Tolkien is merciful; pride brings disaster and death, but not necessarily total corruption, for often the disaster and death follow it too closely. Fingolfin, the "most proud and valiant" of the Elven-kings, challenges Morgoth to a single combat he knows he cannot win, in an act of both pride and despair; but he falls before more harm can be done, except the loss to his people. Turgon, having "grown proud", will not leave the city he has created, though he himself has long recognized that it will fall in the end, and though a long-awaited warning has come that it is time to leave; and he drags the city and its people into ruin and death. Thingol revolts at the idea of his daughter's marrying Beren, a mere mortal (forgetting, incidentally, that his own Queen is far above himself), and brings his own kingdom, hitherto unscathed, under the curse that lies on the Exiles, until he dies the victim of a private murder, with a sneer on his lips. But the theme is worked out at greatest length in the story of the mortal hero Turin. Turin does admittedly lead a life darkened by sorrows and malice that are not of his own devising; but these alone would not have wrecked him, or not in the way they do, had it not been for the folly of his pride. Pride will not let him return to Doriath to face judgment after the death of Saeros; pride will not let him do so even when he learns that that judgment has already ended in acquittal. And it is his pride in his valour and achievements that makes him first break the concealment of Nargothrond and then prevent the destruction of its great bridge (again despite warning); and it is this in turn that leads to Nargothrond's destruction and sets in train the events that culminate in his own despair and suicide. The utterly perverse pride that, so to speak, damns itself is not analysed to the extent that it is in The Lord of the Rings, but the evil and the sheer stupidity of it are made inescapably clear.

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POWER

Most of our choices, prideful or otherwise, are not completely perverse; but they can still be catastrophic for others. One particular field of moral choice keeps turning up in the three later writers of our group - that of power, where choice can so obviously lead to catastrophe. One is tempted to see this as a kind of reflection of the times they lived in, though this is a dangerous speculation, seeing that the problem of power is about as old as mankind. It is certainly very much present in these three. Most obviously so in Tolkien; for the whole of The Lord of the Rings is about the use of power and the Ring of Power. This is of course definitely a corrupted power, evil in its origin and evil in what it effects; there is no suggestion that power in itself must necessarily be wicked. (Those who supposed that the Ring stood for the atomic bomb were utterly mistaken; but they had this justification, that it may well be that the power of the bomb is indeed as corrupted as that of the Ring, so that neither can be used justly or honourably.) The power given by the Ring is not that of authority or leadership, such as that exercised (in very different ways) by the Stewards of Gondor or the Mayors of Michel Delving; it is the power of domination - one will overriding another. Some, such as Saruman and the Lord of the Rings himself, desire this domination for its own sake, or worse. Others, notably Boromir, desire it in order to use it for good ends; but since it is domination, such use would corrupt the user and pervert the ends. Some of the Nazgul evidently began with good ends in view; and Gandalf tells Denethor that if Boromir had indeed taken the Ring "you would not have known your son". Even Galadriel, an Elf, and as such unfalien, would have become a Queen to inspire despair at her remoteness and the terror of her beauty. While Gandalf, Tolkien said in one of his letters, would have been a far worse Ring-lord than Sauron: "he would have remained 'righteous', but self-righteous", and made good seem detestable and evil47. Most of the cases of legitimate authority in Tolkien are monarchies. (There are a couple of elected offices, those of the Master of Esgaroth and of the Mayor of Michel Delving.) This of course is natural enough in the sort of civilization he is describing; and they are monarchies (those on the good side, that is) of service rather than domination. It is no accident that the only King of Gondor to have usurped the throne by force, Castamir, turned out to be a tyrant. It is not suggested that 'authority' may not turn into 'domination'. The history of the Kings of Numenor after Tar-Minastir proves that. But the two are properly distinct. Kings may, says Aristotle, exceed the power allowed them, from a desire for despotic powers48; yet this is in a passage explicitly devoted to showing the difference between a tyrant and a king. Writing to his son Christopher, Tolkien declared that his political opinions were leaning more and more to Anarchy or to 'unconstitutional' monarchy49. It is interesting that the Anarchist side of his thinking comes out

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in his fiction as well as the Monarchist. The Shire is in effect an anarchy: the Thain's dignity is nominal by the time of The Lord of the Rings, and Pippin, the Thain's son and heir, when asked about himself says "My father farms the lands around Whitwell, near Tuckborough"50; while the Mayor of Michel Delving's chief real function is that of Postmaster and manager of the Messenger Service. Until the coming of Saruman's influence and henchmen into the Shire, its 'police', the Shirriffs, only numbered twelve and were more concerned with the straying of beasts than of people. There is hardly any 'government'51. Though, as Tolkien remarks in the letter already quoted, the fatal weakness of anarchy (and monarchy) is that "it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient way". (The Thainship became important again with the War of the Ring!) In only one of Lewis's novels is power a principal theme, That Hideous Strength. This, however, is of considerable interest because in writing it Lewis had in mind what he thought to be a perfectly genuine danger52. It was not the problem of power in general that concerned him, but one specific form of it, and that in specific hands. The power in question is power 'over nature', and more particularly human nature - the power of the 'hidden persuaders' and propagandists over people in the mass, and of psychological cunning over individuals. This sort of power is never likely to be used for good ends, because good people are unlikely to be willing to use it. But what Lewis feared was that it would be combined with a rejection of all ethical principles in the name of 'objectivity'. A wicked man will know that he is wicked; he may repent, he may die and be replaced by someone less wicked than he. But if ethical principles (what Lewis called the 'Tao') have disappeared altogether, repentance and improvement are both out of the question. There will be no reason for anyone to do anything except that he or she wants to do it; and a relative handful at the top will have the power to enforce what they want. Indeed, there will come a time when even these are only puppets, like their subjects, because their own desires have been predetermined by earlier generations of manipulators. "Traditional values are to be 'debunked' and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it"53. This may sound like a mere nightmare. When Lewis wrote it (towards the end of the Second World War) the sort of views that worried him were to be found mostly in two groups: the 'evolutionary moralists' (he quotes Dr C.H. Waddington as an instance), to whom "existence is its own justification", and philosophers of the linguistic schools (who did not agree among themselves, and who were well aware of the logical difficulties in 'evolutionary morals'). But such notions had already begun to reach others - Lewis's Riddell Lectures were sparked off by a couple of school textbooks on English which had become infected. And certainly the idea that morals are and should be

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adjustable - which denies the existence of ultimate principles just as much as these other ideas, though for different reasons - has become quite common. I have myself seen a clergyman writing that the hydrogen bomb had rendered obsolete the old theory of the 'just war' - meaning thereby not that all wars with hydrogen bombs would be 'unjust', so that there was no longer any practical distinction between the 'just war' theory and pacifism (a tenable position), but that we had better revise our ideas of justice and injustice so as to make nuclear warfare legitimate. And I have heard another, the holder of a Chair in moral theology, explain that since many arguments in favour of abortion also seemed logically to support infanticide, we must - not, as you might suppose, adopt infanticide or oppose abortion - but abandon reason. We must do what we can do, and morals must be adjusted to fit. Confined to the philosophers, professional and amateur, such ideas may be relatively harmless, though still false. It is when they get into the hands, or rather minds, of administrators, journalists, teachers and politicians that the danger becomes serious. For these will be unaware of the reservations and qualifications that the philosophers made; and, more important, they are the people who turn proposals into facts, or prepare the public's mind for this. And it is these people whom we see at work in That Hideous Strength. We are only shown two genuinely eminent scientists on the staff of the N.I.C.E., and one of those resigns from it early in the book. (They have him murdered a few hours later.)54 The rest are administrators, propagandists, secret police; and they include at least two clergymen, presumably as a warning that taking the name of God in vain in such a cause is just as possible as taking in vain that of science. Power is a recurrent theme in Williams's novels too: it is absent only from Descent into Hell and (as a moral problem) from The Place of the Lion. In two of the others {Shadows of Ecstasy and All Hallows' Eve) the central figure already has power at the beginning of the story; it is only a question of how far that power is to extend, and also, in part, of the way in which power may be rejected or thwarted. But in the remaining three the opportunity for power is offered, and the story hinges on the way in which the characters respond to the offer. In a way, the most complex of the three is the earliest, War in Heaven, because the instrument of power (the Holy Graal) is being sought for so many different reasons. On the evil side, Gregory Persimmons desires power for possession, and, as this is still a recognition of some sort of good, he is still capable of repentance and salvation; Manasseh desires only destruction; and Lavrodopoulos is beyond even that, his will having rejected everything it can. He has adopted the perverse choice as his principle, and is left "not fighting but vomiting". Among their opponents, the Duke is a somewhat intransigent Roman Catholic, whose main idea is simply to hand over the Graal to the Vatican. Both he and Kenneth Mornington are to some extent romantics, and surround the Graal with royal or poetical associations,

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so that they are inclined to treat it precisely as that which has these associations, and even to think in terms of avenging an insult to God. The Archdeacon is the opposite of Lavrodopoulos, living by acceptance as the other lives (after a fashion) by rejection, and is consequently the only one who is really able to let the Graal go back to its keeper and so pass out of the reach of Church, romantics and magicians alike. None of the three wishes to dominate the Graal, or by means of it; but two of them are still devoted in part to their own ideas. Only one has attained to actual self-denial, has ieft self behind' (as the New English Bible renders that saying of Jesus). Power, it seems, can best be used by leaving it alone; when Manasseh and the Greek try to destroy the Graal by magic, the Archdeacon calls on his friends to pray, but not against anything, not even the magic: only "that He who made the universe may sustain the universe, that in all things there may be delight in the justice of His will". In The Greater Trumps we meet a feminine counterpart of the Archdeacon in Sybil Coningsby, possessed by "the working of the Fate which was Love, [...] restoring beyond belief all the things it took away - except the individual will". But the story does not just duplicate that of War in Heaven', there is no question of Sybil's having to guard or manipulate the Tarots, or determine their fate in any way. Others, indeed, are seeking to manipulate them; Henry Lee, desiring to possess and understand them, would use them to destroy their current owner (who is Sybil's brother and the father of Henry's fiancee), creating from the cards a storm of snow that is to kill him. But Sybil is called on only to rescue her brother - in a sense, quite normally; she goes out into the blizzard to find him, but in the sure confidence that "Love would be safe in his own storm". As indeed he is; she does find her brother and bring him back - or they bring one another back (since it is only the wish to help her that gives Coningsby the energy to fight the storm) - or something different from either of them brings them back together. Meanwhile Coningsby's daughter Nancy has found her lover driving the storm on and tried to stop him by force. The only result is that most of the cards he is holding are dropped and swept away into the storm, which goes right out of control, threatening to engulf the whole planet. But the Tarots are symbols of the dance of creation, and there is a way of diverting the storm, which Nancy finds, not knowing quite what she does. She meets the storm, and the elemental figures of the Tarots which are within it; she meets them, but not with power. Her hands "moved as if in dancing ritual they answered the dancing monstrosities that opposed them. It was not a struggle but a harmony, yet a harmony that might at any moment have become a chaos. [...] the whole of the magical storm was sent pouring back into the place of its origin." It turns to natural snow, and then that too dies down55. As far as the remaining novel, Many Dimensions, is concerned, we need say no more here. I have already referred to the final 'Judgment' on the power of the Stone in the section on the theme of choice; and implied in that

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Judgment are the various attitudes towards the power of the Stone that we have seen exemplified in other books - selfish use, good use, and renunciation of use. The odd thing is that no-one was more aware than Williams of the need for power of some sort if order is to exist. Order is indeed the theme of the whole cycle of Arthurian poems, and of many individual poems within the cycle; and order is sustained by power. In The Greater Trumps this is seen above all in the figure of the Tarot Emperor. I have already mentioned the passage in which for a moment a policeman directing traffic takes on the Imperial form: "helmed, in a white cloak, stretching out one sceptred arm. [...] Order and law were there. Something common to Emperor and Khalif, cadi and magistrate, praetor and alcalde, lictor and constable, shone before her in those lights." And this is taken up in the Arthurian poems, where the Byzantine Emperor is 'operative providence' - as near God as you can get without turning image into allegory. (But then again, not quite God; for Byzantium fell, and the "glory of the Emperor, glory of substantial being" was lost. Still, though God Himself cannot be lost, the power of Him in a given soul can, in certain respects at least.) But can one simply distinguish in Williams between Authority and Domination, as in The Lord of the Rings! Undoubtedly Domination is excluded from Order; but not all the misuses of power are cases of Domination. The Mayor of Rich in Many Dimensions, seeking the healing of the sick, was not! We are given a clue in the quotation from Dante which Williams prefixed to Taliessin through Logres: "Unde est, quod non operatio propria propter essentiam, sed haec propter illam habet ut sit". (The proper operation (working or function) is not in existence for the sake of the being, but the being for the sake of the function'56.) This is true even of the immortal soul of man. "Man's end is to know God and to enjoy Him for ever" - so; but to know God and to enjoy Him are functions, and apart from them man's existence would be pointless. To Williams the whole of creation presented itself as a vast arrangement of interlocking functions - the cosmic dance of The Greater Trumps; "Change - that's what we know of the immortal dance; the law in the nature of things - that's the measure of the dance [...] quick or slow, measurable or unmeasurable, there is nothing at all anywhere but the dance"57. It is therefore a mistake to set yourself, or even your own good purposes, against the rhythm of the dance, or twist anything from its proper function; domination is only an extreme case of this. Power exists to be exercised for its own proper purpose, and not for another; least of all for the sake of its possessor.

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HIERARCHY

And if this is the case, if everyone has his or her part in the dance, then in some sense everyone is essential to it. "Power is not something one has, it is something that one is"58. There are times when Williams seems to be praising a rigid and inflexible system of hierarchy. Words like 'geometry' 'pattern' and 'diagram' occur over and over again; even the Hebrew prophets are "sent out from the visible mathematics of the glory"59. And this impression of stiffness is reinforced when one remembers his use of Byzantium and the Eastern Empire in the Arthurian poems, for if Byzantium suggests anything at all to the normal reader, it is the idea of a stylized rigidity, even an ossification. I have the impression that this was more often the ideal than the actuality of the Empire, but that hardly affects the point. You get something of the same idea in Lewis. The image of the dance occurs in his writings too: there is both the dance of heaven ("It does not exist for the sake of joy, [or evenl for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it"60) and the 'Great Dance' of all being (in which "each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed" and at the summit of whose complexity is "a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring"61). But side by side with this - forming, indeed, a part of it - comes a severe principle of hierarchy. This is set out most explicitly in his address to the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius on 'Membership'62, but it recurs in a good many of his other writings. "I believe", he wrote, "the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. If we had not fallen [...] patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government"63. Democracy exists - and it is vital that it should - simply because we are fallen, and parents, husbands, learned men and monarchs are (like everyone else) bad. Consequently, "a Christian society would be (to a great extent) what we now call leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience and outward marks of respect"64. And any sort of egalitarianism except for this 'preventive' sort is likely to be mere envy - the desire to say 'I'm as good a man as you are' when this is patently false, and, if necessary, to make it true by bringing the other's goodness down. Williams's ideas about hierarchy, however, are quite different from this. There is no one fixed system: "we are not to suppose that the hierarchy of one moment is likely to be that of the next"65. I may be in a position to set you right on a point of fact, and in that case I am 'hierarchically ascendant'; but ten seconds later you may be correcting me, and the ascendancy be yours. If there are degrees of capacity and merit - as there are - they are relative, and

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constantly changing; "the Prime Minister must be docile to an expert scullion"66. Similarly, "Each man", wrote MacDonald, has his peculiar relation to God. It follows that there is a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man - out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. [...] How shall the rose, the glowing heart of the summer heats, rejoice against the snowdrop risen with hanging head from the white bosom of the snow?67 But to Williams this applies everywhere, and not just to our relationships with God68. These are hierarchies of merit. Those of function are more stable; they depend on the need for certain tasks to be done, and not directly on the abilities of particular people to do them. At any given moment there will be a large body of opinion that believes the current Leader of the Opposition better fitted to be Prime Minister than the man or woman who actually holds that office; but they do not deny the authority of the latter. A constitutional monarchy is also an obvious illustration: "The King does not 'deserve' to be royal, and this is so clear that it saves us from the claims of merit which oligarchies and aristocracies are apt to set up"69. As a matter of fact, even ranks of function can exchange position at times; the Prime Minister is not exempt from the direction of a policeman controlling traffic, for it is in him that the authority of the Emperor is (for the moment) lodging. But in general it is true that in function, as distinct from merit, degree and equality are to some extent opposed. It is best, therefore, that high function should be conferred from without, whether by due process laid down, as with the inheritance of the British Crown or the election by lot of the Archons of Athens, or by the choice of those for whose sake the function exists, as with the election by vote of the British House of Commons. Otherwise we may find ourselves landed with an operatio propter essentiam - a dictator or an oligarch whose functions exist for his sake, and not the other way round. And this of course destroys freedom too, which hierarchy proper does not. "Where a child submits, an adult freely submits; the difference is not negligible. Authority does not, among the adult, do away with freedom; freedom indeed lies precisely in the choice of submission"70. There are also, it seems, hierarchies of love. 'The Mother of God was not an apostle, yet the apostles were - only apostles. Do you suppose she and they wrangled over equality?"71 Doubtless both function and merit are involved here; function can be respected, merit admired, but it is the whole person who is loved. And love, unless God be the lover, is between equals: "one cannot love when one thinks oneself superior - even if one is superior"72. But the

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nature of a hierarchy of love is not explored further - only the way in which love may exist within hierarchies. Lewis's fantastic writings include several pictures of worlds in some respects better than our own - Narnia, Malacandra, Perelandra - and all are in some way hierarchical on the lines depicted in 'Membership'. Narnia and its sister Archenland are 'patriarchal monarchies' (though the original line in Narnia itself evidently died out, and was eventually replaced by an invader); Perelandra will become one. Malacandra is rather different; its inhabitants, as was noted earlier, are not fallen as we are, but neither have they overcome a temptation to fall as the 'Adam' and 'Eve' of Perelandra did. On Malacandra therefore we find an 'angelocracy'; beasts are ruled by 'hnau' (rational beings), 'hnau' by 'eldila' (angels), and all by Oyarsa, the spirit to whom the whole planet has been entrusted. 'Rule' here means only that the 'ruler's' authority is acknowledged when exercised. There is no suggestion that the beasts of Malacandra require constant supervision by its rational inhabitants, nor they by the 'eldila'! But it is, I think, a weakness in Lewis's idea of hierarchy that on what ought to be the most familiar level of all - the beast/man relationship - authority is not always acknowledged, even on Malacandra. There are wild animals there which do not obey the 'hnau', and may even on occasion kill them, just as they do on earth. (This is not, however, the case on Perelandra. There the animals do obey.) Williams's more subtle views of hierarchy are not as prominent in his fantastic writings as Lewis's in his. Partly this is because he saw as exemplifying hierarchy relationships which we do not ordinarily recognize as hierarchical - e.g. the correcting of a mistake. For instance, in The House of the Octopus Anthony, the missionary priest, is prima facie in a position of authority among the Christians on the island. But there comes a point where he is definitely in the wrong, and needs to be corrected. As the Chorus says, There is no prestige in any blessed priesthood, only the priesthood; no prestige in any true thing, but God and the thing itself.73 For the moment, the hierarchy of accuracy (a word very dear to Williams) is the reverse of the hierarchy to which Anthony was accustomed. This is, of course, a hierarchy of merit, not of function. Probably the nearest one can find to an instance of the latter in action is in the novel Many Dimensions, in the scene already described in which the fate of the Stone is in the balance. It is decided by Lord Arglay: not because of his superior wisdom (he is, undoubtedly, wise, but then so is the Hajji, and so, in a different way, is Chloe Burnett), but because he is the Lord Chief Justice, and judgment is his proper function as it is not that of the others. In general, however, Williams's novels do not have settings in which hierarchy of function is likely to be

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prominent. Royalty, for instance, the most obvious example of function divorced from merit, is met with only once - the exiled Zulu king in Shadows of Ecstasy, whose royalty is treated with genuine respect, but is naturally unable to function precisely because it is in exile. Hierarchy of function is, I suspect, chiefly valued because it is more visibly a pattern than hierarchy of merit, and to that extent more obviously a 'glory'. In the long run, it is no doubt less glorious, because less important; like those who occupy its ranks, it exists for the sake of the operatio, and there are only a limited number of operationes where it is applicable, which is not true of hierarchy of merit. But then perhaps all hierarchies are important, ultimately, only as occasions for love and humility and joy.

PROVIDENCE

Moralism, the problem of power, hierarchy; these form a connected series of themes. Distinct from these is another important theme, which runs through all our writers, with just possibly the exception of Tolkien - that of Providence or Luck. (The two terms are deliberately identified.) Providence is no doubt an idea common to all kinds of Christianity. But it does bulk very large in our four writers - most of all, perhaps, in MacDonald, in whose non-fictional writings it is constantly turning up. I have said that Tolkien is a possible exception; but really this is only in the sense that the idea is not insisted on in The Lord of the Rings to the same extent as it is in the other three. Even here I have found one writer, Douglas Parker, describing Tolkien's world as 'totally deterministic' and declaring that at the end "freewill has not been restored; it never existed in the first place"74. This is grossly overstating the case. There is an overall determinism of a sort in Tolkien. The Third Age is undoubtedly doomed, whatever replaces it, and the Elves are undoubtedly fated to leave Middle-earth or "dwindle into a rustic folk of dell and cave". But this does not mean there is total determinism. (And one's confidence in Mr. Parker's judgment is badly shaken by other startling mistakes he makes, despite his obvious admiration for Tolkien. He thinks, for instance, that all but the Elves "must die without hope of return or after life" despite the 'returns' of Beren and Gandalf, and the explicit belief in an afterlife of Thorin and Aragorn75; and there are also minor slips - minor, but still suggesting careless reading - like calling the Balrog 'octopus-like' instead of 'man-shape' or saying that the trolls were Men enslaved by Sauron76.) There are indeed a number of passages which imply an active Providence apart from the general workings of nature and history. At the close of The Hobhit Gandalf says to Bilbo "You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your own benefit?" and later, in The Fellowship of the Ring, he tells Frodo "Bilbo was

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meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker, In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought." ("It is not", said Frodo.)77 Again, commenting on the battles in the North, Gandalf remarks that they had averted great evil "because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth"78. And there are one or two other, similar passages. Clearly there is some power (presumably God, Iluvatar, 'the One') working behind the scenes. But there is no guarantee that this working will inevitably prevail. The escapes of Bilbo, the return of Thorin to the Lonely Mountain, the acceptance of his burden by Frodo; these were no doubt meant to happen, but they also very definitely depended on the actions of the characters concerned. It is possible to frustrate the plans even of Providence. According to the Bible, Adam did so; so did King Saul. There are other examples in our writers. Thus, in That Hideous Strength, Merlin says that Mark and Jane Studdock were to have had a son who would "turn the enemies out of Logres" for a thousand years; but they had decided against having children. Williams, in All Hallows' Eve, sees the same sort of thing in the failure of first-century Jewry as a whole to accept Jesus as Christ: it had been intended that "their lofty tradition should be made almost unbearably august"79, yet it did not so happen. What does happen in such cases is that God brings about some other good, or achieves His purpose by a different route. Adam fell; but his 'felix culpa' brought about the Redemption. Saul failed the test; but David was there in to replace him. Eustace and Jill in The Silver Chair miss the first three of the signs given them by Asian, doing so through their own disobedience and self-centredness; when at last they realize what has happened and try to amend, they find themselves, 'by accident', back on the right path. It was always a possibility that Bilbo, having free will, should fail to play his part in the dwarves' expedition; if so, the fate of the Ring would have been different, at least for a time, and some book other than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings would have had to be written. Indeed, at the final climax on Mount Doom we find both the frustration of Providence and its reassertion in the space of a few sentences. After all his heroic struggles, physical and spiritual, Frodo fails at the crucial moment: he cannot bring himself to destroy the Ring but claims it as his own. The plan is frustrated - and changes to meet that frustration. It is another, the unhappy Gollum, who destroys the Ring, and himself with it. It may be answered that both Frodo's failure and Gollum's unintended success were predestined; had not Gandalf said that Gollum had some part to play, for good or ill, before the end? Yet it is unlikely that the One deliberately and unnecessarily made Frodo fail; while Gollum had already played a very important part indeed, for both good and ill, before ever he came to Mount Doom. Maybe artistically it is true that Frodo 'could not' have thrown the Ring into the fire; it would have been almost an anticlimax. But Tolkien the

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author is not God the Creator: God need not always work in what we humans should judge to be an 'artistic' way. Shakespeare's Brutus is a better work of art than the historical Brutus was; God had other things than art to think of when He made him (and so did Brutus in shaping his own life). MacDonald asks in one place80 "Is the final catastrophe in Hamlet such, because Shakespeare could do no better? - It is; he could do no better than the best. [...] It would have been a fine thing indeed for the most nobly perplexed of thinkers [...] to ascend in desolate dreariness the contemptible height of the degraded throne, and shine the first in a drunken court!" And yet if the story in Saxo Grammaticus has any truth in it (admittedly very doubtful) the 'real' Hamlet, the one created by God rather than Shakespeare, did survive. And just because Shakespeare, or Tolkien, moves his characters in a particular way, we need not suppose that they thought God did so too, or intended to portray God in their fictional worlds as doing so. There can be an appearance of predestination in a story without the author's having intended to put predestination across as a theological position! Tolkien makes the theme of the reassertion of providence far more explicit in the first part of The Silmarillion, the 'Ainulindale', where Melkor, the greatest of the Valar, tries to dominate the angelic music with his own themes, not those of God. "And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the throne of Iluvatar, and they were utterly at variance". Melkor's, crude and repetitious, "essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern"; and Melkor is told, when the Valar are shown the world-design their songs have fashioned, 'Thou wilt perceive that they [Melkor's thoughts] are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory"81. Similarly, Ulmo, the Vala of the waters, is told "Melkor hath made war on thy province. He hath bethought him of bitter cold immoderate, and yet hath not destroyed the beauty of thy fountains, nor of thy clear pools. Behold the snow, and the cunning work of frost!" and replies "Water is become now fairer than my heart imagined, neither had my secret thought conceived the snowflake"82. A rejected version had Melkor break the Moon away from the Earth as a stronghold for himself; and yet when he was expelled from it, "because of malice silver has been made of gold, and moonlight of sunlight, and Earth in its anguish and loss has been greatly enriched"83. Can one see traces here of St Augustine's teaching on evil? 'The black colour in a picture", he said, "may very well be beautiful if you take the picture as a whole"84; and, elsewhere, "some things, because they do not harmonize with others, are considered evil; but with still others they do harmonize, and are good"85. Melkor, who is a free agent, misuses his freedom; yet, use or misuse, the music he produces is turned to the purposes of Iluvatar. And the same applies to Men86.

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Hence one must treat the references to 'Doom' (not, of course, used in the modern, limited sense of an evil doom, but in the more general one of 'destiny'), which are found so often in The Silmarillion, not as denials of freedom, but as pointers to fixed elements in the divine plan which may come about in various ways. Mandos is indeed the 'Doomsman of the Valar'; but he does not decide what shall happen, he merely announces it, and then only at the bidding of Manwe87. Even the Doom of the Noldor which provides the theme of the book is a reaction to the freedom the Noldor have misused, and a warning to them (which most ignore, but not all) to misuse it no longer. It is a conditional doom - conditional upon the abuse of freedom. Indeed, 'doom' does not have to be the work of Iluvatar or His servants at all. The outstanding example is once again Turin. The note of 'doom' - in the modern sense as well as the older - is there in all his story. But it is not the work of God or the Valar, it is that of Morgoth and his curse on Turin's father. And it is a doom that has to be worked out with diligence by Morgoth and his servants - aided by Turin's own pride and folly: there is no suggestion that Morgoth, having issued his curse, could simply sit back and let things work out by themselves. Even the darkness that shrouded Turin's early life was not the direct result of the curse; it had its roots in events that took place before the curse was pronounced: "He was gloomy-hearted, and glad seldom, for the sundering sorrow that seared his youth [...] for he mourned the misery of the Men of Hithlum"88, sorrow and misery caused by the defeat inflicted by Morgoth's armies before Hurin defied him and was cursed. But one could set all this aside and still deny that Tolkien's world is to be taken as deterministic. "In the armour of Fate (as the Children of Earth name it) there is ever a rift, and in the walls of Doom a breach, until the fullmaking, which ye call the End", says Ulmo89, and that rift or breach has its origin in freedom, whether the freedom of Ulmo himself, one of the greatest of all the Valar, or in that of an insignificant hobbit. The real answer to Parker's suggestion lies in the emphasis made on choice. One cannot seriously suppose that the responsibilities for choice laid on Saruman, on Turgon, on Galadriel, Boromir, Sam and the rest were intended by Tolkien to be unreal; they are portrayed as free to choose, well or ill, and as doing so. Galadriel "passes the test"; Saruman's decision comes to "the balance of a hair". When Eomer asks Aragorn "What doom do you bring out of the North?", Aragorn answers 'The doom of choice"90. There is Providence, but not Predestination. Mr. Urang inclines91 to the opinion that freedom is unreal in Williams. I believe this too to be a mistake. Freedom is not, as he supposes, indissolubly bound up with the concept of time, which Williams does occasionally treat as in some way unreal. Freedom is a negative - the absence of any power, personal or impersonal, settling our decisions independently of ourselves - and as such could be present in a timeless being as well as in a temporal one. The nearest Williams comes to a real questioning of freedom is, I think, in the

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thoughts of Anthony in The Place of the Lion, on the edge of the spiritual pit in Berringer's house92: "How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being." But his debate continues, and is never ended, either way. (One could add more, even. If, say, I am invited to take something I should like - prefer - to have, and abstain for the sake of someone else, I am, if I can said to be preferring that other's good, choosing to prefer it. Can one then prefer to prefer? And so on!) The case of Sybil Coningsby in The Greater Trumps puts Williams's views on freedom in a different light, for the point about her is that she really is no longer free - by her own deliberate surrender to the divine will. Nearer, oddly enough, to Predestination - oddly, because he repudiated the Calvinistic type with indignation - is MacDonald. 'Predestination' is not, indeed, quite the right word; perhaps 'universal providence' would be better. The theme recurs. Already in his early twenties he was writing to his uncle James "The conviction is, I think, growing upon me that the smallest events are ordered for us, while yet in perfect consistency with the ordinary course of cause and effect in the world"93. At this stage, indeed, he was thinking only of those who serve God (undoubtedly with Romans 8:28 in mind); later, however, in books such as On the Miracles of our Lord, the same principle is applied to the ungodly as well; it is necessary to one's faith, he writes, "to believe every trouble fitted for the being who has to bear it, every physical evil not merely the result of moral evil, but antidotal thereto"94. This is of course the root of his 'purgatorial' view of hell: 'The man whose deeds are evil, fears the burning. But the burning will not come the less because he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till he has paid the last farthing"95. Eventually the idea was versified: If to myself - 'God sometimes interferes' I said, my faith at once would be struck blind. I see him all in all, the lifing mind, Or nowhere in the vacant miles and years96. Pushed to an extreme, this would presumably lead to a complete theological determinism. That it did not was the result of an equally strong insistence, as in Tolkien, on human freedom. "He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should he effect this if he were always moving us from within, as he does at divine intervals, towards the beauty of holiness?"97 It is not easy to see how one could give fictional expression to this idea of universal providence, and I do not think MacDonald ever tries; his supernatural figures (who are of course only supernatural, and not divine) do

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'sometimes interfere'. It is probably easier to give expression to such an idea in a play, and Williams did in fact do something like this. Three of his plays Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, The Death of Good Fortune, and The House of the Octopus - use the figure of Necessity, described earlier, to display Providence at work. Necessity stands outside the action to comment upon it, but also directs it throughout. The Skeleton in Cranmer raises Cranmer to the archiepiscopate, shakes his position and rescues him, deposes him, and so on, driving him steadily towards his final salvation. Necessity - the Skeleton accepts that name, though he adds further on98: I am the only thing that outruns necessity, I am necessary love where necessity is not Necessity may seem terrible, but in the end is not. "If the Pope had bid me live, I should have served him", Cranmer agrees in almost the closing words of the play; the necessity that burned him, the fact that the Pope had not bid him live, also saved him. And I have already quoted what Williams said a propos of the Invisible Knight of the Arthurian cycle, who "is Satan to us but the Holy Ghost to the supernatural powers"99. These figures of Necessity are obviously 'providential', but it is equally obvious that they do leave room for the individual's freedom. It is at all times open to people (Cranmer, Anthony, anyone) to do the wrong thing; and often, indeed, that is just what they do. In The Death of Good Fortune the way is opened for five characters to accept that 'all luck is good'; three do so, but two do not. "It means nothing to me", says one; "something perhaps, but nothing I have any hope to be", says the other. (Not that there is any implication of finality; theirs is not yet, one presumes, the final, perverse choice.) As a matter of fact, two out of five is rather a high failure rate for Necessity; for God knows us well and can adjust His Necessity to our condition. "Most men", says another Necessity figure, the Accuser in Judgment at Chelmsford, "when at last they see their desire, fall to repentance - all have that chance"100. In a sense, faith and repentance are to all four of our writers the natural human reaction to a clear vision of good and evil, and it requires self-deception or deliberate perversity to react otherwise. The unnatural reaction is always possible, but only with careful preparation - the years of pride that destroyed Denethor and Simon the Clerk, or of self-pampering that destroyed Lawrence Wentworth, or of toil in an evil cause that destroyed Wither and Frost. Lewis made an attempt, in the second appendix to his book on miracles, to describe how Providence and human freedom could be compatible with one another, suggesting that our normal view of physical nature as constant and human volitions as variable is no more true than the reverse: that it is equally legitimate (though equally misleading) to regard the whole of nature as adapted by God to the free choice of human beings. I confess that personally I

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find this the least satisfactory part of the book; I do not believe the 'symmetry' suggested by Lewis is possible. The laws of nature and the states of nature can be described uniquely (though doubtless incompletely) without reference to human beings or their volitions; the reverse is not the case. Not only can I not choose to vote for Smith unless Smith, and voting machinery, exist; it is not possible even to put such a choice into words, it is not possible even to think about it, unless they exist. Not even God could make their existence dependent on my choice, because that choice is logically as well as causally dependent on their already existing. This is not to say that Providence is an impossibility, nor indeed do I believe it to be one; only that it cannot work in quite the way that Lewis suggested it did. But if Providence is a reality - whatever its way of working - the ancient Problem of Evil arises in a particularly acute form. All theists are faced with the apparent need to make God ultimately responsible for the existence of evil; but a Providential theist seems to make Him directly and immediately responsible for it. How, then, do our authors deal with this problem? Tolkien I can be fairly brief with. Freedom is asserted; but whatever happens God, Iluvatar, will doubtless turn it to good. Meanwhile, as far as this Middle-earth is concerned anyway, we are given a kind of dualism; there is a perpetual battle going on between good and evil. "Many Men perceive the world only as a war between Light and Dark equipotent", says Andreth in Tolkien's most 'theological' piece . Once the enemy was Morgoth; then it was Sauron; and if he falls, though he himself may be maimed for ever, other evils will come; "for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary"102. But the dualism is not complete. It may in fact look rather one-sided: for a victory by the forces of good is only temporary, whereas had Sauron won there would be no foreseeable end to his triumph. But the reason for this is that in reality the dualism is unreal in the other direction. Even in the Land of Mordor itself Sam is able to realize that "in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and beauty for ever beyond its reach." And Andreth herself continues "But you will say: nay, that is Manwe and Melkor; Eru is above them"103. The only reason that evil appears to be the stronger is that heaven does not normally intervene; that would be too close to Domination. Heaven works more subtly than that. Most of the time it leaves the struggle to the weakness of us lesser beings, Men and Elves and Hobbits and the like. Sometimes we fail. "Nothing is evil in the beginning", as Elrond told the Council; "even Sauron was not so"104. But Sauron fell into evil, as Melkor did, and as (tradition holds) Satan did105; and when one as great as these falls it seems to those in his shadow that the world itself has been ruined; but it is not so. Nevertheless, till the end of the world evil always remains a possibility, and the struggle goes on. MacDonald also allows the possibility of falling into evil - I mean, doing so in spite of the will of God for good. But he believes strongly that the evils

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we suffer are in the long run good. "What we call evil", says Anodos in almost the last sentence of Phantastes, "is the only and best shape, which, for the person and the condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good." So also with Adam's warning to Vane that if he forgets, some evil that is good for him will come to pass; if not, some evil that is not good for him will not come to pass. This MacDonald applies many times, especially in his Unspoken Sermons, to the idea of hell; to him hell is first and foremost a curative place. Evil things "must be destroyed one day, even if it be by that form of divine love which appears as a consuming fire. [...] If you go close up to [God], his spirit will become your spirit, and you will need no fire then. You will find that, that which is fire to them that are afar off, is a mighty graciousness to them that are nigh. They are both the same thing"106. It follows, of course, that there can be no such thing as eternal punishment; hell exists only in order that it may cease to exist. You can, of course, continue to resist God even in hell; but is it imaginable that such self-will will go on for ever? In Lilith, MacDonald imagines such a resistance. At the first stage of selfconsciousness or awareness of her own evil, Lilith only curses God for making her as she was; at the next, she recoils from the fear of annihilation, but relapses, from a submission neither feigned nor quite real, into renewed defiance; only after the third, in which "she knew life only to know that it was dead, and that, in her, death lived. [...] she was consciously a dead thing"107 does a change begin, and then it is but a gradual process. I think it would also be true to say that MacDonald tended to regard past evils as rendered inoffensive by present good. Repentance makes a bad man good, and the fact that he has sinned in the past is no longer relevant. The words of Ezekiel would apply: "None of the offences that he has committed shall be remembered against him; he shall live because of his righteous deeds"108. Much the same applies to 'natural evil'. The whole creation is ultimately to be redeemed, and this must include at least all sentient life; there is a hope given for (though hardly to) animals and perhaps even plants. If so, any sufferings through which they will have gone will in the end be irrelevant too, not to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed109. But there is no attempt to develop this into some sort of theodicy; MacDonald always sought to be practical rather than theoretical, and was concerned primarily with the practical need for his readers to respect and love the creation, and to ascribe a similar attitude to God. Williams's attitude towards evil was utterly different. In a way it is difficult to describe exactly, except by a series of quotations, because of the existence in his thought of several different ideas closely intertwined. If one begins with the chapter of He Came Down from Heaven entitled The Myth of the Alteration in Knowledge', the impression given is that of a view rather like MacDonald's in reverse. To MacDonald a thing may seem evil now and turn out in the end to have been good all the time, once we can see it clearly. To

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Williams, a thing may be good now and yet seem - or rather become - evil because we see it wrongly. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed: "it was part of their good", a "free candour". Then they fell. 'They insisted on knowing good as evil; and they did. They knew that candour as undesirable; they experienced shame"110. But it is not just a case of, as it were, seeing a thing - nakedness or sex or whatever - as bad while all the time it is really good. The distortion, the alteration in knowledge, is a real distortion, a real alteration, and as such is really bad, not just seemingly so. "Sex had been good; it became evil". It follows that part at least of our redemption must consist of another alteration in knowledge - the realization that "all luck is good". It is not just a matter of realizing at last that what seemed bad luck was necessary to a greater good, as in MacDonald; it is (ideally) a glad acceptance here and now of what to others, and to our own fallen vision, seems bad. Evidently Williams himself did not find this easy. He once said111 that Christianity did not come naturally to him; it was a matter of conviction, not of instinct; and this was particularly so where evil was concerned. There is a thread of what might be called a pessimism of the emotions in a good deal of his writing, especially in some of his earlier plays and poems. The play The Witch ends in the total defeat of love by that which first God saw when he beheld pure evil112. In the horrifying poem 'Domesticity' the most ordinary things reveal themselves as nightmares; it is Recovery in a ghastly inversion. The drowned victims of pirates or the noyades of the French Revolution are floating for ever wherever water flows. Water's cool refreshment refreshed not them: Cleansed we arise - cleansed and the more defiled By obscene currents of death no oblivion can stem Or distil from the general river, clogged and unclean. Mrs. Hadfield, in her first book on Williams, saw this poem as ending with a glimmer of hope, quoting And lo through a secret chink in time and space We shall come out afar in the Cocytean South; but in fact the next lines betray this hope: Lost for ever, turning a haggard face On Tasman's rocks or the gunboat-guarded Bay113.

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This attitude is not conspicuous in the novels, but it is there. The most obvious example is the character of Lionel Rackstraw in War in Heaven: "The name of the world that none has dared to speak is Judas [...]. Let us pray only that immortality is a dream. But I don't suppose it is"114. When the diabolist Gregory decides to give himself a little relaxation by worrying Lionel, he gets a serious shock to find that "Lionel was, even in his usual state, beyond this". And it seems clear that Lionel represents, not exactly Williams himself, but something that Williams was very conscious of in himself. "I myself, he wrote to a friend, "have no passion for everlasting life. But I do not conceive that my personal wishes govern the universe"115. In some way this has to be resolved. Even Lionel has to be given some kind of hope, for ruin and despair are not evil in themselves, Prester John ('Necessity') tells him; he may find the annihilation he desires, but "the door that opens on annihilation opens only on the annihilation which is God"116. Such a resolution Williams certainly believed in; but in his writings he found it far harder to express this than to express the conflict it would be the resolution of. It is clear that Lester Furnival, at the close of All Hallows' Eve, is entering beatitude and glory; but it is even clearer that she is parting from her husband in a far more final way than she had by death. Almost her last words to him are "I did love you" (my italics). This is not, one might add, a passage that would have appealed much to MacDonald, for he detested those theologies which, intentionally or otherwise, belittled human affections and made them out to be merely transitory. "Shall God be the God of all the families of the earth, and shall the love that he has thus created go moaning and longing to all eternity; or worse, far worse, die out of our bosoms?" he asked in an 'unspoken sermon'; and he even attempted to bring this insistence into at least one of his novels117, where the heroine, surely rather implausibly, rejects her suitor because, being an atheist, he does not believe that he will love her for ever. But to Williams the sheer otherness of heaven was more impressive than any continuity between it and earth, however genuinely he would have acknowledged that such a continuity must in fact exist. "Of any future union, if any were to be," he had written of Lester Furnival a little earlier, "she could not even begin to think; had she, the sense of separation would have been incomplete, and the deadly keenness of the rain [the signal of approaching separation] unenjoyed. Without him, what was immortality or glory worth? And yet only without him could she even be that which she now was"118. Even the entry into blessedness is, it seems, a pain, and, though certainly in no sense whatever an evil, not altogether welcome, at least as we consider it now: "a sharp pain in a great joy"119, or heaven's kind of salvation, not at all to the mind of any except the redeemed, and to theirs hardly120.

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In the meantime, this life is, it seems, almost unendurable, an "infinite distress". And to try and justify God's creation of it is very nearly impossible. The ordinary apologists - Lewis, for example - will say that He permits the evil in the world without actually willing it. Williams will have none of this: God must have known the consequences of creating before He created, and still He chose to create. This the prophets too had said: "I make peace and create evil"; "Shall there be evil in a city, and I the Lord not have done it?"121 (the latter quoted by the Archdeacon in War in Heaven, somewhat to the bewilderment of his hearers). It may be that God, who sees all things, sees among them some end to which this distress leads and which is worth it; but is His infliction of the distress on us, who never consented to it (nor were asked to consent) justified? Only in one way. God has created all this horror; but at least He has not simply unloaded it on others. He has shared it Himself, on the Cross. "It's God they ought to crucify instead of you and me", says Sydney Carter's ballad; but the words are put into the mouth of the 'penitent thief, and the man he is addressing is in fact God in process of being crucified. "Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things?" Williams quotes from St Luke122, and answers, simply, "Yes; He ought [...]. But then also He did"123. He has not thereby necessarily made life any more tolerable; but He has made it justifiable. Williams's views on the Atonement were, of course, more complex than this; we have seen something of them already, and also of the way in which they found expression in his fantastic writings. This particular aspect of them, however, is much harder to give expression to; it can be stated in an essay directly treating of the Cross, and was124, but hardly elsewhere. The accusation against God, yes; this appears even on the lips of the Archdeacon in War in Heaven - except that there it is not an accusation but a recognition, since the Archdeacon really is capable of accepting 'evil' as good, and from God. But the submission of God to that accusation - that is a much harder thing to introduce, because it belongs to one particular period in history, and does not therefore make appropriate material for fantasy. The nature of evil can be depicted, and its defeat in the individual; but the ultimate reason why it can be defeated - this can only be referred to, not depicted. Lewis was the only one of the four ever to write a book specifically devoted to the existence of evil and the problems this raises for the Christian, in his The Problem of Pain. It is (rightly) something of a classic in this field. But there are reasons not to discuss it here. Firstly, it is, obviously, not a work of fantasy (except perhaps in the eyes of unkind critics). Secondly, it received an admirable analysis by the late Dr Austin Farrer (himself the author of Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited) in the symposium Light on C. S. Lewis125. It has, however, certain features that reappear in the fantastic works and do therefore call for our attention here.

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The most notable of these is the immense seriousness with which Lewis takes the idea of the devil. This contrasts greatly with the attitudes of the other three. In Tolkien, Morgoth is certainly modelled on Satan; but Morgoth is no longer in this world, and both he and his successor Sauron operate as physical tyrants more than as spiritual seducers - though spiritual seduction often aided their plans for tyranny126. In MacDonald's Lilith we do find Satan, as the Shadow whom Vane meets in the city of Bulika and encounters occasionally later; but he is only a vague and largely impotent menace, the real danger lying in his mistress, Lilith herself. MacDonald certainly believed in Satan's reality, or there would be little point in saying, as he does, that in the end even he will come to repentance and salvation; but it can hardly be said that Lilith would lose much if all references to the Shadow were dropped, and in MacDonald's other fantasies he does not appear at all. Williams's attitude is more hesitant. He admitted the possibility of a personal devil, but not the necessity; the Satan of The Rite of the Passion is not the devil of Christian tradition - "Who art thou, my servant Satan?" asks 'Love' (Christ), and the reply is "Lord, I am thy shadow"127. The Accuser in Judgment at Chelmsford bears a name which is of course a translation of 'Satan', but is unambiguously good. Even in the two novels which deal with black magic, War in Heaven and All Hallows' Eve, Satan does not appear with it, and his existence is treated as uncertain. The most definitely diabolic figures we meet are those of the Emperor of P'o-lu (in the Taliessin poems and The House of the Octopus) and of Lily Sammile (in Descent into Hell). But the former cannot be directly identified with Satan any more than the Emperor of Byzantium can be identified with God; he is nearer an image of evil in action, and the fact that he is a person (of sorts) for the purposes of the poetry carries no implications about Williams's beliefs. Mrs. Sammile is a difficult figure in a difficult book. Certainly she tempts people to serve and adore themselves128; certainly she is not a human being, even a wicked one; her names (echoing 'Lilith' and 'Sammael', traditionally another name for Satan) and her home among the graves demonstrate that. But she is hardly supernatural either; she is, again, more of a personification than a person. To Lewis, on the other hand, Satan is definitely a person, and only by accident, so to speak, a personification. I think it might even be true to say that because he is a person he cannot be a personification in the full sense - for that would suggest something perilously close to Manichaeism, a personal being who stands to evil as God does to good. Lewis has indeed been accused of coming much too close to this sort of dualism. He repudiated it: but one can see that there are passages which give plausibility to the charge, however wrongly. We might instance the idea of Satan's face as the 'Miserific Vision' in Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters, for example, or the poem 'Wormwood'129, which, while acknowledging Satan's derived existence, calls him "alternative to God" and "Ahriman", and says to him "God is: thou art: the rest, illusion".

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As a person, the devil figures offstage in The Pilgrim's Regress, Out of the Silent Planet, and That Hideous Strength, and on stage in Perelandra. In the last three of these, the 'Ransom' books, he is brought into the astrological machinery of the novels as the Oyarsa or guardian angel of our planet earth, which would make him greater than the ordinary run of angels ('eldila') (indeed, the Oyarsa of Mars says "he was brighter and greater than I") but not the highest of them all as tradition pictures him. (The greatness of an Oyarsa seems to vary with the size of the planet controlled, the greatest in our solar system being he of Jupiter, despite that planet's lack of inhabitants. But there are other angels far above even him.) The 'bent Oyarsa' of Earth is now confined to this planet130; Perelandra describes an attempt of his to break out, and That Hideous Strength the consequent breaking in of the other Oyeresu. The seriousness with which Lewis took the idea of Satan can be seen in his non-fictional writings as well. The picture of the devil in The Problem of Pain is of course less fanciful, and is free of the astrological background found in the 'Ransom' books. But similar ideas do appear there when Lewis comes to discuss the problem of animal pain131. The devil is, after all, he reminds us, "the lord of this world"; it is "a reasonable supposition that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or at least the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene. |...] It may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared." Tolkien's Morgoth functions in a very similar way. But I am not convinced that "this world" has the meaning here given it in its original context. Moreover, the pains of animals are in part caused by the working of natural laws, and Satan can hardly be supposed to be the author of those laws. But let these queries pass. Presumably the extent of this corruption - universe, system or planet can only be known if and when interstellar travel should become a reality. Lewis, for one, would certainly have hoped that this would amount to 'never'. I have no pleasure in looking forward to a meeting between humanity and any alien rational species. I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black. [...] I do not doubt that the same revolting story will be repeated. We are not fit yet to visit other worlds. We have filled our own with massacre, torture, syphilis, famine, dust bowls and with all that is hideous to ear or eye. Must we go on to infect new worlds?132 In this passage it seems to be assumed that the devil's power is indeed confined to this planet, or at least may very well be; but there are other possibilities, and in the same essay that I have just quoted Lewis goes on to speculate about some of these. A species stronger than ourselves, perhaps, which (rightly) destroyed the humans who tried to reduce it to misery? Or one which, like

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ours, had fallen but been redeemed (not necessarily in the same way as ours)? Or one which had fallen but had not yet been redeemed, and which it was our duty to evangelize? There are theological problems involved here. Could an Incarnation into human life redeem non-human races? If so, much that has been said or written about the Atonement would need re-thinking; but that may be true in any case. Christ is the One through whom all things were made, and His entry into the created universe might well be expected to affect the whole of it, and not just that planet on which He became incarnate. And St Paul in Romans 8:19ff. ascribes a cosmic significance to the redemption of the human race. But it has usually been supposed that God the Son had to become human in order to redeem humanity; "what is not assumed is not redeemed", said St Gregory; and if this is so would His incarnation as a human redeem any other beings?133 Or, finally, Lewis suggests, there might be a nastier possibility, "a race which was strictly diabolical [...] altogether perverted through and through". Even this, though, he argues, should not prove a stumbling-block. We had always heard of such beings - the only thing is, we had supposed them all incorporeal. This last strikes me as very dubious. The demons are supposed to have fallen, each of his own free will, at some point in the past. But these 'corporeal demons' (galactic ores?), if they live, reproduce and die in roughly the same sort of way as earthly species do, would be born demonic - a kind of predestination well beyond anything Calvin or Augustine ever thought of. Should such a race ever be discovered, I think it would make me, for one, seriously doubt the truth of Christianity; but I do not think it will. One other possibility is implied in an article by Lewis on 'Shall we lose God in outer space?'134. Here, considering the question 'Can we, without absurd arrogance, believe ourselves uniquely favoured by the Incarnation if we find our race to be only one among millions?' Lewis says that this question will become formidable //five other questions can be answered: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Are there animals anywhere except on earth? If so, do any of them have rational souls? If so, are any of them fallen? If so, have they been denied redemption by their own Incarnation? (5) If so, have they been redeemed in some other way e.g. through us?135 Now there is the possibility that the answer to (1), (2), (3) and (4) might be 'Yes' and that to (5) 'No'; if, for instance, some fallen species had died out, without any Incarnation, before man reached its home planet. It would still be possible, of course, that this species had been redeemed in some totally

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unexpected and undetectable way. But in the absence of evidence for this, such a state of affairs would constitute a very serious objection to Christianity. (Conversely, of course, Christians will for just this reason think it wildly unlikely that any such discovery will ever be made.) Lewis came very close to seeing this, even if he never put it into so many words. As he himself remarked, "all this is in the realm of fantastic speculation. We are trying to cross a bridge, not only before we come to it, but even before we know there is a river that needs bridging"136. That is true; but it may not be completely wasted time for all that. It has, for instance, some slight philosophical interest. There was for a good many years a protracted debate among philosophers of religion on the general subject of 'falsification'. It would not be relevant to go into this debate in full detail, but its central point may be summed up in a question once put to theists by Professor Antony Flew: "What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"137 Now obviously the answer to this may vary a great deal from one believer to another. But if what I have been saying is correct, here are two possible states of affairs which might constitute such a disproof (of Christian theism, anyway): namely, a planet of 'corporeal demons' and an 'extinct and unredeemed' one. And since behind Flew's challenge lay, not merely curiosity, but the belief that unless some conceivable (not of course necessarily actual!) state of affairs could at least in theory be a disproof, the assertion of God's love (or existence) could have no real meaning, these speculations do seem to have some relevance after all. They might not (I suspect) have satisfied Professor Flew, for the philosophical problems involved are more complex than his question suggests taken by itself; but they do answer that question as it stands.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Gibb(1965), p. xvi. The Greater Trumps, p. 134. The Silmarillion did grow out of the 'Lay of Leithian', where the love-interest is absolutely essential. However, in the later prose version even this is condensed and viewed from without. Ch. 12; p. 86 of the 1962 edition. 'The Legend of the Corrievrechan' (PoeticalWorks, vol.2, pp. 120ff.) MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, series 2, 'The Way', p .7. The Image of the City, p. 116. To these we might add Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength, of whom more later. The Hope of the Gospel, p. 126 (' God's Family'). We might compare the pterodactyl steed of the Witch-king in The Lord of the Rings (contrast the eagle Gwaihir who freely carries Gandalf) though these are not of course symbolic.

Themes 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Page 135. Page 203. Tree and Leaf, pp. 82-83. See above, pp. 56f. Thomas Wingfold, Curate, ch. 74. The Marquis of Lassie, ch. 45. Flecker of Dean Close, p. 63. Cf. John 7:17. See especially the 'unspoken sermon' on 'The Creation in Christ' (Unspoken Sermons, series 3). Series 3, pp. 109-62. By E. W. Boss, quoted by Kilby (1965), p. 141. So, to be fair, did MacDonald;'Justice' was, so to speak, bottled up for years. Mere Christianity, p. 54. The Image of the City, p. xlviii. Ibid., pp. 151 and 153. The Region of the Summer Stars, p. 38. Gibb (1965), p. 6. Contrast Lewis's letter in Vanauken, pp. 227-28: "one dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! [...] but one must not be fanciful"' - clearly referring to the same matter. But see also Wilson (1990), pp. 269-70. The Descent of the Dove, p. 236. The Image of the City, p. 137. Ibid. Ch. 7, esp. pp. 143-48. Cf. also the' Epilogue' in Judgement at Chelmsford. Page 101. Letter quoted above {The Image of the City, p. xlviii). See Williams's introduction to Underhill's Letters, p. 21. The Image of the City, p. 133. Witchcraft, p. 118. The Image of the City, pp. 166-68. And for one member of Williams's circle who found substitution hard to swallow, see Letters to Lalage, pp. 53-54. The Silmarillion, pp. 78ff. The Silmarillion, p. 285. Genesis 12:1. Both to be found in the collection They Asked for a Paper. Page 158 (of the first edition). Page 225. Contrast Descent into Hell, p. 51, where exhaustion might have saved Wentworth from spying on the girl he was attracted to, but does not; "he was not overtired", and physical nature, "which sometimes postpones our more complete damnation" (Williams seems to think less of its potential usefulness than Lewis did!) was unable to help.

43. Pages 365-66. 44. Page 445.

45.

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War in Heaven, p. 242.

92 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

11.

Chapter 5 Mere Christianity, p. 106. Utters, pp. 332-33. Politics, 1310b. Utters, pp. 63-64. 7.077?, p. 799. LO'7'tf, pp. 21-22. See above all Lewis's Riddell Lectures, The Abolition of Man, for a non-fictionalized treatment of this subject. The Abolition of Man, p. 5 1 . Possibly Frost is also a scientist; he is a professor of something, though we are not told what. A very similar idea is used in the play Seed of Adam, when Mary is attacked by the negress Hell and "the movement of the two women quickens and becomes a dance". Williams's translation in The Figure of Beatrice, p. 40. Pages 94-95. It is interesting that the 'Ainulindale', the myth of creation which begins Tolkien's The Silrnarillion, depicts the shaping of the potential world, before its actual creation, as a song; and compare, too, Asian's song in The Magician's Nephew. 'The Figure of Arthur' (in Arthurian Torso), p. 89. He Came Down from Heaven, p. 35. The Problem of Pain, p. 141. Cf. Letters to Malcolm, pp. 94-95. Perelandra, pp. 201 and 203. The chapter on ' Hierarchy' in A Preface to 'Paradise Lost' is obviously relevant, though about Milton's views, not Lewis's. Transposition, p. 49. Mere Christianity, p. 76. The Image of the City, p. 127 ('A Dialogue on Hierarchy'). Ibid., p. 128. Unspoken Sermons, series 1, 'The New Name', pp. llOff. In lairncss to Lewis, it should be said that he too took up this idea, in the description of the cosmic dance in Perelandra. "Each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals" (p. 201). The Image of the City, p. 128. Flecker of Dean Close, p . 60. The Image of the City, p. 129. The Image of the City, p. 120. The House of the Octopus, pp. 298-99. 'Hwaet We Holbytla', in The Hudson Review, vol. 9 (1956-7), esp. pp. 603-04. Urang (1971), p. 89, takes a similarly mistaken view of Williams, of which more below. The Silrnarillion, which makes after-life explicit, had not been published when Mr. Parker wrote; but the above examples show the belief clearly in the earlier books. Actually, in a pencilled note of uncertain date {Morgoth's Ring, p. 414) Tolkien thought that perhaps trolls were "corruptions of primitive human types". But this is a change from what is said of them in LOTR. LOIR, p. 69.

Themes 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

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LOTR, Appendix A, p. 1116; cf. Unfinished Tales, pp. 329ff. Page 59. A Dish ofOrts, pp. 166-67. The Silmarillion, pp. 16-17. The Silmarillion, p. 19. Morgoth'sRing, p. 42. De Vera Religione, xi, 76. Confessions, vii, 13. The Silmarillion, p. 42. The Silmarillion, p. 28. The Lays of Beleriand, p. 14 ('Lay of the Children of Hurin', lines350-51, 355). Unfinished Tales, p. 29. LOTR, p. 454. Shadows of Heaven, p. 89. Page 114. G. M MacDonald (1924), p. 109. Williams might have agreed, in part anyway: "It is certain that (outside sin) the position in which at any moment we find ourselves is precisely the best for us at that moment" {Flecker of Dean Close, p. 35). Page 44. Unspoken Sermons, series 1, 'The Consuming Fire'. Diary of an Old Soul, January 9th. Unspoken Sermons, series 1, 'TheEloi', p. 174. Collected Plays, p. 56. The Image of the City, p. 178. Collected Plays, p. 90. Morgoth's Ring, p. 321. LOTR, p. 913. LOTR, p. 951 Morgoth's Ring, p. 321. LOTR, p. 285. There is no Satan apart from Melkor in Tolkien's world; not only did he fall through pride, he brought about the fall of Men {The Silmarillion, pp. 141, 259); Tolkien calls him "the Diabolos of these tales" {Letters, p. 203). This does not mean that Tolkien ascribed to the Satan of reality all the properties of the Melkor of his fiction: there is no reason to think, for example, that Satan has built evil into the whole fabric of Earth - nor that he is now absent (even executed)! For Tolkien's quasi-theological reflections on Melkor/Morgoth, see Morgoth's Ring, pp. 390ff. - the term 'executed' is used on p. 403. Adela Cathcart (1890 edn.), p. 147. Page 377 of the 1962 edition. Ezekiel 18:22. See especially the last sermon in The Hope of the Gospel. He Came Down from Heaven, p. 21. A. M. Hadfield(1959), p. 181. Three Plays, p. 64.

94 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

Chapter 5 Windows of Night, p. 23; Hadfield, op. cit., p. 56. War in Heaven, pp. 167-68. Hadfield, op. cit., p. 203. War in Heaven, pp. 250-51. Cf. 'On the Sanctissimum', VI (Theology, Sept. 1941). Thomas Wingfold, Curate. All Hallows' Eve, p. 226. Ibid. The House of the Octopus (Collected Plays, p. 250). Isaiah 45:7; Amos 3:6. Luke 24:26. The Image of the City, p. 139. The Image of the City, pp. 131 ff. Pages 3 Iff. Though he may be going to return (Unfinished Tales, p. 395; see also Morgoth's Ring, pp. 403f.), like Satan after the millennium in the Book of Revelation. But Tolkien guards himself here; the Elves, we are told, had no myths of the End, though the Numenoreans did (Morgoth's Ring, p. 342.) Tolkien's ideas about Melkor/Morgoth, as with so many other figures or races, varied from time to time; at one stage he is made out to be far greater than Manwe, at another they are more or less equal. Three Plays, p. 190. Cf. the poem ' Lilith' in Heroes and Kings. Poems, p. 87; The Pilgrim's Regress, p. 177. So is Melkor/Morgoth in Tolkien; but this is not really a parallel, as no 'solar system' exists in the world of The Silmarillion, where the earth is still flat. (Tolkien did at one stage try to rewrite his creation-story to make it fit the actual Solar System (Morgoth's Ring, pp. 39ff.), but this never took definitive form.) The Problem of Pain, pp. 122ff. Christian Reflections, p. 173. Cf. the poem 'Prelude to Space: an Epithalamion' (Poems, pp. 56-57). Cf. my The Word and the Christ (Sturch (1991)), pp. 46-47, 194-97. Christian Herald, April 1958; also reproduced as a separate pamphlet, and under the title 'Religion and Rocketry', in Fernseeds and Elephants. Cf. Perelandra, pp. 155-56: "Not a second crucifixion: perhaps - who knows - not even a second incarnation. [...] some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility." Christian Reflections, p. 176. Flew and Maclntyre(1955), p. 99.

CHAPTER 6 APOLOGETICS "Stone walls do not a prison make Half as secure as rigmarole." (Lewis)

"What we need [...] is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas." (Lewis)

If one were suddenly called upon to write a work of science fiction or fantasy which should be at the same time a work of Christian apologetics, how would one set about it? The immediate answer of those unversed in either kind of writing would probably be something like this: 'Let's put the hero or heroine in a spaceship or a time-machine and then send them to a wise planet or age where everyone knows Christianity to be true.' And such writings have been produced. I have seen a book published by an American evangelistic organization which tried this on quite a large scale. Not only did the hero find wise Martian Christians, but he was enabled by them to see the devil, on Mercury, listening to reports of his subordinates, and, in other solar systems, a planet about to undergo Judgment Day, a planet which had reached perfection, and a planet wholly beyond redemption, where even in this life the inhabitants experienced the torments of the damned. The book was crude, and I should be surprised if it was very effective. A much better-written example of this approach was included in a science-fiction anthology I read some years ago. The story was quite ingenious and contained some nice satirical touches: in its (future) world computers do all the work for would-be Ph.Ds., the real test lying in discovering a subject for one's thesis which no-one else has previously used! The hero's last hope is 'Demons'. ('God' is no good, as His existence has already been disproved, but no-one has ever tried to prove or disprove the existence of demons.) The computer produces a successful formula for conjuring up such a being; but when he materializes, the hero, horrified at such malevolence, subjects him to the treatment used (in this advanced age) to reform criminals, and the demon, logically enough, turns into an angel. The only catch is that the computers must now be abandoned as unreliable; for presumably God does exist after all Whether this story was in fact written with any apologetic intent I do not know; I suspect that if it was this was only an after-thought. Clearly, however, it could have been so written, and if so it would have fallen into the same sort of class as the evangelistic book mentioned earlier. The short story was much

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more neatly written and constructed than the book, and to that extent more likely to be effective, but it had serious disadvantages from an apologist's point of view. The 'plug' for Christianity had to be confined to a single sentence at the end, and the generally light-hearted nature of the story suggested that even that sentence might not be meant to be taken seriously. (Conceivably it really wasn't, though I should doubt this myself.) Now there is one book among those I am considering which also, at first glance, seems to belong to this class - Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. (Its sequels are a very different matter.) But it clearly does not fall into the crudity of our first example or the levity of our second, and it is better apologetics than either. It is, I think, worth looking at the reasons for this. Obviously the fact that it is neither crude nor lightweight is one reason; but there is more to it than that. We may begin by noticing two features of the story. Firstly, Ransom is already a Christian before it begins; there is no question of his having to be converted by his experience (as there is with Mark and Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength). Consequently, he does not 'discover' Christianity to be true. Nor, which is more important, does the reader; the notion of its truth is already there. And this connects with the second feature: the fact that the description Lewis gives of Mars and its inhabitants (material or immaterial) is one that he did not believe to be true. It stands to his religious beliefs as ordinary science fiction does to its authors' scientific beliefs: that is, it is more or less consistent with their general principles, but has had introduced into it elements that are purely imaginative.1 These features enable Lewis to use Out of the Silent Planet in the service of the Christian faith in three ways. These ways, I should add, can be illustrated from many of the other writings I am considering; the point of beginning with Out of the Silent Planet is merely that this particular book appears to be trying to do its work in the simple-minded way with which we began, but in reality is not. The first way I might call that of Remythologizing. Students of theology have long been familiar with the contention that much of the Bible, and of traditional theology in general, is expressed in the language of 'myth'2, and that since this language is no longer comprehensible to most people, a process of 'demythologizing' is needed in order to get at, and communicate to others, the truths of Christian faith at present obscured by unnecessary 'mythology'. Rudolf Bultmann, the biblical scholar whose name is particularly associated with this contention, thought that these truths could best be expressed in existentialist terms; but others have suggested that, since existentialist terms are very hard for most people to understand, some process of remythologizing would be desirable, so that the Gospel would be as comprehensible to modern people as, in its first mythological form, it was to people of the first century A.D.

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Now Lewis certainly had no sympathy with this view (except in the case of a few very crude 'myths' such as that of the 'three-decker universe' of a literally spatial heaven, earth and hell)3. He did not believe that 'demythologizing' was necessary at all, and would probably have regarded the introduction of the word 'myth' as tendentious and misleading. But something rather similar might be needed for evangelistic reasons. A modern may have no good intellectual grounds for rejecting some stories in the Gospels (such as those of miracles) - or none at least which were not available to his or her ancestors. But this does not mean that there are not strong social or psychological causes which may lead to their rejection. And if 'remythologizing' will help to counteract these causes, then 'remythologize' we must. "Supposing", Lewis wrote4, "that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?" To convince an ordinary twentieth-century man or woman, not already a Christian, that (say) angels are a serious possibility - this would be an extremely difficult task if ordinary methods of argument were the only ones available. They might listen to your arguments and acknowledge their logical validity without being in the least bit 'converted' in their habits of thought. Once the conversation was over, their reaction would probably be something on the lines of 'Oh yes, it was all very plausible - but they don't really exist.' But there is no attempt at this sort of persuasion in Out of the Silent Planet. The 'eldila' are given a background, not of stained glass, but of apparent 'science'; they are physical beings whose bodies are made of light rather than matter. It is only well after they have been introduced that their relationship to Christian angels slowly begins to appear. The result is a 'remythologizing' of angels. The picture the reader is given of them is 'myth' in the sense that there is no reason to think it true, and good reason to believe it false; but it may help him or her to realize the genuine possibility that there are beings of kinds other than those with which we are familiar on this planet. (I do not, of course, wish to imply that Lewis wrote the book, or even wrote it the specific way it is, purely in order to make the idea of angels plausible! That is merely one of its happy side-effects.) Much the same applies in several of the 'Narnia' books (to which, in fact, Lewis was referring in the passage from Of Other Worlds just quoted). The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe remythologizes the Passion and Resurrection; The Magician's Nephew, the Creation; and The Last Battle, the Day of Judgment. Here, of course, there is no science-fiction element, except in the idea of Narnia as a 'parallel universe', or rather one of many such; the 'machinery' is that of magic and fairy-tale, not that of science. But the general scheme is much the same. We are invited to forget the usual presentation of a doctrine which for some reason (over-familiarity, perhaps, or "stained-glass

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and Sunday school associations", or plain non-modernity) we find hard to take. Instead, we are given something unfamiliar, without associations (except those the author chooses to allow us), and without any pretensions to heing either modern or unmodern: another universe altogether. And in this other universe things happen which seem credible enough in their context. We have been brought to swallow these things - and they turn out to be the doctrines of Christ's Church militant here on earth! It is still open to us, of course, to close the book and say 'I still do not believe it'; but it is less likely that we shall say 'I can't believe it'. The most sustained piece of 'remythologizing' in Lewis's works, however, is in Perelandra. The figures of Adam and Eve appear often in the writings I am discussing: in MacDonald's Lilith; in Williams's play Seed of Adam, his novel The Place of the Lion (not as characters, but as echoed in the person of Anthony Durrant), and in several of the poems5; in Lewis's Preface to 'ParadiseLost' (naturally enough) and in several of his poems6, in allusions in at least two of the 'Narnia' books, and above all here in Perelandra. Many Christians have concentrated (with sorrow) on what the human race is like; others, on what by God's grace we may become; but here one finds retained the old stress on what we might have been. "I do not doubt", Lewis wrote elsewhere, "that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage. [...] Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slowspoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet"7. This is not meant as fantasy; it is what Lewis thought really was the case; but even thus partly demythologized, and removed from the myth of Eden, it is alien to our normal habits of thought. In Perelandra, therefore, we are not given even the outward appearance of a 'discovery that Christianity is true'. All that, and of course the whole story of Out of the Silent Planet, is presupposed. Instead, we are given the story of Paradisal woman and man, and their temptation, in a context where 'normal habits of thought' hardly apply. We have - and this was even truer when Lewis wrote - very little in the way of normal habits of thought about the planet Venus, unless we are astronomers. It is of course now known to be very unlike Lewis's picture (and a great deal nastier!), but the reality is not familiar, and for the time being we can approach Venus with comparatively open minds. Lewis does not even allow us to ask what sort of evolutionary background the Lady of Perelandra came from; we are simply given a picture of her which seems quite credible, and the points are driven home, through long chapters of debate, that she is not fallen - that she is in a very important sense Ransom's superior - but that she is capable of falling, and that such a fall would be the disaster Christianity has always held our own race's fall to have been. Readers will not believe the story to be true - it comes in a novel, not in a factual account of inter-planetary travel - but they may come to accept it as a

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possible sort of thing to happen. And our own race's fall may seem a little more credible. (This, perhaps, is the place to comment on a criticism of Lewis in the Roses' The Shattered Ring, where it is suggested that he desires "a return of man to the state of instinctive docility which [Lewis] imagines Eden to be"8. This, they point out quite rightly, cannot be correct: "redemption can never be the same as unfallen innocence"9. But Lewis would entirely agree. Whatever human destiny may be, it cannot be that of the Malacandrians, who have remained unfallen and untempted, nor that of the Perelandrians, who have survived temptation10. One of the main points of Perelandra is surely to indicate a way in which humanity could have passed beyond 'instinctive docility' without falling in the process. The Roses seem to assume without reflection that the fall is necessary; they completely fail to notice the change that comes over the Perelandrian Adam and Eve during the course of the book. The second way of using fantasy for apologetic purposes may be called 'Stretching the Imagination' or 'Introduction to Mystery'. It is less characteristic of Lewis and Tolkien than it is of MacDonald and Williams, but only in the sense that it is effected less by the former pair's writings, not in the sense that they were less aware of its value; for it is closely bound up with what I have already discussed when dealing with the charge of 'escapism', and this was something both Lewis and Tolkien thought important. Obviously any good work of fiction is likely to stretch its readers' imaginations to a certain extent; this is inevitable if they are going to feel with the characters at all, or enter into their world. Some science fiction will stretch it even further. Not all science fiction, for many stories in that genre depend on some single idea or twist, and subordinate the characters and their world to this; but there are others where the 'idea' is the characters' world, or, much more rarely, someone within it. In such a case the readers have not only to enter, by means of their imaginations, into a world that is not the real one, but to stretch those imaginations enough to enable them to enter into a world very unlike the real one: a world where the United States has been immeasurably improved by being taken over by gangsters, or where the duty of firemen is not to prevent fires but to cause them (for the better burning of books), or where walking plants dominate a planet most of whose people have suddenly been struck blind11. To this, however, some writers can add a new element: they can suggest, not just a new arrangement of familiar material, but the addition of new material altogether. This is what Lewis is referring to when he ascribes to 'poetic language' the power to convey "the quality of experiences which we have not had, or perhaps can never have, to use factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience"12. But this applies not only to poetry, or even poetic language (which, Lewis rightly points out, are not the same thing). It applies also to a range of ideas and

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techniques which, though they may well involve heightened language, do not depend wholly on this, and may not use it at all. It is likely that a great deal of the effect produced by some writings of MacDonald and Williams in particular springs from their ability to evoke in the reader a certain sense of the 'numinous'; and it is interesting to look at them in the light of what is said about the expression of the numinous by Rudolf Otto in his celebrated book The Idea of the Holy13. According to Otto, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans is usually expressed at first by use of fearful, even horrible images for the tremendum side and by that of the magical or miraculous for the mysterium. From the merely horrible (Otto cites statues of Durga and parts of the theophany in the Bhagavad-Gita) one can progress to the sublime (as in Isaiah chapter 6); and the merely miraculous similarly tends to fade out, though Otto is not specific about what replaces it. Other instruments are the uncomprehended (as in the Latin Mass) or the visual effect of darkness enhanced by some vestige of light; silence; and, in Chinese art especially, the use of emptiness and empty distances. These are, as Otto points out, negative; negations that do away with every 'this' and 'here', in order that the 'wholly other' may become actual. Now it is possible to see a good deal of this in actual instances in the works I am looking at - notably, as I have said, in some of those of MacDonald and Williams. The merely horrible we shall not find; the fearful, however, we may. When Curdie, looking for the old princess's room, finds himself apparently confronted with empty space, we are no doubt being given an image of the demands of faith; but we are also being given an instance of the terrifying, and this in such a way as to suggest overtones of the 'numinous'. For (and here Otto's second element of the magical or miraculous comes in) it is not just any abyss that confronts Curdie, but one associated with the mysterious and magical figure of the old princess. Similarly, the great Lion that Anthony and Quentin see in The Place of the Lion is fearsome enough; and it is in fact one of the 'Angelicals' appearing on earth, so that there is also the element of the 'wholly other'. The effect here is admittedly weakened by the fact that we do not learn the lion's true nature until much further on in the book; but this is not the case with the other Angelicals described. (And even in the case of the lion we are given a hint of what is to come by its sudden appearance out of nowhere and the total d/sappearance of the escaped 'real' lioness.) In both these instances, of course, their tremendum aspect does not consist entirely of fearsomeness; in abyss and lion alike there is an element also of grandeur or majesty - the next stage beyond mere terror. Obviously grandeur is a better evoker of the numinous than terror alone, but it is a lot harder to achieve, and both MacDonald and Williams were better thinkers, and better symbolists, than they were achievers of literary grandeur. However, they did

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at times achieve it, to great effect; and there are other ways too of conveying the numinous, as we shall see. If the miraculous or magical is the way to express the mysterium aspect, then obviously all the writings I am considering will express it. But by itself magic will not do for very long, as Otto noted. It is possible to see a whole series of gradations in magic side by side in Tolkien - possible and, I think, instructive. At the simplest level we find Gandalf producing fire or trying to hold doors closed by means of spells, and (in the latter case) the Balrog countering. Here magic is part of everyday life, to its exponents at least; there is nothing numinous or even mysterious about it, it is only what Gandalf s companions expect of him. Much grander is the magic of the Mirror of Galadriel; for this is more unusual, it seems, in Galadriel's life, and she herself is a remoter and less homely figure than Gandalf is, or, rather, than he chooses to appear. But even here the Mirror is small and quiet; the tremendum aspect is weaker. At the next stage a danger confronts Tolkien. It is the danger that the Dark Lord himself may seem 'numinous', than which little could be more inappropriate. He is even remoter and less homely than Galadriel, and his powers are greater; he really is both mysterious and fearsome, and indeed once, before he fell into evil, he had been sublime as well. Still more true is this of his former master Melkor, mightiest among the Ainur, coeval with Manwe yet stronger than he, whose dark majesty cowed even the bravest. Accordingly, Tolkien is careful to diminish them. Melkor, 'he who arises in might', becomes merely Morgoth, 'the black foe'. "He lost (or exchanged, or transmuted) his original 'angelic' powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world"14. He alone among the Valar knew fear, and proved unvaliant at the last; and his works of evil drew on his native power and weakened him. There is something contemptible about Morgoth which partly offsets the air of evil splendour that otherwise surrounds him. Much the same holds good of Sauron, who by the time of the War of the Ring has become "black and hideous", unable to assume the appearance of beauty and wisdom that had formerly been his. But there is more. It is implied, for instance, that his magic is in some way inferior to that of Galadriel, who says of her Mirror "This is what your folk would call magic, I believe, though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy"15. In some sense, then, what Sauron does is mere 'deceit', or at least much of it is. Moreover, though some of it is not - some of the powers exercised by Sauron in the First Age were real enough, and so most obviously is the power of the Ring itself - it is destroyed. Sauron himself becomes only a spirit of malice gnawing itself in the shadows; his creatures are reduced to mindless panic and despair. Similarly, his chief servant, the Lord of the Nazgul, has a moment of apparent triumph, even of grandeur, as he rides in through the ruined gates of Minas Tirith; but

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his moment is snatched from him, and in a short time he has fallen, fighting not against rival sorcery but against a woman and a hobbit. It is interesting to note that Williams, in All Hallows' Eve, was confronted with a rather similar problem, and solved it in much the same way: Simon's power is destroyed, and before it is destroyed has gone the way of all the 'lordly sorcerers', becoming trivial and grotesque, something that could not conceivably inspire us with awe. The last gradation is represented by Gandalf after his death and return. Very little of actual magic appears in his later career - there is the use of his staff in the Golden Hall, the light that stabs upward from his hand in the fields before Minas Tirith, and almost nothing else. But Gandalf himself has altered in the direction of becoming a kind of embodied mysterium tremendum et fascinans. "He has grown, or something", says Merry. "He can be both kinder and more alarming, merrier and more solemn. [...] He has changed, but we have not had a chance to see how much, yet"16. Magic is present, of course, in Lewis's children's books, and also in That Hideous Strength, but not as a means of expressing the numinous. In fairytales, I suppose, it is too much of a commonplace to carry such weight, and in That Hideous Strength the way in which it is introduced - as a practice once fairly legitimate, but now obsolete - makes it thoroughly w^-numinous. There are a few 'magical' passages where one might have expected more - such as those where Asian is at work in the 'Narnia' books - but in fact one does not find it. The experience Lewis was usually more concerned to convey was a different one, that of 'Joy' or 'Sweet Desire', which is perhaps allied in the workings of God to the experience of the numinous, but is certainly not the same. In Williams and MacDonald we do find the miraculous breaking through, or rather present; and we also find a strong impression of numen. Not, however, entirely as a result of the presence of miracle. Otto, it may be remembered, went on to suggest that the mysterious "finds its most unqualified expression in the spell exercised by the only half-intelligible, or wholly unintelligible, language of devotion, and in the unquestionably real enhancement of the awe of the worshipper which this produces"17. And one can see something like this at work in the writings of Williams and MacDonald, only at a deeper level. It is not that they use unintelligible language; rather that it is often, quite simply, hard to understand exactly what is going on. If one reads Phantastes, it is clear that there is more to it than an adult fairy-story with moralistic leanings. There is something besides that; the story has (as MacDonald acknowledged) more than one meaning: but it is not direct allegory, and it is hard to see just what the second meaning is. Lewis could only say that "the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death"18. Lilith has this quality of Death far more intensely, and less of the 'cool morning

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innocence', but the same sense of a very great mystery embodied in the story but not wholly revealed - there is enough clear symbolism to reveal a part of it, but much is left in a sense to the reader. This was deliberate policy on MacDonald's part; the first draft of Lilith was far more explicit and (dare one say) rational. Something of the same effect is to be found in The Golden Key', where symbols that are readily understood and 'translated' are accompanied by others of which this is not true at all. The Old Man of the Sea is Death, but what are his brothers of the Earth and the Fire? It is significant that when Tangle watches the Old Man of the Fire moving coloured balls about "flashes of meaning would now pass from them. [...] and now again all would be not merely obscure but utterly dark"19. I do not mean to imply that mystification is of itself desirable. But if there is a non-rational, or super-rational, element in religion, and if it is possible to awake one's readers to the reality and nature of this element by means that involve mystification, then surely those means are justified. Similar effects can be found in some of Williams's novels. Not in all; I do not think there are any in Shadows of Ecstasy or Many Dimensions, and not much in War in Heaven. But in the other four there certainly are. Descent into Hell is the extreme instance; it is very hard indeed to follow some of the ideas involved, and I for one remain baffled by the significance of the pervasive image of the Hill. {Descent into Hell was the first of Williams's novels to be turned down by Gollancz; one wonders if this was the reason?) "It is the life", comments Mrs. Hadfield, "of a consciousness below the level of reasoning and thought, a journey through the roots of a forest which are deep under water, like the forest of Broceliande. Above are patterns and definitions and formulas, below are facts, huge, unproportioned, the bottom of the monstrous world"20. To a lesser extent, this is true of the three remaining novels. The Fool in The Greater Trumps, the Angelicals in The Place of the Lion - these do not belong to any well-known mythology or set of symbols, and this means that they cannot be filed neatly away in the mind's card-index; they are both powerful and puzzling, as are the rather vaguer images - the City, the rain, the rose - of All Hallows' Eve. It seems to me that a number of contemporary science-fiction writers have attempted a rather similar effect - notably the American Samuel R. Delany (in The Einstein Intersection) and the British J. G. Ballard (in several stories, such as The Drowned World and The Crystal World). These books are certainly difficult to understand, and it also seems clear that this is deliberate policy on the part of their authors. The Einstein Intersection is a curious mosaic of elements drawn from various sources, including the New Testament and Greek mythology (besides, of course, Mr. Delany'sown contributions!). It is also a peculiarly unfinished book; on several points we are deliberately left at the end without a conclusion. The narrator can, we are told, bring back to life 'Greeneye', the Jesus-figure, and Greeneye could in turn bring back to life

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the narrator's lost love, a kind of Eurydice-figure; but whether either of these things will in fact be done, this we are not told. Delany, one feels, is composing a myth, or rather composing with already existing myths, and this without having any certain philosophy of his own that can be detected (unless the lack of one is itself a philosophy); and this deprives the myths of much of their power. We notice with interest the appearance, say, of elements from the story of Theseus; but our reaction is not 'How moving!' but merely 'How ingenious!' On Ballard's writings one could make much the same comment as Mrs. Hadfield did on Descent into Hell; indeed, his first novel in this style, The Drowned World, was described as an exploration of 'inner space'. In it, the Earth is largely tropical swamp, reverting to the Age of Reptiles, which a band of explorers from one of the remaining (and diminishing) dry areas are trying to investigate. There are strong Freudian overtones, and an evident approval of the irrational fecundity of the swamps, as opposed to the remaining human governments or the 'lone wolf Steelman, who represent a bleak, sterile and violent rationality. In The Crystal World, matter begins to duplicate itself, so that everything, in a steadily increasing area, becomes crystalline, radiant, a thing of eternally immobile beauty; and life as we know it must become crystalline itself, and cease into a curious kind of immortality. It cannot be said of these stories that there is no philosophy behind them, but it is, literally, a hopeless one. One's best policy, in Ballard's worlds, is to accept something that one is going to get anyway. "Meaning", as Mr. and Mrs. Rose rightly say, "is found in the frozen moment, but a somewhat empty meaning with death hovering in the wings"21. It is not a meaning that I believe in, but it is, unarguably, conveyed, and the methods Ballard is using to convey it are very like those of our Christian apologists. What we are given is a kind of counternuminous; a mystery that neither fascinates nor causes us to tremble, but is certainly 'wholly other'. However, even with the imagination stretched, or liberated, Christian ideas have to contend with other ones, and, what is worse, with prejudices in the mind of the reader; and the apologist has to deal with these. Lewis, for one, tried at times to use satire for this purpose. We find this, for example, in the scene at Meldilorn in Out of the Silent Planet. There Weston makes a long and impressive speech on the destiny of humankind; on the achievements of our race and its hopes of leaving our one planet to expand and dominate the universe. It really is impressive - as Weston speaks it, in English. But Ransom has to translate it into his rather halting Malacandrian, and in so doing is unable to preserve its rhetoric or the emotional overtones of its language; on the contrary, he has to express its literal meaning, which turns out to be manifest nonsense. When Weston declares that he does not come as a vulgar robber, Ransom has laboriously to explain that we Earthmen have these people who take other people's property, and that Weston is saying he is not an

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ordinary one of that kind. "What lies in the future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive", says Weston, "it is enough for me that there is a Beyond." "He says", translates Ransom, "that though he doesn't know what will happen to the creatures sprung from us, he wants it to happen very much"22. And so on. There is no need to criticize Weston's notions; they criticize themselves, they expose their own folly. Similarly satirical effects occur in several of the 'Narnia' books. For instance, since the time of Xenophanes there have been suggestions that our ideas of God are only projections of what we find in ourselves or in the world around us. Well, in The Silver Chair Lewis lets the Witch use exactly the same pattern of argument to convince her victims that there is no world outside her underground realm ("Up among the stones and mortar of the roof?"), no sun to lighten it ("Your sun is a dream, and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp"), and quite certainly no Asian ("You've seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it's to be called a lion")23. But the Witch needed magic to get such ideas over! We find the same sort of technique here and there in the other books, as in Bree's superior confidence (in The Horse and his Boy) that Asian can only be called a lion metaphorically, not literally - at a moment when Asian is almost breathing down his neck. (Literally.) Unfortunately, satire has one serious weakness. It is a great consolation to those who agree with the satirist. ("The satire of liberal and radical theology that keeps recurring in Narnia is something that many have quietly relished and nourished themselves upon in dark days", one admirer has remarked.) But, as Williams observed, "Satire is rarely accepted by its victims"24. The Christian apologist needs to get past the guard of his reader, which satire is all too likely to raise. Indeed, he may well need to get past a whole way of thinking. There is a famous aphorism of Bultmann to the effect that "it is impossible to use electric light and the wireless [...] and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and demons. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world"25. Now our writers were as aware of the difficulty as Bultmann was. But their reaction was different. They could in fact 'manage it in their own lives' without (it seemed to them) any illogicality. The difficulties which others experienced were surely, then, only psychological ones; there were undoubtedly causes at work making it hard for the users of electric lights and wireless to believe in the New Testament world, but these causes were not rational causes. If they had been, obviously the New Testament world-view would have to be jettisoned, for the sake of intellectual honesty as well as for that of effective proclamation. But if reason did not enter into it, two possible courses of action lie open to Christians. They may concede as much as possible to their hearers and their difficulties, passing over a great deal that they themselves believe in

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and concentrating on the absolutely essential kerygma. They will, in this case, continue personally to believe in the 'mythical' apparatus of Christian tradition; but they will not let this become a stumbling-block in the way of weaker brethren. It can be taught, if at all, later on. But there is another alternative: to begin by trying to change the psychological factors that have produced this unfortunate state of mind in so many people. Undoubtedly Lewis contributed most of our four on this subject. It appears in the first of his fantastic writings (indeed, the first book he wrote after becoming a Christian), The Pilgrim's Regress, where the hero finds himself imprisoned by a giant called The Spirit of the Age, who (we learn later on) holds his power directly from the Enemy. In the Regress this giant is eventually killed by Reason; and the truth that Reason is and must be independent of the Spirit of the Age (and any other non-rational factor) is a theme that recurs over and over again in Lewis's writings - so much so that one can almost spot it coming and skip the passage in question. It is chiefly used as a refutation of determinism26. Our reasonings must be more than mere effects of physical events in our brains; otherwise we should never have any grounds for supposing that there were such events at all. It must be possible for a chain of reasoning to be determined by our apprehension of the logical links that form it, or there is an end of all reasoning, Christian or antiChristian, theological, scientific, historical, anything. From this, from the basic principle of the autonomy of reason, certain conclusions follow. Firstly, it is possible to turn a good many anti-Christian arguments back upon their users. If a Christian's belief in God is the result of wish-fulfilment, why may not an atheist's d/sbelief in Him be so too27? More important, it is possible to accept what validity there is in these arguments and use them as warnings, to make our reasonings better. Obviously our reasoning is likely to be affected by its social or psychological background; let us then listen to what the psycho-analysts or the sociologists have to say about this, and take particular care when we come to what they have shown to be dangerpoints. The ideal car, undoubtedly, has perfectly functioning brakes; but the next best thing is to know that your brakes are defective, for then you will (a) drive more cautiously and (b) get the brakes repaired. But ideally, if you stick to reason and do it properly, you will have a weapon against which the Spirit of the Age - any age - is powerless. A valid argument is a valid argument, whether it is advanced by St Paul or by Bertrand Russell. Hence, by encouraging rationality, the apologist may hope to overcome the bias the modern mind has acquired, whatever period 'modern' may refer to. And to encourage Reason is not a hopeless task; almost everybody pays at least some sort of lip-service to her. Unfortunately, this is not enough by itself. Reasoning needs premises to work from; and these may be affected by the Spirit of the Age. Moreover, it is possible for someone to reason accurately and acutely in the field of (say)

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mathematics, and yet fail to do so in that of religion and irreligion. And finally, even someone who has followed out a train of reasoning correctly to its conclusion may slide back into his or her prejudices a few hours later. It is not easy to keep oneself up to the rational mark. "Your business", writes Screwtape to his nephew, "is to fix his attention on the stream of immediate sense experiences. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'"28. Is there, then, any way of inducing the reader to abandon his or her prejudices? In this context, a prejudice is presumably a habit of dismissing something without thought. But the fantastic story is, right from the start, one where such a habit has got to be laid aside (for the moment at least), or no-one would ever read it. You may disbelieve in ghosts, and brush aside any alleged instance of haunting almost automatically; but if you are going to read a (fictional) ghost story you will have to refrain from 'brushing aside' its main theme every time it is referred to, or your enjoyment will be sadly diminished. Now readers of ghost stories are unlikely to emerge from their reading any less sceptical than at the beginning (though they may be more likely to look nervously over their shoulder in dark passages). For the main object of most ghost story writers is simply to make the flesh creep, not to convert people to belief in ghosts; indeed, for all I know most of them do not believe in ghosts themselves. The same applies to most fantasy and science fiction, which is after all written chiefly to entertain. To science fiction rather less than to fantasy, perhaps; for science fiction often aims at a greater degree of consistency than fantasy, and a greater connection with the real world. The author may be writing about something very improbable, such as a robot with Cartesian philosophical views and religious mania29, but often this is set in a secondary world but little removed from the primary, and consequently readers will emerge more willing to accept the improbability, should the question ever arise. Fantasy requires a world very different indeed from our own, and generally the writer has no interest in our believing it in any way possible. But what about the Christian writer, such as those I am dealing with? In the case of MacDonald, there is certainly no attempt to make us 'believe in' his worlds. (For one thing, the 'modern man' of his day was not the same as the 'modern man' of ours.) The parts of Phantastes and Lilith that are set in the 'real' world could be cut out without all that much damage to the books; the children's stories (save for 'At the Back of the North Wind' and the semiallegorical 'The Golden Key') are set in traditional fairy-land, or at least fairyta/e-land, and their point lies in the reappearance of Christian principles even there. Tolkien is not aiming to be an apologist. But Williams and Lewis wrote stories that begin in the 'real' world and never altogether lose touch with it; they simply portray it as containing items or aspects which the ordinary 'modern man' does not believe exist. So does the ghost story; but its writer

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does not believe in his or her material, or at least does not think its truth of particular importance. Williams and Lewis did. They did not indeed believe in the 'machinery' they used, but they did believe in the principles lying behind it. Advertising agents have long worked on the basis that it is often better to head your advertisement (to put it crudely) 'How to get the best out of your Whatnot' than simply 'Get a Whatnot today'. The latter suggests that a Whatnot is better than no Whatnot, but still leaves the reader the option to resist and refuse to buy the thing. The former, however, takes it for granted that there is no real question of getting anything but a Whatnot; the only question the victim is allowed to consider is how to use it once it has been bought. Similarly, the story already mentioned about the demon that turned into an angel began with it an open question whether demons did or did not exist; their existence is the story's speculation, not its presupposition. But Out of the Silent Planet, for example, presupposes the general truth of Christianity; its speculation is only over how it would work out on Mars. The possibility that Christianity might not be true at all is not supposed to enter our minds, and, incidentally, we see events through the eyes of the Christian space-traveller, not of his unbelieving companions. It has been remarked that "the best hope of reaching many modern unbelievers is not in the obvious knock of the Christian salesman at the front door, but in the subtle, covert knock at the rear"30. If this is meant as a comment on Lewis (or any of the others) it is wide of the mark, as well as involving a very peculiar metaphor. None of these men concealed for a moment the facts that he was a Christian and that his books were written with Christianity in mind. It is only the effect that they can have on the reader that can be called subtle; the sense of, not just the possibility o/the Christian faith, but of the possibilities within it. What exactly is it, then, that happens (ideally) to the readers of these books? They begin reading them, presumably, for entertainment. They may not realize the sort of entertainment they are going to get. War in Heaven begins like a detective story; Out of the Silent Planet like ordinary science fiction; Shadows of Ecstasy like a political thriller; while Till We Have Faces could have been an historical novel on the lines of Mary Renault's 'reconstructions' of the life of Theseus31. In most cases, however, readers will soon find out that what they are getting is, strictly speaking, fantasy. But as the book progresses it will become clear that it is not just entertainment, fantastic or otherwise; that the author not only is a Christian but is making serious points from an angle that is explicitly a Christian one. The readers have been persuaded, in effect, to take Christianity seriously for a time, if only in order to entertain themselves, and to take seriously its way of looking at things. This may, of course, make no difference whatever to their prejudices. But if readers of Asimov may emerge more willing to accept the idea of robots (even

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with religious mania), readers of Williams or Lewis may emerge more willing to accept the idea of Christianity. The only difference is that no-one is ever likely to challenge them to accept the robot idea, whereas it is, even today, quite possible that they will be challenged by Christianity. Best of all, perhaps, this reading should take place when the intellect is already interested in the faith. Chad Walsh says of his own conversion that when he first read Perelandra he was more than half convinced that Christianity was true. "This conviction, however, was a thing more of the mind than of the imagination and heart. In Perelandra I got the taste and the smell of Christian truth. My senses as well as my soul were baptized"32. And this evidently was typical of those who were affected by Lewis. Ingrained habits of thought might have pulled them back from where the intellect was taking them; but to read Perelandra they had to set those habits aside and let the imagination be 'baptized'. Walsh adds that some have found Lewis "overrationalistic or over-moralistic. [...] stronger on the fact of law than the mystery of grace"33, and that these frequently turned to Williams instead, for a greater 'depth'. They may, perhaps, have found in him something that expresses the numinous, as I have suggested above? For it seems to me that while Williams is certainly more 'mysterious' than Lewis as a rule, he keeps quite a similar balance, or imbalance, as far as Law and Grace are concerned. They would certainly find in him the same taking for granted of the presence of the 'supernatural' amid the things of the 'real world'. Undoubtedly Lewis and Williams have varied considerably in their effectiveness as apologists. Both have tended to appeal to the fairly intelligent, even the intellectual; and fashions change among such. When Walsh wrote, in 1965, Lewis seemed to many young Americans "much too theoretical and abstract, [...] too rationalist and Thomist for their tastes. The intellectual climate [was] increasingly dominated by a kind of diffused existentialism. It [was] not that most people [...] [had] read the works of the existentialists, but rather that an existentialist stance [had] somehow come into being [with which] Lewis's schematic works [did] not fit well"34. It is still a matter of the Spirit of the Age; only that Spirit had taken on a rather different guise, at least in some places. Lewis's writings were fitted to cope with the practical, level-headed 'Bultmannian' type of modern man: much less so with the dropout or the hippie. Williams was in many ways closer to existentialism - he admired Kierkegaard long before that became fashionable, and was one of those responsible for getting his works published in England - but his style seems to make him a permanent minority taste. Mind you, Walsh was writing over thirty-five years ago, and if publishers' lists are anything to go by, both Lewis and Williams have continued to attract American readers. However, it is not surprising that the fantastic writings of both have been eclipsed in popularity by those of Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings, which began to appear in England in 1954, appeared in the United States two years

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later, but did not 4catch on' for another nine years, until the arrival of the paperback editions. Then it did. "The psychedelic-poster-and-button set", wrote Lin Carter, "adopted The Lord of the Rings with little goat-cries of bliss. [...] It is even mentioned at glossy East-side cocktail parties"35. It has spread. Tolkien Societies or the like are not confined to English-speaking countries; and a whole range of nationalities were represented at the Centenary celebrations at Oxford in 1992. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings could almost have been deliberately designed to take over where Perelandra and War in Heaven were less effective. It is not in the least 'theoretical and abstract', nor is it rationalistic (though reasonable enough); it is about action. There is an evil power menacing the world in All Hallows' Eve and That Hideous Strength, agreed. But in the latter the reader sees it through the eyes of the Studdocks, rather weak characters slowly turning away from the evil, and not themselves instruments of its overthrow; in the former the evil power falls partly through its own mistakes, partly through the actions of characters who serve the City almost without knowing it, so that what might seem casual or unconnected deeds - the surreptitious baptizing of a child, the helpfulness of a (dead) girl come together as part of the redemptive process. In The Lord of the Rings, however, the reader sees the events through the eyes of active and willing participants, above all through those of the Hobbits; not very high-ranking figures in the war against evil, but absolutely crucial ones for all that. Certainly the cause of some of Tolkien's popularity is related to that of, say, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - the sheer fascination of an elaborate subcreation; but he has also an appeal to those who see themselves, or would like to see themselves, on the side of Good against the evil powers and principalities dominating the world. Who exactly those powers and principalities may be is another matter. Some have seen them in political terms (regardless of Tolkien's own political views): but Tolkien's admirers can be found on both Right and Left, and in moderate or extreme positions on both sides. What is more, more than one poll has suggested that The Lord of the Rings is not only reckoned as one of the country's favourite works of fiction but also one of its most influential. It is interesting to look at one (admittedly small and unrepresentative) where reasons for 'influence' were sought. In 1972 New Society sought to investigate the influence of fiction on its readers36. 416 readers answered, of whom 217 said they had been influenced by fiction; there was of course an enormous variety of authors involved, but the highest individual score was that of Tolkien, with ten. (The next was George Orwell with eight.) Statistically, this is of course meaningless. But some of the comments were interesting. Two of the ten said that The Lord of the Rings had made them aware of the 'forces of good and evil' and given them models to imitate; four, rather surprisingly, said that it had given them better understanding of the society in which they lived. (This was one of the possible answers suggested by the questionnaire itself, which may explain its popularity

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to some extent.) One man, significantly, said that it told of "a way of life more real than we live today. [...] of which I am somewhat envious." I think that Tolkien would be particularly pleased with this tribute to the value of Escape. As I have said, The Lord of the Rings was never intended as Christian apologetic, nor even to have an apologetic side-effect. As far as I know, none of the ten in the New Society survey said it had influenced their religion; but I have myself occasionally come across people who ascribed their conversion in part to its influence - notably in reminding them of the necessity of choice. This has happened a number of times, I gather, in Russia, where samizdat copies of The Lord of the Rings were circulating well before the book could be published openly, and where it was recognized that this was at heart a Christian book. Even Tolkien's love of languages turned out to have an apologetic value; Russian readers who had been put off the services of the Orthodox Church by the fact that they were conducted in Old Slavonic realized that this was inconsistent with a love of Quenya, and dropped their resistance37. Certainly the mere wearing of a lapel badge saying Tolkien Society' (or even 'Frodo Lives' in Elvish script) is no sign of nearness to the Kingdom. But I suspect that The Lord of the Rings may be having a certain evangelistic effect even when it is not credited with an actual conversion. Partly this is because of the moralist basis of the book. Christianity is not a morality - far from it - but the connection does exist; the faith cannot live without the works. Tolkien takes goodness and wickedness seriously in a way many people do not, and if he influences his readers to do the same, he will also remove one formidable obstacle to conversion. But I think there is something else, more important than this, about The Lord of the Rings, and this is, once again, its attitude towards the Spirit of the Age. Mr. Roger Sale38 has invented a mythical grouping which he calls 'AngloOxford', to which Lewis, Williams, and (just) Tolkien belong (although Williams only lived in Oxford for the last few years of his life, and Tolkien, like several of the 'Inklings', was not an Anglican); it is dedicated above all, he says, to the cult of the Old, and possibly also the Cosy. As far as Lewis is concerned, there is some justice in this: Lewis did dislike, not only the worship of the Spirit of the Age in general, but a good many of the ways in which that Spirit manifests itself in this Age, and he delighted to depict himself as an antediluvian. Such poems as The Last of the Wine' and The Country of the Blind' show him in this mood; so, of course, does his Cambridge inaugural lecture, 'De Descriptione Temp orurn'39'; and in a letter to a Californian society 'for the Prevention of Progress' he said that he felt he had been born a member of it40. But the criticism does not apply to Williams at all; and to Tolkien only with strong qualifications. (As indeed Mr. Sale recognizes: "The heroism he writes of is very modern"41.) That he has an affection for the old would be obvious even in the number of his characters with ages reckoned in millennia; and the culmination of the story is the restoring of the ancient

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double kingdom of Arnor and Gondor. But there is also a very strong sense that the old things do in fact pass, and are meant to; the Elves are leaving Middle-earth, the Ents are slowly dying out, victory is never permanent, a new Age has to begin. It was the failing of the Elves that they sought too much to preserve things. An affection for that which is old may, of course, be no more than an affection for certain things which happen to he old. (Lewis claimed at times that this was his own position - see his poem 'On a Vulgar Error' 42 . But one has one's doubts. Even in his childhood there was an attitude that went beyond this, so that he could write in a piece of juvenilia "In every man's heart of hearts there is a deep-rooted objection to change"43.) If it is more than this, it may simply be a matter of taste and recognized as such. The same may of course be true of the opposite passion, love of the new as new; the one can be justified as a love of that which has stood the test of time, the other as a love of improvement. But worship of either is idolatry, a sin which is not typical of Tolkien as it is of servants of the Spirit of this Age, or any other Age. And anyone whose reading of Tolkien helps him or her to see the world through Tolkinian eyes will be the less likely to sin in this particular way. For one thing alone, it is possible to worship a thing, or conceive an irrational liking for it, simply because it is new, or simply because it is old, but not simply because it dates back to the Third Age of Middle-earth. More seriously, awareness of both the goodness of much that is old and of its transitory nature is genuinely valuable. It is not enough to make one a Christian, granted! but it may help. The Ancient of Days, after all, is also He who makes all things new, Maleldil the Young. The weakness of The Lord of the Rings to the mind of the apologist (doubtless a rather narrow one) lies in this: that the reader is at least as likely to see the Tolkinian world with our eyes as our world with Tolkinian. The sheer fascination of his sub-creation may get in the way and send us off onto sidetracks, whether these consist of naming night-clubs 'Middle-earth' or puzzling over the number of the Kings of Numenor44. Whether Professor Tolkien would have minded very much I do not know. After all, he began his stories simply to provide a world for his languages; they are not 'about' anything but themselves. Nevertheless, while there are people who read The Lord of the Rings seriously (which does not exclude reading it lightheartedly as well), there will be people who give a proper value to the changes brought by time, and strive for good in any world that comes, without succumbing too easily to its immediate temptations. What future lies ahead for this sort of writing is not easy to say. There have been quite a lot of would-be imitators (chiefly of Tolkien and Lewis) who have written 'Christian fantasies', mostly for children. But one is tempted to feel that imaginative Christian writing flourishes best when its particular genre is not too widespread. G. K. Chesterton's detective stories came at a time when

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such stories were (on the whole, and with famous exceptions) a lowbrow taste; the heyday of the whodunit was only beginning. The same applies to Lewis's science fiction: the S.F. magazines were already in existence when Out of the Silent Planet appeared, but few books in the genre would have been reviewed in the respectable newspapers as they would be today. (Again, of course, there were exceptions, and H. G. Wells would correspond here to Conan Doyle in the field of detection. Doyle was indeed the author of some excellent early science fiction himself, most famously The Lost World.) The sort of heroic fantasy to which The Lord of the Rings belongs has existed for a long time: Eddison I have already mentioned; William Morris and Lord Dunsany provide earlier examples (though most of Dunsany's best work lay in the field of the short story). But it was not to the taste of the majority. Now, of course, the thing has caught on, largely as a result of Tolkien; but it is mostly on the 'sword-and-sorcery' level (Mr. Fritz Leiber's coinage, to match 'blood-andthunder' or 'cloak-and-dagger'), with no claim to be called literature. It may be that it is easier to write a classic in the earlier days of your genre than later on, when your work will only be one of many and when it is practically certain to be in some sense an imitation. And the same goes, of course, for a Christian classic. If so, there is little point in Christian writers' trying science fiction as their medium; there is too much of it about. Even in heroic fantasy Tolkien is bound to overshadow them (and their non-Christian colleagues too, for that matter!). It has been tried, of course; Robert Hughes's 'Pelmen' books are quite a reasonable effort in this direction. But they aren't as good! Some other field will have to be sought for. It is interesting to note a link between our group and one 'other field' that has been used a good deal by Christian evangelists in recent years - that of song. I have in mind Mr. Sydney Carter, not a novelist (fantastic or realist) but a distinguished writer of ballads and songs in the folk-song idiom. Whether he has had any direct connection with any of our group, I do not know (an indirect link there certainly is, by way of Donald Swann), but in expressing his faith (and doubt) he has unquestionably used similar themes. 'Every Star shall sing a Carol' has a science-fiction background to it; 'Friday Morning' could well be a versification of Williams's essay on the Cross; his best-known song of all, 'Lord of the Dance', uses a theme that turns up in Williams (The Greater Trumps), Lewis (Perelandra) and even perhaps Tolkien (the 'Ainulindale'). It is the medium that is different. It is possible that the next great writer in this tradition, if there is one, will be working in a field that no-one has yet thought of; this may indeed prove to be part of his or her greatness. But no doubt God will raise up His servants as seems best to Him.

114 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Chapter 6 In fairness, one should say that the American book described earlier had both these features too; unfortunately, it failed to use them in the way Lewis did. This word is being used here in something close to its usual sense, and not in a special sense such as that of Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism. See e.g. Screwtape Proposes a Toast, pp. 5 Iff.; Christian Reflections, pp. 164ff. Of Other Worlds, p. 37. 'Lilith' (in Heroes and Kings); Taliessin through Logres, pp. 10-11; and cf. Many Dimensions, p. 44, andffe Came Down from Heaven, chapter 2. E.g. 'Solomon'; 'The Adam at Night'; 'The Adam Unparadised'. The Problem of Pain, p. 67. Rose and Rose (1971), p. 80. Ibid., p. 67. Theologians may see Lewis's Malacandrians as 'Irenaean', good but needing maturity and far from perfect, and his Perelandrians as 'Augustinian', super-human unless a fall takes place. Cf. the debate as to whether the Fall was a matter of 'deprivatio' or "depravatio". Cf. C. M. Kornbluth, The Syndic; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit451; John Wyndham, The Day of the Trifftds. 'The Language of Religion' (Christian Reflections, p. 133). Pages 62-73 of the English translation. Morgoth'sRing, p. 400. LOTR, p. 381. Cf. also the passage on Magiaand Goetia in Letters, pp. 199-200. LOTR, p. 613. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 67. Cf. Lewis's remarks on 'grandeur' in Milton (Preface to 'ParadiseLost', pp. 40ff.). George MacDonaldiAn Anthology, preface, p. 21. The Light Princess and Other Stories, p. 234. An Introduction to Charles Williams, p. 135. The Shattered Ring, pp. 104-05. Out of the Silent Planet, p. 160. The Silver Chair, pp. 150 ff. Rochester, p. 236. Kerygma and Myth, volume 1, p. 5. E.g. Christian Reflections, p. 89; Miracles, pp. 18ff. The Pilgrim's Regress, pp. 72-73. The Screwtape Letters, p. 12. See I. Asimov, 'Reason' (in /, Robot, pp. 52 ff.). R. B. Cunningham, 'C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith', quoted by W. L. White, The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis, p. 79. See her The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. Light on C. S. Lewis, p. 107; cf. p. 111. Light on C. S. Lewis, p. 114. Light on C. S. Lewis, p. 115.

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Tolkien: a look behind 'The Lord of the Rings', p. 2. D. Spearman, New Society, xxi, no. 510 (6th July, 1972), pp. 6-8. I owe this information to an interview with Christine Scull of the Tolkien Society, broadcast by BBC Radio Oxford on August 17th, 1992. 38. Isaacs and Zimbardo, p. 247; and, more strongly, 'England's Parnassus' (Hudson Review, 1964, pp. 205ff.). 3 9. Reprinted in They Asked for a Paper. 40. Letters, p. 204. 41. Isaacs and Zimbardo, p. 284. 42. Poems, p. 60. 43. Quoted by Hooper in his preface to Of Other Worlds, p. vii. 44. The present writer had deduced from the evidence in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings that the name of one King was missing, either just before or just after that of TarCalmacil. Editorial work in The Silmarillion suggested that no name was in fact lost; but it was gratifying to learn from Unfinished Tales that one was, and in the place I had located it.

APPENDIX THREE UNBAPTIZED IMAGINATIONS Fantasy writers, like greengrocers and politicians, can be of all possible shades of religious belief or unbelief. It might be of interest to notice three writers mentioned earlier in the present study, whose works show obvious signs of affinity to those in our group, but have this major difference - they are written from standpoints which are not Christian, nor indeed recognizable as belonging to any common form of religion or irreligion. First, there is David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which first appeared in 19201. Despite the name, it can hardly be called science fiction. Readers are not given physical adventure or even wonder; instead, they are sent stumbling bewilderedly through a series of spiritual adventures. One new attitude to life and the world follows another at an incredible pace, and each disappears, usually into death or horror. What emerges - only very slowly; we are not given it plainly till the closing pages - is really a kind of Manichaeism. Sparks of the divine are imprisoned, not in matter, but in 'pleasure-seeking will', in 'a ghastly mush of soft pleasure'. All pleasure, 'high' and 'low' alike, all beauty and joy is the work of Crystalman, Lindsay's 'devil', and though he and his empire are only a shadow on the divine light, the battle between the two is a real one, and the chief weapon of the Light is pain. (Yet even this has, in one form at least, been overthrown in an earlier episode of the story; hatred of pleasure can itself be a pleasure.) E. H. Visiak has maintained2 that A Voyage to Arcturus is in reality Christian in standpoint; but he seems to be wide of the mark. There is redemption, no doubt, but no Redeemer (unless you count Krag, the personification of pain). It is true that in a later novel, The Violet Apple, not published during his lifetime, Lindsay did use Christian symbolism and assume Christianity's truth3, and he did acknowledge MacDonald as a major influence on him4; but in A Voyage to Arcturus the representatives both of Christian love (Joiwind) and of Trinitarian worship (Corpang) are rejected. Lindsay's book could hardly be called a flawed masterpiece in the way that, say, MacDonald's Lilith might, or Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (of which more shortly). These are works whose power is marred by relatively minor (though irritating) defects (the baby-talk in Lilith or the absurd introduction of Shakespeare into the Worm, for example). A Voyage to Arcturus has much more serious defects, a clumsiness of style and a certain incoherence of the whole, in that there is no sort of progress or logical connection discernible between the episodes. Nevertheless, it has a disturbing intensity about it. Lewis once described it as "the real father of my planet books' ; if so, its children are a good deal healthier than their parent but have,

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shall I say, less striking personalities. Partly, no doubt, the book's impact arises from the fact that Lindsay's view of the universe is so unusual. If he had ended with the episode of Joiwind or of Spadevil (who embody, roughly, Christian and Stoic views respectively) things might have been different, for these are views we are to some extent used to. As it is, the book hits us (if it hits us at all - many it does not) with an air of something utterly alien, which jolts and hurts. Even the clumsiness and incoherence contribute to this. Secondly, there is E. R. Eddison. Eddison was born in 1882, worked as a civil servant at the Board of Trade, and died in 1945. He was also the author of four very strange 'heroic fantasies', of which the last, The Mezentian Gate, was never completed6. Both Tolkien and Lewis were admirers of his work, and Eddison twice attended meetings of the 'Inklings', reading parts of The Mezentian Gate at the second, in 19447. Of the completed books, the best in most readers' opinions (including mine) is the first, The Worm Ouroboros, and it is the one that least concerns us here. It is a straightforward account of magic and battle. (It is, incidentally, one of Eddison's great merits that his battles are real ones with intelligent generals in command. His fictional captains, Corinius, Juss, Lessingham and the rest, employ genuine tactics to defeat their enemies, even if those tactics seem at times to be derived from those of Hannibal. The battles in Tolkien and Lewis are relatively crude and chaotic8.) The most notable features of the book are its almost unbelievably elaborate prose and the immense value Eddison obviously sets on heroism and a kind of strength of character or selfperfection which can only be called 'aristocratic'. None of his heroes or villains - if such a distinction means much in Eddison - ever has qualms or doubts, and weakness is regarded with distaste. This is even more so in the other three books (Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and The Mezentian Gate), where metaphysics dominates the plots. Eddison is a kind of dualist - not in the Zoroastrian sense of a dualism between good and evil, but in that he separates God ('Zeus') as First Efficient Cause from 'Aphrodite' as Ultimate Final Cause9. There is no value except that of beauty personified in 'Aphrodite': mere truth and goodness are only to be sought for in so far as they are beautiful. Consequently, though there are benevolent characters in the books, they are benevolent simply because the idea appeals to them, just as to others the idea of being a tyrant or a Machiavelli may appeal; the only evil, in a sense, is weakness, and the only inhabitants of Eddison's imaginary world of Zimiamvia who want to change it are "a few weak natures who fail on their probation and [as all ultimate evil must...] fall away to the limbo of nothingness"10. In this world the First and Final Causes, Zeus and Aphrodite, appear in a multitude of guises (at one point there are three 'incarnations' of Him and four of Her alive together), purely because They choose to do so; in one incarnation He is the wise and courageous King Mezentius, establishing peace and justice,

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while in another He is the adventurer Lessingham, stirring up trouble for the sheer exhilaration of playing with fire. They also perhaps appear in our world (as fictitious characters they do, and in Mistress of Mistresses he treats many famous women of the past - Zenobia, for instance, and Lucrezia Borgia - as in this sense 'avatars' of Aphrodite); our world is, to Eddison's mind, much inferior to Zimiamvia, but it probably does exist ultimately, because it pleases Them. Now it so happens that I neither believe in nor like this vision of reality; also, I find Aphrodite's chief incarnation, Fiorinda, very unattractive; so I do not like the Zimiamvian trilogy as much as The Worm Ouroborosn. But the vision is certainly put across. Eddison's novels developed as he went on. They were not planned as a series; it looks as if ideas were incorporated into them as opportunity offered. The Worm is, as I have said, purely heroic romance, of the sort that some might call 'escapist'. Mistress of Mistresses picks up a hint in the Worm and develops Zimiamvia as a world in which 'there is no malaise of the soul', and into which Aphrodite incarnates Herself: A Fish Dinner in Memison expands this with the incarnation of Zeus also, and brings in the idea of our own world as a plaything of these Gods. And finally The Mezentian Gate, though it adds no new metaphysical principle, ends with an utterly appalling climax in which Mezentius, dying, conceives of the possibility of truly dying, even as Zeus, of unmaking Himself and all the worlds with Him into nothing - "a Nothing not to be named or thought; because in it is nor existence nor unexistence, hope nor fear nor time nor life nor God nor eternity (not even that eternity of nothing) [...] not even such last little wet mark or burnt-out ember as might rest for the uncipherable cipher: I am not: I never was: I never shall be." Had the Gate been finished, it might have been the best of the four. My third example is the American writer James Branch Cabell (18791958). It is not easy to characterize Cabell's thought. He was a very prolific writer, for one thing, and his literary career was long; his views might reasonably change during this time. More important, he was above all an ironist, and at times builds such intricate structures of irony upon irony that it is impossible to tell where he is speaking his own mind and where he is not. (The situation in Beyond Life, where Cabell is himself a character, and is made the mouthpiece for criticism of views which are certainly a lot nearer his own than those 'Cabell' expounds in the book, is a comparatively mild example.) And he never sought to make his invented worlds consistent. Generally speaking, his attitude to Christianity is satirical. In The High Place a persecutor is canonized by mistake and promptly develops the power to work miracles (though no other sign of sanctity); in Jurgen the hero finds that Heaven was created (complete with God) to suit the whim of his own grandmother, who had been distressed, when she died, not to find the heavenly city of 'Revelation' awaiting her. In The Cream of the Jest, on the other hand, and in Beyond Life, Cabell speaks with apparently sincere appreciation of the

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artistic beauty of the 'Christian myth', and makes two of his characters proclaim themselves Christians because such things so obviously ought to be. I have no reason to believe he did so himself. His own philosophy seems to be that the world, if you insist on looking at it 'as it is', is a pretty depressing place; but that there is no reason why you should look at it in that way. It is better far to look at it through the illusions of Romance; indeed, that is the only way that it will be made any more tolerable. (This reminds one somewhat of MacDonald and Tolkien on 'escapism'.) Yet even this theme, which prevails in many of his books, he comes close to exploding with a burst of irony, proclaiming that even the ghastly productions of some of his popular contemporaries fulfil the same purpose as Romance's most splendid 'illusions', as they enable their thoroughly dull-witted readers to exercise the highest reach of their endowments12. But to treat of Cabell in detail would not be appropriate in this book and would in any case, by reason of sheer length, require another.

1.

Lindsay was born in 1878 and died in 1945. The statement in one paperback edition of Arcturus that he died young has no foundation. 2. In Wilson etal. (1970), pp. 109-111. 3. See Pick in the same collection, pp. 154-57. 4. Ibid., p. 68. 5. Utters, p. 205. 6. Those parts that were completed have been published, together with Eddison's outlines lor the remainder. 7. See Carpenter (1978), pp. 190-91, for an account of these visits. 8. Admittedly those of Lewis's books which have battles in them are written for children. Yet Tolkien's most 'tactical' battle is in The Hobbil. 9. Interestingly, a similar idea can be found in Lindsay's novel Devil's Tor; there too the world is created in accordance with feminine (or Feminine) taste. 10. Introduction to The Mezentian Gate, p. xii. Weakness, be it noted, and not cruelty, treachery or anything like that, is 'ultimateevil'. 1 1. Neither did Lewis (Of Other Worlds, p. 19). 12. E.g. Beyond Life, p. 237.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (Note: Many of these books passed through a number of quite different editions or printings. The dates quoted are those of the editions used in this study.)

LEWIS, C. S. The Abolition of Man (London, 1953) Christian Reflections (London, 1957) An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961) Fernseeds and Elephants (London, 1975) God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, 1970) The Horse and his Boy (London, 1954) The Last Battle (London, 1956) Letters, ed. W. H. Lewis (London, 1966) Letters to Malcolm (London, 1964) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London, 1950) The Magician's Nephew (London, 1955) Mere Christianity (London, 1952) Narrative Poems (London, 1969) Of Other Worlds (London, 1966) Out of the Silent Planet (p/b, London, 1963) Perelandra (p/b under title Voyage to Venus, London, 1960) The Pilgrim's Regress (London, 1933) Poems (London, 1964) A Preface to 'ParadiseLost' (London, 1942) Prince Caspian (London, 1951) The Problem of Pain (London, 1940) The Screwtape Letters (London, 1942) Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London, 1965) Shall We Lose God in Outer Space? (London, 1959) The Silver Chair (London, 1953) Surprised by Joy (London, 1959)

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Bibliography

That Hideous Strength (p/b, London, 1983) They Asked for a Paper (London, 1962) Till We Have Faces (London, 1956) Transposition, and other Addresses (London, 1949) (with Charles Williams) Arthurian Torso (London, 1948) (editor) Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London, 1947) George MacDonald: an Anthology (London, 1946)

MACDONALD, GEORGE

Adela Cathcart (abridged edition, London, 1882) At the Back of the North Wind (London, 1871) Creation in Christ (abridgments of Unspoken Sermons) (Wheaton, 1976) A Diary of an Old Soul (p/b, Minneapolis, 1985) A Dish ofOrts (London, 1893) England's Antiphon (London, n.d.) The Hope of the Gospel (London, 1892) The Light Princess and Other Stories (London, 1961) Lilith, see Phantastes The Lost Princess {The Wise Woman) (London, 1895) The Marquis of Lossie (London, 3 vols., 1877) On the Miracles of our Lord (London, 1891) Paul Faber, Surgeon (London, 3 vols., 1878-9) Phantastes and Lilith (London, 1962) Poetical Works (London, 2 vols., 1893) The Princess and Curdie (London, 1883) The Princess and the Goblin (London, 1872) Thomas Wingfold, Curate (London, 3 vols., 1896) Unspoken Sermons (3 series) (London, 1867-1891)

Bibliography

123

George MacDonald: an Anthology (ed. C. S. Lewis) (London, 1946)

TOLKIEN, J. R. R.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (London, 1961) *The Book of Lost Tales (London, 2 vols., 1983 and 1984) The Hobbit (London, 1938; pages from Folio Society edition, London, 1979) *The Lays of Beleriand (London, 1985) * Letters (London, 1981) The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) (cited from one-volume edition, London, 1969) *The Lost Road (London, 1987) *Morgoth's Ring (London, 1993) The Road Goes Ever On (music by Donald Swann) (London, 1968) *Sauron Defeated (London, 1992) *The Shaping of Middle-Earth (London, 1986) *77ze Silmarillion (London, 1977) Smith of Wooton Major (London, 1967) Tree and Leaf (London, 1964) * Unfinished Tales (London, 1980) *edited by Christopher Tolkien.

WILLIAMS, CHARLES All Hallows' Eve (London, 1945) Collected Plays (includes The Death of Good Fortune, Grab and Grace, The House by the Stable, The House of the Octopus, Judgment at Chelmsford, Seed of Adam, and Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury) (London, 1963) Descent into Hell (London, 1949) The Descent of the Dove (London, 1950) The Figure of Beatrice (London, 1943)

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Flecker of Dean Close (London, 1946) The Greater Trumps (London, 1954) He Came Down from Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins (London, 1950) The Image of the City (ed. Ridler) (London, 1958) Heroes and Kings (privately printed, London, 1930) James I (London, 1951) Letters to Lalage (ed. Lois Lang-Sims) (Kent, Ohio, 1989) Many Dimensions (London, 1947) 'On the Sanctissimum' (in Theology, vol. 43, 1941, pp. 141-44) The Place of the Lion (London, 1952) Poems of Conformity (London, 1917) Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (London, 1933) The Region of the Summer Stars (London, 1944) Rochester (London, 1935) 'A Scene from a Mystery' (in The New Witness, xv, no. 371, 1919, pp. 70-73) Shadows of Ecstasy (London, 1948) Taliessin through Logres (London, 1938) Three Plays (includes The Rite of the Passion and The Witch) (London, 1931) War in Heaven (London, 1947) Witchcraft (p/b, New York, 1959) Windows of Night (London, 1924) (with C. S. Lewis) Arthurian Torso (London, 1948) (with Michal Williams) Christian Symbolism (London, 1919)

OTHER WRITERS Amis, K. Bradbury, R. Bartsch, H. (ed.) Cabell, J. B.

New Maps of Hell (London, 1961) Fahrenheit 451 (London, 1954) Kerygma and Myth, I (London, 1953) Beyond Life (Johnson reprint, New York, 1970)

Bibliography

Carpenter, H. Carter, L. Cavaliero, G. Eddison, E. R.

Flew, A. and Maclntyre, A. (eds.) Fox, A. Gibb, J. (ed.) Hadfield, A.M. Hein, R. Hooper, W. Howard, T. T. Isaacs, N. D. and Zimbardo, R. A. (eds.) Keenan, H. Kilby, C. S. Kocher, P. Kornbluth, C. M. Lindsay, D.

MacDonald, G. M. Maclntyre, A. (ed.)

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The Cream of the Jest (p/b, London, 1972) The High Place (London, 1923) Jurgen (p/b, London, 1971) The Inklings (London, 1978) J.R. R. Tolkien (London, 1977) Tolkien: a look behind The Lord of the Rings (New York, 1969) Charles Williams, Poet of Theology (Grand Rapids, 1983) A Fish Dinner in Memison (p/b, New York, 1968) The Mezentian Gate (p/b, New York, 1969) Mistress of Mistresses (p/b, New York, 1968) The Worm Ouroboros (p/b, New York, 1967) New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1955) Poetry for Pleasure (Oxford, 1938) Light on C. S. Lewis (London, 1965) Charles Williams (Oxford, 1983) An Introduction to Charles Williams (London, 1959) The Harmony Within (Grand Rapids, 1982) Past Watchful Dragons (London, 1980) The Novels of Charles Williams (Oxford, 1983)

Tolkien and the Critics (Notre Dame, 1968) see Isaacs and Zimbardo The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Appleford, 1965) Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Berkhamsted, 1977) Master of Middle-Earth (London, 1973) The Syndic (London, 1964) A Voyage to Arcturus (p/b, London, 1972) Devil's Tor (London, 1932) The Violet Apple (London, 1978) George MacDonald and his Wife (London, 1924) Metaphysical Beliefs {London, 1957)

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Novalis Otto, R. Parker, D. Raeper, William Rose, L. and S. Sale, Roger

Shideler, M. M. Sturch. R. L.

Temple, W. Underhill, E. Urang, G. Vanauken, S. Walsh, C. Ward, M. White, W. L. Williams, M. Wilson, A. N. Wilson, C , Visiak, E. H., and Pick, J. Wyndham, J.

Bibliography

The Disciples at Sa'is Heinrich von Ofterdingen The Idea of the Holy (2nd edition, English translation, London 1950) 'Hwaet We Holbytla' (Hudson Review, ix, 1956-57, pp. 598-609) George MacDonald (Tring, 1987) The Shattered Ring (London, 1971) 'England's Parnassus' (Hudson Review, xvii, 1964, pp. 203-225) see also Isaacs and Zimbardo The Theology of Romantic Love (New York, 1962) The Word and the Christ (Oxford, 1991) 'Common Themes among Inklings' (in B. Home (ed.) Charles Williams; a celebration (Leominster, 1995) pp. 153-175.) (An earlier draft of chapter 5 of this book) 'Fantasy and Apologetics' (Vox Evangelica, 1984, pp. 65-84) (An earlier draft of chapter 6) Christus Veritas (London, 1924) Column of Dust (London, 1909) Letters (ed. C. Williams) (London, 1943) Shadows of Heaven (London, 1971) A Severe Mercy (p/b, London, 1979) The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (London, 1979) see also Gibb Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London, 1944) The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis (London, 1969) Christian Symbolism (London, 1919) C. S. Lewis: a biography (London, 1990)

The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (London, 1970) The Day of the Tr iff ids (p/b, Harmondsworth, 1954)

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