The Fellowship Lewis Tolkien and the Inklings November
The Fellowship: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings November 28, 2018 -- St. Philip’s Church The Rev’d Brian K. Mc. Greevy, J. D. , Facilitator
Week 10: Recap from previous weeks Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. --Philippians 4: 8 -9 A group that gathered around C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien beginning in the 1930 s and lasting for several decades, defined by Lewis as “…an informal club, whose qualifications are a tendency to write, and Christianity. ” Building upon a deep Christian faith and a recovery of the transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, the Inklings were unafraid to boldly engage the culture and mounted a counter-cultural offensive about how to live and think Christianly in a post-Christian world. They were deeply invested in recovering a Biblical understanding of fellowship and the power of community.
Forging the Inklings--The Impact of World War I --the horror of total war --despair and death of the Myth of Progress Forging the Inklings--Early Threads: Tolkien and Lewis in the 1920 s Tolkien: missing the TCBS, investing deeply in intellectual passions and writing, leaning into his devout Roman Catholic faith, beginning an academic career Lewis: investing in writing and diligently working; beginning an academic career; investing in relationship, especially with Barfield and Coghill; seeking to determine what is Truth while his imagination’s response to Beauty warred with his mind’s nihilistic, atheistic materialism Sehnsucht “All that delights you in earthly things can never satisfy you, for all of your desires are in God. The comforts you have here are only drops inflaming, not satisfying, the appetites of your soul, but the Lamb will lead you to fountains of living water. ” John Flavel (1628 -1691)
The Matrix of Friendship: Choices and habits that tilled the soil for the flowering of the Inklings Walking In these walks, the talk was deliberately NOT small talk, but talk of reading, philosophical ideas, and the life of the soul, as well as an appreciation of the beauty they were beholding. Reading The Inklings’ sense of stewardship in the area of intellect created a faithbased obligation to seek after Truth, and to challenge with their best intellectual acumen ideas and writing which they believed to be error. Talking It is especially remarkable that the conversation was not about oneself, one’s peers in or outside the group, politics, gossip, but primarily about books, ideas, Christian faith, religion, Truth/Beauty/Goodness, humor, and writing. Shared passion/shared cause Seeking out those individuals who shared their passions (not mere preferences or tastes, but rather doorways to one of the Transcendentals [Truth, Beauty, and Goodness]), their attitude was of two friends side by side beholding with wonder a treasure that stood before them. WEEKLY Individual, one on one, and group time The Inklings achieved a striking balance in the use of their discretionary time that provided a fertile field for the flowering of the group, all the more remarkable because this time was deliberately carved out in the midst of extremely busy and pressured schedules with multiple competing priorities.
The Inklings begin—the late 1920 s and the 1930 s Sparks that ignite 1. Tolkien and Lewis’s regular meetings 2. Tolkien’s sharing The Lay of Leithian with Lewis to read 3. Lewis’s conversion to the Christian faith and new devotional life 4. Shared acquaintance of those who would comprise the group
The Inklings find a name— 1933 The Wager— 1935 Deliberate Fellowship The Inklings were anything but monolithic. Even in the early years, the club embraced a variety of professions, including don, doctor, lawyer, and soldier; the popular image of the Inklings as sequestered academics is clearly inadequate. The members’ shared Christianity also included a wide spectrum of views. Differences notwithstanding, the members were glued together by shared adherence to the Nicene Creed and a shared set of enemies, including atheists, totalitarians, modernists, and anyone with a shallow imagination. Above all, they were friends--encouraging, provoking, , enlightening, and correcting one another. --The Fellowship Meeting Charles Williams— 1936
The Inklings Ignite: Tolkien in the 1930 s Three World-Changing Works 1. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”–address to the British Academy, 1936 Tolkien’s brilliant allegory in the essay, reflecting on the destruction of beauty and meaning by “scholars” of Beowulf, and how they utterly miss the whole point of the poem: “A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting. ' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion. ' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea. ” 2. The Hobbit— 1937 3. The Andrew Lang Lectures at the University of St. Andrews--1939 (published later as On Faerie Stories)
The Inklings Ignite: C. S. Lewis in the 1930 s Four World-Changing Works Precursor: The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism --1933 1. Begins The Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama – 1935 2. Publishes The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition— 1937 (Winner of the British Academy’s prestigious Sir Israel Gollancz Prize) 3. Publishes Out of the Silent Planet— 1938 (first volume of the space trilogy) 4. Publishes The Personal Heresy A Controversy, with E. M. W. Tillyard; publishes Rehabilitations and Other Essays.
1. Begins The Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama – 1935 --A huge honor: the 16 th century is widely acknowledged as the Golden Age of British literature --A magnum opus: a 696 page tome with a 33 page chronological table and 90 pages of bibliography -- “…Lewis’s most substantial, and one of his most controversial, contributions to literary scholarship. Not many volumes of academic literary history over fifty years old still demand to be read and discussed. But Lewis’s do. ” --Lewis was approached about writing the volume in June of 1935, and apparently started doing some reading for it almost immediately. He wrote to Arthur Greeves in December of that year that he was reading the English works of Sir Thomas More because they were “necessary to a job I’m doing. ”—Donald T. Williams essay, 2007 --Alan Jacobs (scholar and author of How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed) notes that “…Lewis read every single sixteenth-century book in Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of Oxford’s great Bodleian Library” in preparation for writing the OHEL volume. --Professor C. S. Lewis's contribution to the "Oxford History of English Literature" is learned, brilliantly written, and provocative, as was to be expected. Its position as one of the most readable among historical studies of English literature is assured-if, indeed, it may properly be described as a "history" in any strict sense, for all its substantial proportions. The author has been at some pains to explain his critical method, which is intended to avoid, in so far as possible, a schematization that is too diagrammatically neat to fit the facts and that will allow him to include all the varying currents of literary thought and expression in sixteenth-century England. He surveys these currents in his opening chapter entitled "New Learning and New Ignorance, " a masterly account which is full of fresh and stimulating insights. For the remainder of his book, Professor Lewis eschews the term "Renaissance" as a misleading or empty generalization. —H. S. Wilson (review for academic journal)
Duke Humfrey’s Library
Four World-Changing Works 2. Publishes The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition— 1937 (Winner of the British Academy’s prestigious Sir Israel Gollancz Prize) --The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition won the Sir Israel Gollancz Prize in 1937. It is awarded biannually by the British Academy in honor of Israel Gollancz, a founding member and its first secretary. Originally named "Biennial Prize for English Literature" in 1924 and renamed after Gollancz's death in 1930, the award was established to honor the most important work of literary scholarship among scholars of Old and Early English language and literature and history of the English language. --Immediately hailed as a landmark and transformative work: “It is rarely that we meet with a work of literary criticism of such manifest and general importance as this. No one could read it without seeing all literature a little differently forever after. The arguments [are] pursued with a lucidity and sureness that are beyond praise. ”—Prof. Tillotson, Cambridge -- “During a time of growing crisis within the academic discipline of literary criticism, Lewis held out for an objective, knowable world. In the face of positivism, naturalistic materialism, subjectivism, linguistic analysis and the grab bag of literary critical t experiments that marked the cultural crisis of the 20 th century, Lewis held out for a coherent world that could be known and spoken about. ”--Dockery, Shaping a Christian Worldview: The Foundations of Christian Higher Education --While immersed in working on this project, Lewis signed some of his letters “The Alligator of Love”
3. Publishes Out of the Silent Planet— 1938 (first volume of the space trilogy) --the result of the wager between Lewis and Tolkien at the start of the Inklings in the early 1930 s -- “The motivating force behind these departures [from Wells’ method] is clearly Lewis' worldview. Wells' science fiction is that of a humanist for whom the immensities of the cosmos must inevitably be (at best) alien, indifferent to man. For Lewis, in contrast, the cosmos is the domain and dwelling-place of a God who may be called 'Father'. This is basic to his fiction; in seeking to 'widen' his reader's notions of what the universe might possibly be conceived as including, he is aiming to make room for the Christian cosmology, along with much newly-imagined material. This is fiction with an apologetic purpose, even if it is much more than apologetics. The 'fictional hypothesis' is related to the author's worldview more directly than in Tolkien. As Lewis said of the second novel of the trilogy, Voyage to Venus (Perelandra), 'It wouldn't have been that particular story if I wasn't interested in those particular ideas on other grounds. ’”– Dr. Peter Lowman, Chronicles of Heaven Unshackled “Into this story Lewis builds a theological framework. The categories of 'fallen' and 'unfallen' are essential to an understanding of how Earth came to be 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet, and why Malacandra is so different. The causes of Earth's Fall are traced beyond human history to the rebellion of the 'Oyarsa' of Earth, or the 'Bent One' as he becomes known ('bent' being the only word corresponding to 'evil' in the language of unfallen Malacandra)”--Lowman
The Inklings Ignite: C. S. Lewis in the 1930 s Four World-Changing Works 4. Publishes The Personal Heresy A Controversy, with E. M. W. Tillyard; publishes Rehabilitations and Other Essays. The first three essays of The Personal Heresy were originally published in the journal Essays and Studies, a periodical of the English Association, in 1934, 1935, and 1936. The first was entitled "The Personal Heresy in Criticism, " the second "Rejoinder, " and the third "Open Letter to Dr Tillyard. " Then three additional essays were added, along with a concluding note by Lewis and a Preface by both authors, and together they comprise The Personal Heresy. The controversy was concluded with a live debate at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 7 February 1939 (Collected Letters, Vol. II, 248, n. 24). Of this debate, former student John Lawlor wrote, "There was a memorable occasion when in the Hall at Magdalen Dr. Tillyard met him to round off in debate the controversy begun with the publication of Lewis's indictment of "The Personal Heresy. " I am afraid there was no debate. Lewis made rings round Tillyard; in, out, up, down, around back again—like some piratical Plymouth bark against a high-built galleon of Spain" (C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections, 4). Lewis's position in this work reflects his conviction that objective values are resident in people, places, events, and things, rejecting the relativistic mindset of that age and subsequent ages. Lewis's position was further developed in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and reached its culmination in his 1961 work An Experiment in Criticism. (Wikipedia article)
The process of becoming—the forging of the Inklings: Post-war priorities in the 1920 s Common threads Seeking earnestly after Truth and Beauty Pursuing life and using gifts with serious deliberation Investing in relationship and searching for Fellowship What might we learn from their example? ,
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