C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien & Mythology

 by Mr Brownlo

Alister McGrath's [recent] biography of Lewis sheds interesting information on various aspects of the life of the “creator” of Narnia, and also on his relationship with JRR Tolkien. It seems that Lewis encouraged Tolkien to keep going when the latter was thinking of giving up writing, being unconvinced of the literary value of his efforts.  For his part, Tolkien played an important role in the long process that eventually led Lewis to the Christian faith.

Lewis, Tolkien and the concept of mythology.

Tolkien argued that Lewis should approach the New Testament with the same imagination and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis himself stated in [a] letter, “The story of Christ is nothing but a true myth: a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but with the great difference that it really happened.”

The reader should understand that the word myth is not used here in the general sense of “fairy tale,” nor the pejorative sense of a “deliberate lie told for the purpose of deception.” No doubt that was the way Lewis once understood the concept of myths-he even went so far as to describe them as lies, “breathed through silver.” [Tolkien rejected that definition in his poem Mythopoeia (μυθοποιία, μυθοποίησις), which bears as its heading, “For one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, though they are ”whispered through silver.” From Philomythus (he who is a friend of myths) to Misomythus (he who hates myths).” Lewis and Tolkien used the term myth in its literary-technical sense.

For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys “fundamental things,” that is, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. He asserted that the best myths are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths offer a fragment of those truths, not their totality.

It is not difficult to see how Tolkien's ideas brought clarity and coherence to the jumble of thoughts that filled Lewis's mind at the time. According to Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something beyond their reach. Myths have the innate capacity to expand the consciousness of their readers, allowing them to transcend themselves. At their best, myths offer what Lewis later called “a scintillation of divine truth, real but unfocused, falling upon the human imagination.”

In that way, Christianity, instead of being simply one myth among many, is the fulfillment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a real story about humanity, which gives meaning to all the stories humanity tells itself.

Tolkien's ideas struck deep into Lewis's being. They answered a question that had bothered Lewis since his teenage years: how could only Christianity be true, and everything else false? Lewis realized that he did not have to declare that the great myths of the pagan age were totally false; they were echoes or foreshadowing of the full truth that was made known only in and through the Christian faith.

Christianity carried to its culmination the imperfect and partial appreciations of reality scattered throughout human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of looking at things, that allowed him to see Christianity as the full realization of those echoes and shadows of truth that arose from human quests and longings. If Tolkien was right, the similarities between Christianity and pagan religions “ought to be there.” There would only be a problem if such similarities did not exist.

What was perhaps more important, Tolkien allowed Lewis to reconnect the worlds of reason and imagination. No longer was the realm of longing to be marginalized or suppressed, as the “New Look” [the philosophical context in which Lewis found himself at Oxford] demanded and as Lewis feared belief in God might imply. That realm could be woven-naturally and convincingly-into the overall narrative of reality that Tolkien had presented. As Tolkien later put it, God willed that “the hearts of men should seek beyond the world and find no rest in it.”

Lewis realized that Christianity allowed him to affirm the importance of feeling longing and yearning within a reasonable account of reality. God was the true “source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me...since childhood.” Reason and imagination were equally affirmed, reconciled by the Christian vision of reality. Thus Tolkien helped Lewis realize that a “rational” faith did not necessarily have to be sterile in imaginative and emotional terms. When properly understood, reason could coexist with longing and imagination in Christian faith.

SOURCE: This article was originally published in Spanish at Simplemente Cristiano on 09/06/2013 © Some Rights Reserved, lecturanarrativadelabiblia <https://lecturanarrativadelabiblia.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/c-s-lewis-j-r-r-tolkien-y-la-mitologia/> and translated with some help from free version of DeepL