World on Fire
How the Inklings Responded with Hope & Creativity
by Joseph Pearce
Feast of the Holy and Glorious Apostle Thomas
Anno Domini 2017, October 6
THE TWENTIETH
century was the bloodiest century in human history. It was characterized by two world wars, which killed collectively between 70-100 million people, and a cold war which potentially could have killed many more people than the two world wars combined. The members of the Inklings, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, lived through all three of these deadly or potentially deadly conflicts.
Tolkien referred to World War II as “the first War of the Machines.” But that dubious distinction really belongs to World War I, which was known as the Great War until it was eclipsed by the even greater war that followed it. Men were mutilated on the altars of new technology in WWI on a scale that could not have been imagined earlier. It was the first war in which aviation played a role, and the war in which the tank made its deadly and dramatic debut. The big guns were bigger than ever, and the machine guns were more mechanistically efficient at killing multitudes of people at once; there was also the new invention of barbed wire on which to become entangled, and new chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, in which to drown. For Tolkien, who experienced what he called the “animal horror” of the Battle of the Somme, it took an orc-like imagination to invent such weapons of mass destruction. “Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted,” he wrote in The Hobbit. “They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. . . . It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them. . .”
It would have been very easy for Tolkien and Lewis to have become embittered by their experience of the trenches in the first world war. Both men lost close friends in the war, and both men experienced horrors that would be difficult for most of us to even imagine. And yet they emerged from their world on fire with imaginations that would set the world ablaze with the flame of divine light and love. Tolkien began working in earnest on the invention of his elvish language in 1915 and 1916, only months before the “animal horror” of the Somme, and this would serve as the inspirational launching pad for the creation of Middle-earth in which his world-changing stories are set. Meanwhile, C. S. Lewis discovered the works of G. K. Chesterton in early 1918, while serving in the British Army and recovering from trench fever, an encounter that would set his soul on the road to recovery. Reading Chesterton helped baptize Lewis’s imagination, contributing to his transition from cynical atheism to Christian conversion. And so it was that Lewis and Tolkien received priceless inklings of light amid the darkness of war. From the very ashes of the World on Fire these great writers would enkindle the power and the glory of the Word on Fire!
Joseph Pearce
is a native of England. He is Senior Editor at the Augustine Institute, Senior Fellow and Journal Editor at the Cardinal Newman Society, Editor of the St. Austin Review, Executive Director of Catholic Courses, Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, and Tolkien and Lewis Chair in Literary Studies at Holy Apostles College & Seminary. He is a world-recognized biographer of modern Christian literary figures, and has authored over twenty books.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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