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ROMAN'HC RELIGION m THE WORK OF

OWEN BARHELD, C. S. LE-W-tS, CHARLES WILUAMS, ~

AND J. R. R. TOLKIEN

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MICHIGAN STATE UNMRSITY
. Roberf J. Remy
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Romantic Religion in the Work of Owen Barfield,
C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien

presented by
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L I B R A R Y
Michigan State

University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ROMANTIC RELIGION IN THE WORK OF
OWEN BARFIELD, c. s. LEWIS, CHARLES WILLIAMS,

AND J} R. R. TOLKIEN

By

ROBERT J. REILLY

A THESIS

Submitted to the School for Advanced Graduate Studies
of Michigan State University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1960

325') *3 6/
['71’_-‘r.
\_../"~ fll

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to record here my debts to several peOple
who, in one way or another, helped in the making of this thesis. I
am, of course, especially indebted to the director of the thesis,
Professor Bernard Duffey, whose kindness, patience, and high sense
of scholarship did much to give the thesis what value it has.

I am grateful to Professors David Mead, Arnold Williams, and
Hazard Adams who, as members of my committee, read the thesis and
made helpful comments on it.

Tb Professors John A. Yunck, Edward J. Wolff, and C. Carroll
Hollis I owe thanks beyond my power to eXpress for encouragement,
advice, and endless reading and re-reading of the work in its var-
ious states of composition.

Finally, my thanks are due to my typist, Mrs. Inez Hare,
whose skill and perseverance brought a long task to its conclusion.

ii

ROMANTIC RELIGION IN THE WORK OF
OWEN BARFIELD, c. s. LEWIS, CHARLES WILLIAMS,

AND J} R. R. TOLKIEN

By

ROBERT J} REILLY

AN ABSTRACT

Submitted to the School for Advanced Graduate Studies
of Michigan State University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1960

Approved m M I 1 ms

'T
f}( EL‘~VHrfi%\ Zl“44fij

ABSTRACT

The argument of the thesis is that four contemporary writers
fall naturally into an ideological group, and that analysis of much of
their work reveals a literary-religious trend which is part of the in-
tellectual history of the twentieth century.. The four men--C. S. Lewis
and Charles Williams (Anglicans), J. R. R. Tolkien (Roman Catholic),
and Owen Barfield (AnthrOposophist)--formed a rough group in life until
Williama's death in l9h5. Much of their work, both critical and crea-
tive, is best seen as an attempt to form a construct which may be called
"romantic religion.“ Romantic religion is an attempt to reach religious
truths by means and techniques traditionally called romantic, and an
attempt to defend and justify these techniques and attitudes of roman-
ticism by holding that they have religious sanction. This construct,
which is a conscious revival of older beliefs, constitutes a middle
ground between romanticism and formal religion on which the four men
may meet, a middle ground which minimizes doctrinal differences and is
the point from which the group defends both formal religion and roman-
ticism against what they hold to be the twentieth-century Zeitgeist:
cold classicism, naturalistic science, and rationalistic irreligion.

Owen Barfield is the first man dealt with. His work in linguis-
tics, anthropology, and religion is admittedly much influenced by the

work of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the school of AnthrOpOSOphy.

iv

But since he is more concerned with the phIIOSOphical aspect of Anthro-
pOSOphy than he is with its more occult beliefs, it is necessary to see
his work (and Steiner's) against the background of Kantian epistemology
from which it largely stems. In Barfield's Anthroposophy, Coleridge's
doctrine of the Creative Imagination and the Coleridge-Kant epistemol-
ogy are taken up into occult Christianity and made important religious
facts as well as means of arriving at the great truths of that Chris-
tianity.

lewis is much indebted to Barfield, as he has often said. His
basic idealism as well as certain theories in linguistics and mythology
are in great part taken over from Barfield. He is also a disciple of
George Macdonald and an imitator of Macdonald's romances. When these
two influences are taken into account, his fictional work is seen as
an attempt to romanticize Christianity by placing the general outlines
of it in far off places and times and by minimizing its doctrinal con-
tent. In the doctrinal books, Lewis has turned to the Kant-Coleridge
distinction between the functions of the Practical and Speculative In-
tellects in order, first, to arrive at the necessity of belief in Chris-
tian dogma and, second, to defend it against the charge of absurdity.

Williams is the most explicit romantic religionist of the group.
At the heart of his work is the notion which he called "romantic theo-

logy," which is a conscious attempt to "theologize" romance, especially

the experience we call romantic love, in order to show that the romantic

experience is God-sent and a special means of grace. Though many of
Williams's explanations of his romantic theology are illustrated from
the work of Dante, and are embellished with certain occult trappings,

he is best seen as in the tradition of WOrdsworth. Like WOrdsworth,

he sees in the romantic experience a meaning beyond itself, though
WOrdsworth's interpretations are naturalistic or Platonic and Williams's
are explicitly.Christian.

Tolkien's contribution to romantic religion is explicit in his
critical work on the fairy story and implicit in his adult fairy story
trilogy. He defends the romantic doctrine of the creative imagination
on the ground that by means of it the writer creates in essentially the
same way as the divine creator: the writer of fairy Stories, by means
of the creative imagination, prescinds from the real world in order
to effect in his readers the same state of soul (qualitatively consid-
ered) as that of the person who has reached the Christian heaven. The
romantic experience that Tblkien is concerned with is the peculiar thrill
felt by the reader at the "good turn" in the fairy story; but his view
of the religious validity Of this experience helps to eXplain the other
claims for the romantic experience made by Lewis and Williams. The ro-
mantic experience is qualitatively the same as Christian beatitude.

The four men do not all revive the same elements of romanticism,
but they all contribute to the synthesis called romantic religion, the
function of which is combative in the areas of both religion and litera-
ture.

vi \

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

II

III

VI

Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

IIVWI'RODUCTION O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

OWEN BARFIELD.AND ANTHROPOSOPHICAL ROMANTICISM. .

.c. s. IEWIS AND THE BAPTISM OF THE IMAGINATION. .

CHARLES WIIIJAMB AND ROMANTIC THEOLOGY. . . . . .

J} R. R. TOLKIEN AND THE EUCATASTROPHIC FAIRY STORY

CONCHB ION O O O O O O O. O O O O O O O O O O O O O

BIBLIOGRAPHY O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O C O 0

vii

Page

11

iv

13
79
171;
23h
272

286

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

My intention in this study is to begin to untwist one of the more
interesting strands which go to make up the tapestry of contemporary
literature and thought. The disadvantages of such an attempt are ob-
vious. thnson dealt quite comfortably with Shakespeare because, as
he explained, Shakespeare had been dead a hundred years and more, and
had thereby achieved something of the status of a classic. No one had
anything to gain either by praising him or damning him, and he himself
had passed beyond the time when mere contemporaneity could give his work
a spurious popularity or a merely current raciness. Of the men whom I
deal with, Barfield, Tolkien and Lewis are still alive and at work, and
Williams died only in l9h5. None of my subjects, then, has achieved
classical status; all of them gain, no doubt, by their modernity; and
all thus tempt the critic into the vagaries and blind judgments so com-
mon in a contemporary's assessment of a contemporary.

And yet such a study as this needs little defense. Scholarship,
after all, has to start somewhere. A certain part of scholarship must
in the nature of things commit itself to contemporary matters, for
scholarship is dedicated to achieving that kind of truth which accumu-

lates by many hands over many years. It is to some degree a cumulative

a

thing; modern scholars reach as high as they do partly because they
stand on the shoulders of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Dante but also be-
cause they stand on those of locke, Dryden, Marx and the army of others
who worked in contemporary matters and who were, more or less greatly,
wrong. In short, there is a precedent for being raSh and being wrong.
Moat definitive truth evolves slowly, as in the Hegelian triad, and it
follows that some must go first into the fray although (or because) they
will likely be carried home on their shields. The scholar who turns his
attention to current literature and thought is cannon fodder in the war
for scholarly truth, and knows it. But, so far as he is a noble sol-
dier at least, he knows that someone must make a first breach in a
given wall, even though later and better men decide that it was really
the wrong wall, or that it should have been buttressed rather than
breached. At the least it is not a fort of folly that he storms.

In this study, then, I mean to examine certain literary and re-
ligious aspects of the work of four contemporary writers in an attempt
to write a page in--or a footnote to--the intellectual history of our
time. The group of men I deal with is an interesting, even arresting,
cross-section of modern religious beliefs. It consists of two Anglicans
(Iewis and Williams), a Roman Catholic (Tolkien), and an.AnthropOSOphist
(Barfield). Lewis and Williams are well enough known to need no intro-
duction. Tolkien's reputation, however, is more limited. He is known
among literary scholars for his work in linguistics and Middle English

literature, work that includes Important criticism of Beowulf and (with

 

E. V. Gordon) an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He is
known beyond scholarly circles for his "fairy story for adults," the
trilogy entitled Thg_l9£d_g£_thg.§ing§. Owen Barfield, a London barris-
ter by profession, is one of those twentieth-century rarities, a scholar
not formally connected with any university. His work is difficult to
categorize; he is primarily a linguist, but his interests take him in-
to comparative religion, anthropology, and technical phiIOSOphy. He

is the least known of the group, though his Poetic Diction has long

 

been known to a rather small body of critics and scholars concerned
with poetic theory.

A literary historian looking for obvious affinities among the
four men might well focus on Oxford, for in one way or another all have
been connected with each other there as students or teachers. It was
there that Iewis and Barfield met as students shortly after the first
World war; it was there that Tblkien and Lewis met when both taught
there; and it was there that Williams came and occasionally lectured
when his employer, Oxford University Press, moved there from Iondon dur-
ing the Battle of Britain. During those last years of the recent world
war, the four men and some few others "argued, drank, and talked to-

gether,"1

until Williams's sudden death. Two years later, in l9h7,
Oxford university Press published a collection of essays honoring
Williams, the collection including pieces by the remaining three of the

group and a few others.

 

1Lewis, Preface to Essays Presented tg_Charles Williams (London,
l9h7), p. xi.

 

Thus there is no little biographical justification for thinking
of the four men as a group. But that there is also some meeting of minds
among the group is clear from their published references to each other.
Lewis dedicated his Allegogy 9£_Igzg to Barfield, and Barfield his
Poetic Diction to Lewis. Lewis cited Tblkien's trilogy approvingly
while it was still in manuscript, and reviewed it enthusiastically on
publication. Williams has cited Lewis's work, and Barfield has said that
he has only minor objections to Williams's theology, and so on. My rea-
son for grouping the four men together is based on this meeting of
minds, and in fact the reason for the grouping is in effect the argu-
ment of this study. I mean to Show that the work of the four men is
best understood when seen as a fairly homogeneous body of both critical
and creative literature written for a specific purpose and from a speci-
fic point of view. I mean to describe a phenomenon of contemporary lit-
erature and religion to which all of the four men in some way contribute.
This phenomenon I will call (for want of a better term) romantic religion.

I do not mean by the term only that the four men are romantic
writers who have an interest of some sort in religion; such a descrip-
tion would include perhaps every romantic writer one could name. I mean
that their work, on analysis, reveals itself as a deliberate and con-
scious attempt to revive certain well known doctrines and attitudes of
romanticism and to justify these doctrines and attitudes by showing that
they have not merely literary but religious validity. Further, the end

result of their work, when looked at synthetically, is a literary and

religious construct whose purpose is to defend romance by showing it to
be religious, and then to defend religion by traditionally romantic
means. It is this construct that I mean by the term romantic religion.
Thus the romanticism of the four men is both scholarly and combative.
It is necessarily scholarly and even antiquarian because of the mere
lapse of time between the early nineteenth-century romantics and them-
_selves. It is necessarily combative because their purpose is not lit-
erary criticism as such: it is revival and utilization of romantic
doctrine for present ideological and religious disputation. The roman-
ticism that they advocate is what Williams called "corrected romanti-

cism,’ romantic doctrine lifted into the realm of formal doctrinal re-
ligion and justified as being a part of that religion.

Specifically, I mean to show that both Barfield and Tolkien re-
vive Coleridge's doctrine of the creative imagination and defend its
validity by showing that it leads (for Barfield) to truths about God
and man and the relationship between them, and (for Tolkien) to a state
of soul essentially the same as that of the soul which has achieved the
Christian heaven. I mean to show that Lewis has revived the Kant-
Coleridge distinction between the Practical and Speculative Intellect
in order to apprehend and then defend the truths of the Christian faith.
And I mean to show that Lewis, Williams and Tolkien in various ways
affirm that the experiences and emotions which we generally call roman-

tic--sehnsucht, sexual love, faerie--are divinely originated for a re-

ligious end.

 

This revival of specific romantic elements will, I believe, be

clear enough in Spite of the confusion surrounding the term romanticism,

 

though a writer who deals not only With romanticism but religion as well
may fairly be accused of recklessness. In either matter, much less

"not

both, a writer may well feel, with Sir Thomas Browne, that he is
a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gauntlet in the
cause of Verity." I do not intend to darken counsel on the subject of
romanticism by attempting to define or even describe it. It may be,

as Lovejoy thought, that we must attempt a "discrimination of roman-
ticisms" before the word loses reference completely by being taken to
mean nearly everything. A defining word that can be applied equally

to Satan, Plato, St. Paul and Kant is no doubt very close to meaning
nothing.2 The view of those who would do away with the word altOgether
is understandable. But it is clear, as Iovejoy admits, that the word
is not going to be legislated out of usage, and so we must make do
with it. In the following pages I use the word dozens of times, but

I believe that I have in no case used it in such a way as to cause con-
fusion. Generally I have used it in the obvious senses in which it

is applied to Coleridge and WOrdsworth. Thus I call Kant's "trans-
cendental" philosophy romantic; I call Coleridge's doctrine of the
Primary and Secondary Imagination romantic; I call WOrdsworth's view

of Nature romantic. Beyond these rather doctrinaire uses, I occasion-

ally use the word of attitudes and phenomena which most of us would, I

 

25ee A. O. Lovejoy, "On the Discrimination Of Romanticisms,"
Essays in the History g£_Ideas (New York, 1960), pp. 228-35.

 

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believe, agree to call romantic. Thus I Speak of "rOmantic longing" in
connection with Lewis, partly because he himself uses the phrase, part-
ly because the desire for what is over the hills and far away (either
in this world or some other) seems to me at least intelligible as it

is explained by transcendental philosophy. I call imagined worlds
romantic when it is clear that they are imagined not only for satirical
or didactic purposes but also for their own sake, because I believe
that in such imaginings some sort of agreement with Coleridge's notion
of the Secondary Imagination is implicit. In no case do I equate the
word romantic with unreason or irrationality, although I believe that
in the romantic attitudes of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the four men

to be discussed, reason in the sense of discursive or inferential
thinking often plays a secondary part to something else-~intuition,
desire, religious faith.

Finally, one last word on the subject of romanticism: I do not
intend to show (in fact, I could not) that the four men I am concerned
with are identical in their romanticism. It would be untrue to charac-
terize them as all equally indebted to Coleridge, or as all equally
sure that WOrdsworth's belief in Nature is valid. In far better organ-
ized religions than the romantic one I mean to describe, some latitude
is permissible. By calling the Oxford group romantics, I do not mean
to suggest that they are carbon cOpies of one original, any more than
WOrdSworth is a carbon cOpy of Coleridge.

As I have said, my intention is to describe by analysis a phenomenon

which I have called romantic religion. It follows that this study is
not a "source" study or an "influence" study, much less a "history of
ideas" study. It is the examination of a contemporary phenomenon.
There is no doubt that much influence exists among the members of the
group; often, as in the case of Lewis's debt to Barfield, it is ad-
mitted. HOwever, it is not my primary intention to point out these
influences except in a casual way or when a part of one man's thought
may be clarified by reference to another's. It is true, of course,
that no intellectual group exists isolated in time, that every group
and every man has roots; even Descartes used the techniques of his pre-
decessors in order to start out fresh. Nor did the Oxford romantics
leap full-blown into being. I will note briefly here some obvious
sources and suggest others more conjectural.

Of Barfield I will say nothing now, because the nature of his
work has forced me to discuss in the next chapter the philosophical
background of the movement called Anthroposophy. Williams presents a
problem to the critic concerned with the sources of a man's thought.
Lewis has mentioned Williams's vast reading:3 he was acquainted with
the church fathers and with much of the literature of Western mysticism;
he had a broad, if unsystematic, knowledge of technical philosophy,
ancient, medieval, and modern; he seems to have read all the important

critical and creative literature from the time of the English romantics

 

 

3Lewis, Preface to Essayg Presented, p. xi.

on. There is also the possible influence of certain occult studies,
which certainly produced at least the trappings of most of his fiction.
And in his publishing position at Amen House he would have had easy
access to at least cursory knowledge of ideas and disciplines beyond
enumeration. Anyone acquainted with his work can point out certain
writers and bodies of ideas which seem to have been special favorites
of his: Wordsworth, Dante, the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius,
Malory and the Arthurian legend, Milton. He draws on all these and
more, but there is no obvious pattern to his choices. As Lewis said,
he will not be pigeon-holed. He certainly admired the work of Evelyn
Underhill, whose letters he edited. JOhn Heath-Stubbs has pointed outh

that Miss Underhill's early novel The Pillar 9f_Dust seems to have served

 

as a model for much of his fiction. More important, perhaps, than her
fiction is her work in mysticism and the history of worship. Williams's
The Descent g£_thg.ggzg, a "History of the Holy Spirit in the Church,"
echoes quite closely Miss Underhill's view of the Church as fundamen-
tally a mystical experience tranSlated, and in part distorted, by the
necessary institution and organization in which it is embodied. And

her work on mysticism shows a broad and tolerant view of medieval occul-
tists, many of whom she holds to have been on the border of genuine
mystical experience. This latter view, I believe, Williams must have

found more than palatable. Yet, even granting a certain indebtedness

 

hCharles Williams (London, 1955), p. 13.

10

to Miss Underhill, there is more to Williams than that. I have sug-
gested in my discussion of his "romantic theology" that he tried to
subsume under the heading of the "romantic experience" many seemingly
disparate values drawn from his reading in literature, philosophy and
religion. Like Coleridge, he was forever aiming at synthesis. My own
belief is that, like Coleridge, he requires a Iowes to follow his at-
tempt.

With.Lewis there is, first of all, the obvious influence of
George Macdonald. In dozens of places Lewis has praised Macdonald,
and has even spoken of himself as a kind of disciple. His debt to Mac-

donald's unspoken Sermons, he has said, "is almost as great as one man

 

can owe to another...."5 In The Great Divorce, the hero, venturing

 

into the after-life, meets Macdonald, as Dante met Virgil; and it is
Macdonald who eXplains to him the nature of heaven and hell. And in
the later discussion of Lewis it will be clear that he credits the
books of Macdonald with bringing about his reconversion to Christianity.
Such clear and present influence, one would think, should be easy to
describe. In fact, however, it is almost impossible. If one turns

from Lewis's praise of Phantastes, for example, to the book itself (which

 

was published in 1858), one can guess readily enough that Lewis was
attracted by the Spenserian quality of the story. The hero moves

through fairy landscapes much like those of The Faerie Queene; but there

 

 

5Preface to Georgg Macdonald, A2_Anthology (New York, l9h7), p. 18.

11

is no allegory in Phantastes, and though there is a kind of quest,

 

neither the hero nor the reader is quite certain of its real nature.

At the end of the book, the hero thinks that he has heard a voice pro-
claiming to him a great truth, that a great good is coming to him: "Yet
I know that good is coming to me--that good is always coming; though

few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.

What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person
and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good."6
Perhaps the best way of describing the book (and Macdonald's other
novels) is to say that they are fairy romances, without any special
doctrine, but with a vague "feel" of holiness to them. For Lewis they
seem to have combined in a special way his early tastes for faerie and
a desire to bring these tastes into a moral realm. Later, as we shall
see, he could attribute to Macdonald's work the qualities to be found
in the great myths-~the generalized meaning, what Tblkien calls the
"inherent morality," and the impact on the reader that takes place on
a non-rational level. In his own fiction, particularly in T§ll_Wg_

Have Faces, he is trying to recapture that peculiar blend of fairy ro-

 

mance and generalized religious feeling which he found in Macdonald.
In trying to describe the influence one is driven finally to para-
phrasing Lewis's description of it, and to concluding that each man takes

something different to the books he reads. I believe the nature of the

 

6Phantastes (London, 1923), p. 237.

12

influence is best understood by seeing Macdonald as an early advocate of

"romantic religion,’ which, as I hope to show, exists independently of,
and as a correlary to, formal and professed religions of men such as
the Oxford romantics. And this is also true of the other man on whom
Lewis greatly depends, Chesterton. Like Lewis, Chesterton had high
praise for Macdonald; and if this study were primarily concerned with
sources and influences, a case might be made for a line of inheritance
running from Macdonald to Chesterton to Lewis and Tolkien. All of these
men meet on that middle ground between £32312 and formal religion which
is the subject of this study. But a history of romantic religion is
beyond the scope of this study, and perhaps of any study. One could
not merely begin with Macdonald, for what books Macdonald read are not
beyond all conjecture, and behind Macdonald is the whole English roman-
tic movement.

,A final word should be said as to the organization of this study.
I have begun with Barfield because many of the romantic notions common
to the members of the group exist in their most basic and philosophical
form in his work. I have treated Lewis next because a great part of
his work is best seen in relation to that of Barfield. I have discussed
Williams next and concluded with Tolkien because I believe that much of
what Lewis and Williams have to say is brought more clearly into focus

by Tblkien's view of the religious implications of the fairy story.

CHAPTER II

OWEN BARFIELD.AND ANTHROPOSOPHICAL ROMANTICISM

Perhaps most general readers who know Barfield were first led to
read him from Lewis's remarks about him in Surprised By ggy and other
books. Lewis, in trying to assess his own intellectual development,
places Barfield along with Chesterton and Macdonald as among the most
important conscious influences upon him. They studied together at Ox-
ford after World war I, and he notes that Barfield "changed me a good
deal more than I him. Much of the thought which he afterwards put in-
to Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little
book appeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course
not so learned as he has since become; but the genius was already

there."1 And Lewis's Allegory gf_Iove is dedicated to Barfield, the

"wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.‘ This is indeed high praise
from one of the most respected of modern scholars, and perhaps many
readers of Lewis turn to Barfield with some anticipation, even (it may
be) with a kind of bookish excitement, at the thought of finding the
Real Lewis or the Man Behind Lewis, as a generation ago they might have

turned with some eagerness to find the Man Behind Kittredge or the Real

loves a

 

lSurprised pl 991 (London, 1955), pp. 189-90.

13

it

What they find, perhaps to their dismay, is an AnthropOSOphist.
Lewis has recorded his shock and sense of personal loss at Barfield's
electing to follow the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner. Lewis, when he first
knew Barfield, was a defiant, anti-religious rationalist; and Barfield,
as far as Lewis was concerned, had defected from the rationalist camp
into a religion which contained "gods, spirits, after-life and pre-

2 Lewis later came

existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation."
to accept AnthrOposophy when he discovered that it has a ”re-assuring
Germanic dullness about it which would soon deter those who were looking
for thrills."3

AnthrOposophy began as a rebellion against the TheOSOphic move-
ment led by Madame Blavatsky. Steiner broke away from the original move-
ment, objecting to the Eastern and passive bias which Madame Blavatsky
insisted upon. Theosophical doctrine is too complex to go into here,”
but it may perhaps be best described as a mystery religion which preached
meditation on the One, secret ways of knowledge to the One, reincarnation,
and ultimate return to the One. It had probationers, initiates, and
adapts, and at least occasionally sanctioned magical practices. Steiner
(who died in 1925) did away with the quasi-Buddhist aspects of the move-

ment in his reformation. Meditation was to be retained, but the medita-

tion was not to be so much a willful losing of the self in the One as a

 

2Surprised §y_g9y, p. 195.

3§u£prised §y_ggy, p. 195.

— “See Richard Ellmann, Yeats, The Man and the Masks (New York,
1958), pp. 56-69 for a rough summary of TheOSOphical beliefs. Yeats was
a member Of Madame Blavatsky's group from 1887 till 1890; his wife joined
a Rudolf Steiner group in 191%.

15

systematic examination of the human mind, for reasons which will soon
be apparent. How far Steiner's movenent was originally German in out-
look is conjectural. An Anthroposophist writer named Ernst Boldt holds
that it was entirely so, but Boldt seems to have existed on the lunatic
fringe of the movement, and the beliefs of the school are for him inter-
changeable with his hopes for a rising Germany following WOrld War I.
According to him, when Germany has become sufficiently Anthroposophist,
she will fulfill her "World-Mission,"5 will reveal all that is deep in
her soul. "And this true Soul of Germany is nothing less than the
living Christ, as is witnessed by the genius of German Speech, which
uses I. CH. ('desus Christus') for the first person...thereby appealing
to every German to reveal the immense depths and sublimities of the
human soul."6 Boldt continues in this vein, and from his description
of the movement one is inclined to react as Lewis originally did: An-
throposophy seems at the least grotesque. Steiner is "that strong

'One from Above' who, according to a prophecy, is to come 'before 1932'
and who shall be'as a wave of spiritual force' to the German people
...."7 His philosophy is the same as that of Goethe, an "Objective

8

Idealism," Aor "scientific Gnosticism."9 Steiner is "a true Seer" who

5"Introduction," From Luther tg_Steiner (New York, 1921), p. xix.

 

6From Luther tg_Steiner, p. xix.

 

7Erom Luther _t9_ Steiner, p. 119.

 

aFrom Luther to Steiner, p. 7h.

 

9From Luther tg_Steiner, p. 136.

l6

stands "on the very crest of Time's Breakers as the Tide comes rolling
in."10 And in summation Boldt adds, "The methods of knowledge which are
calculated to serve our times were prepared in the fourteenth century,

for the twentieth century, by Christian Rosenkreuz, and have been brought

 

to perfection in the present day by the Rosicrucian initiate, Rudolf
Steiner, in conjunction with modern Natural Science."11
New the absurdity of Boldt's occultism is patent, even monumental.
But one crank does not necessarily make a movement. Though, as we shall
see, some of Barfield's'beliefs sound strangely like Boldt's fulmina-
tions, Barfield is more than Boldt writ large; certainly it is difficult
to think of Boldt as the wisest and best of Lewis's unofficial teachers.
In view of Barfield's admitted debt to Steiner,12 it is perhaps wise to
turn to Steiner himself and try to ascertain what it is exactly that
this modern Gnosticism teaches, so far as it affects Barfield and his

beliefs. Barfield indicates that he is greatly indebted to Steiner's

book The Philosophy 9: Spiritual Activity; it is in fact the only one he

 

 

mentions by title, though Steiner's bibliography is incredibly long.
Barfield's mentiOn of the book seems significant, since it is Steiner's
major attempt to give the school of Anthroposophy a philosophical basis.

The book also bears out Lewis's above remark: it has a re-assuring

 

10From Luther to Steiner, p. 163.

11From Luther pp_Steiner, p. 166.

 

123ee "Preface to the First Edition" in the second edition of Poetic
Diction, A Study ig_Meaning and also "Appendix II" of the same edition.
See also Saving_the_Appearances, pp. lhO-hl.

17

Germanic dullness about it.

The merely literary man is often out of his depth in technical
philosophy and never moreso than in German philosophy, especially Ger-
man Romantic phiIOSOphy. But that is the background out of which philo-

sophical Anthroposophy comes. Steiner, in an appendix to The PEEIOSQERX,

 

92 Spiritual Activity, notes that Eduard von Hartmann has accused him
of "having attempted to combine Hegel's Universalistic Panlogism with
Hume's Individualistic Phenomenalism...."13 But, he says, his book
fhas nothing whatever to do with the two positions...." (p. 216) Steiner
should know, of course; yet von Hartmann seems right, at least as re-
gards Hegel. Steiner refers to his philosophy interchangeably as Mon-
ism or Objective Idealism: it is monistic in that (as in Hegel) the
basic stuff of which the world consists is held to be thought; it is
objectively idealistic in the sense that phenomena have an objective
existence (as they do not in the radical idealism of Berkeley); it also
differs from Kantian idealism in that it holds that real knowledge
about what Kant called the noumena of the world is possible. I will try
to sketch out briefly the system and its implications so far as they seem
to be relevant to the beliefs of Barfield.

We may begin with what philosophers call the problem of the one
and the many: supposing God (or some other infinite being), why us also?
This problem turns out to be no problem at all in Steiner's system, and

to see how he gets rid of the problem may give an insight into the system

13The Philosophy 93 Spiritual Activity (London, 19h9), Appendix I,
p. 216. In the following discussion of this book the page references
'will be found after the quotations in the text.

18

as a whole. New the philosophically naive man turns his attention to
the world about him and sees himself as distinct from the other phenom-
ena of the world. He sees himself as thinking and perceiving subject,
the other phenomena as objects to be perceived or thought about. In
short, the common man is a "naive" realist (in the technical sense).
But the common man is not aware of the nature of perception itself; he
is not aware that what he supposes he perceives as phenomena are really
constructs of his mental and imaginative makeup. In the old phrase, a
thing is received according to the condition of the receiver. A sound
is heard because the hearing organism is so constituted that the sound
waves in the air are translated into the phenomenon that we call sound.
That which we perceive is only a part of reality; the other part is
added by the mind of the perceiver, through cognition. "The percept
...is not something finished and self-contained, but one side only of
the total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of cognition
is the synthesis of percept and concept. Only the percept and concept
together constitute the whole thing." (p. 67) In other words, mind
completes and fills out (as well as gives meaning to) the phenomena of
the universe.

New according to Steiner, it is through the very nature of think-
ing itself that the problem of the one and the many is solved. One who
has studied himself and the nature of his thought perceives that the
world of phenomena outside him which he sees as object to his own sub-

Jectivity is not that at all. It is a world largely brought into

19

existence through his own thinking, in fact a world which largely exists
only i§_his own thinking. But the nature of thinking is such that it
is misleading to speak of thinking as an individual process. So far as
man thinks, he becomes less and less an individual and more and more a
part of the world process of thought, the ultimate reality. I have said
"so far as man thinks"; it would be more accurate to say "so far as man
intuits," for the kind of thinking that Steiner is describing seems to
be not what we normally call conceptual thinking but rather inference
following on concepts that somehow are infused in us or intuited by us.
This kind of thinking Steiner finds historically-exemplified in such
mystics as Meister Eckhart, Boehme, Angelus Silesius, and also in him-
self. It is as much an experience as it is an intellectual process.
But it is through this kind of thinking that the real nature of the
world is revealed: a world in which man is seen not as individual and
cut off from the rest of the world but truly one with the rest, a part
of the unity which may be loosely described as the world's thought of
itself. In a man who can think like this, there appears

a sun which lights up all reality at once. Something

makes its appearance in us which links us with the

whole world. No longer are we simply isolated, chance

human beings, no longer this or that individual. The

entire world.reveals itself in us. It unveils to us its

own coherence; and it unveils to us how we ourselves as

individuals are bound up with it. From out of self-

knowledge is born knowledge of the world. And our own lim-

ited individuality merges itself spiritually into the great

interconnected world-whole, because in us something has

come to life that reaches out beyond this individuality,

that embraces along witpuit everything of which this indi-
viduality forms a part.

1'Mystics g§.the Renaissance (New York, 1911), pp. 27-28.

20

In short, the problem of the one and the many is no problem.
Mere perception and lower levels of cognition postulate the many, just
as they postulate man as subject and phenomena as objects. But intui-
tion (or what Steiner, with Coleridge and Kant, calls Reason) discovers
that the world and all in it are One, and that the seeming many are essen-
tially spirit, parts of the World-Soul or Logos.

I have made the system seem more tightly knit and perhaps more
Hegelian than it really is. There is in it much that is ambiguous and
much that is unexplained. For example, when Boehme or Eckhart or
Steiner practice intuition or "spiritual perception," (p. 209) what is
it actually that they perceive? 'DOes Steiner, let us say, in a moment
of inspiration perceive that, so long as he remains inspired and raised
.to this mystical level of thought or being, he himself becomes a part
of the eternal logos? Or does he perceive, what the ordinary man cannot
perceive, that gll_men are parts of this logos? If the latter, then are
they always parts, or only when they practice thought? In short, does
he perceive a permanent relation between man and world or a relation
that is true for man in general only at certain times and for himself~
only at certain times? The answer is easy (or relatively so) in Hegel-
ian philosophy: the relation is permanent--this is the true nature of
the world. How Steiner would answer the question, I do not know.

I have said there is much in the system that is ambiguous. The
ambiguities are important; they are recurrent themes in Steiner's work,

and we shall see later that they are some of Barfield's preoccupations.

21

I have called them ambiguities; but perhaps they are not so much ambig-
uous as merely the kind of implications that may be drawn from Romantic
idealism, implications valid within the system but which nevertheless
tease the reader out of thought. It may be only that, as was said of
Macaulay, everyone reads Hegel but no one believes him, "everyone" be-
ing, for the practical purposes of life, a philosophical realist. In
any case, the first of the notions that haunt Steiner's work is the
notion of unity. We have already seen the philosophical justification
of the notion, the fact that all things are essentially the same, that
is, thought or spirit. The notion itself, however, takes on interesting
shapes. Sometimes it is the union of man and nature, or more accurately
a reunion. "...we meet with the basic and primary opposition first in
our own consciousness. It is we, ourselves, who break away from the
bosom of Nature and contrast ourselves as 'I' with the 'WOrld.'" (p.

17) But thought, as we have noted, perceives that the distinction be-
tween subject and object is a distinction that disappears when thought

has revealed the real nature of the world.

We must find the way back to her [naturg7 again. .A simple
reflection may point this way out to us; We have, it is
true, torn ourselves away from Nature, but we must none the
less have taken with us something of her in our own nature.
This quality of Nature in us we must seek out, and then we
shall restore our connection with her. Dualism neglects
to do this. It considers the human interior as a spirit-
ual entity utterly alien to Nature and attempts somehow to
hitch it on to Nature. No wonder that it cannot find the

. coupling link. We can find Nature outside of us only if
we have first learnt to know her within us. What is allied
to her within us must be our guide to her. This marks out
our path of inquiry. We shall attempt no speculations con-
cerning the interaction of Nature and Spirit. We shall
rather probe into the depths of our own being, to find there
those elements which we saved in our flight from Nature. (P-l7)

22

By "flight from Nature" Steiner presumably means man's evolution up from,
or away from, the lower forms of sentient life, since elsewhere he speaks
of MOnism as supplemental to the evolution postulated by Darwin and in-
deed refers to the moral aspect of Monism as "Spiritualized Evolutionism
applied to moral life." (p. 160) And, as Plato knew, man is discontented
until he has achieved Such unity. Until then he lives dissatisfied in
the world of flux and Opinion, harassed by error and by the disturbing
transience of things. "Only when we have made the world-content into
our thought-content do we again find the unity from which we had separ-
ated ourselves." (pp. 12-13) And again, "Thinking gives us the true
shape of reality as a self-contained unity, whereas the multiplicity of
percepts is but an appearance conditioned by our organization." (p. 200)
Sometimes the notion of unity takes the form of individuals mer-
ging with one another on the highest level of knowledge--more accurately,
individuals in the act of cognition merging into the infinite world-

process:

On this level there remains no difference between Plato and
me; what separated us belongs to a lower level of cognition.
we are separated only as individuals; the individual which
works within us is one and the'same....Paradoxical as it may
sound, it is the truth: the idea which Plato conceived and
the like idea which I conceive are not two ideas. It is

one and the same idea. And there are not two ideas: one in
Plato's head and one in mine; but in the higher sense Plato's
head and mine interpenetrate each other; all heads interpene-
trate which grasp one and the same idea; and this idea is
only once there as a single idea. It is there; and the heads
all go ti one and the same place in order to have this idea
in them. 5

15Mystics 93 the Renaissance, pp. 36-37.

 

23

We are not far here from Plato's world of Ideas; nor are we very far from
Jung's race memory, the universal depository of memories, beliefs, and

notions; and we are quite close to Yeats's Spiritus Mundi. It is rele-

 

vant to note here one of Yeats's essays on magic; it was written in 1901,

after he had been to school to Madame Blavatsky. He believes

(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and
that many minds can flow into one another, as it were,
and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and
that our memories are a part of one great memory, the
memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this gigat mind and great memory can be evoked

by symbols.
We will see much of this notion of unity in Barfield, particularly in
what he calls the "ancient unities."

The second notion which is recurrent in Steiner, and of which both
Steiner and Barfield make a great deal, is the notion of man as creator
rather than perceiver. The notion is one of the earmarks of Idealistic
philosophy and especially Of Romantic Idealistic philosophy. It is per-
haps stated in its most popular form in Kent and in its most radical form
in Berkeley. For Berkeley, esse est percipi. NOthing exists except
that which is perceived; the world exists because it is perceived by God;
indeed it exists as an idea in the mind of God. For Kant (and Steiner
and Barfield), the world exists in its present form because it is per-
ceived by beings who are organized in a particular way. The world is
what it is because we are what we are; if our perceiving processes were ‘

different, the world would be different. Kant's noumena are fundamental

to this notion: the noumena are the real phenomena as distinct from the

*—

16Quoted in Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York, 1931), pp. u7-h8.

2h

phenomena which we construct for ourselves through our perceiving pro-
cesses. In effect, according to Kantian and later Idealism, we (in
WOrdsworth's phrase) both perceive and half create. In Steiner the crea-
tion becomes not merely a matter of perception: since perception yields
only a part Of reality and cognition the rest, Steiner holds that the
object does not strictly come into being until it is filled out by cog-
nition; but, more than this, the object is, as it were, baptized and
brought into the realm of spirit. Objects "undergo their rebirth in
spirit."17

But man does more than bring Objects into the realm of spirit. It
is almost true that he brings the Divine into the same realm, and that

the Divine cannot operate without him.‘

Net a mere repetition in thought, but a real part of the
world-process, is that which goes on in man's inner life.
The world would not be what it is if the factor belonging
thereto in the human soul did not play its part. And if
one calls the highest which is attainable by man the Di-
vine, then one must say that this Divine is not present
as something external, to be repeated pictorially inlghe
human mind, but that this Divine is awakened in man.

And Steiner quotes approvingly the remark of Angelus Silesius: "I know
that without me God can live no instant; if I become nothing, He must

of necessity give up the ghost."19

From the foregoing, the significance of the change in name from

theo- to anthroEQSOPhy will be clear. There are meditation and study

in both movements, but in the newer school the object of the meditation

 

17![stics g£_the Renaissance, p. #9.

1 stics 9; the Renaissance, p. A3.

1 stics g£_the Renaissance, p. #3.

 

25

and study has become man. It is the study of man, his nature, and his
thought, that will reveal the true nature of the world. Man looks with-
in himself to discover the world-process because the world-process is
taking place within him, or at least through him. "Know thyself," the

ancient oracle advised. Steiner's Mystics 9£_the Renaissance closes

 

with a quotation from The Cherubinean Wanderer: "Friend, is is even

 

enough. In case thou more wilt read, go forth, and thyself become the

"20 Boldt's reference to the movement as mod-

bOOk, thyself the reading.
ern Gnosticism seems not unfair. The school is eclectic; it picks and
chooses its elements from any number of philosophies and religions. But
it is essentially a mystery religion; it derives (or purports to derive)
its important knowledge from a divine afflatus, as did Boehme and Meister
Eckhart. New let us look at the religion as it takes on the techniques
of philology, mythology, anthropology, and modern science in the thought
of Owen Barfield, the best and wisest of Lewis's unofficial teachers.
Barfield has written numerous articles on literary and linguistic
subjects and three full length books. Since the bulk of his work which
is relevant to this thesis is contained in the three books, I prOpose to
deal entirely with them. Anyone who knows them will appreciate immediate-
ly that this is not a task to be taken lightly. Barfield's mind, accord-
ing to one of his commentators, is "richly stored,-supple in its move-

"21

ments, large in its perSpectives and full of original insights. One

 

20F. 278.

21W. Donnelly, "Knowing and Being," Month, CCV (April, 1958), 2A7.

26

may agree with the judgment but feel compelled to add that the mind (or
at least the eXpression of it) is Often turgid, elliptical, and cryptic.
I will deal with the books in the order in which they appeared, not
merely as a matter of simplicity, but because there is a definite pro-

gression to be seen. The early ideas and theories of History ig_English

 

WOrds (1925) and Poetic Diction (1928) are worked into a religious frame-

work in the most recent book, Savipg the Appearances (1957).

 

Histogy 12 English Words, the most sedate of Barfield's books,

 

introduces two theories which are basic to Barfield's thought, and as
such the book deserves some little analysis. The two theories (really
they are two aspects of the same idea) are what Barfield calls the "evo-
lution of consciousness" and "internalization." They are both arrived
at and demonstrated largely on a philological basis.

The first thing to note about the book is the title itself. It
indicates that the book is not an ordinary history of the language text;
it is rather an attempt to construct h history of humanity (beginning
with pre-history, actually) from the history of the changing meanings
of words. There are, according to Barfield, "secrets which are hidden
in language"22 which only an evaluation of the shifting meanings of words
can reveal to us. Other kinds of history can give us other kinds of in-
formation; geology, for example, can give us a "knowledge of outward,

dead things-~such as the forgotten seas and the bodily shapes Of pre-

historic animals and primitive men." (p. 6) But the study of language

 

 

22History ig_English Words (New York, n.d. [I92§7), p. 6. In the
following discussion the page references will be found in the text.

27

gives us the inner secrets, for "language has preserved for us the inner,
living history Of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness."
(p. 6) What the book attempts to do, then, is to formulate a history of
lthe development of the soul of western man, the history being based
largely (though not entirely) on evidence gained from philology. For
philology, combined with the findings of anthropology, can do more than
tell us what the past was; it enable us to "feel how the past is." (p. 13)
Language is a window of the soul of man, and as man looks out by means of
it, so the philologist looks in.

Abstracting the idea from the documentation in which it is embed-
ded, we see that it comes to something like this: The history of mean-
ings shows an evolution of the human mind from relative unself-conscious-
ness to relatively complete self-consciousness. It shows a progression
away from the aboriginal unity (which either existed or which man felt to
exist) of man and nature, and toward a consciousness of self as distinct
from things. In short, the history Of meanings reveals Steiner's "flight

from nature.’ Recognizable consciousness of self arrives (approximately)
only with the Reformation. With the arrival of self-consciousness comes
the cor§flaary.notion that the meaning of things (what might be called
the essences of things) are not in the things themselves, as primitive
and early man presumably thought, but in the minds of men. The progres-
sion towards this belief Barfield calls the "internalization" of mean-
ing. The Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge in England

and Goethe in Germany, are the first to sense this process and the mean-

ing of this process; they are the first to use, or at least to use well

28

and artistically, a means of coming to terms with this process: Imag-
ination:

The first part of the book, entitled "The English Nation," is de-
voted to an imaginative re-telling of the story of the Aryans, which of
course is largely the story of western civilization. The second part,
"The western Outlook," begins the real thesis, and we begin to see the
philological evidence for the evolution of consciousness, evidence which

'indicates that language pictures a "vast, age-long metamorphosis from

the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as 'mythological' to the
kind which we may describe equally loosely as 'intellectual'...." (p.

7h) Approaching the level of the Aryan pre-historical consciousness from
the point of view of religious thought, Barfield notes that the words
diurnal, diary, and dial derive from the Latin digs, and that Journal
comes to us through French from the same source. "These syllables,"
according to Barfield,

conceal among themselves the central religious conception
common to the Aryan nations. As far back as we can trace

them, the Sanskrit word 'dyaus,‘ the Greek 'zeus'...and the
Teutonic 'tiu' were all used in contexts where we should

use the word sky; but the same words were also used to mean
God, the Supreme Being, the Father of all the other gods--
Sanskrit 'Dyaus pitar,‘ Greek 'Zeus pater,‘ Illyrian 'Deipa-
turos,’ Latin 'Juppiter' (old form 'Diespiter'). We can

best understand what this means if we consider how the Eng-
lish word heaven and the French ciel are still used for a
similar double purpose, and how it was once not a double
purpose at all...if we are to judge from language, we must
assume that when our earliest ancestors looked up to the

blue vault they felt that they saw not merely a place, -
whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture...of a
living Being. .And this fact is still extant in the formal ,
resemblance between such words as diary and divine. (pp. 7h-75)

IThis is, in part, Barfield's picture of the pre-historic Aryan consciousness.

29

It is not a consciousness dwelling in some distant age of metaphor, al-
though the way the consciousness Operates inevitably suggests metaphor.
It is rather a consciousness which has not yet become aware of the dis-
tinction (or, more accurately, in Barfield's terms), has not yet made
the distinction between literal and figurative. It is a consciousness
for which the thought, or perception, of sky is the equivalent of the
thought or perception of God; it is a dreaming consciousness which does
not make metaphors but which is the substance out of which later meta-
phors must come. For it is the basis of western language, and embedded
in it are the ”natural" metaphors of later consciousness-~the equation
of good with light and evil with dark, of height with power and depth

with wretchedness (we must put on the armor of light; facile descensus

 

in Avernus ) .

Barfield, through the scattered hints and insights of language,
traces the evolution away from this sort of consciousness up as far as
the pre-Homeric Greeks, where he pauses over the word panic. The word,
he says, "marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness." (p.

72) Before the word itself came into being, the thing which we call panic
must have been, not perhaps a different thing, but a thing differently
perceived by humanity. He sees in the word a miniature of the whole pro-
cess from mythological to intellectual thinking:

The word enables us to realize that the early Greeks

could become conscious of this phenomenon, and thus name

it, because they felt the presence of an invisible being

who swayed the emotions of flocks and herds. And it also

reveals how this kind of outlook changed slowly into the

abstract idea which the modern individual strives to ex-
press when he uses the word panic. (pp. 72-73)

30

And he goes on to note that with the Romans this consciousness of a real
being, a god or presence, becomes much less real; the analytical mind,
a product of Aristotle and later Greek philos0phy, is reaching toward
fruition, and the "mythical world" of the Romans is more like "a world
of mental abstractions."23
One of the clearest examples of the evolution of consciousness is
to be found in the traditions and beliefs of medieval science. Medieval
logic, says Barfield, is Aristotelian, but medieval science is based on
pre—Aristotelian Greek science. The important point is that medieval
science was content to build on Greek foundations because there remained
in the middle ages enough of the ancient Greek consciousness to make the
Greek medicine seem worth continuing. "In spite of that strong and
growing sense of the individual soul, man was not yet felt, either phys-
ically or psychically, to be isolated from his surroundings in the way
that he is to-day. Conversely, his mind and soul were not felt to be
imprisoned within, and dependent upon, his body." (p. 12h) Barfield then
lists a group of words taken from medieval science, of which I repeat
only a few, to refresh the reader's memory: ascendant, atmosphere, com-
plexion, cordial, disaster, isposition and indisposed, influence, tem-
perament and temper. These, he says, "give us more than a glimpse into

the relations between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the

 

23F. 78. Lewis's discussion of Roman allegory in his Allegogy 9:
love (New York, 1958) is clearly much indebted to Barfield on this
point. He cites Poetic Diction at the beginning of his discussion
(Chapter II, "Allegoryfl).

 

31

medieval scientist." (p. 12h) He then reviews the general tenets of
medieval science: the body contains four humours (moistures). Dis-
eases (distempers) and character traits were connected with the temper-
ament (mixture). Through the arteries flowed three different kinds of
ether (Greek, the upper air) or spirits--the animal, vital, and natural.

But the stars and the planets were also living bodies;

they were composed of that 'fifth essence'...which was
likewise latent in all terrestrial things, so that the
character and the fate of men were determined by the la:
fluence...which came from them. The Earth had its atmos-
phere (a kind of breath which it exhaled from itself); the
Moon...had a special connection with lunac , and according

as the planet JUpiter, or Saturn, or Mercury was predomin-
app or in the ascendant in the general disposition of stars
at a man's birth, he would be jovial, saturnine, or mercurial.
Finally, things or persons which were susceptible to the same
influences, or which influenced each other in this occult way,
were said to be in sympathy or sympathetic. (pp. 125-26)

 

 

 

What has happened to the meanings of the terms of medieval science,
says Barfield, is evidence of the process (corollary to the evolution of
consciousness) which he calls internalization. Man is no longer thought
to have any connection with the world beyond himself. Conscious of him-
self now as distinct from what is not himself, he has retained the for-
mer terms by rooting them out of their objective phenomena and transfer-
ring them to himself. So he is perhaps saturnine, but no longer "in-
fluenced" by anything beyond the confines of his own will and imagina-
tion. That transferring, says Barfield, is the penultimate step in the
evolution toward intellectual thought.

When we reflect on the history of such notions as aaaaag,

influenca, melancholy, temper, and the rest, it seems for ,

the moment as though some invisible sorcerer had been con-

juring them all inside ourselves--sucking them away from
the planets, away from the outside world, away from our own

32

warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy realm of
thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrol-
ogy has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; to-
day the cold stars glitter unapproachable overhead, and
with a naive detachment mind watches matter moving incom-
prehensibly in the void. At last, after four centuries,
thought has shaken herself free. (p. 127)

O

Barfield then takes the same argument into another area--the rise

of astronomy. The three Arabic words azimuth, nadir, and zenith appear

 

in English for the first time towards the end of the fourteenth century

(two of them are to be found in Chaucer's Treatise aa_the Astrolabe).

 

But they appear as a new part of the old context of classical astronomy;
for the most part, the astronomers of the Dark Ages had relied on the
Greek zodiac, and had mapped out the heavens into twelve signs. But

the three Arabic words "express something which the ancients had, appar-
ently, never felt the need of expressing--that is, an abstracted geo-
metrical way of mapping out the visible heavens." (p. 129) The new

words express a new concept, and the new concept is one possible only
because human consciousness has taken another forward step. "It is
probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the first time
into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing himself purely

as a solid object situated among solid objects." (p. 129) Anticipating
the argument that Plato and other early Greeks formulated geometrical
laws, Barfield points out that these "laws" were not so much intellectual
generalizations; they were rather felt to be "real activities of the
soul--that human soul which...the philOSOpher could not yet feel to be
wholly separate from a larger world Soul or planetary Soul." (p. 130)

The rise of astronomy, culminating in the sixteenth and seventeenth

33

centuries, may be seen, then, as an illustration of that same process

(

of internalization which has already been indicated to be the case with
astrology and medicine. The notion that mathematics had its origin in

the observing of the movements of the stars may well be true if we can

account for its later progress by means of internalization.

Is it too fanciful to picture to ourselves how, drawn
into the minds of a few men, the relative positions
and movements‘of the stars gradually developed a more
and more independent life there until, with the rise in
EurOpe first of trigonometry and then of algebra, they
detached themselves from the outside world altogether?
And then by a few great men like Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, Newton, these abstract mathematics were re-fitted
to the stars which had given them birth, and the result
was that cosmogony of infinite spaces and a tiny earth
in which our imaginations roam to-day? When the Aryan
imagination had at last succeeded in so detaching its
'ideas' about the phenomena of the universe that these
could be 'played with,‘ as mathematicians say, in the
form of an equation, then, no doubt, it was a fairly
easy matter to turn them inside out. (pp. 130-31)

The preceding arguments lead us to a rough statement of the chron-
ology of the evolution of western consciousness. Modern consciousness
began roughly about the time of the Reformation and became fairly wide-
spread only in the seventeenth century. The Reformation, "with its in-
sistence on the inwardness of all true grace," (p. 1&2) Barfield sees
as "another manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre
of gravity of human consciousness." (p. 1H2) But until the days of the
revival of learning this progress toward consciousness is an uncon-
scious one. "Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the European

mind upon the world...has'yet always felt itself to be at rest, just as

men have hitherto believed that the earth on which they trod was a solid

3h

and.motionless body." (p. 1h9-SO) But with Bacon we get the first real
historical distinction between the ancients and the moderns, and the
beginning of historical perspective. The seventeenth century first

gives us words that indicate this historical perspective: progressive,

 

antiquated, century, decade, epoch, out-of-date, primeval. Also, as

an aftermath of the Reformation, we begin to find words hyphenated '
with aaif_appearing in the language: self-conceit, self-confidence,
self-contempt, self-pity: the centre of gravity has shifted from phen-
omena to self. The seventeenth century provides us with the most spec-
tacular of proofs that man has arrived at something like a total aware-
ness of self in Descartes, who thinks of himself as starting philosophy
anew; nearly all philosophy from his time has been fundamentally the
same, beginning with a kind of cogito apga app, moving from the mind
outward rather than from phenomena to the mind. Locke adepts the

word consciousness itself, and gives the newer term self-consciousness

 

its "distinctive modern meaning." (p. 15h)

The last argument which we may note as bearing on the evolution
of consciousness and the consequent internalization of meanings concerns
the changing views of the emotions, or what the medieval writers called
"the passions." The philological evidence, says Barfield, shows that
even in respect to these passions, which might be supposed to have al-
ways been a kind of fortress of subjectivity, the shift from outer to
inner has taken place. "The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally

views them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral

35

significance...." (p. 158) As evidence of this he lists such medieval

terms as enyy, gpeedy, happy (i.e., lucky), malice, mercy, peace, pity,

remorse, rue, sin. NOt until the seventeenth century do we find words

 

that express "that sympathetic or 'intrOSpective' attitude to the feel-

ings," (p. 158) words such as aversion, dissatisfaction, discomposure,

 

"while depression and emotion--further lenient names for human weakness
--were used till then of material objects." (p. 158) The eighteenth
century gives us words which indicate attempts to "portray character

or feeling from within"; (p. 158) apathy, chagrin, ennui, the expression

 

 

the feelings. The same century transfers words like agitation, constraint,

 

 

disappointment, embarrassment, and excitement from the outer world to

 

 

the inner. It also gives us a class of words which depict phenomena

not as they are but as they affect us: affecting, amusing, boring,

 

charming, diverting, entrancing, interesting, pathetic. And Barfield
concludes the argument:

These adjectives can be distinguished sharply--indeed
they are in a sense the very opposite of those older
words, which can also be said...to describe external
objects 'from the human point of view.’ Thus, when a
Roman spoke of events as suspicious or sinister, or when
some natural object was said in the Middle Ages to be
baleful, or beni , or malign, a herb to possess such and
such a virtue, an eye to be evil, or the bones of a saint
to be holy, or even, probably, when Gower wrote:

 

The day was mergy and fair enough,

it is true that these things were described from the hu-
man point of view, but the activity was felt to emanate
from the object itself. When we speak of an object or
event as amusing, on the contrary, we know that the pro-
cess indicated by the word amuse takes place within our-
selves; and this is none the less obvious because some
of the adjectives recorded above, such as charming,

36

enchanting, and fascinating, are the present parti-
ciples of verbs which had implied genuine, occult activ-

ity. (pp- 158-59)

 

 

Having established the reality of the evolution of consciousness
and the internalization of meanings, Barfield finds that two results
follow from these processes. First, the "peculiar freedom" (p. 155) of
man is felt to derive largely from within himself; it is a product of
those "spontaneous impulses which control human behaviour and destiny."
(p. 155) ‘This is seen in the semantic evolution of such words as
conscience, disposition, spirit, and temper; in the transferring of
words like dissent, gentle, perceive, and religion from the outer world
to the inner; and in the Protestant Reformation which, as was noted
above, stressed the inwardness of all true grace. Second, the spirit-
ual life which had been assumed to be immanent in phenomena fades: the
life "in star and planet, in herb and animal, in the juices and 'hum-
ours' of the body, and in the outward ritual of the Church-~these grow
feebler.“ (p. 155) There arises the concept of impersonal laws which

govern the world: "words like consistenqy, pressure, tension...are

 

 

found to describe matter 'objectively' and disinterestedly, and at the
same time the earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos re-
volves." (p. 155) The EurOpesn mind has cut itself loose from its en-
vironment (fled from nature); it has become "less and less of the actor,
more and more of both the author and the spectator." (p. 155)

NOw Barfield sees the Romantic movement as essentially a triumph
because, utilizing the end product of the long evolution of conscious-

ness (the end product is, of course, consciousness), they saw the fatality

37

of a dead world moving in a void, a world drained of its immanent life I
by the very evolution which enabled them to perceive its deadness.

They may not have understood how the world came to be dead, but they

saw the necessity of somehow revitalizing it, of bringing it back to
some kind of life. There had been some stumbling poetic attempts before
them, evidence that the poet at least cannot deal with a world of
Bbbbes's matter in motion. Both Denham and Milton had taken up the new
word conscious and had applied it to inanimate things. Denham had writ-
ten: "Thence to the coverts and the conscious Groves...."; and Milton:
"So all ere day-spring, under conscious Night / Secret they finished
...." And Barfield comments that

...we can almost fancy, by their readiness to seize upon

the new word, that our poets were beginning, even so soon,

to feel the need of restoring 'subjectivity' to external

Nature--of 'projecting into' her, as we are now inclined

to say-~a fanciful substitute for that voluntary life and

inner connection with human affairs which Descartes and

bebes were draining from her in reality. (p. 165)

But it was left to the Romantics and their theories of the power
of the Imagination really to resuscitate the lifeless world. Coleridge,
in his distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, is largely
responsible for their success; for Coleridge defined Imagination (in
Barfield's words) as "the power of creating from within forms which

themselves become a part of Nature--'Forms,' as Shelley put it,

more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality."(p. 200)

For Wordsworth and Coleridge, Nature is not only what we perceive but

also what we half-create; "the perception of Nature...depends upon what

38

is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep." (p. 200)
Coleridge had said that Imagination (both the primary and the secondary)
was "essentially vital, even as all objects (aa_objects) are essentially
fixed and dead."2h The world as perceived by the senses and evaluated
by the "reason" was indeed dead; but the world as'perceived" by the
Imagination was alive, for the Imagination as much created it as per-
ceived it. Imagination, for Coleridge, was "organic." As it was alive
itself, so what it bodied forth was also alive. In Kantian terms, it
created phenomena, not a§_nihilo, but out of the noumena. It gave shape,
form, existence itself to the phenomenal world.

And this re-animation of Nature was possible because

the imagination was felt as creative in the full re-

ligious sense of the word. It had itself assisted in

creating the natural forms which the senses were now

contemplating. It had moved upon the face of the waters.

For it was 'the repetition in the finite mind of the

eternal act of creation'--the Word made human. (p. 201)
The book ends on this curious and rather challenging note. ‘Any explicit
conclusion is left for the reader to draw. At the risk of being obvious,
I will draw it briefly. Barfield's book culminates with the Romantics
because the Romantics were the first to do consciously what ancient and
early man had done unconsciously-~that is, participate actively in the
construction of the very world itself. And conscious participation in

the world-process, as Steiner had said in his praise of Angelus Silesius,

is at least analogous to divine creation.

 

2“Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII.

39

Poetic Dictioa_(l928, new edition 1952) is a gnarled and diffi-

 

cult book. Barfield has added a long preface to the second edition in
which he castigates I. A. Richards, the logical positivists, and "scien-
tism" in general, but the preface does little to clarify the argument of
the book. .And,yet, ironically, the book has all the apparatus of clar-
ity: the chapters are very short, and each chapter is subdivided into
very brief sections; there are cross-references between the chapters
and there are appendices which are meant, presumably, to clear up the
difficult points. One is reminded of Chesterton's remark about Arnold
and his rather wearisome attempts to be utterly clear: he kept a smile
of heartbroken forbearance on his face, as if he were a teacher in an
idiot school. One of the reviewers of the book, after admirably circum-
locuting its argument, concludes: "It is to be hoped that the reappear-
ance of this book...will revive attention to its thesis. ... What we
get is an extremely pregnant idea, whose applications are far-reaching
and by no means easy to make. Perhaps one should hope that others will
continue to work on the suggestions with which Mr. Barfield provides us.
If this is done, the results may well be important, perhaps beyond the
field of poetry and criticism“?5
It is with the applications of this pregnant idea "beyond the
field of poetry and criticism" that I am concerned here. There is much
about poetry and criticism in the book that seems to me valuable, but I

am not concerned with that; I am concerned with the book mainly as it

 

25Graham Hough, Review of PoetiC'Diction, New Statesman_CVIL
(Aug. 9, 1952), 16h. -

 

hO

continues and broadens out the basic ideas of the early book and as it
points forward to their religious application in Saving the Appearances.
With this limitation, my analysis will make the book seem much simpler
and more straightforward than it really is.

The book is subtitled "A Study in Meaning," and perhaps it may
be most usefully approached (for my purposes) from the point of view of
what Barfield means by "meaning." In order to do this, we must glance
at the old controversy about the origin of metaphor, for the two are
closely related. Briefly, the problem is this: language is dead meta-
phor, or as Emerson called it, "fossil poetry." Even the most abstract
of our terms, which we use when we do not wish to be "metaphorical," are

themselves fundamentally metaphdrical. Such is the very term abstract;

 

such are words like compel, transcend, ppescind. All language, with the
exception of proper names, seems to have once had as its referent some-
thing material or some simple human activity of the body. When we use
the language of philOSOphy or aesthetics, we are really using metaphor-
ical language, whether we are aware of it or not. Thus a book like

26
The Meaning 2: Meaning is "a ghastly tissue of empty abstractions" be-

 

cause its authors fail to realize that their "scientific" terminology
(wbrds such as cause, reference, organisn, stimulus) is not "miraculous-
ly exempt" (p. 13h) from the nature of language itself. They make the

mistake of supposing that they can Speak literally about metaphor, as if

 

26Poetic Diction, a Study .111. Meaning (Iondon, 1928), p. 135. I was
not aware that a new English edition had been put out until this discus-
sion had been written, and have not thought it worthwhile to change all
the page references. In the following discussion, page references (to
be found in the text) will be to the first edition.

 

hl

metaphor were always contrived and invented and literal language were
indeed literal; whereas what we generally call metaphor is merely late
and obvious metaphor, and what we call literal language is merely early
and hidden metaphor.

Linguists have sometimes postulated what they call a "metaphori-
cal period," a pre-historic age in which primitive man became aware of
various mental concepts for which he had no name. Needing to call them
something, he converted the names of the material things with which he
was familiar into convenient metaphors and began to speak of "cultiva-
ting" his mind and having his "emotions" moved or "stirred up.” But,
as we have seen from History ip English EQEQE2 the history of language
shows an evolution of consciousness. Thus, to suppose primitive man
idiscovering a group of concepts for the names of which he must turn to
metaphor is to fly in the face of linguistic evidence; it is what Bar-
field calls "logomorphism," which is "projecting post-logical thoughts
back into a pro-logical age." (p. 90) The evolution of consciousness
is echoed in the evolution of language and of meaning. Taking the Latin
word spiritus (the equivalent of the Greek pneuma), Barfield points out
that linguists such as Max Muller would have it originally mean breath
or 3129; and would then postulate a certain time when it was used, in
a consciously metaphorical way, to mean spirit or "the principle of life
within man or animal." (p. 80) But, says Barfield,

...such an hypothesis is contrary to every indication pre-

sented by the study of the history of meaning; which as-

sures us definitely that such a purely material content as

'wind'...and...such a purely abstract content as 'the princi-
ple of life within man or animal' are both late arrivals in

he

human consciousness. Their abstractness and their sim-
plicity are alike evidence of long ages of intellectual
evolution. So far from the psychic meaning of 'spiritus'
having arisen because someone had the idea, 'principle of
life...‘ and wanted a word for it, the abstract idea 'prin-
ciple of life' is itself a product of the old concrete
meaning 'spiritus', which contained within itself the germs
of both later significations. We must, therefore, imagine

-a time when 'spiritus' orfihzfi¢a , or older words from
which these had descended, meant neither breath, nor wind,
nor a irit, nor yet all three of these things, but when
they simply had their own old peculiar meaning, which has
since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crys-
tallized into the three meanings specified--and no doubt in-
to others also, for which separate words had already been
found by Greek and Roman times. (pp. 80-81)

The natural tendency in language is toward divisidn, toward a split-
ting up of original singular meaning into later diverse meanings; and
the old single meaning points to the level of consciousness which pro-

duced it.27

We have, says Barfield, a possible example of meaning in
the transition stage from old to new (that is, from singularity to di-
versity) in the phrases which associate emotions with certain parts of
the body. NOwadays we make a "purely verbal allotment" (p. 80) of emo-
tions to the liver, the bowels and the heart; previously such allotment
was more nearly literal than verbal. In the case of the current use of
the word heart, "an old single meaning survives as two separate refer-
ences of the same word--a physical and a psychic." (p. 80) But in our
phrase "I have no stomach for that," we have an eXpression which is
.s.still by no means purely psychic in its content. It
describes a very real physical sensation, or rather one

which cannot be classified as either physical or psychic.
Yet...it is reasonable to suppose that, when a sufficient

 

27Cf. the earlier discussion of the Aryan "concept" of God-sky
in Histogy is. English Words, pp. 28-31 of this study.

“3

number of years has elapsed, the meaning of this word

also may have been split by the evolution of our con-

sciousness into two; and the physico-psychic experience

in question will have become as incomprehensible to our

posterity, as it is incomprehensible to most of us to-

day that anyone should literally feel his 'bowels' moved

by compassion. (p. 80)

What looks to us like a metaphor, then (spiritus meaning soul,
etc.), is simply a meaning that was "latent in meaning from the begin-
ning." (p. 85) In earlier consciousness, the material things which
served as referents for words were not only sensible and material objects;
they were not, "as they appear to be at present, isolated, or detached,
from thinking and feeling." (p. 85) There could not have existed the
subjective-objective antithesis, for the antithesis presupposes self-
consciousness. And self-consciousness "is inseparable...from rational
or discursive thought Operating in abstract ideas." (p. 204) In a pre-
logical time, then, a time when meaning originates, man is incapable
of feeling himself as distinct and cut off from the rest of the uni-
verse; or, in plain terms, he is not thus isolated and cut off. This
is the state of man before Steiner's "flight from nature," the pre-
conscious stage of man-nature unity.

...in order to form a conception of the consciousness of

primitive man, we have really...to 'unthink,' not merely

our now half-instinctive logical processes, but even the

seemingly fundamental distinction between self and world.

And with this, the distinction between thinking and per-

ceiving begins to vanish too. For perception, unlike the

pure concept, is inconceivable without a distinct perceiv-

ing subject on which the percepts, the soul-and-sense-data,

can impinge. (p. 206).

How then can we describe the kind of thinking done by primitive

man? As "A kind of thinking which is at the same time perceiving, a

Ah

picture-thinking, a figurative, or imaginative, consciousness, which we
can only grasp today by true analogy with the imagery of our poets, and,
to some extent, with our own dreams." (pp. 206-7)
The development of consciousness shows us two Opposing principles.
I The first is the principle according to which single meanings tend to
divide; the second is "the nature of language itself at its birth. It
is the principle of living unity." (p. 87) The principle of division
indicates the differences between things; the second indicates the resem- ,
blances. It is this second principle which we find operative in the
metaphors of the poets. It enables them
...to intuit relationships which their fellows have for-
gotten--relationships which they must now eXpress as met-
aphor. Reality, once self-evident, and therefore not
conceptually experienced, but which can now only be reached
by an effort of the individual mind--this is what is con-
tained inva true poetic metaphor; and every metaphor is
'true' only in so far as it contains such a reality, or
hints at it. The world like Dionysus, is torn to pieces
by pure intellect; but the poet is Zeus; he has swallowed
the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it as a liv-
eing body. (p. 88)
What the true poet grasps, then, is the ancient unity of thought and per-
ception. And this ancient unity, this pre-conceptual mixture which in-
cluded both the percept and its significance, is well called "figurative"
or "pictorial." For the percept and the meaning were one and the same
apprehension; the whole of reality, not only the percept or only the
concept, was taken in as a kind of meaning figure. The ancient single
meaning of the verb pg shine, for example, was "the same definite spir-

itual reality which was beheld on the one hand in what has since become

pure human thinking; and on the other hand, in what has since become

“5

physical light; not an abstract conception, but the echoing footsteps of
the goddess Natura--not a metaphor but a living Figure." (pp. 88-89)

In short, ancient man apprehended total reality; or, rather, to-
tal reality lived within him and he within it. What existed (and all
that existed) was Mind; it existed "as Life, and Meaning, before it be-
came conscious of itself, as knowledge...." (p. 179) What we call think-
ing "was not merely 9; Nature, but was Nature herself." (p. 1h?) We are
back to something like Hegel's World-Soul and also something much like

Yeats's Spiritus Mundi and JUng's Collective Unconscious, back to "the

 

prophetic soul of the wide world / Brooding on things to come." In the
beginning was Thought, says Barfield, though not any individual thinker.
In the beginning was Meaning or Life, or, more accurately, Meaning that
was alive. But there is, in the beginning, no understanding; there is
only a vast unconscious creativity, an infinite poetic, irrational im-
pulse. There is only Thought thinking, knowing no subject or object,
working itself out in concrete meaning (which is neither abstract nor
particular), manifesting itself in the aboriginal unity of language.
The path that the World-Process follows is the path suggested previously
as that which language itself follows: division and combination. The
Logos, which is both thought and speech, thinks itself out as an eternal
process of splitting up and recombining itself. We have referred to
these two processes as principles; but this, says Barfield, is inaccurate.
The Greeks had no such word as 'principle'; they

called what I have been speaking of--with that divine

concreteness which makes the'mere language a fountain

of strength for the exhausted modern intelligence--sim—

ply hair and fir-1.. V ---DO and Suffer.
But to ordinary abstract thought a principle can

#6

never be anything more than an idea, induced from ob-
servations of what aaa_happened. ... Yet all conclu-
sions of this nature could be no more than subjective
shadows of the forces themselves, of the two living
realities, which can actually be known, once our intel-
lect has brought us to the point of looking out for them;
being themselves neither subjective nor objective, but
as concrete and self-sustaining in every way as the Sun
and the Moon-awhich may well be their proper names. (pp.
210-11)

NOw the sine qua non of self-consciousness is the rational, dis-

 

cursive intellect, whose natural tendency is to divide, to split up
meaning; in so doing, it destroys the ancient unity of reality--it "mur-
ders to dissect." And the funCtion of the poetic imagination (which is

' creative, unifying) is to try to preserve, or revive, this

"organic,'
same ancient unity, to perceive what Baudelaire called the "correspond-
ences" among things. It does this, as we have seen, simply because it
ia organic and creative, its creation consisting of "the bringing far-
ther into consciousness of something which already exists as uncon-
scious life." (p. 112) In doing so the imagination takes part in the
eternal World-Process of progressive creation; it becomes part of the

logos, the continual and creative Incarnation of the Word.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks on Poetic Qiction, the

 

book is a difficult one; and perhaps I have done nothing to make it any
easier. One question (so far as I can see) is never finally resolved.
The Logos manifests itself, or becomes aware of itself, through the pro-
cess we have traced as the evolution of human consciousness, a necessary
part of which is the emerging discursive intellect. Presumably, then,

the discursive intellect occupies an important place in the progressive

“7

manifestation. Yet Barfield often speaks of it as a kind of enemy, a
"principle" which the principle of imagination and unity is forever com-
bating. "...without the rational principle, neither truth nor knowledge
could ever have been, but only Life itself, yet that principle alone
cannot add one iota to knowledge." (pp. lh3-hh) It performs many use-
ful functions, but it cannot "expand consciousness. Only the poetic

can do this: only poesy, pouring into language its creative intuitions,
can preserve its living meaning and prevent it from crystallizing into

a kind of algebra." (p. lhh)

Very likely what seems to be anti-rational bias is only over-
emphasis, for it is difficult to see how a purely natural principle (to
grant Barfield his premises) can be blamed for performing its function.
What Barfield is trying'to emphasize is the fundamental disparity be-
tween the discursive intellect and the imagination: the fact that the
intellect works of itself and on its own and is always secondary in
order of precedence as it were; while the imagination is a participant
in the divine act of creation, and is felt to be so by those (like
Coleridge and Shelley) who best understand its nature.

Having sketched out and confirmed the basis of Barfield's thought,

we may now turn to the last book, Saving_the Appearances, in which the

 

earlier notion of the evolution of consciousness (and its attendant
theory of the imagination) is taken up into a realm of religion which
was only hinted at in the first two books.

Saving_the Appearances takes its title from Simplicius's sixth

 

1.8

century commentary on Aristotle's 22.922l2‘ The phrase meant that a hy-
pothesis could explain phenomena but was not on that basis necessarily
true: even two contradictory hypotheses could explain the appearances,
as did the Ptolemaic and Copernican versions of the movements of the
planets. Galileo's trouble with the Church, says Barfield, stemmed from
the fact that he and COpernicus and Kepler came to think that the COper-
nican version not only saved the appearances (that is, satisfactorily
explained phenomena) but was on that account true. What the Church
feared was not a new theory of celestial movements but "a new theory of
the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the ap-
pearances, it is identical with truth."28 Barfield's book is an attempt
to explain not merely celestial movements or other phenomena but the
reality underlying all phenomena. It is literally an attempt to explain
the nature of things by an extension of the theories we have already ex-
amined in the earlier books.

It is my intention to examine the theories and their consequences,
particularly the consequences for religion. But what I have said about

the difficulty and cOmplexity of Poetic Diction is a fortiori true of

 

this later book. I have found it impOssible to abstract its thesis and.
present it in anything like intelligible terms, even though the thesis
rests largely on ideas already examined. The argument is presented in
a.way that seems at first perverse and wayward; but careful examination

\

shows that the argument proceeds in what might be called a natural way.

 

28Savingthe Appearances (Iondon, 1957), p. 51. Page references
to the book will be in the text.

“9

A river overflowing its banks does not follow a strictly logical course
but progresses according to the natural contours of the land. So it is
with the book: the long view shows the argument to move ahead in an
intelligible way, even though the long view be a long time coming. I
propose, then, to try to follow the argument pretty much as it is pre-
sented.

The book (the fOreword of which thanks Lewis for help and advice)
begins with an exposition of Barfield's intention: to look at the world
in a new perspective and to see what follows from so doing. The new
perspective consists of a "sustained acceptance by the reader of the re-
lation assumed by physical science to subsist between human conscious-
ness on the one hand and, on the other, the familiar world of which that
consciousness is aware." (p. 11) Modern physics, especially, has taught
us that the actual structure of the universe--what is really "out
there" and distinct from us--is nothing like the phenomena which we see
or hear or smell or even touch. Realizing this, most posteKantian phil-
osophers have dealt at length with the extent to which man participates
in the constructing of the phenomena which he "perceives." Barfield
intends, he says, to keep in mind this psychological relationship be-
tween nature and man, and also to point out (what we have already seen)
that this relation has not remained static through the centuries but has

changed (and will continue to change) as a corollary of the evolution

of consciousness. Barfield then describes the overall intention of the ‘

book:

The greater part of this book consista...of a rudimen-
tary attempt to remedy the omission [of the man-nature

SO

relationshi . But this involves...challenging the

assumption that the relation has remained static

....The result-~and really the substance of the book

--is a sort of outline sketch...for a history of human

consciousness; particularly the consciousness of wes-

tern humanity during the last three thousand years or

so.

Finally, the consequences which flow from abandon-

ing the assumption are found to be very far-reaching;

and the last three chapters are concerned, theologically,

with the bearing of 'participation'--viewed now as an

historical process--upon the origin, the predicament,

and the destiny of man. (p. 13)

The Opening chapters of the book deal largely with epistemology.
It is necessary to review them because they introduce most of the termin-
ology (much of it new) which is used throughout the book. Barfield uses
the example of a rainbow to illustrate the fact that man participates in
the creation or evoking of the phenomena that he perceives. The rain-
bow is not really "there"; no one finds the end of a rainbow; it is
simply "the outcome of the sun, the raindrops and your own vision."
(p. 15) The analogy between the rainbow and seemingly "real" phenomena
is very close. Science tells us that the phenomenal world consists of
atoms, protons, and electrons-oeven that these are perhaps only "no-
tional models or symbols of an unknown supersensible or subsensible
base." (p. 17) Now the tree, unlike the rainbow, can be touched, smelt,
etc.; but if science is right about the composition of phenomena--if
they consist of "particles" (as Barfield calls them)--"then, since the
'particles' are no more like the thing I call a tree than the raindrops
are like the thing I call a rainbow, it follows...that--just as the

rainbow is the outcome of the raindrops and my vision--so, a tree is the

outcome of the particles and my vision and my other sense-perceptions."

51

(pp. 16-17) The tree that I perceive, then, is what Barfield calls a
"representation." 'Phenomena consist of my sensational and mental con-
struction of the particles or the "unrepresented." (The particles seem
close to Kant's noumena, the representation to Kant's phenomena.) The
tree that I perceive is not a dream tree or a private hallucination,
since both you and I perceive.it--that is, you and I construct a sim-
ilar representation of the unrepresented. Thus phenomenal nature--the
nature studied, weighed, measured, and experimented with by scientists
--is what Barfield calls a "system of collective representations." (p.
18) We have the same view of the universe because we have arrived at
the same (or approximately the same) level of consciousness. "The time
comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or
reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have
it both ways." (p. 18)"

NOw a representation consists of the activity of the senses (per-
ception) plus another process. We do not hear a thrush singing, says
Barfield, nor do we smell coffee. Our sensation is, reSpectively,
merely of sound or smell. Another activity must take place before we
can say that we hear a thrush or smell coffee (or even be aware that we
are perceiving these things). It is the activity that identifies, or
puts in their proper places, these raw sensations. This activity Bar-
field calls "figuration."

On the assumption that the world whose existence is in-

dependent of our sensation and perception consists sole-

1y of 'particles', two operations are necessary (and

whether they are successive or simultaneous is of no con-

sequence), in order to produce the familiar world we know.

O

52

First, the sense-organs must be related to the parti-

cles in such a way as to give rise to sensations; and

secondly, those mere sensations must be combined and

constructed by the percipient mind into the recogniza-

ble and nameable objects we call 'things'. It is this

work of construction which will here be called figura-

piap, (p. 2h)

Barfield next goes on to make a distinction drawn from the work
of Steiner. He distinguishes between two kinds of thinking: "alpha-
thinking" and "beta-thinking." Alpha-thinking is thinking about phen-
omena as if they were really objective and independent of our own
minds; it is thinking which assumes the naively realistic view of the
universe. It is the thinking characteristic of the physical sciences
(excepting modern physics). Beta-thinking is thinking about thinking
and perception; it is reflective thinking, the result of which is that
we become conscious of the fact that phenomena are not independent and
totally outside of us. It is not a different kind of thinking from
alpha-thinking; the two kinds of thinking are the same, but their subject
matters are different. Barfield is concerned with "the interaction be-
tween figuration and alpha-thinking," (p. 26) and is thus himself "beta-
thinking."

The next step in the theory introduces the most difficult concept
of the book, that of "participation." Barfield begins the discussion
of participation by citing the anthropological work of Levy-Bruhl and
Durkheim among primitive societies. In effect, he uses their work as
evidence supporting his earlier assertions about primitive mentality--

its lack of conceptual thinking, its relative lack of self-consciousness.

This mentality, levy-Bruhl holds, is "essentially synthetic. ...the

53

syntheses which compose it do not imply previous analyses of which the
result has been registered in definite concepts....the connecting links
of the representations are given...in the representations themselves."
(pp. 29-30) Levy-Bruhl maintains that such thought has nothing to do
with the earlier anthropological theory called animism; the primitive
does not associate his beliefs with his phenomena (representations).
"The mystic properties with which things are imbued form an integral
part of the idea to the primitive who views it as a synthetic whole."
(p. 31) The primitive does not "dissociate" himself from phenomena, does
not perceive himself as distinct from them. And'hs long as this 'dissoc-
iation' does not take place, perception remains an undifferentiated
whole." (p. 31) Turned around the other way, the lack of "dissociation"
may positively be termed participation. For us, the only link between
ourselVes and the phenomena (except thrOugh beta-thinking) is through
the senses. For the primitive, however, there is another link, an
extra- or super-sensory one, not only between the percipient and the
phenomena (representations) but between the representations themselves
and between the percipients themselves. Thus the primitive mind achieves
a kind of unity or reality (through synthesis) by means of participation
or lack of dissociation. ‘Barfield concludes the anthrOpological evi-
dence for his assumption that the psychological relation between man
and nature has not remained static, that the primitive outlook was essen-
tially different from ours:

. It is not only a different alpha-thinking but a differ-

ent figuration, with which we have to do, and therefore
the phenomena are treated as collective representations

54

produced by that different figuration. ...the most

striking difference between primitive figuration and

ours is, that the primitive involves 'participation',

that is, an awareness which we no longer have, of an

extra-sensory link between the percipient and the re-

presentations. This involves, not only that we think

differently, but that the phenomena (collective repre-

sentations) themselves are different. (pp. 33-3h)
There is a fundamental difference between not only primitive thinking
and our own but between primitive phenomena and our own; and the differ-
ence in both cases is due to the fact that the primitive participated in
both his thinking and phenomena as an active eXperience, while our par-
ticipatiOn in our phenomena is largely unconscious.2

From the preceding evidence of primitive mentality it follows
(says Barfield) that the general view of pre-history is a myth. We can
have no real knowledge, for example, of the evolution of the earth be-
fore the arrival of-man--and not only of "man," but of relatively mod-
ern man.. For the evolution of phenomena (including the earth) is correl-
ative to the evolution of human consciousness, since phenomena are no
more than representations on the part of that consciousness. So the
pre-historic evolution of the earth as described, for example, in Wells's
Outline 9: History "was not merely never seen. It never occurred." (p.
37) Something may have been going on in the "unrepresented," but what

it was would depend on the level of consciousness which perceived (and

thus constructed) it. In so far as we really think we know what was

Ll

29Cf. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformation
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1957), especially Chapter Iv, "Primitive World View and
Civilization." Redfield quotes D. D. Lee as saying that, for the prim-
itive, "man is ip_nature already, and we cannot speak prOperly of man
app nature." (p. 85) Cf. also H. and H. A. Frankfort, pp. a_]_._., Before
Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure 9: Ancient Man (Baltimore, 1955).

 

 

 

 

55

going on in pre-historic times, we are simply projecting our own collec—
tive representations into "the dark backward and abysm of time"; we are
creating what Bacon called "idols of the study."

Having come thus far in the argument, Barfield stops and points
out the possible alternatives if his view is not accepted. We can adopt
the "super-naive realism” (p. 38).of Dr. JOhnson; we can kick our stone
and say, "Nature is nature, and the earth is the earth, and always has
been since it all began." (p. 38) But this involves rejecting the find-
ings of science. Or we can do what Orwell called "double-think": we
can ignore the findings of physics except when we are engaged in a
physics problem; we can pretend that the discoveries of physics have no
relation to the subject matters of other sciences such as botany, zoo-
logy, and geology. Or finally we can adopt the view of radical idealism:
that the representations which we call phenomena "are sustained by God
in the absence of human beings." (p. 38) The last alternative involves
believing that God has chosen our own particular set of collective repre-
sentations out of all the possible others of ancient and medieval con-
sciousness. None of the alternatives is attractive to Barfield.

He returns to the argument, then, and resumes the discussion of
the real evolution (of consciousness) contrasted to the false, as in
Wells. Evolution as we ordinarily understand the term, says Barfield,
is an evolution of idols of the study. The theory reached its peak in
the nineteenth century because the original participation of the primi-
tive had been lost and because the participation of man in his percep-

tion was not realized sufficiently (though Kant had taught it). Thus

56

phenomena were held to have an independent and objective existence which
they do not really have. "But a representation, which is collectively
mistaken for an ultimate, ought not to be called a representation. It
is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are
imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in
fact only pertain to the unrepresented." (p. 62) (Here the subtitle of
the book may be mentioned: "A Study in Idolatry.") And the Darwinian
evolution of idols is not only wrong itself but begets wrong in other
fields--in etymology, mythology, anthropology. The doctrine of animism
is a direct result of the failure to perceive that the only meaningful
evolution can be the evolution of phenomena following on the evolution
of consciousness. The early anthropologists accepted Darwinian evolution
as a framework within which all their results must fit. Thus they pos-
tulated a primitive man who was simply a modern man "with his mind
tabula rasa," (p. 66) faced with phenomena (collective representations)
the same as our own.

The development of human consciousness was thus presen-

ted as a history of alpha-thinking beginning from zero

and applied always to the same phenomena, at first in

the form of erroneous beliefs about them and, as time

went on, in the form of more and more correct and scien-

tific beliefs. In short, the evolution of human con-

sciousness was reduced to a bare history of ideas. (p. 66)

When we understand the true evolution, however, as distinct from
the evolution of idols, history takes for us a different and a truer
shape. The evolution of consciousness is correlative with the rise of

conceptual reasoning (as we saw earlier) and with the decline of "orig-

inal" participation. We have seen that participation lasted into the

57

late middle ages. Indeed, says Barfield, "The whole basis of epistemol-
ogy from Aristotle to Aquinas assumed participation, and the problem was
merely the precise manner in which that participation operated." (p. 97)
As Aristotle is more subjective in his thought than Plato, further along
in the process of internalization, so Aquinas is more subjective than
Aristotle; yet even in the rise of subjectivity which goes with increased
self-consciousness we can see that for Aquinas, as for Aristotle, the
principle of original participation is assumed. "The papa Of which

Aristotle spoke and thought was clearly less subjective than Aquinas's

 

intellectus; and when he deals with the problem of perception, he polar-
izes not merely the mind, but the world itself, without explanation or
apology, into the two verbs...paiein and paschein: 'to do' and 'to suf-
fer'...these two words alone are as untranslatable as the mentality
which they reveal is remote from our own." (p. 100) And the whole of
Aquinas's work is shot through with the same assumption; for Aquinas the
assumption is so obvious that only once does he bother to explain it,
and then by analogy: "Suppose we say that air participates the light of
the sun, because it does not receive it in that clarity in which it is
in the sun." (p. 90, quoted from 9a Hebdomadibus, cap. 2) .Aquinas
assumed participation as much in logic as in the ladder of being itself:
At one end of the scale the subject participates

its predicate; at the other end, a formal or hierarchi-

cal participation per similitudinem was the foundation

of the whole structure of the universe; for all creatures

were in a greater or lesser degree images or representa-

tions, or 'names' of God, and their likeness or unlikeness

did not merely measure, but was the nearer or more distant
emanation of His Being and Goodness in them. (p. 90)

 

58

We should read the history of western consciousness, then, as the
gradual decline of original participation, the gradual increase of self-
consciousness and awareness of self as distinct from phenomena which has
(unfortunately, Barfield thinks) culminated in idolatry (the granting of
objective existence to our collective representations). The glaring and
wonderful exception to this historical trend is the case of Israel, which
must be noted because Israel's religion is in many ways analogous to
Barfield's final religious conclusion.

The Israelites in Egypt received from Moses "the unheard of in-
junction" (p. 109) "not to make unto thee any graven image or any like-
ness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth be-
neath, or that is in the water under the earth." They were enjoined not
to make images when the peOple of every nation around them practised the
prevailing original participation. And "Participation and the experience
of phenomena as representations go hand in hand;...the experience of re-
presentations, as such, is closely linked with the making of images."

(p. 109) For in original participation the link between self and phenom-
ena is experienced, not arrived at (as in our case) by alpha-thinking.

"Original participation is...the sense that there stands behind the phen-
omena, and on the other side of them from man, a represented, which is of

O
the same nature as man. It was against this that Israel's face was set."3

 

30P. 109. The Frankforts say that for the primitive, the object
perceived "is experienced as life confronting life." Before Philosophy,
p. 1h.

 

 

 

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59

Participation thus begins to die for Israel as the result of a
moral injunction, while for western man in general it dies only as a
natural process. The Jewish progress away from participation Barfield
traces by the Jewish reference to the name of God Himself. The Old
Testament tells us that the Jews, before they left Egypt, were told by
Moses the real name of their God. The name, says Barfield, was thought
to be "too holy to be communicable." (p. 112) It may be found written
in the Psalms, for instance, but by the third century B.C. it was
never read aloud; other words such as "Adonai" or "Elohim" were substi-
tuted. "The Name itself was pronounced only by the priests in the
Temple when blessing the people or by the High Priest on the Day of
Atonement. Other precautions and uses emphasized and preserved its in-
effable quality." (p. 112) The Name is written in four consonants and
is taken from a verb which means both "to be" and "to breathe."

The Hebrew word for 'Jew' is derived from the same

verb; so that a devout Jew could not name his race with-

out recalling, nor affirm his own existence without

tending to utter, the Tetragrammaton. Written...with-

out vowels, when any true child of Israel perused the

unspoken Name, 177; 3 must have seemed to come whispegi

ing up, as it were, from the depths of his own being:

This Jewish "ingathering withdrawal from participation" (p. 11h)

Barfield sees illustrated in two encounters with God recorded in the Old

Testament. The first shows God as still thought to be "outer" and somehow

 

31As I. CH., according to Boldt, came out of the German soul--one
of the strange echoes already mentioned. The difference, however, if
it is of degree, is of great degree.

in or behind the phenomena; the second shows Him to be considered within.
The Lord appeared to Moses from the midst of a burning bush; but "by

the time of Elijah the withdrawal...was already far advanced...." (p.
113) Barfield then quotes the famous verses which catalogue the nat-
ural beauties which do nap_contain God: He was not in the wind, nor in
the earthquake, nor in the fire--"and after the fire a still small

voice."

...He had now only one Name--I AM--and that was parti-

cipated by every being who had eyes that saw and ears

that heard and who spoke through his throat. But it

was incommunicable, because its participation by the

particular self which is at this moment uttering it was

an inseparable part of its meaning. Everyone can call

his idol 'God', and many do; but no being who Speaks

through his throat can call a wholly other and outer

Being 'I'. (p. 11h)

And Rabbi Maimonides, about 1190, repeated "the mystery of the Divine
Name. It was 'that name in which there is no participation between the
Creator and any thing else.'" (p. 11h) _

Now if the rise of self-consciousness and the decline of original
participation (aided by God, in the case of the Jews) have led to the
state of things that Barfield calls idolatry, what hope is there for
the future? Idolatry is clearly wrong: aside from being forbidden to
the chosen people, it does not square with the nature of things. But
what is to be done about it? The answer to this question is the crux
of the argument.

There have occurred, according to Barfield, certain "symptoms of

iconoclasm," the major one of which (as we saw in Histopy ia_English

Words) was the Romantic movement. The Romantic movement was possible

61

because, as consciousness evolved toward self-consciousness and thus gave
rise to "phenomena on the one side and consciousness on the other,” (p.
126) the thing that we call memory came into being.

As consciousness develops into self-consciousness,

the remembelui phenomena become detached or liberated
from their originals and so, as images, are in some
measure at man's disposal. The more thoroughly par-
ticipation has been eliminated, the more they are at
the disposal of his imagination to employ as it chooses.
If it chooses to impart its own meaning, it is doing,
p59 tanto, with the remembered phenomena what their *
Creator once did with the phenomena themselves. Thus
there ia.a real analogy between metaphorical usage and
original participation; but it is one which can only

be acknowledged if the crude conception of an evolution
of idols...is finally abandoned, or at all events is
enlightened by one more in line with the old teaching
of the logos. There is a valid analogy i:, but only

if, we admit that, in the course of the earth's history,
something like a Divine Word has been gradually cloth-
ing itself with the humanity it first gradually created
--so that what was first spoken by God may eventually
be respoken by man. (pp. 126-27)

The process of internalization has taken the meanings of the phenomena
inside man, and meaning has now become available for his own "creative
'speech'--using 'Speech' now in the wide sense of Aquinas's 'word'."
(p. 127) The decline of participation in the west has had as its com-
plement a "growing awareness...of this capacity of man for creative
speech." (p. 127) The more man comes to believe that phenomena are
wholly distinct from himself and have no immanent life, the more he
comes to see that he can manipulate his memory-images of them in any
way that he chooses. For the artist, so long as Nature contained imma-
nent life akin to that of the artist himself, it was enough to imitate

Nature because "the life or spirit in the object lived on in his imitation,

we

62

if it was a faithful one." (p. 128) The artefact was more than imita-
tion because the artist and the object imitated shared the same immanent
life of the universe. But with the decline of participation, imitation
of Nature became purely mechanical, to be replaced ultimately by photo-
graphy. Thus men, sensing the loss of life in phenomena, began to for-
mulate doctrines of "creative" art, in which the artist (in whom there
was still life) infused life into the objects which he imitated from
dead Nature. Barfield traces the beginnings of these doctrines of
creative art back as far as Chrysostom in the first century, and through
Philostratus in the second and Plotinus in the third. The doctrines
continued up through Scaliger and Sidney in the sixteenth century, and
reached their climax in Coleridge in the nineteenth.

‘ But the romantic theory of the imagination went a step beyond
its forebears. Properly speaking, the theory as it is stated by Sidney
means little more than that the artist manipulates the images of things
for his own moral ends. Literature can teach where Nature cannot, be-
cause literature uses the images of Nature purposefully. It is in this
sense that, as Sidney says, "the truest poetry is the most feigning."
And it is in this sense only that the Renaissance Neo-Platonists spoke
of man as a creator. But Coleridge's doctrine of the Primary and Secon-
dary Imagination radically changed the older view. For Coleridge af-
firmed that the artist does not manipulate dead things outside of him-
self, but live things which he himself has first partly created by means
of the Primary Imagination. Thus the artist was doubly a creator, both

in the making of his objects and in the manipulating of them for his

63

own purposes. Now all of this Coleridge knew as doctrine; but it was
Wordsworth who experienced the truth of the doctrine. Coleridge knew
that Nature is alive because his philosophy told him that he himself
put life into it. But Wordsworth felp_the life in Nature, felt that
somehow the life immanent in himself was also immanent in Nature. He
tried to explain it by theories verging on pantheism, and pantheism,
Barfield says, is a "nostalgic hankering after original participation."
(1% 130)

The distinction between the creativity of the Primary Imagination
and the manipulation of the Secondary may be seen in the division of

labor between Coleridge and WOrdsworth in the gyrical Ballads. (This

 

illustration is not Barfield's, but it will perhaps show what he means.)

In the well—known section from Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria,

 

Coleridge describes the two kinds of poetry to be included in the Expi-
cal Ballads, WOrdsworth was to write poetry that would have "the power
of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the
truth of nature," while Coleridge was to write poetry that had "the
power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of
imagination." Coleridge's work would be the work primarily of the
Secondary Imagination; though he knew of the immanent life in Nature,
he did not feel it, and thus he would be reduced to manipulating the
images of what he fa;p.to be things merely dead and objective. Thus he
would "make up" the "incidents and agents" and feign that they were
"supernatural"; his aim was, like Sidney'a, no more than to show his

readers "the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally

 

6h

accompany such situations, supposing them real." But Wordsworth, who
felt common life in himself and nature, would minimize the inventive-
ness of the Secondary Imagination, because it would be sufficient for
him merely to "imitate nature." He would write of subjects from "ordi-
nary 1ife," for something of the life of Nature would linger on in his
poems. Wordsworth would not have to concern himself with the workings
of the Secondary Imagination so long as he experienced the workings of
the Primary Imagination. He would be practising original participation.

Thus the romantics were symptoms of iconoclasm in the sense that
Coleridge knew and Wordsworth felt that Nature was not an "idol," not
something fixed and dead but alive. Wordsworth, the pantheist, supposed
what primitive man supposed, that God is immanent in all things, and
thus WOrdsworth misinterpreted his experience. Coleridge, saved from.
pantheism by his knowledge of Kantian philosophy, knew that the life
in Nature is the life that we give it through the Primary Imagination.
Coleridge knew that man stands in what Barfield calls a "directionally
creator" relationship (p. 132) to Nature; man creates what he sees and
then manipulates it. But what Coleridge did not know is the true nature
of man the creator. Thus "the true...impulse underlying the Romantic
movement has never grown to maturity; and, after adolescence, the alter-
native to maturity is puerility." (pp. 130-31) The romantic movement
might well have born great fruit if Coleridge had knOwn the kind of
being he was as well as he knew the way that his mind operated. For

u

what stands in this "directionally creator" relationship to Nature is

not my poor temporal personality, but the Divine Name in the unfathomable

65

depths behind it." (p. 132) What stands in this relationship is the Lo-
gos, the World-Process, working its way through and out of my uncon-
sciousness mind or the collective unconscious mind of the world.

And here, having reminded ourselves of the nature of man (in Bar-
field's view), we may also remind ourselves of the nature of Nature. In
Speaking of Wordsworth as one who experienced the immanent life in Nature
we may have allowed ourselves to slip back into the position of naive
realism. But such a position, we recall, is radically wrong. The Na-
ture that we have been talking about exists in a world of thought. Bar-
field finds it ironic that modern man, prone to see the phenomenal world

" should have become so fond of Jung's theory

as objective and "out there,
of the collective unconscious. Our "literal minded generation," he says,
"began to accept the actuality of a 'collective unconscious' before it
could even admit the possibility of a 'collective conscious'--in the

shape of the phenomenal world.".(p. 135) For the phenomena are "collec-
tive representations," as has already been established. Thus of the hypo-
thetical evolution that we are so fond of positing of the phenomenal
world--our talk of "pro-historic" phenomena--the most that we can accur-
ately say is that the phenomena that we posit for those times are "poten-
tial phenomena." (p. 135) But we must keep in mind that "the phenomenal
world arises from the relation between a conscious and an unconscious

and that evolution is the story of the changes that relation has undergone
and is undergping." (p. 136) So it follows that it is at the least "high-

ly fanciful...to think of any unperceived process in terms of potential

phenomena, unless we also assume an unconscious, ready to light up into

66

actual phenomena at any moment of the process." (p. 135) The concept of
the potentially phenomenal as extant in the collective unconscious is

the answer to the difficulty, now that the old act-potency relationship
of Aristotle and Aquinas (arrived at through original participation) has
faded away. .As was the case with participation itself for Aristotle and
Aquinas, so "potential" meant something much more than the possibilis of

J

Aquinas, though Aquinas still meant much more than our mere "possible."

 

We have difficulty in "grasping process as such" because we are "hamstrung
by the lack of just such a concept of the potentially phenomenal and the
actually phenomenal." (p. 136) For us, "to ask whether a thing 'is' or
'is not' is...to ask whether it is or is not a phenomenon...." (p. 136)
And this is to be expected so long as we remain idolaters; but Once we
admit the possibility of the unconscious, we have a basis for reaffirming

the actus-pgtentia distinction; it need no longer be for us, as it was for

 

Bacon (who did so much to help turn the representations into idols) a
frigida distinctio. (p. 136) '

NOw in so far as we realize conceptually (by beta-thinking) that we
participate in our phenomena "with the unconscious part of ourselves,"
(p. 137) we perceive as a fact what may be called "final" participation
as distinct from original participation. That is, we apprehend by con-
ceptual thinking what primitive, ancient and (to some extent) medieval
man felt as an actual experience. But this mere intellectual awareness
has no epistemological significance; our representations are none the
different for our being aware that we in effect create them. There can only

be epistemological significance "to the extent that final participation is

67

consciously experienced. Perhaps...we may say that final participation
must itself be raised from potentiality to act." (p. 137) But to so
raise our final participation is only possible through sustained effort
on our part: "...it is a matter, not of theorizing, but of imagination
in the genial or creative sense. A systematic approach towards final
participation may therefore be expected to be an attempt to use imagina-
tion systematically." (p. 137)

A few, says Barfield, have already tried this systematic use of
the imagination. Goethe and Steiner were its most successful practition-

ers. In Goethe's Metamorphosis g£_Plants, "there is the germ of a sys-

 

tematic investigation of phenomena by way of participation." (pp. 136-37)
He attempted to study potential as well as actual phenomena, which is
possible because the phenomena are a mental construct. His work was

(and is) regarded as unscientific because it was not purely empirical;

but this is only another way of saying that Goethe refused to treat the
phenomena‘(representations) as idols. He attempted to use the imagination
systematically, and

...as imagination reaches the point of enhancing figura-
tion itself, hitherto unperceived parts of the whole field
of the phenomenon necessarily become perceptible. More-
over, this conscious participation enhances perception not
only of present phenomena but also of the memory-images
derived from them. All this Goethe could not prevail on
his contemporaries to admit. Idolatry was too all-powerful
and there were then no premonitory signs, as there are to-
day, of its collapse. No one...had heard of 'the uncon-
scious.'" (p. 137)

Goethe practised final participation without fully realizing what it was

that he was doing; Steiner, one of today's "premonitory signs,‘ worked

68

 

out the metaphysic of it "fully and lucidly" (p. 139) in The Philosophy

 

f Spiritual Activity.

Steiner showed that imagination, and the final participa-

tion that it leads to, involve, unlike hypothetical think-

ing, the whole man--thought, feeling, will, and character

--and his own revelations were clearly drawn from those

further stages of participation--Inspiration and Intuition

-—to which the systematic use of imagination may lead.

(p. 141)

The only example that Barfield cites of Steiner's systematic use
of the imagination is the work being done by The Society for Cancer Re-
search in Arlesheim, Switzerland, a society founded by Steiner. Like
Goethe, Steiner advocated the study of the potential phenomena as well
as the actual. Since cancer is "a process of generation,” (p. lho) it
provides a basis for experiment in the stage of its potential being.
What Steiner was trying to do was to arrest the disease in its potential
stage before it actuated itself in physical symptoms. "...the method in-
volves investigation-of a part of the field of the whole phenomenon named
biggg_which, for a non-participating consciousness, is excluded from it,
not by empirical proof but rather...by definition." (p. lhO) I do not
know how to paraphrase this except by saying that by "studying the po-
tential phenomenon," Barfield means that the idea "cancer" is not yet
fully actuated in the divine Unconscious; since the Unconscious only
becomes conscious in the consciousness of man, it follows that by inves-
tigating the potential as well as the actual (phenomenal) existence of
cancer we will actually be helping to formulate the final idea of cancer

and thus helping ourselves to control it.

If the appearances (phenomena, representations) are a product of

69

human consciousness, and if that consciousness evolves, then the future
of the appearances depends upon the direction that the evolution takes,
for there is no reason to suppose that the evolution has reached its
termination. We may have a further evolution toward idolatry. Or we
may have an evolution toward the final participation practised by Steiner
and Goethe, which is "based on the acceptance...of the fact that man him-
self now stands in a 'directionally creator relation' to the appearances."
(p. lhh) Barfield of course elects the latter:

The plain fact is, that all the unity and coherence of

nature depends on participation of one kind or the other.

If therefore man succeeds in eliminating all original

participation, without substituting any other, he will

have done nothing less than to eliminate all meaning

and all coherence from the cosmos. (p. lhh)
Such schools of philosophy as the logical positivists have already tried

H

to eliminate meaning from the language, and meaning is a valid relation
to nature." (p. lhh) And science in general, having lost any sense of
original participation, "is losing its grip on any principle of unity
pervading nature as a whole...." (p. th) Science, lacking any "unity

of knowledge," (p. 1&5) is becoming increasingly fragmented and increas-
ingly more specialized. This sort of thing can ultimately lead mankind
only to a state of "idiocy"--"a state of affairs, in which fewer and fewer
representations will be collective, and more and more will be private,
with the result that there will in the end be no means of communication
between one intelligence and another." (p. th)

But the electing of the second course is not without its dangers.

Imagination is not necessarily good of itself; it may be used for gigantic

70

good or gigantic evil. It may be a long while before imagination is so
systematically practised that the phenomena are altered by the imagina-
tion, though Barfield holds that it is later in the evolution of con-
sciousness than we think. But taking the long view, the world of the
future might be "a chaotically empty or a fantastically hideous world."
(p. 1&6) He cites the case of the "formally representational arts":
so far as they are merely fads, they are unimportant.

But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine be-

cause the artist has in some way or other experienced the

world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated,

they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing

to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and

ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should

remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs

emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-

bicycle substituted for her left breast. (p. 1&6)
So final participation, "which is the proper goal of the imagination," (p.
1&7) must be used in the future not only to gain knowledge but to save the
appearances themselves "from chaos and inanity." (p. 1A6) We must,
through imagination, "experience the representations as idols, and then
also...perform the act of figuration consciously, so as to experience
them as participated...." (p. lh7) The appearances are our responsibil-
ity; the world is emerging from original to final participation whether
we will it so or not, and the shape of things to come is our moral re-
sponsibility.

But we must understand the nature of man and the nature of the

world before the magnitude of our undertaking can be comprehended. Orig-

inal participation began as "the unconscious identity of man with his

71

Creator." (p. 169) That this state of things was not to remain is clear
from God's commandment to the Jews to forsake idolatry, the normal fruits
of original participation. We must understand that Christ (if we accept
His own claims) "came to make possible in the course of time the transi-
tion of all men from original to final participation...." (pp. 170-71)
For this final end the physical participation in the Eucharist may be re-
garded as preparation and adumbration. We have been uttered by the Word
and-feel "the seed of the Word stirring within us, as imagination." (p.
179) The Incarnation has not been turned off like a water tap; it con-
tinues, "for Christ is the cosmic wisdom on its way from original to final
participation." (p. 18%) And final participation, as the Jews learned
but forgot (causing Christ to shed tears over Jerusalem), is the state
"whereby man's Creator speaks from within man himself...." (p. 184) Thus
is the WOrd continually made flesh. And thus men are not hollow idols
(any more than their phenomena are); they are "the theatre on which par-
ticipation has died to rise again...." (p. 185)

If, in Christ, we participate finally the Spirit we once

participated originally; if, in so doing, we participate

one another--so that 'men' once more become also 'man';

if, in original participation, we were dreamers and un-

free, and if Christ is a Being who can be participated

only in vigilance and freedom, then what will chiefly be

remembered about the scientific revolution will be the

way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last

traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final,

participation. And if what is produced thereby was, as I

have suggested, a world of idols, yet, as Augustine of old

could contemplate the greatest of evils and exclaim Felix

peccatum! so we, looking steadily on that world, and ac-

cepting the burden of existential responsibility which fi-

nal participation lays upon us, may yet be moved to add:

Felix eidolon!

 

72

'Peor and Baalim Forsake their temples dim...‘ the

other name for original participation...is, after all,

paganism. (p. 186)

So concludes the argument which began in 1925 and ended (if it h§§_
ended) in 1958. At the risk of laboring the obvious, we may recapitu-
late it briefly, though if the exposition has failed to make it clear,
certainly the recapitulation will not. Combining the viewpoints and evi-
dence from the three books, then, we may say something like this. Lin-
guistic and anthropological evidence shows that there has been over cen-
turies (and probably over millenia) an evolution of human consciousness.
The rational and discursive intellect is a late arrival in human con-
sciousness; indeed, the rational intellect and self-consciousness are near-
ly interchangeable. In the pre-historical and historical eras preceding
the arrival of human consciousness, then, man (so far as he may be
called man, lacking rationality) practised a kind of imaginative and pic-
torial thinking, a thinking that was really perception with the meanings
of things inherent in the actual percept.

If we accept the universe as being fundamentally Hegelian, and
hold that all that exists is the Absolute Thought thinking itself out
in progressive creation of a spiritual world, we may equate the Absolute
with the findings of later men such as Jung and say that the Absolute and
the Collective Unconscious or Pre-Conscious are one. We may even say,
in a religious sense, that the Absolute and the Collective Unconscious
are both of them only dim and partial adumbrations of the Christian Logos,
the Divine and Creative Word. No matter what we call it, it seems to

follow that the previously established evolution of human consciousness is

73

to be regarded as a part of the process of the uttering of the Word or
the thinking out of the Absolute. The evolution of consciousness shows
the rise of the apprehension of subject as distinct from object, of man
as distinct from phenomena. And this is only another way of saying that
the Absolute is thinking itself out in these terms. Both man and phen-
omena are thoughts of the Absolute.

In the beginning, all was unity. There was only the Absolute, un-
aware of itself, holding within itself all things in potentia. Because
the Absolute is Mind, what it contains potentially is pure, undividuated
meaning, the meaning (of which it is not consciOus) of all the later in-
dividual concepts of things that are to come. It is pregnant with the
Ideas of the world and of man, and will, through the ages, "incarnate"
them, will think them out in a mode that intermediate human consciouSness
will perceive as matter. '

In the early stages of this process, the Idea of Man and the Idea
of Phenomena will hardly be separate from the Absolute; the Absolute
will hardly be aware that It is thinking them. Thus early pre-historic
man and phenomena will exist in a kind of shadow'world; they will be in
the process of becoming, almost (we might say) between potency and act.
It follows that they will not be wholly separate from the Absolute it-
self and so not wholly distinct from each other. So, in this morning of
the world, man will (in Barfield's phrase) participate in phenomena; more
accurately, both man and phenomena will participate in the Absolute, in
the sense that they exist as Ideas conceived but not yet fully spoken

and so not fully formed. The evolution of human consciousness shows the

.{h

Absolute thinking the Idea of Man through, getting things clear (as it
were) in its own mind, shaping the meaning of man_out of its Unconscious,
realizing the possibility of Man and ultimately becoming conscious of
Itself in Man.

,When the idea of man has become sufficiently distinct from the Ab-
solute so that it may fairly be called a recognizable, distinct Idea,
then man no longer participates in the Absolute. It is at this point
that he becomes conscious of himself as distinct from the Absolute and
distinct as well from the other Ideas of the Absolute (such as phenomena);
thus he no longer participates, as he had done, in the phenomena. But
to say that man has become conscious of himself is also to say that the
Absolute has arrived, through man, at consciousness, that consciousness
has come into being. This is roughly the stage ofthe process at which
‘ man and the Absolute now rest. But, as has already been indicated, there
is no reason to suppose that the process has stopped.

So far the construct has been purely metaphysical; but there is a
religious outlook latent in it (as might be guessed from the fact that
Absolute and Iggg§_are convertable terms). Or, rather, it is capable of
a religious application. It is this religious application that is the
end of Barfield's argument.

Only one step needs to be taken-«and emphasized--in order to con-
vert the largely Hegelian position described above into a religious frame-
work, and it is the step--or leap--which both Steiner and Barfield take.

The growing awareness of the Absolute (that is, the process by which the

Absolute gradually discovers what It is) must be localized in the growing

75

self-consciousness of man. The Absolute will then realize Itself in man
--not in all men, but in those who have ears to hear and who use them; in
men who see the desirability of systematically using the Imagination, of
practising what Barfield calls final participation. This is indeed to
die as Man and rise as God, "death to be wished."

Thus from one point of view, we might say that what Barfield has
done is to baptize German Romantic Idealism. The evolving World-Process
of Hegel becomes the slow uttering of the Word. As the world-Process is
becoming, over millenia, aware of itself, so the word, over millenia con-
tinues to utter Itself in man and through man. And participation, which
for Kant is merely an answer to the old dilemma of idealistic epistemology
(How does spirit know matter7), becomes, in Barfield, the basis for a
relationship between the human and the Divine.

From another and perhaps more fruitful point of view, Barfield has
not only baptized but brought up to date the doctrine of the creative
imagination which is implicit in German idealism and which Coleridge and
Emerson and others discovered long before him. The primary imagination,
said Coleridge, is "...the living Power and prime Agent of all human
Perception, and...a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of

"32 And he went on to add that the secon-

creation in the infinite I AM.
dary imagination created poetry as the primary imagination created the
phenomenal world. So it is for Barfield. But for Barfield (it will be

recalled) the romantic impulse evident in the theory of the creative

 

32Biographia literaria, Chapter XIII.

 

76

imagination did not move forward to its real religious fruition because
Coleridge, dependent as he was on Kantian philOSOphy, knew that the Pri-
mary Imagination was creative but did not know to what extent its crea-
tivity reached. He did not know that the noumena had their only existence
as potential existence in the Unconscious; or as we have already seen,

he did not understand the true nature of man. But Barfield, seeing the
culmination of the evolution of consciousness in memory and imagination,
takes the theory of the creative imagination up to the heights of theo-
logy. He takes the notion (from Steiner) out of the same philosophy (Ger-
man Idealism) that Coleridge took it; he buttresses it with philological,
anthrOpological, and modern scientific evidence, and he strips away from
it any vestiges of analogy. It is through the systematic use of this
creative or "genial" imagination that man perceives the plain fact that

he can participate again in the Word. Further, it is through the crea-
tive imagination (which is now taken as an established and scientific
fact) that man‘s moral task of saving the appearances must be accomplished.
He must save them by altering them; quite plainly, he must change the
world, mould it more nearly in accord with his (and the WOrd's) heart's
desire. For the systematic use of the imagination leads, as Steiner
taught, to Inspiration and Intuition; through the imagination, then,

man's purposes may become one with the purposes of the Word in Whom man

...

participates. Omnia per ipsum facts sunt, gt_sine ipso factum est nihil

H

quod factum est; ig_ipso vita erat, gt_vita erat lux hominum. St. John,

 

 

 

of course, added'that the light shone in the shadows but that the shadows

77

grasped it not. It is not too much to say that Barfield's creative imag-
ination will not only enable the shadows to grasp the light; there will

be, as in the physical reality which the image mirrors, no shadows left;

 

 

all will be light. agotquot autem receperunt eum, dedit eis potestatem

filios Dei fieri.

 

I said in Chapter I that the phenomenon I meant to examine was
romantic religion, and that the religion was inseparable from the roman-
ticism. That this is true of Barfield is abundantly clear. One of

33

Lewis's characters, speaking of the relations between men and angels,
says, “It's all in St. Paul." So here we might say, Barfield's religion
is all in St. thn. But for Barfield St. JChn can only be reached
through a means that has always been held to be romantic, the way of the

creative imagination. Barfield is not simply Coleridge redivivus; be:

cause he is that, he is also filius Dei.

 

So far I have commented only on what might be called the doctrin-

aire romanticism eXplicit in Barfield's work. But the word romanticism

 

surely implies attitude as much as it does doctrine. Poetry that we
call romantic nearly always deals, in some way or other, with a world
beyond or behind the phenomenal world that we know. It may be the
dream world of Xanadu, or the mountains where Prometheus stoned, or the
world where Keats lived when he was not "on the cold hill's side." It

may be the world beyond, or within, the Cumberland hills that haunted

 

33hr. Dimble in That Hideous Strength.

Wordsworth like a passion and where he felt "fallings from me, vanish-
ings." It may be as obvious as Yeats's land of heart's desire, or as
obscure as Blake's Jerusalem. But whatever the vision, the poet gener-
ally regards his world with an attitude that may be called ”romantic
awe." In this respect, it surely is no coincidence that so many roman-
tics are philOSOphical idealists and hold with Plato, who

thought nature but a spume that plays3h
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things....

And when the world created by the romantic is a world which he

feels to be genuinely holy or heavenly, as in parts of Wordsworth's

 

Prelude or in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the normal romantic awe be-

comes religious awe, an apprehension of the numinous. It is what Words-
worth feels when he can "see into the life of things," and what Shelley

feels when he envisions man "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." And,

as Barfield's prose amply illustrates, it is what he feels at the world

which he has envisioned. And well he might be awed at the world, for

it is indeed a brave new world in which God contemplates Himself and His

creation within the temple of the consciousness of man.

 

3Lt’ieats, "Among School Children."

H,

CHAPTER III

C. S. LEWIS AND THE BAPTISM OF THE IMAGINATION

From the smoky latter day transcendentalism of Barfield we turn
to the graceful and lucid work of one of the most respected of contem-
porary literary scholars. It is to go from Blake to the fine middle
style of Addison, to a study of which, according to JOhnson, a man should
give over his days and nights. Lewis's work-~doctrinal, fictional, crit-
ical--is characterized by a feeling for the fine phrase, and by judicious
quotation so appropriate that it seems to have grown naturally out of
the sentence. Style, said Newman, is a thinking out into language; it
is the shadow of the man. Lewis's work, like that of thnson or Newman
himself, frequently has a charm and attraction that derive from his
style: partly from the idea's being actuated in language and thus be-
coming lucidly external, partly from the shadow of the man himself, who
is suggested in the easy courtesy and urbanity of the prose. It follows
that one of the things that a man must be wary of with Lewis is that a
given argument or theory may assume a weight and validity more as a result
of its phrasing than of its own merit. Perhaps many have thought more
kindly of the Fall of man as an explanatory hypothesis since Newman looked
about him and concluded that, if there was a God, then man had been in-

volved in "some terrible aboriginal calamity." And perhaps many have

79

thought less kindly of Shakespeare's dash through the fifth act of
Measure for Measure since Johnson's complaint that a cynical villain

is "dismissed to happiness" because of it. It may be that ideas are
more safely expressed by, not poor writers, but ones who are deliberate-
ly colorless, like Aristotle or Aquinas. But then Aristotle and Aquinas
were not only not stylists; they were not romantics either. It is the
purpose of this chapter, having pointed out the possible seduction of
Lewis's prose, to show that the work of Lewis shows him, like Barfield,
to be a romantic in the realm of religion.

I have called the chapter "The Baptism of the Imagination" (the
metaphor is Lewis's) because I mean to show the progress of a certain
sort of romantic imagination from irreligion into Christianity, and show
further that the characteristic work produced by the baptized romantic
imagination is baptized romance. It is not that the early imagination
changes in the course of the progress; it is rather taken up into, sub-
sumed by, religion. Lewis's metaphor puts it neatly: it is baptized;
it remains essentially the same but, like the baptized soul, it begins to
live in a new sphere in addition to the old. For my purpose the fictional
works are of prime importance, since they show most clearly the romantic
attitude toward religion, in fact, the romantic use of religion. But I
hOpe also to show that this romanticized religion is not unconnected with

lewis's pOpularization of Christianity. It follows that such purely

literary works as The Allegory ngLove and English Literature i2_the

 

 

Sixteenth Century I must ignore as irrelevant masterworks.

,_’».

81

The progress mentioned above began in Lewis's childhood. He is
by his own admission a congenital romantic of a certain sort; from the
moment that he could choose his own books he was listening for “the
horns of elfland."l So far as he can recall, his early experiences of
beauty were "already incurably romantic, not formal." (p. 1h) The very
Irish countryside contributed to the romanticism:

And every day there were what we called 'the Green Hills';

that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we

saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off

but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught

me longing-~Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before

I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower. (p. 1h)

Looking back on his boyhood, he distinguishes three separate ex-
periences in which the longing made itself known. The first was a
"memory of a memory." (p. 22) He stood in the garden one summer morning
and suddenly recalled an earlier summer morning when his brother had
brought his toy garden into the nursery. An indescribable emotion came
over him, a wave of desire for something which he could not even con-
ceive. In a moment it was past, leaving behind it only a "longing for
the longing." (p. 22) It was over in a moment, but "in a certain sense
everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in com-
parison." (p. 22) The second experience occurred as a result of reading
a children's book, Beatrix Potter's ngirrel Nutkin. "It troubled me

with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic

to say that one can become enamoured of a season, but that is something

 

1Surprised By_be (London, 1955), p. 12. The next several refer-
ences are to this book; the page numbers will be indicated in the text.

82

like what happened; and, as before, the experience was one of intense
desire.” (p. 23) He returned to the book often, not because there was
a possibility of gratifying the desire--he did not know what he desired
--but to re-awake the desire itself. The third experience came through

poetry, from Iongfellow's translation of Tegner's Drapa. He read the

 

lines

I heard a voice that cried,

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead-----
and immediately the longing possessed him again:

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted

into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost

sickening intensity something never to be described (ex-

cept that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote)

and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the

very same moment already falling out of that desire and

wishing I were back in it. (p. 23)

Analyzing the three experiences, Lewis finds their common qual-
ity. It is an "unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than
any other satisfaction.” (pp. 23-2h) This quality he calls JOy, which
is not to be confused with either happiness or pleasure. It has only
one characteristic in common with them: "the fact that anyone who has
experienced it will want it again....I doubt whether anyone who has
tasted it would ever...exchange it for all the pleasures in the world."
(p. 2h) Nor is it to be confused with esthetic pleasure; it is sui
generis, having what nothing else has, "the stab, the pang, the incon-
solable longing." (p. 7h) It cannot even be said to be really a posses-

sion; it is a reminder of what one does not have, "a desire for something

83

longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'." (p. 79)
He found Joy again, in his later youth, in Wagner and in the
Norse and Teutonic myths, discovering in these what he had found earlier

in Tegner's Drgpa, the "Nbrthe£%ess," the vision of spaciousness, sever-
/

 

ity, even bleakness. Compared to the JOy of Northegness, the religion
which he professed seemed weak and pallid. His inherited Anglicanism
was merely formal, while the Northerhess offered him sc0pe for "some-
thing very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-
abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being
the object it was." (p. 78) He found it again in William Morris, in

The Well gt_the Worldjs End, Jason, The Earthly Paradise. But it was

 

 

becoming rarer as the years went on, and finally it began to take the
format a memory of the experience, "Joy in memory yet." He had to be
content with the memory of what had been even in the beginning only a
reminder.

It was then, at the age of sixteen, that he first read George

Macdonald. The night that he read Phantastes marked the beginning of

 

his reconversion to real, in place of merely accepted, Christianity.
What he found in the book was romance of the Morris and early Yeats sort
combined with religion; never had "the wind of Joy" (p. 170) blown so
strongly through a work before:
I had already been waist deep in Romanticism; and likely
enough....to flounder into its darker and more evil forms,
slithering down the deep descent that leads from the love

of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that
of perversity. New Phantastes was romantic enough in all

 

8h

conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at

that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and

I therefore had no notion what this difference really was.

I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it

was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it

was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant;

that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning

innocence....What it actually did to me was to convert,

even to baptize...my imagination.

At the time the baptism extended only to the imagination, not to
the intellect or to the conscience. Later, when the final conversion
to Christianity had been effected, he could return to Macdonald and see
much that he had not seen the first time; but what he had seen the first
time was a great deal. He had seen that romance and religion could be
combined, and that when they were so the feeling of be was at its
strongest. The later stages of his conversion enabled him to see more
clearly the real character of JOy, this feeling that came to him most
strongly on reading Christianized romance. "The form of the desired
is in the desire. It is the object that makes the desire harsh or
sweet, coarse or choice, 'high' or'low'. It is the object that makes
the desire itself desirable or hateful." (p. 208) He had not, be dis-
covered, really desired be itself; he had desired the object of which
be itself was the desire and which had given be the form it took. But
the object had no connection with any state of his own mind or body; a

process of elimination had shown him this. Therefore the object of JOy

was something wholly other from himself; and this conclusion brought him

 

2Preface to George Macdonald, An Anthology (New YOrk, l9h7), pp.
20-210

85

"already into the region of awe." (p. 208) He was not yet a Christian,
but the recognition of a wholly other had made him religious,

...for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is

a road right out of the self, a commerce with something
which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the
senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social
need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds,
proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than
bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the
naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it
with 3 hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired. (pp.
208-9

The baptism of the imagination has raised sehnsucht to religious awe;

it only remained to determine whether any present religion was the

 

"true" religion. And here we may revert to The Pilgrim's Regress,
where the progress from romanticism to religion already described is
shown to have a universal as well as a personal significance.

The book, which is "An Allegorical Apology for Christianity,
Reason and Romanticism," tells the story of a boy, John, whose early re-
ligious training serves merely to frighten him by pressing upon him relig-
ious duties which he cannot perform. Occurring at the same time as his
religious training, but wholly unconnected with it, are "fits of strange
Desire, which haunt him from his earliest years, for something that can-
not be named; something which he can describe only as 'Not this,’ 'Far
farther,’ or 'Yonder'."3 As he grows into youth, the desire begins to

assume the form of an image of an island which is "partly in the west,

 

3The Pilgrim's Regress (New York, 1935), p. 11. In the following
discussion page references to this book will be found in the text.

86

partly in the past."2+ He gives up his religion with relief, though he
retains to some degree his moral ideals, and goes in search of the
island. He is in the condition that Plato described:

This every soul seeketh and for the sake of this doth all

her actions, having an inkling the: it is; but gh§t_it is

she cannot sufficiently discern, and she knoweth not her

way, and concerning this she hath no constant assurance as

she bath of other things. (p. 11)

He travels westward, away from the eastern mountains and the dim-
ly discernible spires of the landlord's castle (the Church). 'He stays
for a while in the shire of Aesthetics, where thrilling romantic poetry
promises that it will show him the object of his desire. It fails to
do so; he discovers in it "the disguised erotic element" (p. 31) which
purports to be something more. "He piques himself on seeing through
adolescent illusions (as he now calls them) and adopts cynical modern-
ity." (p. 31)

He moves on to the shire of Zeitgeistheim, where he examines cur-
rent literature and the Freudian rationale from which it mostly proceeds.
He comes to think that the Desire he feels is merely "a mask for lust,
and that all systems save materialism are wish-fulfillment dreams."

(p. 51) But he is not content in Zeitgeistheim; it occurs to him that
Christianity cannot be a wish-fulfillment dream, for who would wish a
system involving the dreadful punishments which Christianity threatens?
He leaves Zeitgeistheim, returns to the main road, and continues westward.

‘L

hlewis, "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism," Essays and
Studies, XXVII (l9h2), p. 7.

 

87

He reaches the Grand Canyon and turns northward into the rarified in-
tellectual climate of the Pale Men--Anglo-Catholicism (Eliot), Human-
ism (Babbitt), and Classicism (Santayana). These three are brothers,
sons of old Mr. Enlightenment; they present a united front against a
common enemy--the masses. But they are all intelligence; there is no
room in their systems for the emotion which accompanies his Desire--
which i§_his Desire. He leaves them and moves even further north, into
the land of Fascism and Marxian Communism; he discovers that their
glorious promises are only a "heroic facade," and that they really are
"a genuine recrudescence of primeval cruelty and a rejection, along
with the humane, of the human itself." (p. 115)

He moves southward along the canyon, through and out of the land
of "'broad-church' modernist Christianity," (p. 137) into the shire of
Hegelians (which is Just north of the shire called AnthropOSOphia and
a good deal north of the vast region called Palus Theosophica). Here
he discovers room for his Desire and also for his moral obligations.
But he also discovers that idealism never stands alone in practice.
"The Hegelians of the right draw their real strength from Christianity,
those of the left from Communism." (p. 137) He tries to become a philo-
soPhical monist, but finds that he cannot maintain the theoretical dis-
tinction between the Hegelian Absolute and the Christian God. In spite
of himself he begins to pray, and in this he is assisted by Divine
Grace. As a result, he can no longer doubt "that his Desire, and his

moral conscience, are both the voice of God." (p. 173)

 

88

So Jehn, like Lewis himself, has been brought by his Desire to
the ante-chamber of religion. To explain the next step in the journey,
and to point out that the journey assumes an importance beyond the con-
version of one man, it is necessary to turn for a moment to Barfield.

For the next step--a very large one-~is one which Lewis learned from
Barfield's doctrine of the universe as the slow speaking out of the
Divine Logos. (Jehn did not object to Hegel; in fact, he became a Hegel-
ian Christian.)

Until he met Barfield, Lewis had been a philosophical realist: he
had held that "rock-bottom reality" consisted of "the universe revealed
by the senses."5 But at the same time he had "continued to make for cer-
tain phenomena of consciousness all the claims that really went with a

6

theistic or idealistic view." He had held that the mind was capable

of achieving logical, moral and esthetic truth if it abided by certain
rules of thought. Barfield convinced him that such a view was illogical.

If thought were a completely subjective event, these claims
for it would have to be abandoned. If one kept (as rock-
bottom reality) the universe of the senses, aided by instru-
ments and co-ordinated so as to form 'science', then one
would have to go much further...and adopt a Behaviouristic
theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. 'But such a theory
was...unbelievable to me. ...I was therefore compelled to
give up realism. ... Unless I were to accept an unbelievable
alternative, I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphen-
omenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort,
mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic logos.

U1

p. 196.

.4

p~ 197.

 

89

Lewis felt forced to accept, then, the general world-view of
Barfield which has been examined at length in the preceding chapter.
Now the Barfield evolution of consciousness (or evolution of God in man)
throws a new and strange light on the subject of myth. We recall that
current meanings of words are products of the active principle of divi-
sion operating in human consciousness (as rational thought) and there-
fore operating in language itself. If we could trace the plurality of
meanings (both literal and metaphorical) in a given word, we would, pre-
sumably, be moving back to a time when the word meant all its present
meanings and more; we would be moving backwards toward that other great
principle operating both in human consciousness and language which Bar-
field calls living unity.8 now what one finds in the classical myths,
according to Barfield, are any number of these old single meanings be-
fore the divisive and analytical process has begun to work on them,
meanings which are "delicately mummified"9 for our present inspection.
They explain (or contain), often enough, what we have come to call the
"natural" metaphors, the relation between sleep and death and winter
or the reverse of these, waking, birth, summer. If we could trace back
such a natural metaphor as the one just mentioned, we should find an

ancient single meaning from which all later meanings have descended.

 

8Lewis accepts this process explicitly. An appendix to his
Allegory 9: love refers the reader to Poetic Diction for further explan-
ation. The process is also assumed in Lewis'svaluspels and Flalansferes:
A Semantic Nightmare," in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London,
1939 .

 

 

9Poetic Diction, p. 91.

 

 

...in the beautiful myth of Demeter and Persephone we find
precisely such a meaning. In the myth of Demeter the ideas
of waking and sleeping, of summer and winter, of life and
death, of mortality and immortality are all lost in one
pervasive meaning. ... Mythology is the ghost of concrete
meaning. *
NOw Lewis, as well as accepting Barfield's evolving spiritual
universe, learned from him "a more respectful, if not more delighted,

attitude toward Pagan myth."ll

It is not hard to see why his attitude
should be respectful. For if myth is the ghost of concrete meaning,

it follows that myth is, in a way, true. It is true so far as it is
the correct embodiment of the consciousness which evolved it (or as
Barfield would say, perceived it). Like everything else in the world
which is in the last resort mental, it is something which has been
uttered by the Logos, and which therefore has presumptive relevance to
that world. The relevance is explainable if we assume that myth pre-
figures later truth, adumbrates later truths arrived at through concep-
tual thought or, in the case of Christianity, through revelation. The
process might be compared (though Lewis does not so compare it) to what
biblical scholars call accommodation, the theory that God reveals His
word to man in the way that man at that particular stage of civilization
is best fitted to receive it. Accepting this view, then, Lewis asks,

"Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have

the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?"12

 

logpetic Diction, pp. 91-92.

 

llJoy, p. 221.

129.1-

91

Christianity is thus seen as the culmination of a long religious
evolution; as the Old Testament prefigures the New, so all the dying
gods which Frazer and others recorded, far from being proof that Chris-
tianity is only another such pagan myth, are really glad tidings of
great joy, messages sent on beforehand to make straight the path of
the real dying God. Regarded in this way, as Chesterton pointed out,
pagan myths "make dust and nonsense of comparative religion."13 This
is the lesson that Jehn learns from Father History; but what is more
important for our present purpose is that he also learns the historical
function of both his Desire and his author's JOy.

Father History explains to John that the Landlord has sent both
"rules" and "pictures" to the tenants of his land, though he has not
sent them together. The rules were sent to the Shepherd people (the
Jews); the pictures have been sent to all the other tenants at various
times. At one time, presumably, there was no conflict between the
rules and the pictures, but now, because of the machinations of the
Enemy, there is. (At the risk of being tiresome I point out that the
pictures symbolize the imagination and the rules, the moral injunctions
of God or conscience.) The best thing, says Father History, is to live
with Mother Kirk from infancy "with a third thing which is neither the
Rules nor the pictures and which was brought into the country by the
Landlord's Son." (p. 19h) But this happens very rarely:

Even where Mother Kirk is nominally the ruler men can grow
old without knowing how to read the Rules. Her empire is

 

13The Everlastinngan (New York, 1955), p. 266.

 

 

92

always crumbling. But it never quite crumbles: for as

often as men become Pagans again, the Landlord again sends

them pictures and stirs up sweet desire and so leads them

back to Mother Kirk even as he led the actual Pagans long

ago. There is, indeed, no other way. (p. 19h)

Contrary to the usual belief that the Landlord never spoke to the Pagans,
he "succeeded in getting a lot of messages through," (p. 195) in spite
of the enemy's attempts to hinder him by passing about any number of
false stories about him. The messages he got through were mostly pic-
tures; in fact, one of the pictures was thn's picture of his island.
The Pagans made c0pies of their pictures, tried to get satisfaction from
what was meant only to arouse desire. They made up stories about their
pictures and then pretended their stories were true; they tried to sat-
isfy the desire in lechery or in magic. But the Landlord did not allow
them to stray too far.

Just when their own stories seemed to have completely over-

grown the original messages and hidden them beyond recovery,

suddenly the Landlord would send them a new message and all

their stories would look stale. Or just when they seemed to

be growing really contented with lust or mystery-mongering,

a new message would arrive and the old desire, the real one,

would sting them again, and they would say 'Once more it has

escaped us.‘ (p. 195)

The Shepherds had the rules and the Pagans had the pictures; but
neither was complete without the other, "nor could either be healed
until the Landlord's Son came into the country." (p. 198) (The imagina-
tion is faulty till it is baptized.) JOhn objects that many have said

that the pictures were dangerous and could lead one to evil. Father

History replies that this is true, but that for a pagan there is no

93

other way. And most men, he adds, are pagans at heart; they will mostly
want to stop with the desire that the pictures awake in them (remain
simply romantic). But though the pictures are dangerous, they contain
the only possibility of conversion for those who receive them. It fol-
lows that "those who preach down the desire under whatever pretext--
Stoic, Ascetic, Rigorist, Realist, Classicist--are on the Enemy's side
whether they know it or not." (pp. 199-200)

Over the centuries the desire-arousing pictures have taken var-
ious forms; but always they have awakened in men the Special desire for
something above or beyond the world in which they live. In the early
Middle Ages, for example, which began in the decadent lusts of dying
paganism, the Landlord sent a picture, not of a woman, but of a Lady.
Men thrilled to the picture and turned from her to the women around them
and saw them too in the new light of Ladyhood. Of course, the Enemy
managed to garble the message somewhat, in the form of courtly love,
but one of the tenants preserved the picture, the new form of the de-
sire, carried it "right up to its natural conclusion and found what he
had really been wanting. He wrote it all down in what he called a
Comedy." (p. 200) Later, in the land of Mr. Enlightenment, when peOple
were being forced into new cities and when Mammon was inventing the
assembly line, the Landlord sent them a picture of the actual country-
side. In this Romantic revelation, men looked at the picture, then
looked at the real countryside and saw it differently.

And a new idea was born in their minds, and they saw some-
thing--the old something, the Island West of the world, the

9h

Lady, the heart's desire--as it were hiding, yet not quite
hidden, like something ever more about to be, in every wood
and stream and under every field. .And because they saw
this, the land seemed to be coming to life, and all the old
stories of the Pagans came back to their minds and meant
more than the Pagans themselves ever knew: and because
women were also in the landscape, the old Idea of the Lady
came back too. For this is part of the Landlord's skill,
that when one message had died he brings it to life again
in the heart of the next. (pp. 201-202)

JOhn's last fear is that his island may not have come from the
Landlord, since it seems all at odds with the Rules which the Landlord
has promulgated. Father History replies that JOhn has proved that the
picture came from the Landlord merely by living. Angular (Eliot,
Anglo-Catholicism) would say that it did not; but Angular had not lived
with it. He had only thought about it; but thn's life has proved the
origin because JOhn has sought the object of desire in everything in
this world and has found that "this desire is the perilous siege in
which only One can sit." (p. 20%)

I have said that The Pilgrim's Regress raised be to a universal

 

level. In a later edition of the book, Iewis added marginal comments

to help the allegory along. One reads: "There was a really Divine
Element in John's Romanticism" (3rd ed., p. 151); and another, "Even
Pagan mythology contained a Divine call." (p. 153) We may now fairly
expand this to read that many things, romantic longing and pagan myth
included among them, are sent by God to arouse in man that Desire for
‘the wholly other which is Himself. Sehnsucht, the mountains of the moon,

Des Ferne--all this is God-directed, a pulley (to use Herbert's phrase)

95

meant to haul man into Christian heaven. "Man's most persistent dream,"
the momentary and fleeting anguish of knowing somehow that something
is missing, is but an art of the Almighty, a devious means for accom-
plishing His ends, necessarily devious, since the Fall has made His
ends different from ours. Hulme, Lewis notes, has defined romanticism
as spilt religion. Lewis accepts the description. "And I agree that he
who has religion ought not to spill it. But does it follow that he who
finds it spilled should avert his eyes? How if there is a man to whom
those bright drops on the floor are the beginning of a trail which...
will lead him in the end to taste the cup itself?"1h
We may now turn to the creative work which a baptized romantic
imagination will produce, the work of a man who considers romanticism
.to be religion purpoSefully spilled by the creator. Knowing as we do
the influence on Lewis of both Macdonald and Barfield, we should not be
surprised to find that the baptized imagination expresses itself most
characteristically in the creation of myth, or,frequently, in giving
traditional myth new depth and meaning. Romantic imagination baptized
will remain romantic; and what is so romantic as myth? Myth is not
only the ghost of concrete meaning; it is also strange and wonderful
(rather than probable), its settings in the far off, the long ago--its
very origins lost in a nebulous and Opaque past. It is no accident that

Shelley should turn to myth, nor that Keats should spend his brief life

 

lhPreface to the 3rd edition (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1958), p. 11.

96

trying to bring the Greek myths back to life in his poetry. It is no
coincidence that Yeats, like Blake, should invent his own mythology and
so prescind from flat conceptual statement. The "esemplastic" imagina-
tion turns naturally to myth. It is true, of course, that Joyce and
the "classical" Eliot also utilize myth; but in their work myth assumes
partly an ironic function, partly a structural one. The Fisher King

in "The Waste Land" is merely an objective correlative meant to convey
a sense of desolation and barreness; of itself it does not "mean” any

more than the quotation from wagner's Tristan and Isolde or the para-

 

phrase of Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra. The Ulysses myth in
Joyce's novel serves largely as a structure for the wanderings of
Stephen Daedalus, or at the most an ironic contrast between past and
present (parallel to the ironic contrast between the outer travels of
Ulysses and the inner ones of Stephen) of the sort to be found in
Eliot's contrast between Sweeney and Agamemnon in "Sweeney Among the
Nightingales." Myth, for Joyce and Eliot, is merely a way of saying
something utterly other than the myth itself; it serves as a metaphor,
or as an adjunct. But the romantic imagination takes myth seriously.
For Shelley the truth which he is trying to convey is not separable from
his myth of Prometheus, any more than for Melville the truth he is con-
cerned with is separable from the myth of the Titans which concludes
Pierre. The romantic marries his meaning to the myth, as in Faulkner;
Eliot and Joyce's meanings are merely acquainted with it. Yeats does

not merely use Spiritus Mundi in "The Second Coming": the myth i§_the

97

meaning ("How can we tell the dancer from the dance?"). When the ro-
mantic is a Christian, the myth becomes, not merely a vehicle for
conveying a detachable truth which could as well be said another way
but rather a myth married to Christian meaning. It is with this kind
of Christian myth that I mean to deal mostly in the following pages,
for it is in Christian myth that the union of romance and religion is
most obvious.

Lewis has had much to say about myth. We have already seen that
he considers Christianity the culmination of the fragmentary truths
inherent in the pagan myths: that "the myth must have become fact; the
Word, flesh; God, Man."15 He has even created a "myth" to eXplain what
happened to man at the Fall; it is, he says, "an account of what mgy_
2222.2232 the historical fact," and it is "not to be confused with
'myth' in Dr. Niebuhr's sense (i.e., a symbolical representation of
non-historical truth)."16 Elsewhere, he works out a kind of progressive
scale of truth from mythical to historical, though the scale is "ten-
tative and liable to any amount of correction."17 According to this
scale, "the truth first appears in mythical form [Here he presumably
means mythical in the sense of "a symbolical representation of non-
historical truth.:7 and then by a long process of condensing or focus-

sing finally becomes incarnate as History."18 Thus there is a progress

 

15,191, p. 222.

16The Problem gf_Pain (New York, 19h6), p. 6h.

 

17Miracles (New York, 19h7), p. 161.

l8Miracles.

98

from pagan myth to the Old Testament and a further progress from the
Old Testament to the New, the last parts of the Old being scarcely less
historical than the events recorded in the New. Such a progress

involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely mis-

understood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical

illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying

(as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at

its best, a real though unfocpased gleam of divine truth

falling on human imagination.

He adds that the Hebrews, like the pagans, had a mythology; but,
because they were the chosen people, "so their mythology was the chosen
mythology--the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest

"20

sacred truths.... Here again, though Lewis does not mention "ac-

?

commodation,' it looks very much as if what he is saying is that God
grants man as much truth as man can at the moment assimilate in the
form most intelligible to him. The Hebrews were not yet able to com-
prehend full truth about God, what we should call final, literal truth;
thus they were given a mythical explanation, as we tell children that
the gifts come from Santa Claus because they are unable to realize the
concept that love is correlative with giving. Lewis, it will be clear,
is looking at Barfield's evolution of consciousness from the point of
view of God, which is a difficult feat when we consider that, for
Barfield, the evolution of consciousness ig God. Barfield would say
that the Meaning which the Logos was uttering had not yet arrived at

the stage of conceptual thought in human consciousness, and so became

 

19Miracles.

20Miracles.

99

extant as myth. But Lewis, though he has accepted the Barfield view
by his own admission, continues to refer to God as transcendent rather
than immanent. (It seems a curious contradiction. God, for Lewis, is
the Wholly Other; yet the world is in the last resort mental, and our
logic is a participation in the Divine Logos. Perhaps the contradic-
tion is not as basic as it seems to me; perhaps the Hegelian-Christian
God can in some way be said to be both immanent and transcendent, as
in the Christian mystery of the Incarnation. In any case, I am not
aware that Lewis anywhere resolves the question.)21
At any rate, the view that truth evolves slowly from mythical
(that is, symbolical) to historical is understandable. In this view,
as we have seen, the Incarnation becomes myth made fact; Christianity
becomes historical truth, and all pagan fables and philosophies are
seen to be more or less true guesses of the shape of things to come.
Vergil's "Messianic Eclogue" becomes a true guess; the Manichean and
Platonic guess about the evil of matter, a false guess. "Plato might
"22

despise the flesh," Chesterton observed, "but God had not despised it.

And Yeats echoes the change:

Odor of blood when Christ was slain
Makes all Platonic tolerance vagn,
And vain all Doric discipline.

But Lewis sometimes seems to depart from this view, perhaps because it

A7_
21Kathleen Mott thinks that Lewis's monism is superficial, that he
is often "troubled...by the old difficulty of Cartesian dualism." The
Emperor's Clothes (Bloomington, Ind., 1958), p. 259.

22g} Thomas Aquinas (New York, 1933), p. 139.

 

23Second of "Two Songs For A Play."

lOO

assigns to myth a function which is now past and assumes therefore that
myth can be dispensed with. It is difficult to maintain "a respectful
attitude"toward pagan myth if it amounts to little more than a fine
primer, useful for the boy but superceded for the man. Thus he remarks
that "our mytholOgy may be much nearer to literal truth than we sup-
pose."21+ And John, having on the advice of Mother Kirk taken a headlong

dive into_the pool and come up beyond the land of Peccatum Adae, is

 

taught "many mysteries in the earth, and he passes "through many

elements, dying many deaths." (p. 218) According to the scale dis-
cussed above, he should be dealing now (in the Church) with fact, not
myth. But this seems not to be the case. Wisdom tells him that what
he is experiencing must be figurative; and the marginal note reads:
"He comes where Philosophy said no man could come." (3rd ed., p. 171)
But a voice behind him replies:

Child, if you will, it i§_mythology. It is but
truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then
it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom are also myth and
metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what
they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it
should be servant: and it is but of man's inventing. But
this is My inventing, this is the veil under which I have
chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this
end I made your senses and for this end your imagination,
that you might see My face and live. What would you have?
Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele?
Or was there any age in any land when men did not know
that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and
yet living God? (pp. 219-20)

It is easy enough, of course, to speak loosely of Christianity as

 

2"Problem 9£_Pain, p. l2u.

L7

101

the "true" myth, the real story as distinct from all the pagan rumors.
But if truth (like Tennyson's freedom) slowly broadens down from prece-
dent to precedent and becomes in the end historical fact, then to call
Christianity myth is only to muddle matters. I take the above passage
to mean that Christianity (for John hears this after he has returned to
the Church) is a further and higher "accommodation"; or, to put it dif-
ferently, I take it to mean that Christianity is not Truth but only
relative truth, more nearly true than pagan myth and Old Tastament pre-
figuration, but still mythical, still metaphorical. But Christ was not
a myth either in Lewis's scale or in his Christianity; He was not a
prefiguration, not a symbol, but the end and fulfillment of all pre-
figurations and symbols, the myth made incarnate in fact. And a fact
is not a myth, even in a universe which is in the last resort mental.25
I do not mean to carp. Lewis's remarks on the subject of myth were made
over a period of years; as he has said, his views are subject to re-
vision, and obviously a man may change his mind. All that I mean to

point out before I deal with his fictionalized mythology is that he has

no settled view of mythology as it is related to historical Christianity.

 

25Cf. M. C. D'Arcy: "Independently...of Christianity human societies
have been able to separate what is genuine from what is counterfeit, and
the good numen is not just a projection of the unconscious but a happy,
if confused, glimpse of truth. But in Christianity the truth is free
from subjective fancyings; it comes down from above and exercises the
severest control of symbol and image and fantasy; it can be as cold as
ice and as inflexible as the historical fact on which it rests, and it
'beats down upon the soul with all the alien power of an existent truth
which is not a dream." The Mind and Heart g£_love (New York, 1956),
p. 170.

 

102

He advances the notion, for example (in the trilogy), that all myth
may exist as fact somewhere in the universe. The theory may be merely
fanciful, or it may be an gg_hgg_argument for the sake of his planetary
novels.l In any case, it is further evidence that his view of myth and
mythology is indeed "tentative."

But if his mythology is unsystematic, his purpose in using it
as embodiment of Christian truth is clear enough. His novels may be
best described as he described Macdonald's work: "fantasy that hovers
between the allegorical and the mythOpoeic."26 And this kind of fantasy
has an impressive effect on the reader, one that a religious writer may
well utilize. "It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than
our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all
questions are re-opened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than

27

we are for most of our lives." In the novels, then, we see a pro-
fessed Christian turning to romantic fantasy and myth with a serious
purpose, uniting (as I hOpe to show) the religion with the myth so that
the eternal good news of Christianity comes to the reader with an imag-
inative shock, comes to him, in fact, as romance. Lewis's remark on
Christian literature is here apprOpriate, though he would be the last
to claim such praise for his own work.
When Christian work is done on a serious subject there is

no gravity and no sublimity it cannot attain. But they
will belong to the theme. That is why they will be real

 

26Preface to George Macdonald, én_Anthology, p. 1h.

 

27Preface to George Macdonald, 53 Anthology, pp. 16-17.

 

103

and lasting--mighty nouns with which literature, an ad-
jectival thing, is here united, far over-tOpping the
fussy and ridiculous claims of litggature that tries to
be important simply as literature.

We may begin with Till H§_Have Faces, which is last in the order

 

of publication but first in the sense that it deals with the end of
paganism and is in fact a kind of preamble to Lewis's mythical version
of Christianity. The book is "A Myth Retold," that of Cupid and Psyche.
The only extant source of the original myth is the second century IE2

Transformations g£_Lucius Apuleius g£_Madaura or, as it has come to be

 

 

known, The Golden Ass 9£_Apuleius. In Apuleius's book, the story is

 

'told by an old woman to a young girl being held prisoner in a cave by

a band of brigands. It is often taken as an "allegory of the progress

"29

of the rational soul towards intellectual love, though in The Golden

 

§§§_it seems to have only a tenuous connection with Apuleius's conver-
sion to a mystery religion. Listening to it in his asinine form, he
remarks merely that it is a "beautiful story."3O
Briefly, the story of the myth as it appears in Apuleius is as
follows. Cupid has the west wind carry off Psyche, the youngest of a
certain king's three daughters, to a secluded place. There he visits

her bed only by darkness so that she never sees his face. Under the

urging of her jealous sisters, she lights a lamp one night as he sleeps,

 

28"Christianity and Literature" in Rehabilitations, P- 196'

 

29Robert Graves, Introduction to The Golden Ass 9£_Apuleius (New
York, l95h), p. xvi.

 

3oGraves translation, p. 130.

lot

a drOp of hot oil splashes on his shoulder, and he vanishes. Venus,
vexed that her son should marry a human, apprehends Psyche, flogs her,
and sets her various tasks to do. She must sort out a huge quantity

of different kinds of seeds; in this an army of ants helps her. She
must then fetch Venus a hank of wool from the sides of the golden sheep
of the gods. She contemplates suicide but is dissuaded by a reed,

which also tells her to wait till the sheep are asleep and then pluck
the wool. She follows its advice. Venus then orders her to climb the
mountain Aroanius and bring back a jar of water from a stream at the
'place where the stream begins from the rock. She cannot cross the
River Styx and pass the dragons to reach the stream, but an eagle takes
her jar and fills it for her. Enraged, Venus orders her to descend

into the underworld of Tartarus, go the palace of Pluto, and bring

back a box containing a small bit of the beauty of Queen Proserpine.

A tower dissuades her again from suicide and tells her to go to the
city of Taenarus, where she will find an entrance to the underworld.

She must carry with her two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water
and two coins in her mouth. She is to pass by a lame ass and its lame
driver when the driver asks for her help. When she reaches the river
of the dead, she is to let Charon take a coin from her mouth as his fee.
On the ferry she will look into the water and see the corpse of an old
man which will raise his hand imploringly, but she must feel no pity
for him. Again ashore, she will meet three women weaving cloth who will

ask for help, but she is forbidden to touch the cloth. All of these

lOS

apparitions,says the tower, are traps set by Venus to make her relin-
quish her barley bread, the loss of which will keep her forever in the
underworld. The bread she must feed to Cerberus, one piece as she
enters Pluto's palace and one as she leaves. While she is there she
will be offered sumptuous fare, but she must decline it, sit on the
ground and eat only bread. 0n the way back she must give her second
coin to Charon; and she must not open the box containing divine beauty.
All this is fulfilled; but when she returns to the upper world she can-
not resist opening the box, whereupon she falls into a deep sleep. She
is rescued by Cupid, who pleads their marital cause before Jupiter.
They are married with all godly ceremony and Psyche bears Cupid a
daughter named Pleasure (Voluptas).

Now Lewis's retelling of this myth is anything but simple, and as
a result the book has been much misunderstood. Lewis has remarked that

31

he "felt quite free to go behind Apuleius," because he considers that
hpuleius is the transmitter of the story and not its inventor. Apul-
eius's story "in relation to my work...is a 'source', not an 'influence'
or a 'model'." (p. 313) Of course, what is "behind" Apuleius is not a
version of the myth at all but only the material (what Barfield would
call the "undifferentiated meaning") out of which Apuleius's late

version has been fashioned. What Lewis is trying to do in the book is to

 

31T111 113 Have Faces (New York, 1956), p. 313. In the following
discussion page references to this book will be in the text.

 

106

recreate the ancient consciousness which saw a part of reality in terms
of the myth; and such a consciousness is a good deal older and more
naive than the consciousness of the man who wrote it down in the second
century after Christ. Or, to revert to Barfield once more, the mind
perceiving reality in terms of myth is not nearly so conscious of it-
self. What we have in the novel is a picture of man just beginning the

last phase of Steiner's "flight from nature, attaining to self-
.consciousness and thereby acquiring the corollary of self-consciousness,
the conceptual intellect. When once it is recalled that primitive man
did not, for centuries, see himself as distinct from nature, and there-
fore was not rational and therefore was not Man in the usual sense of
the word, than much of what seems puzzling about the story becomes
clear.

The story is told in the form of a complaint to the gods by
Psyche's oldest sister, Orual. She has written down her version of the
Psyche story as a vindication of herself and an accusation against the
gods. The three daughters of the king of Glome (which is vaguely to
the east and north of Greece and, in time, somewhere between Aristotle
and the historical Incarnation) are tutored by a captured Greek ration-
alist named the Fox. The kingdom worships a goddess called Ungit under
the appearance of a great shapeless mass of stone in a misshapen stone
temple. But the Fox has taught Orual and Psyche (the third sister,

Redival, is too stupid to care) to treat Ungit in the new Greek ration-

alist fashion, to debunk her in fact. The Fox equates Ungit with the

107

Greek Aphrodite: both are merely lies of poets. The land becomes bar-
ren, and the high priest of Ungit tells the king that a sacrifice is
required. Because of Psyche's beauty and goodness, rumor has gone
about that she can cure ills by touch, can impart beauty to others,
can, in short, diSpense favors like a goddess. The priest fixes on
Psyche for her supposed blasphemy and demands that she be given to the
god of the Grey Mountain, who is also called the Shadowbrute.

All the Fox's rational admonishment cannot persuade the king to
save Psyche, for the king believes the priest when the priest tells him
that "the Brute is, in a mystery, Ungit herself or Ungit's son, the
god of the Mountain; or both." (p. h8) The victim must be tied to a
tree atop the mountain and left for the Brute. To the Fox's assertion
that the priest is calling Psyche the best and the worst of the land
at the same time, and so contradicting himself, the priest replies that
he has dealt with the gods for three generations and knows that

...they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another

like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly

can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places.

It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we

get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water,

but thick and dark like blood. Why should the Accursed not

be both the best and the worst? (p. #9)

Psyche herself partly believes the Fox, partly the priest. She
concludes finally that the Fox has not all the truth, that there is
much in what the priest says. She then reveals to Orual that, as long

as she can remember, she has had a longing for death. In fact, what

she felt was something very close to the sehnsucht, the vision of the

108

island, already discussed. She would look across the valley at the

mountain:

And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always

longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Every-

thing seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't

(not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to.

It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the

other birds are flying home. (p. 7h)

Ultimately she convinces herself that she has always longed for the god '
of the mountain, and goes happily to the sacrifice.

Weeks later Orual and Bardia (the commander of the palace guard)
journey up the Grey Mountain to see if there are any remains to be
buried. They are dismayed to find Psyche alive and looking like a god-
dess. She tells Orual her story. She was lifted out of her chains by
West-wind--not an it, he, Looking on him, she was ashamed of being a
mortal. He carried her to the god's palace, where spirits bathed and
fed her. Later the god came to her in the darkness. As she tells
Orual this, she leads her into the palace. But Orual cannot see the
palace, only trees; she cannot taste the wine Psyche gives her, only
water. She thinks Psyche either hoaxed by some lecherous monster or
simply mad. Psyche in turn is heartbroken that Orual cannot see what
she herself sees; there is "a rasping together of two worlds, like the
two bits of a broken bone." (p. 120)

Camped across the stream from Psyche's palace, Orual sees (or
thinks she sees) the palace for a moment, but it fades into swirls of

fog. Bardia voices what would be the belief of all Glome when she asks

him what he thinks has happened:

109

The god and the Shadowbrute were all one. She had been

given to it. We had got our rain and water....The gods,

for their share, had got her away to their secret places

where something, so foul it would not show itself, some

holy and sickening thing, ghostly or demonlike or bes-

tial--or all three (there's no telling, with gods)--

enjoyed her at its will. (p. 137)

Orual goes back to Glome and hears the whole thing explained away by
the Fox. She prays to the gods dg_profundis, but receives no answer.
She returns to the mountain and threatens to commit suicide unless
Psyche will light the lamp and look on her lover. Psyche sadly agrees,
asserting that Orual's love differs little from hatred.

Orual crouches beside the stream that night, looking into the
blackness. A light glints; there is a shout of golden sound, then the
noise of Psyche's sobs., Amid thunder and lightning the bright man-like
figure of the god stands before Orual, and she feels that she has
always known that Psyche's lover was a god, that she has been wilfully
and hatefully blind. The god speaks to her:

Now Psyche goes out in exile. New she must hunger and

thirst and tread hard roads. Those against whom I can-

not fight must do their will upon her. You, woman, shall
know yourself and your work. You also shall be Psyche.

(pp- 173-7“)

In time, Orual becomes queen of Glome. Ten or fifteen years
later she takes a trip to neighboring Essuria, where she comes on a
little roadside temple. The priest tells her that it is a temple of the
new goddess Istra (Psyche). When she questions him about Istra, he
tells her the whole story of Cupid and Psyche much as it appears in

Apuleius: both sisters went to the palace, both saw it, both were

llO

jealous. It is then that Orual determines to write her book, her accu-
sation against the gods; for she of all peOple knows that the story the
gods have implanted in human imagination is false.

I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will

neither...go away and leave us to live our own short days

to ourselves, nor will they show themselves Openly and tell

us what they would have us do. For that too would be en-

durable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams

and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as

seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide

back and whiSper (words we cannot understand) in our ears

when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one

what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-

mouse play...? Why must holy places be dark places? (p. 2h9)

In spite of her hatred of the gods, Orual cannot fail to perceive
that the simple people of Glome derive comfort from Ungit. Soon both
her waking and sleeping consciousness become obsessed with Ungit: in
what seems to be a dream she replies to her dead father's question, "I
am Ungit." (p. 276) After that she can no longer tell dream from
reality, and in fact is half-convinced that there is no essential dif-
ference. She goes to a riverbank, intending to drown herself, but a
god's voice tells her that she cannot escape Ungit by going to the dead-
lands; Ungit is there also. "Die before you die," he tells her; "there
is no chance after." (p. 279) She concludes that the god means some—
thing like the Eleusinian mysteries in which an initiate is said to
die in evil in order to live in good. And then she remembers her
Socrates, his saying "that true wisdom is the skill and practice of

death." (p. 281) She sets out to lead the true Socratic, examined

life, but fails miserably.

111

Then in another dream she sees the golden-fleeced sheep of the
gods. As she goes forward to pluck their wool they turn and trample
her. When she recovers, she sees another woman calmly picking the
shreds of wool from the thickets which the rams have rushed past in
their onslaught on Orual. Orual now despairs "of ever ceasing to be
Ungit." (p. 28h) She comforts herself with the thought that at least
she has loved Psyche truly; but then, in a vision, she finds herself
walking over desert sands, carrying an empty bowl. In this vision she
is Ungit's prisoner and must bring back the water of death from the
Spring that rises in the deadlands. An eagle from the gods comes to
her, but on finding that she is Orual refuses to help her. She discov-
ers that the bowl has become her book, her complaint against the gods.
She is taken to a vast cave and placed on a promontory before the end-
less masses of the dead. Her complaint is to be heard.

She is stripped naked. "The old crone with her Ungit face stood
naked before those countless gazers. No thread to cover me, no bowl in
my hand to hold the water of death; only my book." (p. 289) Orual
reads out her harangue: the gods have stolen Psyche from her, have made
Psyche different from what she was and from what Orual wanted her to be.
"We want to be our own," (p. 291) she tells them. As she reads she
becomes aware that she is confessing her real selfishness and cruel
love, that she is at last speaking in her real voice. The judge asks if
she has been answered. She replies that she has been: "The complaint

was the answer." (p. 29h) She has said what has been buried in her soul

112

for years but which she has never been able to say, the word that has
revealed her to herself as a responsible being. "I saw well why the
gods do not Speak to us Openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can
be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we
mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" (p. 29h)
The shade of the Fox reveals that his easy Greek rationalism is
too shallow to hold the truth about the gods. He has taught her to
think of the gods as lies of poets and false images; he should have
taught her that they are "too true an image of the demon within." (p.
295) He has learned since death that the way to the gods is not
through rationalism but through something much more like the Ungit
worship. "The Priest knew at least that there must be sacrifices.
They will have sacrifice--will have man." (p. 295) The Fox takes Orual
to a chamber where the walls are covered with paintings that come alive
and move. She sees Psyche at the riverbank, contemplating suicide;
she sees Psyche, helped by ants, sorting out the seeds; she sees Psyche
taking the rams' wool at her leisure as the rams trample down an in-
truder. She sees Psyche in the desert with herself as Psyche's shadow;
the eagle comes and fills Psyche's bowl for her with the water of
death. The Fox tells her that much of Psyche's anguish she has her-

self born. "We're all limbs and parts of one Whole,"

says the Fox.
"Hence, of each other. Men, and gods, flow in and out and mingle."
(pp: 300-301) Orual bore the anguish, but Psyche achieved the tasks.

They look at the last picture. It is of Psyche descending to the

113

deadlands to perform the last of Ungit's tasks. Orual asks if there
is a real Ungit. The Fox replies:
All, even Psyche, are born into the house of Ungit. All
must get free from her. Or say that Ungit in each must
bear Ungit's son and die in childbed--or change. And now
Psyche must go down into the deadlands to get beauty in a
casket from the Queen of the Deadlands, from death herself;
and bring it back to give to Ungit so that Ungit will be-
come beautiful. (p. 301)
But Psyche must speak to no one on her journey or all is lost. First
she meets a crowd of people from Glome who ask her to be their prin-
cess and oracle; she continues on without speaking. She meets the
Fox, who tries to rationalize her out of her task; she ignores him.
Finally she meets Orual, who tries to persuade her to come back to
their old world; Psyche is much moved but goes on, unspeaking. All
things in these pictures are true, the Fox tells Orual; she and the
Fox really have done those things.
She had no more dangerous enemies than us. And in that
far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or
we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this
will happen more and more. For mortals...wi11 become more
and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend
will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with
the Divine Nature. (p. 30h)
When Orual asks how the gods will become beautiful, the Fox replies
that he knows little of it, even though he is dead; but he does know
that the age in which they live "will one day be the distant past.
And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true
form." (p. 305)

Psyche returns with the casket and gives it to Orual, to make

114

Ungit beautiful. Orual sees that Psyche is radiant, like a goddess;

but then she concludes that she has simply never seen a real woman be-
fore. The god comes to judge Orual; she stands hand in hand with Psyche
beside a pool in a pillared court.

I was being unmade. I was no one...rather, Psyche her-
self was, in a manner, no one. I loved her as I would
once have thought it impossible to love, would have died
any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she
that really counted. Or if she counted...it was for an-
other's sake. The earth and stars and stars and sun, all
that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was
coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only
dread and beauty there is, was coming. (p. 307)

She looks down into the water at her feet; she cannot tell which re-
flection is hers and which Psyche's: both are beautiful. The voice
of the god says again, "You also are Psyche." (p. 308) Orual wakes

from her vision to find herself in her garden, her book Open before

her. Her book concludes with her death:

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are your-
self the answer. Before your face questions die away.
What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to
be led out to battle against other words. Long did I
hate you, long did I fear you. I might-- (p. 308)

The book, as I have said, has been much misunderstood. One cri-

tic has called it religious allegory which is "plain to read, relig-

ious allegory "in which the great gulf between faith and skepticism

yawns wide, in which rationalism is shown to be blind when it stands on the

"32

threshold of revelation.... And another critic comments, "This is not

 

3213. R. Redmen, "Love Was the Weapon," fl, xxxx (Jan. 12, 1957),
15.

115

"33 The truth is

allegory; call it symbolism and forsake quibbling.
rather that the book is exactly what the title says it is, a myth re-
told; and a myth retold remains a myth, not an allegory, not symbolism;
it remains the kind Of truth "which must be grasped with the imagina-
tion, not with the intellect."3" lewis has, as he says, gone behind
the story as Apuleius recorded it; he has gone behind Apuleius' neat
allegory, which is a late and rational redaction Of the myth, to deal
with Barfield's concrete meaning, Of which the myth itself is merely
the ghost. The story is a myth retold, but it is not the Apuleius
story retold; we may say, in fact, in terms of the origin of the
Cupid-Psyche myth, that Lewis's version comes first and is a Source
for Apuleius's version. For Iewis's version is an attempt to present
the almost unindividuated meaning itself out Of which myth, allegory
and symbol may later be extracted. It is an attempt to present pure
aboriginal meaning in which, as potency, all later meanings reside.
If this is the case, it follows that the Lewis story ought to have
the density and Opacity of Barfield's ancient unity of meaning; and in
fact it has these qualities: they comprise the critics' difficulties
of interpretation.

The major Obstacle that the reader encounters in the book is

'the temptation to accept the characters Of the book as "real" characters,

33T. F. Curley, "Myth into NOvel," Commonweal, LXV (FEb- 8, 1957):

 

1+95.

3"§gg§g§§, preface to 3rd edition, p. 13.

116

people who have a life Of their own on the story level although they
may "stand for" something else on another level. In short, the tempta-
tion is to read the book as an allegory Of the sort to be found in The

Faerie Queene, in which Archimago, for example, has a story life and

 

a symbolic meaning as well. But Psyche and Orual become one, or are
discovered to have been one all along: this is incomprehensible on
the story level unless we assume that Psyche was literally taken up by
Westdwind and that Orual, in the end, is simply suffering from anile
hallucinations. The truth is that Orual and Psyche are not "real" per-
sons but rather adumbrations of real persons. They have a modicum of
individuality and objectivity, but they have not become fixed and per-
manent. They hover between symbolic existence and fictional reality
because the world they live in hovers between potential and actual
existence. It is a dream and nightmare world, an early phase of a
world which is in the last resort mental. Men and gods mingle and flow
in and out of each other, as the Fbx says. Nothing is fixed yet, nothing
has assumed its final form. The matter of the myth is the last fluctua-
tion of a world which has been in a state Of flux since the beginning
and is only to assume its final shape at some time soon after the story
itself takes place.

None of the people in the story, then, has received the stamp Of
finality; none may truly be said to be Men. As Barfield said of the
ancients who practised original participation, they are all of them

dreamers and unfree. They are (and also stand for) the penultimate stage

117

in the evolution of man. "We're all limbs and parts of one Whole,"
says the Fox; in Barfield's terms, what the Fox means is that all are
aspects of the Idea of Man being progressively thought out be the Io-
gos. All the characters in the book are subject to a revision of the
pattern; they are malleable, they have not hardened yet; they are, as
the title suggests, without individuality, without faces, the molten
lead not yet poured into the mould. All the elements have been col-
lected but are not as yet fused by the final creative act of the Word.
In this sense, Psyche stands for, or is, the last creative touch of

digitus Dei, the last ingredient necessary in the makeup of Man. .All

 

else has been present for centuries: rationality (the Greek rational-
ism of the Fox transferred to the passionate and naturally loving
nature Of Orual), the capacity to apprehend the numinous (shown in

the priest and people of Glome), the very felt need of religion. The
only thing lacking is what Psyche has always felt: the longing, the
desire for what she can only call death, the wanting to be both with
God and in another world. It is no accident that the closer toward
union that Psyche and Orual come, the more dissatisfied Orual is with
pagan polytheism and the more she feels that her faults lie not in her
stars but in herself. Her complaint is against the gods; when she
mingles with Psyche, Ungitbecomes beautifu1--the nightmare gods become
"you" and "Lord." Man is finally created when human consciousness is
capable of not only human love, rationality, apprehension of the numin-

ous and need of religious solace, but when it is capable of an intense

ll8

otherworldly religious desire which can only be comforted in mono-
theism.35

There is in the book what Barfield calls the "pervasive meaning"
of myth. The meaning is one which fuses death and birth and life, the
twilight of the gods and the birth of God: Orual, the level of con-
sciousness which perceives the fragmentary truth of God as Ungit, and
perceives that man makes his own gods, must die so that the Ungit in
man's consciousness may die and so become beautiful in the concept of
One God. We might say that the pervasive meaning is growth: contin-
uous life sloughing off old forms and attaining to new ones. The pro-
cess of growth is occurring in the consciousness of western man, and
the process culminates in the union Of ancient religious feeling with
the concept of a single, transcendent and loving God.

Now if my imagination has grasped the myth rightly, or approxi-

mately so, certain interesting implications follow. I have said that

the time of the story is roughly between Aristotle (whose Metaphysics

 

Orual studies with the Fox) and the historical Incarnation. If this

is the case, and if the myth suggests (as I think it does) that man is

 

3SOrual and Psyche are also understandable as rough equivalents of
the two principles of existence in the human make-up which D'Arcy calls
animus and anima: animus, the egotistical, intellectual drive analogous
to Aristotle's and Aquinas's "act"; and anima, the self-effacing, non-
intellectual, passive desire analogous to "potency." These two drives
are reminiscent of Barfield's terms Do and Suffer (poiein and aschein),
those "principles" of Aristotle's nous whose proper names (we recall)
may well be Sun and Moon.

 

119

not really man until a certain religious consciousness has been reached,
then man arrived at his final stage of evolution (and became really men)
only at about the time of Christ. Or if that is too sweeping, then at
least western man arrived at manhood at about that historical period.
Before that time what we think of as western man was really what we
should call western pre-man, or, as the myth suggests, a shadow and
dream of western Man-to-come (in Barfield's terms, the slow clarifica-
tion of the Idea 322.1“ the logos). From this point of view, the ancients
are relegated indeed to a limbo, are indeed little more than the shades
in Homer's Hades, little bats' voices twittering and squeaking in the
shadows of the underworld, potency in the mind of the world on its way
to becoming act. Their existence was one of seed or sapling, an exis-
tence not so much extinguished as fused with the later, and final, stage
of growth. Further, from this point of view, the Incarnation (and con-
sequent return of the possibility of salvation) occurred as soon as it
could, as soon as man was created, or re-created, after the Fall. There
is no necessity of making the effects of the Ihcarnation retroactive to
include the ancient pagans (which is Barfield's objection to Williams's
theology), for the ancient pagans of a mental world are Man's youth
subsumed in the grown Man. Lewis's myth of the Fall is relevant here.
According to the myth (in the sense of what may have been historical
fact), man, as a result of the Fall, lost "status as a species. What

"36

man lost by the Fall was his Original specific nature. He had been

 

36Problem 9.11 Pain, p. 70.

120
originally "all consciousness";37 all of his physical functions were
under the direction of his will, as were his appetites. With the Fall,
"rational consciousness became what it now is--a fitful spotlight rest-

38

ing on a small part of the cerebral motions." If I read the myth

of the later book rightly, and if I may presume to stretch Lewis's
tentative theories of mythology, then what may have happened at the
Fall was that man lost all_consciousness, so became no longer man, and
then was (so to say) re-created over aeons as consciousness returned
slowly by stages of evolution. This view postulates a hiatus between
the Fall and the Incarnation if we regard both events as historical oc-
currences, as Lewis presumably does; there must have been an indeter-
minate time when men, morally speaking, did not exist, the time coming
to an end at the Incarnation. But a lapse of mere "profane time"39 is
of relatively little importance in an ultimately mental world."0 And

the necessity and the effects of the Incarnation remain the same; as

soon as man is re-created he is in the state of original sin and needs

 

37Problem 9.1T. Pain, p. 65.
38Problem 9£_Pain, p. 71

39The term is Mercia Eliade's coinage; see Cosmos and History (New

York, 1959), Po 35-

 

"OCharles Williams often toys with this idea, as in his remark
about the end of the Grail Quest. JOseph of Arimathie says mass in
Sarras; then a bishop, surrounded by angels, says a Mass of Our Lady
--a bishOp who may be Christ. Williams comments that even Malory's
version suggests "that at that moment something like the Creation and
the Redemption exist at once." "Malory and the Grail legend," Image
9; the Gig and Other; Essays (london, 1958), pp. 193-9h.

 

121

redemption. Orual stumbles onto her own responsibility, the fact that
she has sinned--and immediately arrives at the awareness of a single,
awing God.

In any case, the myth is, as I have said, the preamble to
Lewis's mythopoeic Christianity. I have said that the pervasive mean-
ing that informs the myth is growth, which means both decay and birth.

An air of Die Gotterdamerung hangs over the whole story. The rising

 

rationalism, the coming of the conceptual intellect of which the Fox is
symbolic (or which the Fox is a part of) is driving the gods into the
limbo of abstractions where they will have their only existence for the

Roman empire to come."1

And parallel with the death of the gods is the
changing concept of religious sacrifice: both the death and the change
point toward something new, something about to be. The gods, says the
Fox, will have sacrifice, will have man--in the wisdom of death per-
ceiving that even pagan polytheism is closer to the truth than mere
rationalism. Psyche and Orual share the burden of arriving at the new
stage of humanity; they are phantoms who sacrifice (or as Williams
would say, substitute) for each other. The consciousness of man is
shaping itself toward, becoming capable of perceiving, the great and

unique sacrifice that is to come to it, the Incarnation. In this sense

the myth is a rumor; it is "a symbolical representation of non-historical

 

"lLewis discusses this in detail in the chapter on allegory in
Allegory gf_love, the chapter already referred to as being indebted to
Barfield.

122

truth." It is truth on its way from symbolic to historical: truth
that will soon become fact at Bethlehem in "the uncontrollable mystery
on the bestial flOor."

From the preamble we may turn to the current stage of Christian-
ity as it appears to the mythOpoeic imagination, to what Lewis refers
to as his "planetary romances." They owe much to the science fiction
of Wells and his followers; they also owe much to the urbane and allu-
sive school of thrillers or "entertainments" headed by Michael Innes.
But they may most profitably be seen as attempts to do what Macdonald
had done, to Christianize romance. They are attempts to throw over
esoteric landscapes the holy light of JOy. The overall "conceit" of
the trilogy is of battle; the books present a crucial moment in the
life of humanity, part of a scene from the cosmic play that Aquinas
called a purposeful drama. At the risk of tedium I give the stories
in some detail since, for my purposes, not only the bare plot but the
settings and (above all) Lewis's attitude toward both settings and
characters are of prime importance.

The first book of the trilogy, Out gf_the Silent Planet, begins

 

when Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a walking tour of the
Midlands, accidentally comes on an Old farm house which has been con-
verted into some sort of laboratory by a famous physicist named Weston
and his partner Devine. Devine discovers that no one knows Ransom's
whereabouts, that no one will be surprised if he does not turn up at

a given time, that he has for family only a married sister in India.

123

Ransom is then drugged and awakes aboard a space ship bound for the
planet Malacandra, a planet which Weston refuses to further identify
except to say that he and Devine have been there before. Ransom has
been brought along on orders that Weston and Devine have received on
Malacandra. All that Weston will divulge is that he is working for
the good of the human race, not that of the individual, and he holds
that Ransom should willingly sacrifice himself (as he himself would) if
the necessity arises. Ransom replies hotly that to work for the race
instead of the individual is "raving lunacy.""2

In spite of having been kidnapped, Ransom feels thrilled and
exhilarated as the ship soars through the sun-drenched heavens, through
the Space which he had always supposed vaguely to be dark and cold.
Now, he reflects,

the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this

empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could

not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it

every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out

of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He

had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of

worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down

nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes--and here,

with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older

thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the

heavens. (p. 29)

But one day toward the end of the month-long trip he overhears a con-

versation between Devine and Weston which leads him to believe he is

 

"ZOut gf_the Silent Planet (New York, l9h3), p. 23. Further page
references to this book will be in the text.

 

12h

going to be handed over to Malacandrian creatures called sggns as a
sacrifice. His imagination full of Wellsian monsters, he hides a
kitchen knife from his captors and plans to make a run for it when they
land, preferring, if necessary, suicide to immolation.

They arrive on Malacandra, and Ransom finds it to be "a bright,
pale world--a water-colour world out of a child's paint-box," (p. #0)
with air cold and thin as on an English winter morning. They encamp
beside a small lake and presently he sees six "long, streaky, white
reflections motionless in the running water." (p. hh) He looks up to
the things themselves--which he is sure are the sorns--and sees "spindly
and flimsy things, twice or three times the height of a man." (p. hh)
Weston and Devine begin to drag him into the water toward the sorns,
but a great fish comes streaking toward the trio and in the confusion
Ransom breaks loose and flees into the forest.

Running himself into near exhaustion, he finally slows to a walk
and begins to observe the character of the country he is passing through.
The ridges and gullies are very steep, the hummocks of earth are very
narrow, small at the base and narrow at the top. He recalls that the
waves on the lake had the same shape, and, looking up at the leaves,
he sees "the same theme of perpendicularity--the same rush to the sky
....” (p. h?) He concludes that he is in a world that is lighter than
earth, where "nature was set free to follow her skyward impulse on a
superterrestrial scale." (p. h7) Even the mountains that he sees in

the distance seem to rise to needle-sharp points. He sleeps that night

125

in the forest; next day he sights a sorn and flees headlong again. He
comes to the edge of a vast lake and throws himself down on its edge
to drink. Suddenly, ten yards away from him, there is a disturbance
in the water,

and a round, shining, black thing like a cannon-ball

came into sight. Then he saw eyes and mouth--a puffing

mouth bearded with bubbles. More of the thing came up

out of the water. It was gleaming black. Finally it

splashed and wallowed to the shore and rose, steaming,

on its hind 1egs--six or seven feet high and too thin

for its height, like everything else in Malacandra. It

had a coat of thick black.hair, lucid as seal-skin, very

short legs with webbed feet, a broad beaver-like or

fish-like tail, strong fore-limbs with webbed claws or

fingers....It was something like a penguin, something

like an otter, something like a seal; the slenderness
and flexibility of the body suggested a giant stoat.

(p. 514)

The animal begins to make noises, and Ransom realizes that it is
speaking. For a moment he forgets to be afraid and Speculates wildly
on the discovery of non-human speech. "The very form of language it-
self, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his
hands." (p. 55) The creature sees him and they make tentative overtures
to each other. The creature is called, Ransom discovers, a hgogs. They
become friendly and Ransom learns a few basic Malacandrian words:
handra (earth), handramit (a crevice in the earth). The hross gives
him food. Ransom discovers that he panics when he tries to think of the
hross as a man but can accept him quite easily as a beautiful animal
‘with all the qualities that make'animals attractive and, additionally,

"as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true,

the charm of speech and reason." (p. 59)

126

They get into the hross's boat and paddle across the lake to the
hross's home, a great handramit near the equator of the planet. Ransom
lives among the hrossa (plural) for several weeks, learning the Mala-
candrian language. He discovers that the hrossa eat only fish and.
vegetables, that they farm in some sort of communal system, that they
have evening songfests and are accomplished in oral poetry. As his
command of the language increases, he tells them that he comes from
earth. One evening they point out the earth and tell him that it is
called Thulcandra, which means "the silent world or planet." When he
asks why it has this name, they cannot tell him; but, they say, the
seroni (umlauted plural of soap) would know. He tells them of the
"bent" men who brought him to Malacandra and they advise him to go to
Oyarsa, who will protect him. He questions them about Oyarsa and dis-
covers that Oyarsa "(1) lived at Meldilorn; (2) knew everything and
ruled everyone; (3) had always been there; and (h) was not a BEQEEJ
nor one of the seroni." (p. 70) He asks them if Oyarsa made the world.
They answer that Maledil the Young made the world and is still the
ruler of it. When he asks where Maledil lives, they reply that he
lives with the "Old One." (p. 70)

Upon further questioning it becomes clear that Maledil is "a
Spirit without body, parts or passions." (p. 70) He is not a 22225
hrossa are hnau, as are men, seroni and pfifltriggi (the frog-like
rational creatures who are the Malacandrian artists, goldsmiths and

artisans). When Ransom asks which of the three species rules, the hrossa

127

say simply that Oyarsa rules. He asks if Oyarsa is hnau. The question
puzzles them. If he is hnau, then he is a different kind of hnau, for
he does not die and has no young. They advise him again to ask the
seroni, who know nothing about fishing or boating and who cannot make
poetry but who are clever at astronomy and at interpreting the words

of Oyarsa.

He discovers that there are also on Malacandra beings called
eldila, messengers from Oyarsa who are nearly invisible to him, mere
glints of light. As Ransom and the hrossa are preparing for a great
fish hunt (they are going to try to kill the deadly hnakra), an eldil
comes to their boat and tells them that Ransom must be taken to Oyarsa.
First they kill the hnakra in a fight in which Ransom plays a mildly
heroic part. Afterwards they celebrate their victory ashore, and the
'fight and celebration mark a point in Ransom's otherworldly education.

It did not now seem strange to him to be clasped to a

breast of wet fur....He was one with them. That diffi-

culty which they, accustomed to more than one rational

species, had perhaps never felt, was now overcome. They

were all hpgg, (p. 85)

But in the midst of their joy a rifle bullet drops Hyoi (Ransom's orig-
inal friend among the hrossa) and he dies in Ransom's arms. Realizing
that they have been sighted by Weston and Devine, Ransom receives
hurried instructions on how to get to Oyarsa and immediately sets out.

He must leave the handramit and begin the ascent of the mountains, reach

the harandra (high land) and find the temple of Augray, who will help

128

him on his way.

He labors up the mountain into a region of intense cold and
atmospheric rarity. The Malacandrian atmosphere lies almost completely
in the handramits; the surface of the planet contains almost no air.

At nightfall he comes finally to a fire-lit cavern and finds that he
has delivered himself up to his most dreaded fear--the sorn. But the
sorn reveals himself to be friendly (in fact, Ransom's fear of the
seroni turns out to have been completely unfounded); he feeds Ransom
and gives him oxygen from a device planned by the seroni but constructed
by the pfifltriggi. As they sit in the warm cavern that night, the
sorn explains to Ransom many things about Oyarsa and the eldila that
the hrossa could only guess at. Oyarsa is the greatest of the eldila
and was put on Malacandra to rule it when the planet was made. Eldila,
says the sorn, though nearly invisible to Ransom, have bodies, but he
does not explain their bodies in terms of terrestrial solids, liquids,
and gases.

Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell some-

thing; if at another, you hear a sound; if at another,

you see a sight; if at another, you neither hear nor see

nor smell, nor know the body in any way. (pp. 100-101)

The faster the movement, he tells Ransom, the more nearly a thing is in
two places at once. If the speed were increased tremendously, finally
the thing would be in all places at once. That is "the thing at the

tOp of all bodies--so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it

has ceased being body at all." (p. 101) The swiftest thing that touches

129

our senses, says the sorn, is light. But we "do not truly see light,

we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the
edge-~the last thing we know before things become too swift for us."

(p. 101) Eldilic bodies are movements swift as light--that is, what
light is for us. What is light for an eldil is a movement so swift that
for us it is nothing at all. What we call light

is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing
he can touch and bathe in....And what we call firm
things--flesh and earth--seem to him thinner, and hard-
er to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and
nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half—real
body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself
he goes through them because he is solid and firm and
they are like cloud. And what is true light to him and
fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays
of the sun to refresh himself fromh§t, is to us the
black nothing in the sky at night.

 

Ransom, reflecting on all this, recalls "the recurrent human tradition

of bright, elusive people sometimes appearing on earth--albs, devas

 

and the like...." (p. 102) They may have been eldila; the anthropolo-
gists may be all wrong; the world may be much different than we have
thought.

The next day Augray takes Ransom on his shoulders and they jour-
ney over the cold harandras toward Meldilorn. They spend the night at a
sorn cavern, where Ransom (like Gulliver) is questioned much about the

earth. He discovers that earth is called Thulcandra (the silent planet)

 

"3?. 101. In The Great Divorce, the people in heaven are called
"the solid people." Those on earth or in hell are shadowy and nebulous.
The implication is that God, as in a Blake painting, is the most solid
and particular of all. .

 

130

because it has no Oyarsa to communicate with the Oyeresu of the other
planets. Next day they travel on, finally descend from the harandra
toward a new handramit where, like a jewel set in a silver sea, the
island of Meldilorn rises delicately out of a circular lake--"a sapphire
twelve miles in diameter set in a border of purple forest." (p. 113)

Amidst the lake there rose like a low and gently sloping

pyramid, or like a woman's breast, an island of pale red,

smooth to the summit, and on the summit a grove of such

trees as man had never seen. Their smooth columns had

the gentle swell of the noblest beech-trees: but they

were taller than a cathedral Spire on earch, and at their

tops, they broke rather into flower than foliage; into

golden flower bright as tulips, still as rock, and huge

as summer cloud. Flowers indeed they were, not trees,

and far down among their roots he caught a pale hint of

slab-like architecture....he had not looked for anything

quite so classic, so virginal, as this bright grove--lying

so still, so secret in its coloured valley, soaring with

inimitable grace so many hundred feet into the wintry

sunlight. (p. 113)

Ransom examines the island while he awaits his summons from
Oyarsa. He finds that Oyarsa is served by all three Malacandrian spe-
cies, according to the capacities of each. He finds, out into huge
stones, the story of malacandrian mythology. Each of the planets is
represented as a ball with a flaming angel-like figure atOp it. He dis-
covers that Malacandra is Mars, and that Malacandrian mythology, like
earth's, represents the planet Venus as female. 0n the ball which must
be the earth there is no figure, only an irregularly shaped cleft, as
if the artist (or a later editor, perhaps) had erased something. A
pfifltrig hOps out from behind a slab and on orders of Oyarsa asks Ran-

som to pose for him while he cuts into the rock a picture of man for

131

Malacandrian posterity. Ransom perceives at first only that the car-
ving makes man ugly; then, with a start, he realizes that the pfifltrig
is trying to idealize him.

Next day an eldil summons Ransom to Oyarsa. He walks up an
avenue, formed by monolithic stones and lined on both sides by crowds
of all three species of Malacandrians, to the crown of the island. He
perceives, by the almost invisible glints of light, that the place is
full of eldila. Presently Oyarsa comes, as Ransom can tell, partly by
the look on the faces of the crowd, partly from "the merest whisper of
light--no, less than that, the smallest diminution of shadow." (p. 128)
The multitude is hushed.

.Like a silence spreading over a room full of peOple,

like an infinitesimal coolness on a sultry day, like

a passing memory of some long—forgotten sound or scent,

like all that is stillest and smallest and most hard

to seize in nature, Oyarsa passed between his subjects

and drew near and came to rest, not ten yards away from

Ransom in the centre of Meldilorn. Ransom felt a ting-

ling of his blood and a pricking on his fingers as if

lightning were near him; and his heart and body seemed

to him to be made of water. (pp. 128-29)

Oyarsa speaks to Ransom in a voice "'with no blood in it. Light
is instead of blood for them.'" (p. 129) He reassures him; Ransom should
not fear Oyarsa simply because they are not similar beings: "We are both
cOpies of Maledil." (p. 129) Ransom is astounded to learn from Oyarsa
that what Ransom had supposed to be a fortuitous kidnapping by Weston
and Devine was really something more. Weston and Devine has assumed

that what was wanted was a sacrifice for the seroni, had in fact some-

how garbled the message from Oyarsa that the seroni had transmitted.

132

They had picked Ransom because he happened by, and in so doing had un-
wittingly fulfilled, if not Oyarsa's orders, at least Maledil's wish.""
Oyarsa reveals that his servants informed him of the presence of the
space ship as soon as it left the earth's atmosphere-~not before, be-
cause "Thulcandra is the world we do not know. It alone is outside the
heaven, and no message comes from it." (p. 130)

The real reason why the earth is called the silent planet then
becomes clear to Ransom. The Oyarsa of earth, "brighter and greater"
(p. 130) than that of Malacandra, was once free, like the Oyeresu of
other planets. But he became bent and consequently was bound by Maledil
to earth to prevent his spreading further evil. All this was long be-
fore any human life on earth.

It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own.
He smote your moon with his left hand and with his right

he brought the cold death on my harandra before its time;
if by my arm Maledil had not opened the handramits and let
out the hot springs, my world would have been unpeOpled.

We did not leave him so at large for long. There was great
war, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound
him in the air of his own world as Maledil taught us.
There doubtless he lies to this hour, and we know no more
of that planet; it is silent. We think that Maledil would
not give it up utterly to the Bent One, and there are
stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and
dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thul-
candra. (pp. 130-31)

 

He goes on to tell Ransom of Weston and Devine's first trip to Malacandra,

that Devine had applied himself to sifting the sun's blood (gold) out of

 

""At least I assume this to be the case. It is not wholly clear in
what sense Ransom himself was sent for, though in the later books there
is no doubt that it is Ransom himself who has been selected to perform
a mission for God.

133

the streams. Ransom is beginning to tell Oyarsa of Weston's purpose
on the planet--to make further room for the human race against such
time as the earth is Over-populated or destroyed-~when their discussion
is interrupted by the arrival of a party of hrossa bearing the corpses
of three other hrossa. With them, as prisoners, are Weston and Devine.

Oyarsa orders a funeral chant to be sung over the dead hrossa
(whom Devine and Weston have killed) before he "unbodies" them. As
the hrossa sing, Ransom begins to understand not only the art of the
hrossa but that which the art embodies.

New first he saw that its rhythms were based on a dif-

ferent blood from Ours, on a heart that best more quickly,

and a fiercer internal heat. Through his knowledge of

the creatures and his love for them he began, ever so

little, to hear it with their ears. A sense of great

masses moving at visionary speeds, of giants dancing, of

eternal sorrows eternally consoled, of he knew not what

and yet what he had always known, awoke in him with the

very first bars of the deep-mouthed dirge, and bowed

down his spirit as if the gate of heaven had Opened be-

fore him. (p. lu2)
When the song is ended Oyarsa sends a pfifltrig to touch each corpse
. with a small crystal object. In a moment there is a blinding glare of
light, a gust of wind, and the biers are empty. "So will Maledil scat-

ter all worlds,’ says Oyarsa, "when the first and feeble is worn." (p.
1A3)

Oyarsa then questions Weston, with Ransom acting as interpreter.
Weston's argument is roughly that superior races have rights over in-

ferior ones, and that the superior ones may be distinguished from others

by their cultural advancement. Such rights include the elimination of

13h

the inferior races if it should happen that the superior need their land
or goods. Life, he says, has pressed forward and reached her present
peak in civilized man; Weston is her representative and as such is em-
powered to make for the human (civilized) race the interplanetary leap
which will put Life beyond the reach of Death forever. It is his (and
Life's) intention to move from planet to planet, exterminating all
forms of inferior life and preparing the way for the eventual coming of
civilized humanity. He works for posterity, though he is not sure what
"strange form and yet unguessed mentality" (p. 1&7) posterity will
assume. Ransom finds the high flown abstractions difficult to trans-
late. Says Weston:

I may fail....But while I live I will not, with such a

key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future

on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our pre-

sent ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough

for me that there is a Beyond. (p. 1&8)
And Ransom translates:

He is saying...that he will not stop trying to do all

this unless you kill him. And he says that though he

doesn't know what will happen to the creatures Sprung

from us, he wants it to happen very much. (p. lh8)
Oyarsa concludes that the aberrations of Weston's argument are the work
of the Bent One, who is determined to establish a beach-head of evil
in worlds other than his own.

Oyarsa orders Weston and Devine to attempt the space flight back
to earth, in spite of the fact that the flight is almost impossible be-

-cause Mars and earth are not in Opposition. Ransom decides to accompany

them, though he is at liberty to remain on Malacandra if he chooses.

135

Oyarsa wishes Ransom well and tells him that the ship has been supplied
for ninety days of flight, that at the end of that time the ship will
become unbodied. The eldila of deep heaven will be near the ship in
its flight and will not let Weston and Devine kill Ransom to conserve
supplies. Oyarsa adds a last warning and exhortation to Ransom about
his companions.

They may yet do much evil in, and beyond, your world

....I begin to see that there are eldila who go down

into your air, into the very stronghold of the Bent One;
your world is not so fast shut as was thought in these
parts of heaven. watch those two bent ones. Be cour-
ageous. Fight them. And when you have need, some of

our peOple will help you. Maledil will Show them to you.
It may even be that you and I shall meet again while you
are still in the body; for it is not without the wisdom
of Maledil that we have met now....It seems to me that
this is the beginning of more comings and goings between
the heavens and the worlds and between one world and an-
other....The year we are now in...has long been prOphesied
as a year of stirrings and high changes and the siege of
Thulcandra may be near its end. Great things are on foot.

(p- 155)

The flight begins and Ransom, looking down on the vast handramits
which had been engineered by the Malacandrians before the dawn of human
history, reflects that such things will seem like mythology to him if
he ever gets back to earth. And it "occurred to him that the distinc-
tion between history and mythology might be itself meaningless outside
the Earth." (p. 157) After nearly unendurable hardships on the flight,
they make a safe return to earth. Weston and Devine slip away while
Ransom is asleep. He wakes to the sound of English rain, slogs through
the country side for a half hour, turns to see a flash of light and a

gust of wind as the ship beOOmes unbodied.

136

The story prOper ends here and is revealed to have been told by
Ransom to Lewis (who wrote it down) when the two scholars happened to
correspond about the twelfth-century Platonists. Lewis had written to
ask Ransom's views of the word Oyarses, which he had come across in
Bernardus Silvestris in connection with a heavenly voyage. Lewis sug-
gested that the word ought to be Ousiarche (two-input) but wanted to
know if Ransom agreed. The result of the correspondence was that the
two met, exchanged information about the medieval Platonists, gathered
a great many facts about Mars and about the physicist who has been
called Weston. They decided to publish the story as fiction because
it would not be believed as fact and would only result in a libel
action from Weston and Devine. They concluded that the medieval Platon-
ists were living in the same celestial year as our own (that it began
in the twelfth century), and that the force which Weston represented
"will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries,
and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one." (pp. 166-67)

In the second novel, Perelandra, Ransom is ordered by eldila to

 

go to Perelandra (Venus) to counteract (in some way not yet known to

him) the machinations of the Bent One. Ransom tells Lewis, who helps
"us

send him off, that he believes the "COSmic war is going into a new

phase and that mortals may soon be called on to fight the powers of

 

 

"5Perelandra (New York,l9hh), p. 18. Page references will be in
the text. -

137

darkness not only spiritually but in other ways as well. He thinks
that he has been chosen for the mission because he has learned Hressa-
Hlab," which he supposed to be merely the Malacandrian language but now

knows to be "Old Solar, Hlab-Eribol-gffCordi." (p. 19) This is the

 

original language of the universe, lost so completely on earth since
the Dark One took over that no human speech derives from it.

His coffin-like ship plunges into a coppery sea on Perelandra
and dissolves, leaving him swimming easily in the warm waters.

The water gleamed, the sky burned with gold, but all was:

rich and dim....The very names of green and gold...are too

harsh for the tenderness, the muted iridescence, of that

warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world. It was mild

to look upon as evening, warm like summer noon, gentle and

winning like early dawn. (p. 31)
As he floats over the see, he feels what he can only describe as "exces-
sive pleasure." (p. 33) He is surprised that he feels no guilt: "There
was an exuberance or prodigality of sweetness about the mere act of ‘
living which our race finds it difficult not to associate with forbidden
and extravagant actions." (p. 33) Surviving a violent storm, he clam-
bers onto one of many thin, flexible mats of vegetation which he comes
to think of as floating islands. He eats of a balloon-like fruit so
marvelous that it is "like the discovery of a totally new g2gg§_of
pleasures" (p. 38) and decides this early in his mission that there is
that pleasure in Perelandra that "might overload the human brain." (p.
38)

Next day Ransom sees birds and fish in droves moving toward an-

other floating island. What he first takes to be a hump on the back of

138

one of the dolphin—like fish turns out to be a human form. As his
island drifts closer to the other, the form (having alighted from the
fish's back) waves greetings; he sees that the person is green against
the orange of the island.

For one second the alien eyes looked at his full of love

and welcome. Then the whole face changed: a shock as

of disappointment and astonishment passed over it. Ran-

som realised...that he had been mistaken for someone

else....And the green man was not a man at all, but a

woman. (p. 51)

Ransom speaks to her in Old Solar, tells her that he comes in peace.
Her reply disconcerts him: "What is 'peace'?" (p. 5h) Ransom realizes
after some conversation that whatever knowledge she possesses has been
infused in her by Maledil rather than arrived at by conceptual thought.
But she begins to grow "older" from the moment that she listens to

him; she begins (as Barfield would say) to become conscious of herself
as distinct from phenomena. She perceives that "a day has one appear-
ance as it comes to you, and another when you are in it, and a third
when it has gone past. Like the waves." (p. h7) She has never done
this before, this "stepping out of life into the Alongside and looking
at oneself as if one were not alive." (p. 58)

Ransom is surprised that she has a human form: rationality had
been embodied in non-human creatures in Malacandra. She replies that
Malacandra is an older world than Perelandra or earth; in the younger
planets rationality takes (and will take) human form because Maledil

the Young "took himself this form, the form of your race and mine."

(p. 59) Beings such as hrossa and seroni may linger on in ancient

139

worlds, but "Among times there is a time that turns a corner and every-
thing this side of it is new." (p. 60) She is the only woman on Perel-
andra; she is the Queen, the Mother. Somewhere on one of the islands
is the King, the Father, her husband-to-be, the only male.

When Ransom happens to mention death, She can hardly comprehend
that it may be seen as evil: whatever comes must come from Maledil and
thus be good. Ransom reminds her that she was disappointed because he
was not the King, thus Showing her that not all events are welcome.

The concept comes to her with a shock and Ransom is at once uneasy at
what he has done. Her "purity and peace were not...settled and inevit-
able like the purity and peace of an animal." They are "alive and
therefore breakable, a balance maintained by a mind and therefore...
able to be lost." (p. 66) In a sentence that might have been taken
from Barfield She tells Ransom, "I have been so young till this moment
that all my life now seems to have been a kind of sleep." (p. 66)

Next day Ransom sights what the Lady calls the Fixed Land, a
solid island which she and the King may visit during daylight but on
which they have been forbidden to live. They mount the great fish and
to to the island to climb its peak and search the sea for the King.
They fail to sight him but do see Weston's Space ship floating Offshore.
Weston comes ashore and speaks to the Lady in fluent Old Solar. When
the Lady leaves to look further for the King, Weston stays with Ransom.
He tells Ransom that he no longer works merely for the human race; he

has become an emergent evolutionist. All things are one, he says, all

1h0

is "blind, inarticulate purposiveness" (p. 91) moving ever forward, a
vast cosmic process forging ahead toward the state of pure spirit. He
claims that there are no essential differences between his philosophy
and Christianity. The cosmic process is alive, not a person but a
FOrce which selects its instruments. It has selected him, made him a
great scientist for a purpose, guided him, infused in him his knowledge
of Old Solar. "It is through me," says Weston, "that spirit itself

is at this moment pushing on to its goal." (p. 9h)

Ransom warns him that Spirit is not necessarily good, that it may
be dangerous to deal with Spirit, that the Devil is spirit. But Weston
professes to believe that belief in the Devil is merely an outmoded
view of the Life Force. They argue, and finally weston, in a burst of
rhetoric, identifies himself with the Life Force: "I am the Universe.
I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me com-
pletely." (p. 97) .As soon as he has said this, he goes into convul-
sions, screams "Ransom, Ransom! For Christ's sake don't let them--"
(p. 97) He falls howling and writhing to the ground.

Next day Weston has disappeared. Ransom, mounting a fish which
seems to have been sent to him, sets out in pursuit. He looks beneath
the surface of the water and sees "veritable mermen or mermaids." (p.
103) They are fish incredibly resembling humans:

They were...like human faces asleep, or faces in which

humanity slept while some other life, neither bestial

nor diabolic, but merely elvish, out of our orbit, was
irrelevantly awake. He remembered his old suspicion

lhl

that what was myth in one world might always be fact
in some Other. (pp. lO3-th)

That night the fish lands him on one of the islands; he sleeps, wakes
in darkness to hear Weston's voice tempting the Lady to break Maledil's
law not to live on the Fixed Land. It is good for her to think about
breaking the law, he tells her; it is noble and poetic. She ought not
to wait and ask the King; the King would be happier if she were old
enough to think the thing through herself. The colloquy ends. Next
morning Ransom sees neither Weston nor the lady but comes upon a trail
of mutilated frog-like animals and follows it till he comes on Weston,
who is composedly tearing another one apart. Ransom perceives that
he is really looking at a dead man, that something is merely using
Weston's body. When he moves toward the thing he finds himself
fainting and unable to rise. Either the Bent One or one of his fol-
lowers has used Weston as a bridge to the unfallen world of Perelandra.
Shaken, Ransom follows the thing and discovers it again tempting the,
Lady.

Ransom notes immediately that, in the Lady's face, "the hint of
something precarious had increased." (p. 115) Weston (the Un-man)
is telling her the wonders of courage: Maledil wants her to achieve
independence, so she must muster the courage to do what He really
wants; she must disobey Him and thus Show Him that His creature has
matured. The law about the Fixed Land is not a good law or it would
have obtained on other planets as well as Perelandra. Maledil wants

His creatures to become old enough to realize that the law is one of

1&2

"mere commandment." (p. 120) He desires the law to be broken, but He
cannot say so, for that would obviate the creaturely independence and
wisdom which He desires. Ransom breaks in to say that the law may
exist Simply to allow the creatures to practise sheer obedience, for
in other things they obey but also understand why they obey. He tells
her the story of the earthly Fall. The Un-man answers that it was
through the Fall that Maledil was brought into the world and made man,
to the infinite benefit of that world. Confronted with the paradox

of the fortunate fall, Ransom is momentarily at a loss. Then he re-
plies:

Of course good came of it....Whatever you do, He will

make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for

you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost forever. The

first King and the first Mother of our world did the

forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end.

But what they did was not good; and what they lost we

have not seen. And there were some to whom no good

came nor ever will come. (p. 125)

And he asks the Un-man what good came to him from the Incarnation. The
Un-man howls in agony of loss.

The Un-man continues the assault by telling the Lady scores of
stories in which women braved all worldly scorn and hate in order to
do some grand and needed and forbidden act for their children, husbands,
or society. He creates an image of noble, selfless, suffering woman.
The battle continues day and night, Ransom sometimes falling asleep
from exhaustion, the Un-man needing no sleep. The Un-man makes it

seem cowardice for her to consult the King: she must do the forbidden

thing alone so that all benefits are his, all risks hers. After the

lh3

Un-man has dressed her in lovely birds' plumage and given her a mirror,
so that She is beginning to think of herself as a sort of tragedy
queen, Ransom concludes (with Maledil's help) that it is a physical

as well as an oral struggle that he is called on to carry out. At
first the idea seems grotesque.

\

It would degrade the spiritual warfare to the condition

of mere mythology. But...Ransom had been perceiving that

the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both

from fact was purely terrestrial-~was part and parcel of

that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted

from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a

permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome

nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its

disappearance. In perelandra it would have no meaning at

all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that

earthmen would call it mythological. All this he had

thought before. Now he knew it. (p. lh9)
And the voice of Maledil seems to tell him that there is reason for his
being named Ransom: Maledil's name is also Ransom.

The fight is long and bloody. Ransom defeats the enemy once, is
tricked by its reassuming Weston's personality, and finally kills it
in the depths of an underwater cave. Wounded in the heel, he undergoes
many adventures with gigantic earth-beetles and finally escapes to the
light outside. He encounters the Oyeresu of Mars and Venus, who have
prepared a new ship for his return to earth. They tell him that today
is the beginning of the new world of Perelandra, the reign of the King
and Queen, which he has helped to bring about. All the beasts of Perel-
andra gather with Ransom and the Oyeresu for the ceremony.

The Oyarsa of Perelandra relinquishes her planetary power to

them: "Hail and be glad, oh man and woman, Oyarsa-Perelendri, the Adam,

lhh

the Crown, Tor and Tinidril, Baru and Baru'ah, Ask and Embla, Yatsur
and Yatsurah, dear to Maledil. Blessed be He!" (p. 220) Maledil,
through the instrument of Ransom, has wakened the King and Queen to
knowledge of good and evil, and in this consummation the Dark One has
also been unwittingly of use. Ransom is honored by all, and much is
revealed to him by the King and the Oyeresu. When Perelandra has
circled the Field of Arbol ten thousand times, when Perelandra is full
of new life and new beings engendered by Tor and Tinidril, then the
atmosphere surrounding the planet will be lifted and the Deep Heavens
will become visible. There will be a great war, the siege of Thul-
candra will be lifted, and all the evil of the earth dispersed. Then
the Great Dance, in which all creation rejoices in and with the Creator,
will truly begin. ,Ransom is given an overpowering vision of the Great
Dance:

It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation

of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under

one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flow-

er-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it be-

came the master-figure or focus of the whole Spectacle,

by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought

it into unity--only to be itself entangled when he looked

to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and

found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and

the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby

dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a sig-

nificance greater than that which it had abdicated. (p.

231+)
He sees brightnesses which are the "peoples, institutions, climates of

Opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences." (p. 23h) He sees the cords of

light which are individuals and those which are universal truths and

lhs

ideas. The whole solid figure of dancing and intermingling lights
merges with a vaster four-dimensional pattern which in turn is only
the boundary of other patterns in other worlds. Finally,

as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet
more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more in-
tense, as dimension was added to dimension...then, at
the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up
and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard
blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all
comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable,
pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into
its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a
privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he
stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had
the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from
trance, and coming to himself. (p. 235)

When Ransom recovers, he finds that the vision has lasted for a
year. The King and Queen then put him in his ship ("Some natural tears
they dropped, but wiped them soon"); they cover his face with scarlet
flower petals to shield his eyes from the sun, and he returns to earth.
On arrival he is radiantly healthy except for his heel, which refuses

to mend.

 

In That Hideous Strength (longer and more complicated than the
first two novels) the phase of war predicted comes about. Ransom's
widowed sister in India, a Mrs. Fisher-King, became acquainted with a
great native Christian mystic named the Sura. Before his death the
Sura became convinced that the vital battle of the war would be fought
in England. Mrs. Fisher-King left her wealth to her brother on condition
that he take the name Fisher-King and gather about him a company alert

for signs of the enemy and prepared to defeat it. He has done this, and

1h6

the company's headquarters are not far from a small university (Edge-
stow), which is on the edge of a small wooded land called Bragdon Wood.

The National Institute of.Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.)
has made attempts to buy the wood from the poor university in order to
set up a laboratory there. With the rather unwilling help of Jane
Studdock (a natural medium), Ransom discovers what the N.I.C.E. is and
what it wants with Bragdon WOod. N.I.C.E., ostensibly led by two scien-
tists named Frost and Withers, is really an instrument of the Dark
Eldil of earth. Physical science, having drifted without direction for
so long and having grown indifferent to objective truth, has become an
easy prey to the manipulation of the evil one. N.I.C.E., the ultimate
in brutal experimental science, wishes to settle in Bragdon Wood be-
cause it has discovered, through its real master's eldilic knowledge,
that there is buried under the soil of the wood the body of Merlin,
miraculously undecayed. If N.I.C.E., "the new goetia,"h6 finds him,
it will revive him and he will cast his lot with the forces of evil;
thus will be effected a union between the vast power of the physical
sciences and the natural magic of a former age. And then

...Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while

still in the body, still crawling on this little globe,

would enter that state which, heretofore, they had en-
tered only after death, would have the diuturnity and

l

 

h6That Hideous Strength (New York, l9h6), p. 336. Page references
to the book will be in the text.

 

lh7

power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe of

Tellus, would become their slave; and of that dominion

no end, before the end of time itself, could be certain-

ly foreseen. (p. 235)

Ransom is now identified by his company with the Pendragon of
Ingres; his company and the house they live in "are all that's left of
the logres: all the rest has become merely Britain." (p. 22h) His
strategy is simply to discover Merlin before the enemy can. With this
in mind he and the company discuss at length the character of Merlin
and his power; fortunately, along with the extraordinary power of Jane
Studdock, they have a fund of scholarly knowledge of the Arthurian
history, and the Pendragon is still occasionally given military infor-
mation by the eldila of Mars and Venus. They conclude that a historical
Merlin once worked in Bragdon Wood, though they are not really sure
what kind of power he wielded. Ransom thinks that "Merlin's art was
the last survivor of something older and different--something brought
to Western EurOpe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era
in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had
been other than those we know." (p. 232) What Merlin practised was
"the last vestiges of Atlantean magic." (p. 232) (In the enemy camp,
Frost and Wither, discussing the same question, agree that Merlin was
the last of some power that survived into the fifth century, a power
"that comes down from long before the Great Disaster, even from before

primitive Druidism: something that takes us back to Numinor, to pre-

glacial periods.")(p. 310)

1h8

Acting on information received from Jane Studdock's dreams,
Ransom sends one of the company out into the night to meet Merlin. But
first he has him rehearse in the "Great Tongue" what he will say. The
messenger speaks "in great syllables of words that sounded like
castles," (p. 265) the ancient language spoken "before the Fall and be-
yond the Moon." (p. 265) For this is "language herself, as she first
sprang at Maledil's bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star
called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven." (pp. 265-66)
Merlin bursts into the house and immediately challenges Ransom to a
duel of occult knowledge, the loser to become the other's servant. He
asks what Numinor is; Ransom replies that it is "the True West." (p.
320) He asks whom Ransom serves; the reply is "the Oyeresu." (p. 320)
Merlin then asks, "Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why
is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?" (p.
321) Ransom replies thateSulva is the Moon, that she walks in the
lowest sphere, that "half of her orb is turned towards us and shares
our curse." (p. 321) It is on this side of her that the marriages are
cold. Merlin asks where the ring of Arthur the King is. Ransom re-
plies that the ring is "on Arthur's finger where he sits in the House
of Kings in the cup-shaped land of Abhalljin, beyond the seas of Lur
in Perelandra." (p. 321) Arthur, says Ransom, is of the company of
those who did not die but who were taken up in the body--those such as
Enoch, Elias, Moses, and Melchisidec. Merlin asks his last question:

"Who shall be Pendragon in the time when Saturn descends from his sphere?

1h9

In what world did he learn war?" HIn the sphere of Venus I learned
war,I said Ransom. "In this age Lurga shall descend. I am the Pen-
dragon." (p. 322) Merlin acknowledges defeat and sovereignty.

Ransom takes Merlin to an upper room of the house, and there they
await the coming of the Oyeresu of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and
Jupiter. The Oyeresu come, nearly unmaking both men with their power,
and they transfuse a modicum of this power to Merlin. Merlin goes to
Belbury, the N.I.C.E. headquarters, brings about confusion of tongues
to confound that hideous strength, and causes gigantic earthquakes and
floods to destroy it utterly. The world saved for the moment, the com-
pany has leisure for discussion. It is revealed that the Arthurian
legend is mostly true history, that there has been in England since
Arthur's time a secret logres and "an unbroken succession of Pendrag-
ons." (p. hh2) Ransom is the seventy-eighth in the line of Arthur, Uther,
and cassibelaun. As Arthur was taken up to Perelandra in the body, so
will Ransom be, and Perelandra is now identified with St. Paul's Third
Heaven. When Ransom is taken up, a new Pendragon will be appointed,
for Ingres must remain intact against Britain; the war is not yet over,
nor will it be for ten thousand years. But an important engagement has
been won.

That the trilogy has its faults no one will deny. All in all,
perhaps the first book is the most satisfactory of the three, the
second the most beautiful. Most of the faults of the trilogy occur in

the second and third books, and they occur for the very reason which it

150

is the purpose of this chapter to point out. The trilogy seems to have
grown under Lewis's hand, as is illustrated by certain minor defects.

At the end of the first book the hero has been given the name "Ransom"
as a fictional device, just as "Weston" is a pseudonym for a supposedly
real scientist who would sue if his real name were used. But in 2232}?
égdgg it is revealed to the hero that he has been picked from all
eternity to do battle with the evil one on Venus; that is why his name
is Ransom, which is also Maledil's name, i.e., Christ. What seems to
have happened is that the second and third books are attempts to con-
tinue the original story but to continue it in a new way. The first
book presents a humanistic philologist fighting a misguided, amoral
scientist; it presents a struggle between the old Christian-humanist
values and those of godless modern scientism. In the first book the
notion that myth may be fact is merely toyed with; in the second it is
advanced seriously; in the third, it becomes the basis of the whole
work, with various attempts to make it also the retroactive basis of

the first two as well. In the third book, Ransom becomes in a way the
focal point of all myth; he is the fisher king, the Pendragon, the re-
turn of the king. And the whole Arthurian legend is projected backwards
into the second book by having Arthur reside in the Avalon of Perelandra
and having Merlin confirm that this has always been so. What began as
an ideolOgical battle is continued as a battle between sheer good and
evil; the transition from science fiction to cosmic mythological warfare

is not quite smooth; some ragged edges of juncture show.

' . 151

But I am not concerned so much with the defects of the attempt
as with the attempt itself. As has been noted, Lewis has his hero medi-
tate often on what he calls the "purely terrestrial distinction" be-
tween truth, fact, and myth; and Ransom finally concludes that what is
myth on earth is fact somewhere else in the universe. What this con-
clusion allows Lewis to do, of course, is to use the grand improbabil-
ities of myth as literal plot and detail; it makes the wonderful prob-
able. Thus ancient and medieval astronomy and astrology, which most
would regard as myth, present the reader with real truths of other
worlds: the planets all have their guiding "intelligences" (the Oyer-
esu) as Plato and Averroes thought; the planets ray down influences on
earth, as medieval astrologists thought. Venus is supremely warm and
feminine, Mars supremely cold, male and martial. The heavens (Deep
Heaven) are alive with intelligence in the form of eldila (angels) as
in a medieval painting. Arthur is really carried off to Avalon and,

in a way, is still not only rex quondam but rex futurusque, since there

 

 

has been an unbroken line_of Pendragons since his time. Ransom is the

fisher king, wounded, "with the arid plain behind me,’ who must be
healed before the wasteland of the earth can become fertile. His wound
will be stanched in the world where it was received, in Perelandra,‘
and when Perelandra has made ten thousand turns around the Field of
Arbol, the dark eldil of earth will be defeated and the world will be-

come as it was in the time of Numinor, the true west, which was indeed

a green and pleasant land.

152

Further, the use of myth as fact allows Lewis to use the great
natural metaphors which run through the myths as cosmic facts. The
moon's shadow and the dark veil around Venus are evil because they are
dark (or are dark ESQ evil) and will one day be diapersed by the good
‘ light of the Deep Heaven. The eldila are perceivable only as glints
of light, and are explained in terms of light as well as motion.
Ransom's vision of eternal beatitude at the end of Perelandra is de-
scribed as a vast cosmic dance of bands and cords and patterns of light.
Behind all this is a philological-metaphysical theory derived, in part
at least, from Barfield‘s theory of ancient concrete meaning:

...if those original equations, between good and light,

or evil and dark, between breath and soul and all the
others, were from the beginning arbitrary and fanciful

--if there is not, in fact, a kind of psycho-physical

parallelism (or more) in the universe—~then all our

thinking is nonsensical. But we cannot, without con-

tradiction, believe it to be nonsensical. And 5 7..the

view I have taken has metaphysical implications.
The use of natural metaphor as fact allows Lewis to use the "original
equations" as the structure of planetary reality, a hierarchy in which
the greatest good is light and the greatest evil, dark.

But it remains to ask the effect of mythologizing religion, to
ask in short the point and purpose of the four novels. The answer,
so far as Lewis himself is concerned, is simple enough: his purpose

was to combine an old love with a newer, to combine the romance of the

far Off and faerie with the religion of his maturity, to unite what the

 

h7Lewis, "Bluspels and Flalansferes," in Rehabilitations, p. 158.

153

imagination loved with what the intellect was convinced to be true.
In short, his purpose was, as I have said in more general terms, to
romanticize religion.

Now, it is often said by anti-romantics that the romantic throws
up a screen between himself and reality, that he idealizes or digni-
fies a reality which he would otherwise find unendurable. As one such
critic has it, he tries to "maintain an illusioned view of the universe")48
in the face of broad scientific evidence that the real nature of the
world is other than he wants it to be. He tries to see reality as won-
derful when it is only probable and even predictable. Or, again, it is
a criticism of the romantic that he inhabits (by choice) a dream world,
simply abandoning the real world for that of faerie, the land of
heart's desire. There is a substratum of agreement between the two
criticisms: both hold that the romantic prefers, even demands, the
wonderful—-one party holding that the romantic romanticizes this world
(witchery by daylight), the other holding that the romantic abdicates
this world for another of his own making and closer to his heart's de-
sire. The romantic can reply, alternatively, that this world is more
wonderful than the anti-romantic supposes; he can, like Chesterton,
romanticize even the very notion of being as the Aristotelian scholas-
tics conceived it. Or he can reply, like Shelley, that his dream world
has more reality and validity than our own, that his creations are "more

real than living men, nurslings of immortality." (We have already seen

 

 

1+8Hoxie Fairchild, The Romantic Quest (New York, 1931), p. 251.

15%

that Barfield praises this second school because their esemplastic
images did not reproduce reality as we know it but instead created their
own.)

Everyone will agree that the romantic will have the wonderful,
one way or another. So it is too with a romantic religionist of Lewis's
sort. He will have his religion because he believes it true; but he
will also have it wonderful because he is romantic. Lewis sometimes
dramatizes the romance of being, though never to the extent that Chas--
terton did in Manalive (perhaps because, in spite of Iewis's admiration
for Chesterton, the fact remains that Chesterton was a Thomistic,
"moderate" realist or "conceptualist" and Lewis is not). But what he
does in his fiction is rather to take religion out of the normal world
and translate it into the fairy land of myth.h9 Thus the beginnings of
Christianity (or the end of paganism) are seen against a backdrop of

shadows and semi-darkness in Till Wg_Have Faces; Christianity indeed is

 

imaged as a bright dream following on aeons of dark and fearsome ones.
All the dimness and opacity of the far mythical past are conjured up

in order that they may enhance the birth of Christ; Homer, Sappho, Plato
become dreams in order that Christ may seem more real. All the bright
hard world of Aristotle is made pliable, is made to retreat into a

swirling world of.flux where Psyche and Orual are neither real nor

h9Tolkien, we will see, holds that to abstract an idea or belief
:from reality and to project it into myth is a means of recovering of
'cbne's perspective toward it. Lewis, reviewing Telkien's trilogy some
'ten years after his own was done, agreed explicitly with Tolkien.

155

symbolic but merely ingredients. The whole of the ancient world is
made potency so that the Incarnation may be seen as act. It is the
world of Cornford and Edwin Hatch, but it has been manipulated out of
reality and into dream.

In the trilOgy, Christianity--the very story of Christianity as
well as many of its dogma-~is translated into mythology in order that
Christianity may seem more wonderful (not more wonderful than it is,
perhaps, but more wonderful than we ordinarily conceive it). Romance,
beginning as a means to Christianity, is now used as a servant to Chris-
tianity. The whole trilogy is full of the old Chesterton device of
making something marvelous by describing it in terms that we never use
for it, of making us see something as if for the first time. The drama
of the Incarnation takes on a strange new light by being told by a
naked green woman on a floating island on Venus, as the Fall assumes
new grandeur by being almost repeated. Maledil, So truly in motion
that He is still (a psycho-physical parallel of God's infinite act?);
Maledil the Young locked in battle with the Dark Eldil of Thulcandra,
setting an impassable frontier against him across the face of the moon;
lMaledil reviving Merlin after fifteen hundred years so that he may join
the Pendragon and the planetary Oyeresu in the fight against the Bent
(Dne-owhat could be more wonderful, what could be less like not only
Iahat Newman called "the dreary, hOpeless irreligion" of the time but
.less like the very religion itself of the time? Lewis's religion seems

laardly to belong to the same century, or the same world, as Eliot's

Thoughts after Lambeth or Jaspers's and Bultmann's discussion Of myth

 

and religion, or the work of Camus.

Nor is it improper to compare Lewis's mythology with the relig-
ious writings Of the time, for none of the four books is simply donnish
fooling with religion. There runs through all the books what has come
to be called (since Otto) the feeling of the numinous; there is, in
fact, the element which lewis found in Macdonald and was forced to call
holiness. But the feeling of the numinous is never directly attached to
the Christian God or to Christ, but to Maledil or Maledil the Young;
awe is not felt in the presence of the seraphim or powers but in the
presence Of the planetary Oyeresu. Orual feels that she is being un-'
made at the approach of an undefined and pre-Christian divine presence.
When Ransom first sees Meldilorn, the island palace Of the Oyarsa of
Mars, Lewis describes it as "virginal," "still," and "secret" and adds,
purposely, that its tree tops were taller than the cathedral spires
on earth. When the Oyarsa of Mars comes before Ransom, Ransom's "heart
and body seemed to be made of water.“ When he hears the funeral hymn
of the hrossa, his spirit bows down "as if the gate of heaven had

Opened before him." In the closing pages of That Hideous Strength,

 

Ransom, soon to be assumed to Perelandra, says goodby to the company

of faithful and, prelate-like, blesses them in Old Solar: "Urendi

 

Maledil" (presumably Dominus vobis cum). In short, holiness or awe of
- the divine presence runs through the books, but is is always directed

at the mythical counterparts of the Christian trinity or angelology.

ts-

M

157

Given the framework of the books, Of course, this is what is to be ex-
pected. But it is with the purpose and the desired effect that I an
concerned here. And the purpose is to romanticize this-worldly Chris-
tianity by seeing it as something else or as a part of something else,
the something else being other-worldly and wonderful.

The extent to which Lewis has romanticized Christianity in his
fiction may be emphasized by a contrast with Christianity as it is pre-
sented sympathetically but "realistically" by such writers as Greene
or Waugh or Mauriac. The best of Greene's characters have a touch of
brightness about them that is due largely to their religion, but for
the most part their lives are bleak and mundane. Often enough in his
work the religion is accepted in a hopeless, desperate way, as in the

case Of Scobie in The Heart g£_the Matter, who says his Christian

 

prayer as he commits suicide. Sometimes it is accepted as a dreary
answer to the dreary question of the world, as in the case Of the

police chief in The Quiet American who reads the "sad arguments" of

 

Pascal while he waits for the next footpad or mugger to be brought in.
And in Waugh, as in Eliot, Christianity becomes a kind of passionless
intellectual achievement at best, at worst a kind of social snobbery.
For Richard Crouchback Christianity presents a system Of abstract
rules; it is a legalistic game which mortals play with God in which a
man may try to make love to his divorced wife because he is still theo-
logically married to her. Waugh's Christianity is much like Mr.

Angular's: it knows all the answers, it is all intellect. When a mild

158

theOlOgical controversy occurred concerning Scobie's ultimate destina-
tion (though a suicide, he had acted out Of motives Of sneer love for
both his wife and mistress), Waugh diSplayed no indecision, no dis-
position to dwell on either g£9§_or gggpg; ScObie, he said, was in
hell, where he richly deserved to be. Now to "realistic" Christianity
Lewis Opposes mythOpoeic Christianity, made wonderful by being shown
to be a part of a vast web of cosmic romance, a religion grown out of
a dim and flickering and unreal past into a present heightened by an
interplanetary war between good and evil in which Arthur unites with
the twelfth-century Platonists, a religion which will ultimately bring
man to the pinnacle from which he can watch the Great Dance.

The romanticism Of the trilogy is perhaps made more clear by
setting it over against other attempts to do roughly the same sort of
thing, that is, to show the battle of Christianity against the forces
of evil. One of the clearest distinctions between classical and ro-
mantic may be drawn from a comparison of Milton's battle and Lewis's.
Milton's is traditional and epic: the battle is between, not equals,
of course, but between beings who are far above human capacity; Adam
and Eve are, as it were, local pawns in the cosmic battle between
forces of good and evil beyond their comprehension. All the grandeur
and sublimity of the battle scenes, of the temptation, Of the angelic
fall from peace, derive from the fact that the beings involved are
supernatural, with infinite capacities for good and evil, for suffer-

ing and joy. The angelic battle is described as a battle of the Titans

159

because, for artistic purposes, it is simply that; it is heroic, the
primal battle of the earliest age of the heroes. In Lewis the battle
has descended to the human level: a middle-aged philologist counseled
by the Almighty fights a middle-aged scientist possessed by the devil;
the fight is no longer on the plains of heaven, nor even on the ring-
ing plains of windy Troy, but in a glade, in the shallows of a lake,
in an underwater cave. The whole thing has become localized and inti-
mate, like part of a Wordsworthian landscape. And yet the issues are,
if not the same, at least equally important. As much depends On
Ransom as on Milton's Christ. But the sense of cosmic Objectivity
has gone, perhaps because the tradition itself has gone; Milton is
retelling an Old and true story, but Lewis is making one up. Inti-
mations of the divine come flooding into Ransom from Maledil much as
intimations come flooding into Wordsworth from Nature, while in Milton
any divine communication is simply formal, as when Michael lectures
Adam on the future.

Again, Bunyan's Christian takes on a stature and nobility that

Ransom or JOhn (in The Pilgrim's Regzess) never achieve because Chris-

 

tian is everyman, or at least every Christian. Bunyan's images, meant
to convey the truths of Christianity, fail to be romantic by being
clearly allegorical; the Slough of DeSpond and the Delectable Mountains
(like Milton's darkness visible) have no local habitation, nor are they
dwelt On for their own sake; they exist just so far as they are alle-

gorical, as they are representations of the state of the soul.

160

But the romanticism Of the trilogy is most distinguishable in
the very romanticizing of reality itself, so far as the religious battle
is concerned. The image of battle has always suggested itself as the
appropriate one to convey the human religious situation. But battles
in general, and particularly religious battles, are hardly ever ex-
citing, or at least the excitement is hardly ever of any appreciable
duration. Any soldier knows that, just as any religious man knows it.
For every pitched battle, or even faintly exciting skirmish, there
are long and bleak periods of entrenchment, or trOOp movement, or even
of activity having nothing at all to do with the war. Every war is
ninety percent sheer boredom or unwarlike occupations. As Auden says,

"50

"The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time Of all. Ransom

is always in the midst of battle; at every moment the outcome of the
world is in doubt. But Auden suggests the real flatness of the great
part Of the struggle:

In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night Of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayegi
God will cheat no one, not even the world Of its triumph.

 

50For the Time Being, lhBh.

 

51For the Time Being, lh99-1508.

 

161

For most Christians, the time is noon, but never for Lewis's characters.
It may be objected at this point that a writer like Lewis, who
is not after all primarily a theologian, may choose to deal romantically
with religion in his fiction without its following necessarily that his
religion itself is romantic. But a brief examination Of his doctrinal
works and the general source from which they largely derive will show
that this is not the case, that in fact (as I said in Chapter I) his
romanticism is not distinguishable from his religion. First of all,
as an introduction to the doctrinal works, I must make one last point
about the fiction. It will not have escaped notice that the fiction,
the trilogy especially, manages to argue for Christianity without at
any time going at all deeply into the real dogmas Of Christianity. On
the eve of Ransom's fight with the devil, for example, Ransom is in
communion with the Almighty (Maledil); and it is made perfectly clear
that Ransom is to perform a heroic deed in order that a new Redemption
will not be necessary on Perelandra. But in what exactly the earthly
Redemption consists, what it was that Christ did, these questions of
theology never occur. The only point_of theolOgy that is dealt with
in the trilogy is the paradox of the fortunate fall previously men-
tioned, and that takes on the aspect Of a tour de force, with the devil
admitting defeat in a mournful howl. Now I do not mean to suggest that
fiction is the apprOpriate place for theological discussion; I do not
mean to suggest even that the fiction suffers from the lack of it (the

reverse is probably true). What I do suggest is that the presence of

162

Christianity and the near absence of dogma may be at least as much an
extension of a religious attitude as it is an artistic necessity.

Let us turn for a moment to Lewis's Mere Christianity, a book

 

in which Lewis tries to sketch out for the unbeliever the body of be-
lief which "has been common to nearly all Christians at all times."52
In an effort not to scandalize the pagan reader, Lewis makes the
section called "What Christians Believe" utterly undenominational (to
the extent that various sects are mentioned only in alphabetical order).

. He attempts, as he does in the trilogy and other apologetical works

. such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, to distinguish

 

 

Christianity as a homogeneous body of belief which may be set over
against paganism (Old or new), modern materialism, and "scientism,"
which may be described as the emancipated modern belief that science
holds the answers to questions about the human situation, questions
that it has traditionally been within the province of religion to an-
swer. Thus the whole historical aspect Of Christianity—-the religious
wars, the doctrinal disputes, the Inquisition, the Reformation itself
--all this is ignored on the ground that "Our divisions should never be
discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to be-

lieve that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son."S3

Throughout, an attempt is made to see Christianity, as it were, empirically:

 

52Preface to Mere Christianity (New York, 1957), p. vi»

 

53Preface to Mere Christianity, p. vi.

 

163

not to teach theology but to stress the fact that Christianity "works,"
is Operative. Thus of the Atonement, Lewis comments that it has given
us "a fresh start," but that "theories as to how it did this are an-

"Sh

other matter. And the Eucharist he calls "a mysterious action which
different Christians call by different names."55 In the matter of dog-
mas, in short, the conclusion is that "the thing itself is infinitely
more important than any explanations that theologians have produced,"56
and that "no explanation will ever be quite adequate to the reality."57
Now an unfriendly or zealously rationalistic critic might see in
such an attitude evidence Of anti-rationalism or even fideism. But
such a view is short-sighted and too simple. No one familiar with
Lewis's university sermons (to mention only one source) could accuse

Iewis either Of irrationalism or lack of interest in theology. It is

rather that, as a layman, he feels that he has to "walk ip_mirabilibus
58

 

supra me_and submit all to the verdict of real theologians." But such
admirable humility is yet only half the story. For the informing
Spirit of Lewis's Christianity, and for the position that theology occu-

pies in his religion, we must turn elsewhere. I have already indicated

Iewis's many debts to Barfield and have indeed spoken Of Barfield as

 

5"Mere Christianity, p. u3.

 

 

55Mere Christianity, p. #3.

56Mere Christianity, p. #3.

 

S7Mere Christianity, p. #3.

 

58"Transposition," in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New
York, 19h9), p. 28.

 

 

16h

"the man behind" Lewis. But examination of Iewis's doctrinal work
shows that the real man behind Iewis is, not uneXpectedly, the same as
he behind Barfield: Coleridge. Examination shows that Lewis's Chris-
tianity is not merely "Pauline" (as Miss Nott calls it)59 but rather
transcendental in the sense in which that word is applicable to the be-
liefs of Coleridge and Kant. Once the kinship is seen, Lewis's doc-
trinal works fall easily and truly into place as complements to the
mythOpoeic Christianity of the fiction.

The clearest evidence of the religious kinship is to be found in

Lewis's The Abolition gf_Man, a book which makes the same point as That

 

Hideous Strength--that the real and crucial battle of our time is be-

 

tween Christianity and scientism. In the course of the argument Lewis
refers to the "Tao," the combined wisdom of the world, which the Chin-
ese had defined as "the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that
was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road.
It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the way in which things
everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into Space and time."

It is this Way or "law of nature" that all must assent to, must affirm.
It is the necessary premise to any argument; it is undemonstrable but
obligatory. But how affirm an undemonstrable premise? By an act of

the Practical Reason, for the premise is in fact a "platitude" Of the

 

59The Emperor's Clothes, p- 255.
60

 

The Abolition 9; M3}; (New York, 191w), p. ll.

165

Practical Reason, and "we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Prac-

"61 Against the "under-

tical Reason as having absolute validity....
standing" of Science in the realm Of morality, Lewis Opposes, in Col-
eridge's words, the "Practical Reason of Man, comprehending the Will,
the Conscience, the Moral Being with its inseparable Interests and
Affections--that Reason...which is the organ Of Wisdom, and (as far

as Man is concerned) the Source of living and actual Truths."62 In a
word, the assent to the Tao is a non-conceptual assent, a moral
affirmation.

Now such an affirmation supposes the whole Of the Kant-Coleridge
distinction between, respectively, the understanding and the reason,
and the pure or speculative reason and the practical. The understand-
ing, as Coleridge defined it, is an adaptive faculty common to both
men and beasts; it is, in man, a higher and more subtle form of the
instinct that leads the ant and the bee to build roads, walls, hives
in order to obtain a certain goal of ease or security.. It is discur-
sive, it makes syllogisms, it abstracts and compares and generalizes.
It is limited in its Operation in the sense that the materials it works
with are phenomena, that is, reality perceived according to the Kantian

categories of space and time and organized according to the Kantian

forms Of perception (substance, quantity, cause, effect, and so on).

 

61The Abolition gf_Man, p. 32.

 

62Coleridge, Aids t2_Reflection (London, 1836), p. 165.

 

166

It does not work with the noumenal reality because it does not perceive
the noumenal reality; it can see noumena only in terms of phenomena
(Barfield's collective representations). If it tries to go beyond this
Sphere, if it tries to deal discursively with noumenal reality, it be-
comes "the meddling intellect," murdering to dissect a transcendental
reality perceptible only to the Reason. The Reason (either Speculative
or practical) is a single power of knowing in which all men Share,
while there are as many understandings as there are men and beasts.
Reason is the Word, the logos; it perceives things Of the Spirit as the
senses perceive material things; it is "reasoning from infinite to in-
finite." while understanding is "reasoning from finite to finite."63
It is not inference (the Logos has no need to infer); it is spiritual
perception.

It is this Reason considered under its practical (or moral) as-
pect which Lewis utilizes in the assent to the existence of Natural Law,
or to the reality and validity of conscience. .We recall that he agrees
with Barfield that our logic is a participation in the cosmic Logos,
which is an echo of Coleridge's belief that Reason is "part of the
Image of God in us."6" And it is Reason considered under its pure or
speculative aspect which is the basis of much Of Lewis's doctrinal work

--The Problem of Pain, Miracles, the university sermons. Coleridge had

 

 

63Aids §g_Reflection, p. 155.
6h

 

 

Aids tg_Reflection, p. lhO.

167

assigned a particular function to Speculative Reason in matters of
theology. It is to be used to buttress the truths of faith which have
been apprehended by the assent Of the Practical Reason, truths which
have been presented for acceptance by Revelation. " t is its Office
and rightful privilege to determine on the negative truth of whatever

M

we are required to believe. The Doctrine must not contradict any uni-

 

65

versal principle: for this would be a Doctrine that contradicted itself."
The distinction here is nice: it is not to establish the truth Of dog-
ma (that haS been established by Practical Reason, or moral assent);

it is rather to Show that the dogma is not contrary to reason. In

“other words, the function of Pure Reason is to work at hypotheses, not

in the hope Of arriving at truth of dogma but rather in the hOpe of

showing that it iS not absurd to believe the dOgma. So, in The Problem

 

gf_P§ig, Lewis's concern is to establish reasonable hypotheses about

the existence of mental and physical anguish in the world; the fact

that pain should exist must be shown to be not irreconcilable with

the established truths of Christianity. Pain thus becomes "God's
megaphone,"66 a means by which.(bd tries to make unrepentant man turn

to Him. "...it gives the only Opportunity the bad man can have for amend—
ment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the for-

67

tress of a rebel soul."

 

6sAids tg_Reflection, p. 177.

 

66Problem gf_Pain, p. 83.

672mm 9!. faith p. 83.

168

In Miracles, Lewis attempts to show that miracles are amenable
to Reason by hazarding that what seems miraculous in our nature is per-
haps merely natural in another; what we perceive when we see a "mir-
acle" is not really a miracle at all but a bringing together of two
different and perhaps Opposite natures. God,.for reasons known only
to Him, allows two such natures to come into contact, and for a moment
one nature Operates according to the laws Of the other; the result seems
to us miraculous (i.e., inexplicable). In any case, Once the miraculous
phenomenon has occurred, it is received into the nature we know, and
begins to abide by the natural laws of our own earth. The Virgin
Birth iS a miracle, but Christ went through the nine months of gesta-
tion. Nature absorbs the miraculous into itself.

But the negative function of Pure Reason in theological matters
is most evident in Lewis's university sermons, particularly in the two
entitled "The Weight of Glory" and "Transposition." In the first, Lewis

It

deals with the Christian concept Of "glory, the state we will assume
in beatitude. If it means fame or good reputation, it'seems to contra-
dict the Christian notion of humility. But when it is suggested that
it does not mean fame among men but rather praise by God, it is seen to
be not contradictory to reason. And if it means "brightness, Splendour,
luminosity,"68 it seems at first rather silly: "who wishes to become

6
a kind of living electric light bulb?" 9 But again speculation shows

 

68"The Weight Of Glory," p. 12.

69"The Weight of Glory," p. 8.

169

the doctrine not to be absurd, but in fact to be founded on one of the
deepest and most common of human desires, the desire for beauty. Here
and now we can only perceive beauty; but we want more. "We want somee
thing else which can hardly be put into words--to be united with the
beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe
innit, to become part of it. That is why we have peOpled air and earth
and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves--that, though we
cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty,

grace, and power of which Nature is the image."70

In the state of
beatitude, this deep desire will be somehow fulfilled, and though we
do not know how, yet it is enough that the doctrine has been shown to
be reasonable.

"Transposition" is an attempt to show the reasonableness of the
phenomenon of "glossolalia," or "speaking with tongues." We believe that
the apostles Spoke with tongues, yet we have evidence from revival meet-
ings that something much like that same phenomenon sometimes occurs and
produces a torrent of gibberish. We are forced into the position of
holding that "the very same phenomenon which is sometimes not only
natural but even pathological is at other times (or at least one other

"71

time) the organ of the Holy Ghost. Lewis attempts to remove the

apparent absurdity by pointing out'that when the Almighty acts in our

 

70"The Weicht of Glory," p. 13.

t

71..

Transposition,' in The Weight g£_Glory, p. 17.

 

170

Nature, he acts within the limitations of that Nature; analogously, we
have the case of lust and love, which both culminate in the sexual act
but which are different things. The human body has limitations; its
organs must be used for many purposes, and the same organs must be
used to gratify lust in a waste of shame and to consummate the noblest
kind of sexual love. Pepys, says Lewis, was ravished by hearing the

music of The Virgin Martyr, and reported that it pleased him so much

 

that it made him physically sick. Thus both aesthetic pleasure and
sea-sickness (for example) bring about the same physical phenomenon,
simply because the body is limited in its physical reactions to psycho-
logical and spiritual stimuli. -And thus glossolalia and religious
hysteria appear to be the same because what is rich and complex is
being expressed in a poorer medium, translated into a cruder language,
and using what comes to hand, the limited reactions of the body. Fur-
ther, what is unpleasant in one case (the sickness) becomes pleasant in
lanother. The sickness of the stomach common to both sea-sickness and
aesthetical rapture is hated in one case and wanted in the other. The
physical reactions themselves can be transformed according to the stim-
ulus that effects them. There is perhaps an analogy, Lewis thinks, be-
tween this transposition and the theology of the Incarnation. As the
sensation of sickness is subsumed by aesthetic joy and made, as it were,
a part of that Joy, so in the Incarnation, which worked "not by con-

version of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into

171

God," man may be "veritably drawn into" God.72 But Lewis advances this

only as a hypothesis, walking in mirabilibus supra me. The real truth

 

(as distinct from its lack of logical absurdity), the way that it really
differs from hysteria, can be known only as St. Paul himself knew it:
by Practical Reason, by spiritual Perception. "Spiritual things are
spiritually discerned."73
Now what I have said of Lewis's doctrinal works, that they are
products of the Pure Reason and thus adjuncts to the Practical Reason
or the will, is in some degree true, if not of Anglicanism as a whole,
at least of some part or school of Anglicanism. Historical examination

shows that Coleridge played no small part in nineteenth-century broad-

church Anglicanism before the advent of modernism.7h Further such

 

72"TranSposition," p. 28.

73"Transposition," p. 25.

7hSee C. T. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Dur-
ham, N.C., 19H2). F. D. Maurice paid tribute to Coleridge's part in the
movement in 18h2. His book The Kingdom 9£_Christ is concerned with a
universal church to which all the sects could belong, and he wrote in his
dedication to Derwent Coleridge: "In preparing for the consideration of
this great subject I have felt...that Mr. Coleridge's help has been in-
valuable to us. Nearly every thoughtful writer of the day would have
taught us, that the highest truths are those which lie beyond the limits
of Experience, that the essential principles of the Reason are those
which cannot be proved by syllogisms, that the evidence for them is the
impossibility of admitting that which does fall under the law of exper-
ience, unless we recognize them as its foundation; nay, the impossi-
bility of believing that we ourselves are, or anything that is, except
upon these terms. The atheism of Hume has driven men to these blessed
discoveries, and though it was your father's honour that he asserted
them to an age and a nation which had not yet discovered the need of
them, he certainly did not pretend...that he was the first receiver or
expositor of them. But the application of these principles to Theology,
I believe, we owe mainly to him. The power of perceiving that by the
very law of the Reason the Knowledge of God must be given to it; that
the moment it attempts to create its Maker, it denies itself...I must
acknowledge that I received from him." Quoted from Basil Willey,
Nineteenth Century Studies (London, l9h9), p. 3.

 

 

 

172

examination, which is beyond the scope of this work, might reveal why

it is a "typically Anglican conviction that truth is larger and more
beautiful than our imperfect minds are able to apprehend or conceive,"7S
and why Anglicanism, more than some other communions, should strive al-
ways "not to define too exactly those mysteries which God has hidden in

"76

His own knowledge. I do not suggest that lewis's romantic Chris-
tianity is identical with Anglicanism as such, any more than the romantic
religion of Macdonald or Chesterton was identical with their formal
religions. I do suggest that Lewis has come to terms with dogma in a
typically romantic way learned from Coleridge, that he has done this

in order to go beyond dogma to experience, the romantic experience of
longing which he now can see as of religious significance. Transcend-
ental Christianity preserves the value of both dogma and experience by
explaining both as attempts to reach the same end, by showing that
sehnsucht is qualitatively the same as the Practical Reason or the Will.
Romantic longing is for what never was on sea or land, for the beyond
"partly in the west, partly in the past"; transcendental Christianity

provides an ultimate reality that is opaque, unapproachable and unknow-

able except through the will. As Coleridge said, "Omnia exeunt in_

 

mysterium....There is nothing, the absolute ground of which is not a

Mystery. The contrary were indeed a contradiction in terms: for how

 

75Stephen Neill, Anglicanism (Baltimore, 1958), p. h22.
76

 

Anglicanism, p. #29.

173

can that, which is to explain all things, be susceptible of an explana-

n77

tion? Christianity itself, for the transcendentalist, may be thought
of as a myth or accommodation, so far as it is understood rather than
perceived spiritually by moral means; just so far as Christianity is
formal and dogmatic, it is a limitation of the transcendent God, a form
of perception like quantity or substance by which we mutilate and dis-
tort the I AM WHO AM. In order to know God, we must love Him; there

is no discursive way. Transcendental Christianity, like romantic long-

78

ing, puts its good in "the High Countries," where the heart is.

 

77Coleridge, Aids tg_Rgflection, p. 131.

78Lewis, Preface to The Great Divorce (New York, 19h6), p. vii.

CHAPTER IV

CHARLES WILLIAMS AND ROMANTIC THEOLOGY

The most extensive and perceptive criticisms of the work of
Charles Williams to date are those of his friends and close acquaintances
--Lewis, Eliot, Ann Ridler. Now no one can doubt that, other things be-
ing equal, to have known the man whose work you deal with is almost
surely to possess insights into the work that other critics will not
have. Yet there are dangers in such intimate knowledge. Coleridge was
a better critic of Wordsworth after their estrangement, and no one turns
to Boswell for a critical evaluation of 13322, One might even argue
that the more magnetic the personality of the writer, the less objec-
tive the criticism of his friends will be. It is one of the difficul-
ties which I have already noted as facing the critic of contemporary
matters. It is necessary to point out the danger in the case of Williams,
for he seems to have impressed his friends in a way not really suscepti-
ble of analysis by someone who did not know him. Lewis, when he tried
to combine the idea of death with the idea of Charles Williams, found
that it was "the idea of death that was changed."1 And, speaking of

Willians's death, he records the testimony of two of William's fr ends:

 

1Preface to Essays Presented tg_Charles Williams (London, l9h7),
p. xiv.

 

 

17h

175

A lady, writing to me after his death, used the word
stupor (in its Latin sense) to describe the feeling
which Williams had produced on a certain circle in
London; it would almost describe the feeling he pro-
duced on us after he died. There is, I dare say, no
empirical proof that such an experience is more than
subjective. But for those who accept on other grounds
the Christian faith, I suggest that it is best under-
stood in the light of some words that one of his friends
said to me as we sat in Addison's Walk just after the
fluneral. 'Our Lord told the disciples it was expedient
for them that He should go away, otherwise the Comforter
would not come to them. I do not think it blasphemous
to suppose that what was true archetypally, and in em-
inence, of His death may, in the apprOpriate degree, be
true of the deaths of all of His followers.‘

Eliot, commenting on the unity of Williams's life and work, adds, "To
have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough;
but no one who has known both the man and his works would have willing-

'3 And Auden has said that his meetings

1y foregone either experience.;
with Williams were "among my most unforgettable and precious exper-
iences."h Ann Ridler mentions that, when he was lecturing at Oxford
during the second WOrld War, he always had time to talk with his stud-
ents, even the dullest. "His friends, to tease him, would call him
promiscuous, and perhaps would wish him to be more selective, but would

5

then recall that the saints were not selective."

2Preface to Essays Presented, p. xiv.

 

 

3Introduction to All Hallows' Eve (New York, 19h8), p. xi.

glntroduction to The Descent of the Dove, The History gf_the Holy
Spirit .29. the Church (New York, 1953)’, p. v.

 

 

5Introduction to The Image g£_the City and Other Essays (London,
1958), p. xxii.

 

176

Now these testimonies to Williams's sanctity must be taken into
account in any discussion of his work. For as regards his theological
beliefs, his theme is one and always was: what he calls "substitution,"

"co-inherence, exchange." In the following pages I will discuss these
principles gg theological beliefs inducing, in Williams, certain atti-
tudes; I will not, and cannot, discuss them as a practical way of life.
But exchange and substitution may have been for Williams, as Auden says,
not only a "basic theme" but I'a way of life by which...he himself
lived."6 Now as a practical way of life, substitution and exchange be-
come a kind of physical communion of the saints by which one man may
literally bear the burden of another's pain and anguish. By an act of
the will one may assume another's suffering, and by an act of the will
one may yield up his suffering to another. Such a notion, I believe,.
strikes the average reader as either grotesque (like something out of
Williams's occultish novels), or as a matter bordering on the miraculous.
And either alternative makes him uneasy. But Williams's friends were
not uneasy: knowing the man, they accepted the second alternative.
Eliot speaks of the "states of consciousness of a mystical kin ? which
Williams'knew, and could put into words."7 And of this practical way of
exchange following from these states, Iewis adds that he believes Wil-

8

liams "spoke from experimental knowledge."

 

f

6Introduction to Descent g£_the Dove, p. v.

 

7Introduction to All Fhllows' Eve, p. xvii.

8"Williams and the Arthuriad," in Arthurian Torso (tendon, 1948),
p. 123.

 

177

On the question of whether or not Williams had mystical exper-
iences, I, of course, can have no Opinion except from the evidence of
his work. There he often Speaks of mystical experience in connection
with Dame JUlian of Norwich or Evelyn Underhill or the pseudo-Diony-
sins;9 and one certainly gets the impression that he knows whereof he
speaks, that he speaks, as it were, from the inside. And it may be that
what looks from the outside like transcendental philosophy, which sees
the world as manifesting God in His various aspects, may be from the
inside knowledge arrived at by spiritual communion.' It may be that,
like Dame Julian, Williams §33_the essential Unity of the world. But
what his work shows to the reader is that he was a man (as Wordsworth

said of Coleridge) to whom the essential unity of things had been re-

vealed-~but by natural means, exciting moments of metaphysical insight.

 

. 9But he is not then talking about his own experience. Thus, in
his edition of Evelyn Underhill's letters (Iondon, 19h3) he quotes ap-
provingly what Miss Underhill is in turn quoting from her spiritual
teacher Baron von Hugel: "We all need one another...souls, all souls,
are deeply interconnected. The Church at its best and deepest is just
that--that interdependence of all the broken and meek, all the self-
oblivion, all the reaching out to God and souls...nothing is more real
than this interconnection. We can suffer for one another--no soul is
saved alone and by its own efforts." (p. 21) Williams remarks that he
once talked briefly to Miss Underhill about this principle of substi-
tution-exchange. He had written of an exchange in his novel Descent
into Hell: ”He endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the sub-
stitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the
central mystery of Christendom." And he adds: "It was a well-meant
sentence, but she charmingly corrected it. She said something to this
effect: 'Oh, but the saints do--they say they do. St. Catherine said:
"I will bear your sins."' She spoke from a very great knowledge of the
records of sanctity, but I should be rather more than willing to believe
that she spoke from a lofty practice of sanctity and from a great under-
standing of the laws that govern, and the labours that are given to,
sanctity." (p. 21)

178

NOwhere in his work (so far as I am aware) does he lay claim to any-
thing more than that; and it is with his work that I must deal.

What is received is received according to the condition of the
receiver: a personal knowledge of Williams the man has helped to form
the receiving intellects of his friends. It may be that his friends,
disarmed, are thus partially disabled as critics; or it may be that
other critics are themselves disabled by the lack of such knowledge.

It is a nice question, to which I do not have the answer, but a question
which must be posed. Truth, as Donne said, is a steep cliff, and we go
many a weary round to scale it. No one ever lived who did not carry
with him his armor of preconceptiOns and his shield of beliefs. No one
ever went naked into an ideological battle. The most that any man (and
critic) can hOpe is that he know the armor he is wearing. That of
Iewis, Auden, Eliot and Ann Ridler is that of the Anglican faith and

the friendship of Williams. The rest of us must look to our own.

And here I must say a further preliminary word, this time as re-
gards the limitations I have imposed upon myself in my appnoach to Wil- .
liams's work. It is at present difficult to say into what literary cat-
egory Williams's best work falls. He is perhaps best known for his
theological thrillers, and of all his work these have been dealt with
the most extensively by critics. Iewis regards his poetry as his most
important literary work, and looks forward to the time when "Williams
criticism" will sweep away Lewis's own preliminary and tentative remarks

on the Arthurian poems. And another critic regards Williams as a

~11: Nu

 

179

Miltonic poet"10 who, in the Taliessen poems, has "produced a new kind
of poetic mythology."l; Further, any estimate of Williams's total work
must include an evaluation of his dramatic work, particularly his con-
tribution (at the same time as Eliot) to the poetic drama. The resem-

blance between Williams's Thomas Cranmer 9£_Canterbury and Eliot's

 

 

Murder in_the Cathedral is too marked to be merely accidental. Fin-

 

ally, there remains (aside from his theological writing) a quite ex-
tensive and uncollected mass of literary criticism. Of this last, some
is hack work, but some is rather highly regarded-~his introduction to

the WOrld's Classics edition of Milton, his several pieces on Dante

 

(particularly The Figure g£_ Beatrice), and his criticism of Wordsworth

in Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind.

 

Thus, unfortunately for the literary historian, Williams's talent
splashes untidily into several areas. Literary assessors will have to
decide Williams's merit in fiction of a special sort, in poetry, in
drama, in criticism. 'In the last, it may well be found (as has been
suggested to me) that Williams anticipates such recent and equitable
analyses of romantic theories of poetry as that of M. H. Abrams; and
certainly Williams's interest (both critical and creative) in the
nature of allegory and symbolism antedates such recent interest in the

subject as shown by NbrthrOp Frye and Edwin Honig. And there is little

 

 

10George Every, Poetry and Personal Responsibility, An_Interim
Report gg_Contemporary literature (London, l9h9), p. #1.

 

11Poetry and Personal Responsibility, p. 59.

 

180

doubt that Williams belongs in the ranks of those who, like Douglas
Bush and Lewis, have done so much to re-establish the reputation of
Milton after the damaging attacks on it by Eliot, Pound, and Leavis,
among others.

Williams, then, may be approached from many directions; and ul-
timately he must be so approached, for (and this is the possibility
that nags every critic) he may just be a really important writer. But,
the shoemaker must stick to his last. I have sketched out problems for
others that I mean to ignore myself; my purpose, as I have said before,
is not literary evaluation as such but the examination of a religious-
literary phenomenon. Thus I have drawn no line between his work in A
the several categories. His religious ideas and attitude are fundamen-
tal to all his work and pervade all his work, and so I have traced out
these things in whatever form they occur in his work, using as criteria
only the clarity or the forcefulness with which they are expressed.

We may begin, then, with a term that I have already used in con-
nection with Iewis and Barfield--transcendentalism. Williams, says one
of his critics, belongs "to the tradition of Christian transcendentalism
in English poetry--the great tradition of Spenser, Vaughan, the later

WOrdsworth and Coleridge....' It will be clear as we go on that the
observation is true of his prose as well. Yet it is not really helpful

to call Williams transcEndental in the sense that I have used the term

 

12John Heath-Stubbs, Charles Williams (London, 1955), p. 15.

 

 

 

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181

of Barfield and Iewis. Within the rather vague confines of the phenom-
enon we call transcendental Christianity, there are all sorts of em-
phasis possible; and though it is true to say that Spenser and Coleridge
belong to the same tradition, such cataloguing is of little real help
in establishing what it was that each man particularly believed and prac-
tised. I have used the term transcendental of Barfield to refer es-
pecially to his use of the creative imagination as the concept comes
from Coleridge and, ultimately, out of German romantic philoSOphy.
And I have used the term of Iewis to mean especially his use of the
transcendental epistemology as it is found in Kant and, again, Coleridge.
But though there is emphasis in Williams's work on the faculty of
the creative imagination, it is not the same sort of emphasis that we
have found in Barfield; nor are there the distinctions between the spec-
ulative and the practical intellect that we have found in Lewis. There
is rather more of Wordsworth than of Coleridge in Williams's work. He
is more the poetic romantic than the analytical romantic, more concerned
with the Wordsworthian vision than with the Coleridgean glossing of the
workings of the mind. What we find in Williams's work is emphasis on
the union of the intellect and the imagination as the highest means of
reaching religious truth. We find him time and again insisting on this
union in terms for which he has to resort to Wordsworth: this union

results in "the feeling intellect," or "absolute power,’ or "reason in

 

her most exalted mood." Thus Merlin in Taliessen through Iogres magic-

ally sends his imagination into the "third sphere" in order to perceive

"

 

 

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182

Pelles the Wounded King and lancelot outside the King's gate, reduced
to wolf-shape after his enchanted begetting of Galahad on Helayne:

he sent his hearing into the third Sphere--

once by a northern poet beyond Snowdon

seen at the rising of the moon, the mens sensitiva,

the feeling intellect, the prime and vital principle,
the pattern in heaven of Nimue, time's mother on earth,
Broceliande. ("The Son of Lancelot," pp. 55-56)

 

This union of intellect and imagination as a way to religious truth is
illustrated most clearly in what Williams called "the theology of roman-

tic love,' and it is with this theology that we must greatly concern our-
selves in this chapter.

Before we examine the phenomenon of romantic theology, however,
it is necessary to glance at the framework within which it exists. To
do this requires sketching out Williams's general theological beliefs
and, by so doing, establishing another facet of his transcendental the-
ology.

We must begin by pointing out that Williams follows "one ar-
rangement of doctrine rather than what is perhaps the more usual" but
one "that...is no less orthodox."l3 'This arrangement or doctrine holds

that God (to speak in time) desired to become incarnate.1h He could

have done so without creating man and the universe, but He chose the

 

13Williams, The Forgiveness 9; Sins (London, 1950, in a volume
which also includes Hg Came Down From Heaven), p. 119.

lhThe doctrine that the Incarnation would have occurred even had
there been no Fall, Williams attributes to Duns Scotus. See Descent of
the Dove, p. 122.

 

 

183

latter course:

He willed...that this union with matter in flesh
should be by a mode which precisely involved crea-
tures to experience joy. He determined to be incar-
nate by being born; that is, he determined to have

a mother. His mother was to have companions of her
own kind; and the mother and her companions were to
exist in an order of their own degree, in time and
place, in a world. They were to be related to him
and to each other by a state of Joyous knowledge;
they were to derive from him and from each other;
and he was to deign to derive his flesh from them.
All this sprang, superfluous, out of his original
intention-~superfluous to himself and to his direct
purpose, not superfluous to his indirect purpose of
love. It was to be a web of simultaneous interchange
of good. 'In the sight of God,’ said Lady JElian,
'all man is one man and one man is all man.‘ 5

From the above description of the creation and Incarnation, we
may proceed to the rest of the root ideas to be found in Williams's
work. First, as I have already said, from this description another
facet of his transcendentalism is clear. The universe, including the
unity, man, is to be seen as a vast interlocking web of glory; all
things manifest God in their degree; the hills skip for joy and the
sons of God shout His praises. All things, man included, are glints of
God; He is not in all things but, as it were, behind all things; the
creation is an array of the masks of God. It is thus that Taliessen
envisions the Empire (the world); it is the unity of Byzantium (heaven)
translated into multiplicity in order to be perceived phenomenally:

The organic body sang together;

dialects of the world sprang in Byzantium;
back they rang to sing in Byzantium;

 

15Forgiveness 9£_Sins, pp. 119-20.

 

 

18h

the streets repeat the sound of the Throne.

The Acts issue from the Throne.

Under it, translating the Greek minuscula

to minds of the tribes, the identities of creation

phenomenally abating to kinds and kindreds,

the household inscribes the Acts of the Emperor;

the logothetes run down the porphyry stair

bearing the missives through the area of empire.

("The Vision of the Empire" in Taliessen, p. 6)
Thus there are, as Melville and Emerson and Baudelaire knew, "corres-
pondences" between things. This, for Williams, is particularly so in
respect to God and man. The whole of the relationship among men, and
between man and God, is clear from the meanings of three of Williams's
favorite terms: co-inherence, substitution, and exchange. We must
pause here to examine them.

The three terms all refer to single aspects of the same thing,
and this thing we may call the universal principle of existence. This
principle may be stated negatively by saying that nothing, not even God,
exists alone and without reference to anything else. The pattern of all
existence is to be found in the Trinity: this is the supreme example of
co-inherence and exchange. And the universe, as in the neo-Platonic
tradition, mirrors or adumbrates the existence of God. All things co-
inhere in each other and in God because, literally, that is the way exis-
tence is, that is the nature of existence, divine or worldly. And sub-
stitution, the model of which is the Redemption and the Atonement, is a
further application of this same principle. As all things co-inhere_

and practise exchange among each other, so all things substitute for each

other. More accurately, in the case of man, who is a unity, all men

 

 

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185

substitute for each other and thereby serve themselves. Augustine,
says Williams, stressed the existence and importance of this web of
humanity:

'Fuimus ille unus' he said; 'we were in the one when we
were the one.‘ Whatever ages of time lay between us and
Adam, yet we were in him and his guilt is in us. And in-
deed if all mankind is held together by its web of exis-
tence, then ages cannot separate one from another. Exchange,
substitution, co-inherence are a natural fact as well as a
supernatural truth. 'Another is in me,’ said Felicitas;
'we were in another,’ said Augustine. The co-inherence
reaches back to the beginning as it stretches on to the

. end, and the anthropos is present everywhere. 'As in
Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive';
co-inherence did not begin with Christianity; all that
happened then was that co-inherence itself was redeemed
and revealed by that very rigemption as a supernatural prin-
ciple as well as a natural.

 

But the nature of substitution and exchange, principles of ex-
istence as they are, does not lermit them to be practised only at the
whim or will of the persons involved. Christ's substitution was a
willing one, and man may imitate Him in sacrifice and desired suffer-
ing. But this is only a part of existence. Frequently Williams uses
the image of a city as a symbol of the continual exchange that con-
‘stitutes existence; the city exists only as a vast "exchange between
citizens."17 And the necessary exchange is not necessarily between
lovers or even acquaintances; it may be, and often is, between enemies,

peOple who despise each other.

 

‘16Descent g£_thg Dove, pp. 69-70.

17"Anthropotokos," in Image 9.1: the City, p. 112.

186

Hostility begins to exist...whenever and wherever we for-

get that we are nourished by, that we live from-~whomever;

when we think that we can choose by whom we shall be nour-

ished. If anthropos has any meaning, if the web of human-

ity is in any sense one, if the City exists in our blood

as well as in our desires, then we precisely must live from,

'and be nourighed by, those whom we most wholly dislike and

disapprove.l
Thus the very nature of existence, for Williams, may be nearly para-
phrased by the Scholastic definition of accident as that to whose na-
ture it belongs to exist by virtue of another. All things, it may be
said, are accidents existing by virtue of the substance (the only sub-
stance) of the co-inhering Trinity of God.

NOw, again to speak in terms of time, this is the way the world
was before the Fall. But to speak in terms of time is inaccurate, ac-
cording to Williams. Though Williams never mentions Kant, he seems to
hold with Kant that time is a mode of perception; we grind the timeless
down intotemporality and sequence because otherwise we could perceive
nothing. Strictly speaking, the past, the present, and the future are
relative and temporal_terms. Existence operates in timelessness: the
past and the future are happening. The practices of substitution and
interchange can and do Operate in the past as well as in the present and
the future. Thus Taliessen envisions all Christian poets indebted to

Virgil rushing out of the future at the hour of his death to substitute

for him:

 

18"Anthropotokos," in Image 9: the Citz, Po 112-

187

Virgil was fathered of his friends.
He lived in their ends.
He was set on the marble of exchange.
("Taliessen on the Death of Virgil" in Taliessen, p. 32)
Thus we may warily hope that Herod does not slaughter the innocents,
nor Salome demand the Baptist‘s head. Examples of this timelessness in

the novels are numerous and have often been noted. The most spectacu-

lar occurs in Descent into Hell: the heroine, haunted by a doppel-

 

ganger, allows another to hear her burden of fear; she in turn takes
on the sufferings of her ancestor, a Protestant martyr who died at the
stake under Bloody Mary, thereby providing him with the courage to go
to his death singing the praises of God. Ann Ridler, who accepts
Williams's doctrine of substitution, remarks on the advantages of sub-
stitution operating outside time:

...one of its great rewards is the liberation which

it brings from the tyranny of time as well as space,

so that the sense of guilt at any temporary forget-

fulness is abolished: there is no such word as too

late; all times, like all fortune, must be good.

This is also surely the Justification for those ef-

forts to share imaginatively in the sufferings of

Christ, which to some have seemed a masochistic prac-

tice: if the doctrine is true, even there the Crea-

tor may accept help from His cieature--a help that

speeds from any point in time. 9

Now this is the nature of the transcendental, interlocking uni-
verse so far as it is not fallen. It is good; it could not be other-

wise, being, as it is, a divine facade. There remains then to explain

the nature of evil and the fall of man, their place in the creation which

 

19Introduction to The Image of the City, p. xlix.

.

an-

188

God looked on and found to be good. If the creation is good, if all
things praise God by their existence, it follows that man ought normal-
ly to perceive this.. But man does not. How does it happen that he
does not perceive the true nature of things? The answer lies in the
nature of the fall. -

Williams explains the nature of the fall by what he calls "the
myth of the alteration of knowledge." Before the fall occurred (or oc-
curs) man knew (or knows) the good as good; he existed in "a state of
joyous knowledge"; he perceived the transcendent universe, of which he
is himself a part, for what it really is, a reflection of the love and
glory of God. The fall of "the Adam" (Williams stresses the human unity
described by the lady Julian) consisted in failing to be, in Milton's
words, "lowly wise." The Adam wished to be as God, knowing both good
and evil. In the prelapsarian state the Adam, knowing all things as
good, could know evil only as an intellectual possibility. But the Adam
received the wish, and knew immediately "good lost and evil got."

Unfortunately to be as gods meant, for the Adam, to die,

for to know evil, for them, was to know it not by pure

intelligence but by experience. It was, precisely, to

experience the opposite of good, that is the deprivation

of the good, the slow.des§5uction of the good, and of

themselves with the good..

They wished to see "the principles at war" as God does; but what God

sees as mere possibility they had to live:

 

20Forgiveness 9: Sins, p. 123.

 

-...

189

The Adam in the hollow of Jerusalem respired:
softly their thought twined to its end,

crying: 9 parent, g_forked friend,

§m_I not too long meanly retired

ip_the poor space 9f_jgy's single dimension?

Does not God vision the principles at 333}
I§§_u§_grow §9_the height gf_God and the Emperor:
LEE.E§.SBZ€, §9§_9£_map, gp_§hg_Acts 12 contention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Adam climbed the tree; the boughs
rustled, withered, behind them; they saw

the secluded vision of battle in the law;
they found the terror in the Emperor's house.

The tree about them died undying,

the good lusted against the good,

the Acts in conflict envenomed the blood,

on the twisted tree hung their body wrying.

they had their will; they saw; they were torn in the terror.
("The Vision of the Empire" in Tiliessen, pp. lO-ll)

Evil, for Williams as for Aquinas, has no positive existence; it is
good warped and bent or, more accurately, good misperceived.

They knew good; they wished to know good and evil.

Since there was not--since there never has been and

never will be--anything else than the good to know,

they knew good as antagonism. All difference consists

in the mode of knowledge.21

The nature of the Fall, then, may be described as man's loss of
vision. With the Fall he loses his clarity and accuracy of moral and

metaphysical sight. "Hell," Williams observes, "is inaccurate."22 Man

sees good as evil, awarding to evil the tenuous existence of a mode of

 

21Forgiveness 9: Sins, p. 129.

22Quoted by Heath-Stubbs, p. 18.

190

perception, a gay_rather than a phenomenal existence. It follows, then,
that the Redemption must consist of some way or ways of restoring the
original accuracy of knowledge. And, according to Williams, the Redemp-
tion consists of two such ways: the Negative Way and the Affirmative
Way. The Negative Way is the way of ascetism and denial, the rejection
of all the images of God which make up creation in favor of the single
image of God Himself. This is the way of what we usually call mysti-
cism: the original clarity of vision, the true God-man relationship,
are restored to the follower of the Way of Rejection by means of a
direct communion with God. This is the way of the anchoress,,the her-
mit, of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila. In Taliessen

through Ingres Dindrane, whose religious name is Blanchefleur, follows

 

the Way of Rejection, as Taliessen himself follows the Way of Affirma-
tion. She rejects the good and pleasant life of the court for that of
the nunnery where she will devote her life to bringing up Galahad. She '

professed at Almesbury
to the nuns of infinite adoration, veiled
passions, sororal intellects, earth's lambs,
wolves of the heavens, heat's pallor's secret
within and beyond cold's pallor, fires
lit at Almesbury....
("The Son of Lancelot" in Taliessen, p. 55)

The pseudo-Dionysius, says Williams, is "the great intellectual teacher
of that Way...."23

The other Way is the Way of the Affirmation of Images, the

 

23The Figure 93 Beatrice (Iondon, 19h3), p. 8.

 

191

determination to restore the original vision by affirming in Some way
that the images of God of which creation consists are still good; this
way consists not in ignoring or rejecting the world but in accepting
it for what it is, but what it no longer seems to be--good. Now these
images to be affirmed are not subjective; they are, as Williams said
of them in respect to Dante, "the subjective recollection within him
of something objectively outside him" (Barfield's collective represen-
tations); they are images "of an exterior fact and not of an interior

2h

desire." Thus, as Antony Borrow says, "Potentially...any and every

thing known Or perceived by man, including man, is an object from which

"25 Thus death, madness, bereavement, loss

such an image may be formed.
are images to be affirmed. "The Way of the Affirmation is...an accep-
tance of the world, including an acceptance of what we happen to see
as evil, and at the same time continually striving to see it as one
aSpect of God."26

Now the mystic, the follower of the Way of the Rejection of
Images, has his original vision restored, at least briefly, by direct
communion with the Godhead; he has seen what Plato called the Idea of
the Good, though when he returns to the mundane cave in which the rest

of us live he can only speak to us of his vision in metaphors and dark

conceits, can only tell us, like St. Jehn of the Cross, of the light in

 

2“th rises: 22 B__e_a_trice, p. 8.

25"The Affirmation of Images," Nine (Summer/Autumn, 1952), 327.

26nThe Affirmation of Images," Nine, p- 329~

192

the dark night of the soul, or, like St. Theresa, of the bright nuptial
hymns she has heard. But a vision need not be intelligible; for a mo-
ment the mystic has seen the light turned on behind the universe, has
seen the great wheels rolling, like Ezekiel. But how does the Affirma-
tive Way restore the accuracy of prelapsarian vision? The answer to
this, which is the burden of this chapter, is the essence of Williams's
religious romanticism. .

Williams's romanticism is what might be called "corrected" ro-
manticism. It is theologized romanticism, the romantic experience seen

sub species aeternitatis. Williams, says Lewis, was a "romantic theo-

 

logian."

A romantic theologian does not mean one who is roman-
tic about theology but one who is theological about
romance, one who considers the theological implica-
tions of those experiences which are called romantic.
The belief that the most serious and ecstatic exper-
iences either of human love or of imaginative litera-
ture have such theological implications, and that they
can be healthy and fruitful only if the implications
are diligently thought out and severely lived, is the
root principle of all his work. His relation to the
modern literary current was thus thoroughly 'ambiva-
lent'. He could be grouped with the counter-romantics
in so far as he believed untheologized romanticism
...to be sterile and mythological. On the other hand,
he could be treated as the head of the resistance against
the moderns in so far as he believed the romanticism
theyzgere rejecting as senile to be really immature

It is the "uncorrected" romanticism, or what Williams calls pseudo-
romanticism,which Williams dislikes. Uncorrected romanticism may be

defined as the romantic experience unreflected upon, the romantic

 

27Preface to Essayquresented, p. vi.

 

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193

experience seen only as itself and not through the spectacles of eter-
nity. If WOrdsworth has been content to revel in the experience of
Nature which haunted him like a passion instead of looking for its
meaning, he would have been an "uncorrected" romantic. If the man in
love does not try to see the significance of being in love, he, too,'
is an uncorrected romantic. The experience itself is not enough; it
must be related to the rest of the web of existence. True romanticism
must consist of the union of the intellect and the imagination; it
must be passionate thought, analyzed passion. Wordsworth and Blake,
says Williams, were true romantics.

The true Romantic, maintaining the importance of what

Blake calls 'the visionary Fancy or Imagination', ad-

mits and believes that the holy intellect is part of

it. ... Both of these noble poets have been said to

repudiate 'the meddling intellect'; in so far as they

did, it was precisely the meddling intellect which

they discarded. The power which they felt and be-
lieved was defined by WOrdsworth in the ggand climax
of the Prelude--'the feeling intellect‘.

Williams's "true"

romanticism, characterized as it is by the "feeling
intellect," is a good deal like the current notion of metaphysical

poetry which stems from Grierson and Eliot. If we may borrow Eliot's
phrases, we may say that Williams's true romantic is one in whom there

can be no "dissociation of sensibility," one who feels a thought as
immediately as the odor of a rose, one whose thoughts are experiences
which modify his sensibility. In Eliot, however, the unified sensi-
bility serves largely as a faculty for the writing of poetry. In Williams,
' L_

28"Blake and Wordsworth," in Image 9§_§h§_CitX; po 60-

191+

the union of thought and feeling serves, as I have indicated, as a
means of arriving at religious truth.

Now theologized romanticism is one of the modes of the Affir-
ative Way, and thus one of the ways of restoring the prelapsarian
vision. The romantic experience theologized, like Lewis's sehnsucht,
is one of the potential benefits to man brought about by the Redemption.
There are various kinds, or modes, of the romantic experience which,
when joined with the intellect, may lead man back to the original vis-
ion. Williams nowhere in his writing develops them, but he apparently
used them as talking points in his wartime lectures to Oxford under-
graduates. John Heath-Stubbs catalogues them from this source:

In a lecture which I heard him deliver at Oxford in
l9h3, Charles Williams distinguished five principal
modes of the Romantic experience, or great images,
which occur in poetry. They are:

(a) The Religious experience itself. Having posited
this, Williams proposed to say nothing further
about it. Obviously, in a sense, it is in a
category apart, and includes the others.

(b) The Image of woman. Dante's Divine Comedy is the
fullest expression of this mode, and its poten-
tial development.

(c) The Image of Nature. Of this WCrdsworth in Th2 \
Prelude...was the great exponent. ‘

(d) The Image of the City. Had Williams not been ad-
dressing an audience composed of English Litera-
ture students, I have no doubt that he would have
cited Virgil, in the Aeneid, as the great expon-
ent....

(e) The experience of great art. Of this, Keats's
Qgg_gh_g_Grecian urn was a partial expression.

 

29

 

 

29Heath-Stubbs, pp. 18-19.

195

The only one of these five modes of the romantic experience which
Williams ever fully developed is the image of woman, out of which sub-
heading comes his theology of romantic love. Of the others there are
only scattered hints throughout his work. The experience of great art,

for example, he touches on briefly in the novel Manquimensions. The

 

plot centers about a certain stone_by the use of which a man may travel
through space and time. One of the persons in the novel, having ex-
perienced this travel, meditates its possibilities and causes:

...the past might, even materially, exist; only man
was not aware of it, time being, whatever else it
was, a necessity of his consciousness. 'But because
I can only be sequentially conscious,’ he argued,
'must I hold that what is not communicated to con-
sciousness does not exist? I think in a line--but
there is the potentiality of the plane.‘ This per-
haps was what great art was--a momentary apprehension
of the plane at a point in the line. The Demeter of
Cnidos, the Praying Hands of Durer, the ggg_§g_g
Nightingale, the Ninth Symphony--the sense of vast-
ness in those small things was the vastness of all
that had been felt in the present.

Before we turn to the theology of romantic love as Williams's
most fully developed mode of the Affirmation of Images, there is one'
last general theological point which we must consider, for it plays a
basic part in that mode: the point is Williams's beliefs concerning
the body, its place and function in the religious life.

Ann Ridler believes that Williams's notions about the body came

originally out of what we should call occult sources. Shortly after

 

 

3OManyDimensions (Iondon, 19h7), p. 58.

196

the first World War, Williams became friendly with A. E. Waite, who
introduced him to the Order of the Golden Dawn, the theosophical so-
ciety of which Yeats had earlier been a member. Though Williams's‘
‘connection with the order was brief, he read with great interest

Waite's book The Secret Doctrine ip_Israe1, which is a study of the

 

Jewish mystical work called the Zohar. Waite's book makes much of the
body as symbolic:

The frontispiece shows a diagram of the Sephirotic
Tree laid out upon the figure of a man, with the dif-
ferent prOperties related to different parts of the
bodya-e.g., Chesed, Mercy, is at the right hand, 92?
burah, Severity, at the left. In this book, I believe,
'are the foundations of Williams's thought about the
symbolism of the body, and of his life-long attgmpt

to develop an adequate theology of marriage....

There is also much of the Arthurian imagery of Waite's The Hidden Church

 

g; the Holy Grail in Williams's Arthurian poetry. There is an end-paper

 

design in the English edition of Taliessen through Logres which indi-

 

cates in Blakean fashion the symbolic geography of the poems.

Here the Empire is represented as a human figure.
The head is in Ingres (Britain) for it is in Britain
that the myth is to be enacted....The breasts are in
Gaul (where Christendom is nourished by the milk of

 

3llRidler, p. xxv. Williams himself has said that "the visionary
forms of the occult schools are but dreams of the Divine Body." ("The
Index of the Body" in Image 93.322.01tl: p. 8%) D. D. Runes's sum-
mary is helpful here: God is gig soph, the endless, ever creating;
or, in the words of...Spinoza, 'Natura naturans' (infinite creative sub-
stance).

"God manifests Himself in ten emanations, or Senhiroth. His di-
vine attributes are: Wisdom, Reason, Knowledge, Greatness, Strength,
Beauty, Eternity, Majesty, Principle, and Sovereignty (Chokmah, Binah,
Death, Geduiah, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth):

The Wisdom of the Kabbalah (New York, 1957), pp. 9-10.

 

 

 

 

.-..

~~

19?

learning and culture). The hands, at Rome, symbolize
the manual acts of the Pope, which are the acts of the
Church (blessing, laying on of hands, etc.). Byzantium,
the seat of the Emperor...is the navel--traditionally
the seat of the soul. Jerusalem is the genital organs
‘--the place both of Crucifixion and Redemption. At the
furthest remove from Iogres (but nearest to Byzantium)
is Caucasia, the buttocks--this represents tgg natural,
but still essentially good, human functions.

It is with such body symbolism in mind that one must read

The milk rises in the breasts of Gaul,

Trigonometrical milk of doctrine.

Man sucks it; his joints harden,

sucking logic, learning, law,

drawing on the breasts of intelligo and credo.
("The Vision of the Empire, Taliessen, p. 8)

Certainly much of the occultism of the novels concerns the body,
not in a specially erotic way, but as a vehicle formed (according to
both nee-Platonic and kabbalistic traditions) out of "prime matter."

It has been suggested that Milton was also familiar with the teachings

of the Zohar and kabbalistic lore;33 in any case an acquaintance with

32F. 36.

'33See Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York, 1925), Part
IV, Section II, pp. 281-328. See also Saurat, Gods g£_the People (1on-
don, l9h7), pp. lhO-hl. It is not relevant to try to establish proof of
this knowledge here, and in fact it may be unprovable. Certain lines in
Paradise lost, however, do remind one of phrases from Hermetic or kabbal-
istic literature (though they may as easily be only neo-Platonic). Thus
Hermes Trismegistus: "That which is below is like that which is above,
and that which is above is like that which is below, for the performance
of the miracles of the one substance." (Quoted in Runes, p. 168.) Hea-
ven must in some way correspond to earth in order for the magician or
alchemist to work his wonders.

Raphael, about to reveal to Adam the creation of all things, the
Satanic rebellion and fall from grace, cautions his listener in a way
that also suggests these heaven-earth correspondences:

...and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense I shall delineate so,
By likening spiritual to corporeal forms,
As may express them best-~though what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
(PL) V: 5713(6)

 

 

 

 

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198

the neo-Platonic and possibly kabbalistic traditions as they appear in
Milton clarifies a great deal of the rather muddy background of many
of Williams's novels. (Williams, as I have said, was a great admirer
of Milton and so the comparison is relevant.) We recall Raphael's
lecture to Adam on the properties of angelic bodies: they both eat
and practise some form of intercourse. Matter (of which the angels
are composed) is able to endure nearly endless "refinement" or atten-
uation, but it remains matter. It is out of prime matter, Chaos, that

the Miltonic universe is created in Paradise Lost; Adam and all else

 

have originally come from the swirling, indeterminate mass of hot, cold,
moist, and dry which lies amorphously "beneath" heaven.

The magic stone of Mapquimensions is somehow a bit of prime
matter on which have been engraved the letters of the Tetragrammaton.
Its magical qualities derive from the fact that it is what an Aristotel-
ian might call pure potency: it can, by an act of its user's will, be-
come anything its user desires. NOw the bodies of the characters in a
Williams novel of Course derive from this same substance; what is less
obvious is that their souls do too, their souls being as much material
as the "bodies" of Milton's angels. This is not often stressed in the
novels, but when it does occur it leads to the same rather grotesque

conclusion that we find in Paradise Lost as soon as we take Raphael's

 

speech at all literally (as Milton gives us every chance to do). In

All Hallows' Eve a dead woman returns to the scene of her active life,

 

and still feels love for, and attraction to, her live husband. Because

199

both she (though dead) and he (though alive) are of the same substance
some sort of semi-physical relationship is possible. And one critic
has found "a suggestion of Swedenborgianism, perhaps, in the idea of
a posthumous sexuality that more than one passage of this novel evokes."3u
Other instances of this occult vision of the body and of matter
7 are numerous in the novels. In the case of substitution that I have
already cited from Descent into Hell, Williams makes it clear that the
body as well as the mind accepts the sufferings of others: "The body
of his fleshreceived her alien terror, his mind carried the burden

of her world."35 In The Greater Trumps the heroine of the novel stands

 

in her library with her lover, holding in her hands the greater trumps
of the Tarot pack which are the archetypes of power and energy, keys
to the prime matter out of which all things come. And by a union of
her will with the primal energy of the cards, she creates:

...nor was it mer. fancy that some substance was slip-
ping between her fingers. Below her hands and the
cards she saw the table, and some vague unusualness

in it attracted her. It was black...and down to it
from her hands a kind of cloud was floating. It was
from there that the first sound came; it was some-
thing falling--1t was earth, a curtain, a rain of
earth falling, falling, covering the part of the table
immediately below 6making little sliding sounds--earth,
real black earth.3 '

Now how far this occultism is to be taken seriously is proble-

matical. Eliot assures us that he has "never known a healthier-minded

 

31'Ernest Beaumont, "Charles Williams and the Power of Eros," Dublin
Review, No. #79 (Spring, 1959), 71.

35Descent into Hell (New York, 1949), p. 109.

 

36The Greater Trumps (New York, 1950), p. 51.

 

200

man than Williams, that the occultism and magic are merely an "appar-
atus," that Williams merely "borrowed from the literature of the oc-
cult...for the sake of telling a good story."37 Others, however, are

not so sure of this. The same critic who was bothered by the hint of

Swedenborgianism in All Hallows' Eve finds that "a certain illuminism

 

is apparent in the novels; moreover, the goetic element is clearly not
intended to be symbolical only; one has the impression that Williams
considered the magical events he described as possibilities that could

be actually realized."38

And he agrees with another critic that Wil-
liams was "under the sway of erotic spiritualism."39

But however much or little Williams believed the occult views
of matter and the body to be found in the novels, we must set over
against such views his beliefs about the body and matter as they are
related to the Incarnation. We recall that Williams chose to follow
"one arrangement of doctrine: rather than another, and that the arrange-
ment he chose involves the belief that God would have become incarnate
even had there been no fall. Such an arrangement of doctrine makes
one point very clear: it is not possible to regard matter as in any
sense evil. If the fall necessitated the Incarnation, then one may be

Platonist enough to hold that Christ's love for man enabled Him to

take on "even" matter to save him; it is possible to retain the Platonic

 

37Eliot, p. xv.

38Beaumont, p. 7%.

39Evgveny Iampert, The Divine Realm (london, l9hh), n. l., p. 93.
Quoted by Beaumont, p. 75.

 

 

 

 

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201

view of matter as evil and the body as punishment. One need only look
at the great Augustinian tradition in Christianity to confirm this pos-
sibility. But if the Incarnation would have occurred even without the
fall, then this possibility no longer exists. We can no longer be
pained that God had to assume the indignity of matter in order to save
us; He wanted to assume matter; and therefore any indignity we see
either in His assumption of matter or in matter itself must derive not
from the object, matter itself, but from our misconception of it. In
fact, it seems to follow that the usual view of matter as somehow less
than spirit is simply a result of the fall, part of our postlapsarian
blindness.

Williams's view of the-goodness of matter are somewhat tenuous,
and I will not make them any more eXplicit than he himself did. ‘Certain
things, though, are, in his view, clear enough. So far as we can under-
stand the fall itself, for example, we can see that whatever prohibition
was violated by the Adam was violated by the spiritual side of the Adam,
not by the physical. The sin of the fall consisted in an act of the
will, not the body.

The body was holily created, is holily redeemed, and

is to be holily raised from the dead. It is, in fact,

for all our difficulties with it, less fallen...than

the soul in which the quality of the will is held to

reside; for it was a sin of the will which degraded us.

'The evidence of things not seen' is in the body seen

as this epigram; nay, in some sense, even 'the substance

of things hOped for', for what part it has in that sub-
stance remains to it unspoiled.

 

l“)"Irnex of the Body," in Image r t e City, p. 85.

202

It is perhaps worth remarking here on the eclectic quality of Williams's
thought. So far as he is a transcendentalist, he is within the great
stream of neo-Platonism; so far as he is an occultist, he is a part of
a minor eddy of the same stream. But his evaluation of the body and
of matter, his insistence on the goodness of matter, place him closer
to the tradition of medieval Aristotelianism. Yet such a remark as
the one we have just noted, that it is the soul rather than the body
that has fallen, has little meaning in terms of Aristotelianism; it
belongs rather to the nee-Platonic tradition which in the Middle Ages
produced the endless debates between the body and the soul. Aquinas
echoed Aristotle in holding that the union between body and soul is
"substantial," that it is inaccurate to say that the eye sees or the
ear hears or the will sins, but rather that the man sees with the eye,
hears with the ear, sins with the will. Thus it was man_that was in-
volved in the fall, and it was on man that the consequences devolved.
The objection is minor, however. Williams's main thesis is
that the Church has, if not preached, at least tolerated and encour-
aged a kind of unofficial Manicheeism. This is particularly so as re-
gards marriage. "The hungry sheep look up for metaphysics, the pro-
found metaphysics of the awful and redeeming body, and are given
morals.”+1 But the body, as we have seen, cannot be evil. It cannot

be evil because of the nature of the Incarnation:

 

h1"Sensuality and.Substance," in Image 92.222.913X2 p' 75'

 

203

...it is clear that the Sacred Body was itself virtue.
The same qualities that made His adorable soul made

His adorable flesh. If the devotion to the Sacred
Heart does not, in itself, imply something of the sort,
I do not know what it does imply. The virtues are both
spiritual and physical--or rather they are expressed in
those two categories. This is recognized in what are
regarded as the more 'noble' members in the body--the
heart, the eyes. But it is not so often recognized as a
truth Hgderlying all the members--the stomach, the but-
tocks.

God Operates, manifests Himself, in the two modes of matter and spirit;
it follows that the two cannot be compared in terms of value--they are
simply different. Yet the Church has allowed it to be assumed that

the two modes could be so evaluated. Thus the word sacramental, Wil-

 

liams comments, "has perhaps served us a little less than well; it has,
in pOpular usage, suggested rather the spiritual using_the physical
than a common--say, a single----operation."1‘k3
NOw the Incarnation, for Williams, is the supreme example of God
manifesting Himself in the two modes (the Eucharist is an echo of this
manifestation). We say that God became man, assumed the body and soul
of man in the person of Christ--"the WOrd was made flesh." But we may
also say, with the author of the Athanasian Creed, that God became
man "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the

manhood into God...not by confusion of substance, but by unity of per-

son." And "Not me," said St. Paul, "but the (bd in me." All men are

 

u2"Index of the Body," in Image g£_the City, p. 8h.

l'3"Index of the Body," in IEEEE.9£.EE§.QEEZJ p. 85'

20h

literal members of the "Mystical Body of Christ." The virtues exist
in the body as truly as in the soul, though differently.

The Sacred Body is the plan upon which physical human
creation was built, for it is the centre of physical
human creation. The great dreams of the human form as
including the whole universe are in this less than the
truth. As His, so ours; the body...is also a pattern.
We carry about with us an Operative synthesis of the
Virtues...the Sacred Body Z_is_7t..the Archtype of all
bodies. In this sense the Eucharist also exposes its
value. The 'index' of our bodies, the incarnate quali-
ties of the moral universe, receive the Archtype of all
moralities truly incarnated; and not only the pattern in
the soul and will but the pattern in the body is renewed.
... We experience, physically, in its proper mode, the
Kingdom of God: the imperial structure of the body carries
its own high doctrines--of vision, of digestithof mys-
teries, of balance, of movement, of operation.

Thus, for Williams, there can be no talk of the soul as "the divine
element" in man; there are two divine elements in man--both the soul
and the body. Taliessen meditates on the fact that women cannot be
priests because they share, by menstruation, in the "victimization of
the blood," and thus in a sense are part of the sacrifice itself. And

he continues:

Flesh knows what spirit knows,
but spirit knows it knows--categories of identity:
women's flesh lives the quest of the Grail
' in the change from Camelot to Carbonek and from Carbonek
to Sarras,
puberty to Carbonek, and the stanching, and Carbonek to death.
Blessed is she who gives herself to the journey.

Flesh tells what spirit tells
(but spirit knows it tells). Women's travel

 

“*"Index of the Body," in has: 9!; 2112 9.121, PP- 86‘5”:

205

holds in the natural, the image of the supernatural....
("Taliessen in the Rose Garden" in The Region 9: the
Summar Stars, pp. 26-27)

 

Man, at the Incarnation (whether in time or out of time), became "in-
godded," became a "son of God" in body as well as in spirit. And thus
the theology of romantic love, to which we may now turn, has much to
say about the body as well as the spirit, for romantic love does not
deal with "the marriage of true minds" but with total beings in whom
God has manifested Himself in the two modes of spirit and matter.

let us begin by recalling that romantic love, for Williams, is,
or can be, one of the ways of practising the Affirmation of Images,
of following the Affirmative Way. If practised rightly it leads to
the restoration of the original vision of all things as good, to the
removal of the scales from the eyes, to prelapsarian accuracy of know~
ledge. And, to move to the other end of the spectrum, it can lead out
of the fallen world and to beatitude.

According to Ann Ridler, Williams wrote a complete book on
Romantic Theology, but the authorities to whom he showed it objected
to it, or to part of it, and it was never published. Thus his fullest
treatments of the subject are to be found in a pamphlet called Religion

and Love in Dante, and the books The Figure 9£_Beatrice and H§_Came Down

 

from Heaven. As two of the titles indicate, it is difficult to separ-
ate Williams's Romantic Theology from his views of Dante, for it was in
Dante's work that he found the only real example of the particular mode

of the Affirmative Way that is romantic love. It is in Dante, Williams

f

t.

206

thinks, that we find the first and greatest "true" romanticism: the
union of thought and feeling leading to beatitude, the theologizing
of the romantic experience as it came to Dante from the troubadours'
treatment of courtly love. What Wordsworth is later to call Imagina-
tion is in Dante "the union of the mind and heart with a particular
vision.”5
Now the word "romantic" as Williams uses it to qualify "theol-
ogy" is used "in some such defining sense as the words Pastoral, Dog-
matic, or Mystical; it means theology as applied to a particular state

h6 The first thing that the romantic theolo-

--that of romantic love."
gian must decide is what romantic love is, what the experience of be-
ing in love consists of; and obviously it is not an easy thing to de-
termine, though it is easy enough to lampoon. "It is neither sex
appetite pure and simple; nor...is it necessarily related to marriage.
It is something like a state of adoration, and it has been expressed
...by the poets better than by anyone else.'J'7 Thus Williams turns
for a description of the state, not to one of the "more extreme Roman-

h8
tics," who might prejudice his case, but to Milton. Adam's explana-

tion to Raphael of the state of mind that Eve produces in him, Williams

 

1'SReligion and love in Dante (Westminster, l9hl), p. 5.

 

theligion and love in Dante, p. 3.

 

h7H§_Came Down from Heaven, p. 65.
#8

 

Hg_Came Down from Heaven, p. 65.

 

207

thinks, serves as a useful introductory sketch (he neglects to mention-
that Raphael's reaction to the description is immediate apprehension
and concern, and that Raphael warns Adam that such a state is dangerous
to prelapsarian bliss):

...when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded: Wisdom in discourse with her
Loses, discount'nanced, and like Folly shows:
Authority and Reason on her wait,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally: and, to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed.)+9

What has to be established about the experience so described is,

"is it serious? is it capable of intellectual treatment? is it cap-

"50 These are the

able of belief, labour, fruition? is it...true?
questions which Romantic Theology must answer. It is the work of R0-
mantic Theology to discover if this experience can yield "the first

matter of a great experiment."51

The end of such an experiment is the
end of all the Ways to God. "The end...is known by definition of the

kingdom: it is the establishment of a state of caritas, of pure love,

 

l'9Paradise lost, VIII, 5h6-59.

 

5°§§_Came Down from Ihaven, p. 66.

 

51HgCame Down from Heaven, p. 66.

 

208

the mode of eXpansion of one moment into eternity."52
Williams then proceeds to an analysis of the experience of
falling in love, its potentialities and its consequences. His discus-

sion, as I have said, largely consists of a gloss on Dante's Vita Nuova,

 

Comedy, and Convivio. Dante himself analyzed his reaction to the sight
of Beatrice quite accurately, says Williams, allowing for the differ-
ences between medieval and modern physiological terminology:

The heart, where (to him) 'the spirit of life' dwelled,
exclaimed to him...'Behold a god stronger than I, who
is come to rule over me'.. The brain declared: 'wa
your beatitude has appeared to you'. And the liver
(where natural emotions, such as sex, inhabited) said:
'O misery! how I shall be disturbed henceforward!

Dante sees her as "the youngest of the angels," as "the destroyer of

"51+

all evil and the queen of all good. When she salutes him in the

.street he is cast into a state of such exaltation that he would have

forgiven any injury done him and "if anyone had asked me a question

I should have been able to answer only 'Iove'."55 He is, says Williams,

56

"in a state of complete good will, complete caritas towards everyone."

He is, as we say, in love. "And therefore he calls her salutation

 

52H§_Came Down from Heaven, p. 66.

53Religion and love ig_Dante, pp. 6-7.

 

51'Reliflgion and love in_Dante, p. 8.

 

55Religion and.Iove in_Dante, p. 9.

 

56Religion and.Iove in_Dante, p. 9.

 

209

'blessed', because it is beatitude which it inspires. In fact, he be-
comes for one moment in his soul that Perfection which he has observed
in Beatrice."57
But though the vision of Beatrice fills Dante's being with car:
itgg, says Williams, Dante does not suggest that that state is in any
way permanent. It comes upon him gratuitously, but it does not remain
so. His being is acting according to a kind of natural law; having
been granted the vision, "love, charity, a a e, was for the moment

”58

inevitable. But the vision would fade, as Wordsworth's youthful

vision of Nature faded; and like Wordsworth's vision it would have to
be replaced by something which the vision had made possible. The prob-
lem for Dante, as for all romantic lovers, is to discover the way to
God that the vision has pointed him towards and made him aware of:
"could he indeed become the Glory which he saw and by which for a mo-

,..59

ment he had been transfused The rest of Dante's work, says Wil-

liams, including especially the Comedy, is "a pattern of the Way."60

 

later in the Vita Nuova Dante sees coming towards him a girl

named Jban, the beloved of his friend Cavalcanti; she is so beautiful

57Religion and Love in_Dante, p. 9.

 

. 58Religion and love in Dante, p. 10.

 

59Religion and love in_nante, p. 10.

 

60Religion and Love in_Dante, p. 10.

 

 

 

h,

210

that she is called "Primavera," Spring. She is followed by Beatrice;
and the thought occurs to Dante that Jban goes before Beatrice as
John the Baptist went before Christ. This is not, according to Williams,
a near blasphemous conceit derived by adding theological or religious
concepts to the tradition of courtly love. It is probably seriously
meant, and if it is so meant,

...it is the beginning of a very high mystical iden-

tity. Beatrice is not our lord. But Beatrice has

been throughout precisely the vehicle of love, of

sexual love and of the vision in sexual love. She

has awakened in Dante a celestial reverie; she has

appeared to him the very carriage of beauty and good-

ness; she has, unknowingly, communicated to him an

experience of caritas. These are the prOperties of

Almighty love. What Dante is now doing is to identi-

fy the power which reposed in Beatrice with the nature

of our lord. love had been...a quality; now...he is

on thg point of seeing it as precisely the Person of

love. 1

The nature of the experience of falling in love is now fairly
clear. The lover is given the experience gratuitously (like grace;
in fact, such experience i§_grace); the lover is in a state of caritas
because what he perceives in the person (the vehicle, the carriage) of
the beloved is love, is Christ. He sees, not her, but Christ in her;
and caritas is at once the condition of his seeing and the object of
his vision. This mystical identity which Dante propounds in the Vita

Nuova is carried to its great conclusion in the Purgatorio. Here

Beatrice is a part of the procession of Angels, Virtues, Prophets and

 

61Religion and Love in_Dante, p. 11.

 

2ll

Evangelists led by the two-natured Gryphon who is Christ.

1 She gazes into the eyes of the Gryphon...and it
back into hers. There it is mirrored now as one,
now as the other, 'immutable in itself, mutable in
its image'. The Godhead and the Manhood are, as it
were, deeply seen in those eyes whence love began
to shoot his arrows at Dante, by the Glory and the
femininity. The moment in the N23 Life when the
girl was seen as the vehicle of love, preceded by
Joan as Christ was preceded by thn, is here multi-
plied and prolonged--one might say, infinitely.

The supernatural validity of that 'falling-in-love'
experience is again asserted....In the full Earthly
Paradise, she is seen mirroring the Incarnate Splegé
dour, as in Florence its light had been about her.

In a word, what the lover in the actual state of being in love per-
ceives is the timeless fact of the Incarnation; he perceives the fact
that the loved one is ”ingodded,” that human nature is taken up into
Godhead, as the Athanasian Creed says. Dante himself could only sym-
bolize this; he saw, he says, "the circle which is Christ painted with

..63

the image of man. It is the circle of which the apparition of

love had Spoken in the Vita Nuova, the circle by which St. Bonaventure

 

had symbolized God when he said that God is a circle whose center is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. What the lover per-
ceives, through this temporary return to prelapsarian vision, is the
true nature of things; he sees accurately that Christ is gggpg, is

love, and that man, by the Incarnation, is ingodded in Him.

 

62Religion and love ig_Dante, p. 30.

63Religion and Love in_Dante, p. 35.

 

It"!

u

0

212

The lover, then, experiences a vision of beatitude, which may
be defined as the true knowledge and experience of the God-man rela-
tionship. But he experiences it only briefly. It may lead to the
final Paradisal and permanent vision as Dante described it, but only
if it is acted upon. Falling in love, being granted the Beatrician
vision, is a mode of the romantic experience; if it is allowed to lie
fallow, if it is untheologized, of itself it comes to nothing good.
If it is theologized, it leads to power in this life and beatitude in
the next. It is an invitation to follow a certain mode of the Affirma-
tive Way; it is not in itself the Affirmative Way, for of its nature
it is not lasting.

The effort after the pattern marks the difference.

The superstitions make heaven and earth in the form

of the beloved; the theology declares that the be-

loved is the first preparatory form of heaven and

earth. Its controlling maxim is that these things

are first seen through Beatrice as a means; the co-

rollary is that they are found through Beatrice as

a first means only. The gfleposition refers not only

to sight but to progress.
The vision brought about by romantic love, like the vision brought about
by Nature, is not beatitude; it is a return to prelapsarian vision in
which all the images of God are seen as preparatory to the final exper-
ience of God. Nature, for Wordsworth, is not an end, but a way of ar-

"65

riving at; so, for Dante, "Beatrice is his Knowing.

 

61'§_e__Came Down from Heaven, p. 70.

 

65The Figgge gf_Beatrice, p. 232.

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213

"Hell," says Williams, "has made three principal attacks on the

"66 The first is the assumption that the Beatri-

Way of Romantic Iove.
cian vision is everlasting. As we have seen, this is not so. It is

the false romantic who tries to retain the bliss of the vision by mul-
tiplying the number of his sexual love affairs. The vision "is eternal
but is not everlastingly visible, any more than the earthly life of
Christ."67 It is a momentary perception of God's glory in the love
_which is Christ. "The appearance of the glory is temporary; the author-
ity of the glory towards pure love is everlasting; the quality of the

68

glory is eternal, such as the heavens have in Christ."

In Taliessen through Iogres Williams gives an example not only

 

of the transience of the vision but of the vision untheologized (and
thus dangerous) in the experience of Palomides, the Saracen knight,
when he visits the court of King Mark and there sees the Queen Iseult
sitting between her husband Mark and her lover Tristram. He falls in
love with the queen and experiences the Beatrician vision. But he can-
not take the normal course of the Way of romantic love; he cannot marry
the queen, who already has both husband and lover. And, as Lewis says,
he is unwilling to take "the long pilgrimage of Dante to 'intellectual

nuptials'."69 For a moment he sees the queen as holy flesh and holy

A

66H§_Came Down from Heaven, p. 79.

 

67g§_Came Down from Heaven, p. 79.

 

68§g_Came Down from Heaven, p. 79.

69"Williams and the Arthuriad," in Arthurian Torso, p. 126.

 

21h

spirit ingodded in Christ; but then the vision fades (because his will
has failed to act upon it), and he is overcome with sexual jealousy,
symbolized in the poem by the image of the Questing Beast. In the
first flush of the vision he sees the queen's arm as it lies grace-
fully on the table; he sees it, as I have said, as Christ under the
mode of matter, as a vision which begins the Affirmative Way: his
heart and his thought flame in union, his mind moves

by the stress
of the queen's arm's blissful nakedness,
to unions metaphysical....

But the vision vanishes almost at once:

Down the arm of the queen Iseult

quivered and darkened an angry bolt;

and, as it passed, away and through

and above her hand the sign withdrew.
division stretched between

the queen's identity and the queen.

Relation vanished, though beauty stayed;

too long my dangerous eyes delayed

at the shape on the board, but voice was mute;

the queen's arm lay there destitute,

empty of glory....

And immediately he is overcome with jealousy:

and aloof in the roof, beyond the feast,

I heard the squeak of the questing beast,

where it scratched itself in the blank between

the queen's substance and the queen.

("The Coming of Palomides," in Taliessen, pp. 35-37)

The second assumption of Hell is that the love experience is a

personal possession of the lovers. But love does not belong to the

lovers; rather they belong to it. They cannot own love any more than

they can own Nature or art or any other mode of the romantic experience.

 

215

The experience is God-sent; they are meant for love, not love for them.
The essence, Williams is fond of saying, is meant for the function, not
the function for the essence. Thus in Williams's play §E§§.9§.é§2§:
Mary, after the archangel has announced to her that she is to be the
mother of Christ, enters the state of caritas as surely as any roman-
tic lover, but realizes that the state is not a personal possession.
Jeseph asks her whom she is in love with, and she replies,

Dearest, you did not hear: we said in love.
Why must, how can, one be in love with someone?

To Jbseph's objection that to be in love with someone is the nature of
love, she answers,
Dearest, to be in love is to be in love,

no more, no less. love is only itself,
everywhere, at all times, and to all objects.

70

To be in love is to be able to see accurately again; the sight is not

limited to any one thing, but extends to all the images of God which

constitute reality. - '
The third assumption of Hell is that "it is sufficient to have

known that State of love."71 This occurs when the eXperience is held

to be thrilling and unique but only natural, when its transience is

taken as proof that the experience is illusory and when, as a result,

the experience is not related to the rest of life. The person who has

 

70"Seed of Adam," in Seed g£_Adam and Other Plays (Iondon, 1948),
p. 11.

 

71H9_Came Down from Hggven, p. 80.

216

been in love but has passed out of it without theologizing it is per-
haps a good person, naturally speaking. But St. Paul allows him no
place on the Way to God: he may have faith enough to move mountains,
but if he has not caritas it avails him nothing.

This third assumption of Hell enables us to see what Williams
means by theologizing the romantic experience. The lover must do what
Palomides did not do. "To be in love must be followed by the will to
bg_love; to be love to the beloved, to he love to all, to be in fact
(as the Divine Thing said) perfect."72 Thus a slave girl in Taliessen
through Iogres falls in love with Taliessen and experiences the Beatri-
cian vision. There can be no hOpe of marriage, for Taliessen is the
poet, the unicorn, not made for women. But she can do what Palomides
did not do; she can direct her experience to holiness. And, with
Taliessen's help, she does this. The vision, he tells her, is more
than he is, more than his song is, though he and the song have effected
the vision in the experience.

The king's poet leaned, catching the outspread hands:

More than the voice is the vision, the kingdom than the king:

the cords of their arms were bands of glory; the harp
sang her to her feet, sharply, sweetly she rose.

 

 

The soul of a serving-maid stood by the king's gate,

her face flushed with the mere speed of adoration.

The Archbishop stayed, coming through the morning to the Mass,
Hast thou seen §g_soon, bright lass, the light 9§_Christ's

glory?

 

 

 

("The Star of Percivale" in Taliessen, p. #6)

 

72H§ Came Down from Heaven, p. 81.

 

217

There are, in short, duties to be performed, Christian duties to be
done in and through love. The Beatrician vision is a "way of return
to blissful knowledge of all things. But this was not sufficient;
there had to be a new self to go on the new way."73 The lover for a
moment sees the world as it is; it then becomes his duty to go on act-
ing'as if the vision remained with him, even though it does not. Hav-
ing seen the Incarnation, the ingodding of man, and having thus per-
ceived that all mankind is one, all men co-inhering in each other and
all in turn co-inhering in Christ; having briefly seen and to a degree
experienced all this, it becomes his duty to make the Beatrician
vision modify his life. It is, in brief, his duty to become and re-
main a good Christian by means of the special grace which has been
awarded him. All the things and the activities of the world are the
matter to which caritas should be the form. After the vision come
the duties; but the duties are only made possible by the vision.

The way of romantic love is only one mode of the Affirmative
Way; the other modes also provide the particular stopping place at

which a man may say, with Dante, Incipit vita nova. The other modes

 

also provide the original infusion of caritas, the return through love
to the real vision of the world; and the other modes equally demand
the living of the life in caritas, the seeing of all things in caritas.

The way of romantic love does not make the Christian life any easier

 

73HgCame Down from Heaven, p. 85.

218

than the other ways do; like them, it only makes it possible.

Of the validity of Williams's claims for the power and potential
beneficence of romantic love, no one has had a great deal to say as
yet. And that this should be so is not surprising, for the validity of
Williams's argument depends largely upon two vastly complex and ambig-
uous questions: one a question of some importance to the whole of
western civilization, the other a question of some importance to lit-
erary and religious history. The first is the question of the nature
of love itself: what is human, "romantic" love, and how does it differ
from, or resemble, man's love for God and, in turn, God's love for man?
The second question is the function of Beatrice in the work of Dante:
was she a real woman, and if so, did she remain real throughout his
work or did she become symbolical or anagogical; was she a woman in
the Comedy or was she Theology? And if she is both literal and anagog-
ical, according to Dante's fourfold interpretation, then what becomes of
Williams's prime example of the Way of Romantic love?

I do not pretend to have the answers to these questions; but some
lines of approach to the answers must be sketched out. In a discussion
of the nature of sexual love, most modern writers have thought it nec-
essary to take the historical approach and begin their analysis of
romantic love with a study of the troubadour poetry of eleventh and
twelfth century France. "French poets, in the eleventh century, dis-
tuyvered or invented, or were the first to eXpress, that romantic species

(If passion which English poets were still writing about in the

219

"'7}+

nineteenth. Until then, in western civilization, romantic love as
we normally conceive it did not exist. For classical Greece, the high-
est form of human affection was friendship between two males. Marriage
was a partnership necessitated by the social order. Passionate love

was an abnormality, an excess, as in Medea. Nor did romantic love

exist for the Romans: Dido's love for Aeneas is a kind of frenzy, and
Ovid's treatment of love is hardly more than a series of ironic and
realistic comments on the sexual relationships between man and woman--
rules for, and advice about, the skirmishes and major battles of sexual
warfare. Nor did the Dark Ages produce romantic love: its general view

of love echoed the caustic comment of St. Paul--it is better to marry

than burn. Every woman was, at least potentially, Eva rediviva; the

 

medieval marriage of convenience is evidence of the view that woman was
held to be hardly more than valuable property.

All this changes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as if
humanity had turned a corner in history, or in evolution. The begin-
nings of courtly love mark what Lewis has called one of the real changes
in human sentiment;75 and thus it is at this point that a discussion of
romantic love usually begins. The important part of such discussions,
so far as we are concerned, is the attempt to distinguish the kinds of

love possible to human beings, the attempt to show that there is, or is

7hLewis, Allegory gf_love (New York, 1958), p. h.

75Allegogy g£_Iove, p. 11.

220

not, a relationship between man's love of woman and man's love of God.
For what Williams's Romantic Theology claims is that love of woman can
lead to love of God, to beatitude, in fact: “For Williams, the romantic
love relationship is, in Buber's terms, a spectacular example of the
I-Thou relationship possible to human beings; and in all such relation-
ships the Divine Thou is operative. ."Every particular Thgg is a
glimpse through to the eternal‘Thgg; by means of every particular They.

76 Mere specifically,

the primary word addresses the eternal 2392:"
"He who loves a woman, and brings her life to present realisation in
his, is able to look in the Thgg_of her eyes into a beam of the eternal
Thou."77

The question is, what connection (if any) is there between roman-
tic love and love of God, between Eros and Agape. For Nygren, no con-
nection exists. Eros is one thing, agape another. Agape, the love for
God, is brought about by God Himself. Where there is nothing, He puts
something, and then there is human love for Him. There is no possi-
bility of confusing the two loves; they differ in ends and in origins,

and human love (eros) is not even an image or an echo of love for God

(agape), for man is naturally capable of eros and naturally incapable

 

76M'artin Buber, I_and Thou, translated by R. G. Smith‘(New York,
1958), p. 75-

77_I_ 225.1. Thou, p. 106.

221

78

of agape. For de Rougemont, romantic love (eros) is the dark passion

pictured so well in the Tristan myth. It is an analogue to the Mani-
chean and pagan desire for utter extinction in the One. Eros, or
"boundless desire," does not want earthly fulfillment; what it really
wants is death. Tristan and Iseult are forever parting, forever sep-
arating, because they do not really want each other. They want the
agonies of being apart, because their passion is an echo of the Mani-
chean hatred of matter and of diversity; underneath the surface love
of eros is the urge to flee the world of daylight for the night of ex-
tinction.

Eros is complete Desire, luminous Aspiration, the prim-
itive religious soaring carried to its loftiest pitch,
to the extreme exigency of purity which is also the ex-
treme exigency of Unity. But absolute unity must be the
negation of the present human being in his suffering
multiplicity. The supreme soaring of desire ends in
non-desire.. The erotic process introduces into life an
element foreign to the diastole and systole of sexual
attraction--a desire that never relapses, that nothing
can satisfy, that even rejects and flees the temptation
to obtain its fulfillment in the world, because its de-
mand is to embrace no less than the All. It is infinite
transcendende, man' rise into his god. And this rise
is without return.

 

 

Christianity, according to de Rougemont, has changed the whole‘
end and direction of eros. The Incarnation both gave to man and showed

to man the worth and dignity of the individual. Man no longer had to

 

78For my summary of Nygren's views, I'am indebted to D'Arcy's Mind
and.Heart 9: Love (New York, l956), passim.

791ove _ia the western World, translated by M. Belgion (New York,
1957), p. 52.

 

222

run from other men because they were diverse and imperfect manifesta-
tions of the One. It was now possible to love the other "as he or she
really is."80 Christian love was now seen to be in imitation of Christ's
love for the Church; and it is this Christian love which is agape, the
. love of one's neighbors, the love of one's enemies. Eros and agape,
for de Rougemont as for Nygren, have no connection; in fact, it is

part of de Rougemont's thesis that marriage founded on the Manichaen
admiration for passionate love cannot help but founder. Neither in
Nygren nor in de Rougemont, then,is there anything like a Way of Roman-
tic Iove. Eros leads nowhere in Nygren's scheme; in de Rougemont's it
leads only to Mbnichaeism or hell.

M. C. D'Arcy, in a work published after Williams's death, has
looked critically at the work of Nygren and de Rougemont and several
others. There are, he believes, partial truths in Nygren, de Rougemont,
the Existentialists, the Personalists, in Buber and Karl Heim, and he
draws on all of them in order to achieve his final distinction between
eros and agape. All things, says DiArcy, exist according to two print
ciples which will be called different things in different spheres of
existence. The two may be paired on one level as dominant and reces-
sive, on another as male and female; psychologically they may be called
aggressive and regressive, or egotistical and effacing. On the level

of brute creation, they will be the principles according to which the

80Love ig_the Western World, p. 60.

 

223

species survives: the receptiveness of the female complementing the
urge of the male. On the spiritual level they will be the desire for self-
perfection and the desire for self-sacrifice. On the philosophical level,
they will be act and potency, form and matter, essence and existence.
The human person, according to D'Arcy, like all other things, is com-
posed of these two principles, and so is his love. One kind of love
is eros, the assertive, possessing, dominating love which is associated
largely with the intellect; it "has a desire to know all things," as
Aristotle said, and this desire to know essences (meanings) is largely
self-regarding and egotistical. This relationship is the one that Buber
calls the "I-It" relation, in which the object is not regarded existen-
tially as a ”Thou" but only essentially as a thing to be understood.
This is eros, or, in D'Arcy's phrase, the animus. 'Complementing this
kind of love in all humans is the 39295: the agape. This is the other
side of the coin-~the desire for self-sacrifice, the passivity, the
desire to be done to, to be used, to be made into something else. This
is the non-intellectual love which desires not essences but existence;
this is the love which constitutes for Buber the "I-Thou" relationship;
it does not seek to see the other person as an “It," an essence to be
understood; it sees the person existentially as a being who must be
received as himself.

Now these two principles of love Operate together in any human
love, whether it be the love of a man for a woman or the love of a man
for God. "A person...has to include both the human essence and the

existence of that essence if it is to be properly and adequately defined.

224

The self-regarding love preserves the integrity of the self and pre-

..81

vents the other love from getting out of hand and being too prodigal.
In human affairs, that is, in love of humans for each other, the animus,
the intellect, nearly always has to be in charge of the animg, lest

the gnlm§_give itself up foolishly to something unworthy of the self.
"Were our loves enlightened we could say: ama et fac quod vis. But

it is not until the searchlight of truth has played upon the many shapes
which hold our attention and the many loves which beckon to us, that we
can give ourselves wholeheartedly to another....82 The love of a man
for a woman, then, is wary love; it has to be prudent because it is
fallible and may be misinformed. But in the case of agape, love of

man for God, this wariness is put away:

...in one case, and one only, that of divine love,

the self may and must drop all its self-regard, strip
itself and say, 'all that I am and have is yours.‘

The primary act of the creature is not to possess God
but to belong to Him. The essential self is not, in-
deed, dead--that could not be so long as a person re-
mains a person--but it is the existential self, the
anima, which goes forth to greet the divine lover. No
doubt the essential love prepares the way. The mind

has for a long or short while to direct and fortify the
anima. The true God may be hidden and have to be dis-
covered, and when he is discovered there must be so much
to be learnt about him, either by the mind's own effort
or from God's own communications about himself. ... The
mind, then, will have constant work to do, but never-
theless so far as the primary relation to God is concerned,

alMind gng_Heart g£_Iove, p. 365.

82Mind 2.29. Heart 93 love, p. 367.

225

love dictates all, and he love is one of homage and sac-
rifice and self-giving.

In brief, then, for Nygren, eros is wholly different from agape.
The finite cannot love the infinite except by a capacity specially in-
fused by the infinite itself so that, as it were, the infinite loves
itself through a finite medium. In this way God remains the Wholly
Other. For de Rougemont, agape differs from eros in that the end of
human love (mankind, one's neighbors) has been essentially changed by
the Incarnation. Tb love God means to love one's redeemed neighbors
in obedience to God's command. For D'Arcy, one loves both God and man
by means of the same capacity for love, but the mixture of the animus
and anima changes radically as the loved object is either man or God.
Man gives himself over to God as he is never safe in doing in a merely
human relationship. Thus, for all three men there is some sort of
distinction between the loves of man, distinction either of kind or
of degree.

But this distinction seems not to exist in Williams's Romantic
Theology. It is true that there are two kinds of love: that of Palo-

mides ("untheologized") and that of Dante ("theologized"). But on

 

83Mind 32% Heart 9£_Iove, p. 368. D'Arcy's view is substantially
'the same as that of Aquinas. Aquinas held that, generally speaking, the
intellect is superior to the will, and it is also superior as regards
sensible things. But "with respect to divine things, higher than the
scnnl: now thus it is better to love them than to understand them; it
is better to love God than to know about him, for the divine goodness
is most perfectly in God, which is how it is desired by the will, than
i1: is as shared in us or conceived by the mind." Disputations, XXII
de Veritate, II; quoted from T. Gilby, Saint Thomas Aquinas: Philosofl-
'i'c'ai Texts (New York, 1960), p. 257.

226

analysis these seem to be not so much two kinds of love, which we might
call eros and agape, as simply love as distinguished from lust or love
as distinguished from passing infatuation. Where the other writers
draw their distinctions is exactly where Williams does not. If Williams
is right, then Dante loved, not Beatrice, or not gnly_Beatrice, but
God-in-Beatrice; more accurately perhaps, in view of Williams's insis-
tence on the Athanasian Creed, Dante loved Beatrice-in-God. Bluntly,

he loved both woman and God at the same time in seemingly the same way.
Eros and agape merge, and the specter of pantheism arises because a
single human affection may encompass both God and man. Dante saw the
circle of Christ painted with the image of man; but he saw it in heaven,
and even in heaven it was a symbol. Beatrice's eyes mirrored the two-
natured gryphon who is Christ; her eyes did not contain it. The in-
godding of man at the Incarnation seems, in Williams, to have blurred
any distinction between the kinds (and even the objects) of human love.
One of Williams's frequent remarks is that the motto of the Affirmative

Way is, "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.‘ All things are
God's image, God's manifestation, but no things are God. But of
caritas as induced by romantic love it seems possible to say, "This is
Thou; and this is also in some sense I." Even if we distinguish as
carefully as the Athanasian Creed does between substance and person,
the inclination to a kind of pantheism seems apparent.

Nor do the examples of romantic love in Williams's novels do

anything to clarify Romantic Theology. There, where one might hope to

x)

 

 

 

227

find some sort of explication of the particular duties of the romantic
lover acting in accord with the Beatrician vision, one finds generally
that the union of thought and feeling with a particular vision has pro-
duced, not the good life arrived at in a new way, but sheer power. The

girl in The Greater Trumps who created matter by holding the Tarot

 

cards did so because she was really in love. The hero of IES.BlEEE.2£.
thg_L;gg saved the world because, through the power which he had gained
by being in love, he was able to recall the animals of the earth to
their archetypes before they could devastate the earth. In short, the
occultism of the novels prevents their being taken seriously as examples
of Romantic Theology or of "theologized" true love.

Then there is the question of Dante and the function of Beatrice
in his work. The question is important to Williams's view of roman-
tic love because, for him, Dante is the prime example of the Way of
Romantic love, and in fact, as I have said, a great part of his Roman-
tic Theology reads like a gloss on Dante. So far as it may be shown
that Williams finds a more explicit system of love as beatitude in
Dante than is really there, then so far Williams's system seems dis-
abled. New Williams holds, as we have seen, that Dante began this sys-
tem in the y_i__t_a_ m and enlarged upon it in his later work; he makes
much.of'Dante's encounter with Beatrice in the streets of Florence,
and the fact that Dante said that his beatitude had come upon him. But
it is a commonplace that the medieval habit of thought was incurably

analogical: it saw most earthly things as analogues of heavenly things,

228

and it saw in this way as a matter of course without, as it were, pre-
meditation. One need only point to the microcosm-macrocosm analogy
and the medieval notion of the "signatures" on things. And if Dante's
caritas in the 2325 was meant to be taken as serious theology, then
any number of other similar protestations of the poets of the @9122_

stil nuovo must also be so taken. Cavalcanti's ballata Veggie negli

 

occhi, for example, says almost exactly what Dante says in the Vita
in the passage which Williams has quoted as the beginning of the Way
of Romantic love:

In my lady's eyes I see a light full of spirits of
love which brings wonderful delight into my heart, so
that it is filled with joyous life;

Such a thing befalls me when I am in her presence that
I cannot describe it to the intellect: It seems to me
that as I gaze at her there issues from her semblance
a lady of such beauty that the mind cannot grasp it,
and from this at once another is born of wondrous
beauty out of which it seems that there issues a star
which says: 'Behold, your blessedness is before you.‘

When this beautiful lady appears, a voice goes forth
before her which celebrates her meekness so sweetly
that if I try to repeat it, I feel that her greatness
is such that it makes me tremble, and in my soul stir
sighs which say: '10, if you gaze at this one you will
see her virtue ascended into heaven.'8u

In short, what Williams seems to ignore in his continual citation
of Dante as a teacher of the Way of Romantic Love is that Dante, in

treating love philosophically and even theologically, was doing no more

 

8h

Quoted from Maurice Valency, I2 Praise ngLove, Ap_Introduction
tg_the Love Peetryrg£_the Renaissance (New York, 1958), p. 229.

 

 

 

 

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229

than the other writers of his school. Thus the image of the lady in
the Cavalcanti poem just quoted would strike the poet, as Beatrice
struck Dante, in the vegetative and sensitive soul, but in the rational
soul it would give him

another sort of experience, neither joyous nor sad, but

wonderful. There the image of the lady was rendered in-

telligible as an essence of wondrous beauty and, glowing

in the intellect as a celestial intelligence, a star, it

foretold the salvation of the poet if he could but follow

this beauty to its source in heaven. Of all the stilnov-

isti, only Dante attempted such an excursion, and that

effort led into another kind of poetry, in which the beauty

of the lady became a progressive revelation until at last

it was quencheg in a greater beauty still, the ineffable

beauty of God. 5
In other words, it was the fashion of the school of the sweet new style
to prescind from the beauty of the real lady and dwell on the essence
of beauty, to talk, in short, not of romantic love as a way of salva-
tion, but of the Idea of love. Of the ladies in the poems, Beatrice
included, "We have no idea...where they come from or where they go;
their very nature is in doubt, whether human or divine."86

Further, Dante was careful to insist in the Convito that Beatrice
was not only Beatrice in the Paradiso; according to his fourfold inter-
pretation, she was also theology. Williams seems to feel too that she

is both, but that so long as she is in some sense still Beatrice, Dante

is showing the way of Romantic love. But just so far as Beatrice becomes

 

853; Praise 9; Love, p. 229.

86In Praise gf_Iove, p. 210.

 

5%

 

 

230

anything bnt_Beatrice, so far is she an assertion that Dante was not
erecting a personal experience into a theological system. And if he
was not doing this, then Williams's prime example of the Romantic Way
is gone.

But perhaps the most cogent objection to Romantic Theology is
one from the purely human and natural point of view. It seemed at
the outset to promise so much. It seemed to indicate that the one
truly unforgettable experience in human life could be licitly raised
to a way of life, and even a way of sanctity. But it can account for
the fading of the romantic vision only by saying that it is one's duty
to see all things in ldve, "as to the Lord." But that is exactly
what every Christian has always known and always found so difficult.
Worse, it is exactly what most Christians have discovered to be the
most humdrum part of the religious life. What can be drearier than to
act as if you love your neighbor merely because you know you should?
The trouble is that Romantic Theology promised somehow to be exciting,
because it deals with the most exciting thing in the world. But it

has nothing to say about the "time being,‘ just as Lewis's novels have
nothing to say about the time being. By theologizing the experience of
romantic love Williams seemed to promise an explanation of the exper-
ience. But the experience remains as enigmatic as when Williams took
it up. In the world we know it often leads to obvious evil; and Milton

thought it played a great part in, was the efficient cause of, the

fall itself. One may be a Christian and yet think the experience to be

231

nature's subterfuge for continuing the species; and one may think so
still when Williams's theology is understood. Housman's description

of the experience seems no more refutable for one's having read Wil-
the boy was quite himself again after he had fallen out of

liams:
love, and everyone understood that he had recovered from an interest-

ing and typical but not lasting disease.

However, I am concerned not so much with the validity of the
theology as with the religious cast of mind which produced it. And it

is abundantly clear that this cast of mind can hardly be called any-

thing but romantic, for a number of reasons.
First, so far as he is a transcendentalist, Williams belongs in

the great tradition of English, American and German thought that in-

cludes Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle; Melville, Emerson, and
Whitman; Goethe, Kant, and Schiller. This kinship is too obvious to

require comment. Second, so far as he is an occultist he belongs to
what might be called the tradition of decadent romanticism, the members
of which dabble to some degree in magic and various secret ways to know-

ledge. This tradition includes such figures as Shelley, Baudelaire,
This too

Poe, and Yeats--not to mention Barfield and Rudolf Steiner.
is too apparent to dwell on. I am concerned especially with a further
reason for calling Williams a romantic in the matter of religion; it

is a reason neither as neat nor as easily said as the others, one which

I have already tried to suggest.
Williams, like Lewis and Barfield, has made a conscious attempt

232

to bring the matter of romanticism within the province of religion,
to combine a literary bent with religious beliefs. And, like Lewis

and Barfield, he has succeeded to such a degree that it is impossible
But it is most accurate

to separate his romanticism from his religion.

and most useful to call Williams a romantic religionist in the special

sense that we think of Wordsworth's Prelude as romantic naturalism.
is the other side of the

What both Wordsworth and Williams illustrate
Coleridge talks much

Kant-Coleridge coin, that is, the creative side.

of the creative imagination, but most of his own creative work may

fairly be called assimilation rather than creation, as Iowes' monumen-

7 What one hardly ever finds in Coleridge is what

tal work has shown.
the actual creation of a kind of

one often finds in Wordsworth:
vision into which the poet steps and according to the laws of which

This is in great part the explanation of Wordsworth

he then composes.
as a poet: we find in him the monumental faith in his vision, the

absolute fidelity to an experience, and the determination to make the
Reason is in its most exalted mood when it is

experience meaningful.
in accord with the vision; the intellect and the imagination are in

perfect union when the vision may be shown to be intelligible enough not

8701’. Basil Willey: "The difference between his 'great three' poems
and most of his other verse is so extraordinary that it can only be called
a difference in kind, and only accounted for on the supposition that in
them he was using faculties and powers which lay dormant at other times.
Professor Lewes has demonstrated that in the 'great three' poems the
images stored in Coleridge's mind had undergone alchemical change by be-
ing plunged in the deep well of his subconscious, whereas elsewhere they
are merely produced by a deliberate choice of the will, and rhetorically
Nineteenth Century Studies (Iondon, l9h9), p. 26.

juxtaposed. "

233

to be called a dream and a delusion. Wordsworth is, in Williams's
He is not content with

terms, a true romantic, a reflective romantic.
the eXperience of the passionate apprehension of the life in Nature.

He is always turning it around, observing it, making it meaningful by

speaking of it in terms of Hartley or Plato or Spinoza. And this is

the case with Williams. He too begins with the experience and the

reaction to it; he too reflects upon the experience; he too is faith-

ful to the vision and is determined to make it meaningful. But where
Wordsworth is naturalistic, Williams is a Christian. For him the union

of thought and feeling is the union in experience of the two sacred

modes of God's manifestation in body and spirit. To reflect upon the

romantic eXperience is, for a Christian, to theologize it; it is to
see truly in the vision that love, that co-inherence, which is the law

of the world: man ingodded in the body and spirit of Christ.

CHAPTER V

J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND THE EUCATASTROPHIC FAIRY STORY

Tblkien, as I mentioned in the introductory chapter, needs no

intrmhxfiflon in the world of scholarship. Over the years he has pun-

lishedzhithe fields of Old and Middle English and in philology; his

work:has always been highly respected, and his interpretation of

Beowulf as a "heroic-elegaic poem"1 instead of an epic is, I believe,

generally regarded as a landmark in the scholarship on the poem and

the problems it presents. But his introduction to the non-scholarly

public has been more recent. Lewis, in his preface to That Hideous

 

Strength, informed his readers that there existed a work which had rele-

vance to his own: "Those who would like to learn further about Numinor

and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still
exists only in the M33. of my friend, Professor J} R. R. Telkien."

The next year saw the publication of the collection of essays in honor
of Charles Williams (who had died two years before) to which Tolkien

contributed.a.long discussion of fairy stories, about which I will have

 

1"Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics," Proceedings 9; the Brit-

ish Academy, XXII (1936), p. 33.
2(New York, 196), p. viii. Dr. Dimble, the authority on Arthur-
ian myth in the novel, may also be modeled partly on Tolkien.

23h

235

much to say later. Iewis mentioned Tolkien again in print in l9h8 in
his discussion of Williams's Arthurian poetry: Williams had read the
manuscript of his retelling of the Arthurian legend to Iewis and
Tolkien. But until l95h-Tolkien was known beyond the world of scholar-
ship largely for a children's story called The Hobbit, published in
1937-

In 195% appeared the first volume of the trilogy entitled Th5
Iggd_9§_thg_§12g§; the second volume appeared that same year, and the
third a year later. It is a tale, Tolkien says in his Foreword to the
first volume, "which has grown to be almost a history of the great War
of the Ring," and it was taken from the memoirs of two famous hobbits,
memoirs "preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch."3 It is, he says, a
continuation of the earlier tale recorded in The Hobbit, but it "speaks
more plainly of those darker things which lurked only on the borders of
the earlier tale, but which have troubled Middle-earth in all its his-
tory. It is, in fact, not a book written for children at 811....” (p.
7) The trilogy, the reader learns, was fourteen years in the making.
It contains maps, an appendix of the family trees of the major charac-
ters of the story, and appendices which contain "some brief account...

of the languages, alphabets, and calendars that were used in the Westlands

 

3Foreword to The Fellowship gf_thg Ring (Boston, n. d.), p. 7.
Houghton Mifflin has published the trilogy in the U. S. Volume II is
The Two Towers; Volume III, The Return gf_thg King. None of the volumes
is dated in the American printing; original publication dates were res-
pectively l95h, l95h, 1955. Hereafter all page references to the tril-

Ogy will be by volume and page in the text.

 

‘Mfiltlfl‘lu .lllv

 

236

in.theffifird.Age of Middle-earth." (p. 8) So equipped, the reader may
then munito the story prOper.

It is on this anomalous work that Tolkien's non-scholarly re-

putation rests, and understandably it is a work only partly understood

by its friends as well as its foes. I hOpe to show the work for what

it is: a fairy story in Tolkien's meaning of that term and, beyond that,
an excursion into the realm of what has been called in this study ro-
mantic religion.

I must now try to retell the story of the trilogy, and in so
doing I will mutilate it, for, more than most stories, it suffers from
redaction. The length of Tolkien's imagined events (the trilogy runs
nearly 1200 pages) and the complexity of his imagined world give his
trilogy an atmosphere and a reality that no recapitulation can capture.
For one thing, a retelling necessarily puts into straightforward order

events and knowledge which the reader of the trilogy comes by, as it

were, haphazardly, by indirection, as in real life. The world of the

trilogy, the strange imagined backdrop against which the story moves,
He hears half

is revealed to the reader only in bits and snatches.
stories out of the dim past, bits of gossip, parts of songs; he pieces
out the world of the trilogy as the reader of Beowulf pieces out the
dim tribal world of the poem from shreds of knowledge gleaned from
Hnothgar‘s description of the mere-wife's den, or Beowulf‘s mention

<1lereca, or the author's passing allusion to the coming destruction of

Heorot. This patchwork creation of the world is , in fact, a great part

237

of'mmestory's fascination, and the technique is one which Tolkien,
whodemnflbed it so well as it was used in Beowulf, consciously uses.

Whatzuia web of story in the trilogy becomes, necessarily, a straight

line2h1recapitulation. Further, the pleasure of following the twists

and'humm of the adventures on the maps which are provided is necess-
arily lost in summary, as is the fascinatiOn at the linguistic pyro-

technics provided in the differing languages of the elves, the dwarves,

the trees, and the other speaking beings of the story. All I can hope

to do, then, is to sketch out the world of the trilogy analytically
and to retell the major plot of the story, resorting to quotation occa-

sionally as a feeble means of trying to convey something of the tang of

Tolkien's imagined reality.
The story prOper really begins, as I have said, before the tril-
ogy itself, in one of Tolkien's fairy stories for children entitled

The Hobbit. There we are introduced to the creatures called hobbits--

manlike little beings of some three feet in height, with furry feet.
They live in burrows, are in general a good natured lot, and have the

general mannerisms and speech habits of the English. The hero of this

early story is a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins. Together with Gandalf,

who is a Man and a wizard, and. several dwarves, Bilbo undertakes a quest
to a dragon's lair to recover the stolen treasure of the dwarf kings
which is hidden "beneath Erebor in Dale, far off in the East." (I, 21)

The quest is successful; but what is important for the trilogy is an

event that happens at the end of this early story. Bilbo becomes lost

238

in a cavern under the mountains and there finds a ring which belongs to

a creature named Gollum, who lives there in the dark. They play a

riddle game for Bilbo's life, and Bilbo wins when Gollum cannot tell
what Bilbo has in his pocket (the ring). But Gollum finds his ring

missing, realizes that he has been tricked, and pursues Bilbo. Bilbo

accidentally discovers that by putting the ring on he can become invis-

ible, and so he escapes.

The first volume of the trilogy Opens in the Third Age of Middle-

Earth, and like the era of Lewis's Till [is Have Faces, it is an era of
Die Gotterdamerung. The elves are a declining race ,‘and continually

pass from east to west, embarking at Grey Havens for the lands far out

in the western sea. There are men in this world, but it is not yet the

era of men; at the end of the Third Age the elves, the dwarves, the
hobbits, the orcs, the trolls, and other miscellaneous species will

disappear, but for the period of the story man is only one of many he-

ings capable of will'and rationality. Man had originally come "over

the Sea out of Westernesse" (I, 11+) and was taught to speak by the

elves. In the west of this world, near the Great Sea, is the district

called simply The Shire (which may be thought of as England before it

was separated from the Continent), the present home of the hobbits. It

is here that the story of the trilog opens.
Bilbo has been back from his adventures for many years and has

adopted his nephew Frodo as his heir. Bilbo gives a birthday party for

himself, the climax of which is his disappearance by means of the ring,

239

which he has kept carefully hidden all these years. His intention is

to leave the Shire and spend his declining days among the elves, whom

he had come to know and admire during his earlier adventures. But now

the nature of the ring begins to become apparent. He means to leave

it to Frodo, along with his other possessions. But suddenly he finds

it almost impossible to give it up, and it is only through Gandalf's

help that he is able to do so. He leaves then, and Frodo becomes

master of the house and owner of the ring. He lives a pleasant and

commonplace existence, except that he retains something of Bilbo's

spirit and curiosity; he walks by moonlight and visits the elf bands

passing through the Shire. Years pass, and Frodo hears nothing from

Gandalf; but he learns from the elves and other travellers that the
Enemy is growing in power, that his kingdom (which had once been over-

thrown in Mirkwood by the power of the White Council) is on the rise

again in the South, in the land of Mordor.

Presently Gandalf returns with alarming information about the

ring. It is an elven ring, dangerous to all mortals; it grants its

owner endless life as well as invisibility, but ultimately its owner

will fade, become shadowy. Worse, its owner will sooner or later lose

his strength and will to the dark power' of which the ring is the outer

manifestation. Gandalf reveals secret elven writing on the ring by

casting it into the fire. The ring contains two lines of verse, part

of a larger verse which is:

2h0

fflmee Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf—lords in their halls of stone,
lfine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark lord on his dark throne
Lithe Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
hithe Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. (I, 60)

Frodofisrdng is the Master-ring lost by Sauron, the Dark.lord of Mor-

dor. Chndalf explains the meaning of the verse:

The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength
and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the
last defences, and cover all the lands in a second

darkness. He lacks the One Ring.

The Three, fairest of all, the Elf-lords hid from
him, and his hand never touched them or sullied them.
Seven the Dwarf-kings possessed, but three he has re-
covered, and the others the dragons have consumed.
Nine he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so
ensnared them. long ago they fell under the dominion
of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under
his great Shadow, his most terrible servants. long
ago. It is many a year since the Nine walked abroad.
Yet who knows? ,As the Shadow grows once more, they
too may walk again. (I, 60-61)

Gandalf suggests that Bilbo's finding the ring was part of a
design, and that thus Frodo's possession of it now is also part of
the desigmu but the design is not Sauron's. But now the situation has
grown crucial. Gollum, searching the world over for his ring, has
been taken to Mordor, and now the Dark Power knows the whereabouts of
the ring. The ring must be destroyed, and this can only be done by
throwing it into "the Cracks of Doom in the depths of Orodruin, the
Fire-mountain." (I, 70) Thus Frodo, full of self-doubts, leaves the
Shire with a few friends and makes his way East; though they have left

secretly, they are followed by a Black Rider whom they can barely elude

2hl

by using their hobbit wood-lore.

They travel through the dense Old Forest, where they are res-
cumifTom voracious trees by Tom Bombadil, a kind of Nature guardian,
'thter of wood, water, and hill," (I, 135) who takes them to his home
in the forest where he lives with Goldberry, "daughter of the River."
(I, 13h) He tells them stories of when the world was young, for he is
the "Eldest"; he "remembers the first raindrOp and the first acorn”;

He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little

PEOple arriving. He was here before the Kings and the

graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed

westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were

bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was
fearless--before the Dark Lord came from Outside.

(I, we)
They leave the forest and become lost in a fog crossing the Barrow-
Downs. They are captured by a Barrow-wight and laid in his burrow
along with his treasures, but Tom Bombadil comes like sunlight into
the cold barrow and frees them.

They reach the town of Bree, where they meet Strider, one of a

strange group of men called Rangers. He reveals himself as Aragorn,

a friend of Gandalf's and leads them East. But they are caught at
night by the Black Riders, the Ringwraiths, those nine mortals drained
<1f flesh and blood by the rings of Sauron. They come, drawn by the
scent of blood and by the ring which Frodo bears. Frodo yields to the
temptation to use the ring, and is wounded by one of the Riders; the

wcnnu11refuses to heal properly and leaves his shoulder partly paralyzed,

for he "has been touched by the weapons of the Enemy." (I, 216)

2h2

After another desperate encounter with the Riders, they reach
thelmi'city of Rivendell, where Frodo is healed, and where he finds
Bilbo. .A great council is held, and Elrond, lord of Rivendell, re-
lcounts part of the history of the recurring war with the Enemy:

Of Numenor he spoke, its glory and its fall, and the
return of the Kings of Men to Middle-earth out of the
deeps of the Sea, borne upon the wings of storm.

Then Elendil the Tall and his mighty sons, Isildur and
Anarion, became great lords; and the North-realm they
made in Arnor, and the South-realm in Gondor about the
mouths of Anduin. But Sauron of Mordor assailed them,

and they made the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, and
the hosts of Gil-galad and Elendil were mustered in

Arnor. (I, 255-6)
Aragorn is revealed as the heir of the last Kings of the West, and he
carries a broken sword which, by prOphecy, will be remade in the time
of great war. It is resolved to attempt to destroy the ring, and the
fellowship of the ring is formed. The company includes Gandalf; the
hobbits; a dwarf, Gimli; an elf, Legolas; Aragorn and Boromir, a man
from the embattled southern land of Condor which is hard pressed by
the forces of Mordor. Aragorn's sword is remade, Frodo receives an
elf knife, and the company moves toward the South. They are spied on
by flocks of birds, by clouds, are caught in a blizzard in the high
pass of Caradhras, attacked by wolf packs, and are forced to take the
route that goes to the dwarf Mines of Moria under the Misty Mountains,
where no one has been since the last of the great wars. There they are
set upon by orcs (semi-human, barbaric creatures), and Gandalf, in a

duel of power with a great Balrog (part shadow, part fire, and winged

2‘43

like a bat) is dragged into an abyss of flames.

Escaping, the rest of the company come to one of the last of
the strongholds of the elves. the golden forest of lothlorien. where
"bloom the winter flowers in the unfading grass: the yellow elanor,
and the pale niphredil." (I, 365) There they meet the rulers of
Iothlorien the Lord Celeborn and the Lady Galadriel the last and
greatest of the elf rulers: "no sign of age was upon them, unless
it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were...profound. the
'wells of deep memory." (I, 369) Frodo discovers that the lady Galad-
riel wears one of the three remaining elf rings; and she tells him
that if the Enemy acquires the Master-ring. then all of elfdom is
lost, for the elf rings will bow to the power of the Master-ring.
And even if the Master-ring is destroyed, the elves are doomed, for
when the power of the Master-ring is dispersed, the derivative power
of all the other rings will fade. Either way. the end of the Third
Age will mean the passing of the elves. "...Lothlorien will fade,"
she tells him ”and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must
depart into the West. or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave,
slowly to forget and to be forgotten." (I. 308) And as the company
leaves Lothlorien to sail down the broad Anduin Frodo looks at Galad-
:riel and she seems to him "a living vision of that which has already
'been left far behind by the flowing stream of Time." (I, 359)

They sail to the South, and at the Falls of Rauros they must

2AA

decide whether to turn West and go to the aid of Boromir's city, Minas
Tirith, or turn E:st and pursue the ring-quest towards Mordor. Over
this decision the first dissension in the company occurs: Boromir
sees it as sheer duty to help his city, Frodo cannot justify any de-
viation from the quest. Boromir tries to take the ring by force, but
Frodo uses it to escape. He decides to make for Mordor alone, but his
servant Sam catches up with him and they leave together. Just before
they go, Frodo climbs a great peak and looks at the panorama of the
country around them, and the first book ends on the foreboding note
'of what he sees:

Horsemen were galIOping on the grass of Rohan; wolves .
poured from Isengard. From the havens of Harad ships
of war put out to sea: and out of the East Men were mov-
ing endlessly: swordsmen, spearmen, bowmen upon horses
....All the power of the Dark Lord was in motion. Then
turning south again he beheld Minas Tirith. Far away

it seemed, and beautiful: white-walled, many-towered,
proud and fair upon its mountain-seat; its battlements
glittered with steel, and its turrets were bright with
many banners. Hope leaped in his heart. But against
Minas Tirith was set another fortress, greater and more
strong. Thither, eastward, unwilling his eye was drawn.
It passed the ruined bridges of Osgiliath, the grinning
gates of Minas Morgul, and the haunted Mountains, and
it looked upon Gorgoroth, the valley of terror in the
Land of Merdor. Darkness lay there under the Sun. Fire
glowed amid the smoke.’ Mount Doom was burning, and a
great reek rising. Then at last his gaze was held:
wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, im-
measurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel,
tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dur, Fortress of
Sauron. All hope left him. (I, #17)

In the second volume, which begins after the breaking up of the

fellowship, the lines of the story diverge; one book follows the adventuresi

2&5

of Aragorn's party, the other those of Frodo. The major events of
the first line I will note only briefly. Gandalf has returned from
seeming death, and is now the White Rider; as such he replaces the
traitor Saruman of Isengard as Chief of the Great Council. The great
Tree-folk (the Ents) join with Gandalf in attacking the tower of Sar-
uman and subduing it. Thus the forces in the coming war will be
those of Mordor and those of Minas Tirith, though Boromir is now
dead.

Frodo and his servant Sam are overtaken by Gollum, who has been
following them all the way from Lothlorien. Frodo partly draws Gollum
out of his evil and he becomes their guide into the Land of Mordor.

He leads them across the Dead Marshes, which are lighted dimly by what
seem to be moving and flickering candles. They slog through the swamp
and foul pools, the graveyard of an ancient battle; and down through
the murky pools they can see “pale faces, deep deep under the dark
water...grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces
proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all
rotting, all dead." (II, 235)

Gollum leads them to Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor, but
it proves impassable. They move south towards what Gollum promises
is a secret entry through the mountain pass Cirith Ungol, the Spider's
Pass. They climb slowly upward through the loathsome pass, where

even the occasional pale flowers give off the stench of death. Amid

 

 

u...

246

thunder and lightning, as they crouch in fear, the first of the great
armies of Mordor marches out, with a Black Rider at its head, to make
war on the West. They move on and come finally to a cave entrance in
the wall of the pass; out of it comes a hideous stench. They go in
and up a long dark tunnel in which the stench worsens. Totally lost
and exhausted, and noting that Gollum has disappeared, they stop when
they hear a sound "in the heavy paddedsilence: a gurgling, bubbling
noise, and a long venomous hiss." (II, 328) Frodo holds up his gift
from the Lady Galadriel, a phial of white elvish fire, which radiates
the blackness. The many-eyed thing that is watching them retreats
into the shadows. Their way out is barred by a gigantic spider-web,
which Frodo hacks down with his elvish sword, but they have not es-
caped Shelob, "bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her
feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food,
and her vomit darkness.” (II, 332)

Frodo races up the pass, Sam some distance behind; and Shelob
comes out of a black hole in the passage wall behind Frodo and moves
after him on great knobbly spider's legs. As Sam tries to warn Frodo
he is set upon by Gollum, who has sent Frodo to Shelob's lair in hOpe
of getting the ring back. Sam frees himself, but Shelob has Frodo.
In a desperate battle reminiscent of both Thg_Faerie Queene and Beowulf,
Sam wounds the monster; armed with Frodo's sword and Galadriel's light,

he shouts at Shelob the elvish cry

2A7

O Elbereth Gilthoniel

o menel palan-diriel,

le nallan si di'nguruthos!

A tiro nin, Fanuilos! (II, 339)

And Shelob crawls off to her lair. But Frodo is dead, so far as Sam
can tell. As he mourns there in the pass by Frodo's side the words

of the Council at lothlorien come back to him: "And the Council gave
him companions, so that the errand should not fail." (II, 3A1) He
takes the ring from Frodo and goes on. Ore-guards appear, and he puts
'the ring on to disappear. The orcs find Frodo and carry him off to
their tower; Sam, following, overhears that Frodo is not dead but
stunned by Shelob's poison. The second volume ends with Frodo cap-
tured by the enemy.

The last volume, like the second, falls into two parts; in the
first the great battles between Mordor and the West are told, Gandalf,
Aragorn and the rest of the company playing crucial parts. In the
second, in events which occur at the same time as the battles, the
final stages of the ring quest are shown. As before, I will deal only
'briefly with the secondary plot.

The war for the ring has begun in earnest, and the black cloud
of’Nbrdor darkens all the southern lands, hovering over even Minas
Tirith, the last stronghold of the West. A series of battles are fought,
skirmishes of attrition before the great battle of Minas Tirith. Before
<one of these Aragorn is forced to march his troops along the Paths of

'the Dead, and as they near the end of the region Legolas the elf looks

2&8

behind them. ”The Dead are following," he says. "I see shapes of Men
and of horses, and pale banners like shreds of cloud, and spears like
winter-thickets on a misty night. The Dead are following.” And his
companion replies, "Yes, the Dead ride behind. They have been summoned."
(III, 61-62) And the dead and the living ride into battle together.
Gandalf and Aragorn march their troops to the Black Gate of Mordor to
challenge the enemy; they are met by a messenger from Sauron, a being
so lost in evil that he has no name but "the mouth of Sauron." He
shows them Frodo's clothes and armor as evidence of Frodo's death and
the failure of the ring quest. They see their cause as finally hope-
less, and are attacked from all sides by the armies of Mordor.

. Sam rescues Frodo from the orc tower, and they move through a
. series of desperate adventures towards Mount Doom. The ring itself
becomes heavier and heavier, so that Frodo can hardly move with it.
Worse than its weight is the spiritual pressure it puts upon him:. he
sees it always in his mind's eye as a wheel of fire, and it begins to
deaden his mind. He has forgotten most things of the past, he tells
Sam. "No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory
of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star...and there is no
veil between me and the wheel of fire." (III, 215) They move snail- .
like up the great ash heap of Doom, Sam carrying Frodo, who by now is
‘wholly spent except for his driving will and the sense of his mission
as part of a pattern. Gollum leaps suddenly off a crag and attacks

IFrodo, but is beaten off. Sam cannot bring himself to kill Gollum even

249

now. Frodo arrives at the precipice overhanging the abyss of fire in
the heart of Mount Doom, and then cannot throw the ring in. ”I have
come," he said. "But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I
will not do this deed. The Ring is mine:" (III, 223) At that moment
he is attacked again by Gollum; Gollum wrenches the ring away from him
and in a mad dance of victory totters over the edge into the flames,
the ring with him.

The towers and battlements of Mordor fall in ruins, and the
armies of Mordor, deprived now of their will, bolt or destroy themselves.
The Third Age is at an end, and the Fourth Age, the Age of Men, is at
hand. Aragorn becomes King of Condor, ”Aragorn son of Arathorn, chief-
tain of the Dunedain of the North, Captain of the Host of the West,
wielder of the Sword Reforged, victorious in battle...." (III, 2&5)

The company disbands, and the hobbits return to the Shire. But after
three years, Bilbo comes back to the Shire with the elf people--Elrond
and Galadriel and their kindred. Frodo and Gandalf Join Bilbo and the
elves and go to Grey Havens to take ship for the land far out in the
western sea. Frodo has saved the Shire, has saved the world in fact,
but not for himself. "It must often be so...," he says, "when things
are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others
may keep them." (III, 309) And here the trilogy ends, "for the Third
Age was over, and the Days of the Rings were passed, and an end was
come of the story and song of those times." (III, 309)

I have called the work anomalous, and perhaps even such brief and

250

sketchy recapitulation as I have given shows the justice of the term.
On first glance, it is certainly not a realistic novel, not a symbolic
novel, perhaps not even a novel at all as we usually understand the

I!

term. It would seem closest to "myth, except that we generally think

of myth as some sort of adumbration of what was once either fact, or

felt to be fact, or desired to be fact. But here there is no question

of fact at all. It is clearly sheer invention, and that is the sharp

edge of the razor which both friendly and hostile estimators of the

work have had to get over. In fact,the trilogy, more than perhaps any

other recent work, poses the question of the value of invention in our

time. And it follows, of course, that to ask the value of invention

is to assume a knowledge of, and a judgment of, reality; and to ask

how far, and in what way, and for what reason, this invention departs

from reality--and whether this departure is justifiable. Most of the

essential criticism of the work resolves itself to this fundamental

question; and I mean now to deal with some of this criticism as a means

of leading up to my own interpretation of the work, which is that it

is wholly understandable only if seen as an example of romantic religion.
There can be no doubt as to the leader of the hostile criticism:

it is vast understatement to say that Edmund Wilson does not like the

trilogy; he feels insulted at being asked to review it. He could accept

h

it as "a philological curiosity," but the fact that grown peOple could

 

h"Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" Nation, CLXXXII (April 1A, 1956), 312.

251

take it seriously as literature, and even morality, goads him beyond

the bounds of civility. He castigates the reviewers who have commended

",5

this "hypertrOphic sequel to The Hobbit . Richard Hughes, who men-

 

tioned The Faerie Queene in connection with it; Naomi Mitchison, who

 

took it as seriously as she does Malory; Lewis, who compared Tolkien

to Ariosto and found Tolkien the better; and Louis Halle, who thought

it had the same meaning as the Odyssey, Genesis, and Faust. The only

way he can explain such tastes is to conclude "that certain peOple

6

...have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash." And though he depre-

cates both the prose and verse of the work, which "are on the same

level of professorial amateurishness,"7 the crux of his dislike is

that the work is "imaginary."

he prefers Cabell's Poictesme.

If he must read of imaginary kingdoms,

"He at least writes for grown-up

peOple, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between

Good People and Goblins.”8

‘ And another critic, Mark Roberts, echoes (more courteously)

Wilson's accusation: the work

What is essentially wrong with

9

has no "relevance to the human situation.“

it is that it is ”contrived." "It does

 

5”00, Those Awful Orcs!"
6"00, Those Awful Ores!"
7”00, Those Awful Orcs!"
8"00, Those Awful Orcs!"

9"Adventure in English,"

Nation, 312.
lease. 313-
Nation, 313.
Nation, 31h.

Essays ig_Criticism, VI (Jan., 1956), u58.

252

not issue from an understanding of reality which is not to be denied;
it is not moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the
same time its raison dfgtggf”lo

The more friendly estimates turn largely on the same pole. But
in these the invention is held to have a moral significance, and thus
relevance to the human condition. Michael Straight, who regards the
work as one of the "very few works of genius in recent literature,"11
holds that there is a theme in the trilogy, and that the theme is essen-
tially a moral one: personal responsibility, as symbolized by Frodo
and his relationship with the ring. "In the presence of limited good,
and of corruptible man, what is the responsibility of the ring-bearer?
Is it to use present evil on behalf of present good and thereby to
ensure the continuation of evil? Or is it to deny present gain in an

"12

effort to destroy evil itself? Thus the work is not escapist; it

13

"illuminates the inner consistency of reality."
And another critic refutes Wilson by pointing out the ethical

character of the trilogy; it is not a matter of Good People versus

Goblins: "...the force and complexity of its moral and theological

 

10"Adventure in English," Essays ;g_Criticism, 169--

11"The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien," New Republic, CXXXIV
(Jan. 16, 1956), 26. '

 

12"The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien," New Republic, 2h.

 

13"The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien," New Republic, 26-

 

253

scheme provide the fundamental power of The lord gf_the Rings."l)+ Fro-

do and Sam are clearly endowed with free will, and free will “entails

. . l
a necessarily structured un1verse....” S

The overall pattern of the
work illustrates one of man's fundamental problems--his relation to

the universe. Frodo and Sam's sense of dedication to the quest shows

a sense of duty not merely to themselves; it shows also a "cosmic respon-
sibility, justified by the existence of some vast, unnamed power for

"16

Tolkien has rejected realism in order "to talk more forcefully
“17

good.

about reality.
Douglass Parker reminds the reader of Tolkien's interpretation

of Beowulf, and holds that what Tolkien has done in the trilogy is to

recreate the world, and world-view, of the poem. The words that Tolkien

took from Widsith to apply to Beowulf can as well be applied to the tril-

ogy: Lif is 1aene: eal scaece, leoht ond lif somod, "Life is fleeting:

everything passes away, light and life together."18 There hangs over

the tale, he thinks, the same cloud of determinism that hung over

Beowulf. The end of an age is coming, and nothing that men or hobbits

or elves can do will forestall that end. In the face of inexorable

 

l“Patricia M. Spacks, "Ethical Pattern in The Lord of the Rings,"
Critigue, III (Spring-Fall, 1959), 30.

 

15"Ethical Pattern in The Lord of the Rings," Critique, 3h.

 

l6"Ethical Pattern in The Lord 9: the Rings," Critique, 35-

 

 

l7"Ethica1 Pattern in The lord.g£_the Rings," Critigue, #1-

18”Hwaet We Holbylta...," Hudson Review, No. 9 (Spring l956-Winter
1956-7), 609.

 

25h

extinction the only answer that man or hobbit can make is to be heroic.
Tolkien has gone to fantastic lengths to make his world "a prodigious
and...unshakable construct of the imagination"19 in imitation of the
world of the Beowulf poem because Tolkien feels "that only in this way
can he attain what the author of Beowulf (also an antiquary) attained:
a sense of man's Verganglichkeit, his impermanence, his perishability."2O
And this imaginary world has relevance to the real one. His borrowings
from, or re-working of, myths from the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Norse
provide a bridge from his world to ours; they make "the implicit state-
ment that our world, in the Age of Men, the Fourth Age, is a continua-
tigg_of his, and will recapitulate its happenings in new terms, as the
Third Age recapitulated the Second, and the Second the First."21
lewis, too, sees the meaning of the trilogy as heroism, the
heroism necessary to a man if he is simply to live. He does not like
to extract a moral from a work which he finds "good beyond hope," but
if there must be a moral, then that is it, "that our victory is imper-
manent."22 The work serves to recall us "from facile optimism and wail-

ing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into

Man's unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived."23

 

19"Hwaet We Holbylta...," Hudson Review, 605-

20"Hwaet We Holbylta...," Hudson Review, 608.

21"Hwaet We Holbylta...," Hudson Review, 606'

 

22"The Dethronement of Power," Time and Tide, XXXVI (October 22,
1955), 137%-

23"The Dethronement of Power," Time and Tide, l37h.

 

 

255

Most of the criticism, as I have said, comes down to the ques-
tion of whether the book is relevant to life, whether (in Parker's
terms) there is a bridge between its invented reality and the accepted
reality of our world. Can a tale which is totally "made up" be im-
portant? The implicit agreement among all the critics noted above is
that the work can be relevant to life, and can be taken seriously, only
if it is in some way allegorical or symbolical. The hostile critics
deny allegory of any sort, or find the allegory childish and over-
simplified. The friendly critics find the allegory serious, complex,
and moral. It is almost as if Tolkien had held a mirror up to, not life,
but to critical attitudes (which presuppose philosophical attitudes),
and in it each critic had seen himself. 8

And against all these opinions we must set Tolkien's own remarks
on the work, made in a statement to his publisher. Wilson quotes these
with tremendous relish, regarding them as the last evidence he needs
to show the inanity of those reviewers who found serious value in the
work. Tolkien himself has confessed, Wilson thinks, that the work is
only "a philological game."2u Tolkien has said, "The invention of lang-
uages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a
world for the languages than the reverse. I should have preferred to

write in 'Elvish'."25 When people ask him "what it is all about," he

 

2b’"Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" Nation, 312.

25"00, Those Awful Orcs!" Nation, 312.

256

replies that it is an essay in "linguistic esthetic." "It is not 'about'
anything but itself. Certainly it has gg_allegorical intentions, gen-
eral, particular or topical, moral, religious or political."26 This last
disclaimer is for Wilson the end of the matter; his mood is that of
Aquinas when he pounded his fist on King louis's table and exclaimed,
"That will settle the Manichees!"

For my purposes, it does not matter much whether Tolkien is being
ironic or not, or whether artists' remarks on their own work are to be
taken as final evidence as to the nature and meaning of their work.

The aim of the critic, as Chesterton once remarked, is to show what the
artist did, whether the artist meant to do it_or not. But in the inter-
est of truth it should be pointed out that Wilson makes the matter far
too simple, and the internal evidence in the work shows this quite
clearly. The trilogy may have begun as a philological game easily
enough, but other things have grown beneath their makers' hands. And
if it were relevant to my purpose I could cite innumerable passages

in the trilogy which are clearly not part of any game, philological or
otherwise--passages in which the heart of the author is laid bare for
all to see who read them. No one ever exposed the nerves and fibers

of his being in order to make up a language; it is not only insane but
unnecessary. Whether or not Tolkien is to be taken literally in his

remarks, there is something in the trilogy, and I hope to show now what

 

26"00, Those Awful Orcs!" Nation, 312.

"I

 

257

that something is.
The genre and the meaning of the trilogy are to be found in T01-
kien's essay on fairy stories, published in l9fi7, seven years before

the appearance of the first volume of The lord gf_the Rings. The essay

 

has not been completely ignored in discussions of the trilogy. Straight,
for example, points out briefly that the trilogy accords generally with
the specifications that Tolkien has laid down for the fairy tale. And
Lewis's review of the second and third volumes spends some time defend-
ing the work on a basis which is really Tolkien's, though Lewis does
not mention this. But the total relevance of the essay to the trilogy,
and the nature of the theory set forth in the essay have not, I think,
been sufficiently examined.

Tolkien's essay attempts to determine the nature, origin, and
use of fairy stories. As to the nature of them, no definition can be
arrived at on historical grounds; the definition must rather deal with
"the nature of Faerie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that
blows in that country."27 But this is exactly what cannot be either
defined or accurately described, only perceived. Faerie may be roughly
translated as Magic, but not the vulgar magic of the magician; it is
rather magic "of a particular mood and power," (p. #3) and it does not

have its end in itself but in its operations. Among these Operations

 

27"0n Fairy-Stories," in Essays Presented tg_Char1es Williams (Lon-
don, l9h7), p. #3. Page references to the essay will be in the text.

 

 

258

are "the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires" such as the
desire "to survey the depths of space and time” and the desire "to
hold communion with other living things." (p. uh) Travellers' tales
are not fairy stories, and neither are those stories which utilize
dream machinery to explain away their marvels; if a writer attaches his
tale of marvels to reality by explaining that it was all a dream (as in
the old medieval tradition, for example), "he cheats deliberately the
primal desire at the heart of Faerie: the realization, independent of
the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder." (p. h5)

Now these remarks throw much light on the trilogy. It is a fairy
story in the sense just described: it concerns itself with the air that
blows through the Perilous Realm of Faerie. It attempts to satisfy

"certain primordial human desires.l It surveys the depths of time,
as lewis's trilogy surveys the depths of space (and in Tolkien's sense,
Iewis's trilogy is thus a fairy story). The story itself is of the

Third Age, but the story is full of echoes out of the dim past; in fact,
the trilogy is in great part an attempt to suggest the depths of time,
"which antiquates antiquity, and hath an art to make dust of all things."
The Third Age is, for the reader, old beyond measure, but the beings of
'this age repeatedly tell stories out of ages yet deeper "in the dark

backward and abysm of time,"

and in fact often suggest that these stor-
ies recount only the events of relatively recent times, and that the
oldest things are lost beyond memory. All this is to satisfy that pri-

mordial desire to explore time, for "antiquity has an appeal in itself."

.\

239

(p. 57) Fairy stories, Tolkien's among them, "open a door on Other
Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand out-
side our own time, outside Time itself, maybe." (p. 57)

And the trilogy attempts to satisfy the other desire, ”to hold

communion with other living beings,‘ just as lewis's trilogy does.
The Ents, for example, whom I have mentioned only briefly, are the

great trees of the Third Age, and are among the oldest living things.
'They speak to the hobbits in a language as old, as slowly and carefully
articulated, as the earth itself. And when Tom Bombadil speaks, it is

as if Nature itself--non-rational, interested only in life and in grow-
ing things--were speaking. The elves, the dwarfs, even Gollum and the
orcs, are gradations--either up or down--from the human level; they are
”other living beings" with whom the reader holds communion in the trilogy
world of imagined wonder.

Lewis, we recall, had much to say of the b00ks of Beatrix Potter;
it was in these that he found early traces of the thing he called Joy.
And Tolkien finds something in them of Faerie. They are mostly beast
fables, he thinks, but they "lie near the borders of Faerie" because of

the moral element in them, "their inherent morality, not any allegorical

significatio." (p. #6) Here, perhaps, is a partial answer to the ques-

 

tion which, as we have seen, all the critics of the trilogy have dealt
with: the relevance of the work to human life. It is not only through
allegory that invented characters and actions may have significance.

Allegory is ultimately reducible to rational terms; and in this sense

260

there is no allegory in EEE.LQEQ.9£.EEE.BEEEEI But there runs through-
out the work an "inherent morality" which many critics have discerned,
and which some have tried to reduce to allegory. It is the element of
the numinous that is to be found throughout the work of George Macdonald
and in Lewis's novels. It is the sense of a cosmic moral law, con-
sciously obeyed or disobeyed by the characters, but existing nowhere

as a formulated and codified body of doctrine. Patricia Spacks has
commented that Tolkien has included in the trilogy "all the necessary

'28 It is even more accurate to say that he has

materials for religion.’
included Conscience, which may be defined, for the purposes of the tril-
ogy, as an awareness of natural law. But it is not a rational aware-
ness; that is, rationality plays almost no part in it. It is rather

an emotional or imaginative awareness; the doctrine does not exist,

but the feeling normally attached to the doctrine does.. The value of
this inherent morality, as we shall see, comes under Tolkien's heading

' which is one of the uses of the fairy story.

of "Recovery,'

.Fairy stories, then, are those which utilize Faerie, ”the reali-
zation of imagined wonder," and which have, or may have, an "inherent
morality." Their nature is "independent of the conceiving mind," or,
as Lewis said of Macdonald's myth-making, it comes to us-on a level

deeper and more basic than that of the conceptual intellect, and must

'be perceived with the imagination.

 

28"Ethical Pattern in The Lord of the Rings," riti ue, 36.

ww‘fl

Tolkien's views of the origins of fairy stories take us a step
closer to the heart of the matter. The history of fairy stories is
"as complex as the history of human language." (p. #9) In this history
three elements have figured in the creation of "the intricate web of
Story" (p. #9): invention, diffusion, and inheritance. The latter
two lead ultimately back to the first and do nothing to clear up the
mystery of invention. For diffusion is merely "borrowing in Space"
(p. 50) from an inventor, and inheritance is merely ”borrowing in
time." (p. 50) Both presuppose an inventive mind, and it is to the
nature of the inventive mind that Tolkien now turns.

The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in

our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the
powers of generalization and abatraction, sees not
only green-grass, discriminating it from other things,
...but sees that it is green as well as being grass.
But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty
that produced it, was the invention of the adjective:
no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent.

And that is not surprising: such incantations might
indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives,

a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that
thought of light, heavy, ggey, yellow, still, swift,
also conceived of magic that would make heavy things
light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold,
and the still rock into swift water. If it could do
the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both.
When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven,
and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's
power--upon one plane; and the desire to wield that
power in the world external to our minds awakes. It
does not follow that we shall use that power well upon
any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man's face
and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible
blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with
silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put
hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such
'fantasy,’ as it is called, new form is made; Faerie
begins; Man becomes a sub-creator. (pp. 50-51)

 

 

 

 

262

Barfield might well have written this passage; but, more important, be-
hind the passage, as behind the work of Barfield, there is the romantic
doctrine of the creative imagination. Faerie is a product of the "esem-
plastic" imagination, a product of the Secondary Imagination, which is
an echo of the Primary Imagination that creates and perceives the world
of reality.

Nor is the creative imagination to be taken lightly, or metaphor-
ically, in Tolkien's theory of the fairy story. The writer of the story
is really a sublcreator; he creates a ”Secondary World“l (p. 60) which
the mind of the reader really enters. Further, the reader's state of
mind is not accurately described in the phrase "willing suspension of
disbelief," which indicates a kind of tolerance or tacit agreement.

When the story is successful, the reader practises "Secondary Belief,"'
(p. 60) which is a positive thing. So long as the artist's art does

not fail him, "what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of
that world. You therefore believe it, while you are...inside." (p. 60)

Tolkien elaborates, and slightly qualifies, the doctrine of the
creative imagination in his discussion of the use of fairy stories. He
begins with a dictionary distinction between the Fancy and the Imagin-
ation. According to this distinction, the Fancy is the image-making
faculty, what Coleridge called "a mode of memory emancipated from the

29

order of time and space”; the imagination is "the power of giving to

 

29Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII.

 

263

ideal creations the inner consistency of reality." (p. 66) Coleridge
thought of the two capacities as wholly distinct faculties, the Fancy
being analogous to the understanding, and the Imagination analogous to
the Reason. Tolkien would re-combine them because he believes "the
verbal distinction philologically inappropriate, and the analysis
inaccurate. The mental power of image-making is one thing, or aspect;
and it should appropriately be called Imagination. The perception of
the image, the grasp of its implications, and the control, which are
necessary to a successful expression, may vary in vividness and strength;
but this is a difference of degree in Imagination, not a difference in
kind." (p. 66) What gives "the inner consistency of reality" or Secon-
dary Belief is not prOperly Imagination but Art, which is "the opera-
tive link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation."
(p. 67) Needing a term to express both the "Sub-creative Art" and
"a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from
the Image,” (p. 67) he chooses to use the word Fantasy. For the term,
in the sense in which he means it, "combines with its older and higher
use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of 'unreality'
(that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the dom-
ination of observed 'fact', in short of the fantastic.” (p. 67)

He is aware, he says, of the implications of the word fantastic,
that it implies that the things with which it deals are not to be found
in the "Primary World." In fact, he welcomes such implications, for that

is exactly what he means by the term, that the images which it describes

26#

are not extant in the ”real" world. That they are not "is a virtue
not a vice." (p. 67) (We are reminded of Barfield's use of Shelley's
lines: "Forms more real than living man, / Nurslings of immortality.")
Just because Fantasy deals with things which do not exist in the Pri-
mary World, Tolkien holds, it is "not a lower but a higher form of Art,
indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most po-
tent." (p. 67) It is relatively easy to achieve "the inner consistency
of reality" in realistic material. But good Fantasy is very difficult
to write. Anyone, Tolkien points out, can say "the green sun," but

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun

will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will prob-

ably require labour and thought, and will certainly de-

mand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few at-

tempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted

and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achieve-

ment of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its

primary and most potent mode. (p. 68)

The fairy story, then, of which the trilogy is an example, uses
Fantasy, and so far as it is successful is "story-making in its primary

and most potent mode.‘ That is to say, in dealing with fantastic things
rather than with real ones it attempts the purest form of narrative art,
and succeeds to the extent that it induces in the reader the state of
mind called Secondary Belief. In short, invented or created stories,
if successful, are better than, on a higher level than, stories which
merely manipulate the materials of the Primary World. Now this is so
not only because such invented stories are harder to make but because

they offer certain things to the reader which realistic stories do not

offer, or do not offer to the same degree. These things Tolkien calls

265

Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.

"Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-
gaining-~re-gaining of a clear view." (p. 7#) Recovery is a means of
"seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them...." (p. 7#) All
things become blurred by familiarity; we come to possess them, to use
them, to see them only in relation to ourselves. In so doing we lose
sight of what the things themselves really are gua things--and "things”
here includes-peOple, objects, ideas, moral codes, literally everything.
Recovery is recovery of perspeCtive, the old Chestertonian lesson which
Tolkien calls ”Mooreefoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy,“ (p. 7#) which
Chesterton borrowed from Dickens. Fantasy provides the recovery neces-
sary to those of us who do not have humility; the humble do not need
Fantesy because they already see things as not necessarily related to
themselves; their vision is not qualified by selfishness or egotism.
lewis, as I have said, defends the trilogy's relevance to life, and he
does so in terms of what Tolkien means by Recovery:

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things

we know and restores to them the rich significance which

has been hidden by 'the veil of familiarity.‘ ... By

putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads

into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we redis-

cover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind,

the real things are more themselves. This book applies

the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good

and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our

Joysé By dipping them in myth we see them more clear-
ly. ' '

 

3O"The Dethronement of Power," Time and Tide: 137“:

 

266

We re-discover the meaning of heroism and friendship as we see the two
hobbits clawing their way up Mount Doom; we see again the endless evil
of greed and egotism in Gollum, stunted and ingrown out of moral shape
by years of lust for the ring; we recognize again the essential anguish
of seeing beautiful and frail things--innocence, early love, children
--passing away as we read of the Lady Galadriel and the elves making
the inevitable journey to the West. We see morality ag morality by
prescinding from this or that human act and watching the ”inherent
morality" to which all the beings of the Third Age--the evil as well as
the good--bear witness. And, perhaps, the devouring nature of time it-
self is borne in on us, as it was for the Elizabethan sonneteers, and
we learn again from the trilogy that all things are Time's fools, that
all comes within the compass of his bending sickle.

If Tolkien is right, if Recovery is what he claims it is, and
if Fantasy provides Recovery, then it follows that Fantasy, far from
being irrelevant to reality, is in fact terribly relevant to moral
realitys And the trilogy, so far as Tolkien's art does not fail him,
is an example of the dictum, so favored by the Renaissance critics and
the ancients, that literature is both dglge_and 33313, that Spenser,
as Milton said, could be a better teacher than Aquinas.

Finally, the fairy story, by the use of Fantasy, provides Escape
and Consolation, two elements which are, as Tolkien notes, very closely
connected. In fact, Escape brings about Consolation as its end or

effect. Now the fact that the fairy story is "escapist" is the very

(“I

267

crux of most of the accusations brought against it (as we have seen in
regard to the trilogy). But Tolkien will not admit that Escape is a
bad thing. The word, he thinks, has fallen into disrepute because its
users too often confuse "the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of
the Deserter." (p. 76)

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? The world out-

side has not become less real because the prisoner

cannot see it. (p. 77)

Thus Escape from Hitler's Reich is not desertion, it is really rebellion,
a refusal to be identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks, this is
often the nature of Escape. A man may refuse to write about the world
in which he lives not out of cowardice (which is the usual accusation)
but because to write about it is in a sense to accept it. He may, like
Thoreau, simply secede. And this, for him, is not desertion; it is war,
"real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Con-
demnation, and Revolt." (p. 77)

But fairy stories provide other Escapes, and these bring about
Consolation of various kinds. Fairy stories, like other kinds of liter-
ature and like many other things as well, can provide a kind of solace
in a world of "hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death.”
(p. 79) And this kind of solace or respite is necessary; it is not re-
fusal to face reality, it is a time needed to regroup one's forces for

the next day's battle. Thus the poets talk of "Care-charmer sleep" and

the sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care; but they do not

258

advocate sleeping one's life away. Further, fairy stories, as we have
seen, provide a kind of Consolation in their satisfaction of "primordial
human desires."

But the major Consolation that the fairy story has to offer is
one which it contains to a degree that no other kind of literature can
equal. It is "the Consolation of the Happy Ending":

Almost I would venture to assert that all complete

fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say

that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest

function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story.

Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses

this opposite--I will call it Eucatastrophe. The euca-

tastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its

highest function. (p. 81)

What the fairy story pre-eminently presents is "the Joy of the happy
ending," (p. 81) and it is in this respect that the fairy story, for
Tolkien, is related to reality. But the reality is not the reality of

this world, the world of flux and Opinion; rather the eucatastrOphe

"denies...universa1 final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a

 

a fleeting glimpse of JOy, {by beyond the walls of the world, poignant
as grief." (p. 81) The good fairy story, by means of its eucatastrOphe,
gives the reader "a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart,
near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears," (p. 81) for in the eucatas-
trOphe, or happy ending, the reader gets "a piercing blimpse of joy,

and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends
indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through...." (p. 82)

The relevance of the fairy story to reality lies in this gleam," which

is a "sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth." (p. 83)

269

Thus there are two answers to the question, Is the fairy story

‘ true? The first, and obvious answer is, it is true if it induces
Secondary Belief, if the Art has successfully translated the image of
the "created wonder." But that is merely a question of art. The na-
ture of the eucatastrophe_suggests that the second answer is infinitely
more important, for "in the 'eucatastrophe' we see in a brief vision
that the answer may be greater-~it may be a far-off gleam or echo of

evangelium in the real world." (p. 83) It is in this second truth that

 

the fairy story, for Tolkien, ceases to be merely literature, and becomes
explicitly a vehicle of religious truth, becomes what Man is for Bar-
field, be is for Lewis, and love is for Williams.

God has redeemed man in all his capacities, and one of his capaci-
ties is that of telling stories, especially fairy stories. As Redemption
has once more made man in the image and likeness of God, so the capacities
of man to some degree echo the capacities of God. In this sense, this
secOnd truth of the fairy story is "only one facet of a truth incalcu-
lably rich," (p. 83) for in all spheres of human activity there is neces-
sarily something like the signature of God. The eucatastrophic fairy
story, a product of redeemed man, echoes the GOSpels, which contain a
story "which embraces the essence of all fairy-stories." (p. 83) For
the Gospels contain not only marvels, as the fairy story does; they con-
tain the birth of Christ, which is "the greatest and most complete con-

ceivable eucatastrophe, the eucatastrOphe of Man's history." (p. 83)

And they contain the Resurrection, which is "the eucatastrophe of the

270

story of the Incarnation." (p. 83)

The joy which the happy ending of the fairy story gives, says
Tolkien, is of the same quality, though not the same degree, as the joy
which we feel at the fact that the great fairy story of the Gospels is
true in the Primary World, for the joy of the fairy tale "has the very
taste of primary truth." (p. 8h) This is the Justification of the
fairy story (and thus of the trilogy), that it gives us in sma11--in
the beat of the heart and the catch of the breath--the joy of the in-
finite good news. For “Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of
angels, and of men--and of elves. Legend and History have met and
fused." (p. 8h)

It is perhaps not too much to say that Tolkien's view of the
fairy story has made explicit Coleridge's claim for the worth of the
creative imagination. The Secondary Imagination, which created liter-
ature, was for him an "echo" of the Primary Imagination, which is "the
living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and...a repeti-
tion in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite
I AM."31 For the fairy story, as Tolkien insists, is sheer creation,
the making of a Secondary World out of, and by means of, the Imagination.
’That is the special activity of the fairy story maker, and the one by
which he becomes, not a writer, but a sub-creator of a kind of litera-

ture analogous--or more than analogous--to the universe created g§_nihilo

 

31Bngr§phia Literaria, Chapter XIII.

 

271

by the true Creator. In his degree he creates joy-~or creates what
gives joy--as God, in the purposeful drama of creation, has created
what also gives joy, the world with the Christian happy ending. Tol-
kien's defense of Fantasy, in doggerel in which there is perhaps more
truth than poetry, is also a defense, and, it may be, the last defense,
of the doctrine of the creative imagination, which brings the making of
God and the making of man so close that they nearly touch:

Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
'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. (71-72)

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

In the light of the evidence arrived at in the preceding analyt-
ical chapters, it is now possible to comment upon and sum up the phen-
omenon that I have called romantic, or transcendental, religion. The
evidence, I believe, reveals two broad truths about the phenomenon
which may be described roughly as follows: first, Barfield may be
thought of as the phiIOSOpher of the group, the one in whose work the
most important notions of romantic religion are to be found in their
most radical and exciting form; second, underlying the work of the other
three is the pervasive notion that the "romantic eXperience" is somehow
connected with, or leads to, the Christian God.

The present study, as I have said, is not a study in influences;
it is not thus primarily concerned with the ideas of these men from the
point of view of priority in time, or cause and effect. If it were such
a study, Barfield might well be thought of as the intellectual well-
spring of the group-~though beyond the obvious and admitted influence
of Barfield on Lewis, the evidence becomes rather tenuous. But it is
clear that, influence aside, the naked ideas of the religious attitude,
ideas unclouded and ummodified by any attempt to express them creatively,

are to be found in the work of Barfield. It is, in fact, Barfield's

272

273

determination to get at the ideas themselves, and at their logical im-
plications, that gives his work the peculiar character that it has, a
character that I must try to describe briefly.

In reading Barfield, one has the distinct and not entirely plea-
sant feeling that he is being led at a gallop up the steep hill of
truth but that the slightest misstep will send him plunging into depths
of occultism and crankism. The excitement of the chase keeps him going,
but he cannot forget at what peril he advances. There are dark places
in Barfield, nooks and crannies of occultism, which Lewis, for one,
has been careful to steer clear of. If a critic were learned enough,
he might make a study of Barfield's work in which he tried to separate
out its component parts, and decide which were valid and which only
cultish or exciting. Such a study would lead him along that shadowy
frontier between occultism and "legitimate" philos0phy. He would find
that none of the elements of Barfield's work is new, but that they have
been put together in new combinations and with new emphases, and for
ends which their former users did not always intend. Mechanical analysis
of his work will reveal indebtedness to such strange bedfellows as Philo
Judaeus, Kant, Jung, Aquinas, and Coleridge, not to mention the individ-
uals and the traditions to which the above-named are in turn indebted.
But it is the amalgam of all these, the total blending of these for
specific ends, that makes up the work of Barfield. There lingers about
this eclecticism some trace of "the night-side" of man's search for

truth, something of the obsession with secret ways to God to be found in

JO

27L.

Apuleius, the medieval Gnostics, and such modern occultists as Madame
Blavatsky and Steiner.

It is tempting to try to discriminate between Barfield's methods
and his ends, and this, I believe, is what Lewis has attempted to do.
But I doubt that it can logically be done. It is probably safer to
admit that there is much in Barfield's Anthroposophy that is curiously
attractive and curiously like both the attempts and the results of .
"licit" transcendental philOSOphy. The difference between the two, as
('I have tried to suggest, is the emphasis that Barfield places on cer-
tain aspects of that philosophy and the determination with which he pro-
ceeds to radical positions which he considers to be implicit in that
philosophy. This is most clearly seen in the romantic doctrine of the
creative imagination, a doctrine which figures prominently in the work
of all four--indeed, in the work of any romantic-~but which is to be
seen in its most Spectacular form in the work of Barfield.

We recall that for Barfield the aim of the creative imagination
is ”final participation." :And by this he means something almost in-
credibly literal. Barfield holds that man, by means of what Coleridge
called the Primary Imagination, participates in the creation of the uni-

verse. The key word here is participates. It is not to be taken anal-

 

ogously or metaphorically, but literally. In the beginning, man par-
ticipated unconsciously in God's unceasing creation by virtue of the
fact that man was contained in God; he existed as potency in the divine

”Unconscious.' This is what Barfield means by "original participation."

1

275

Now the rise of self-consciousness and correlary emergence of the ra-
tional intellect have led man to think of himself as cut off from God,
as existing substantially on his own. But this is because he does not
understand the nature of the creative imagination. (Coleridge, and
Kantian philOSOphy in general, do not go beyond the position that the
sensations and the intellect "represent" the outer world to the con-
sciousness of man; by a combined act of perception and intellection,
man gives shape, color, size, and meaning to the basic "unrepresented"
stuff of the universe. He half perceives and half creates, gives phen-
omenal existence to the ultimately unknowable noumena. But Barfield
goes through Kant and Coleridge and out the other side. For Barfield

the noumena of the universe are not "out there,"

waiting to be repre-
sented to the consciousness by_the consciousness. The noumena are
"in there," in the unconscious of man, which is the same as saying
they are in the divine Unconscious. The twin acts of perception and
intellection necessary, for Kant, to give phenomenal existence to the
noumena are for Barfield an act of the creative imagination. Barfield's
world is mental, and in it only two "things" or "principles" exist:
to do and to suffer, act and potency, active and passive, consciousness
and unconsciousness. The one actuates the other. Phenomenal existence
is the effect of the rational consciousness speaking a WOrd, informing
the "pure, unindividuated meaning" of the unconsciousness.

New all this is only a long way of saying that God (the WOrd,

the Werld-Soul)‘creates through, and by means of, man's creative imag-

ination. For God exists only in man's consciousness; there is literally

 

 

276

no other place He could be. God becomes aware of Himself, potency be-
comes act, God incarnates Himself in human consciousness. It is the
creative imagination which brings into being all things; or, said
differently, God, through the instrumentality of human consciousness,
conceives of Himself and thus actuates Himself, moves from potential

to actual existence. New in a mental world that only exists which
someone is conscious of. But the only consciousness is human conscious-
ness, which may be defined as God in act. It follows that what the
human consciousness becomes conscious of, God creates. What man can

imagine,K God makes; in fact, the terms human imagination and divine

 

creation are interchangeable.

Thus man can change the "appearances" of things. "Brooding on
things to come," he makes them come. Thus the awful necessity of de-
ciding rightly the kind of world he wants, for the world he wants is
the world he will have. No one, I submit, could make the doctrine of
the creative imagination more important than to say that God emerges
in it and creates by means of it. Barfield's creative imagination is
no mere "finite echo" of divine creation. It i§_divine creation.

Such a position necessarily emphasizes the immanence of God in
man, and involves, for a Christian, the doctrines of the Incarnation
and Redemption. Barfield's position is radically simple: God exists
only in man, brought into existence by the human imagination. Tb repeat
the words of Angelus Silesius: "I know that without me God can live no

instant; if I become nothing, He must of necessity give up the ghost."

277

None of the other three men, being Christians, can go so far. But the
doctrine of the creative-imagination clearly involves the problem and
hints at an awful closeness of God to man. Thus, as we have seen, both
Williams and Lewis make much of the Athanasian Creed, which holds not
so much that God was made man as that man was taken up into God. From
Barfield's ultimate implication of the doctrine of the creative imag-
ination both Lewis and Williams retreat. Yet Lewis, we recall, speaks
of our logic as participating in the WOrd; and Williams holds, in ef-
fect, that the lover sees Christ in his beloved, seeing in the "Bea-
trician vision" the "ingodding" of man. But it is that ultimate im-
plication of the theory of the creative imagination--God's complete
immanence in man--at which Lewis, Williams and Tolkien balk, for to
step over that threshold is to believe in Man-God, Anthroposophy.

From such logic they are saved by Christian doctrine. Thus they must
maintain the efficacy and vaiae of the Secondary Imagination without
attempting to apecify the real nature of the Primary Imagination.

But if they necessarily refuse Barfield's doctrine of God's total
immanence in man, they do not abandon certain positions which Barfield
sees as following from it--positions which it is rather difficult to ex-
plain on grounds other than Barfield's. Thus, according to Williams,
it is possible to establish relationship with God through man, or through
woman. Something like the beatific vision occurs in romantic love,
Williams thinks; something of the immanence of God in man becomes ap-

parent to the romantic lover in that moment of vision. It is what puts

278

the lover in a state of caritas, in which he sees all things in love.
For Barfield, the relation between man and God is both simpler and
clearer. He looks within himself, and there is God. Barfield has made
the problem of God's immanence radically simple: by the traditional
transcendental means of the creative imagination, he has done away with
theiranscendence of God. Williams, like all Christians, is at pains to
preserve both the immanence and the transcendence of God, though, as
has been suggested, his near identification of g£g§_with gggpg leads
him very close to Barfield's position.

Again, in the matter of myth, Barfield has much to say, and his
(view of myth follows from his basic philOSOphical position. Myth is
"the ghost of concrete meaning." And by "concrete meaning" Barfield
means the cosmic unconscious which is God and which will become con-
scious of itself in the self-consciousness of man. Barfield explains
myth as pre-logical thought on the part of the divine unconscious, the
Werd slowly working toward rational statement in the mind and myth of
primitive man. It follows that myth is "truth" of some sort, spoken
as it is by the word in the mind of man. Lewis, as we have seen,
adopted from Barfield a "more respectful" attitude toward myth after
his discussions with Barfield, and speaks of myth as "a real if unfo-
cused gleam" of truth, a theory which I have compared to the theory of
scriptural accommodation. And both Lewis and Tolkien speak, more than
wistfully, of the possibility of all myth being true. Again Barfield

has said straight out what the others, unable to accept his basic

279

position, can only hint at or hold to be desirable.

Now I do not mean to imply that Lewis, Williams and Tblkien
have plundered Barfield's work, have picked and chosen what they wanted,
and then retreated into Christian doctrine, at whatever cost to their
logic. It is rather more likely that the ideas which all four share to
some extent are a result of what Tolkien, in connection with myth, calls
inheritance and diffusion. There is no question here of the invention
of ideas, only the use of them. The notion of the creativity of the
imagination is, after all, at least as old as Plato. My point has been
to maintain that these ideas are most radically expressed in the work
of Barfield, and to suggest in passing that this radicalism is a part
of Barfield's occultism, that, in fact, the radicalism i§_his occult-
ism. It may be hinted that Barfield's use of these ideas is more log-
ical than the others' use without implying that Barfield's logic leads
to truth. Faith is a fine invention, as Emily Dickinson remarked, for
those who cannot see. .And Barfield presumes to see what no Christian,
mystics excepted, has ever professed to see-~God. Hints, cautious
analogies, an awed awareness of correspondences between God and man--
these are, for the Christian, not cowardice, not failure in logic, but
humility.

Indeed, the major difference between Barfield and the other three
men in their use of romantic doctrine is that Barfield seeks knowledge
partly by means of Gnostic secret ways and the others do not seek know-

ledge at all. Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien are concerned, not with

280

knowledge, but with experience, the romantic experience which in var-
ious ways brings them closer to God. Here it is necessary to distinguish
between the romantic experience, as these men mean it, and what we gen-
erally call the mystical experience; for none of the three professes to
be a mystic, though, as we have seen, Williams's friends attributed to
him both sanctity and various states of mystical vision. None of the
three claims to have experienced the sort of mystical state which
Edwyn Bevan describes:

...in the mystical experience a man's ordinary conscious-

ness of temporal sequence is suSpended and he seems to

apprehend by direct contact, or even by identification,

some tremendous Reality which is above, or below, or be-

hind, the multiplicity of things or psychical events, a

Reality which reduces this multiplicity of things to an

unreal appearance. It involves an apprehension which

seems knowledge in a supreme degree, Even if it is know-

ledge without any conceptual content.

Now Williams especially talks often of the Unity behind the mul-
tiplicity of things, and of the unity of Man; but when he does so he does
not Speak of his own experience, but of that of the Lady JUlian, of

Evelyn Underhill, or of The Cloud 9: unknowing. ‘And Lewis's fictional

 

hero, who undergoes a kind of mystical experience at the end of nggl-
gpggg, describes his experience in terms borrowed from Ezekiel or from
any of a number of mystics who have described the ultimate reality as a
great dance. The experience that Lewis, Williams and Tolkien are con-

cerned with is not the mystical experience, and they are too honest and

 

lEdwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief (Boston, 1957), p. 3kg.

 

281

too humble to attempt to confound them. Their concern is with the value
and the meaning of the romantic experience, an experience undergone by
everyone at some time or another. In their various ways, all three
writers see in this experience some sort of religious and moral signi-
ficance.

lewis has Spelled out explicitly both what the romantic exper-
ience is for him and the meaning that he has attached to it. His phrase
"the baptism of the imagination" is a perfectly accurate description
of the phenomenon. The romantic experience is, for'him, spilt religion;
it is God-sent. A great part of his character and life was formed for
him by the visitation of a longing over which he had no control, which
he did not make for himself and which he could not explain until he
had been reconverted to Christianity. The painful pleasure of this
thing that he called be took on meaning for him only when he found
that it was to be gained from reading Macdonald, in whose work Joy and
holiness were nearly indistinguishable. Ultimately, from within the
framework of Christianity, he could see that the romantic longing--the
stab and pang felt at the notions of tar-off lands and remote pasts--
was really longing for God. The romantic desire for fairy land mantled
the ultimate desire for heaven; fairy land was, when seen rightly, a
preview of the land of spices. In the last analysis, all longing has
God for its final cause. In Aquinas's words: "In the perfect happiness

of heaven nothing more will remain to be desired; in the full enjoyment

 

282

of God man will obtain whatever he has desired in other thing."2

Williams, too, has tried to make the romantic experience mean-
ingful, to make it, like Iewis's Joy, the beginning of a religious ex-
perience. He has tried, as Lewis has said, to theologize the romantic
experience, to make of it the basis for the "romantic theology" which
we have already examined. He has tried to make the eXperience of fall-
ing in love a beginning of the Positive or Affirmative way, the way of
life which consists, not in withdrawal from the world, but in accep-
tance of the world, the way by which one who has been granted grace by
the falling-in-love experience may affirm the goodness of God's creation.
The lover is awarded the power of seeing all things in caritas, in ef-
fect, of seeing them as God sees them. Further, the love experience is
only one mode of the romantic eXperience. The romantic experience of
nature, as Wordsworth lived it, is another of the modes; and from that
experience, as from the love experience, the spiritual power or grace
proceeds. What the romantic experience provides is an awareness of the
relationship between God and man and between God and nature. But the
awareness is not knowledge; it is a feeling, an intelligible emotion
"felt along the heart," a thought "steeped in feeling," (Prelude, II,
399) an awareness of

the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought

And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart.... (II, hOl-h05)

 

2Summa Theologica, 2a-2ae. xxviii. 3. Quoted from Gilby, Saint
Thomas Aquinas, Philosophical Texts, p. 279.

 

283

The romantic lover and the lover of nature, in the moment of the roman-
tic experience, see all things as unfallen, see all things reflecting
God, all things looking

Towards the Uncreated with a countenance
0f adoration, with an eye of love. (hl3-hlh)

Finally, Tolkien, combining the religious value of the romantic
experience with an explicitly Christian interpretation of the creative
imagination, sketches out with clarity and boldness a form of romantic
religion which in some ways sums up and brings into focus the beliefs
of both Lewis and Williams. The version of the romantic experience
. that he is concerned with is the peculiar throb and thrill felt at the
good "turn" in the eucatastrophic fairy story. This Joy is qualita-
tively the same as the Christian Gloria, the beatitude of the blessed;
and this Joy is brought about primarily by a kind of literature which
is wholly the work of the Secondary Imagination. Man, the sub-creator,
creating in the image of and as an echo to the primary creator, brings
into being essentially the same spiritual state as does the Almighty
when He bestows the gift of final beatitude. This qualitative identity
between Tolkien's Joy and beatitude is, I believe, the position which
Lewis's Joy and Williams's caritas assume when they are set down in ex-
plicit terms. Longing, love, the joy of the man-made eucatastrophe--in
short, the romantic experience as these men define it--these are best
explained by the fact that the romantic experience is in quality, but
not in quantity, identical with Christian beatitude. The lesser exper-

ience is not an echo of the greater; it is not analogous to the greater;

28h
it is not a reflection nor a shadow of the greater. The romantic ex-
perience i§_beatitude, in however small a portion. It is a tiny room,
but it belongs to the many-mansioned house of bliss.

The nature of what I have called romantic religion is by now
fairly clear. It is both romantic and religious, the beliefs and meth-
ods of romanticism consciously brought within the province of religion.
As such, it has nearly nothing to do with religious dogma or sectarian
differences; it is a kind of non-denominational adjunct to formal re-
ligion-~and thus provides a meeting ground for men whose formal religions
differ in important ways. It assumes what unity it has partly from the
fact that Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien share the belief that
romantic tastes are significant beyond the sphere of literature, and
partly from the fact that it is embattled. It is what it is, a fusion
of both romanticism and religion, in order to defend both these things
against their natural enemies--naturalism, realism, classicism, irre-
ligion. Barfield attacks naturalistic evolution, showing it to be an

" and Opposing to it "real" evolution, in which

evolution of "idols,
phenomenal change is dependent on the evolution of human self-conscious-
ness and the consequent emergence of God. And as a sub-division of his
argument, he attacks the logical positivists and traditional philologists,
who do not understand the literally sacred nature of meaning. Lewis
defends the validity of the romantic experience against the coldness

and intellectualism of the classicism of Eliot, and in his planetary

fiction sets Christianized romance over against "the new goetia" of

285

naturalistic scientism. Williams rescues romantic love from the Freud-
ian naturalists by holding it to be God-sent and the beginning of the
Affirmative Way to God. Tolkien's fiction prescinds from the Primary
World both in order to condemn that world and to show that faerie
effects a pre-vision of the Christian Gloria. Against the forces of
anti-romanticism the Oxford romantics close ranks. As Chesterton said,
no one ever went into battle shouting a distinction in terms; if roman-
tic religion were less militant it might be more distinguishable. But
this can not be so in wartime, and what is being defended is very pre-
cious: not classroom romanticism; not self-pity, or sentimentality,

or gushiness, or any of the thousand other things that romanticism is

often accused of. What is being held against the enemy is the last

 

bastion of romance--the experience itself as seen sub species aeterni-
tatis--seen as Vaughan saw Sundays, as

The milky way Chalkt out with Suns; a Clue

That guides through erring hours; and in full story
A taste of Heav'n on earth; the pledge, and Cue

Of a full feast; And the Out Courts of glory.

 

1111:}, ii

 

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