Sayers in context: Tolkien & other British Christian imaginative writers
For copyright reasons, I can’t post Mills’s whole article. I don’t get a cut for saying it (and I think the service is still a trifle overpriced), but you can get this and thousands of other articles from Christian History, Leadership Journal, Christianity Today, Books and Culture, and re:generation Quarterly from CTLibrary.com, where this article also resides in full.
Alternatively, you can probably find the Tolkien issue, along with other back issues, at your friendly neighborhood seminary library.
Unfortunately, this issue is now out of print, so it is not available, like other issues, from the CHB website. But there’s another way to get it. I haven’t sampled this product yet so I can’t tell you much about it, but the idea is great: a company called Hovel Audio has created
an audio version of the issue.Here is the beginning, at least, of Mills’s article highlighting Sayers:
One Truth, Many TalesHow did Tolkien’s approach to writing for a secularizing world compare with those of his Christian contemporaries?
Tolkien and his Christian literary peers wrote for people who did not know the faith, or did not like it, or did not think it important—”a public which knows no History, no Classics, no Theology, and has almost forgotten its Bible,” Dorothy L. Sayers complained.
“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily,” said Flannery O’Connor.
T. S. Eliot described the writers (and readers) of the day as “those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism.”
This was the reader to whom writers like Tolkien, Sayers, Eliot, O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene wrote. Yet Tolkien’s books were less obviously Christian than theirs. He did see his Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” He even expressed some frustration that readers did not see this. But in writing Christian truth to a swiftly secularizing modern world, Tolkien took a different tack.
Where’s the faith?
First, he only wrote stories. He wrote nothing directly Christian or apologetic. C. S. Lewis wrote apologetics, literary criticism, theological studies, allegories like The Great Divorce, and whatever The Screwtape Letters is. Williams wrote apologetics, biographies, histories, and theology. Sayers wrote apologetic essays like “Creed or Chaos?” and theological works like The Mind of the Maker. Waugh, Eliot, O’Connor, and Walker Percy all wrote essays on the faith and reviewed religious books for secular magazines.
These writers used their literary gifts to present the old arguments in a new way. Tolkien did not do this at all. Besides his stories, he wrote a few academic papers on early English literature and just one essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” giving his own religious ideas in any explicit form.
Second, he did not give his stories an overt religious meaning. Almost all his peers wrote stories whose Christian meaning was fairly obvious. In Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, Aslan, an obvious Christ-figure, tells the children that they were brought from earth to Narnia so “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” At the end of Sayers’s play The Zeal of Thy House, the archangel Michael argues theology with the main character. Eliot wrote poems with titles like “Ash Wednesday” and reflected on prayer in his poetry and his plays. In O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a young man tries to establish the “Church of Christ without Christ” and The Violent Bear It Away is the story of a boy called to be a prophet.
Stories, plain and simple
Tolkien did not do this at all. . . .
Mills goes on to analyze Tolkien’s way of enfleshing Christian values in his characters, letting the story be told in a natural way, rather than as a didactic exercise intended to “teach the Gospel.” And as I studied Tolkien’s life and work for that issue, I became increasingly sensitized to the ways in which the Gospel is innately present–or better, sacramentally present, in Tolkien’s work.
Not that Sayers’s more explicit apologetic work was somehow lower on an abstract artistic scale for it’s up-front, didactic nature. In fact, Sayers herself, in her introductory notes to her wonderfully series of radio plays, The Man Born To Be King, insisted that even the most spiritually laden of stories must have their own inner artistic integrity–see my related newsletter (“Caveat Gyrator”) elsewhere on this blog. But Mills’s point is that Tolkien created a “sub-creation” of such scale and such tangible “real-ness” as has seldom been surpassed. And it is through that coherent, paradoxically “realistic” fantasy world that he shines the Gospel. As in the bread and wine of communion, grace comes to us through all the richness of creation (or sub-creation).
In fact–and Sayers would have approved–Tolkien worked through this sort of real-fantasy much (as many Christian literary observers have pointed out) as the great Victorian novelist George MacDonald had done in his own fanatasy novels. And MacDonald thought long and carefully about how imaginative works of fiction could communicate spiritual truths. The proof of that great author’s thought is most certainly “in the pudding.”
A final note–I can’t resist–I encourage you, if you are interested in knowing more about MacDonald, to look at the recent issue of Christian History & Biography dedicated to him.
