*
Apart from the last stage, when he had admitted some kind of supernatural experience, Lewis had reached this position entirely through logical argument. Even his acceptance of ‘Joy’ as a factor had only been conceded after elaborate reasoning by Barfield. But now he began to realise that reasoning would not take him any further. The acceptance of God did not lead him automatically to the acceptance of Christianity. He was becoming certain that he wanted to accept it: he examined other religions, but found none that was acceptable; meanwhile his present state of simple Theism was inadequate. On the other hand he did not know how he could argue himself into specifically Christian beliefs. Even if he were to accept the historicity of the Christian story – and he could see no particular barrier to it – he could not understand how the death and resurrection of Christ were relevant to humanity.
*
By the time that Lewis had come to believe in God (but not yet in Christ), Owen Barfield had done something for him that would later bear fruit. He had shown Lewis that Myth has a central place in the whole of language and literature.
Barfield’s arguments were printed in Poetic Diction, a short book by him that appeared in 1928 – though by that time Lewis knew its ideas well. Barfield examined the history of words, and came to the conclusion that mythology, far from being (as the philologist Max Müller called it) ‘a disease of language’, is closely associated with the very origin of all speech and literature. In the dawn of language, said Barfield, speakers did not make a distinction between the ‘literal’ and the ‘metaphorical’, but used words in what might be called a ‘mythological’ manner. For example, nowadays when we translate the Latin spiritus we have to render it either as ‘spirit’ or as ‘breath’ or as ‘wind’ depending on the context. But early users of language would not have made any such distinction between these meanings. To them a word like spiritus meant something like ‘spirit-breath-wind’. When the wind blew, it was not merely ‘like’ someone breathing: it was the breath of a god. And when an early speaker talked about his soul as spiritus he did not merely mean that it was ‘like’ a breath: it was to him just that, the breath of life. Mythological stories were simply the same thing in narrative form. In a world where every word carried some implication of the animate, and where nothing could be purely ‘abstract’ or ‘literal’, it was natural to tell tales about the gods who ruled the elements and walked the earth.
This, in greatly simplified form, is what Barfield argued in Poetic Diction. He was not the only person to come to this conclusion: for example in Germany, Ernst Cassirer had said much the same thing independently. But it was said with particular force by Barfield, and his book impressed not just Lewis but also Tolkien. Not long after the book’s publication, Lewis reported to Barfield: ‘You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said à propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. “It is one of those things,” he said “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”’ Perhaps it was as a result of reading Barfield’s book that Tolkien made an inversion of Muller’s remark. ‘Languages’, he declared, ‘are a disease of mythology.’
So it was that by 1931 Lewis had come to understand that mythology has an important position in the history of thinking. It was a realisation that helped him across his last philosophical hurdle.
*
On Saturday 19 September 1931 Lewis invited two friends to dine with him in Magdalen. One was Tolkien. The other was Hugo Dyson.
Henry Victor Dyson Dyson, always known as ‘Hugo’, lectured in English Literature at Reading University. He was a couple of years older than Lewis. He had been severely wounded in the First World War, had read English at Oxford, and was a practising member of the Church of England. He was also exuberant and witty. Lewis had been introduced to him in July 1930 by Nevill Coghill, and ‘liked him so much that I determined to get to know him better’. On further acquaintance he found Dyson to be ‘a man who really loves truth: a philosopher and a religious man; who makes his critical and literary activities depend on the former – none of your dammed dilettanti’.
On this Saturday night in 1931, after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds. They strolled along Addison’s Walk (the path which runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell) and here they began to discuss metaphor and myth.
Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth. Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder. Now, Barfield had shown him the crucial role that mythology had played in the history of language and literature. But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him. Beautiful and moving though such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue. As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’.
No, said Tolkien. They are not lies.
Just then (Lewis afterwards recalled) there was ‘a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath.’
When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching.
You look at trees, he said, and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’.
This was not a new notion to Lewis, for Tolkien was, in his own manner, expressing what Barfield had said in Poetic Diction. Nor, said Lewis, did it effectively answer his point that myths are lies.
But, replied Tolkien, man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his thoughts into lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals. Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years. Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practising ‘mythopoeia’ and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller, or ‘sub-creator’ as Tolkien liked to call such a person,1 is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light. Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies’: there is always something of the truth in them.
They talked on, until Lewis was convinced by the force of Tolkien’s argument. But he had another question to put to his friends, and as it was late they decided to go indoors to Lewis’s rooms on Staircase III of New Buildings. There, he recorded, ‘we continued on Christianity’.
*
Lewis had a particular reason for holding back from Christianity. He did not think it was necessarily untrue: indeed he had examined the historicity of the Gospels, and had come to the conclusion that he was ‘nearly certain that it really happened’. What was still preventing him from becoming a Christian was the fact that he found it irrelevant.
As he himself put it, he could not see ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example could help us’. And he knew that Christ’s