The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  ‘I gather’, Lewis says, ‘he wants you to write something about the forgiveness of sins.’

  ‘He does,’ Williams answers. ‘It is, of course, something that we have often considered, and yet a good deal of thought is still required.’ (He often uses the ceremonial ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, declaring it not to be conceit but showing an awareness of ‘function’.) ‘One thing particularly nags: he wishes an entire chapter to be devoted to How We Should Forgive the Germans.’ He sighs. ‘It will not be easy.’

  ‘Do you know.’ Tolkien says, ‘there was a solemn article in the local paper the other day seriously advocating the systematic extermination of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory because, if you please, they are all rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! Can you beat it?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lewis. ‘How do you begin to talk about forgiveness to the kind of person who writes that stuff?’

  ‘On the other hand,’ remarks Havard, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Germans if you were a Pole or a Jew?’

  ‘So do I,’ Lewis says. ‘I wonder very much. And I suppose that compared to them we have nothing to forgive, and shouldn’t even begin to try.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Williams. ‘By the side of their sufferings it would be ridiculous for us to – O so laboriously – forgive the Germans for the small things they have inflicted on most of us: a slight financial loss, a personal separation or two. Without real personal injury, there can be little question of real forgiveness.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ says Tolkien, ‘that in doing what that newspaper article did, we are in spirit doing exactly what the Germans have done. They have declared the Poles and Jews to be exterminable vermin, utterly subhuman. We now declare that all the Germans are snakes, and should be systematically put to death. We have as much right to say that, as they have to exterminate the Jews: in other words, no right at all, whatever they may have done.’

  ‘Otherwise,’ Lewis says, ‘we will be no better than the Nazis.’

  ‘Exactly. As Gandalf often says, you can’t fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy yourself.’ Tolkien sighs.

  Warnie shifts uncomfortably. ‘This is getting a bit rarefied. I mean, in purely practical terms the best way to ensure that the Germans don’t do it again, when the war is over, is to put their leaders to death. That’s only practical common sense.’

  ‘It does sound very much like it,’ says Williams.

  ‘And it seems to me’, Warnie continues, ‘that taking what Jack and Tollers were saying only just a little bit further, you land up in a kind of pacifist state of mind in which you’re not going to fight anybody, however wicked and dangerous they are, because you know that potentially you’re just as wicked and dangerous yourself. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not attacking real pacifism, a real hatred of war. The only true pacifists I’ve met have been professional soldiers – they know too much about the game to be fire-eaters. What I’m attacking is the kind of woolly intellectual pacifism which we’ve all seen a good deal of.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ says his brother. ‘I don’t think any of us is really remotely pacifist in the sense that we’re uneasy at taking part in a war. Don’t we all believe that it’s lawful for a Christian to bear arms when commanded by constituted authority, unless he has a very good reason – which a private person scarcely can have – for believing the war to be unjust?’

  ‘The notion that the use of physical force against another is always sinful’, says Williams, ‘is based on the belief that the worst possible sin is the taking of physical life. Which I’m sure none of us believes.’

  ‘I know it’s off the point,’ Havard interjects, ‘but I’d like to ask Williams what he would regard as the worst possible sin?’

  Williams answers without a moment’s hesitation: ‘The exclusion of love.’

  Havard nods.

  ‘Certainly war is a dreadful thing,’ Lewis continues, ‘and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he’s entirely mistaken. What I can’t understand is the sort of semi-pacificism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face, as if you were ashamed of it.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Tolkien agrees. ‘And it’s a perfectly ridiculous attitude. I find it refreshing to discover at least some young men who have the opposite approach. I’ve met several, all of them airmen as it happens, to whom the war has offered the perfect round hole for a round peg – and they only found square holes before the war. What I mean is, the job of fighting demands a quality of daring and individual prowess in arms that I’d have thought was a real problem for a war-less world fully to satisfy.’

  ‘All right,’ says Warnie. ‘You’re not, any of you, supporting pacifism. You say it’s all right to fight Hitler. But you’re not in favour of exacting cold-blooded revenge after the war has been won. Is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ says his brother. ‘And I’d have thought that the prohibitions in the Sermon on the Mount supported that view – they don’t prohibit war, but revenge.’

  ‘You’re certain, in fact, that it’s our duty to forgive the Germans, both now and after the war?’

  ‘Oh yes. We must love our enemies and pray for our persecutors. Our Lord made that perfectly clear.’

  ‘And yet you say that in practical terms it’s silly to try and forgive them for what they’ve done to us, because what we’ve suffered is nothing compared to the sufferings of the Jews and the Poles. So it would seem to me,’ Warnie concludes, ‘that our duty is to try and forgive them on behalf of the Jews and the Poles.’

  ‘O but is it?’ Williams asks. ‘When we ask the Omnipotence to forgive Herr Hitler for what he has done to the Jews, are we not in fact reminding Him of how terrible Herr Hitler is? Are we really asking for forgiveness, or indulging our anger?’

  ‘Isn’t there such a thing as holy anger?’ Havard asks.

  ‘There is: O yes there is,’ Williams answers. ‘“The golden blazonries of love irate” – mingled with compassion. But, you know, holy anger is a very dangerous thing indeed for anyone who isn’t a saint to play with. Supernatural indignation may be possible, but it springs from a supernatural root. Our business is surely to look for that root rather than to cultivate the anger?’

  ‘All right then,’ says Warnie. ‘Why don’t we just say we pardon them and have done with it?’

  ‘A little facile,’ Jack grunts.

  ‘And anything other than a facile pardon would probably, in the circumstances, prove to be impossible,’ Tolkien adds. ‘Say you were a man who’d been deliberately crippled by the Gestapo, or you’d seen your wife tortured – well, you’d almost certainly be unable to reach a state of real forgiveness, even if you thought it was your duty to try to.’

  ‘Vicarious pardon, may be?’ Williams asks.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone who has endured what Tolkien describes might, well, entreat anyone who loved him to make an effort towards pardon on his behalf.’

  ‘Exchange and Substitution again, Charles?’ Lewis asks.

  ‘An operation of it. But you know, we seem to forget that many Germans (including Hitler? possibly indeed) may feel that they have much to forgive us. And what sort of reconciliation can be achieved if we are prepared to forgive but not to be forgiven?’

  Lewis sighs. ‘Of course, Charles. You’re quite right. But it’s getting late, and as usual you’re turning the whole issue topsy-turvy and discovering all sorts of complications that really needn’t concern us now.’ (Williams smiles.) ‘As I see it, you want a straight answer (for the purposes of your book) to the question: what are we going to do about the Germans after the war is over? Now, I’d have thought that you can quite simply resign the whole issue to the civil authorities, whose task it is to decide such things. You can say that it is our duty to be in as best a state of forgiveness as we can manage, and that it is their job �
�� the League of Nations, I mean – to do whatever they think fit.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ says Williams. ‘The League of Nations: but it owes its existence to treaties, does it not? And the problem with the Germans is that they are breakers of treaties; they deny the League of Nations.’

  ‘Well of course the League can respond by passing laws which declare the Germans guilty of various crimes,’ Warnie says, ‘and it can then punish them. They would of course be retrospective laws, but really it wouldn’t be any more unjust than the Germans’ own behaviour.’

  ‘No more and no less unjust,’ says Jack. ‘We’re back with an eye for an eye. It would only be legalised vengeance. And we’re agreed that vengeance is out of the question.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Williams muses. ‘We can surely take vengeance if we choose; but we must be honest; we must call it vengeance.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ Havard asks. ‘Executions?’

  ‘Execution? Yes; maybe sacrifice. It is dangerous, but it could be done. It is a responsibility we could accept if we chose.’

  ‘I can’t see how,’ says Lewis.

  ‘Shall we say, the new League of Nations – whatever form it may take – might rise not merely out of the blood that has been shed in the war. It might be definitely dedicated to the future with blood formally shed.’

  ‘But we’ve already said that there’d be no justification for that,’ says Tolkien.

  ‘No justification, no. It would be a new thing. We should say in effect: “We have no right to punish you. But we are determined to purge our own hearts by sacrificing you.” And indeed to execute our enemy after that manner would be an admission of our solidarity with him. We should execute him not because he was different from us, but because we were the same as he.’

  ‘But this is quite impossible for Christians,’ Lewis expostulates. ‘It’s forbidden to the Church. And after all, if bloody vengeance is a sin, bloody sacrifice is an outrage.’

  ‘But if it were conceded outside the Church?’ Williams asks. ‘The Church, though refusing it in one sense, might allow it in another – as she does with divorce.’

  ‘You amaze me, Charles,’ Warnie bursts out. ‘Sheer bloodthirstiness!’

  Williams laughs, and lights a cigarette with hands that shake (as they always do). ‘At the time of Munich,’ he says, ‘I was regarded as a cowardly wretch because I wanted peace and appeasement. Now I’m called a bloody wretch. A lonely furrower – that’s what I am!’ He gets up, says brief goodnights to the company, thanks Warnie for the tea (‘Why does no one else – except my wife – provide tea at all hours? You spoil me’) and is gone. Warnie and Havard follow a few minutes later, making for Havard’s car, which is parked in the yard at the back of the college. Magdalen clock strikes midnight as they leave, and as the last strokes die away another sound reaches their ears from some distance away. Jack Lewis has accompanied Tolkien downstairs, and as they leave the cloisters of New Buildings and make their way across the grass, they have started to improvise their opera about Hamlet’s father. It is a very strange noise.

  4

  ‘A fox that isn’t there’

  Charles Williams’s book The Forgiveness of Sins, with its discussion of the difficulties of ‘forgiving the Germans’, was published in 1941. It was dedicated to the Inklings. Lewis found a setting for his floating islands and wrote a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. Tolkien sometimes wrote and read aloud more chapters of The Lord of the Rings, but his progress on the book was slow and often came altogether to a halt. The war went on. The Inklings continued to meet.

  Were the Inklings more than just a group of friends? Some people have suggested that Lewis, Tolkien and Williams saw their work as a movement which would in some way alter the course of literature, or which would at least encourage a particular kind of writing. It has also been suggested that Owen Barfield participated in this literary movement, and that the philosophical books which he wrote in the years after the 1939–45 war were in some way associated with the work of the other three men.1 One critic has dubbed Lewis and his friends ‘The Oxford Christians’, explaining that he uses this term ‘to suggest a shared outlook and to connote both an academic and a religious point of view common to them all’. Another has declared that the work of Lewis, Tolkien, Williams and Barfield represents a conscious attempt to present religion through the medium of romanticism, while a third has talked about ‘the common Inklings attitude’.

  Was there any such thing as a ‘common Inklings attitude’? Can the group of friends who met on Thursday nights really be called with any significance ‘The Oxford Christians’? Or is any attempt to search out important links between the work of these people really, as Lewis himself put it, ‘chasing after a fox that isn’t there’?

  *

  If we are going to see whether or not the fox really exists, a good starting-point might be the expression ‘The Oxford Christians’, because certainly Lewis, Tolkien, Williams and Barfield were all Christians. But once that plain fact has been stated, even a superficial examination of their beliefs and attitudes shows that a number of strong qualifications have to be introduced – so strong that the statement rather loses its force.

  Tolkien was a Roman Catholic of entirely traditional views. He thought that the sacraments were by far the most important part of a Christian’s life. He did not believe that interpretation of Christianity was the crucial thing; what was required (in his view) was regular attendance at Mass, with Communion taken only after a preparatory Confession; and this, together with private prayer, was the centre of his spiritual life. Lewis, on the other hand, believed that the sacraments were important but did not regard them as the bedrock of his faith. He had come to Christianity after a long intellectual struggle: hence the great attention that he paid in his books to justifying Christianity intellectually. As for Williams, he certainly could and sometimes did turn his hand to the intellectual justification of Christianity – for example, in his book He Came Down From Heaven, where he shows himself quite as capable as Lewis of closely reasoned argument on the subject of doctrine and belief. But that was not where Williams’s heart lay. His vision of Christianity was idiosyncratic for two reasons: first because he was a poet, and many of his writings on theology are in fact poetic vision rather than rational argument; and second because of his interest in the neo-magical fringes of the Church.1 His principal doctrines – Co-inherence, Romantic Theology, Substituted Love – reflect his early involvement with Rosicrucianism and the Golden Dawn. As a result there is scant resemblance between the breezy outdoor Chestertonian Christianity of Lewis and the esoteric world occupied by Williams and his disciples. As for Barfield, his approach to Christianity had very little in common with any of the other three. While Lewis had reached a belief in God through his search for an exterior and objective idealism, Barfield had come to his Anthroposophical Christianity through delving inwards and exploring the inner nature of the human mind and imagination. If Chesterton had been one of Lewis’s chief guides, the great influence on Barfield’s ‘conversion’ was Coleridge. Moreover, before the 1939–45 war Barfield regarded himself solely as an Anthroposophist, and was not a practising member of any Christian church; after the war he did join the Church of England, but retained his belief (derived from Steiner) in reincarnation and continuing personal revelation from God. Lewis objected to both these doctrines, declaring that no Christian can possibly believe in reincarnation, and that personal revelation is a thing of the past which ceased once the canon of Scripture had been settled. When Lewis and Barfield published books about their beliefs it could be seen that they were far apart from each other. Lewis accepted the Christian world-picture as a literal truth (he was indeed very nearly a fundamentalist) and set about defending it. He also concerned himself frequently with the ethical problems of Christian behaviour, and with practical things such as prayer. Barfield devoted his attention to explaining and defending Rudolf Steiner’s view of existence without concerning himself seriously wi
th ethical or practical problems. Lewis expressed this profound difference between himself and Barfield when he said of his friend, ‘He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it.’1

  So ‘The Oxford Christians’ does not seem to be a term which holds much real meaning. Nor does the idea that there was an academic viewpoint common to Lewis and his friends stand up at all well to examination. Certainly Lewis, Tolkien and Williams were all expert in English literature, but within this field their forms of expertise could scarcely have been more different. Tolkien’s area of scholarship was confined to Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English, as well as related Germanic languages. Moreover he approached it primarily through philology. His academic work was distinguished by great insight, and there was nothing remotely pedantic about it, but it was none the less work of great precision and accuracy, involving a detailed study of the minutiae of early literature. Lewis, though he certainly had an interest in Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English, was expert in later literature, and there was nothing of the precise textual scholar about him. ‘Lor’ bless you,’ he once told a former pupil. ‘I can’t edit any more than I can audit. I’m not accurate.’ He was not. Though he quoted fluently it was often inaccurately. Of course he and Tolkien did have an important attitude in common with their shared feelings about ‘Northernness’, but Lewis was also susceptible (as The Allegory of Love shows) to the entirely different literary traditions of Southern Europe.

  It might be supposed that Williams and Lewis had something in common as literary critics. Certainly Williams’s Milton lectures at Oxford were the germ of Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost. But apart from this it is surprisingly hard to find any similarity in their literary criticism. Indeed their attitudes reveal themselves as fundamentally different. Lewis liked to maintain that literature is ultimately no more than a recreation, though a very valuable one. In the essay ‘Christianity and Literature’ he declared that ‘the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world’. Though Williams, as a Christian, would perhaps have agreed with this with his rational mind, it is difficult to believe in his assenting to it emotionally. To him, great poetry was a thing of supreme importance, essential to a full spiritual life, and indeed itself a source of supernatural power. ‘Love and poetry are powers,’ he declared through the mouth of Roger Ingram in Shadows of Ecstasy; elsewhere in the same novel Ingram declares that Milton’s verse is a form of ‘immortal energy’. This is very far from Lewis’s view of such things.