Review
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Title: A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War
Author: Joseph Loconte
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Genre: N/A
Year Published: 2015
Number of Pages: 222 (incl. Acknowledgements and Notes) (244 pages per back cover)
Binding: N/A
ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 2 370000 223 265 [Jacketed Hardcover ISBN: 9780718021764]
Price: $24.99
Reviewed by D. Allen Randall for the Association for Mormon Letters
[Allen Randall was born in 1950, grew up in Riverside, CA. He was raised in the Episcopal church, became an atheist during his teens and subsequently converted to Christian discipleship through an evangelical gathering in the summer of 1972. After five years of informal study within the Calvary Chapel movement, Mr. Randall founded a Calvary Chapel Church in Chino, CA. Since that time he has done Chaplain work as a police and prison chaplain. For eleven years he served as the director of a soup-kitchen ministry at First Presbyterian Church in downtown San Diego. Allen retired in 2011 to pursue photography (a lifelong passion) and oil painting. Mr. Randall has four grown children and lives contentedly with his wife and their three cats in San Diego.]
One hundred years ago the world of warcraft was no game. However, as our culture is now experiencing, the effects of wars— both virtual and real—have substantial effects on the lives and minds of the young soldiers who fight them, effects which also tend to ripple back into the culture and generation from which those young soldiers came. Such cultural ripples are especially evident when the young men in question happen also to possess gifted, creative literary minds. Such were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The war in their case was of course the Great War—World War I. Its effect on their young minds and beliefs—and in the formation of their entire generation’s worldview—was indisputably profound. Joseph Loconte’s latest book, *A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War*, explores how these two authors understood and internalized their wartime experiences and traces how those experiences are reflected in their great works of fiction.
Professor Loconte deftly connects the wartime experiences of both authors—as recounted from their letters from the front, as well as later recollections—to specific examples taken from their great works of literary imagination, especially *The Hobbit* and *Lord of the Rings* (Tolkien) and *The Chronicles of Narnia* (Lewis). Loconte looks not only at how the authors used their experiences of battle to lend realism to the battle scenes they portrayed in their mythical narratives, but on a deeper level, how each author employed the noble characteristics they saw in their fellow soldiers—and themselves—to flesh out the humble heroes of their respective stories. Especially significant is how they saw great nobility in the extraordinary bravery and fortitude of the “average joes”—their trench mates—who found themselves in conditions terrible almost beyond description.
For many of their fellow writers, the war’s influence was profoundly negative. Writers in that grieving battle-scarred post-war era typed out their contempt for—and disillusionment in—the pre-war attitudes and beliefs that had led to the seemingly senseless slaughter of some sixteen million of their peers. The very hope in technology that had so buoyed the culture at the turn of the century with dreams of an ever-better world had been dramatically dashed, as many of those very technologies were turned instead toward bloody life-obliterating ends.
How did Tolkien’s and Lewis’s experiences as soldiers, facing fierce and fearsome battle in the trenches, shape their respective outlook on life’s meaning and purpose? How were they able somehow to avoid being drawn down by the prevailing undertow of cynicism and nihilism that the war produced in so many of their peers? These questions are engaged skillfully and answered convincingly in this very timely book — timely because a powerfully resurgent undertow seems once again at work in our day, pulling western culture out into a similar sea of cynicism, much like that which threatened to drown an earlier generation in war-weariness and despair.
Loconte’s well-drawn description of the almost-over-the-top optimistic zeitgeist of pre-war/turn-of-the-century Europe enables the reader to sense the disorientation of that generation as they faced history’s most horrific war: a war that raged on and on, year after bloody year, over mere acres of muddy ground—minuscule tracts of barren land that changed hands back and forth, each exchange costing untold thousands of young lives. Even if a reader were not interested in Tolkien, Lewis, or their stories, this book would serve as an eye-opening introduction to the social, political, philosophical and religious dynamics leading up to and flowing from the Great War.
How both Lewis and Tolkien were able to rise above the numbing cynicism of their day to craft magical and mythical worlds that hold both moral equilibrium and point to meaningful purposes, is a tribute to the authors—and a clue to why *The Hobbit*, *Lord of the Rings* and *The Chronicles of Narnia* have become beloved classics. The Christian faith of Tolkien and Lewis is not on display in obvious or direct ways in their stories, nor does it dominate this book. Loconte does though show how Tolkien’s faith was an influence in Lewis’ thinking and how Lewis’ faith informed his creative imagination.
Although brief references are made to their wartime correspondence, the book would have benefited from some more lengthy quotes from these sources. Notwithstanding, the reader comes away with a much greater appreciation of how truly profound was the influence on these two writers of the war that had been seen as “the war to end all wars.” It would seem that that sad illusion is forever gone from the world stage. Yet, as Lewis and Tolkien beautifully assert in the mythical worlds they so carefully created for us, faith, friendship and heroism are not illusory, but are the very real stuff of which a meaningful life is made.
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[I asked Prof. Bruce Young of BYU to provide an addendum to this review in order to bring out some reasons why Lewis is so popular in Mormonism. His essay is a valuable addition to our understanding of Lewis, and is received with great thanks. Bruce W. Young is an Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he has taught since 1983. He has published articles on Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis, and other topics as well as reviews, poetry, and personal essays. In 2009, he published the book *Family Life in the Age of Shakespeare.* He is currently at work on a book titled *Shakespeare’s Dramas of Atonement.* He is married to Margaret Blair Young, an accomplished writer and film maker. They met in 1984 in a class on literary criticism—Bruce was the teacher; Margaret a student. They live in Provo, Utah, and are the parents of four and grandparents of three.]
C. S. Lewis was aware of Mormonism. He lists Salt Lake City in *The Great Divorce* along with other exotic locations. He mentions the Book of Mormon in his essay “The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version” and is aware that the book’s style is superficially similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible. Apparently Neal A. Maxwell, before becoming a General Authority in the Church, sent a copy of the Book of Mormon to Lewis, but there is no evidence Lewis read it. Some have wondered whether Lewis’s reference to health practices (no smoking or drinking) and special underwear in *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader* is an allusion to Mormons. I think it almost certainly is not. Lewis is describing the Scrubbs, and they are non-religious rationalists who wear special underwear for hygenic reasons.
Given Lewis’s superficial awareness of Mormonism, it’s likely that any real similarities are indirect, the result of Lewis’s familiarity with the Bible and with Christian tradition generally, including the early Church Fathers and Christian writers from the Middle Ages onward. Many Latter-day Saints would account for similarities as the result divine inspiration: they believe Lewis was open enough that God was able to help him understand important truths of the restoration to which many of his contemporaries were blind.
Latter-day Saints are among many Christian groups that would like to claim Lewis as their own. Many evangelicals are drawn to Lewis because of his unabashed supernaturalism and focus on Christ. Among other things, Eastern Orthodox Christians love his emphasis on human deification. There are Lewis devotees among Roman Catholics and Anglicans. And for some reason, the C. S. Lewis Society (an American organization that sponsors conferences and other activities) seems to be dominated by Presbyterians. Besides doctrinal affinities, many are drawn to Lewis by his style and by his ability to turn Christian ideas into vividly imagined stories.
Many Latter-day Saints love Lewis for these and other reasons: they love his fiction, his wit, his combining of brilliant intellect and deep faith, and the engaging clarity and grace of his style. As with other Christians (and non-Christians, for that matter), they are also drawn to the personality they perceive through his writing. He is at once bold and unassuming. He seems warm, informal, and accessible, engaging us in intelligent, friendly, often cheerful, and sometimes playful conversation. He presents himself as a normal human being, struggling along with the rest of us. But at the same time, he is a source of stunning insights helping us see things that seem obvious once he has stated them but that we had never seen as clearly before. Without being overbearing, he appears to be whole-heartedly committed to his convictions, and so he is an inspiring example of discipleship.
How close in fact is Lewis’s understanding of Christianity to that of Latter-day Saints? Has Lewis actually influenced Latter-day Saint understanding or practice? Apart from a brief childhood encounter, my first real experience with Lewis was in 1970, when I read *The Screwtape Letters.* I was so taken with him that I helped form a student-run class on Lewis at Brigham Young University in the early 1970s. After returning to BYU as a faculty member, I taught a class on Lewis for about twenty years, starting in the 1990s. A class on Lewis has also been taught at BYU-Idaho.
The earliest published references to Lewis by Latter-day Saints date from around 1960. Starting in the 1970s, Lewis has been quoted frequently in Church publications, including over 30 times in General Conference, making him one of the most often quoted non-Latter-day Saints in these meetings. Lewis is especially associated with Neal A. Maxwell, who served as an apostle from 1981 until his death in 2004. Despite his love of Lewis, Elder Maxwell was careful to note that Lewis was not an authoritative source of doctrine. As he once put it, “while it is not doctrine for which I look to Lewis, I find his depiction of discipleship especially articulate and helpful” (C. S. Lewis: *The Man and His Message,* ed. Andrew Skinner and Robert Millet [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1999], 9). Yet Lewis’s insights about discipleship clearly have doctrinal implications, including belief in a personal God, one who is loving and redemptive but who also demands our complete commitment.
Latter-day Saints have been especially drawn to certain doctrinal ideas found in Lewis and perhaps even more to the way he depicts these ideas. Besides the need for complete commitment, Lewis describes the results of that commitment: our natures can be transformed. One of the passages Latter-day Saints have quoted most often is Lewis’s paraphrasing of George Macdonald’s parable about a living house that God turns into a palace. Latter-day Saints have been especially happy to find that Lewis unabashedly celebrates the scriptural (and early Christian) idea that humans can become like God—can in fact become gods and goddesses. Some skeptics of the connection between Lewis and Mormonism have suggested that Lewis’s ideas on this subject are very different from those of Latter-day Saints: that he asserts that we can become no more than “little Christs” and that we will only reflect God’s light. In my judgment, the differences are not as great as some make them.
Beyond a few scriptural statements, Latter-day Saints don’t know in detail what godhood will entail, and it is commonly understood that, though we may receive of God’s fullness and be “joint heirs” with Christ, we will still acknowledge the Father and the Son as having precedence over us. And contrary to what some critics think, Mormons in general are keenly aware that God’s transcendent glory and perfection far surpass human nature as we know it and that we can partake of the divine nature only through his grace. For his part, Lewis enthusiastically affirms the glory of deified humans, each “a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine” (*Mere Christianity* Book 4, chapter 9). In his science fiction books, Lewis imagines some sort of creative, eternal future for the redeemed, and elsewhere he notes scriptural evidence that we may have positions of authority in the eternal world. At least once, he denied that we could do no more than reflect God’s light: according to a passage in *The Pilgrim’s Regress,* the experience of embodiment and life on earth makes humans different from the angels so “That we, though small, may quiver with fire’s same / Substantial flame as Thou—nor reflect merely, / As lunar angel, back to thee, cold flame. / Gods we are, Thou hast said: and we pay dearly.”
The basic Christian doctrines Lewis embodied in his Narnia stories have rung true to Latter-day Saints. Lewis’s own summation of the themes of several of the Narnia books happily coincides with Mormon ideas: besides linking two of the books with the creation and fall and the end of the world (*The Magician’s Nephew* and *The Last Battle*), Lewis told a young reader that *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe* is about “the Crucifixion and Resurrection” (and for Latter-day Saints clearly alludes to the role of justice and mercy in the atonement), *Prince Caspian* (startlingly, for Latter-day Saints) is about “restoration of the true religion after a corruption,” *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader* is about “the spiritual life,” and *The Silver Chair* deals with “the continued war against the powers of darkness” (quoted in Walter Hooper, *C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide* [London: HarperCollins, 1996], 426).
Among other doctrines on which Latter-day Saints have felt affinity with Lewis are his belief in an active, personal God and in the divinity of Christ and the reality of his miracles, especially the miracle of his (and our) literal resurrection; the view that life is a spiritual and moral struggle and test and that there are real consequences for our choices; his emphasis on free will and on the necessity of both human effort and God’s grace; and his discussion of the problems inherent in being a self and of the transformative power of submission to God. Lewis discusses this last set of issues (the dangers and possibilities of selfhood) in many of his works, including his chapter on pride (“The Great Sin”) in *Mere Christianity.* In 1989 Ezra Taft Benson (then president of the LDS Church) quoted heavily from that chapter in one of his most memorable General Conference talks, a discourse titled “Beware of Pride.”
Latter-day Saints have also been impressed by Lewis’s insights about sin and temptation (and his openness to belief in a literal devil) and by his way of dealing with the problem of evil and suffering, though many have felt that the restored gospel—especially certain insights provided by Joseph Smith—offers a much more satisfying response to that problem than Lewis’s. Latter-day Saints have been grateful for Lewis’s sense of kinship with all believers—his tendency to be inclusive rather than exclusive—and have appreciated his affirmative, joyful view of Christianity and of life in general.
Many Latter-day Saints have certainly wanted to make Lewis more of a Mormon than he was. At the same time, some have recognized (and a few have exaggerated) the differences between Lewis’s views and those of Latter-day Saints. Lewis, for instance, assumes that humans are completely creations of God, made out of nothing and not literally his offspring (and certainly not begotten in the same sense Christ was). Lewis accepts the classical Christian view that God is the only absolutely real being, that all other beings derive their reality from him. Furthermore, in contrast with Latter-day Saints, Lewis gives relatively little emphasis to questions of ecclesiastical authority and organization. And he has mixed feelings about the continuation of family relationships in the hereafter.
On this last question, though, Lewis’s views are complex and are not entirely at odds with LDS understanding. He asserts that we must love God for himself and not for what we hope he will give us—including association in the hereafter with those we love. He claims that there is nothing scriptural in the image of happy family reunions on the other side. Yet he desperately hopes that he can be reunited with his wife after death. And he sees the painful irony in the idea that God will give us what we want only if we stop wanting it. His conclusion (apart from leaving things in God’s hands) seems to be that whatever we experience in the hereafter will not be exactly like what we experience here. Yet if our relationships here have at least begun to be heavenly, perhaps they can be preserved and glorified as part of the fabric of celestial life.
On the question of God’s nature, again there may be fewer differences than at first appear. Lewis’s view that God is the only absolute being is certainly different from the Mormon view that God is the same kind of being we are and that we are literally his offspring. Lewis tends to view God as being outside of time and space, though he recognizes that this is a philosophical rather than a scriptural idea and is not essential to Christianity. On the other hand, Lewis believes that God is a real person, with preferences, even with something like emotions, who acts and speaks and commands. God is thus active in the world and has concrete relationships with individual human beings.
Lewis is concerned that God not be turned into an abstraction or a “featureless generality.” He asserts that “God Himself must be concrete, and individual in the highest degree.” He is not a “formless ‘everything’ about whom nothing in particular and everything in general is true,” but is “a particular Thing” with “a determinate character” and must in fact be “the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, ‘organised and minutely articulated’” (*Miracles* [1947; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001], 115-17, 121). Lewis reinterprets the creedal formulation of a God “without body, parts, or passions” to mean that God possesses these attributes in a transcendent sense: “The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that He lacks some reality which we possess. It would be safer to call Him trans-corporeal, trans-personal. Body and personality as we know them are the real negatives—they are what is left of positive being when it is sufficiently diluted to appear in temporal or finite forms.” We talk of God being “beyond us” not because He is less than we are, but because He is more, more than our language or thought can handle: “He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language” (121).
While this is not entirely consistent with a Latter-day Saint understanding of God, Lewis at least allows, in some sense, for God’s corporeality and even more clearly for God’s existence as an active, individual, personal being with feelings corresponding closely enough to our own that we can experience his faithfulness and love as well as his demands and displeasure.
Thus, while Lewis may have influenced Mormon thought in subtle ways, especially over the past four or five decades, as Latter-day Saints have looked for connections with mainstream Christianity, he has also assisted in affirming the importance of some distinctively Mormon doctrines, including the idea of human deification, an idea that has provoked discomfort and even hostility among many mainstream Christians. Lewis has helped Latter-day Saints to articulate the relation of grace and works and been helpful in their attempts to clarify and defend other doctrines. Most importantly, he has given powerful, often brilliant and moving, expression to beliefs Latter-day Saints share with many other Christians, including the role of Christ, the nature of the Christian life, and the necessity for committed discipleship.