Friendship and Conversion - Tolkien and Lewis
September 19, 1931 - the date of the famed Night Talk between C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson - was a milestone for Lewis. It was the night that perhaps allowed him to make the final step toward giving up his long resistance to the Christian Faith. He became around this time (in his words) “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”.
The events of that night and the long conversation between Tolkien and Lewis are dramatized in my one act play “I Call You Friends - an Evening with Tolkien and Lewis”. This play will be filmed by EWTN next year and aired on the Network sometime in 2021. I play Tolkien in this story and my fellow Theater of the Word actor David Treadway plays Lewis. Hugo Dyson is the “fourth wall” - played (we imply) by the audience, who, like Dyson, is listening in on a fascinating discussion.
Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves about the talk that took place on that night …
We began on metaphor and myth—interrupted by 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 all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would.
We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship—then finally drifted back to poetry and books.
In discussing poetry and books, they hit upon George MacDonald and William Morris. Lewis referred to Morris when the talk turned toward the topic of Longing, and how Longing is never completely satisfied in this life. Lewis wrote to Greeves …
These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy,—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied. … [Morris] is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you . . . to go further.
Tolkien, of course, spoke of this Longing and of this Fulfilment as something hinted at, not only in the works of MacDonald and Morris, but in all myths and fairy stories, a transcendent joy that was “a joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief”. This Longing, unable to be fulfilled fully in Middle Earth, is represented in The Lord of the Rings as the land beyond the sea. In The Return of the King, Tolkien has Legolas exclaim:
The Sea! Alas! I have not yet beheld it. But deep in the hearts of all my kindred lies the sea-longing, which it is perilous to stir. Alas! for the gulls. No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm.
And in my play C. S. Lewis refers to an image he will later use in Pilgrim’s Regress.
But … this joy ... I have only glimpsed it. As if through a window in a wood, seeing an island far away, an island that entices me, draws me out.
And yet, in my play, such delicate and evanescent insights are scattered amid moments of laughter, and take place at a kind of “symposium” of drinking and jocularity. This was, after all, a night spent with friends.
In my story, Tolkien is an old man. It is 1963. He has just found out that Lewis has died. He begins reminiscing about the “Night Talk” of many decades prior. As he does so, the young Lewis enters, and the two engage again in that old discussion.
THE YOUNG LEWIS: After all, the conversation was just getting interesting. Wasn’t it, Tollers?
THE OLD TOLKIEN: Yes … it was … but … I don’t remember exactly where we were.
LEWIS: Not yet forty and already in your dotage! Well, I’ll pick up the thread for you. On our walk, I made the point that the Christian story is just another myth, and that a myth is just another lie.
TOLKIEN: … though breathed through silver …
LEWIS: Though breathed through silver. And you said …
TOLKIEN: Living silver.
LEWIS: What?
TOLKIEN: Living silver.
He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued.
LEWIS: What are you talking about?
TOLKIEN: My response to you - Philomythus to Misomythus - Myth Lover to Myth Hater. Written after our night talk. 19 September, 1931. You, me and Hugo. Jack, it was one of the turning points of your life. Don’t you remember? I can almost picture it happening all over again.
LEWIS: What are you talking about? Tollers, did you start this Symposium without us? It was nippy out of doors, but perhaps you were having a nip before we got together. A nip or two. Or three. Is that it?
TOLKIEN: This talk was a turning point in your life. A turning point in a drama - a catastrophe. Or a eucatastrophe.
“Eucatastophe” is Tolkien’s word for the sudden happy turn toward joy at the end of a Fairy Story. In fact, it was Tolkien’s realization that Fairy Stories and Myths are as evocative as they are because they point beyond themselves to something greater and truer.
And this perception of Tolkien’s made quite an impression upon Lewis. As Lewis wrote to Greeves, the upshot of that “Night Talk”, the insight that most impressed him, was this …
The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference - that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.
This double-barrelled realization: that even secular writers write books that show that Longing is never completely satisfied in this world; and that all myths point toward a comprehensive true myth, a story which is greater than all stories because it is true - these two insights were perhaps the final ingredient in Lewis’ intellectual turn to the Christian Faith.
But there was one more element - and that was friendship.
As Lewis remarked in his book The Four Loves …
To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.
And it was this much ignored love of friendship - philia - which made the Night Talk possible. It was this friendship which was the ingredient that went beyond mere intellectual conviction. It was friendship that paved the way for C. S. Lewis to be brought into the fold.
And it is friendship, which, astonishingly, God Himself offers us.
No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends. - John 15:15
We never approach Christ through our minds alone. We must always be drawn by friends - either by writers we grow close to (Lewis and Tolkien are friends to many of us) or by “pals” who drink with us and who talk with us; friends who accompany us amid the rush of the wind and the stirring of the leaves; friends who are by our side, as we talk together of the great mystery of truth.
