A walk in the dark that leads to the light
George Pitcher retraces CS Lewis's night-time stroll with Tolkien and wonders whether the nation might be about to share a similar kind of renewal
Little more than a fortnight ago, Queen Elizabeth was head of state and Boris Johnson was our prime minister. All that has changed in less than half a month – now Charles is king and Liz Truss is “his” new PM. It’s a bit of a shock to the system. Or perhaps the system hasn’t changed at all.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, as the saying goes. The more it changes, the cynic claims, the more it stays the same. We’re said to have ended an era with the death of the Queen and the wild aberration of Johnson’s short premiership is over. But has anything really changed and, more importantly, are we changed by these events?
If so, this could be a moment of constitutional and political renewal. And if that is the case, then could this also be a moment of almost Wesleyan religious renewal?
Our narrative
We need to examine our narrative. We’re defined as a people (and as people) by the stories we tell of ourselves. And we like to think these stories are true. So we might pause to wonder: What is our collective story now?
Last Sunday, after celebrating early communion, I travelled to Oxford to go for a walk with an old friend from journalism days, Mark Jones, who is writing a book about the great theologian (not that he’d have called himself that), CS Lewis. The trains ran on time, weekend engineering works having evaporated in the warmth of the Queen’s obsequies.
Mark’s book is about retracing Lewis’s regular walks with his friends, little pilgrimages in which he shaped his thought. We were marking the 91st anniversary of a night-time stroll he took in 1931 along Addison’s Walk, around the deer park behind Magdalen College, where he was a fellow. Lewis was accompanied by his friends JRR Tolkien, of Rings and Hobbit fame, and Hugo Dyson.
Converting the atheist
This dark and very probably slightly drunken walk is credited with converting the famously atheist Lewis into the totemic Christian figure he became. Principally, Tolkien’s great achievement was to impress upon Lewis the power of myth as a source of truth – indeed of the most profound truth. According to Tolkien, the story of Christ’s life, death and resurrection differed from ancient myths, such as the Norse, as this was a true story being told by God himself. Less than a fortnight after that walk, Lewis embraced the Christ as the profoundest source of Truth.
So we retraced the walk, with Mark’s mobile phone both lighting the way and recording our exchange, conveniences unavailable to Lewis and Tolkien. I banged on about the ancient Greek mythos co-extending with the rational logos for the first time in the resurrection, the mythical meeting true fulfilment in the Word, which as John’s preface to his gospel states was pre-existent of God’s creation. I doubt we matched the intellectual standard of the original conversation, though the slight inebriation was probably authentic.
Whether our discourse had the effect on Mark’s atheism that Tolkien had on Lewis’s I await to discover. But I’m not counting the days and rather doubt it. Still, doubt isn’t the opposite of faith – certainty is. So we’ll see. What we can be certain about is that Lewis was changed by his walk that night.
Queen’s funeral
Change was much on my mind as I took the train south again on Monday, the day of the Queen’s funeral. England looked exactly the same, but there was still a feeling that everything had changed. In London, indeed everywhere, there was a stillness to the public holiday, apart from the areas immediately around the pageantry and processions of the state funeral. It was more than about everything being closed – there was a pause, a hiatus, as if something was awaited.
But what could possibly be expected? It was a day about ending, not beginning, surely, the Queen’s 70-year reign being marked by its finality, a feeling almost too much to bear for many of those public mourners looking on. And a feeling, I imagine, not unlike that of mourners on the first Easter Saturday.
The words of scriptural comfort from the Queen’s committal service in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, came from the Revelation of John, witnessing “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Then the voice from the throne declares: “Behold, I make all things new.”
Longueur
Into the stillness of that funeral day, the longueur in the life of a nation on an extra bank holiday for mourning, came a sense of and an urge to renewal. There’s a hard winter coming, but nonetheless there’s an opportunity to renew our public life, with something more hopeful and fresh. It may be one of the little resurrections that a nation can periodically and necessarily experience.
Lewis spoke of a sudden gust of wind from apparently nowhere that accompanied his night-time revelation with Tolkien. There is, perhaps, a wind of change apparent in our public life now, if we’re willing to catch it.
We have the chance to retell the story of who we are, bringing the myths of our nationhood into alignment with rational logic to reveal some profounder truths, if we’re brave enough to face them. It’ll require honesty and rigour. But, as with Lewis’s night-time walk, it could be more than worthwhile, because we could just, right now, be experiencing the darkness before a bright new dawn.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE
A version of this column appeared on PremierChristianity
A small but not insignificant correction, George: he was already a deist by the time of the walk. In fact, the more I read the less convinced I am by CSL's 'famous' atheism. His heart was never in it. Atheists are nothing but progressive – and Lewis was anything but progressive. But I loved our walk. I managed to shut up and you made a good case for magic.
More like this, please George ! Perhaps something on John Polkinghorne, who worked to bridge the gap between science and religion? Polkinghorne observed that "debating with Dawkins is hopeless, because there's no give and take. He doesn't give you an inch. He just says no when you say yes." We all need to yield a little, never more than in these increasingly secular days when we need to have the curiosity accompanying agnosticism rather than the certainty of atheism. And we must all be grateful to C S Lewis for our sense of the numinous.