'Surprised By Joy': Understanding What It Means To Miss The Void
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(OPINION) By his own admission, C.S. Lewis grew up a rationalist, shaped by a naturalistic viewpoint characteristic of the modern West. Naturalism holds that Nature (usually capitalized) is all that exists.
Religion is nice, perhaps even inspiring, but it isn’t the stuff of real life.
In 1925, Lewis became a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. There he met J.R.R. Tolkien. Six years later, Lewis was at a dinner party with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. He was expressing his difficulty with mythological tales which Lewis said are beautiful and moving, but “lies and therefore worthless.”
“No,” said Tolkien, “They are not lies.” He went on to tell Lewis…
“You look at trees and call them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more about it. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw these stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to eternal music.”
In “Surprised by Joy,” Lewis describes what happened the following day: “When we [Warnie and Jack] set out [by motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”
I share this story because Tolkien recognized what Lewis had never imagined: an ancient mythological background saturated with spiritual beings. Beginning some 500 years ago, it was discarded for a naturalist background. “The heavens” were discarded for mere blue sky.
You can see when the mythological background began to be discarded when you visit the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy, as Kathy and I recently did. About midway through the tour, the ancient background, so beautifully moving in depicting what’s real and true, is discarded for mere clouds and sky. Check the date. It begins about 500 years ago.
I think this explains the times in which we live, what Paul Kingsnorth calls “The Void of the West.” How so? Well, there’s an old idiom: “You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.”
But it’s just as true that you don’t miss your water if you’ve never tasted water, if your life is devoid of water. Western Christianity is devoid of the mythological background, leaving us in a void.
To read the rest of Michael Metzger’s post, please visit his Substack page.
Michael Metzger is the president and founder of The Clapham Institute, which consults ministries and nonprofits.