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Let us join together in song singing hymn number 376, Love Divine, All Love's Excelling. It's my pleasure this morning to introduce Dr. Ralph Wood. Dr.

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Wood is a native Texan. Indeed, like so many good things in this world, he comes from East Texas. He earned both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from East Texas State University in 1963 and 1965, respectively. He wrote his master's thesis on the scandal of redemption in the novels of Flannery O'Connor.

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Dr. Wood earned a second master's degree in 1963. and his PhD in 1975 from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Dr.

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Wood has spent much of his scholarly life investigating, as he says, the implications of the Christian gospel for the wider world of literature and culture. Dr. Wood has had a distinguished teaching career. From 1971

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Until 1997, he taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where from 1991, he was the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion. Dr. Wood spent the academic year of 1997 to '98 as Distinguished Professor of Religion at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1998, he was appointed as an interdisciplinary university professor, teaching in the departments of Religion and English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and on the faculty of Truett Theological Seminary, also in Waco.

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Dr. Wood is committed primarily to teaching. The classroom, he says, remains my first and unabashed calling. His teaching has been recognized by two teaching awards, both which he received at Wake Forest, the Reed Doyle Prize for excellence among junior faculty in 1979, and the John Reinhardt Award for distinguished classroom work among senior faculty in 1991.

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Dr. Wood serves as an editor-at-large for The Christian Century. a member of the editorial board for the Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, and book review editor for Perspectives in Religious Studies. Among his own books are Civil Religion and Transcendent Experience and The Glad Irony of the Gospel, both of which he edited.

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He is the author of The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and Peter DeVries, which was published by the University of Notre Dame Press. The subject of Dr. Wood's E.C.

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Westerfelt lecture is Three Kinds of Christian Witness in Imaginative Literature. This morning, Dr. Wood will speak to us about the desire for fantasy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.

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Tolkien. He has reminded me that there are outlines in the foyer, if you didn't receive one, for his lectures, to be sure and have one of those. I ask you to join me this morning in welcoming Dr. Wood to Austin Seminary.

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I want to thank President Shelton and the faculty of the Austin Seminary for inviting me to give these Westerfelt lectures and for your very generous attendance at them. It's no small thing for Presbyterians to invite a Baptist into their midst. They say that we Baptists are rather like jalapeno peppers. One or two adds spice and zest to things, but a whole bunch makes you want to cry.

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There, after all, are so many of us. They claim that we Baptists multiply like cats by fighting. reminded of the story of the Baptist and Catholic boys who decided to have an ecumenical exchange of worship services, each going to the others and then asking questions about it. The Baptist boy had all kinds of questions about the Catholic service that were very puzzling to him.

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Genuflections, crossings, rosaries, pectoral crosses, scapulars, all that stuff. Very confusing to him. He didn't know what it might mean. So he asked the Catholic boy,

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puzzles for you about our service? And the boy said, no, not really, just a lecture followed by a concert. But he said, there was one thing, he said, what did it mean when the pastor took off his watch and put it there on the podium? And the Baptist boy said, it didn't mean a thing.

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I'll try to make sure this means something. C.S. Lewis liked to say that reason is the faculty of truth, while imagination is the faculty of reality.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky made a much more drastic claim when he said that even if it were proved to me that Christ were outside the truth, and it really was so that the truth were outside Christ, then I would still prefer to stay with Christ rather than the truth. These staggering statements by Lewis and Dostoevsky. I think are there ways of trying to distinguish between disinterested and engaged kinds of truth. For example, 2 plus 2 equals 4 and the boiling point of water at sea level is 212 degrees are truths discerned by the calculating and collating powers of reason, raw reason.

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Without these elemental truths, we would have no way of ordering and regulating our lives. We would indeed dwell amidst chaos. For most of our physical lives depend upon such truthful deductions. As myself, the beneficiary of deductive science that has produced hearing aids, without which my career would have long been over, I have no contempt for this kind of truth.

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Yet reality remains a much greater thing. It can be discerned only by the imagination, through likenesses that give life to doctrine, and not through propositions merely that make thought ever more abstract in general. Such rational truth is a disembodied thing that's thin and clear like water.

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I'm borrowing my metaphors here from Lewis's novel, Till We Have Faces. Reality, by contrast, is not thin and clear like water. It's thick and dark like blood. Reality is truth made personal and concrete, truth made morally and religiously imperative.

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All neutrality towards such clamor and incarnate truth, as Karl Barth said about the Bible more generally, all neutrality toward that kind of truth is comical. Reality requires either a radical response of embrace or a radical response of rejection. central claim of the Christian gospel, of course, is that God in Christ is the truth made incarnate, living, real. As the God who's embodied Himself in finite form, Jesus Christ can be known chiefly through imagination.

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That is to say, through embodied thought and experience. If we don't know Christ imaginatively, we are not likely to know Him very deeply. If we cannot offer fresh and vivid images of how the incarnate Lord works in the world, our faith will become trite and banal and shallow.

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P.D. James, the mystery novelist, says that one cannot perform a good deed without first being able to imagine it. Walker Percy, by contrast, claims that nearly all of the essential Christian words have been worn slick and faceless with our unimaginative use of them. They are like coins without value.

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Such terms as salvation and damnation have largely ceased to register. As Martin Marty notes, the doctrine of hell itself has virtually disappeared without anybody bothering to notice. Even the command to love God, Thomas Merton once observed, has roughly now the same spiritual force as the slogan which urges us to eat Wheaties. They're about the same, love God, eat Wheaties.

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What we need, therefore, I think, is an encounter such as C.S. Lewis had when he read the work of George MacDonald. Lewis said that reading MacDonald, the Scots Presbyterian, baptized his imagination. MacDonald's fantasies immersed Lewis into a cleansed and resurrected way of seeing.

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It gave him a new set of lenses for discerning a reality, capital R, deeper even than truth. small case, T. John Calvin made a similar claim. He said, we read the Bible in order to see what is already in the world.

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The scandalous strangeness of the redemption wrought in Jesus Christ therefore does not flatten but invigorates imagination. So the aim of these lectures is to discern the inseparable link between Christian faith and literary imagination. They're premised on the conviction that the God who has created us in His image who has recreated us in his Son, and who has reconciled us by his Spirit, also commands us to image forth his gospel in the works of our imaginations, no less than the acts and deeds of our lives.

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So three lectures then, the first on the desire for fantasy in C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, the second on the necessity of satire in Walter Percy and Flannery O'Connor, and the third on the call to devotion in the poetry. of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. First of all, then, Lewis and Tolkien on fantasy.

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As you probably know, I'm not sure you all know, in fact, Lewis and Tolkien belonged to a group that called themselves the Inklings. They arose in the mid-30s and had their work really through the '50s. They were all ink-stained wretches, dabblers in ink, but of course, they were also Christians who had a hint. a cue, an inkling of a reality which the rest of the world had largely ignored.

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What most people don't know is that there were tremendous differences among the inklings. C.S. Lewis resented the influence of Charles-- sorry, Tolkien resented the influence of Charles Williams on Tolkien, on Lewis. And in turn, Tolkien did not like Lewis's

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apologetic works. He thought Lewis was an Ulsterman all too eager to defend Christianity when, as Kirkigor said, To defend God is to insult God. Lewis, of course, became famous primarily for his apologetic work. He was an arguifier by nature.

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His father was what we'd call the D.A. for the city of Belfast. Lewis's nickname at Oxford, you may know, was Heavy Lewis. because he loved to enter the boxing ring with anyone he would take him on, and he loved to flatten them.

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Mere Christianity, of course, is his most famous work of apologetics. I read just this past week that it has outsold every other work in the English Christian world except the Bible. Only Pilgrim's Progress and The Cost of Discipleship ranking as a very laggard third and fourth behind. Tolkien thought Lewis was out of his depth in his apologetic work.

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He thought there was something embarrassingly amateurish about Lewis trying to function as a theologian. He, in fact, called Lewis every man's theologian, and that was not a compliment. Tolkien, by contrast, was a far more confident Catholic who believed that the gospel converts by its own convincing tradition of art and thought, of worship and ethics, that the church has built up over the two millennia of its existence.

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That therefore Christian faith is not something you're argued into, but something you enter into by way of sacramental life, not intellectual engagement merely. And yet despite these differences between Lewis and Tolkien, they were far more deeply agreed about things fundamental. So I want to point out a few of those agreements then. They both rejected the radical Augustinian Calvinist notion of original sin.

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They could neither one ever imagine themselves saying what Calvin did when he described the human heart as a factory for the perpetual making of idols. For Lewis and Tolkien, the human heart is indeed flawed. It's indeed very deeply fallen. It's marred almost beyond recognition, but it's not paralyzed.

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It is not rendered inoperative. It can still receive indeed deeply feel what they would both call the longing for God. That means that for both of them there is a consequent hungry, a hunger for otherness, capital O, otherness, at work in every human heart.

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They believe that that hunger is expressed most definitively in the ancient myths of the world, no less than the world religions. For both of them, the myth-making faculty is proof not of human self-delusion, as Sigmund Freud thought, but rather as evidence of God's own redemptive self-offering as it breaks through into human consciousness. You probably know when Lewis left the church, he left so because of his intellectual skepticism, not least of all about the Christian story.

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He described famously all myths as being beautiful lies, lies breathed through silver, he said. By contrast, Tolkien helped him to understand, and Lewis later came to believe, that the great myths and religions of the world are foreshadowings and anticipations of God's own story. The story of which God is not only the playwright, but enters the story as its chief actor. So it follows that all the world's other religions, even the most aboriginal and seemingly barbaric religions, point toward their ultimate fulfillment in the biblical story.

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Whereas Lewis very famously said, myth becomes fact or history. You probably know Lewis was fascinated as a boy with the Norse god Baldur, B-A-L-D-E-R, the god of light, who could be slain only, or could be poisoned only by mistletoe. And Baldur was slain, you probably know, by a dart made of mistletoe by the evil god Loki, L-O-K-I. Lewis was fascinated with this dying god, the god willing to die, even in Norse mythology.

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He came to see through Tolkien's tutelage that Norse myth of the dying god Balder, slain by the evil spirit Loki, was in anticipation of the Christ who was to be slain by the powers of evil. But because he was no merely human divinity, but rather God in the flesh was raised from the dead so that evil itself might be defeated. Lewis's return to Christianity in 1929, which he recounts, as you know, when surprised by joy, was largely prompted by a long conversation he had with Tolkien. One of the strange things about that autobiography, he doesn't mention this conversation there.

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He does elsewhere. It was a conversation that prompted his own real return to the church. They talked until 3 a.m., walking up and down in the garden outside Modlin College. where Lewis was a tutor.

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Humphrey Carpenter, in his very fine book called The Inklings, sums up the case that Tolkien made against Lewis. Here's how he summed it up. This is Lewis speaking to Tolkien as recorded by Carpenter. To you, says Tolkien,

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tree simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of trees and stars saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music.

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They saw the sky as a jeweled tent and the earth as a womb, whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was myth-woven and elf-patterned. Fine praise, myth-woven and elf-patterned. Given that fact, then, that the whole world is Tolkien, we'll call it, is mythopoeic, myth-making,

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Then they both come to conclude that there is a fundamental human desire for myth. They prefer the term fantasy because they know that in our world myth has become a synonym for delusion. They think by contrast that all people desire the fantastic in the truest sense of the word. So I want to talk then about their differing visions.

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Lewis's creation of what I call other versions of this world, Tolkien's creation of an entirely invented world, Middle Earth. I get sometimes amused at my conservative students, whether at Baylor or at Wake Forest, when they fail to realize that Lewis' basic theological commitments are much closer to traditional Catholicism and to Protestant liberalism than they are to the Protestantism, say, of Luther or of Calvin. For Lewis is also for Tolkien.

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Human experience is itself true grounds for the knowledge of God. We don't first of all encounter God in Scripture or in the Church, but in our own experience. As you know, Lewis's apologetic work tries to address the way in which God encounters us through conscience, through the moral sense. He speaks, therefore, of the universal human reality of conscience.

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He argues that all cultures and all people strive, albeit in very different ways, to fulfill the axiomatic moral norms that undergird all social and personal life. Lewis tries to stress that these axiomatic moral norms are not merely Western hegemonic inventions, as we like to say, but rather universal by calling them by the name Tao, T-A-O, gives them a deliberately Asian name to try to stress their universality. He shows that all cultures, at all times, in all places, he's what we now call the foundationalists, abide by these same basic rules of self-sacrifice, honor, trustworthiness, et cetera. He makes that taste best, I think, in his book called The Abolition of Man, much under, to me, recognized book, much better than Mere Christianity.

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Wish it were the bestseller instead. And yet Lewis came in his later career to doubt the efficacy. of his apologetic work, to wonder whether people really are argued into the faith. Some are, but many are not.

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And so in his fiction, not only the Narnia Chronicles, but also in his space trilogy and preeminently in his last great work, Till We Have Faces, it's that book I'll be turning to mainly, he sought to take another tack entirely. He set aside this business of the moral appeal, the moral encounter with God, for something much more mystical. Much nearer to St.

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Augustine, he argued that human beings all share an ingrained longing for what he called an otherworldly completion of this world's partial joys. It's an idea that has, I think, a lot of indebtedness to Friedrich Slyermacher's notion of the feeling of absolute dependence. A much clearer indebtedness, as Lewis acknowledged, to Rudolph Otto's idea of a cultural transcending experience of ultimate reality that he called, as you know, the mysterium tremendum et facenans, namely that mystery that shakes and frightens us to our very depths, while at the same time it draws and allures us to itself. But Lewis knew that the word longing is easily misconstrued in our time.

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He declined to use that word. He knows it has too many erotic associations. And so he preferred the German term Sehnzucht, I have there on the outline if you want to learn how to spell it, as his notion of our basic universal encounter with the holy. It's a German word deriving from the verb Sehnen, meaning to long for, to yearn after, and the noun Zucht, meaning sickness, passion, even rage.

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Zainzuk thus means a passionate longing, a lifelong desire for a larger world than we now know. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis defines Zainzuk as follows. He calls it the experience, and I'm quoting him, of an unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.

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Repeat that. The experience of an unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. Here's my little lame example. The slaking of our parched throats by water is not what makes it so very satisfying.

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We long instead for a water so inexhaustibly satisfying that all earthly drink constitutes but a shadow and foretaste of that ultimate water. Consider, for example, this confession made by Psyche, one of the lead characters in Till We Have Faces. It's a very important scene when Psyche is trying to explain to her half-sister, Orawal, why it is that she is willing to give up her life, to be a sacrifice to the gods in order to end this terrible drought and famine that has fallen upon their

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their native land of Gloam. To Orewal, it's the height of absurdity that this gorgeous, good woman named Psyche, the Greek word for soul, would simply give up her life, would die. Here is Psyche's explanation about why she's willing to die. It was when I was happiest that I most longed to die.

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It was on happy days. When we were up there on the hills, when we were up there on the hills with the wind and the sunshine, don't you remember? The color and the smell. Looking across at the gray mountain, the gray mountain is where the gods dwell and where, of course, Psyche would be taken for her own sacrifice.

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Looking across at the gray mountain in the distance, and because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing, somewhere else. There must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, psyche, calm. Well, given that very basic conviction that all human beings have this deep ingrained hunger, longing for and satisfaction beyond the walls of the world, Lewis sets out in his fiction to try to create a new way of seeing the ordinary world.

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a transformed way of seeing, so that with this transformed vision, we might have an encounter with a larger reality than we ordinarily know. So I try to lay out here several ways in which Lewis transforms or seeks to transform our way of seeing, in short, to baptize our imaginations. For example, he tries to transform our way of viewing space. Our conviction, as you know, ever since Pascal and the rise of modern science, Galileo forward, is that space is a massive cosmic emptiness.

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As you know, Pascal said he looked out upon the starry spaces and they made him shudder by their emptiness. When, by contrast, Lewis has his hero, Elwin Ransom, travel first to Toolcandra, another name for Mars, and then Paralandra, another name for Venus, in a spaceship. To his great surprise, Ransom discovers that space is not empty, but full.

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He comes to see it as a great oceanic matrix in which all the planets and all the stellar systems are islands floating in this grand, full cosmic sea. So that rather than seeing space as something void and without significance, it's a place that's pregnant with life. Even more tellingly to me, he tries to transform our notion of space in his little wonderful allegory called The Great Divorce. Whereas you know, Lewis envisions hell not as some pit of flaming, miserable intimacy,

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but rather as a huge emptiness where people live further and further apart. So that hell finally is the ultimate emptiness. It's life lived in utter isolation, being cut off from all other contact. This one's also to transform our notions of gender.

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Lewis believes, he knows quite fully, that gender is a human social construction, no doubt about that. He tries to help us see, however, that it's a spiritual condition, gender is, deriving from our genital condition, but having much higher and deeper truth than merely our sexuality. Gender is, for Lewis, superior to sexuality. He tries to show, therefore,

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that the ancient people were not simply arbitrary in assigning gender to nouns. Only in English, as you know, that we've largely dropped that. All the world's languages give gender to all things. What Lewis does in his space trilogy is to try to

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give gender also to these two planets. He thinks that not for nothing they were named Mars and Venus. He renames them Tulcandra and Perilandra. If you've read the first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, you'll know it's a very masculine world.

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It's a world of great steeps and deeps. There are magnificent activities on the top of which Ransom looks out on magnificent spaces, but there are awful declivities as well. horrible valleys and canyons into which there's great danger of falling. It's a masculine world because it's so angular.

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It's so full of jutting edges. It's a world that requires great physical courage to survive it. The chief test that Ransom faces in that first novel, Out of a Silent Planet, is largely having to do with moral and physical courage. It's a masculine world.

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By contrast, Paralandra, Venus, It's a feminine world. It's a liquid world. It's not a world of rock and mountain, but largely a world of water.

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A world of floating islands, for example, and friendly, dolphin-like creatures called sorens. Where, interestingly enough, the chief dangers are moral rather than physical. And there, some of you will know, the heroine is a woman. It's interesting to me that sometimes while Lewis is accused of being the aboriginal male chauvinist,

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He gives women the more serious challenge in those first two books, whereas men face mere physical danger, women face, in this case, the Green Lady, moral danger, a much, much greater kind of danger. Of course, you probably know she triumphs over that moral danger. So he wants us to rethink our whole notion of gender by showing us that there are masculine worlds, there are feminine worlds, even planets that are so designated. The third place he tries to challenge our notion, now almost regnant in the modern world, that we could not have good without having evil.

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At least since the time of Hume, that's almost a premise, that if you can't have light without dark, you cannot have good without evil. Therefore, to experiment with evil, to plunge into the dark side of life is somehow creative. Of course, it's much more ancient than that. It goes all the way back to the Zoroastrians.

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Goethe plays with that notion, as you know, in his Faustus. Lewis tries to resist that notion. He thinks that it has led us to a very deadly life worship, to believe that good and evil somehow exist in a tandem relation with one requiring the other. And so he creates, as you know, in Out of the Silent Planet, an Edenic world that is not only unfallen, but is very largely untempted.

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Again, trying to recover our way of seeing so that we might contemplate the absolute beauty and wonder of a world into which evil has not entered, even really as temptation. By contrast, in Peralandra, he shows us a world that, though unfallen, is very drastically tempted. And it comes very near, of course, to going under, to succumbing to temptation. Thanks again to the rescuing work of Elvin Ransom.

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The Green Lady is saved from her three temptations by the satanic human force of evil named Weston, named with a rather obvious pun for a western. He's a scientist, not by accident. So that the fall doesn't occur. Lewis therefore experiments with the notion of what it would be like to have a world tempted but unfallen.

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and showing us that it's not an inferior world, as we are tempted to think, but in that impact, a greatly superior world. In the fourth case, Lewis wants to challenge and remind us of the very great perils of barbarism. Lewis saw our culture as falling very rapidly back into a state not of paganism, but of barbarism. of the breakdown of all moral norms and values.

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Pagans, after all, have very high moral norms and values. They're not Christians. But he saw our world as terribly threatened by barbarism. If you've read Till We Have Faces, you know that he sets it in a pre-civilized, barbaric world called Gloam.

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And again, the puns are pretty obvious. It's a gloomy world, a dark world, a world where the light of reason and civilization have not yet entered. is characterized chiefly by its bloodthirstiness and by its violence, by its cruelty. It's a world, of course, where the worst victims of that cruelty are women.

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Where, for example, when a king desiring a male heir gives birth to a girl child, she is either sacrificed or she is treated in ways worse than sacrifice. So Lewis shows how important it is for the figure called the fox, the representative of a kind of stoic rationalism to come into that world to bring the light of reason, to write the first book. in Gloam because without civilization we indeed would all succumb to being what Lewis calls trousered apes, one of his terrifying metaphors from the abolition of man. Animals with clothes on, barbarians with clean fingernails.

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And so he shows us in that book that barbarism is a state of very great danger that we're likely to fall into if civilization is not maintained. But at the same time, he shows that civilization is not salvific. We will not be saved by culture and by civilization.

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In fact, it's the terrible limits of the fox, the rational creature in that novel, that are really so remarkable. Lewis knows, of course, that Christianity has already survived the collapse of one civilization. We may have to survive yet the collapse of another. If we come to look at Walker Percy tonight, you'll see that he believes that our civilization has already collapsed, that we're now living, as this famous novel indicates, in the ruins of that civilization.

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So barbarism, a terrible, regnant, pressing climate danger, and yet civilization, though necessary, will not finally suffice. To me, one of the most interesting transformations Lewis makes of our imagination is to try to demonstrate that God is the ultimate hedonist. Something Presbyterians may have a difficulty understanding. Some of you know that H.L.

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Mencken, very famously, defined Presbyterians as those people who live in the dread fear that somewhere, somehow, somebody might be having a good time. Not for Lewis, of course. He got enough of that, I think, growing up in Belfast in Ulster, Ireland. For him, God is the ultimate pleasure maker.

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He is very fond of quoting William Law. William Law said, God gets angry only when we will not be happy. This, of course, is the great mistake of our entertainment manic culture. We seek delight as an end rather than a byproduct.

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of knowing, enjoying, and glorifying God forever. And so, in the Screwtape Letters, Lewis has that pathetic minion of Satan experience a terrible frustration when, as he confesses, he is unable to create a single pleasure. He confesses only God can do that, because he doesn't call him God, as you know. He can only pervert pleasures by having people indulge them to excess or by having them, of course, scant them and underindulge them.

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It's interesting to note that in Lewis-- it would be the one major contrast I draw between Lewis and Tolkien-- for Lewis, evil is always the perversion of good. Evil always has a basically human source. It comes from our own distortion. our own twisting of the good toward an end other than its true end to order our loves at God, as Augustine famously says.

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We'll see that's not the case for Tolkien, but for Lewis it is. For Lewis, there is no such thing really as metaphysical evil. Evil is the sum total of all of our wrongdoing. While in the great divorce, hell is a human creation, not as in Dante, the first thing that God makes before he even makes the world.

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Finally, Lewis seeks in his work to, this is where I think Calvinism did get to him for the good, to restore a radically prevenient conception of God's grace. He wants to insist, as T.S. Eliot suggests in a wonderful line from the Four Quartets, that God's grace prevents us everywhere. Splendid pun on that Latinate word.

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Grace always precedes. Grace always goes before. Grace always enables. It's never simply a neutral option awaiting our choice.

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And so his two greatest women creations, Psyche and Orwal in that great novel, Till We Have Faces, are women who discover that they are far more chosen than choosing. that they did not elect their roles, they were themselves strangely elected. It's their chosenness that enables their choices. They work out, as you know, a wonderful drama of substitutionary atonement between them, in which they both become Christs, at least Psyche becomes a Christ to Orwall, as Elvin Ransom becomes a Christ to the Green Lady in Perelandra.

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That will be another major difference between Lewis and Tolkien. We shall see in Tolkien there are no Christ figures. In his work, we are priests to each other, not Christ to each other. In Lewis, by contrast, we can be indeed Christ to each other.

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That then is a survey of what Lewis does to baptize our imaginations by creating larger versions of our existing world. Tolkien, by contrast, creates an entire secondary world, as he called it, an invented, imaginative world by the name Middle Earth. It's interesting to note that Tolkien had rather severe objections to the way the Narnia Chronicles began.

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He didn't much like the opening scenes in either Out of the Silent Planet or Paralandra, because in both cases, Lewis has a kind of magical deliverance from the present world into this other world. As you know the Narnia Chronicles, you go through the back of a wardrobe, a closet, into the world of Narnia. In the two space novels, you get on a spaceship, and then you're suddenly transplanted into another realm. This will be a topic of my third lecture, but Tolkien thought that encouraged a kind of layer cake theology, a two spheres theology of this world and then a kind of supernatural world outside it.

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Tolkien's fundamental conviction is that the invisible and visible realms, the divine and the human and the natural and even the demonic, are inextricably woven together. Here's how he argues his case. He says that humanity would not be mythopoeic, myth-making, if God Himself were not anthropoeic and cosmopoeic, and say if God were not human and cosmic-making. He argues that we make myths not to cheer ourselves up amidst an empty universe, but because we have been created to do microcosmically what God does macrocosmically.

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He therefore calls us sub-creators. God alone is the prime creator. God alone creates out of nothing, pre-existing Himself, whereas we always create out of the existing given of our world. The key to everything for Tolkien is speech.

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He argues that speech and consciousness of God and morality are coeval. That's spelled C-O-E-V-A-L, not I-L. That means that they arise at one and the same time. For example, Tolkien uses the case of the Norse god of thunder named Thor, T-H-O-R.

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He says that belief in this Norse god of thunder probably originated at the same time some red-headed Norse farmer, angry, roaring his wrath at some miscreant who had perhaps stubborn his lutefisk, screamed. By the way, have you heard that lutefisk