Philip and Carol Zaleski argue in their book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings--which focuses upon C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams--that the literary project of the group was an attempt to "re-enchant" the world in the face of modernity. And while the Inklings never formally articulated their shared goals, you could argue that Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories," the Andrew Lang lecture delivered by Tolkien in 1938, served as the group's de facto manifesto.
Key to the collective attempts of the Inklings was more than the creation of "fantasy." To be sure, the imagination of the Inklings was fanciful and whimsical. But the Inklings also used reason and morality to point the way toward enchantment.
For example, consider how reason is used as a tool for enchantment in the conversation the Professor has with Peter and Susan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter and Susan are trying to puzzle out if Lucy is lying about the wardrobe and meeting a faun in the forest. Hearing their skepticism, the Professor counters with a discourse on logic:
“Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”These are lines that echo a famous moment in Lewis's apology for the Christian faith in Mere Christianity:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.I don't want us to judge here the adequacy of Lewis's famous "Liar, Lunatic or Lord?" trilemma. The key point I want us to note is how Lewis inserted it into a children's story, using logic as a tool of enchantment. This blend isn't unique to the Inklings, but it is a mark of the Inklings's imaginative art. We can also look at Lewis's science fiction novels to make similar observations about how Lewis used reason and science to create enchantment.
Tolkien's use of reason was different. Tolkien was much more of an artist than Lewis, so he didn't go in for Lewis's analytical and logical fireworks. Tolkien's use of reason was focused on creating a dense and comprehensive mythological world, complete with Elvish languages of his own devising. Critical for Tolkien was the inner consistency of this world. Achieving that consistency, given the richness and size of the world Tolkien was creating, was one of Tolkien's greatest accomplishments. It was Middle-Earth's intellectual integrity and richness that made it so believable. Reason, again, became a a tool for enchantment.
Accompanying this intellectual seriousness, the fantasy produced by the Inklings also embodied a strong moral sensibility informed by the Christian faith. As we know, a robust moral vision governs The Lord of the Rings as it pits the forces of Good agains the power of Evil. An appeal to the "moral law" also played a critical role in Lewis's apologetics. For example, Lewis starts off Mere Christianity with an appeal to a shared, common morality:
Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard...It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.All told, then, it was this combination of imagination, reason, morality and Christianity that gave the enchantment of the Inklings its distinctive and peculiar quality.
"But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds--all over the place, just round the corner--like that?"
"Nothing is more probable," said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.”
