This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
“Where is the university campus?” That is a question sometimes asked by visitors to Oxford. But of course, there is no single “campus” where Oxford University can be visited. The university consists of 43 separate colleges and numerous faculty buildings scattered throughout a bustling city that is at once medieval and modern.
Located 60 miles west of London, Oxford is famous as the city of “dreaming spires,” in the words of Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, its honey-toned towers still whispering “the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.” The tallest of those dreaming spires belongs to the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, founded in 1490. The surging uprush of its Gothic architecture takes one’s eye irresistibly to the sky.
And what does one discern in that sky? The home of God or empty space? This is a question that much occupied the writer C.S. Lewis, whose life and works have been my special study ever since I first came to Oxford as undergraduate nearly 30 years ago.
Friendship and conversion
C.S. Lewis was raised a Christian, in the Anglican Church, but then fell away from the faith and called himself an atheist for about two decades. In this period of unbelief, when he looked at the sky, all he saw was hollowness, vacuity, “a meaningless dance of atoms.”
But then, thanks in no small part to the influence of his friend and colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis underwent a profound conversion. In 1931, walking late one night on the grounds of Magdalen College, where he worked as a fellow and tutor in English, Lewis discussed with Tolkien the meaning of life, a conversation that had a deep impact on both men. It inspired Lewis’ return to Christian faith and led Tolkien to write a poem titled “Mythopoeia,” which is about perceiving the universe in a mythical or sacramental way.
Tolkien, a devout Catholic, showed Lewis that creatures here on Earth are more than “slime crawling up from mud to live and die.” If that is all we are, then, when we look above our heads at the night sky and behold the stars, all we are seeing is “some matter in a ball / compelled to courses mathematical.” But no one can stare at the star-lit sky honestly and not be awed by the majesty of the Milky Way:
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.
Tolkien is here channeling the words of the psalmist: “The heavens are telling the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). Lewis was convicted. He no longer saw the sky as empty space. He now perceived it as a heavenly realm, a meaningful network of radiant angels, divine messengers proclaiming God’s handiwork to us here below. He hailed Psalm 19 as “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.” It is no surprise that in both Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” and Lewis’ “Magician’s Nephew” we find accounts of creation in which stars and trees and rivers — all things in heaven and earth — are brought into being through the song of divine imagination.
Just as Tolkien helped Lewis back to faith — and indirectly therefore to his Christian writings, both fictional and nonfictional (“The Chronicles of Narnia,” “Mere Christianity,” etc.) — so Lewis helped Tolkien produce “The Lord of the Rings,” often cited as the greatest novel of the 20th century. Tolkien remarked frankly that “but for the encouragement of C.S.L. I do not think that I should ever have completed or offered for publication The Lord of the Rings.”
The Kilns
The writings of these two men have nourished the minds and imaginations of countless millions of people, including my own. If it had not been for their books, I might well have lost my own faith as I entered my teens. And I’m sure that, if it hadn’t been for their connection with Oxford, I would never have applied to this university, where I studied for a degree in English and now work in the Faculty of Theology and Religion. By a pleasing quirk of fate, the college I attended as a student was right next door to The Eagle and Child, the pub where the two men and their circle of friends, known as “the Inklings,” met for many years to chew over ideas and share their works-in-progress.
It has been my privilege to have lived almost all my adult life in the city they called home. For three years I even got to occupy Lewis’ own house, The Kilns, an idiosyncratic red-brick villa that has become a residential study center. The house can be visited by appointment with its owner, the C.S. Lewis Foundation. The lake and woodland that originally formed part of his property are now accessible to the public as the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve. It was to Lewis’ house and garden that evacuee schoolchildren came during World War II in order to avoid the blitz. Their arrival helped inspire his best-known work, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” which begins,
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office.
The Kilns in reality is not quite so remote as all that. It is within easy walking distance of Holy Trinity Headington Quarry, the church where Lewis worshipped and where his body now rests in the graveyard. It was while attending a service at Holy Trinity that Lewis had the idea for an imaginary correspondence between devils about the psychology of temptation. This became one of his most successful and popular works, “The Screwtape Letters,” which he dedicated to Tolkien.
‘Beren’ and ‘Luthien’
Tolkien, with his wife, Edith, and their family of four children, lived in several different houses during his years in Oxford. None of these places are open to the public, but one of the properties (20 Northmoor Road) does bear a blue plaque on its front wall, announcing the fact that Tolkien “lived here, 1930-1947,” the key years when he was writing “The Lord of the Rings.” He was a member of three colleges in the course of his academic career: Exeter College, as an undergraduate; Pembroke College, where he was professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945; and Merton College, from which institution he retired in 1959.
As he moved house, he moved church. He belonged for the longest period to the parish of St. Gregory and St. Augustine, a lovely little Arts and Crafts building where, during adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, he had a “sudden vision” or “apperception” of “the light of God” illuminating souls as sunshine makes motes of dust golden in its beams. He also worshiped at the Oratory Church of St. Aloysius, where St. John Henry Newman had preached and where the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had been curate. He sometimes went to the Dominican Priory of the Holy Spirit, more commonly known as “Blackfriars,” and it was here, after Lewis’ death in 1963, that Tolkien had a priest say Mass for the repose of his friend’s soul, with Tolkien serving as acolyte.
In his final years, he attended St. Anthony of Padua in Headington, a building he helped fund, and so it was there that his funeral took place in 1973. Tolkien is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, on the north side of Oxford, in the same plot as his wife. The names “Beren” and “Luthien,” from one of his Middle-earth stories about a mortal man and an elven princess, are inscribed on their shared headstone.
Addison’s Walk
Of all the places associated with Lewis and Tolkien, the most beautiful, in my opinion, is Magdalen College, and, in particular, that part of its grounds known as Addison’s Walk, the tree-lined, circular riverside walk where they had their life-changing conversation in 1931. The conversation inspired not only Tolkien’s “Mythopoeia,” but also Lewis’ poem “What the Bird Said Early in the Year.” I happened to be reading this poem in 1995 when it occurred to me that someone ought to put it on a plaque somewhere within Addison’s Walk. I took the idea to the Oxford Lewis Society, and they adopted it as a project to commemorate the centenary of his birth, which was approaching in 1998. That gave us three years to obtain permission from the Lewis Estate and from the Fellows of Magdalen and to raise the necessary funds. The circular stone tablet was erected on one of the walls adjacent to the walk and has become a popular site to visit among those who admire the writings of the Inklings. I have even heard of marriage proposals being made beneath this plaque! It serves as a permanent reminder of one of the most important conversations — in terms of its spiritual and literary consequences — ever to have taken place in Oxford.
Amusingly, Lewis’ first encounter with Oxford happened only after a mistake. Arriving by train in 1916, he sallied out of the railway station on foot to find lodgings for a week. Lewis decided that his initial disappointment at what he saw could be put down to the fact that “towns always show their worst face to the railway.” But as he walked on and on, he became perplexed by the succession of dark shops and drab streets. Could such a dull place really be Oxford? Only when it became evident that he was reaching open countryside did he turn round and look. “There, behind me, far away, never more beautiful since, was the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I had come out of the station on the wrong side and been all this time walking into what was even then the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley.”
Lewis later interpreted this little adventure as an allegory of his whole life. He had spent years looking in the wrong direction for the meaning of existence. Only when he began to perceive reality as a sacrament and understood the story of Christ as “the true myth,” the myth that “really happened,” did his life begin to make sense.
The “fabled cluster of spires and towers” that he found so beautiful included, as we have noted, the spire of St. Mary’s, the tallest landmark on the skyline. It was in this University Church that Lewis, in 1941, would preach his classic sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” from the same pulpit that Newman had so often occupied in his Anglican days when he was the vicar of St. Mary’s. In this sermon, Lewis declared that, if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, we may then believe “that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun.” In other words, human beings are destined to participate in heavenly glory; they may, if they choose, become partakers of the divine nature (cf. 2 Pt 1:4).
Tolkien never preached a sermon, but, like Lewis, he believed that the shekinah, the light of holiness, could become available to those who opened their hearts to God in faith and love. In his characteristically more mythic fashion, Tolkien presents this in “The Lord of the Rings” by means of Galadriel’s star-glass. Galadriel, the elven queen, who in many respects is a figure evocative of the Blessed Virgin Mary, gives to the heroic pilgrim Frodo a vial that has within it “the light of Eärendil, our most beloved star.” Galadriel says to the little hobbit as she makes him this priceless gift, “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
