This post has to do with a thought on what the Inklings were doing with the concept of "myth" and how Lewis's space trilogy is a sort of unique ... I'm not sure what to call it ... maybe a table of contents for that project. But, as this idea came to me on the fly driving back up from the first meeting when we made the plan to do this book at the next meeting, and since it relies on having read the trilogy so many times even by the time I took a course on Lewis 20 years ago that I skipped reading the first two (Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra) and re-read the third (That Hideous Strength) only because I like it so much and usually go back around to reading it again every year or two, for these reasons I'm going to rely on the reader knowing them or being interested enough to go read them, rather than describing plot elements etc.
So, the central thing is the basic definition of "myth" as not "false." This was a whole issue between Tolkien and Lewis at first, in which Tolkien then showed Lewis a new way of thinking and both were influenced to a great degree by the work of Owen Barfield. Lewis had seen myth as simply lies. The position to which he eventually came around (see his essay "Myth Become Fact" in the collection God in the Dock), through the influence of Barfield and Tolkien, was that myth actually contains truths that are beyond fact. This means that historical, material fact is only one form of truth and that it is not the base or root form of it, because there are forms of truth that can be present without being fact.
In fact (ha ha), there is only one place where mythic truth ever has also been historically factual truth as well, and that is the Incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. So, we can have mythic truth that is NOT fact AND we can have myth that IS also fact. I don't think Lewis or Tolkien ever examined factual truth entirely divorced from any mythic truth as something that they viewed positively ... it's pretty much scientism (the belief that scientific factual knowledge is the root form of knowledge and the definition of reality ... which pretty much puts God out of a job). There are many other considerations that would need to be brought in for a full exposition of the matter, such as the real core of myth as evidenced in the original use of the word for the "plot" of a narrative, but for here, I want to keep on focus with the simple breakdown of myth being distinct from fact without being contrary to truth.
This is where I bring in Lewis's space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I think that the project of myth in relation to Christian faith is the single most central project of the Inklings. For here, all I really want to do is to use the three books of Lewis as a sort of table contents for the three distinctive "chapters" in that project, three bodies of "mythic" literature: Pagan mythologies (Out of the Silent Planet), the Bible (Perelandra), and the Arthurian materials (That Hideous Strength).
If I had to attempt a statement synthesizing a main point to the work of the Inklings along this line, it would be that the Bible is the place where myth really became fact and gave humanity the fullness of the pairing (myth and fact), the only pairing that could be truly it, in which the two were united while remaining what they really are (like the two natures in the Hypostatic Union of the Incarnation), and so freed humanity from false conflations of them that blurred them together (such as polytheistic mythology). In a way, Tolkien's concept of sub-creation relates best to fiction because it is the place where sub-creation is no longer confused with creation as the content of mythic literature. But I would need to work out how this plays out in the Arthurian material itself, because those boys loved them some Arthurian legends as much as or more than just about anything else.
But for now, the remainder of this post consists of some thoughts on each of the books in the space trilogy as I just jotted them down quickly when getting back from the first meeting of the book club.
Out of the Silent Planet deals with ancient pagan polytheistic mythology. I don't think his point is simply to explain such things in light of Christian metaphysics. The fact that he uses "angels" just shows he thinks they are connected. His CORE project is not as simple and easy saying "the Greek gods were the fallen smaller versions / minor edilla and the real ones are pretty much just arch-angels" (even though Ransom accepts some validity in the theory in his letter in the appendix, he's not overly excited about it and seems to think it's not a particularly complete or significant step in understanding the edilla). We could say that the arch-edilla are the writ-large of the parts of the Greek gods CSL sees as possibly meaningful in spite of corruptions in our way of seeing it, but the meaning is more than simply "they got confused about who angels were, but the Greek gods are pretty much just the same as the spiritual beings in the Judeo-Christian tradition that are differentiated no further than 'angel' vs 'archangel.'"
Perelandra deals with the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden. But, as with the polytheistic gods and their mythologies, this is not simply allegorical. The "things are different this time on this world because the Incarnation happened on Thulcandra" thing is the indicator that it is not simple allegory, but I DO think that, by doing this altered situation "out beyond," he is looking to tease out qualities he can fold back interpretively (but not materially) on the actual biblical story.
(The instance is different from Silent Planet and polytheo mythology because, for CSL as a Christian, the biblical story has a truth of some "historical" kind that the pagan myths do not: the method is the same, but the teleological extent goes further with the Biblical story).
That Hideous Strength focuses on Arthurian Literature, which is the hardest to pin down in the way I have outlined things, but it is also undeniably central for all three of the central Inlkings. The centrality for Lewis can be seen here in the form of Merlin returning. As for Tolkien, alongside "the Monsters and the Critics" and "On Faeirie Stories" in that popular edition named after the first of those two, we find another of his famous essays, the one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of which he also did a translation (that's the other place you can find the essay, is in the paperback of the translation of the tale). And among the most recent, if not the most recent (depending on when one is reading this post), posthumously published material by Tolkien is The Fall of Arthur. And Charles Williams's interest in and expertise on the Arthurian material is almost insulted by having to make sure to point it out, at least to anybody who has read his "the Figure of Arthur" in what is commonly known as the Arthurian Torso or knows of the two volumes of Arthurian Poetry in that volume.
As I said, the Arthurian material is the hardest to pin down, but I think it interested them as the meeting of pagan and Christian. This can be seen some in William's discussion of the movement from the pagan grail that symbolized fertility etc to the grail as the Cup of Christ in the medieval continental romances (actually, he does so in rebuttal to what could be called "neo-pagan" readers, those who say that, even in the romances it is still just the automatically appearing magical dish that gives food and drink and symbolizes fecundity; his response is that, disagree with medieval Europe's complete fascination with the Eucharist as much as you want; say it is silly; say it is foolish; say it is dangerous ... but to say that it is not what the grail is for the continental romances? That is simply bad scholarship). Likewise, Lewis's Merlin is described as having been on the border between old pagan and new Christian.
This is what the Inklings really are at core: Christians examining mythological lit, including the Bible itself, as related to the core meaning of the Gospel, by using it as models for new "myths" (plots).
An Example
I'll give just one example here of how this differs from simple allegory, particularly with biblical material. In the Fellowship of the Ring, when the fellowship comes up to the back door of Moria, Tolkien uses Numbers 21 as a direct literary model. Of particular import is the striking of a rock/stone to which one was supposed to speak and thereby forfeiting entry into a good land. In Numbers 21, after Moses brings the Isrealites, who are often described as the Lord's "fristborn" among the nations, out of Egypt in the Exodus, they are complaining by asking "why did you bring us up into this wilderness, to die here?" Moses is told to speak to the rock at Meribah and it will send forth water to placate the people, but he gets frustrated with their complaints and strikes the rock with his staff out of anger. The rock does send forth water for the people, but Moses is sentenced to not being able to enter the promised land himself: he must die out in the wilderness with the first, unfaithful generation of Israelites and Joshua would be the one to lead the second generation into the land.In Fellowship, when they come to the back door and realize you need a password and that Gandalf does not know it off the bat, Bormomir, a firstborn son, complains, "If you didn't know the password, why did you bring us up to this desolate place, to die here?" Then there is a stone/rock to which one is supposed to speak, but instead Gandalf at one points strikes it with his staff in frustration. Gandalf had already indicated before this that Moria is forty miles from east gate to west door, reminiscent of the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness, and on the other side of this forty miles, Gandalf must again strike rock with staff, this time the bridge, and thereby forfeit entry into Lothlorien, the golden land.
(Note: This is one of the places that make me think that Peter Jackson, or at least Fran Walsh, really knows some of Tolkien's background ... a movie obviously would have great difficulty translating an aspect like this into the film, but there is an interesting line change from book to movie just before the back door scene: In the book, G simply says "we stick to this course west of the misty mountains for many days and many miles," BUT in the film, McKellan's voiceover is "forty days," and I can see no reason to make the change unless one knows some of the background and is putting in a little hat tip for something that a contemporary film can't accommodate but that is still pretty stinking cool).
The point is, however, that Gandalf is not simply an allegory of Moses. Gandalf is Tolkien's own unique sub-creation, and part of his character is inspired by things about Moses's qualities as described in the Pentateuch, but others are based in other things. The point to using Numbers 21 as such an obvious literary model is not to do an allegory of biblical material, but rather as a signal to say "he's a bit like Moses, especially in having a special connection to the larger things (like maybe Valar), but also in blundering out of frustration." But there would be other places where other things come into play, since aspects of Moses's character are only one of the building blocks for Gandalf (not to mention the fact that there will be key differences even in the material that does match, such as the fact the Lothlorien does not play the same role for the fellowship as does the Promised Land for the Israelites, such as the fact that the fellowship never had any plan for Lothlorien to be a final dwelling place).
The same thing can be true of the polytheistic gods and Judeo-Christian angels as building blocks for the edilla in Out of the Silent Planet, but we notice it more with biblical material because that is where we have been taught to expect straight-up allegory, with works like Pilgrim's Progress (Lewis's work that sort of emphasizes his difference with such a project is his Pilgrim's Regress).
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