Puritan, Covenanter, Huguenot,
Did you find what you were looking for?
Whence arose that sharp fine-honed precision,
That armed you in theological war?
Indulging in dark beer from Wittenberg,
Did old Greek scripts charge your soul?
Did the merchants unsettle your accounts
With tracts and booklets bought and sold?
Why did your unsatisfied soul hate incense?
Your candles were used for Bible reading.
For priests’ destruction, your intercession;
You bled against a sacrifice still bleeding.
What contentment being a Calvinist malcontent?
Never did you know comfort in a smooth creed.
You carried crosses and tore down altars.
You weaned your nations from ritualistic feed.
What contentment being a Calvinist malcontent?
Both shepherds and sheep were sacrificed–
Your sermons’ blazes stoked by burning preachers;
You loosed fanatics; no compromises sufficed.
Puritan, Covenanter, Huguenot,
With battle cries for holy war,
You rent kingdoms and shook stable monarchs,
With an ear to a Genevan voice from afar.
With Calvin’s lens scanning an open Bible:
No bishop, no king—all promise, not threat,
You confessed unto death a living faith,
Your martyrs warned children not to forget.
The words of the Word so painfully studied,
In fearful thought of displeasing your God;
The double bladed dissevering of a sinful vein
And pained agony of a father’s chastening rod.
There were millers grinding corn routinely,
And carpenters ignoring slight overlaps;
But for you every false kiss was given by Judas
And all errors were Tarshish-bound ships.
Perhaps some cottage in England, Scotland, or France,
With your laughing children playing round the door
Haunted your memories, while locked in prison—
With that ravenous faith that cried, “More, more.”
Puritan, Covenanter, Huguenot,
You crossed the Sinai ocean to explore,
On those rotted hulks of west bound vessels
That carried you to an eastern shore.
You built bright cities that crested great hills,
You dedicated to Kings Jesus, James, and George,
Colonies that became a faithful and wayward nation,
Of mettle from the Reformation forge.
Puritan, Covenanter, Huguenot,
You died unhappily happy in your day;
If you could see us, you in misery and joy
With imprecatory thanksgiving would pray.
Puritan, Covenanter, Huguenot—
You sketched earthly plans for heavenly glories
With rivulets of blood-soaked presbyteries
And lots of Sabbath eve bedtime stories.
The preacher of Ecclesiastes tells us, "Of the making of many books, there is no end." To which we add, "Of the buying and reading of many books, there is no end."
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Honor Due to Rushdoony
Honor needs to be given more often where it is due. I recently retold the story of the Siege of Malta, based on Ernle Bradford's book. I first heard this story about twenty-five years ago. It was in the midst of a transforming experience: I was listening to R. J. Rushdoony's taped lectures on world history. In his lecture on the rise of Islam, he told of his delight in the Bradford book and then preceded to tell the story of the siege. From that experience on, I loved the story and wanted the book. Sometime after Al Gore invented the internet, it became much easier to find out-of-print books. The Great Siege was one of my early acquisitions at that time.
My library is filled with quite a few books by Rushdoony and with lots more that I bought simply because Rushdoony recommended the book. As a freshman history student at Texarkana College, Henry Wood, the resident and often dreaded Calvinist history professor, commented on Rushdoony frequently. First, he told a humorous story he heard from Rushdoony: "I am an Armenian, but not an Arminian." Professor Wood chuckled as the told the story. I and the fellow cattle in class stared blankly. Later on, Professor Wood recommended Rushdoony's book This Independent Republic and Gregg Singer's Theological Interpretation of American History. "You need both of these books if you are a history major." I bought and read them, but still did not have enough theological pegs in my brain to hold on to many of the concepts.
Rushdoony's books were difficult reading for me then, but I kept being drawn in. I knew this guy was smart and I wanted to be able to at least nod my head intelligently as I read. After I became a Calvinist some months later, Rushdoony began making lots more sense.
At first Rushdoony seemed to fulfill my initial image of Calvinists as cold, scholarly, abstract, puritanical, overly somber, but not very 'spiritual.' Only when I began listening to his tapes did I realize that he was warm, gracious, entertaining, and filled with a heart of love toward God and His Word.
The ten tape series on World History and its accompanying spiral bound notes had only one defect: There were only ten tapes. I wanted to hear a hundred. Of course, I quickly discovered that Rushdoony had tapes on American history, education, theology, and a host of other topics. In time, he began his delightful Easy Chair tapes where he discussed his prodigious reading, past and present.
I am reminded of all of this because I received a magazine yesterday called Faith for All of Life," which used to the Chalcedon Report. This issue--September/October 2005--is dedicated to celebrating Chalcedon Foundation's 40th anniversary. Chalcedon was founded by Dr. Rushdoony. The magazine is filled with wonderful stories by his children and heirs of his legacy relating the importance of his ministry and writings.
I have a few Rushdoony stories myself that are special to me.
I got married on July 13, 1991. I was thirty-five years old at the time (I am a late bloomer.) Stephanie, my wife, and I would have married a week earlier on July 6 had it not been for Rushdoony. On July 6, he was speaking in Rowlett, Texas, just a few hours from here. Several carloads of us from our church headed off to hear Rushdoony. You can always go and get married, but you cannot always get to hear Rushdoony. Quite a few of the young people in our church had that opportunity to actually hear and meet the great man.
A second story: After my mother died in 1986, I often found it difficult to get to sleep at night. I began a habit of listening to Rushdoony's Easy Chair tapes after I turned the lights out. Rushdoony's voice was slow--very slow--and pleasant. Maybe it is not a complement to a preacher to say that they put you to sleep, but I found it a win/win situation. If I could not sleep, I relaxed while listening to Rushdoony's stories; if I were sleepy enough, I drifted off to sleep pleasantly while listening. I kept up this habit for years. Rushdoony accompanied me via cassette tape on many driving trips in my truck and he told me bedtime stories on many evenings.
A third story: Rushdoony's reading interests were incredibly eclectic. He read books old or new, well known or obscure, orthodox or scandalous, brilliant or insane--it did not matter. He was well-known for his book-a-day habit. All too many scholars are brilliant within a narrow scope but ignorant outside the confines of their doctoral dissertation. Not so with Rushdoony.
Quite often I picked up books in all kinds of places simply because Rushdoony referenced the book somewhere or spoke of it in his lectures. My friend Randy Booth once discovered a little book store in a small Louisiana town where we were attending a summer camp for our church kids. He found a hardback copy of a Van Til book in this unlikely place. The book had obviously sat on the shelf for some years. When he showed it to me, I insisted on racing to the store. My wife and Randy joked with me, saying that I would probably find some strange book and get it because Rushdoony once mentioned it.
We got to the store and began scouring the shelves. Alas, like so many religious book stores, there was little or nothing worth looking at. As we walked along, Randy glanced at a couple of books on a high shelve. "Look at that. Why in the world is that book here?" Randy said. For me it was love at first sight. It was Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles Hapgood. This book showed how the entire world--including Antarctica--had been mapped out by the ancient Phoenicians and others. I had first heard of the book from Rushdoony. The book had rested on that shelf for years having no home, but I quickly remedied that.
On another occasion, I was at a junky flea market when I came across a decent looking copy of a book called Family and Civilization by Carle C. Zimmerman. I looked at the book, then put it down. Later that afternoon, I pulled a Rushdoony book off the shelf, glanced at the index and found where he had referenced Zimmerman's book. Of course, I raced back across town and bought the book. It was from this book that I later found a comment about the power of the father in Roman society. I passed this comment on to Randy Booth who was then working on his book on infant baptism, and it found its way into Randy's book.
Some aspects and topics of Rushdoony's books are now obsolete. Some of the issues have changed in large part because he and others brought about a paradigm shift in the Christian community. Yet the overwhelming bulk and content of his books are still worthwhile. His works are now primary source material showing what ideas influenced the modern Christian school movement and other aspects of Christian activism. And his ideas are still most relevant to thinking Christians. Like his contemporary, Francis Schaeffer, Rushdoony showed how the faith was to be applied intelligently to all areas of life and thought.
The books, tapes, and articles of R.J. Rushdoony are largely still in print and available from the Chalcedon Foundation. Visit their web-site at http://www.Chalcedon.edu.
Again, the recent magazine was most delightful. Among the benefits I got from this was in realizing that Rushdoony was 49 years old when he started Chalcedon. That's how old I am, so there is hope for me. Of course, I expect anyone who was around during the famous Lloyd Bentson-Dan Quayle debate will be quick to tell me: "I knew Rushdoony. He was my friend, and you are no Rushdoony."
Well, I may not be all that Rushdoony was, but I can still buy and read the books he mentioned.
My library is filled with quite a few books by Rushdoony and with lots more that I bought simply because Rushdoony recommended the book. As a freshman history student at Texarkana College, Henry Wood, the resident and often dreaded Calvinist history professor, commented on Rushdoony frequently. First, he told a humorous story he heard from Rushdoony: "I am an Armenian, but not an Arminian." Professor Wood chuckled as the told the story. I and the fellow cattle in class stared blankly. Later on, Professor Wood recommended Rushdoony's book This Independent Republic and Gregg Singer's Theological Interpretation of American History. "You need both of these books if you are a history major." I bought and read them, but still did not have enough theological pegs in my brain to hold on to many of the concepts.
Rushdoony's books were difficult reading for me then, but I kept being drawn in. I knew this guy was smart and I wanted to be able to at least nod my head intelligently as I read. After I became a Calvinist some months later, Rushdoony began making lots more sense.
At first Rushdoony seemed to fulfill my initial image of Calvinists as cold, scholarly, abstract, puritanical, overly somber, but not very 'spiritual.' Only when I began listening to his tapes did I realize that he was warm, gracious, entertaining, and filled with a heart of love toward God and His Word.
The ten tape series on World History and its accompanying spiral bound notes had only one defect: There were only ten tapes. I wanted to hear a hundred. Of course, I quickly discovered that Rushdoony had tapes on American history, education, theology, and a host of other topics. In time, he began his delightful Easy Chair tapes where he discussed his prodigious reading, past and present.
I am reminded of all of this because I received a magazine yesterday called Faith for All of Life," which used to the Chalcedon Report. This issue--September/October 2005--is dedicated to celebrating Chalcedon Foundation's 40th anniversary. Chalcedon was founded by Dr. Rushdoony. The magazine is filled with wonderful stories by his children and heirs of his legacy relating the importance of his ministry and writings.
I have a few Rushdoony stories myself that are special to me.
I got married on July 13, 1991. I was thirty-five years old at the time (I am a late bloomer.) Stephanie, my wife, and I would have married a week earlier on July 6 had it not been for Rushdoony. On July 6, he was speaking in Rowlett, Texas, just a few hours from here. Several carloads of us from our church headed off to hear Rushdoony. You can always go and get married, but you cannot always get to hear Rushdoony. Quite a few of the young people in our church had that opportunity to actually hear and meet the great man.
A second story: After my mother died in 1986, I often found it difficult to get to sleep at night. I began a habit of listening to Rushdoony's Easy Chair tapes after I turned the lights out. Rushdoony's voice was slow--very slow--and pleasant. Maybe it is not a complement to a preacher to say that they put you to sleep, but I found it a win/win situation. If I could not sleep, I relaxed while listening to Rushdoony's stories; if I were sleepy enough, I drifted off to sleep pleasantly while listening. I kept up this habit for years. Rushdoony accompanied me via cassette tape on many driving trips in my truck and he told me bedtime stories on many evenings.
A third story: Rushdoony's reading interests were incredibly eclectic. He read books old or new, well known or obscure, orthodox or scandalous, brilliant or insane--it did not matter. He was well-known for his book-a-day habit. All too many scholars are brilliant within a narrow scope but ignorant outside the confines of their doctoral dissertation. Not so with Rushdoony.
Quite often I picked up books in all kinds of places simply because Rushdoony referenced the book somewhere or spoke of it in his lectures. My friend Randy Booth once discovered a little book store in a small Louisiana town where we were attending a summer camp for our church kids. He found a hardback copy of a Van Til book in this unlikely place. The book had obviously sat on the shelf for some years. When he showed it to me, I insisted on racing to the store. My wife and Randy joked with me, saying that I would probably find some strange book and get it because Rushdoony once mentioned it.
We got to the store and began scouring the shelves. Alas, like so many religious book stores, there was little or nothing worth looking at. As we walked along, Randy glanced at a couple of books on a high shelve. "Look at that. Why in the world is that book here?" Randy said. For me it was love at first sight. It was Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by Charles Hapgood. This book showed how the entire world--including Antarctica--had been mapped out by the ancient Phoenicians and others. I had first heard of the book from Rushdoony. The book had rested on that shelf for years having no home, but I quickly remedied that.
On another occasion, I was at a junky flea market when I came across a decent looking copy of a book called Family and Civilization by Carle C. Zimmerman. I looked at the book, then put it down. Later that afternoon, I pulled a Rushdoony book off the shelf, glanced at the index and found where he had referenced Zimmerman's book. Of course, I raced back across town and bought the book. It was from this book that I later found a comment about the power of the father in Roman society. I passed this comment on to Randy Booth who was then working on his book on infant baptism, and it found its way into Randy's book.
Some aspects and topics of Rushdoony's books are now obsolete. Some of the issues have changed in large part because he and others brought about a paradigm shift in the Christian community. Yet the overwhelming bulk and content of his books are still worthwhile. His works are now primary source material showing what ideas influenced the modern Christian school movement and other aspects of Christian activism. And his ideas are still most relevant to thinking Christians. Like his contemporary, Francis Schaeffer, Rushdoony showed how the faith was to be applied intelligently to all areas of life and thought.
The books, tapes, and articles of R.J. Rushdoony are largely still in print and available from the Chalcedon Foundation. Visit their web-site at http://www.Chalcedon.edu.
Again, the recent magazine was most delightful. Among the benefits I got from this was in realizing that Rushdoony was 49 years old when he started Chalcedon. That's how old I am, so there is hope for me. Of course, I expect anyone who was around during the famous Lloyd Bentson-Dan Quayle debate will be quick to tell me: "I knew Rushdoony. He was my friend, and you are no Rushdoony."
Well, I may not be all that Rushdoony was, but I can still buy and read the books he mentioned.
Monday, September 19, 2005
The Great Siege Then and Now
In one instance at least, I wish that Voltaire, the French atheistic philosopher were right. He said, “Nothing is better known than the siege of Malta.” In this dark age of historical ignorance, with abysmal historic mental lapses and pandemic historic amnesia, the siege of Malta in 1565 ranks as one of the most forgotten events ever.
The island of Malta, located in the Mediterranean Sea just south of Sicily, has been a hinge upon which the tide of history has turned. In the first case, in Acts 28, Malta served as a refuge for the Apostle Paul and all his fellow ship passengers after their ship struck a reef. After the friendly Maltese saved Paul and ministered to him, God opened the door for Paul to return their kindness by preaching the Gospel to them. Malta is a springboard to Italy, and from there Paul went to Rome where he wrote several of the New Testament epistles.
Malta again played a crucial role in World War II, over a hundred years after the British had gained control of the island in the early 1800s. Domination of the Mediterranean was a key issue in World War II. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Vichy France controlled most of the land and territories of Europe and North Africa bordering the Mediterranean. Rommel’s Afrika Korps and his less than stellar Italian divisions were poised to capture Egypt and the Suez Canal. That “what-if victory” would have toppled the dominoes of the Middle East into the Axis camp, leading to an encirclement of the beleaguered Soviet Union.
Perhaps as important as the valiant campaigns of Montgomery’s Eighth Army, perhaps as heroic as the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, the British garrison on the island of Malta kept the Axis powers from winning the war. Rommel’s tanks were left without fuel, replacement parts, and personnel in large part because the British air and naval units striking out from Malta were sinking Axis supply ships.
In between the events of Acts 28 and World War II, Malta played its greatest role in history. Europe in 1565 was embroiled in the religiously and politically fractious Reformation. Within the inner circles of Christendom, theologians and bishops, kings and priests, Reformers and Catholics battled with pen and sword. Critical doctrines were at stake. The rhetoric was inflamed, but the battle was for the soul of man and of Christ’s Church. While all these matters were being hammered out—not always very nicely—inside Europe, a threat loomed outside.
The threat was Islam. Under Suleiman (or Soleyman) the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottomans, Islamic forces possessed the power, the will, and the desire to conquer all of Europe. Islamic theology gave an ideological drive to the Seljuk (also called Ottoman) Turks, who from the year 1071 combined fanatical faith and military might with the ambition and will to rule. This power vanquished the once great Byzantine Empire in 1453. The fall of Constantinople broke the last barrier between the forces of Islam and the Christian West.
By the 1500s, Ottoman expansion already reached deep into Europe. The Balkan Peninsula was Ottoman territory. In 1529 the Ottoman forces were stopped only at the gates of Vienna. Under Suleiman, the Ottoman Turks added thousands of square miles to their possessions. Among his conquests was the island of Rhodes, captured in 1522. Rhodes had been defended by a holy order of monks, known as the Knights of St. John. This religious and military order dated back to the time of the Crusades. Their primary calling was hospital ministry to Christian pilgrims. This holy order of nurses dropped their bedpans and bandages for the sick only when the occasion called for the sword and shield. They refrained from battle when Christian fought Christian, but took up the sword readily when the enemy was Muslim.
After a valiant and hard-fought defense of Rhodes, they were defeated, but were granted the honors of war by being allowed to leave. Emperor Charles V of Spain gave the Knights the island of Malta in 1530. Losing Rhodes and having to resettle in the smaller and less attractive island of Malta was a depressing event for the warrior monks, who were now increasingly becoming relics of obsolete medieval Christendom. The spirit of nationalism of the 1500s had little regard for a military force that was united by faith and not by geographic identity.
By 1565, there were about five hundred and fifty knights on Malta, along with about four thousand Maltese men capable of bearing arms. Suleiman recognized that possession of Malta and the final liquidation of the Knights of St. John would provide the base from which to conquer Sicily and Italy, and from there the rest of Europe.
Suleiman marshaled a force of nearly two hundred ships, bearing ample arms and powder, and somewhere between thirty and forty thousand troops. Malta was all that stood between the Islamic East and the Christian West. In a practice that European leaders have honed to perfection in the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, the European sovereigns—narcissistic, greedily nationalistic, and strategically blind—did nothing. Francis I of France was allied to the Sultan Soleyman, even though many of the Knights were Frenchmen. (France—allied to the enemies of Europe and Christendom! France—doing nothing to stem the threat to Europe!) The German states and Elizabethan England were entangled in internal matters and the only border issues were those close at hand. Spain, under Phillip II, had the power and the interest to act, but also did nothing.
The military battle that ensued at Malta fulfills all the drama and vicissitudes of war that has lured historians, poets, filmmakers, and armchair soldiers from Homer’s time to our own. As Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible less we grow too fond of it.” The battle for Malta had no lack of the blood, gore, and carnage of war, with the heroism and super-human actions of men in warfare as well.
The initial key to the defense of Malta was the fortress of St. Elmo. The Turks anticipated capturing it in a few days time, with a minimal cost. In the end, it took over thirty days and 8,000 Muslim dead before the Turks could raise their banners over this one fortress. After that, the Knights and Maltese still held two well-defended peninsulas from which they were never removed.
The great Christian hero of this story was Grand Master Jean La Valette. The capital of Malta is now named after him. Seventy years old at the time, he was, in the words of Ernle Bradford, “that rarest of human beings, a completely single-minded man.” He had endured and survived the siege of Rhodes, naval battles with the Turks, the miseries of being a galley slave under the Turks, and physical wounds from battle. His rhetoric in war-time was like that of Churchill; his religious zeal like that of Cromwell; his strategic and tactical gifts like those of R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; his personal bravery and example to the men like that of Washington.
Like all commanders in wartime, he took actions that cause the more prissy historians (to borrow a term from R.J. Rushdoony) to blanch and faint. When the decapitated bodies of four brave knights were nailed to crosses and sent across the channel to the shore defended by the knights, Valette responded forcefully. He took his Turkish prisoners, beheaded them, and fired their heads from his cannons into the enemy camp. This action sent a message of defiance to the Turks, but also told his own men that this fight was to the death. There would be no exit strategy.
When the Turks sent a miserable underling to Valette to offer surrender terms, Valette coldly responded, “Hang him.” The messenger begged for his life. Valetta showed him a huge ditch on the edge of the Knight’s defensive perimeter. “Tell your master that this is the only territory that I will give him. There lies the land which he may have for his own—provided only that he fills it with the bodies of his Janissaries.” At this point, the poor messenger “dirtied his breeches.”
Not only did the Knights fight bravely for their faith and their island, the native Maltese, little noticed in the chronicles of the battle, earned their laurels for courage and dedication. Along with the image of the Knights clad in their full armor of by-gone eras, one must picture the hardy Maltese swimmers, stripped to the buff, dashing into the water with knives in the mouths, going after the Turks who were attempting to dismantle the off shore defenses.
In time, help came from Sicily. But by then, the Turkish juggernaut had already been blunted, with that enemy having been bled white, ravaged by death and disease, and broken in morale. The Turkish fleet limped back to Istanbul with the miserable news of their defeat to present to the Sultan.
The book The Great Siege: Malta 1565, by Ernle Bradford, is a brilliant account of this battle. Too many good episodes and details have been left out of my account. Bradford’s book is currently out-of-print, but readily findable in the used book market. Another Bradford book, The Knights of the Order, tells the story of the Knights from their beginnings to the battle of Rhodes, with a brief account of Malta.
The Great Siege and Us
The Western world seems not to understand history and the nature of real war. The Christians West has been victimized by shame over our past, particularly the Crusades. After all, we are told, Middle Eastern people are still angry over the hypocritical and brutal Crusades. Poor Muslims, poor Arabs, poor Middle Easterners—all victims of bad white European Christendom.
Before you order your ‘sackcloth and ashes kit’ off the web, you might better rethink and restudy the Crusades. Also, we need to consider the fact that Islamic forces threatened the future of European Christendom in the early 700s, until turned back by Charles Martel and the Franks. When the Ottoman Turks combined Islamic fanaticism with military power in the in the Eleventh Century, they threatened the future of Europe again. It was the defense of Malta and the latter sea battle of Lepanto, celebrated G.K. Chesterton’s poem, which halted this Islamic threat in the 1600s.
The militaristic Islamic ideology is still around. Islam is a world-view; it is dominion oriented; it is fanatical; it rests on the concept of Jihad, or holy war. What modern Islam lacks is military and political power. Victor Davis Hanson’s monumental work Carnage and Culture explains why non-Western countries, even when armed with Western weaponry, are no match for the heirs of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture.
Even in the time of Suleiman, the best Turkish soldiers were the Janissaries. The Janissaries were an elite unit of soldiers, consisting of boys conscripted at age seven from Christian homes and molded into Muslim soldiers. Bradford says they were “Christian by birth, Spartan by upbringing, and fanatical Moslem by conversion.” (I refrain from commenting here on the absolute necessity of Christian education.) Politically, modern Islam has only puppet states, third world countries, and sheiks basking on oil reserves. Instead of the armies of the Sultan, they rely on the terrorist camps of Bin Laden and company. Their weapons of war--car bombs, plane hijackings, terror networking—have changed. Their objectives are the same.
Europe is rather passively evolving into an Islamic continent. Europeans are depopulating themselves, while the Muslim population is growing by both begetting and immigrating. George Weigel’s book The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God is must reading on this topic. Spain was train-bombed into pacifism. Germany shed Nazism, but picked up pacifism and appeasement. France, well, is still France. By a mercy from God, Tony Blair, Labor party Prime Minister of Britain, seems to have contracted a Churchillian virus from somewhere in the halls of Parliament.
While the Knights fought a war not for land but for faith, modern Europe has little or no Christian faith. Searching European cities for true Christianity makes the pilgrim long for an American Bible belt city like Boston or San Francisco. Europeans have shed their Christian clothing with a brash zeal that would make a stripper blush.
Even in America, what Ronald Reagan called mankind’s last and greatest hope, many are blind to the lessons of history and the dangers of the future. John Kerry still pouts at having been denied the chance to fulfill Neville Chamberlain’s destiny. The Left still believes Chamberlain’s mantra: “We shall have peace in our time.” The culprit, once again, is America, and particularly the current American President. Americans go to war against an ideology that has tormented the world since 610 A.D. and we wonder why we can’t tame it by the 6:00 evening news.
Valette was a man who knew how to identify an enemy and how to fight a war. He also knew the only options for peace: Victory or death. Since American Christianity is often so effeminate and passive, we assume that most Muslims are really nice ‘love-your-neighbor’ type people too. If only we could just trade our Precious Moments Christian figurines (or are they theologians and pastors?) for sturdy Amish farmers, at least we would have a vision of Christian manhood. I wish for Scottish Covenanters, for English Puritan Roundheads, for Washington’s Continental Army, or for Robert L. Dabney, but that is too much.
Something Medieval is needed in this culture war. Our President falters, but he seems to instinctively understand the long war. Something that happened between that west Texas upbringing and the new birth gave him a vision of a God bigger than the Washington beltway or the U.N. His advisors falter, but most of them at least understand what guns are for. When the Christian West fulfills Voltaire’s statement, “Nothing is better known than the siege of Malta,” I think the war will be won.
The island of Malta, located in the Mediterranean Sea just south of Sicily, has been a hinge upon which the tide of history has turned. In the first case, in Acts 28, Malta served as a refuge for the Apostle Paul and all his fellow ship passengers after their ship struck a reef. After the friendly Maltese saved Paul and ministered to him, God opened the door for Paul to return their kindness by preaching the Gospel to them. Malta is a springboard to Italy, and from there Paul went to Rome where he wrote several of the New Testament epistles.
Malta again played a crucial role in World War II, over a hundred years after the British had gained control of the island in the early 1800s. Domination of the Mediterranean was a key issue in World War II. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Vichy France controlled most of the land and territories of Europe and North Africa bordering the Mediterranean. Rommel’s Afrika Korps and his less than stellar Italian divisions were poised to capture Egypt and the Suez Canal. That “what-if victory” would have toppled the dominoes of the Middle East into the Axis camp, leading to an encirclement of the beleaguered Soviet Union.
Perhaps as important as the valiant campaigns of Montgomery’s Eighth Army, perhaps as heroic as the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, the British garrison on the island of Malta kept the Axis powers from winning the war. Rommel’s tanks were left without fuel, replacement parts, and personnel in large part because the British air and naval units striking out from Malta were sinking Axis supply ships.
In between the events of Acts 28 and World War II, Malta played its greatest role in history. Europe in 1565 was embroiled in the religiously and politically fractious Reformation. Within the inner circles of Christendom, theologians and bishops, kings and priests, Reformers and Catholics battled with pen and sword. Critical doctrines were at stake. The rhetoric was inflamed, but the battle was for the soul of man and of Christ’s Church. While all these matters were being hammered out—not always very nicely—inside Europe, a threat loomed outside.
The threat was Islam. Under Suleiman (or Soleyman) the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottomans, Islamic forces possessed the power, the will, and the desire to conquer all of Europe. Islamic theology gave an ideological drive to the Seljuk (also called Ottoman) Turks, who from the year 1071 combined fanatical faith and military might with the ambition and will to rule. This power vanquished the once great Byzantine Empire in 1453. The fall of Constantinople broke the last barrier between the forces of Islam and the Christian West.
By the 1500s, Ottoman expansion already reached deep into Europe. The Balkan Peninsula was Ottoman territory. In 1529 the Ottoman forces were stopped only at the gates of Vienna. Under Suleiman, the Ottoman Turks added thousands of square miles to their possessions. Among his conquests was the island of Rhodes, captured in 1522. Rhodes had been defended by a holy order of monks, known as the Knights of St. John. This religious and military order dated back to the time of the Crusades. Their primary calling was hospital ministry to Christian pilgrims. This holy order of nurses dropped their bedpans and bandages for the sick only when the occasion called for the sword and shield. They refrained from battle when Christian fought Christian, but took up the sword readily when the enemy was Muslim.
After a valiant and hard-fought defense of Rhodes, they were defeated, but were granted the honors of war by being allowed to leave. Emperor Charles V of Spain gave the Knights the island of Malta in 1530. Losing Rhodes and having to resettle in the smaller and less attractive island of Malta was a depressing event for the warrior monks, who were now increasingly becoming relics of obsolete medieval Christendom. The spirit of nationalism of the 1500s had little regard for a military force that was united by faith and not by geographic identity.
By 1565, there were about five hundred and fifty knights on Malta, along with about four thousand Maltese men capable of bearing arms. Suleiman recognized that possession of Malta and the final liquidation of the Knights of St. John would provide the base from which to conquer Sicily and Italy, and from there the rest of Europe.
Suleiman marshaled a force of nearly two hundred ships, bearing ample arms and powder, and somewhere between thirty and forty thousand troops. Malta was all that stood between the Islamic East and the Christian West. In a practice that European leaders have honed to perfection in the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, the European sovereigns—narcissistic, greedily nationalistic, and strategically blind—did nothing. Francis I of France was allied to the Sultan Soleyman, even though many of the Knights were Frenchmen. (France—allied to the enemies of Europe and Christendom! France—doing nothing to stem the threat to Europe!) The German states and Elizabethan England were entangled in internal matters and the only border issues were those close at hand. Spain, under Phillip II, had the power and the interest to act, but also did nothing.
The military battle that ensued at Malta fulfills all the drama and vicissitudes of war that has lured historians, poets, filmmakers, and armchair soldiers from Homer’s time to our own. As Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible less we grow too fond of it.” The battle for Malta had no lack of the blood, gore, and carnage of war, with the heroism and super-human actions of men in warfare as well.
The initial key to the defense of Malta was the fortress of St. Elmo. The Turks anticipated capturing it in a few days time, with a minimal cost. In the end, it took over thirty days and 8,000 Muslim dead before the Turks could raise their banners over this one fortress. After that, the Knights and Maltese still held two well-defended peninsulas from which they were never removed.
The great Christian hero of this story was Grand Master Jean La Valette. The capital of Malta is now named after him. Seventy years old at the time, he was, in the words of Ernle Bradford, “that rarest of human beings, a completely single-minded man.” He had endured and survived the siege of Rhodes, naval battles with the Turks, the miseries of being a galley slave under the Turks, and physical wounds from battle. His rhetoric in war-time was like that of Churchill; his religious zeal like that of Cromwell; his strategic and tactical gifts like those of R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; his personal bravery and example to the men like that of Washington.
Like all commanders in wartime, he took actions that cause the more prissy historians (to borrow a term from R.J. Rushdoony) to blanch and faint. When the decapitated bodies of four brave knights were nailed to crosses and sent across the channel to the shore defended by the knights, Valette responded forcefully. He took his Turkish prisoners, beheaded them, and fired their heads from his cannons into the enemy camp. This action sent a message of defiance to the Turks, but also told his own men that this fight was to the death. There would be no exit strategy.
When the Turks sent a miserable underling to Valette to offer surrender terms, Valette coldly responded, “Hang him.” The messenger begged for his life. Valetta showed him a huge ditch on the edge of the Knight’s defensive perimeter. “Tell your master that this is the only territory that I will give him. There lies the land which he may have for his own—provided only that he fills it with the bodies of his Janissaries.” At this point, the poor messenger “dirtied his breeches.”
Not only did the Knights fight bravely for their faith and their island, the native Maltese, little noticed in the chronicles of the battle, earned their laurels for courage and dedication. Along with the image of the Knights clad in their full armor of by-gone eras, one must picture the hardy Maltese swimmers, stripped to the buff, dashing into the water with knives in the mouths, going after the Turks who were attempting to dismantle the off shore defenses.
In time, help came from Sicily. But by then, the Turkish juggernaut had already been blunted, with that enemy having been bled white, ravaged by death and disease, and broken in morale. The Turkish fleet limped back to Istanbul with the miserable news of their defeat to present to the Sultan.
The book The Great Siege: Malta 1565, by Ernle Bradford, is a brilliant account of this battle. Too many good episodes and details have been left out of my account. Bradford’s book is currently out-of-print, but readily findable in the used book market. Another Bradford book, The Knights of the Order, tells the story of the Knights from their beginnings to the battle of Rhodes, with a brief account of Malta.
The Great Siege and Us
The Western world seems not to understand history and the nature of real war. The Christians West has been victimized by shame over our past, particularly the Crusades. After all, we are told, Middle Eastern people are still angry over the hypocritical and brutal Crusades. Poor Muslims, poor Arabs, poor Middle Easterners—all victims of bad white European Christendom.
Before you order your ‘sackcloth and ashes kit’ off the web, you might better rethink and restudy the Crusades. Also, we need to consider the fact that Islamic forces threatened the future of European Christendom in the early 700s, until turned back by Charles Martel and the Franks. When the Ottoman Turks combined Islamic fanaticism with military power in the in the Eleventh Century, they threatened the future of Europe again. It was the defense of Malta and the latter sea battle of Lepanto, celebrated G.K. Chesterton’s poem, which halted this Islamic threat in the 1600s.
The militaristic Islamic ideology is still around. Islam is a world-view; it is dominion oriented; it is fanatical; it rests on the concept of Jihad, or holy war. What modern Islam lacks is military and political power. Victor Davis Hanson’s monumental work Carnage and Culture explains why non-Western countries, even when armed with Western weaponry, are no match for the heirs of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture.
Even in the time of Suleiman, the best Turkish soldiers were the Janissaries. The Janissaries were an elite unit of soldiers, consisting of boys conscripted at age seven from Christian homes and molded into Muslim soldiers. Bradford says they were “Christian by birth, Spartan by upbringing, and fanatical Moslem by conversion.” (I refrain from commenting here on the absolute necessity of Christian education.) Politically, modern Islam has only puppet states, third world countries, and sheiks basking on oil reserves. Instead of the armies of the Sultan, they rely on the terrorist camps of Bin Laden and company. Their weapons of war--car bombs, plane hijackings, terror networking—have changed. Their objectives are the same.
Europe is rather passively evolving into an Islamic continent. Europeans are depopulating themselves, while the Muslim population is growing by both begetting and immigrating. George Weigel’s book The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God is must reading on this topic. Spain was train-bombed into pacifism. Germany shed Nazism, but picked up pacifism and appeasement. France, well, is still France. By a mercy from God, Tony Blair, Labor party Prime Minister of Britain, seems to have contracted a Churchillian virus from somewhere in the halls of Parliament.
While the Knights fought a war not for land but for faith, modern Europe has little or no Christian faith. Searching European cities for true Christianity makes the pilgrim long for an American Bible belt city like Boston or San Francisco. Europeans have shed their Christian clothing with a brash zeal that would make a stripper blush.
Even in America, what Ronald Reagan called mankind’s last and greatest hope, many are blind to the lessons of history and the dangers of the future. John Kerry still pouts at having been denied the chance to fulfill Neville Chamberlain’s destiny. The Left still believes Chamberlain’s mantra: “We shall have peace in our time.” The culprit, once again, is America, and particularly the current American President. Americans go to war against an ideology that has tormented the world since 610 A.D. and we wonder why we can’t tame it by the 6:00 evening news.
Valette was a man who knew how to identify an enemy and how to fight a war. He also knew the only options for peace: Victory or death. Since American Christianity is often so effeminate and passive, we assume that most Muslims are really nice ‘love-your-neighbor’ type people too. If only we could just trade our Precious Moments Christian figurines (or are they theologians and pastors?) for sturdy Amish farmers, at least we would have a vision of Christian manhood. I wish for Scottish Covenanters, for English Puritan Roundheads, for Washington’s Continental Army, or for Robert L. Dabney, but that is too much.
Something Medieval is needed in this culture war. Our President falters, but he seems to instinctively understand the long war. Something that happened between that west Texas upbringing and the new birth gave him a vision of a God bigger than the Washington beltway or the U.N. His advisors falter, but most of them at least understand what guns are for. When the Christian West fulfills Voltaire’s statement, “Nothing is better known than the siege of Malta,” I think the war will be won.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
The Saved Generation
In the early 1920s, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were dubbed "the lost generation". During these years, they lived for a time in France, formed a friendship, nurtured each other’s literary careers, and traveled about Europe. Across the channel from Hemingway and Fitzgerald, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were beginning their careers as teachers and scholars at Oxford University. In time their famed literary friendship began around an informal group called the “Koalbiters” where they gathered to read Old Norse myths in the original languages.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tolkien, and Lewis all enjoyed popularity from the books they wrote. Most of their works remain in print with sales remaining quite high. The influence of these authors and their books lives on.
Even though all four men were contemporaries, several factors separated Hemingway and Fitzgerald from Tolkien and Lewis. While the first pair were Americans and the second British, more than geography and history separated them. And while the first two devoted themselves almost entirely to being writers (aided with lots of pretty heavy drinking), the second two were primarily university professors whose writing careers were secondarily pursued amidst lectures and grading exams. But more than academic robes separated the two pairs.
The main gathering spot for Hemingway and Fitzgerald was the apartment of a writer named Gertrude Stein. More remembered for her influence than for her actual writings, Stein influenced the writers, poets, painters, and other artists—mostly American—who found a literary comradeship in post-World War I France. She directly affected much of modern 20th century literature and art (Picasso, for example). It was Stein who told Hemingway, “You are a lost generation”. Hemingway used the phrase in the opening of The Sun Also Rises. The phrase became a description of the entire group.
The main gathering spots for Tolkien and Lewis were a pub called “The Eagle and Child” and their rooms at Magdalen College. As Lewis once put it, “My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs—or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics, over beer, tea, and pipes.” It was in these gatherings that Tolkien and Lewis shared their faith and fiction. It was here that they came to be called “the Inklings".
The Contrast
Living in the same era, having literary camaraderie, and penning their early works, these two sets of friends developed two entirely different modes of writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both known for their realism, for the tragic bent of their plots, and for the uprooted, cynical, modern, this-is-all-there-is-to-life heroes who sought some type of this-worldly grace to live under the pressure of existential meaninglessness. Hemingway’s heroes faced war and the loss of loved ones; they accepted death or life on its own terms with resignation and stoicism. Fitzgerald’s heroes struggled to find life in the parties and opportunities for wealth during that era known as the "Jazz Age". Their heroes usually died with the same vigor with which they lived. These were fictional characters without roots, for the past was irrelevant. They were characters without futures, for the future was lost somewhere out on the battlefields of the First World War.
Tolkien and Lewis rejected modernism and realism in literature. The main characters in the fiction of Lewis and Tolkien—children, talking animals, Hobbits, and elves—fought against magical and mystical forces in fantasy worlds. The issues were clear, the battle lines plainly drawn: Lucy and Edmund, Bilbo and Frodo all faced evil forces and battled for the good. They battled for Narnia and Middle-earth, found strength in the supernatural and fantastic, and faced death with courage and honor.
To read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and then pick up A Farewell to Arms, to read The Return of the King and then read The Great Gatsby, to try to find a common thread between these two sets of writers is most disconcerting. One is reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s comments about fantasy. He said that fantasy reminds us that "the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull…. In the fairy tale, the cosmos goes mad, but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness…of the cosmos.”
The main characters in the fiction of Lewis and Tolkien fought against magical and mystical forces in fantasy worlds. The issues were clear, the battle lines plainly drawn: Lucy and Edmund, Bilbo and Frodo all faced evil forces and battled for the good.
To assess the importance of these writers, one must go beyond style; they were all master stylists. One cannot demean Tolkien and Lewis by saying that they wrote "children’s stories". As a matter of fact, I read a fair bit of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in my teenage years, but did not read Tolkien and Lewis until many years later. Some critics see realism as superior to fantasy because it is more representative of life; that is, as Aristotle talked about literature as imitation, so realism is imitation. The problem is that Samwise Gamgee acts more like people we know than does Jay Gatsby.
The real point of demarcation between these two sets of writers concerns their different worldview, or you could say philosophies or even religions. Both Tolkien and Lewis were dedicated Christians whose theologies permeated their fiction. While Lewis was more obvious with his Christian symbolism and themes, Tolkien was strongly committed to Christian themes and symbols in his fiction.
Besides the events that caused Hemingway and Fitzgerald to abandon the Christian culture of Midwestern America and the events that caused Tolkien to be a committed Catholic and the events that would later bring Lewis to the Christian faith, the key event in all their lives that they shared was participation in the military in the First World War.
World War I
The experience of World War I and its aftermath impacted them all. The experience of this war is one of the underrated events of the 20th century. World War I, more directly than anything else, caused World War II. It also caused the Great Depression in the US and the world, the rise of Communism in Russia, the rise of Nazism in Germany. Perhaps even greater than the military and political effects of the war were the social, cultural, philosophical, and theological effects.
The clumsy film images of young men, brightly uniformed, being cheered by huge crowds give a foreboding image of the naivety toward the horrors that would soon face the youth of Europe in "No Man’s Land" in the trenches of France. Some particular battles, like the Battles of the Somme and the siege of Verdun, produced casualty counts that exceeded whole wars of the past. In some cases, the first hours of an attack destroyed more young men than whole campaigns from previous centuries.
The grim futility of the war can be found in the anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Marie Remarque. His story takes a group of young men, Germans in this case, and traces their lives in the trenches, their struggles with fear and death, their momentary flings with youthful fun, through the war until the last one dies. In one sense, it would only be “all quiet on the Western Front” when all were dead. The grim futility of World War I still elicits explanation
The causes of World War I were vague. History books might list causes, both immediate and long-term. None of the causes seems to explain the extent of the effects. Some years back Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August eloquently described the course of events in the August of 1914 that led to the outbreak of war and the first month of battle that initially saved France. But that was only one month out of a war that would last for nearly four years.
The course of the war was insane, with ever increasing casualties remedied only by the development of ever-more shocking weapons; the results of the war displayed a blinded greed on the part of the winners and guaranteed a desire for revenge by the losers, particularly Germany. French General Ferdinand Foch rightly prophesied that the peace treaty was nothing more than a twenty-year armistice.
The Wartime Experience
The British went to war in 1914, so Tolkien and Lewis were quickly drawn into it. It was 1917 before America declared war on Germany. Americans went into that war with the idealistic promise that "this was a war to end all wars" and a "war to make the world safe for democracy". Our comparative casualty count was low, since we entered the war late and at that point in time when the last German offensive was grinding to a halt. The German army was reduced to large numbers of old men and boys. Still lots of Americans died; others survived shell-shocked, gassed, and scarred for life. The optimism of youth, the promise of a bright century, the certainties of life were gone.
Fitzgerald said in his novel This Side of Paradise that they returned from the war to find “all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken". Disillusioned by the war, rejecting belief in God or any creeds, pained over his past and lost youth, Fitzgerald’s character says at the end of the book, “I know myself, but that is all".
Hemingway’s character Frederic Henry faced the death of his lover, Catherine, and her son and of his wartime comrades with the thought, “That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you…. You could count of that. Stay around long enough and they would kill you".
Plenty of British writers experienced the same despair, unbelief, and existentialism. Some like the poet Wilfred Owen died in battle; others like Siegfried Sassoon survived to continue his writing career. It is in this same cultural context that T.S. Eliot published his famous poem "The Waste Land".
But not all who experienced World War I emerged with philosophies of despair. Both novelist and historian have often written about the unbelief and the existential reaction to World War I. What have been less often explored have been the stories of the boys of 1914-18 who left the war with a greater vision of life. There were many. While he was not converted until some years after the war, Lewis avoided the cynicism of so many. Two Southern literary scholars, John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson, returned to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and preceded to give the world a great body of Southern literature, especially poetry, and the Agrarian movement. Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy conceived his vision of history at the Battle of Verdun where he was serving in the German army and from that began his work Out of Revolution.
Tolkien and World War I
Most important from our perspective, from the experience of the Battle of the Somme and the trenches of France, J.R.R. Tolkien resolved to fulfill the vision of his university chums, most of whom perished in battle, and he put together vital pieces of his epic creation of Middle Earth. The way the war made Tolkien the man and ultimately how it effected the creation of Middle-earth is the theme of an important recent book on Tolkien, called Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth. The author says, “Without the war, it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on a conflict between good and evil; or if they had, whether good and evil would have taken a similar shape." P. 309
This story begins with the comradeship and scholarship of four young men at King’s College. These men were certainly among Britain’s finest. Their education embodied the best of the older Classical education model—a later casualty of the 20th century. They performed Greek plays in the original; they fellowshipped together as members of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS); they played spirited games of Rugby against school rivals; they pursued various academic disciplines, with Tolkien being ever drawn to the field of Philology and the writings of Norse legends.
This fellowship was disrupted by the outbreak of the war. College educated men were prime candidates for the officer corps. Off they went to training and later to battle, carrying along copies of Paradise Lost along with their own poetry and dreams of bright future lives as men of letters. As officers, their risks were great, and their casualty numbers were high. Like the characters in All Quiet on the Western Front, they soon began to die in battle.
After the first member of this fellowship was killed (Rob Gilson was his name), another one, G.B. Smith wrote to Tolkien, “I am safe but what does that matter…Now one realizes in despair what the TCBS really was. O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do?” (p.168) Gilson was not the only one to die. Looking back years later, Tolkien said, “To be caught in youth in 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939…by 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”
As the scythe of war swept more men away, Tolkien was providentially blessed by contracting trench fever. This disease, fatal for some, was life saving for Tolkien.
Victor Davis Hanson points out in his book Ripples of Battle that battles produce consequences far beyond the immediate effects on the battlefield. Garth’s book certainly illustrates some of the far-reaching ripples of the Battle of the Somme. As Tolkien created the battles for Middle-earth, he used his visual memories of WWI to construct the settings. Garth says, “Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs.” P. 309
Tolkien was not unique in falling back on his war experiences for his fiction. Tone, subject, and attitudes from the war affected the literature of the next generation. But what was unique about Tolkien was the perspective he had on the war. In the last chapters of Garth’s book, he brilliantly examines the ways different writers reacted to the war. This portion is worth the price of the book. Garth says, “…writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.” (p. 300) A bit earlier he pointed out, “In a century when revolutionaries dismissed the whole concept of good and evil as a delusion of the weak or deviant, this became a substantial issue, and already during the Great War it was an urgent one. For Tolkien’s mythology, ‘the memory of good and evil’ is the keynote.” (P.292)
So the battlefields of France merge into the fictional battle for Middle-earth. A real war with indefinite causes and unclear moral realities helps create a mythical war with an all-powerful ring as the cause and good and evil as the unmistakable alternative outcomes. A historical human tragedy becomes a fantastic epic.
Tolkien ended the war with a pen in hand and a vision in mind. Unlike the Lost Generation, for Tolkien, God was very much alive; for him, faith was strengthened; and for him, all wars were not fought—there would be more wars, the shires would need scouring, but the ultimate victory was sure. Gertrude Stein was more right than she realized in referring to Hemingway and Fitzgerald and company as "the lost generation". What we can now see is that they have been way surpassed by their contemporaries who were or were to be "the saved generation".
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tolkien, and Lewis all enjoyed popularity from the books they wrote. Most of their works remain in print with sales remaining quite high. The influence of these authors and their books lives on.
Even though all four men were contemporaries, several factors separated Hemingway and Fitzgerald from Tolkien and Lewis. While the first pair were Americans and the second British, more than geography and history separated them. And while the first two devoted themselves almost entirely to being writers (aided with lots of pretty heavy drinking), the second two were primarily university professors whose writing careers were secondarily pursued amidst lectures and grading exams. But more than academic robes separated the two pairs.
The main gathering spot for Hemingway and Fitzgerald was the apartment of a writer named Gertrude Stein. More remembered for her influence than for her actual writings, Stein influenced the writers, poets, painters, and other artists—mostly American—who found a literary comradeship in post-World War I France. She directly affected much of modern 20th century literature and art (Picasso, for example). It was Stein who told Hemingway, “You are a lost generation”. Hemingway used the phrase in the opening of The Sun Also Rises. The phrase became a description of the entire group.
The main gathering spots for Tolkien and Lewis were a pub called “The Eagle and Child” and their rooms at Magdalen College. As Lewis once put it, “My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs—or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics, over beer, tea, and pipes.” It was in these gatherings that Tolkien and Lewis shared their faith and fiction. It was here that they came to be called “the Inklings".
The Contrast
Living in the same era, having literary camaraderie, and penning their early works, these two sets of friends developed two entirely different modes of writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both known for their realism, for the tragic bent of their plots, and for the uprooted, cynical, modern, this-is-all-there-is-to-life heroes who sought some type of this-worldly grace to live under the pressure of existential meaninglessness. Hemingway’s heroes faced war and the loss of loved ones; they accepted death or life on its own terms with resignation and stoicism. Fitzgerald’s heroes struggled to find life in the parties and opportunities for wealth during that era known as the "Jazz Age". Their heroes usually died with the same vigor with which they lived. These were fictional characters without roots, for the past was irrelevant. They were characters without futures, for the future was lost somewhere out on the battlefields of the First World War.
Tolkien and Lewis rejected modernism and realism in literature. The main characters in the fiction of Lewis and Tolkien—children, talking animals, Hobbits, and elves—fought against magical and mystical forces in fantasy worlds. The issues were clear, the battle lines plainly drawn: Lucy and Edmund, Bilbo and Frodo all faced evil forces and battled for the good. They battled for Narnia and Middle-earth, found strength in the supernatural and fantastic, and faced death with courage and honor.
To read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and then pick up A Farewell to Arms, to read The Return of the King and then read The Great Gatsby, to try to find a common thread between these two sets of writers is most disconcerting. One is reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s comments about fantasy. He said that fantasy reminds us that "the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull…. In the fairy tale, the cosmos goes mad, but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness…of the cosmos.”
The main characters in the fiction of Lewis and Tolkien fought against magical and mystical forces in fantasy worlds. The issues were clear, the battle lines plainly drawn: Lucy and Edmund, Bilbo and Frodo all faced evil forces and battled for the good.
To assess the importance of these writers, one must go beyond style; they were all master stylists. One cannot demean Tolkien and Lewis by saying that they wrote "children’s stories". As a matter of fact, I read a fair bit of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in my teenage years, but did not read Tolkien and Lewis until many years later. Some critics see realism as superior to fantasy because it is more representative of life; that is, as Aristotle talked about literature as imitation, so realism is imitation. The problem is that Samwise Gamgee acts more like people we know than does Jay Gatsby.
The real point of demarcation between these two sets of writers concerns their different worldview, or you could say philosophies or even religions. Both Tolkien and Lewis were dedicated Christians whose theologies permeated their fiction. While Lewis was more obvious with his Christian symbolism and themes, Tolkien was strongly committed to Christian themes and symbols in his fiction.
Besides the events that caused Hemingway and Fitzgerald to abandon the Christian culture of Midwestern America and the events that caused Tolkien to be a committed Catholic and the events that would later bring Lewis to the Christian faith, the key event in all their lives that they shared was participation in the military in the First World War.
World War I
The experience of World War I and its aftermath impacted them all. The experience of this war is one of the underrated events of the 20th century. World War I, more directly than anything else, caused World War II. It also caused the Great Depression in the US and the world, the rise of Communism in Russia, the rise of Nazism in Germany. Perhaps even greater than the military and political effects of the war were the social, cultural, philosophical, and theological effects.
The clumsy film images of young men, brightly uniformed, being cheered by huge crowds give a foreboding image of the naivety toward the horrors that would soon face the youth of Europe in "No Man’s Land" in the trenches of France. Some particular battles, like the Battles of the Somme and the siege of Verdun, produced casualty counts that exceeded whole wars of the past. In some cases, the first hours of an attack destroyed more young men than whole campaigns from previous centuries.
The grim futility of the war can be found in the anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Marie Remarque. His story takes a group of young men, Germans in this case, and traces their lives in the trenches, their struggles with fear and death, their momentary flings with youthful fun, through the war until the last one dies. In one sense, it would only be “all quiet on the Western Front” when all were dead. The grim futility of World War I still elicits explanation
The causes of World War I were vague. History books might list causes, both immediate and long-term. None of the causes seems to explain the extent of the effects. Some years back Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August eloquently described the course of events in the August of 1914 that led to the outbreak of war and the first month of battle that initially saved France. But that was only one month out of a war that would last for nearly four years.
The course of the war was insane, with ever increasing casualties remedied only by the development of ever-more shocking weapons; the results of the war displayed a blinded greed on the part of the winners and guaranteed a desire for revenge by the losers, particularly Germany. French General Ferdinand Foch rightly prophesied that the peace treaty was nothing more than a twenty-year armistice.
The Wartime Experience
The British went to war in 1914, so Tolkien and Lewis were quickly drawn into it. It was 1917 before America declared war on Germany. Americans went into that war with the idealistic promise that "this was a war to end all wars" and a "war to make the world safe for democracy". Our comparative casualty count was low, since we entered the war late and at that point in time when the last German offensive was grinding to a halt. The German army was reduced to large numbers of old men and boys. Still lots of Americans died; others survived shell-shocked, gassed, and scarred for life. The optimism of youth, the promise of a bright century, the certainties of life were gone.
Fitzgerald said in his novel This Side of Paradise that they returned from the war to find “all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken". Disillusioned by the war, rejecting belief in God or any creeds, pained over his past and lost youth, Fitzgerald’s character says at the end of the book, “I know myself, but that is all".
Hemingway’s character Frederic Henry faced the death of his lover, Catherine, and her son and of his wartime comrades with the thought, “That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you…. You could count of that. Stay around long enough and they would kill you".
Plenty of British writers experienced the same despair, unbelief, and existentialism. Some like the poet Wilfred Owen died in battle; others like Siegfried Sassoon survived to continue his writing career. It is in this same cultural context that T.S. Eliot published his famous poem "The Waste Land".
But not all who experienced World War I emerged with philosophies of despair. Both novelist and historian have often written about the unbelief and the existential reaction to World War I. What have been less often explored have been the stories of the boys of 1914-18 who left the war with a greater vision of life. There were many. While he was not converted until some years after the war, Lewis avoided the cynicism of so many. Two Southern literary scholars, John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson, returned to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and preceded to give the world a great body of Southern literature, especially poetry, and the Agrarian movement. Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy conceived his vision of history at the Battle of Verdun where he was serving in the German army and from that began his work Out of Revolution.
Tolkien and World War I
Most important from our perspective, from the experience of the Battle of the Somme and the trenches of France, J.R.R. Tolkien resolved to fulfill the vision of his university chums, most of whom perished in battle, and he put together vital pieces of his epic creation of Middle Earth. The way the war made Tolkien the man and ultimately how it effected the creation of Middle-earth is the theme of an important recent book on Tolkien, called Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth. The author says, “Without the war, it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on a conflict between good and evil; or if they had, whether good and evil would have taken a similar shape." P. 309
This story begins with the comradeship and scholarship of four young men at King’s College. These men were certainly among Britain’s finest. Their education embodied the best of the older Classical education model—a later casualty of the 20th century. They performed Greek plays in the original; they fellowshipped together as members of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS); they played spirited games of Rugby against school rivals; they pursued various academic disciplines, with Tolkien being ever drawn to the field of Philology and the writings of Norse legends.
This fellowship was disrupted by the outbreak of the war. College educated men were prime candidates for the officer corps. Off they went to training and later to battle, carrying along copies of Paradise Lost along with their own poetry and dreams of bright future lives as men of letters. As officers, their risks were great, and their casualty numbers were high. Like the characters in All Quiet on the Western Front, they soon began to die in battle.
After the first member of this fellowship was killed (Rob Gilson was his name), another one, G.B. Smith wrote to Tolkien, “I am safe but what does that matter…Now one realizes in despair what the TCBS really was. O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do?” (p.168) Gilson was not the only one to die. Looking back years later, Tolkien said, “To be caught in youth in 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939…by 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”
As the scythe of war swept more men away, Tolkien was providentially blessed by contracting trench fever. This disease, fatal for some, was life saving for Tolkien.
Victor Davis Hanson points out in his book Ripples of Battle that battles produce consequences far beyond the immediate effects on the battlefield. Garth’s book certainly illustrates some of the far-reaching ripples of the Battle of the Somme. As Tolkien created the battles for Middle-earth, he used his visual memories of WWI to construct the settings. Garth says, “Middle-earth, I suspect, looks so engagingly familiar to us, and speaks to us so eloquently, because it was born with the modern world and marked by the same terrible birth pangs.” P. 309
Tolkien was not unique in falling back on his war experiences for his fiction. Tone, subject, and attitudes from the war affected the literature of the next generation. But what was unique about Tolkien was the perspective he had on the war. In the last chapters of Garth’s book, he brilliantly examines the ways different writers reacted to the war. This portion is worth the price of the book. Garth says, “…writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.” (p. 300) A bit earlier he pointed out, “In a century when revolutionaries dismissed the whole concept of good and evil as a delusion of the weak or deviant, this became a substantial issue, and already during the Great War it was an urgent one. For Tolkien’s mythology, ‘the memory of good and evil’ is the keynote.” (P.292)
So the battlefields of France merge into the fictional battle for Middle-earth. A real war with indefinite causes and unclear moral realities helps create a mythical war with an all-powerful ring as the cause and good and evil as the unmistakable alternative outcomes. A historical human tragedy becomes a fantastic epic.
Tolkien ended the war with a pen in hand and a vision in mind. Unlike the Lost Generation, for Tolkien, God was very much alive; for him, faith was strengthened; and for him, all wars were not fought—there would be more wars, the shires would need scouring, but the ultimate victory was sure. Gertrude Stein was more right than she realized in referring to Hemingway and Fitzgerald and company as "the lost generation". What we can now see is that they have been way surpassed by their contemporaries who were or were to be "the saved generation".
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