Reasons for Focusing on Lewis, O’Connor, and Tolkien

The broader and more comprehensive reason for focusing on these particular authors are several.

First, and most obvious, is their shared Christian faith. It is common knowledge that all three of the authors considered here were Christians who held orthodox beliefs about God. None had reservations about confessing his or her faith amidst an unbelieving world, and did so repeatedly.

In a letter to the Houghton Mifflin Co., dated 5 June 1955, Tolkien told the publishers, “I am in any case myself a Christian.” And, in a letter to Amy Ronald, dated 15 December 1956, Tolkien wrote, “Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic.” Specific to the influence his Christianity had on his writing, he wrote in a letter to Robert Murray in 1953, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”

Lewis’s Christianity is likewise common knowledge, as is Tolkien’s influence on his conversion. Lewis’s autobiographical work, Surprised by Joy, documents his journey to conversion. In the chapter titled, “Checkmate,” Lewis writes,

As the dry bones shook and came together in the dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its grave clothes, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was allowed to play at philosophy no longer… that which I had greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Then, on October 1, 1931, Lewis wrote to his friend, Arthur Greeves, expressing his true conversion to Christianity: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.” Additionally, Lewis’s radio broadcasts during WWII, given as a series on Christian apologetics, were later published as one of his more widely recognized works, Mere Christianity.

On the matter of her faith, Flannery O’Connor spoke often of her Catholic faith and wrote in an essay titled, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction.”

This first reason is already well-established by previous scholarship and requires little argument but it is necessary to mention because it is the foundation on which this dissertation will make its more important argument: their commonality is in the “mere-ness” of their Christianity as O’Connor and Tolkien were both Roman Catholic, while Lewis remained an Anglo-Protestant. However, Joseph Pierce, a Roman Catholic himself, argues rather convincingly that Lewis had some Catholic proclivities, especially toward the end of his live, but could not bring himself to embrace the Roman church due to the childhood influence of his Irish family’s contempt for the papists.

In any event, while they would not have agreed on some important doctrines of the faith, it was their humanist proclivities rising out of their Christian worldview that made their writing, and particularly their use of the grotesque, an effective means of recovering a Christian vision for the human being within the modern world.

The second reason for writing a dissertation on these particular authors is the fact that they lived and died in approximately the same era sharing similarities in culture, literary popularity, and influence, though living an ocean apart. An enormous amount of credible research has well-documented the proliferation of modern thought in twentieth-century England and the interaction Tolkien, Lewis, and their Inklings had had with it. Excluding their own prolific writings, writers like Tom Shippey, Joseph Pierce, Bradley Birzer, Walter Hooper and Owen Barfield, to name a few, have contributed volumes of pages to the lives and works of Tolkien and Lewis as Christian Humanists engaging modern thought. It would be unnecessary to expound on that here.

What has not received the degree of attention Lewis and Tolkien have received in this regard is the proliferation of modern thought in the twentieth-century American South and Flannery O’Connor’s interaction with it—though that body of work has significantly increased in the past twenty years. David Eggenschwiler, Brad Gooch, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Ralph Wood have been some of the most significant contributors. By way of introduction, one example of the nature of modern thought in O’Connor’s American South will be insightful.

Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925, and was a college student during World War II, but she was no stranger to the Zeitgeist of the age. The warmongering spirit that plagued twentieth-century Europe came home to the American South after the Second World War. And in some ways the struggle was even more intense. In addition to dealing with social issues that rose from significant losses of life (more than 600,000 Americans in World War I and World War II) and unexpected changes in industry and agriculture that affected the Southern economy, racial and political tension between returning veterans and those that remained at home intensified, exponentially.

In his essay, World War Two and the Mind of the Modern South, James Cobb recounts the ways in which the war after the war raged in the South. He writes, “During the war, racial tensions had exploded during six civilian riots, over twenty military riots and mutinies, and from forty to seventy-five lynchings. The resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity paralleled a horrifying explosion of post-war violence, much of it directed against returning black veterans. Georgia and Alabama were the most homicidal states in the nation in 1946, with murder rates nearly seven times that of New York.”

The bigger picture of his work shows that following the War Between the States, the American South wrestled significantly with the emergence and proliferation of modern beliefs about the nature of reality, the limits of knowledge, and the definition and telos of humanity. Some of the more prominent historical events between 1865 and 1965 included Reconstruction, Southern Industrialization, Jim Crow laws, World War I, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, The Scopes Trial, the Great Depression, World War II, and finally The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The tensions grew so intense during this period, by the time Flannery O’Connor was headed for college, her home state, Georgia, topped New York and led the nation in homicides by sevenfold.

In an essay cited previously, O’Connor wrote: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” She means that even though remnants and echoes of Christianity still lingered and reverberated throughout the American South during her own lifetime, there was little doubt H. L. Mencken’s “Bible Belt” had come unbuckled.

What is important to note as it pertains to this dissertation is the fact that though the American South had begun embracing modern sensibilities about the nature of humanity, it had inherited a tradition of conceptualizing the human being in theological terms like fallenness, sinfulness, and redemption by Christ. The context of O’Connor’s statement about the South being “Christ-haunted” indicates that, much like twentieth-century England, Southern thought, though no longer Christ-centered, could not do otherwise than use its inherited theological arms, as it were, to grapple with the human questions being raised with its coming-of-age into the modern world. Therefore, its orientation in the conversation was naturally rooted in a concept—though an often distorted concept—of Christian theology.

The similarities of thought shared between the American South and England will become more apparent in later chapters, but it is one of the more significant reasons for focusing on these three authors in particular.

The third reason for focusing on these three authors is significant but so apparent it need only be mentioned briefly. These three shared significant literary popularity in their life times, and have maintained and even gained popularity a half-century after their deaths. These authors’ contribution to literary thought have long been regarded as significant, even now maintaining a strong voice in the Postmodern twenty-first century.