In the most recent post, I made another bold claim: No group in history understood original meaning better than the Inklings.
Why is this important? And what does it even mean?
In his book An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis said:
“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors . . . My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others . . . I will see what others have invented . . . But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poems, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.”
I believe the sentiment Lewis expressed about authors from the past can be true of our friends in the present, especially when our friends are members of the greatest literary collaborative fellowship in history: The Inklings. When he hosted meetings of the Inklings Lewis did not see through the eyes of a thousand men, only 10 or so. Oh, but what eyes!
The Inklings
The Inklings were a literary collaborative group that met casually at The Eagle and Child each Tuesday morning, and then more seriously on Thursday evenings in Lewis’ Magdalen College quarters.
The Inklings shared a love of literature. They were, to a man, lovers of myth and literature, fantasy and poetry, but it is not as if they were all cut from the same cloth—they were different. Each brought unique expertise and perspectives to the group.
In their book, The Fellowship, Phillip and Carol Zaleski offered a glimpse into their culture:
“The Inklings resembled an intellectual orchestra, a gathering of sparkling talents in common cause, each participant the master of his own chosen instrument, be it literature, theology, philosophy or history.”
People tend to think the Inklings were a group of “Literary Establishmentarians”, but in truth, they were quite radical. By the time the last Inkling passed away on the eve of the 21st Century, the group had altered the field of literature:
- They altered the course of imaginative literature (fantasy, allegory, and mythopoeia).
- They altered Christian theology, and Western philosophy.
- They altered comparative mythology, courtly love, faerie, and epic poetry.
- They altered the scholarly study of Beowulf, Dante, Spenser, and Milton.
Other Literary Collaborative Groups
The Inklings gathered to indulge a great passion held in common. They were not the first literary collaborative group in history, but many believe they were the most impactful such group ever.
Earlier groups include the following:
The “Scriblerus Club” (early 1800s)
- Alexander Pope
- Jonathan Swift
- Henry St. John
- John Gay
“The Club” (late 1800s)
- Samuel Johnson
- Joshua Reynolds
- Edmund Burke
- Adam Smith
- Edward Gibbon
The “Bloomsbury Group” (early 1900s)
- Virginia Woolf
- E.M. Forster
- John Maynard Keynes
- Duncan Grant
These groups now occupy the dustbin of history. Meanwhile, the Inklings continue to shape significant aspects of modern religion and worldwide culture.
I repeat my claim: No group in history understood original meaning better than the Inklings.
Why is this important? Because “Comprehension” means extracting the most accurate understanding of the author’s intended meaning. C.S. Lewis had an unparalleled talent for “Comprehension”, quite possibly exceeding any other person in history. But Lewis was better at “Comprehension” because of his collaboration with the Inklings.
Members of the Inklings
All members of the Inklings were attuned to the importance of English literature, myth, linguistics, language, etymology, philology, rhetoric and semantics. They were all advocates of religion, though they were members of different denominations.
Key members included:
C.S. Lewis was an expert in English literature, semantics, and literary criticism (and many other topics). He was the founder and leader of the Inklings.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist who loved linguistic aesthetics, artificial languages and especially mythopoeia, like Beowulf. He was a professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford.
Owen Barfield was a lawyer, an author and philosopher. His chief passions were literature, language, philosophy, and human perception.
Charles Williams was Editor of the Oxford University Press and an expert on Dante and English poetry.
Lord David Cecil was the aristocrat among the Inklings. As the grandson of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, he did not have to write or teach, but he did. He was one of Oxford’s best-loved teachers. His best works were biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
Neville Coghill was a Merton Professor of English Literature. He is most famous for his work on Chaucer. He also had a keen interest in dramatic productions, once directing Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Hugo Dyson taught at Reading University and Merton College. He and J.R.R. Tolkien were most involved in Lewis’ acceptance of Christianity.
J.A.W. Bennett was a close colleague of Lewis at Magdalen College. He was a great medievalist, and taught Anglo-Saxon. After Lewis’ death he succeeded him as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.
Adam Fox was a Dean of Divinity and Professor of Poetry at Magdalen College, then later a Canon at Westminster Abbey. He is buried in Poet’s Corner.
Colin Hardie taught at Baliol College, Oxford, then later at Magdalen College. He specialized in the writings of Virgil.
John Wain was a novelist, poet and critic and a former student of Lewis. Like Boswell, he wrote an excellent biography of Samuel Johnson.
Robert Havard was a physician. Lewis referred to him as the “Useless Quack.”
Warren Lewis was a retired military man, and C.S. Lewis brother.
It is not my purpose to give each member the attention they deserve. To that end, I recommend three books by experts who can tell you so much more about the members of the Inklings and the group culture. They are:
- The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (by Diana Pavlac Glyer).
- Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings (by Diana Pavlac Glyer).
- The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (by Philip and Carol Zaleski).
“Meet the Inklings” Who Mattered Most
All members of the Inklings were brilliant, and most of them were successful authors on their own merits. But the greatest were J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield.
(a) J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien and Lewis were blessed with a collaborative friendship on the order of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Without Lewis’ encouragement, Tolkien might never have completed The Lord of the Rings. Without their mutual pact to “write the books they wanted to read” Lewis might never have written The Space Trilogy.
Most people assume that J.R.R. Tolkien was the most important of the Inklings and that he had the greatest influence on Lewis. To be sure, Tolkien was the most famous of the Inklings. He taught Lewis the truth in old myths. Moreover, he had the greatest impact upon Lewis’ faith journey. But I do not think he was the most important Inkling.
(b) Charles Williams
Charles Williams came later and was invited to join the Inklings by Lewis. By any measure, Williams was the oddest Inkling, but an unusually charismatic person. Williams was a swirling mass of contradictions; he was not simple and happy but complex and tortured. He was a man “trembling with nervousness” who was always chattering away with “staccato eagerness”. He gave an impression of electric animation, a bundle of raw nerves, spewing ideas, conveying images and spouting observations in all directions. His personal magnetism must have been virtually radioactive to judge from his admirers; for to be with him was to find yourself in the presence of someone utterly unique and astonishing.
Williams wrote The English Poetic Mind, a survey of English poetry to discern what separates the truly great poets from those who can’t quite rise to the same standard. Williams was a renowned expert on the Arthurian legend and also Dante’s Divine Comedy. Moreover, as Editor with Oxford University Press, he was exceedingly well read.
Tolkien disliked him intensely, but Lewis simply enjoyed his company. Of Williams writings, Lewis was most intrigued by the “supernatural thrillers” Williams wrote. He is sometimes referred to as “the Stephen King of spirituality.”
Theologically, Williams was a bit “out there.” He was an enigmatic man whose foray in the Golden Dawn and dabbling in Rosicrucianism disturbed some, especially Tolkien. Williams had a taste for the occult. His friend T.S. Eliot saw Williams as having profound insights into evil. Eliot once said of Williams:
“For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. Had I ever to spend a night in a haunted house, I should have felt secure with Williams in my company; he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection.”
Williams developed the concept of “co-inherence” (the practice of substitutionary suffering and the bearing one another’s burdens, including pain and illness). Lewis experienced the spiritual power of “co-inherence” in the temporary healing of his wife, Joy.
(c) Owen Barfield
In a dedication in The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis wrote:
“The wisest and best of my unofficial counselors . . . Barfield towers above us all.”
Other than Lewis, I consider Owen Barfield to be the most important of all the Inklings. He was not the most consequential of Inkling meeting attendees, but he was the Inkling who was most consequential to C.S. Lewis. I see Barfield’s impact upon Lewis to be less than but approaching that of George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton.
Barfield was Lewis’ greatest friend from their college days. He was Lewis’ “second friend”, meaning the friend who has all the same interests as you, but who holds diametrically opposed positions on nearly every one of them.
They rigorously debated a wide range of topics, from epistemology to philosophy to theology. In the 1920s, Lewis and Barfield engaged in a rigorous but civil debate on philosophy, which they called “the Great War”. It was from Barfield that Lewis came to appreciate the validity of old ideas, and to understand the inherent bias against old ideas merely because they are old.
Barfield’s seminal works, The History in English Words and Poetic Diction, influence etymology even today. His Saving the Appearances and The Rediscovery of Meaning created a new paradigm for meaning. His Evolution of Consciousness took him into the realm of human perception never before explored to the same extent.
Owen Barfield was the Coleridge-Like theorizer who got the Inklings thinking deeply on the Philosophy of Language. Four themes on perception ran through Barfield’s works, including:
- The importance of the imagination.
- The relationship between imagination and meaning.
- The evolution of human consciousness.
- How this evolution is revealed in the “evolution of language”.
Through Barfield, Lewis came to understand how “imagination” and “reason” are both essential to the pursuit of truth, but with very different roles. Everything that we understand from life experiences or revelation comes to us through imagination. Imagination is antecedent to reason. The role of reason is merely to assess validity of that meaning.
For 70 years, Barfield was devoted to understanding the evolution of human consciousness, and how the evolution in language reveals this evolution of consciousness by serving much like a fossil record.
It is fascinating thinking, but not easy reading. I recommend my readers look into Barfield’s ideas . . . of course, many of you have already. A good (and accessible) place to start is with this book about Barfield’s theories: Reweaving the Rainbow: The Thought of Owen Barfield edited by David Lavery.
All the Inklings were brilliant thinkers, but Owen Barfield is the only one who could be considered Lewis’ intellectual equal. He was revered by T.S. Eliot, W.H Auden, Walter de la Mare, Saul Bellow and Marshall McLuhan and most of all by C.S. Lewis.
As Lewis said of “The Great War” in Surprised by Joy: “Out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him.”
So, in the final analysis, why is C.S. Lewis’ association with The Inklings important? Because it extended the reach of his “Comprehension”. His twice-weekly interaction with this group of gifted thinkers–all committed to truth, all keenly interested in old books, and all seeking the author’s original meaning–provided Lewis with an entirely different layer of “Comprehension”.
There are other nominees for designation as “the most erudite person in history,” but I cannot imagine any of them had powers of comprehension on a par with C.S. Lewis. None of them had access to a cadre of “like-minds” to fire-test and augment his thinking.
With the next post I move into the section on “Retention.” It is the final factor in my effort to build a compelling case that C.S. Lewis is (plausibly) the most erudite person in history.
Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20
Erudition Series Index
