Brooke Foss Westcott, George Macdonald, and J. R. R. Tolkien
It turns out that there are many
similarities between Westcott and the “Inklings” of Oxford. The
Inklings were a literary discussion group comprised of C. S. Lewis,
Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy
Sayers. Tolkien of course was the author of the Lord of the Rings
which has now been serialized as a trilogy of movies and very widely
viewed. Tolkien was Catholic and probably Rosicrucian. None of these
people were orthodox Christians, all were Neoplatonic. Lewis was an
Anglo-catholic who believed in salvation by taking the sacraments.
He did not believe in plenary, varbal inspiration of the Bible. He
accepted the doctrine of purgatory and took the last rites of the
Catholic church at death. Owen Barfield was Lewis's close friend
from 1919 to Lewis's death in 1963. He was Lewis's legal and
financial advisor, and became an executor of his estate. Lewis
dedicated his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love, in1936, to
this “wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.” He said in its
preface that he wanted to spread Barfield's literary theory and
practice, and dedicated the first Narnian chronicle to his friend's
daughter. Barfield was a theosophist.
The Inklings believed, like Plato, the gnostics,
Westcott, and Gladstone, that myth could teach spiritual truth and
that pre-Christian myths foreshadowed and pointed to Christianity.
They believed that myth could not keep itself from showing spiritual
reality. Tolkien expected Christ-figures in particular to appear in
myths, because he saw them as emerging from human minds in which
were found all the longings and yearnings that ‘the Christ-event’
was meant to fulfil. They included the Old Testament in these myths
and therefore did not believe in the Genesis account of creation and
were evolutionists. They all tended toward the idea of universal
incarnation, as Westcott did. They all attempted to syncretize or
combine pagan ideas with Christianity. Remember that Plato was also,
like the Inklings, a myth-maker and intended his myths to convey
spiritual truth. Westcott’s syncretism is shown by his statement
that Plato was an unconscious prophet of the Gospel whose ideas
foreshadowed Christianity. He said that Plato points us to St. John
and that Christianity is the fulfillment of philosophy. He said that
the religious thought of the ancient Greeks aided the development of
Judaism, and that the chosen people gathered to itself the spiritual
treasures which other races had won.
Tolkien believed in reincarnation and included
it in the Lord of the Rings in the character known as Gandalf.
Tolkien did not see how any theologian could deny the possibility of
reincarnation as a mode of existence for certain kinds of rational
incarnate creatures. A hierarchy of reincarnation, not universally
the same but dependent on the earthly works of a man, was a feature
of Platonic philosophy and of Hindu religion as well. Barfield also
believed in reincarnation. But the Bible does not teach
reincarnation and expressly denies it in Hebrews 9:27: “it is
appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”
Following Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Tolkien
believed in the concept of root races and in the legend of Atlantis.
That legend is the touchstone characteristic of theosophy. He said
that the Atlanteans were a superior race operating on a superior
“spiritual” and physical plane. Many mystics have said that some of
those superior beings escaped when Atlantis sank beneath the sea,
made their way to India, Tibet, or Egypt, and gave rise to the Aryan
race. Berit Kjos says that Tolkien put the legend into the First Age
of his mythical history. The destruction of Atlantis came in the
Second Age. The Lord of the Rings takes place in the Third Age. But
they all fit together as can be seen in "Lord of the Rings: True
Mythology" at http://www.leaderu.com/focus/tolkien.html Westcott
also believed that the Atlantis story was true and historical, as I
have shown in my book, A Testimony Founded For Ever.
Tolkien’s ideas about time were mystical as
well:
It is not surprising to learn that Tolkien was
deeply influenced by the 19th century Romantics, chiefly S. T.
Coleridge and George Macdonald, since his friend and literary
companion C. S. Lewis was also decisively shaped by them. Nor is it
startling to find Tolkienian connections with J. M. Barrie's Peter
Pan and Mary Rose, with the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot, even with
Henry James' unfinished story The Sense of the Past. What comes as a
genuine shock is the news that Tolkien's mind and work were marked
by the fictional dream-journeys of George Du Maurier, by the psychic
experiences of Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, by the
time-travel fantasies of H. G. Wells, and especially by the notion
of J. W. Dunne that all temporal events are simultaneous. Dunne held
that time is no less constant than space, and that by certain habits
of mind we can move backward and forward over time as we traverse
space, even experiencing events that have not yet happened.
(www.leaderu.com/humanities/wood-review.html)
[Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846-1937) and Eleanor
Jourdain (1864-1924) were known to the theosophist William Butler
Yeats and corresponded with the English spiritualistic Society for
Psychical Research about their supposed vision of Marie Antoinette.]
To believe that all temporal events are simultaneous is very close
to, I believe, the ancient Greek idea that time is cyclical and to
Westcott’s claim that eternal life is here and now. Do not forget
the circle of life of The Lion King. Westcott said that all things
come from God and go to God in order for Christianity to complete
the circle of existence. Westcott’s gnostic belief in the
preexistence of souls is a necessary corollary of the idea of a
circle of existence, a circle of life. The Biblical concept of time
is that it moves from a beginning to an end and is teleological or
inherently purposeful and not cyclic.
Tolkien also believed that rationalism and
creativity, for example literary work or the creation of a “new”
language expressly for his books, were expressions of the
incarnation if the Christ spirit into the artist and were from God.
He wrote the following poem for Lewis:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to
build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons -- 'twas our
right
(used or misused), that right has not decayed.
we make still by the law in which we’re made.
This poem illustrates Tolkien’s feeling about
creativity as an expression of God incarnate in man. An internet
article about Tolkien and the Inklings confirms this in a
description of the Silmarillon by Steven A. Armstrong, “There and
Back Again: Creation and Reintegration in the Work of J.R.R.
Tolkien.” It appeared in the Rosicrucian Digest 80:1 (Spring 2002)
pp. 2-5. [ http://www.joyfullight.org/essays/tolkien.html] Mr.
Armstrong is a Rosicrucian and has an M.A. and M.Div. He is a Ph.D
candidate in Church History at the Pacific School of Religion at
Berkeley; it is a consortium of 9 theological seminaries using some
of the same faculty and the library of the University of California
at Berkeley. The schools range from American Baptist to Jesuit to
Unitarian. Mr. Armstrong has also given a course of lectures on
Hermes Trismegistus at the New School for Social Research in New
York. According to Armstrong, “Creation of Language is a sign of the
Divine Spark for Tolkien: “By making a language, the Firstborn of Ilúvatar identified themselves as Incarnates, children of the One:
‘The making of a lambe [language] is the chief character of an
Incarnate,’ Pengolodh the sage of Gondolin observed.” Westcott
believed in universal incarnation of the Christ spirit into all men,
the divine spark of the modernists of our day.
Verlyn Flieger of the University of Maryland
and Mary Carman Rose of Goucher College in Baltimore both have
written academic articles on Tolkien’s platonic philosophy.
Interestingly, both are published by the Catholic University of
America. Flieger is author of “Naming the Unnameable: the
Neoplatonic ‘One’ in Tolkien’s Silmarillion,” in Diakonia: Studies
in Honor of Robert T. Meyer Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 1986. These professors hold the same worldview as
Tolkien and know very well what he believed.
Tolkien’s cosmogony was gnostic and Platonic.
It is described not so fully in The Lord of the Rings as in The
Silmarillon, which begins with the statement “There was Eru, the
One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur,
the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were
with him before aught else was made.” Arda is Tolkien’s name for
earth, similar to the German word Erde for earth, and Iluvatar
sounds to me as if it came from illuminated avatar. Notice his
monism, the One, of Coleridge and Westcott and the modern versions
of the Bible, especially the NIV. It goes back to Plotinus.
Tolkien’s world was created by a series of beings who emanated from
the One, just as in Plato the Absolute gives rise to the logos, the
soul of the world, and the ancient gnostic pleroma of 30 emanations
from these beings. The last of these created gods, the Demiurge,
formed from Sophia’s mixing with matter, organized, but did not
create, an imperfect world. Tolkien said that in his mythology the
One remains remote, outside the World, and only directly accessible
to the Valar or Rulers who are created spirits. He is not accessible
to men through the “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus” as we learn in I Timothy 2:5. Tolkien’s supreme being, the
One, is therefore exactly like Plato’s unknowable Absolute. He does
not hear our prayers. The One is not the personal God of the Bible
who made this world and controls and directs its affairs. To come to
a knowledge of the truth Tolkien would substitute man’s imagination
and myth-making for the truth of God’s Revelation given in the Bible
by the Holy Ghost, who teaches the interpretation of that truth to
those who believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Tolkien and Lewis were not composers of
original literature, as many believe. 2400 years ago Plato told a
myth of the ring of Gyges, a ring which gave supernatural power to
its holder and could make him invisible. That is precisely like
Tolkien’s “One Ring.” I looked at “The Myths of Plato” in Westcott’s
Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West and found no
mention there of the ring of Gyges, but it is hard to believe he did
not know the story. Blavatsky knew of Gyges and included a
definition of it in her theosophical glossary.
Then there was an obscure 19th century
religious and literary figure who gave inspiration to Tolkien and
Lewis. His name was George Macdonald, contemporary of Westcott but
not mentioned in Westcott’s biography. He was a friend and confidant
of Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin. He also knew Edward George
Bulwer-Lytton, who was one of the fathers of the new age. Macdonald
was a Scottish Presbyterian preacher who became a follower of F. D.
Maurice and Emerson and was dismissed from his church for preaching
universalism and denying eternal punishment. Westcott was also a
disciple of Maurice. Macdonald then took up writing children’s
fantasy. In his book Phantastes he makes the following Al Gore-like
statement:
With the sun well risen, I rose, and put my arms as far as they would reach around the beech-tree, and kissed it, and said good-bye. A trembling went through the leaves; a few of the last drops of the night's rain fell from off them at my feet; and as I walked slowly away, I seemed to hear in a whisper once more the words: "I may love him, I may love him; for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree.
Tolkien also revered trees to a fault and that
appears in the Lord of the Rings.
Macdonald began his book Lilith with a
quotation from the gnostic Kabala. Lilith, in Jewish folklore is a
devil that is an enemy of newborn children. She may be the “screech
owl” in Isaiah 34:14. Lilith was known in Babylonian myth, but she
also appears in later, post biblical Jewish literature. There she is
described as Adam's first wife, who left him after a quarrel,
according to the encyclopedia. It is hard to understand why
Macdonald would write children’s stories and stories about Lilith as
well. Here is the introduction to Lilith:
I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not gone into society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; their trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,--as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed. But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
This introduction was written by Henry David
Thoreau, the Unitarian Transcendentalist friend of Emerson. When you
read it you immediately see the origin of Tolkien’s hobbits.
It is likely that Dungeons and Dragons and
Harry Potter are more degenerate offspring of the fantasy writings
of the Inklings. J. K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series,
has also said that she is a great admirer of the Inklings,
especially Lewis. Even Faith for the Family from BJU recognizes the
relationship between D&D and Tolkien. But strangely the acceptance
of Lewis at BJU comes from a 1954 meeting of Bob Jones, Jr. and C.
S. Lewis after which Bob Jones declared that Lewis was an orthodox
Christian. Even Ian Paisley, Jr. spoke recently of his father and of
C. S. Lewis as “fellow Ulstermen,” without any reservation expressed
about Lewis and with no distinctions made between Lewis and Ian
Paisley, Sr. Something strange is going on. All these folks are able
enough to see the problems with Tolkien and Lewis and with Westcott
if they were inclined to do so. I quote from an internet article:
Fantasy is especially dangerous for children. While most children in the 1970s knew enough truth to place divination in the forbidden realm of the occult, today's children -- who often feel more comfortable with occult games than Biblical truth -- see nothing wrong with pagan practices. Fantasy movies, like Disney's The Lion King, are good matches for the new earth-centered paradigm or world view that is transforming childrens' views of reality. While God told us to continually communicate truth to our children (Deut. 6:5-7), today's culture trains children to see reality through a global, earth-centered filter. This "new" mental framework distorts truth, stretches the meaning of familiar words, and promotes mystical “insights” that are incompatible with Christianity. Packaged with entertainment, this message usually bypasses rational resistance, desensitizes opened minds, and fuels general acceptance of pagan spirituality…BJU Press has published Medallion, a popular fantasy reader for elementary age home-schoolers. There are strange similarities between Medallion and two explicitly pagan books -- one a sixth-grade reader for public schools called The Dark is Rising, and a Wiccan manual by Starhawk called The Spiral Dance. In response to a review of Medallion by Berit Kjos, BJU trivializes the similarities, and states, “It appears that what this critique requires of Medallion rules out all fantasy for the Christian. We hold that no story can mix fantasy with the supernatural facts of Scripture without dangerously trivializing Biblical truth by associating scriptural realities with a dream world.” Couldn't have stated the truth more clearly if we had tried! Contrary to the scholarly opinion of BJU's Literature and Language departments, “Christian” fantasy parallels the occultic literature for children, using similar images, story-lines, symbols, and characters. Literary fantasy, rather than being neutral, has occultic roots. (Excerpted and/or adapted from the 10/96, The Christian Conscience, pp. 40-42; see page 41 for a detailed comparison of Medallion and The Dark is Rising.) (See Biblical Discernment Ministry's report on "Christian" Fantasy)
Biblical Discernment Ministries has advanced
beyond the thinking of professors of literature at many
“fundamental” colleges and recognizes the dangers of Tolkien,
Rowling, and other modern myth-making gnostic fanatsizers. But it
still cannot see that modern Bibles are also contaminated by the
gnosticism which has given us “Christian” fantasy and sadly is not
committed to the KJV alone.
The Trinity Foundation recently published an
article by John W. Robbins entitled, “Did C. S. Lewis Go To Heaven?”
Robbins said that he did not.
http://www.trinityfoundation.org/reviews/journal.asp?ID=205a.htm
Here C. S. Lewis is quoted as saying: “If every good and perfect
gift comes from the Father of Lights, then all true and edifying
writings, whether in Scripture or not, must in some sense be
inspired.” Westcott also believed that revelation was not confined
to the Bible but could be seen in nature and “advancing” human
knowledge and in pagan writings. He said that Christianity was the
fulfilment of Philosophy and that God was still speaking to men. C.
S. Lewis said: “The question was no longer to find the one simply
true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was
rather, 'Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if
anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?'....
Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a
prophetic dream.” Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism
been fulfilled?'.... Paganism had been only the childhood of
religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full
grown?....There were really only two answers possible: either in
Hinduism or in Christianity.” Westcott said, "Can we doubt that
India, the living epitome of the races, the revolutions, and the
creeds of the East is capable of adding some new element to the
complete apprehension of the faith?"
Westcott believed that pagan myths pointed to
Christianity; therefore he said that “the vital force of any other
great religion is not alien from Christianity, and thus each
pre-Christian religion becomes a witness to the Faith which combines
these manifold powers in a final unity. These views of Westcott are
documented by his own statements in my book, A Testimony Founded For
Ever. Westcott and Lewis did not believe in the plenary, verbal
inspiration of scripture or in its inerrancy. Neither believed in a
vicarious, substitutionary atonement.
Robbins in another web article quotes C. S.
Lewis as saying: "For we are taught that the Incarnation itself
proceeded 'not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by
taking of (the) manhood into God'; in it human life becomes the
vehicle of Divine life." This statement is panentheistic. As
Westcott had said long ago: "He was not an individual, though truly
man: not one of the multitude, but man, in Whom humanity, so to
speak, found corporate personality... If He were only an individual
man, He could not gather all men into Himself." Notice the word
corporate. In another quote Westcott said: "He took to himself not
simply a human life but humanity." Lewis and Westcott sound very
much alike on Incarnation.
And so we see that there are important
historical and philosophical parallels between Westcott and
Macdonald and Tolkien and Lewis. Westcott, F. D. Maurice, Macdonald,
Emerson, and Thoreau are among the “academic” 19th century
forerunners of the new age movement; Madame Blavatsky and Annie
Besant popularized this gnosticism as the academics handed it down.
Their “academic” counterparts in the 20th century include Barfield,
Lewis, Tolkien, Verlyn Flieger, Mary Carman Rose and Steven A.
Armstrong. Among the popularizers of our time are Alice Bailey,
Shirley MacLaine, Sharon Gless, Lola Davis, Marilyn Ferguson, and
many pop culture celebrities.
There are unfortunately many misguided
“fundamentalists” who fanatically defend and popularize Lewis and
Tolkien and the new age versions of the Bible as well. It is likely
that in most fundamental churches there will be some who have
watched the Lord of the Rings without knowing the background and
realizing the meaning of what they have seen.
Sightler Publications
October 9, 2003
I Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and
men, the man Christ Jesus;
Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after
this the judgment:
