The Eric Metaxas Show - On Myth as a Vehicle for Truth A Dialogues Conversation with Holly Ordway & Louis Markos

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

How often do you use your imagination? In our newest program, Socrates Dialogues, authors and professors Louis Markos and Holly Ordway discuss the enduring friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their most famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of The Rings.  They discuss how the two balanced their disagreements while maintaining respect and a close bond, the mythical worlds they created, the fight between good and evil, and ultimately, the importance of imagination through reason

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. If you're looking for the Eric Metaxis show, you've come to the right place. If you're looking for some other radio show, well, go down the road, two stoplights, make a right at the gas station, go past Billy's Fruit Stand, hard left, and bingo, another show. Maybe, or you're terribly lost. Hey, why don't you just stay right here because you've found Eric Mattaxia. Hey there, folks. Welcome to Friday. I believe it's Friday. The reason I know it's Friday is because today I am in Tennessee. Yes, I'm in Tennessee. It's a Christianity and Culture Conference World Outreach Church. My friend Pastor Alan Jackson invited me ostensibly to take the place, the slot. Not that I could ever fill his shoes of our Sweet brother Charlie Kirk, who was slated to speak tonight at the opening of this conference. Needless to say, he cannot be there.

He's in a better place in every way. And so I am speaking tonight. This is in the Nashville area. I am this weekend going to be in Phoenix for the Charlie Kirk Memorial that's in Phoenix. I'm traveling a lot in the weeks ahead, even as I'm writing my book on the American Revolution. I still am traveling quite a bit. I'm going to be in Dallas a couple of times. You can find all this at Eric Mataxis.com.

If you are in the same city as I am, I'd love to meet you. But I'll be in Dallas. I will be in Waco, Texas. I'll be in Waco, Texas on October 7th. I'm going to be, goodness, I'll be in Colorado, I'll be in Florida. Some of these are private events. I'm going to be in Houston on October 28th. I'm going to be in Grand Rapids doing some events at Cornerstone University at the end of the month.

I will then be back in Dallas. And on November 2nd, on the night of November 2nd, my friend Ken Fish is going to be up Bethel, Connecticut at the, at his vineyard church. That's his vineyard church, Bethel, Connecticut. That's November 2nd at 6 p.m. on Sunday, November 2nd, lots of stuff going on. I am also going to be, some of you know that we have a Socrates and the city gala coming up. That is our annual Christmas gala. It's December 2nd in New York City. If you're interested in coming, you should look into it quickly because it will sell out. I promise you.

The room is not huge. I think we have room for maybe just 250 people, something like that. And that's going to fill up quick if it hasn't already. I don't know. Probably not. But I would jump on that. So that's Socrates in the city.com. Socratesin the city.com.

And I also want to mention our matching grant. If you go to Socrates in the city.com slash match. we are about halfway to our $25,000 match. Socrates in the city, I've been doing it for 25 years. It's important. And we've actually started a new thing. We're going to introduce that to you today, Friday. What is that new thing? Well, we've started what we call Socrates Conversations. Now, Socrates in the city is where I have a conversation with someone. Socrates in the studio is where we're where I have a conversation with someone. Socrates' conversations is when two Socrates' guests have a conversation with each other, and I'm not involved. And I feel kind of cut out. I feel kind of hurt.

But it's okay, because these are amazing people that we have had do these events. So today we are airing in a couple of minutes. We're airing one that we just taped recently with Holly Ordway and Lewis Marcos. These are two extraordinary people. The title of their conversation is myth as a vehicle for truth. Myth as a vehicle for truth. We're going to play that the extent that the whole thing today, starting in the next segment.

And let me read the description for you so you know what you're getting into. How often do you use your imagination? In our newest program, Socrates' dialogues, I said conversations, I got it wrong. It's dialogues. Socrates' dialogues. For crying out loud, Eric, I think you should know this by you. now. In our newest program, Socrates' dialogues, authors and professors, Lewis Marcos and Holly

Ordway, discuss the enduring friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their most famous works and discuss their most famous works, not the enduring friendship between their most famous works. The Chronicle of Narnia, obviously the biggest and the Lord of the Rings for Tolkien. So Holly Ordway and Louis Marcos will discuss how these two giants of 20th century letters balance their disagreements while maintaining respect and a close bond. They will also discuss the mythical worlds that each of them created, the fight between good and evil, and ultimately the importance of imagination through reason. If anybody wants to know why C.S. Lewis is so great, it is because he wasn't just somebody who reasoned. He wasn't just somebody who engaged in what we call

apologetics. No, he used his imagination to do some of that same work, but in a different way. And my goodness, if you've never read the Chronicles of Narnia, I read them for the first time when I turned 30. And I couldn't believe how great they were. I said, this is not kid stuff. I mean, you can read it to kids. But if you're an adult, it just resonates on so many levels. It's so, so powerful. So in a couple of minutes, we're going to play the conversation between Holly Ordway and Lewis Marcos, both of whom are just spectacular. I've interviewed each of them for Socrates in the studio. But as I say, in this new feature, newest program called Socrates Dialogues, they will have a conversation with each other. And I'm looking forward to it myself. I want to mention again,

before we get to that, we have a Christmas gala coming up. The last year's Christmas gala was spectacular. It was the Rockettes did not show up. I want to be very clear. I'm not going to lie to you. They were no shows. And there's nothing I can do about that. But it was a Christmas spectacular. in every other sense. It was, everybody kept saying this was magical. This night was magical. And it was somehow particularly New York in the best sense. When you think of old New York, it really felt beautiful.

There was something beautiful about this kind of an event, a Christmas event in New York. So if you know anybody that would like to visit New York for a couple of days, this is, again, at the very beginning of December, December 2nd, it was so special last year. And there's a community. there's something important. We're going to be doing more of this in the years ahead, more of these kinds of events, because building community is part of why we do what we do at Socrates in the city. We're going to be having another retreat next summer in Oxford, England. We'll be getting that information out to you eventually. But the community that's built, when friends meet friends and people who love C.S. Lewis, people of faith, get to know each other. Friendships are formed

It happened last year on our cruise. I don't know for sure whether we're doing a cruise next year, but it's an important thing. And so if you can get to New York December 2nd, we have reserved a block of rooms at the Union League Club, which is gorgeous and tremendously affordable by New York standards. I mean, way, way, way better than trying to find a hotel at that time of year. so I want to say again, please go to the website, Socrates and the city.com. We're all over YouTube. Our stuff is finally blowing up. We have millions and millions of views. People talk to me and say that they have come to faith from watching Socrates' videos. Guess what? That makes me real happy. But the life of the mind is important. We don't really have enough of that in the culture and often very little of it in the church.

So I recommend Socrates in the city to you. Some of the guests are just as good as it gets. And so Soxasicity.com subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you're able to help us with our match, we'd love you to do that. It helps us get the videos out to more people to touch more lives. Go to Socrates in the city.com slash match. Socrates in the city.com slash match. We're on our way to making that match, but we're not there yet.

It's a $25,000 match. please help us Socrates and City.com. Okay, we are now going to play the entirety of a Socrates dialogue with Holly Ordway and Lewis Marcos. I know you're going to enjoy it. Please share these things with anyone you can. God bless you. A major retail chain just canceled a massive order leaving MyPillow with an overstock of the classic My Pillows. And this is your gain because for a limited time, my pillow is offering their entire classic collection at true wholesale prices.

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top it off. Don't wait. Head to MyPillow.com today or call 800-978 3057. Now. Don't forget to use promo code Eric to grab your standard My Pillow for only 1798 only while supplies last. Hey folks, today we're playing a Socrates in the city dialogue between Holly Ordway and Louis Marcos. The title of it is Myth as a Vehicle for Truth. Here it is. Hello. My name is Lewis Marcos, and I want to welcome you to Socrates in the city. I am a professor of English and scholar and residence at Houston Christian University, and I have been teaching there since 1991, 34 years, and I am a lover of Lewis and Tolkien, ancient Greece and Rome, and also apologetics and classical Christian education. And I'm here today with Holly Ordway.

All right. Well, thanks, Lou. So, as you heard, I'm Holly Ordway. I'm the Cardinal Francis George, Professor of Faith and Culture at the Ward on Fire Institute, and also visiting professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University. And I'm a Tolkien scholar. I have two big books on Tolkien, one of them Tolkien's modern reading, Middle Earth Beyond the Middle Ages, and the other, the most recent one, Tolkien's faith, a spiritual biography. So it's a great pleasure to be here and talking with you, Lou, Lou, about all things Lewis and Tolkien. Well, Holly, you and I have a mutual friend in Michael Ward, whom we both admire greatly, and in addition to Planet Narnia,

which hopefully we'll talk about later, he helped recover an important sentence from an almost forgotten essay with an unpronounceable title. You probably know where I'm going. Yes, that would be Bluss Fools and Flalan spheres, a semantic nightmare. There we go, there we go.

It's crazy G.K. Chester, and I love it, right? And he says there that whereas reason is the organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning. And I've read some of your essays where you talk about that. And tell us a little bit about that. Right. Well, this is such an important concept,

this idea of the role of the reason and the imagination. And this is something that I really got right from Michael. He has a really excellent essay called Imagination Reason in the Work of C.S. Louis. It's a book titled Imaginative Apologetics. And so the idea. that imagination is not just some sort of optional extra that we can use or not as we as we might want to, but imagination is actually part of the way that we process reality. It's a human faculty. It's the faculty of meaning making. And this is what Lewis is saying. So our senses

bring us data about the world. You know, I see a visual image of you there, Lou. But it's the imagination is the processing faculty. that takes that data and creates an image. And so I see you and I think, well, of course, this is Lou Marcos. But for instance, if I were looking for you at the airport and I happen to see someone in a characteristic white tux jacket, I might say, oh, hey, Lou, but I might have processed it incorrectly. And I might be somebody else, you know, with a white suit jacket. Oh, oops.

Sorry, looking for my friend. So the imagination processes the data and gives an image to our reason, which is, the organ of truth. And then the reason has to judge, is this image matching truth? Is it truthful or not? Is that really Lou? Or is it some other guy who also is sort of Natalie dressed? And so the imagination is that image-making faculty. And we cannot engage with the world without it. So we are constantly using our imagination all the time, whether or not I realize it. The only question is, is our imagination healthy? Is it able to produce correct images, images that match up with truth?

Is our reason healthy, able to make judgments about these images? And is our imagination being nourished? And that's one of the things that great writers like Lewis and Tolkien do. They give us these images, these stories that are really meaningful. And they allow our imagination to really grasp things in a deep way. It gives our reason something to work on. I think the reason Lewis is the greatest apologists of the 20th century is he had this unique way of bringing together reason and imagination in this fruitful marriage. So as Americans, we've got great people like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell and Chuck Colson.

They're just great, we would say, left-brain thinkers. They're so logical and systematic. And I'm not saying they're not imaginative. They tell great stories. But Lewis and Tolkien himself, but especially Lewis had a way of making an argument in something. like mere Christianity and then incarnating it into Narnia or even his ransom trilogy of this way of appealing to both sides of us. And that's very unique. One of the things I found very free, we're both English professors at Hartwright. And one of the things that I loved is that hideous

strength, this character named Mark, and he's about to be indoctrinated into the Nice, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments. And then suddenly he's restored to himself as they throw him in this room that's all lopsided, suddenly bubbling up from within is this understanding of the normal that he forgot. And what I love about it is he runs away and he gets to this place and he sees a serialized sort of adventure novel. He started when he was a kid, but he reached a certain age and said, got to put that childish stuff away. And he found himself tearing through the book. I love this. And you know, you and I, a lot of times Christians, particularly evangelicals or words with this. Well, if you're a Christian, you shouldn't be reading all this fantasy. But for Lewis,

his return to faith allowed him to re-access his imagination, re-accesses wonder, and it made it stronger and more powerful. And we still need this in America. It's happening. We're slowly getting people that can talk both languages. But we need a Lewis who are Tolkien to do it. Yeah. And I think that image from that hideous strength is just really apt, because what we have is his character Mark, who's dealing with a direct attack on whatever little bit of faith he might have. They want him to reject all possibility of objective morality so that he can become amoral and get taken over by the demonic courses and serve them. But the final test on that is that they ask him to trample on a crucifix.

And this is a particularly significant scene because Mark is not religious. He doesn't view this as blasphemy. because he hasn't been raised religious at all. But he looks at the crucifix, and it's important that it's a crucifix, it's not just a cross. He looks at the figure, and he sees this as sort of an embodiment

of the straight, the normal that's going to be trampled on by all this twisted stuff. And he sees that this crucifix, the figure on the crucifix cannot do anything. He's helpless. And he sort of instinctively revolts against that. And he decides,

This is his real conversion moment that he would rather be on the side of the humiliated, wooden figure on the cross, the straight and the normal, even if it means losing. So he refuses to do it. And that's, I think, a great instance

of Lewis's gift for conveying really truth imaginatively, because he is not showing Mark convinced by an abstract idea. Mark has not been convinced that objective, morality is true, he's still really muddled, but somehow he recognizes, imaginatively he grasps

that this image means something, and he says, I want that, I want what that image means, and he chooses that. And that's really powerful. And later on, presumably, his intellect will catch up with that, and he'll think it through. And I think this really helps us see a lot of what we need to be working with in convincing people. Because if we start with trying to talk at people and give them rational arguments and we try to give them things to reason about, but they have nothing for the imagination to grasp, they have no meaningful images. We're just going to talk past them. And then all too often we say, oh, they're hard of heart, they're stupid, they're ignorant, they won't listen to us, they're radicalized or they're whatever, they're just so they won't

care, they won't listen to us. Well, no. Actually, the problem is that our words literally don't have any meaning for them. It's not their fault. If they haven't got any meaning for it, they haven't got any meaning for it. Like, they can't make something out of nothing. So we have to give them meaningful images to say, this is what we're talking about. And then we might get somewhere. You know, I speak often for classical Christian education. I got a book called Passing the Torch, an apology for classical Christian education. And it's kind of ironic that this new movement has really come out of a reformed Presbyterian background. And the reason I say that's odd is that when I was growing up, they would say total depravity, but they really meant utter depravity.

Now, total depravity rightly understood is that every part of the person has been subjected to it. And I don't think Aquinas would have had a problem with that. Okay. And it's funny because, you know, Lewis has mere Christianity. He never takes liberty. But he says again and again, I don't believe in total depravity. Well, what he really means is, I don't believe in utter depraise. I don't believe we're so fallen that our black is God's white and our white is God's black. That's really what he's saying. And finally, when the reform people were willing to talk about natural law, which they used to think it was a Catholic thing.

It's not a Catholic thing. It's a Christian thing, right? That we still have a conscience. And it's not like reason is always right and instinct is always wrong. We do have instincts that are right. They're just gone the straight. this directed desire. And Lewis and Tolkien have this way of

getting us back on track. Again, they're able to take a Christian concept and just smuggle it in. You sheltered me from heart. You've been listening to a conversation, a Socrates dialogue, part of Socrates in the city,

between Holly Ordway and Lewis Marcos. The title is Myth as a Vehicle for Truth. Here is more of that. So in the silver chair, in the chronicles of Narnia we have these children Eustace and Jill and they go down into the underland

and rescue Prince Rillian who's been under a spell from this evil green witch and they rescue him and they're about to leave and then the witch shows up and you think she's going to try to kill them but instead she closes the door she goes over to the fire she throws this green

dust in there everything becomes heavy and sleepy and she says children where are you going Oh, we're going back to Narnia. Nornia, where it's up there? This is the world. And they immediately think that there is no real world. And then puddle glum, the marshal.

Well, there's the sun. What is this thing called Sun? She's struggling on a mandolin hypnotically. What is this? Well, you see that torch? Well, imagine that torch was bigger and bigger. That would be the sun. Oh, I see.

We're playing a game. You looked at a torch and wondered what it would be like if it got bigger. And then she does the same thing with the ass land, the lion. Oh, you saw a cat. And imagine what it would be if it was bigger. And you made up a game. And what's amazing is that they're all convinced. Now, this is like Plato's allegory of the cave.

But if I may say this, it's more brilliant. Because in Plato's allegory of the cave, we have always grown up only seeing shadows and thinking their reality. But these children have seen Aslan. They know he's real. They've seen the sun. They know it's real. and in a matter of 10 minutes, Harvard University, because that's what it is, has convinced them that everything they know is real is an illusion.

And this is actually deep for children because Freud wrote a book called Moses and Monotheism, where he said, Moses just took his earthly father and projected it upward to create the heavenly father. And that's just not the way reality works. earthly fatherhood is a falling away from divine fatherhood. Lust did not sublimate itself into love. Lust is a falling away from love. And so Lewis is able to teach these deeply theological things by appealing to, again, a kind of comment in that hideous state. It doesn't even say all that, what he says.

Or maybe all that is true. You can't crush it like a nerve. there's a truth in there. And again, I think we can appeal to people who've had their desires misdirected to remember what they know is true. They were not just born blank slates, but they were born with meaning and purpose,

and we have to figure out what that is. I think I want to push back a little bit here now because in one sense, Lewis is making an apologetics argument. But I worry sometimes that we might too easily take Lewis and Tolkien and sort of try to put him on a particular side. And so I noticed the you named like Harvard University is the Greenwich. And I would say that's not quite fair.

What I mean is modern, postmodern education that tries to tell us that what we know is real is not. So he's not attacking specifically. Right. But I think the challenge here is to realize that we all have that temptation to distort reality regardless of our position. So I think, you know, a lot of Christians will try to kind of slant things as well and say, well, all that science stuff, that's just liberal lies. And we don't need to pay any attention to that. We're just going to read what the scriptures tell us from this particular perspective that we're not going to think about how we got that perspective.

And then, of course, the young people go, you know, out of the, out of the, you know, their little nest and discover people who have different views, and they think, what's this contradiction? So I think you can kind of get, if I may say so, maybe not the green witch, but the purple witch, you know, struggling and saying, oh, yes, science, so there's none of that. That's all just a lie. We don't have to think about science.

Just pray. You don't need medicine for depression. You know, don't even think about going to see a therapist. Just pray harder. And, of course, you get people who get really hurt by that because they're told that they need to see the world in a very rigid way, according to what they had been told is the faith. But it turns out, I mean, this is much more capacious

because God made the entire cosmos, and it gave us the intellect to figure out how that cosmos works. And because of the natural law, people who don't know anything about God can still figure out a lot of true things about the cosmos and share them. So I just push back a little bit to say, it's not maybe quite so clear cut. And of course, Lewis writing in the UK,

we mustn't take his views and just sort of put them on to America grappling of modernism and postmodernism. So I think this might be an interesting time to shift over to one of the questions that we've been thinking about, which is the ways in which Tolkien and Lewis can sometimes be misrepresented

or have their ideas sort of, you know, twisted in ways that they shouldn't go. And I'm thinking about, you know, one thing about Tolkien. In the 1960s, his work was really co-opted by the American hippies. And, of course, Tolkien was still alive at this point, and he sort of rolled his eyes at the whole Frodo lives and Go Go Gandalf. But he also had a real sympathy for it. He commented that, you know, these hippies, much as he didn't like their aesthetic and all that, he did respect. He did that they were going against the sort of drab authoritarianism that they were growing up in. And he respected that.

They were trying to get something more vivid and real and true, even though he wasn't really keen on the direction they were going in. And, of course, taking the Lord of the Rings and making it into some sort of, you know, eco-warrier tract is a misuse of the text. You know, drawing us like this real, and I mean, he really did love trees more than the average person. So that's not what the text is about. The Lord of the Rings is not, you know, for that. And I found out a long time ago. Today on this program, we're playing a Socrates dialogue, a conversation under Socrates in the city between C.S. Lewis, I'm sorry,

between Holly Ordway and Louis Marcos about C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien. It's terrific. Here it is. Now, as we think about where is Tolkien in the 21st century, I see sometimes people who try to claim him for right-wing politics. And that is so mistaken, I don't even hardly know where to start, because Tolkien really opposed totalitarianism and specifically fascism. And he was very much against sort of the worship of the big man, which in his day would have been Mussolini and Hitler.

He said that he had a demonic inspiration and impetus. And literally demonic, I think he meant. He wasn't just being hyperbolic. And he called him a ruddy little ignoramus. And to give Lewis abundant credit, Lewis also called out Hitler and Hitler's evil long before. But I think the important thing to recognize is that around this time, now we think Hitler, okay, he might as well wear a big sign.

This is a bad guy. No, no, there were a lot of people who were looking at Hitler and saying, he's getting stuff done. There were a lot of British fascists. They thought this was great. And, you know, it's tragic. Including the one who almost became king. Exactly, yeah.

So we're not looking at a really clear-cut, you know, in hindsight, it's not as clear-cut as it seems clear-cut now, but it wasn't so much then. But Tolkien and Lewis both were very clear-eyed, and they saw Hitler, fascism, totalitarianism, the abuse of power. And that is actually a challenge to the far-right wing, especially in America, where they want to use power.

And this, I think, starts to shift us into, I think, a more nuanced understanding of how Tolkien and Lewis speak to our times. Because Tolkien was very clear that the Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. Now, we can pick up this up in an allegory later because it's very interesting. But specifically, it is not an allegory, and specifically, it's not an allegory of the Second World War. See, he was getting people who are writing to him saying, oh so is Sauron Stalin or Haley? No.

It's not an allegory. It has applicability, but it's not an allegory. But he does say that it works with certain themes, and one of them is about power and about the desire to seize divine power. And that's always the temptation of authoritarianism, which shifts into fascism. It starts out with good intentions so often, not always,

but so often it starts with good intentions. And Tolkien even has Gandalf addressed that. Because Frodo, why don't you take the ring? Gandalf says, no, no, no, no, no. It would start off perfectly well. I would want to do good things with the ring. But then he says, I would become just this horrible fire. And Galadro says the same.

Exactly. It would begin that way, but it didn't in that way. Yeah. What do you think about this? Because I think if we want to, you know, we don't want to peg people. But I don't know about you, Holly, but I'm very hopeful that the new Pope has taken Pope, Pope Leo. And I'm hoping the reason he did that is the last Pope Leo

gave us Reram-Novarum and talked about the idea of subsidiarity. It's sort of Catholic social teaching that you should do things in the smallest level possible, which I think is the shire. I don't want to peg him, but I think it's helpful to say that, yes,

I would say Lewis and Tolkien are conservative, but that doesn't mean Republican. They're conservative. They don't like big government, but they also don't like big business. They want to do something on the lower, more human level. Maybe you can think of Wendell Berry, agrarianism, and I don't want to make an exact link, but I think if there's some way we can understand it, we have this desire to get back to the human and not trusting mass

anything. Exactly. And I think subsidiarity is such an important to be talking about today. Because, of course, subsidiarity isn't just about doing things at the smallest level. It's about doing things at the smallest level that is possible to do them. Because not all things are possible to do at the local level. So in the Shire, for instance, there's a lot of things that are done in the local level. But Tolkien is clear that they have been protected by the Rangers. Right, right. Even though I didn't know it, that the Rangers, so one level higher up,

are able to do things for the Shire that they can't do for themselves. And when Erigorn becomes king, he then is establishing the rule of law throughout the kingdom. So there's that sense of, okay, it's not just about let's scrap the entire system of authority. It's about saying what are the things that we can do at the local level and should do? And one of the things that, okay, we need to come together to do. And Tolkien recognizes that there are things. He has King Aragorn who does things, including one of the things that I think is underappreciated. One of his first acts as king is, do you remember how there's the Ganbury Gan and his people?

Oh, yes, yes, yeah, the quote primitive people. Exactly, yeah, who actually turn out to. And not to be too primitive, but yeah. Yeah, well, they turn out to challenge the racism of Aeomer. No, no, actually, we actually, we know what's going on here. But the wild men of the woods have been hunted by the Rohiram. So Tolkien is acknowledging that the wild men of the woods have been the recipients of racism and oppression. Well, that's happened to the Aborigines in Australia.

Exactly. It's happened to the Native Americans in America not so long ago on our history, alas. And so this is an injustice that has happened. And so one of the first things that Erdogan does is he gives them the Farisudoran for their own. and he declares that no longer will they be hunted. And that, I think, is an example that Tolkien's giving us to kind of balance the shire, because the shire, okay, they're dealing with their own affairs as they should, subsidiarity.

But at the same time, it takes the king to say, here is an injustice that we must set right. These people have been oppressed, and now we're going to allow them to self-rule, and we're not going to let them be, you know, oppressed and killed anymore. You know, Barloman Butterboro, you know, at the end of the prancing pony, he realizes, maybe we did need the... Rangers, right? And then there's a wonderful moment where Gando says there's now a king in the throne and he's about to turn his eye this way, as if that will clean up the roads. I mean,

you know, in Prince Caspian, Caspian comes back and he falls in with two dwarves, trumpkin and nickabric and a badger named Truffle Hunter. And Truffle Hunter says, you'll be my king, Caspian. And the dwarves, you want to give the, you know, Narnia to the humans? And he says, no, no, Narnia is a land for talking animals, but it's a land for a man to be king, because Aslan established, sons of Adam, daughters of Eve, they're going to be the royalty. And so there is a balance. He doesn't believe that Narnia belongs to the humans. It belongs to the talking animals, the Seder's all that. But there's a proper ordering in which it works the best when you've got a son of Adam on the throne. And also, both Lewis and Tolkien have very

clear that to be a son of Adam, to be a king, whether it's Caspian or Aragorn, calls for virtue. Folks, today we're playing a Socrates in the city dialogue between Holly Ordway and Louis Marcos. The title of it is myth as a vehicle for truth. Here it is. It's very clear that to be a leader, you don't just say, oh, lucky me. I get to rule and now it all gets to go this way. No, there's a responsibility. And of course, Aragorn has prepared for his entire life, very long life. And Caspian, likewise, is shorter life, but he's been preparing. And they're both characters who are actively virtuous.

And I think that's something that both Tolkien and Lewis are really, I think, calling our attention to this need for virtue, for personal virtue. There's a wonderful moment near the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Caspian wants to go with Riepeachie to the end of the world. And Riepeachie says, you can't do that. What do you mean I can't? You cannot do that. You're not a private person to follow your desires.

You have a kingdom. And of course, Lucy reminds him of the daughter of the star that you've got to go back. So the king can't do whatever he wants. And, you know, Azzellan always has his little catechisms about will you be the, you know, first in battle and the last to leave? Will you, you know, hurt so your people can. There's a sense that the king. We need that so much today. Exactly.

The idea of responsibility and duty is beautiful. And it really comes back to the Christian ideal. You know, he who would be, you know, leader must be servant of all. We tend to miss that out. There's a lot that Jesus said that we kind of don't maybe look at as closely as we would. No, no, to be servant. Environmentalism, stewardship of nature, that's okay. Okay, not deifying nature, but we are stewards and responsible.

And, you know, he's always taking care of the animals and stuff like that. It's quite an amazing thing. then Tolkien both have this, and Lewis himself was against what he called vivisection. I guess we would call it animal experimentation. He was against that way, and I don't remember if Tolkien spoke on that, but I'm sure he would be against it. But Lewis specifically, you know, is an essay where he's against it. Yeah, because cruelty is always wrong.

Yeah, yeah. And this is something that I think we tend to forget. We live in an age of instrumentality, of utilitarianism. We have a mind of metal and wheels? We do? I think we do. And I think it becomes very easy to sort of say, what's that terrible phrase? Well, if you want an omelet, you've got to break some eggs.

Well, okay, that's great if you want to make an omelet, but human beings are not eggs. And if we are breaking people to get what we want, perhaps what we want is not what we should want. Or perhaps we should go about it a different way. Cruelty should never be part of our process. And that's something that I think we need to come to grips with better in our current culture. Maybe there are some things we shouldn't have. Exactly. You know, there is such a thing as forbidden wisdom.

Yeah. And both Lerney and Lord of the Rings are places where people that breach that taboo and seek, you know, the white witch found the secret of the deplorable word that would destroy everything, right? And she said, I paid a terrible price to get it. Even Uncle Andrew said his hair went gray seeking after these secrets he shouldn't have known. And we, you know, Sarammon and Ghalam, right from the beginning, Ghalam is seeking after a wisdom that is not meant for him. And it destroys him from the inside out.

Yeah. So we have to be aware. You know, what's the old thing, you know, beware what you wish for. You may have the misfortune to get it. And we do see characters like that. And, you know, I'm just, you know, magician's nephew is still for kids. And yet we can understand Jadis and Uncle Andrew, the two villains. are basically what Nietzsche would call them ubermans, and overmen.

They think that the rules don't apply to them because they've got this charisma that allows them to rise above beyond good and evil. And you see the same thing with a character like Saruman especially. Yeah. But yet, how much do we need to be reminded of the Augustinian understanding that evil is spoiled goodness? Do you think we need to be reminded of that again? Yeah, and I think I do.

And this leads us into an interesting aspect of Tolkien's work, because sometimes people, they think about how Tolkien handles evil, how Lewis handles evil, and I think people can have a simplistic reading of the Lord of the Rings. I think of Sauron in the dark tower there, you know, at Mount Doom, and they think of it as being like, oh, evil, you know, it's a bad guy versus the good guys. And, of course, then I'm saying, have you actually read the book? Yeah, that's right, yeah.