Truth Unites - The Night Tolkien Convinced C.S. Lewis of Christ (The Power of Myth)

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Gavin Ortlund explores the famous 1931 conversation between Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson to explore how myth and storytelling might point to the truth of Christianity.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth.Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

On September 19, 1931, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson stayed up late into the night talking. The conversation was instrumental in C.S. Lewis becoming a Christian, as we'll recount in this video. And it raises a question for us to work through here, and that is, do stories point to Christianity? This human tendency for storytelling is absolutely fascinating when you think about it. And it raises religious questions. For example, why do stories and myths from all different cultures? around the world in all different times tend to reflect the same basic elements like good versus evil, a happy ending, and suffering and sacrificial love. These elements can be expressed in all different kinds of forms like Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star with the help of the Millennium Falcon and Obi-1 Canobi, Marty McFly and Doc Brown making it back to 1985, restoring his family to well-being, the Avengers closing the wormhole and bringing Loki to justice for his crime. Rocky Balboa, surviving 15 rounds against Apollo Creed, proving that he's not just another bum from the streets. Chris Gardner getting the job offer when he's walking out of the building, finally having a breakthrough in his life.

Enigo Montoya finding the six-fingered man and Wesley and Princess Buttercup being reunited. We could go on and on and on. Just a couple of examples of great movies there. Most of you will be familiar with them. You could think of classic hero versus villain pairs like Batman versus the Joker. or Sherlock Holmes versus Moriarty or the Autobots versus the Decepticons. We could stack up different examples from children's movies to sports movies, I was thinking of remember the Titans, to sci-fi, to westerns and all across the genres

with some variation, and it's stronger in some genres than others. But you get the idea here that amidst all this variation of circumstance and detail, there's an underlying moral pattern to the stories that we tell. Good has to fight evil and overcome evil through struggle and courage and suffering and so forth. And this moral shape that characterizes stories isn't totally universal, and it is more pronounced in some genres than others, but it's common enough to be discerned as a clear tendency in the human heart across different cultures. Sometimes, by the way, the evil is not in people, but there's evil in nature or in systems or machines or aliens. So leave room for, though usually in those kinds of stories, you have good and evil characters as well.

That's one of the interesting things about zombie novels. My oldest brother wrote a zombie novel. Other kinds of genres like this, what you get to do is you get to show the real threat is usually not the non-human danger. It's usually actually other human beings around you. So sometimes those genres actually make the point even more. But the point is even when it's even like a movie like Jaws or something like a survival story, movies are never just about random striving for power. There's this moral dimension that's almost always there and a moral structure to the drama and a heightened sense of significance as a result of the moral drama. We have this sense in our hearts that good should defeat evil. And we want that and it feels right when it happens. So that raises the question, why is this in the human heart? Why do we tell stories over and over of good, triumphing over evil like this,

Is there any significance to that? Well, this is the topic that is being debated between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, starting in the 1920s in Oxford, England, where they are both teaching. They first meet in 1926, and over the next several years, Lewis's atheism is suffering some major blows. And by the spring of 1929, or possibly 1930, if Alistair McGrath is right, the date is disputed. You can see his case in his 2013 biography for that. but in either which way he becomes a theist at a certain point. And so you've probably heard this passage from his autobiography surprised by joy, where C.S. Lewis describes himself as the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. But that passage and that conversion is to

theism. It is not to Christianity. It's later in 1931 that Lewis becomes a Christian, and a key catalyst for that is this question of the role of stories, or to use the less generic term and the better term myths. Myths are a particular kind of story that are often seen as pointing to a deeper truth. This is a huge point of debate between Lewis and Tolkien in the late 20s and into the early 30s, and it comes to a head on September 19th, 1931, on an evening walk around Addison's walk, which is a trail on the grounds of Modlin College at the University of Oxford. There are three people present. C.S. Lewis, who's 32, Tolkien, who's 39, and then Hugo Dyson, who's 35.

They eventually retire to Lewis's room, and they keep talking late into the night. Tolkien leaves around 3 a.m., and Lewis and Dyson keep talking until about 4 a.m. Dyson was a good counterpart complimenting Tolkien, because Tyson is a little more energetic, and he's emphasizing the emotional qualities of myths, whereas Tolkien is giving these arguments. he's a little more calm and methodical in his appeal, but they're a good tag team over and against Lewis, and they have an impact. Just imagine being there to listen in on this conversation.

Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greaves about it later, and he's explaining that they began talking about metaphor and myth, and then he says, imagine this moment, we were interrupted by a rush of wind, which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening, and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing, almost as you would, we continued in my room on Christianity, a good, long, satisfying talk in which

I learned a lot, then discussed this difference between love and friendship, then finally drifted back to poetry and books. For some reason, I just love this detail of the leaves coming down and all three of these men stopping and standing, especially because of what we're going to talk about in a moment, about the significance of trees from Tolkien's perspective and eventually Lewis's as well. within two weeks of that conversation, Lewis had become a Christian, and he explains that this conversation had much to do with it. So let's talk about this. What were they talking about? All three of these men shared a deep, emotional love for mythology. But Lewis thought basically that myths were just lies, and there's no underlying truth to them. So, for example,

Tolkien and Lewis loved Norse mythology. One article that I will link to describes Lewis's love for what he called northernness, an almost visceral pang of longing for the epic, heroic gray filter world described in Norse mythology. For Lewis, myths had this ability to draw up a longing in the human heart, which he associated with joy. He uses this German term to describe this because there's no word in the English language for it, this deep ache and this deep yearning for something transcendent that you can't put into words. It's like the country that you've never visited, but somehow it's your true home and you long to get there. And as a reader, he describes his experience of this particular quality, this what he calls Northerness.

I'll put up an example of a passage like this, just drawing him in and evoking this longing and this memory of joy and so forth. I wonder if anybody out there has had this experience where particular qualities of stories affect you like this. You can't even put it into words. For me, I have, you know, there's a certain scene of a, simply an image in my mind of a green valley between two steep mountains. It's from till we have faces by C.S. Lewis, and just the mere image of it makes me long for heaven

in a way I can't put into words. That's what Lewis is describing here, and he's had that experience. But for him, there's no truth to that. It's just, you know, basically myths are just beautiful lies. In Alan Jacobs' book, The Narnian, which is a cool book about C.S. Lewis really well-written book, he draws attention to this theme throughout Lewis's life that there are these two halves to his mind, his imagination and his rationality. And before he becomes a Christian, these two halves are in tension with each other, but after he becomes a Christian, he's able to reconcile them. Christianity brings together the rationality and the imagination. Let's get this from Lewis's own words, insurprised by joy. He's reflecting about his early years. He says, such then was the

state of my imaginative life. Over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth. On the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved, I believed to be imaginary. Nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless. You think about that language of finding something lovely, but just thinking it's not real. And you think, you know, maybe you've had this experience watching a movie or reading a story and you think, the truths in this story actually feel more important than I actually think. think the world is? There's a Christian explanation behind that that Lewis eventually comes to.

One of the struggles he has is the relationship between Christianity and these other pagan myths. Because Lewis, at this point, just thinks they're all false. They're just beautiful lies. And the idea of accepting only one, but still rejecting all the others, therefore, seems kind of arbitrary. He says, no one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled paganism or paganism prefigured Christianity. The acceptance is that. position seems to be that religions were normally a mere farago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was true. So that was a hanging point as well for him that he eventually works through, and Tolkien and Dyson are helping him. He also struggled particularly with the

idea of the atonement. And this idea that Christ's death and resurrection, he sees this as just one more iteration of the common mythic motif of a dying and rising God. So he's saying, why would make an exception here? So this is where Tolkien and Dyson are able to be able to be able to be. to help him, and it can help us as well to think about this. They help him understand that a myth is a profound vehicle for expressing truth. It's not a deception. It's a window into truth. They argue that myths are humanity's way of longing for and groping toward the divine. And they're saying that basically the reason they're spread throughout all cultures is because all humans are made in the image of God, and we instinctively sense that there's a

larger story behind the world. Tolkien uses the term sub-creation to describe this tendency in the human heart to tell stories that unconsciously mirror the ultimate story because we're made in the image of God. And for Tolkien and other Christians like Dorothy Sayers, this storytelling capacity is hugely significant. It's central to our humanity, to what makes us human beings. So Tolkien uses as one example of that the term eucatastrophe to describe the sudden happy ending that tends to characterize the stories we tell. And he says this is a little window into a deeper reality at the heart of the universe. It's a glimpse into an underlying reality.

I talk about that more in other places. So for Tolkien, Jesus is the true myth. His life and resurrection is humanity's happy ending. quote, the birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of man's history, the resurrection is the eucatography of the story of the incarnation. So he's helping his friend C.S. Lewis understand this, and he writes a poem after this conversation called Mythopia, and it's dedicated to Lewis. You can see the dedication on the screen. Lewis had said that myths are lies breathed through silver, and the Latin terms there mean myth lover to myth hater. He starts off talking about trees and trees.

and stars. And he's essentially saying, you look at these, but you can't really see that there's anything more to them. Let me just read this to start it off. I won't read the whole poem because it's really long and really good. You can read the whole thing online. Quote, you look at trees and label them just so, for trees are trees and growing is to grow. You walk the earth and tread with solemn pace, one of the many minor globes of space. A star is a star, some matter in a ball, compelled to courses mathematical, amid the regimented cold inane where destined atoms are each moment slain. I just did a video on a Christian view of the stars that Tolkien held and Lewis would come to hold, namely that they have an association with angels. Another interesting aspect of creation from a Christian perspective is trees.

For both Lewis and Tolkien, trees have a spiritual significance. Tolkien had this view at this point, Lewis came to this view. Trees reflect the glory of God in a particular way as a symbol of God's original intention for the world, where they convoke beauty and life and rootedness and harmony and the passing and turning of one season to another. And what they're saying is that trees are a kind of sacrament. They point to this truth that creation is meaningful. Creation is alive under God. Creation conveys a sense of the Creator.

God speaks through creation. So it's not just empty matter, God is whispering to us through the trees and the stars and other things. And by the way, that view of trees gets reflected then in their fiction with the ends in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And also in Lewis's where, and the Chronicles of Narnia, you'll find language about how even some of the trees are on the witches' side and this kind of thing. So Tolkien is highlighting the barrenness of Lewis's worldview, where it's just nothing other than physical matter in contrast to this rich, vibrant, enchanted vision of the physical world, such as stars and trees. And Tolkien is unfolding in his poem how the Christian view of nature is so much better. He says, trees are not trees until so named and seen.

Speaking of the stars, he says, he sees no stars who does not see them first of living silver made that sudden burst to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song. more about how enchanted is a Christian view of the stars. Watch my video on that. Point is, you can't understand trees and stars until you see them for their deeper spiritual significance beyond just a materialist explanation of what they're made out of. And to do that requires myth. Myth is the mode of knowing that allows us to perceive the meaning of the world around us. You don't arrive at the deepest truth by dissecting a leaf or calculating a star's mass but by entering a story.

Myth is how the human heart does justice to the world's depth. Without a mythic imagination, you cannot even look at the stars well and understand what they are. Or look at a tree, like the beautiful tree that's just changing colors of the leaves in my backyard right now and understand a single tree can tell you something about the universe if you're looking at it from the right angle. And Tolkien is saying, our myth-telling instinct is not a mere. wish fulfillment like Lewis thinks at this point in his life. It's not escapism. It's a kind of perception. And the reason of, again, has to do with this idea of subc creation. In one sentence in this poem, he sums it up well by saying, we make still by the law in which we were made. In other words,

because we ourselves, our creatures, were made in God's image, we're part of God's story. We instinctively tell stories that are patterned after that, after the real world. And in an important passage, he develops this, and what he's showing is that our fallenness has not stripped away the awareness that God has deeply implanted in us about our dignity, almost the way like the conscience is implanted in us as a form of divine revelation. He says, the heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only wise, and still recalls him, though long now estranged, man is not wholly lost or wholly changed, disgraced he may be, yet he is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned.

So for Tolkien, our storytelling capacity is a part of our being made in God's image, and therefore it is a God-given organ of perception, a way of discerning truth that reason alone cannot touch. You can see how this dispute is going to go right to the core of what it means to be a human being. Is this tendency in the human heart, the good versus evil, the house? happy ending, this way of spinning out stories, a deception or an accident or actually a clue. Ultimately, Lewis comes to believe with Tolkien and Dyson that stories convey deep truths

that are ultimately expressed and fulfilled in Christianity. And these deep truths include not just the meaning of good versus evil, the ultimate victory of good over evil, what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe, the value of heroism and sacrifice and love and courage, but more specific the dying and rising hero, which Lewis connected with belief in Pagel, Balder, the Norse god of light and beauty, who's the son of Odin, Adonis from Greek mythology, various other Greek figures as well, and we can obviously connect that with many modern stories as well. You see the dying rising motif all over in stories. Neo in the Matrix is a more obvious expression, but if you keep your eyes peeled for this, you can see it in more subtle expressions like Harold Crick in

Stranger Than Fiction, which is an amazingly well-done movie. I love that movie. And it's the same thing over and over. When you accept death, you truly find life. Lewis came to see this, fulfilled ultimately in Christ, the true myth, the story behind every story. And the following month, he wrote to Greaves again, explaining that Dyson and Tolkien enabled him to understand the relation of Christ and myth, and saying, the story of Christ is simply a true myth. A myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. Here's how Lewis put it elsewhere. Speaking of the gospel accounts, if ever a myth had become fact had been incarnated, it would be just like this. Here and here only. In all time,

the myth must have become fact, the word, flesh, God, man. This is not a religion nor a philosophy. It is the summing up an actuality of them all. Some up from this, the question we can ask ourselves and pose for application is, do we have a worldview that can explain why stories move us the way they do? In a naturalistic worldview, stories exist in different human cultures purely as the result of evolutionary psychology. On this few stories developed in the way they did, not because they point to something transcendent, but because they helped our animal ancestors survive. Therefore, they are accidental and frequently illusory. So our longing for a moral meaning and a happy ending is not a clue. It's just a psychological byproduct of natural selection.

Think of the difference, how profound this is. In naturalism, stories resonate because essentially, at core, they're tricking us. They're making us feel some kind of significance. that isn't actually there. For Lewis and for Tolkien and in a Christian outlook, stories resonate because they are telling us the truth, in fact, the deepest truth. They're giving us a window into the heart of the universe. The story that is happening. So think about your favorite stories. Maybe it's Batman rising again in the Dark Night Rises coming out of the ashes to overcome Bain. Maybe it's Simba climbing pride rock in the rain, reclaiming his fallen kingdom and restoring the land. Maybe it's when beast is transformed, when Bell finally falls in love with him

just in time to break the spell at the last possible moment. Think of Andy Dufresne escaping through the tunnel, lifting his hands in the rain. It's like a living image of the theme of that movie, summarized by the quote, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. Here's a favor of mine. Think of Maximus, collapsing in the Coliseum, but he's secured justice for Rome, but then think these little clues when you see his hand waving over the wheat field and there's the hints that theme of that movie is the afterlife. There is something more beyond the grave. This life is not all there is. You see this message seeping through in every movie you've ever seen over and over and over coming from every possible angle at us. Is this divine revelation

as poignant and as thick as conscience? Good versus evil. Good finally defeat. evil, but it takes suffering and sacrifice to do this, and it matters that it happens. What if that storytelling instinct in the human heart isn't a delusion or an accident? What if it's a clue, like Lewis and Tolkien and Dyson came to believe? What if Jesus is the story behind every other story?