BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Stephen Hayes is a South African author and Orthodox deacon. His fiction includes the fantasy novels The Enchanted Grove, Of Wheels and Witches, The Year of the Dragon, and Cross Purposes. His nonfiction explores various topics, including missiology, South African history, and the Inklings and missiology. His research includes the books Black Charismatic Anglicans: The Iviyo loFakazi bakaKristu and Its Relations with Other Renewal Movements and African Initiatives in Healing Ministry. He is a former editor of the Pharos Journal of Theology and has been published in Missionalia. He has taught missiology at the University of South Africa, the Orthodox Seminary in Albania and at the Orthodox Catechetical School in Johannesburg.

His work on the Inklings has appeared in various places, including his blogs Khanya and Notes from underground. He also manages the Inklings Groups.io chat, which encourages sharing new developments in Inklings research.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions. As this was an interview conducted over email, some questions and answers appear repetitive, but each of Hayes’ responses added fresh details and points worth considering. The question-and-answer exchange has been published unchanged except for minor grammar changes.

Interview Questions:

How did you first become interested in the Inklings?

My first encounter with the Inklings was when I was a teenager, through some books by C.S. Lewis that my mother had bought when she was returning to the Christian faith after some time of being a “none” as a young adult. I was more interested at that stage than she was, and read Beyond Personality and Mere Christianity, but didn’t get excited about them. A couple of weeks later, however, I read Perelandra, and as I was quite keen on science fiction, I enjoyed that a lot more, but wasn’t sure that the author was the same as the one who had written the other two books. I followed it up pretty quickly with Out of the Silent Planet. I am not sure when I read That Hideous Strength, but it was probably around the same time. At that point they were just stories to me. I got that Maleldil was probably Jesus or God, and that eldila were something like angels, but the theological significance escaped me.

In 1960 I got to know Brother Roger of the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican religious order. We visited him at their priory in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, and he lent us books from the community library. He lent me mostly books by or about the Beat Generation, and to my mother he lent All Hallows Eve, which I also read. That was followed by The Place of the Lion. Again, to me they were just stories. I had no idea that Williams and Lewis knew each other, or that there was such a thing as the Inklings.

In 1963 we read The Greater Trumps. I had never heard of Tarot cards until Brother Roger lent me The Sandcastle, by Iris Murdoch. After reading The Greater Trumps I bought a pack of tarot cards, though they were very hard to find in Johannesburg. I eventually found them in a strange little shop called “The Mystic Bookstore,” where they found a couple of packs at the bottom of a cupboard somewhere—there was absolutely no demand for them.

I studied theology at university. In Theology, discussing theories of the Atonement, the question of “principalities and powers” came up. In Biblical Studies, it came up in dealing with the letters of St Paul. I asked the lecturer about it. In those Cold War days my idea of “principalities” was places like Monaco and Liechtenstein, and “powers” was the USA and USSR. The lecturer recommended that I read a book called Principalities and Powers by G.B. Caird. I did, and a whole lot of things fell into place for me concerning theories of the atonement, and I went on to read Christus Victor by Gustav Aulen. I mentioned this to my mother, and she remarked that it sounded weird, like The Place of the Lion, which I re-read, and a lot of things fell into place all at once.

In September 1965, when I was preparing for my final exams for the BA degree, a friend lent me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and over the next few weeks I devoured all the Narnia stories, and at Christmas 1965 gave them to all the children I knew.

In December 1965 I was working as a bus driver in Johannesburg, trying to save money to go to the UK to do postgraduate studies in theology at Durham. One afternoon in January 1966, when I was about to go to work, a policeman from the Security Police phoned me and said he wanted to come and see me. I said I would go to see him after my overtime in the morning, but I didn’t even go to work that evening, but got in a car, with a friend to take the car back, and drove through the night to the border with Rhodesia, and the next day got a plane from Bulawayo and the following morning arrived in England. I interpreted the security policeman in the light of Maugrim, the head of the witch’s secret police in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Academic theology and fantasy literature by Williams and Lewis, had come together to help me make sense of what was happening in the world and in my own life.

I managed to get a job driving buses in London till the UK academic year started in September, and went on reading Lewis and Williams. In June 1966 I went to Oxford to apply for a bursary from the Dorchester Trustees, who were meeting there. One of the other applicants was John Henderson, who had the previous year been a fellow student at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and was now studying at Westcott House in Cambridge. He told me that there was a new craze among Cambridge students, who were all mad about a book called The Hobbit and another one called The Lord of the Rings by a bloke called Tolkien. The books sounded interesting and I made a note to look out for them. Then he told me something astounding—that this fellow Tolkien knew both C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams and that the three of them regularly went drinking together at a pub in this very town where we were sitting waiting for interviews, and that they called themselves the Inklings.

Within a couple of weeks, I had found and read The Hobbit and in a couple of months, I had also found and read The Lord of the Rings. I later discovered that there were other Inklings as well, but that was when I discovered the link between Lewis and Williams, and that there was a third Inkling, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Was there a point where you shifted from being an Inklings reader to performing scholarship on them?

In 1983 I spoke to an Anglican priest, Robert Clucas, who was working on a Masters dissertation in Missiology on the work of C.S. Lewis and George Macdonald.[1] I was studying missiology at the time myself, and was rather surprised it his choice of field, as I’d thought of C.S. Lewis’s work would have been more relevant to a field like Systematic Theology. I was a bit skeptical about his approach, but began to be more interested in the Inklings as related to my academic field of missiology.

What has kept you interested in them as a group, enough to keep returning to study their work?

I see their work as continuing to be relevant, and in fact increasingly relevant to topics studied and debated by missiologists, such as gospel and culture, and mission and colonialism. In South Africa, the official apartheid ideology was a bone of contention among Christian theologians, some saving it was good and right and just, while others said it was evil and oppressive. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, in which not merely different races, but different species got along well together, spoke to that, and Weston’s speech, trying to justify his imperialist vision to the Oyarsa of Malacandra, dealt with the question of mission and colonialism.

Do you find that having an interdisciplinary background influences your work on the Inklings?

Yes. Missiology itself tends to be interdisciplinary, as it is a kind of applied theology, studying the interaction of the Christian faith and different cultures throughout the world and throughout history, and culture includes literature and the arts.

Do you find your Orthodox perspective informs your approach to the Inklings—spiritual themes you especially emphasize, things of that nature?

Yes. Western Christianity grew into modernity and in many ways helped to shape it. Orthodox Christianity remained essentially premodern, and experienced modernity mainly as an external imposition, from Peter the Great to the Bolsheviks, and therefore tended to see modernity as alien. The Inklings, for the most part, thought there was something in premodern culture that had been lost in modernity, and therefore their writings gave moderns a glimpse into premodern culture and values. They became interpreters of premodernity to the modern world.

The Inklings, especially Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, either incorporate myth into their stories, or create their own. An Orthodox philosopher, Nicolas Berdyaev, said of myth:

“Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality, and with anything, in fact, which is essentially opposed to reality… The creation of myths among peoples denotes a real spiritual life, more real indeed than that of abstract concepts and rational thought. Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do; its nature is bound up with that of symbol. Myth is the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language memory and creative energy of the people… it brings two worlds together symbolically.”[2]

And this is what the Inklings tried to do.

You’ve written some interesting posts on Charles Williams’ work, including his novel Shadows of Ecstasy, and his play The Chapel of the Thorn. How did you first become introduced to his work particularly?

As mentioned above, Brother Roger, of the Community of the Resurrection, lent my mother All Hallows Eve, which I also read, and thereafter most of the other novels. At the time I knew nothing of the Inklings as a group, and so had no idea that Williams knew Lewis, and had not heard of Tolkien or any of the others.

I was at that time an Anglican, and when our parish youth group wanted to have a play-reading evening I asked Brother Roger for a recommendation, and he recommended, and lent us, The House of the Octopus.

Then, as mentioned earlier, in my university studies of theology, the question of St Paul’s mention of “principalities and powers” came up, and the lecturer, Dr. Victor Bredenkamp, recommended that I read G.B. Caird’s Principalities and Powers. Caird was, I believe, a contemporary of Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford so I’d be interested in any information about interaction between them.[3]

If I’m not mistaken, Williams’ fantasy novels had some influence on your own fiction. What are some ways it inspires your stories?

Williams’s novels belong to a sub-genre of fantasy sometimes described as “intrusive fantasy.”[4] Lewis’s That Hideous Strength also belongs to this genre, in which fantastic or mythological creatures intrude into our everyday world. It is a genre that I particularly like, and, as Lewis once said to Tolkien, “if we want more of the kind of stories we like, we shall have to write them ourselves.”

Another author who has written such stories is Alan Garner, and he, like Williams, incorporates creatures from mythology and folklore into his stories. So, in writing fiction, I’ve tried to write intrusive fantasy like Williams, and also to incorporate creatures from mythology and folklore, as Williams and Garner did.

Given that you’ve published work on charismatic Christianity, I’m curious: any thoughts on how Williams or the other Inklings talk about the spiritual life? Mysticism, things of that nature?

The charismatic renewal movement had a particular effect on South African Christianity in the 1960s and 1970s, which has hardly been documented, and I thought there was a need to document it. After 1979 it tended to disintegrate.

An example of the link is a Bible study I was leading in Durban in the mid-1970s, in an upper-middle class white suburb. Most of the group were established Christians who had been coming to church for years. There were also two recently-married young women who had had little church involvement before, and had a largely secular worldview, but had been drawn through the charismatic renewal movement. I gave them Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy to read. Our Bible study was on politics and there were certain passages from Revelation that the older members could not grasp at all. But the two young women who had read the Cosmic Trilogy perked up and got all excited and said, “So that’s what it’s about, it’s all in those books.” The writings of the Inklings enabled charismatics to understand the Bible where others couldn’t.

There has been some interesting work about how Lewis handles colonialism in his science fiction, including your blog post about how Cecil Rhodes may have partially inspired Dick Devine. Any thoughts on how the Inklings deal with colonialism in their work?

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and a growing number of supporters of these in the USA. Christian Nationalism was the ideology that held South Africa in thrall from 1948 to 1994, but Lewis deals with it pretty directly with the issue of Telmarine supremacy in Prince Caspian. Aslan’s message to the Telmarine supremacists in Narnia is crystal clear—if you are prepared to live in peace with the Old Narnians and get along with them, you may stay, but if not, it’s best that you leave. And, as I have mentioned, Ransom had great difficulty in translating Weston’s imperialist speech to the Oyarsa of Malacandra, who had little experience of human sinfulness. 

Since your work includes supporting Inklings scholarship discussions, I’m curious. Any advice for researchers looking to underexplored areas?

I’ve already mentioned one, but repeat it: Is there any record of contact between any of the Inklings and G.B. Caird? Any record of opinions any of them had of Caird’s work, or that he had of theirs?

Likewise, any record of any contact between any of the Inklings and Nicolas Zernov, an Orthodox author who lived in Oxford?[5]

Any projects you’re especially excited about that you would like to share?

I’ve been trying my hand at writing urban fantasy (my previous efforts could be regarded as rural fantasy) with a different set of characters, and am waiting for a few more reports from beta readers before polishing it up for possible publication.

Also, a second edition of my children’s book Of Wheels and Witches is in preparation.

Stephen Hayes’ updates on his work can be found on his website Notes from underground, as well as Mastodon, Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter.

Interviewer Footnotes

[1] This appears to be the thesis by Robert Stephen St John Clucas, “Myth and Fantasy in Faith and Mission,” (MTh thesis: University of South Africa, 1983) cited by Ian C. Storey in “An Annotated Bibliography to C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces: a myth retold,” Trent University, 2020, p. 11. Outside of this citation, not much is known about Clucas’s work. He was cited for his work with the Missiology Project of the University of South Africa’s Institute for Theological Research in at least two editorials by David J. Bosch in Missionalia (Bosch, “Editorial,” vol. 11, no. 2, August 1983, p. 42, and Bosch, “Editorial,” vol. 13, no. 3, November 1985, p. 93). ). A writer with a similar name wrote “The positive contribution of the religious life to the life of the church,” (BDiv, Rhodes University, 1957). Any fresh insights into this topic are welcome.

[2] This quote is from Freedom and the Spirit, by Nicolas Berdyaev, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935, p. 70. Hayes has quoted it in his blog post “Bourgeois theology,” Khanya, September 16, 2013.

[3] To the best of the interviewer’s knowledge, this question has not been answered, although Caird’s work has been mentioned in secondary scholarship. Paul S. Fiddes cites Baird’s book Powers and Principalities when he discusses Williams’ work (“Charles Williams and the Problem of Evil,” in C.S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, edited by Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan N. Wolfe, Oxford University Press, 2015, 65-88; 87). Scot McKnight has compared and contrasted Baird’s theology with Lewis’s theology in two Substack articles (“Mission Statements, Boundaries, and C.S. Lewis,” Mar 10, 2024; “C.S. Lewis and G.B. Baird,” Mar 13, 2024). Baird’s theology books have more generally been discussed alongside Lewis’ books in various articles (for example, “For Churchmen: Recommendations from an Embarrassment of Riches,” Rev. Robert J. Page, The Living Church, May 17, 1964, p. 15).

[4] For a full definition of this subgenre, see Farah Mendelsohn, “Introduction,” Rhetorics of Fantasy, Wesleyan University Press, 2008, pp. xii-xxv; xxi-xxii.

[5] James M. Houston recalls that Lewis was a friend of Zernov, with whom Houston shared an Oxford apartment of South Parks Road from 1947 to 1954; Houston reports that Lewis came to the apartment every Wednesday from 1947 to 1956 to take part in a discussion group (“Reminisces of the Oxford Lewis,” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society, Vol. 7, No. 2 (August 1983), pp. 6-12; “C.S. Lewis’s Concern for the Future of Humanity,” C.S. Lewis Institute, March 3, 2006; “The Prayer-Life of C.S. Lewis,” C.S. Lewis Institute, January 6, 2010).