In Lewis’s personal life a very significant meeting occurred on the 11th in 1926. Prior to returning to the Christian faith Lewis met J.R.R. Tolkien, who not long after became one of two friends that were invaluable aids in Lewis’s conversion. They first met on that date in May at an Oxford English faculty tea, but Lewis wasn’t all that impressed by him. However, they soon became good friends once it was discovered that they each shared a love of “Northernness” and enjoyed Norse mythology. Because of their mutual interests they began getting together to discuss them (an ultimately their own writings) in what eventually became known as the Inklings. One of the outgrowths of this was for them to challenge each other to write a science fiction story from a Christian worldview. Lewis would write a “space-journey” and Tolkien a “time-journey.” Tolkien’s effort was never published during his life, but Lewis’s attempt resulted in the 1938 book, Out of the Silent Planet, which became the first of three books in a series. It’s interesting to note that this effort has some indirect ties to the distancing between Tolkien and Lewis. When the last of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength came out it was immediate recognized as being influenced by the writings of Charles Williams. It was Lewis’s close friendship with Williams that began the decay of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien. Prior to all this, however, Lewis was a key factor in encouraging Tolkien to finish writing The Hobbit and seeking to get it published. He was also a vital influence in the follow-up, The Lord of the Rings.
Then, just over ten years later, on the 21st in 1936, his first scholarly work, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published by Oxford University Press. Interestingly, the idea for this book came the same year (1925) that he obtained his fellowship at Oxford. It was suggested to him by a former tutor, F. P. Wilson, that he should consider writing a book on some characteristic of Medieval thought. About two years later he began the task of creating something that would dramatically build his reputation as a first-rate scholar. The Allegory of Love may not be read by many outside those interested in literary criticism, but it clearly shows that from his early days as a Christian Lewis didn’t see any conflict about being a person of faith who took his “secular” work seriously.
In “Religion without Dogma?” Lewis begins by summarizing Professor Price’s positions into four points and then takes the assertions one at a time. The first, which he disagrees with is “that the essence of religion is belief in God and immortality.” This is also addressed in a chapter in Reflections on the Psalms. One of the other points had to do with the miraculous, which Price stated as something that could not be accepted by those believing in science. Besides addressing this more completely in Miracles: A Preliminary Study, Lewis proclaims in this article that “I do not think that science has shown, or, by its nature, could ever show that the miraculous element in religion is erroneous.”