Tolkien: Does He Matter?

Joseph at Ironical Coincidings published this post the other day, discussing what it means to "Inherit Tolkien". He pointed out that he's moved away in some respects from his youthful affiliation with Tolkien, and mentioned towards the end that I seemed to have done likewise, asking for my input on what I had done with the old, pipe-smoking, armchair-loving linguist. It's a question that I found very interesting; partly because Joseph seemed to be suggesting that the two options for what to do with him are either to relegate him to the children's bookshelf (not something I'd think appropriate) or to interpret him in a way compatible with modernity. This second possibility could be read two ways: either it means finding a justification for Tolkien's work within the aesthetic criteria of literary modernism (in which case, I think one would need to look for a third solution), or showing that Tolkien was in fact responding to concerns of the modern world, though he found it necessary to move into the realm of fantasy to formulate his response. It's that latter possibility that I agree with, to some extent. It does leave out part of the truth: Tolkien started the story primarily as a way to indulge his hobby of language-creation, not so much to "send a message" or "address" anything; that came along naturally when he started to craft the story.

Anyway, the question is pertinent also to this blog in the sense that, as Joseph points out, it was started with Tolkien and his friends as the primary inspiration: just look at its name. So I'm copying the response I posted on his blog and reproducing it here. Despite the fact that it's a bit jumbled at times, it does, I think, give a bit of insight into how Tolkien can still be an "inspiration" years after discussion of his work fell by the wayside.

See Joseph's second post in the series for background for my occasional references to Gene Wolfe.

My attempt at an answer:

It’s interesting that you bring this up when you do, because I had begun to notice how far I’d moved from the original focus of my blog about two months ago. Accordingly, the updated “look” of the site dropped the Tolkien photo, which seemed a bit out of keeping with the content, and replaced it with a non-author specific photo: just a bunch of bookshelves from the tiny used bookstore in my hometown. Even the place where that photo was taken reflects my shift in focus…you mention T.S. Eliot as having supplanted Tolkien in my consciousness, which in a literary-critical sense is true, but even my initially strictly-New-Critical focus on literature has expanded to be more like cultural criticism than anything else. Not that I like the way most cultural criticism is done, but I was getting rather sick of thinking about literature in a vacuum, which (pure) New Criticism would have you do.

Questions about literature in my blog have been overshadowed by questions about the relationship between geographical places, their history, the culture of the people there, and in turn the relationship between the sum of those aspects and the sum of those found in completely different geographical areas. I’m beginning–and this is kind of natural, given that I’m over here studying “Belgian” literature and finding that the first question that needs to be asked is “Is there a Belgian literature?” Or even, “Is there any such thing, really, as a Belgian?”

When considering this shift, I'm not sure myself if it’s permanent, or simply a stage informed by my previous ideas about literature. But whether a permanent shift or a temporary stage, the fact that it’s “informed” by my earlier ideas is unquestionable. Which brings me back to Tolkien.

I, like you, was introduced to Tolkien at an early age: my dad read us the Hobbit when I was five; I had finished the trilogy by the time I was about eight. And I’m indebted to the fellow on several levels. For one thing, finishing the trilogy taught me that I could read “grown-up” literature. Without having crossed that threshold chez Tolkien, I wouldn’t have read Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, or Bleak House, or Crime and Punishment, or any of the other classics I devoured well before high school. So in a sense, reading “serious literature” had its roots in Tolkien, though even that far back it was fairly obvious that Tolkien wasn’t “serious” in the sense that a lot of that other literature was. I did consider him an important literary figure, but that was more for his translations of Beowulf and Sir Gawain, his linguistic skills, and his encouragement of Nordic mythology–one reason I’d object to what Wolfe says is that I think Tolkien considered himself an “heir” of Dante only in the sense that he was Catholic–aesthetically, it was always the Beowulf-type story that attracted him.

But honestly, I’m not entirely ready to put Tolkien on trial to see whether his work can be called “great literature”. I always conceived of it as doing something very consciously different than the mainstream of literature, and I don’t mind that. He wasn’t a writer, primarily; not friends with Hemingway or Woolf or any of those. He was just a linguist who could tell a darn good story. Whatever literary critics will make of Tolkien, the fact remains that he is much more widely and passionately read than Woolf or Faulkner or Hemingway. As great and innovative as all of them are, they are difficult to read. Maybe not for an English major, who’s accustomed to reading difficult things, but honestly, for the average person, Faulkner or Woolf are not going to be fun, rewarding reads. Now, I know that Eliot can be accused of this excessive difficulty as well (and the accusation is true to an extent), but I’m 100% in agreement with his essays calling for a literature that’s more accessible to the public (“Marie Lloyd” is one I can think of off the top of my head).

Tolkien is accessible to the public. Tolkien tells a good story. Tolkien also in my view, for what it’s worth, is not so much trying to return to the Middle Ages, as Gene Wolfe suggests, as he is using the setting to make his emphasis on heroism, sacrifice, and redemptive suffering seem natural. He was aware enough of his time to understand that after WWI, a turn to fantasy was the only way to make “discredited” heroic virtue real again. That might not get him into the anthologies, but that hardly discredits his work as juvenile, in my opinion.

Regarding Tolkien’s influence on me. I would say that he’s neither been relegated to the children’s bookshelf, for the reasons above, nor do I find it necessary to map his solutions more closely to modernity than I’ve already done. He’s not offering a “modern” point of view; he’s offering a timeless solution to some of the deepest questions plaguing modern man…and if he doesn’t treat the modernist question of “well, how can we tell what’s real anyway”….well, he’s careful enough to make it all fiction, which actually makes it much more realistic than presenting the same ideas in a realist medium. (Although, it would admittedly be interesting to look more closely at the use of mythical models by Eliot, Joyce, Northrop Frye, etc, though that’s not the most fashionable thing to do in lit crit just now.)

What I’ve taken from Tolkien is a very basic framework for understanding what literature is and what sorts of problems the post-enlightenment, post-world wars world is facing. Sure, it’s a framework that’s not purely Tolkienian, given how often its been modified by other writers, and the fact that Tolkien certainly was not all I read when I started my blog at seventeen. But here are some of its most important points:

A.) Mythical resonances make great literature. You don’t need everything to be fantasy or theology, talking about gods or God, to find these. Look at the lighthouse in Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”; the symbol of the “accursed family” in Faulkner; the return to Greek mythology around WWII in France. You need things in literature that resonate with meaning for more than just the author. Successful literature can’t be wholly subjective; it’s got to call on images and master-plots and characters that the audience can identify with. The difference between fantasy and “realism” is actually rather blurred here: in some ways, fantasy seems to be different mostly in its willingness to forefront the symbol or master-plot (and then jettison “realism” altogether to make that move more palatable to the modern audience) while the realists seek to camouflage the same things so that they do not strike us as unrealistic.

B.) Culture matters. Friendship matters. Two things to which our society pays extravagant lip-service, but which it really doesn’t understand. What does it mean to be “rooted” in a place? What does it mean to be a friend? Those are questions of which I first became aware through Tolkien’s work, and they are still very explicitly at the center of my writing, both on the blog and off.

C.) Good literature is a good story. The biggest reason that the contemporary lit crit circles put me in such a state of ennui just now is simply that they all seem to have forgotten this. And since growing up on Tolkien (and Dickens and Austen, and the Brontes and Lewis and so forth) I can’t forget it. It’s why, even now, I hold myself to the rule of “no criticism on the first reading” unless it’s a school text and I’m forced to do so. I see absolutely no reason why one should go on about the aesthetic merits of a text unless one has first shown that the story is excellent. And if the story is excellent, the text is worth something, in my opinion. Maybe it’s not the most innovative of books; maybe the characters (as in Dickens) are stock figures; maybe the line of reasoning behind some of the Bronte’s plots is occasionally fragile. But they’re all darn good stories. You can figure out that the modernists are good storytellers after you’ve read a lot of their work and understand the type of story they’re trying to tell. Appreciation of their aesthetic innovations, comes however, for me at least, only after I appreciate the story. The reason Tolkien is so much more popular than the modernists is evident though: he tells a fantastic story that does not rely so heavily on the reader’s capacity to sit down, struggle through 200 difficult pages, go back, read it again, and then finally appreciate it. Aesthetically innovative or not, excessively “fantastical” or not, his books are admirable in that respect at least.

Something Rather Intelligent by Chesterton

Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

~Why I Am A Catholic; The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton

Pope Benedict on Péguy

This is a short but interesting commentary by Pope Benedict on a performance of the play «Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc», which had been written by Charles Péguy, a member of that strong movement of modernist Catholic authors in France, somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century.

It's also nice to see recent papal commentary regarding the role of Joan of Arc and the reasons for her sanctity. Especially since her vocation is currently dismissed even among many Catholics as imaginary and her virtue reduced to her "strong moral conviction"...The rather Reformation-esque opinion that sincerity is the only criterion of sanctity is the commonly accepted one. While the pope does not address this opinion directly, his statements certainly are not framed in such a way as to cast doubt upon the validity of her visions or of her mission to confirm the dauphin's heritage and to end a hundred years of bloodshed by driving the English out of France.

Another excellent quote

"It seems to me there's so much hubris regarding how much today's Christians worry about saving the world through art. I wish many more of us would brood about how to write a lovely paragraph now and then."
--From the same article as below (Article here) 

On "Christian" Art

This is from an interview with my cousin. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have grown up in a family where ideas like this are emphasized. Really can't imagine my English major self if I'd somehow missed this crucial point.

"I hate to even make the concession it requires to refer to some movies and stories as "Christian." Practically speaking, I'm not sure what it means to be a Christian story. I know what it is to be a beautiful movie, and this has everything to do with excellence of craft and integrity of theme and story. It makes sense to me that anything that is a beautiful movie should also be esteemed by Christians. I do make the distinction that some stories are sacred in that they are relating Biblical or explicitly religious images and history. Using this language, we could say that there have been sacred stories that are unchristian, like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kingdom of Heaven. . .

The greatest "epiphanies of beauty" (JPII, Letter to Artists) in storytelling today are coming from artists who are outside of any real attachment to a faith community. Movies like the 2006 Best Foreign Oscar film, The Lives of Others. Or Jason Reitman's wonderfully and unintentionally pro-life film, Juno. I have never experienced in any Christian film what Aristotle referred to as "tragic wonder," but I have felt it in Precious, and The Hurt Locker and Sophie Scholl and In the Bedroom and Requiem for a Dream. None of those films were made by Christians, but they are much, much more beautiful and consequently Christian than the banal and badly crafted Christian sub-culture products like Facing the Giants, Bella, Therese, and Fireproof. 

In short, if we serve the beautiful and honor the story we have the chance of finding both. If we set out, instead to foment a spirit of triumphalism in the Church, then story and beauty will evade us; and also any really lasting good."

"An Ecclesial Existence"

I was delighted to find that Hans Urs Von Balthasar had written on Bernanos when I was searching Amazon for books related to my thesis topic.It was one of those innocuous-looking Ignatius Press "Communio"-line books. Usually you order them and they're tiny things, practically pamphlets (I admit, most of my experience in this line is Pieper, so my word is hardly authoritative). Given my associations with this publishing line, and the fact that I hardly expected a renowned theologian to be devoting a tome to my author-of-choice (who is so greatly undervalued in a world that often associates angst and angst alone with great literature), I was surprised to receive a 600+ pager in the mail a few days after ordering it.

Needless to say, I have not finished this book yet. Within the first hundred pages, however, it is (as one might hope) pretty clear the sort of approach Balthasar is taking. He's far too interested in--one might even say, enchanted by--Bernanos the man to veer off into abstractions about him as some archetype of the Christian writer. Yet somehow he does manage to consider him primarily as an archetype of the Christian writer while avoiding all sense that he's merely abstracting from the man. Sounds a bit paradoxical, but there it is. Balthasar takes Bernanos' life and his ideas, and uses them to present a picture of what the ideal of the Christian author is both in Bernanos' eyes and in Balthasar's own, and then in showing this slips in a hint or two that Bernanos' life, not merely his ideas, supports this ideal.

That's not to say that the book is a hagiography. Part of the respect Balthasar pays this writer is that of recognizing his faults, of pointing them out rather keenly--he never takes him as something superhuman, preferring to show openly Bernanos' failures, but always presenting them as they may be most charitably understood. And in this charitable understanding, one realizes that even these failures often contribute to Bernanos' overall mission. The sensitivity and vehemence of his personality, though his struggles against these never actually overcame them, manage to inform and give vitality to his desire to communicate the drama of God's relationship with man to a world he saw as almost bereft of the proper disposition towards its Creator. A world that is far from God, but never without hope, because the power of grace--Bernanos' most firm conviction, in Balthasar's mind--can do with it precisely what it can do with Bernanos' own failures: redeem them by making them a part of the work which it is only half consciously yearning to join.

The writer's job is not, then, some hallowed vocation above all other vocations, but rather a hallowed vocation like all other lay vocations: the writer's goal is to bring the world to the consciousness of its desires. And if he succeeds in so doing--as Aristotle, Aquinas, Bernanos and Balthasar would all agree--he will simply be bringing it to an awareness of its final end; as a Catholic would say, to an awareness that all its desires can be satisfied only in responding to God and His plan of grace for the world.

Marie de France

One of the poets whom we're studying in Medieval Lit. I highly recommend her lais, which are both amusing and insightful. To anyone interested in fairy tales, they're especially interesting, because many of the elements of the classic European fairy tales can be found here.

The Forgotten Inkling

What a dramatic opener, no? Charles Williams, the forgotten member of the literary group that so many fans of 20th century literature know and love, friend of J.R.R. Tolkein, Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, to name a few.

So who is he, and what does he write about? Intrigued by this question and by the relative lack of any information about this fellow, I've been remaining keenly alert to any copies of his works that I find lurking in hidden corners of used bookstores (often his books are drastically overpriced - in my opinion - online) and I know have a respectable collection of his novels. These are often described, by the few critics who address them at all, as "spiritual thrillers". I'm not quite sure what to make of such a description, which seems to me to be unhelpfully vague. There's certainly a rather chilling aspect to those I've read, and they all treat things that our culture tends to consider fantastic - such as souls, ghosts, life after death, etc - as having a very real and substantial effect on the ins and outs of material existence. (I look forward to giving some thought eventually to William's philosophical compatability with Gilbert Ryle, but that will take a few more reads, I think.)

There's a definite power to his writing, which really draws you up into the story, but my one concern with the books - particularly Descent Into Hell (a book very sound in its moral philosophy, but perhaps just a tad questionable in its metaphysics) - is that their plots are dreadfully confusing. I closed Descent Into Hell with a clear idea of what it was trying to say and of the basic arc of moral development among the characters, but without a firm grasp of how or when anything happened.

I exaggerate. I did understand a lot of it, but there were some portions that seemed to get so wrapped up in mysticism that the logic of the plot is defied. Maybe this is an effect he's trying to acheive. I wouldn't doubt it, given his purpose in writing. My judgment as to its literary merit, however, I think will have to wait to give me a chance to do some second readings.

René

To give a better idea of Chateaubriand's stamp of Romanticism (in his case, it might be more accurate to say "pre-Romanticism") I'm going to publish a small sample from René. The title character -suppsedly a literary version of Chateaubriand's younger self - narrates here. The emotional contortions he goes through in the text are fairly painful to follow, but not unconvincing. You can sympathize with René's troubles despite the fact that it's fairly obvious that what he needs is a good bash over the head with some common sense (G.K. Chesterton-style common sense - the kind that answers the tough questions of life and is blunt enough to tell people when to stop moping and start living). It's reassuring to know that Chateaubriand did return to the Faith shortly after writing this - the main character's despair would seem quite a bit bleaker without the background knowledge that this author at least, found what he was so melancholy without.

Sorry for the French to those who don't understand it. I'm going to post my translation directly after this, since this post is getting too long.

" La solitude absolue, le spectacle de la nature, me plongèrent bientôt dans un état presque impossible à décrire. Sans parents, sans amis, pour ainsi dire, sur la terre, n'ayant point encore aimé, j'étais accablé d'une surabondance de vie.
Quelquefois je rougissais subitement, et je sentais couler dans mon coeur comme des ruisseaux d'une lave ardente ; quelquefois je poussais des cris involontaires, et la nuit était également troublée de mes songes et de mes veilles. Il me manquait quelque chose pour remplir l'abîme de mon existence : je descendais dans la vallée, je m'élevais sur la montagne, appelant de toute la force de mes désirs l'idéal objet d'une flamme future ; je l'embrassais dans les vents ; je croyais l'entendre dans les gémissements du fleuve ; tout était ce fantôme imaginaire, et les astres dans les cieux, et le principe même de vie dans l'univers.

" Toutefois cet état de calme et de trouble, d'indigence et de richesse, n'était pas sans quelques charmes : un jour je m'étais amusé à effeuiller une branche de saule sur un ruisseau et à attacher une idée à chaque feuille que le courant entraînait. Un roi qui craint de perdre sa couronne par une révolution subite ne ressent pas des angoisses plus vives que les miennes à chaque accident qui menaçait les débris de mon rameau. O faiblesse des mortels ! ô enfance du coeur humain qui ne vieillit jamais ! voilà donc à quel degré de puérilité notre superbe raison peut descendre ! Et encore est-il vrai que bien des hommes attachent leur destinée à des choses d'aussi peu de valeur que mes feuilles de saule.

" Mais comment exprimer cette foule de sensations fugitives que j'éprouvais dans mes promenades ? Les sons que rendent les passions dans le vide d'un coeur solitaire ressemblent au murmure que les vents et les eaux font entendre dans le silence d'un désert : on en jouit, mais on ne peut les peindre."

Chateaubriand

François-René de Chateaubriand, founder of the French romantic movement, is the first author my French Literary Traditions class is covering this semester. He wrote at the very beginning of the 19th century, only a few years after the French Revolution.

He seems to have been a rather interesting chap. He grew up in what he describes as having been a very dark, gloomy castle in Brittany where he developed a close friendship with his sister Lucille and a fairly dysfunctional relationship with his father. When the Revolution broke out, he was initially sympathetic, but, disillusioned by its violence, he went off to America. It appears that American culture - and more importantly the "American myth" of independent man (particularly exemplified by the Indians) in nearly the state of nature - influenced him deeply, because the country is the setting of several of his works (Atala and René) This trip also reveals him as a bit of a liar: he makes a fair number of outrageous claims in his writing, swearing that he met George Washington, lived with the Indians, visited Niagra Falls, and encountered a fair number of other stereotypically American entities (Niagra Falls, by historical records of his journey is the only of these things he had any likelihood of having seen). Rather lovable.


Almost all of his work is (so I read) strongly autobiographical. He wrote, in fact, that "We are convinced that the great writers have told their own story in their works. One only truly describes one's own heart by attributing it to another, and the greater part of genius is composed of memories" (Génie du christianisme). There are two characteristic elements of his writing which would influence the Romantic movement as a whole quite strongly. First of these is the plethora of stirring, detailed descriptions of nature and emphasis on the purity of the world unmarred by the noise of human society. Second but just as important is the attention he pays to human emotions: these he analyzes practically to a pulp in places, and that's exactly what his many successors and admirers would be doing for quite a few years to come.


On his return to France, he had a rather odd but apparently sincere reconversion to Christianity. It seems that much of his reasoning is quite tied up in his aesthetic responses to the beauty of Christianity - the beauty which formed the central argument for the Catholic religion in his book Génie du christianisme (The Genius of Christianity). Hopefully he found a bit more to value in Catholicism than its aesthetic value eventually; he probably did: God can build on much stranger foundations.

Heart of the Matter

I finished reading my first Grahame Greene novel, The Heart of the Matter recently. Now, everything I'm going to say here will assume knowledge of the plot, so if you dislike spoilers don't read on.

The last few lines of the book give the sense that they are absolutely crucial to any interpretation of the book. Yet I've been having a rather difficult time trying to decipher them. At this point, Police Inspector Scobie (the novel's main character)has just committed suicide, and his wife is discussing the tragedy with the local priest.

"(Mrs. Scobie) He must have known that he was damning himself."

..."For goodness' sake, Mrs. Scobie, don't suppose that you - or I - know a thing about God's mercy. ... It may be an odd thing to say - when a man's as wrong as he was - but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God."

"He certainly loved no one else."

"And you may be in the right of it there, too."

Did Greene intend us to take the priest's final analysis of Scobie as accurate? All things considered, I'm inclined to think that he did. It's the "last word" of the book, so to speak. The priest, though not a saint, seems to be a man of integrity and of real faith in the Church. But if one accepts this analysis, what can one make of it?

A little backstory is definitely necessary. (How, indeed, could the ending of any book be quite comprehensible outside the context of the book itself?) Scobie's driving characteristic (in the literal sense that it really provides the motive for just about every one of his actions) is an overwhelming desire that those around him be "happy". However, he believes hat he can keep others happy by keeping them content. By being perfectly kind and creating an atmosphere of peace, whether the peace is true or not. This falsity is a problem from the beginning, but the habit of killing those around him with kindness leads to a fatal conclusion when he is faced with the choice of "what's right" versus "what will make everyone else comfortable". "In human relations, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths" he believes, and even the reply from God he seems to hear in his prayer, "[to do what I ask] one of them must suffer, but can't you trust me to see that the suffering isn't too great?" isn't enough to make him choose what's right.

It's easy to see how, for all of his compassion, Scobie's love for those in his vicinity was empty. You can't really love someone by hiding the truth. Comfort is not the greatest good which you can provide another, especially when it comes at the cost of truthful and meaningful relationships with others. Moreover, at least initially, Sobie's main concern seems to be with his own peace - domestic peace in his relationship with his wife, the mental peace of having "done his duty" to those around him.

But how could the priest possibly say that Scobie "really loved God"? Scobie was fully aware that his suicide was the one of the ultimate offences against God. However, it seems as though the "heart of the matter" - his real, though distorted, love - lies in the fact that he was willing to "hurt" God in order to put an end to the pain which he knows he will continue to cause Him. Once again, it's heresy of the grossest kind. But it is perhaps the case that by rejecting all possibility of his own comfort, his own peace in a life which he knows will be inextricably tied to God, whether through an eternal rejection or eternal acceptence of God, he has shown some hint of the love necessary for salvation. His hopeless explanation, "I can't shift my responsibility onto you. I love you, and I won't go on insulting you at your own altar" does perhaps contain just enough love to leave him open to God's mercy. God, whose "weakness", according to Greene, is precisely the enormity of His love, can turn even Scobie's assault against this into a saving grace. "Don't suppose, Mrs. Scobie, that you - or I - know a thing about God's mercy."

Pleasure and Beauty: Wilde's Picture

The Picture of Dorian Gray has been on my list of favorite novels ever since I first read it, though I'll admit I didn't get around to that particular accomplishment until just over a year ago. I was re-reading the last few chapters of the book the other day, and was once more struck by the beauty of the language, the amount of pity Wilde is able to evoke in the reader for the depraved protagonist, and the starkness of the conclusion.

The book's basic conceit, of course, is that Dorian, while still a relatively innocent young man, makes a wish that he will forever retain his youthful beauty while the effects of age and excess are transferred to his portrait (painted by his friend, Basil Hallward). Soon corrupted by the influence of the older Lord Henry, his life becomes a mad pursuit of pleasure which destroys those who enter his sphere. He nevertheless remains young, beautiful, and to all appearances perfectly pure; his wish has been mysteriously granted and the portrait alone bears the outward effects of his sin.

The haunting conclusion to the tale chronicles Dorian's growing despair at the hideousness of the picture after he has spent years in a life of callous debauchery. His explicit choice to designate pleasure as his highest good, to define it as happiness in a sense, has led only to depair, coldness, and cruelty. Wilde never seems to deny pleasure's goodness, but remorselessly displays its insufficiency as the ultimate end of life.

One can hardly avoid thinking of Aristotle at this point: "All men by nature desire happiness", but few are able to discover where it truly lies. The attractiveness of pleasure (or power, or wealth, or honour, as the case may be for each person) dupes many into equating such a lesser good with the highest end of human life - even when those in error are not aware of explicitly making such an equation.

Attractiveness aside, it is intrinsically impossible for a good like pleasure to satisfy human longings for something higher. Thus we see in Dorian also a passion for beauty. He corrupts this throughout most of the novel by treating this passion as merely another desire to be gratified. External beauty, he thinks at first, will be enough for him; his natural beauty and the beauty he attempts to create by surrounding himself with decadence should suffice. Yet it is not enough. Somewhere in the soul, there is a longing for true beauty that runs deeper than his. The picture makes it impossible to deny that his physical appearance is no more than a facade, and the knowledge of the hideous state of his soul torments him.

Though Dorian would not have recognized the fact (perhaps even Wilde did not fully when he wrote it), this yearning for the expunging of his hypocrisy, for genuine beauty, for truth, is in the end - from a Catholic viewpoint - a yearning for God. God is Beauty. He is Truth. Without Him, every other good becomes cold, cruel, void of meaning. Like Hallward, Wilde has painted a picture of a soul - a picture of every soul in a sense - and in its center is the gaping hole of which St. Augustine speaks: the God-shaped hole which makes every human heart "restless until it rests in Him".

"The Windhover"

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


The first half of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Windhover,” is composed of a rich, lingering description of a falcon’s early morning flight. At the sight the poet is caught up in a moment of awe similar to the falcon’s own high “ecstasy” (5). Yet the moment moves beyond the purely sensual experience to relate the grandeur of the falcon to the glory of Christ and the beauty the poet’s soul can achieve in following its divine master.

The imagery of the first half emphasizes the power and the mastery of the bird, which, paradoxically, is most conclusively proved when the creature allows itself to be swept along by a powerful gust of wind. On first appearing, the falcon is introduced as “daylight’s dauphin” – heir to the kingdom of the day – who strides the “steady air” effortlessly (2, 3). Then his motion changes: from his hovering poise over the earth, he now swings and plunges smoothly along a stray gust of air. The reader does not even discover the “big wind” which precipitates the action until after the poet has already depicted the falcon’s masterful plunge into it, and the omission serves to strengthen the sense of the bird’s invincibility. Though it allows itself to be overcome by the wind, this “defeat” only adds to its power in flight. The sight and stirring of the poet’s “heart in hiding” are drawn together into a single long instant in this stanza, as the feeling of timeless awe and quality of intensely present action are strengthened by the reiteration of words ending with the suffix “-ing” (7).

The transition from this vision to the poet’s reflection about it is clearly marked by a switch to a repeating b-c rhyme scheme. Describing the scene as indicating “brute beauty and valour and act,” the poet seems to enjoin his own assumed “airs” and “pride” to “buckle” – “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!” (9-10). The same injunction also serves as a continued description of the falcon’s victorious flight as the bird simultaneously “buckle[s]” down to grapple with the wind and conquers it by buckling under it. All the beauty of this single vision from nature draws the poet’s mind to Christ, as he joyfully proclaims that “the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovlier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!” (10-11). Like the falcon, Christ’s defeat of the power that assailed him – death – was completed only as he allowed himself to be momentarily defeated by it. In this act of submission, the true “dauphin” of light in the world revealed power and beauty beyond previous imagination (2).

Despite the brilliance of the falcon’s flight and the subsequent reverie, the poet observes that his conclusion is “no wonder” at all, really (12). By simply plodding along behind the plow of daily life, every soul can make the “plough down sillion / Shine” (12). Every person is called to sacrifice himself to the daily struggle of coming to life through dying to oneself. It is in imitating the falcon’s descent and Christ’s “fall” that any human can best imitate their mastery and intransient beauty, the poet concludes. Even the most apparently unprepossessing object, such as the “blue-bleak embers” which remain after the fire seems extinguished, gain infinite grandeur if they will “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion” (14).

Inclination vs. action

I was reading a Dorothy Sayers essay about Dante the other day in which she discussed the manner in which the souls in Inferno have become identified with their sin. She was quite emphatic in pointing out the fundamental distinction between Dante's and the readers' journey through hell and the status of the sinners within hell. Those who remain in hell have chosen sin through a deliberate action of the will: an action which could not be more dissimilar from that of Dante and the readers who only witness the punishments to see what accepting the temptations of sin will lead to.

This point rather leads her off onto a tangent. She tells of a letter she once received from a student with very definite ideas about psychology (a young man of that type so thoroughly convinced of his own modernity in accepting certain ideas that he'll hold onto them far past the threshold of illogicality). He tried, she writes, to persuade her that her writing of mystery stories revealed a suppressed impulse to actually commit a murder, basing his idea on the assumption that the unconscious is the sum of the mind and ignoring the function of rational choice in defining a person's state.

Sayers relates this odd correspondence to her belief that it is invalid to identify impulse and the human unconscious too exclusively with the activity of the mind. Ultimately, the tendency to say that the unconcious is all that genuinely exists in the mind leads one to reject both intellect and will (two fundamental concepts for Dante) - the rational and directive capacities of the mind. To reject these two is to reject precsely that aspect of the mind which makes us human (a very convenient rejection if you want to define man as no more than a particularly clever ape). If, as the student she writes of says, the impulse to write a murder story and the impulse to murder are one and the same, we would have to admit that simple thinking about something is morally equivalent to doing it.

But wait... perhaps you're not supposed to talk about morals nowadays... Nonetheless, even if you were to discount all language of morality, you must admit that such an idea promotes something of a logical fallacy: it identifies an impulse that is actualized as being identical to an impulse that is merely felt; it refuses to consider action and views consideration as all that counts. No assent of will can distinguish the actor from the mere contemplator. The view discounts the decision to either act on or reject an impulse and holds that only the impulse itself is of any account.

In more Dantean language, it denies sin by making temptation itself into the only thing that counts in the human mind. Sin is inflicted on people by circumstances which cause temptation to arise, rather than being - as Dante believed - a concious choise of the individual's will to act according to temptation and against what the intellect informs it is right.

"Abandon every hope, who enter here"

The quotation in the title is probably one of the most famous phrases of Dante's "Inferno". I had a specific point I was intending to make before writing that, but the simply act of recording it has made me perform something of a double-take. (Dante's intricate layering of meaning upon meaning - of metaphorical sense on top of theological sense on top of literal sense - makes reading the Divine Comedy, not to mention discussing it, a daunting venture, dontcha think?)

That single line, inscribed above the gates of hell serves so many fascinating purposes. The most obvious reference, of course, is to the sinners who enter choosing to abandon hope of ever fulfilling the role for which God created each of them; to reject the one route to true happiness that lies in that role. Ironically enough, however, "Dante the pilgrim", having strayed from the path - that is, the "Way" which will lead him to heaven, can only get back onto the right track by first descending through hell. Still lost, he sees a mountain crowned with the sun - he wants to move towards the light, but is prevented by three beasts, the sight of which " so weighted me with fearfulness that I abandoned hope."

I hardly think it a coincedence that Dante's phrasing here directly echoes (or rather, foreshadows) the inscription over hell. But why? How could one who has abandoned hope ever be able to regain it by entering into the one place where hope most utterly dead?

First, Dante-pilgrim has a guide - Virgil, the embodiment of reason. Moreover, his journey is sanctioned, even commanded, by heaven. Beatrice, explaining to Virgil why she does not fear hell, gives us some idea of how it is that Dante may be kept safe. "One ought to be afraid of nothing other than things possessed of power to do us harm...God, in His graciousness, has made me so that this, your misery, cannot touch me." God offers Dante an opportunity to pass through the worst dangers in safety, providing him with the guide of reason to guide Dante's own choices, and with divine protection when reason fails (as we see happen in moments when Virgil's vulnerability in certain circumstances becomes pronounced. All of this seems to be getting off my original point, but I'll try to tie it in, I promise.

The sentence that sheds the greatest light on all of this for me comes directly after the inscription. Explaining the words carved above the gates, Virgil tells Dante that those in hell are souls who have "lost the good of the intellect". And what is the good of the intellect? Reason, perfected by faith in God. (I'm presupposing pretty much the entire substance of Fides et Ratio here, I admit...) As Dante descends further and further into the Inferno, the sins he encounters are offenses against reason - beginning with the virtuous pagans whose only fault was their lack of faith which made their reason imperfect, and ending with those who used their intellects to break faith. Hell is essentially "the great divorce" (to plagiarize the title of CS Lewis' book) between reason and faith.

Dante could abandon reason, his guide, and be lost in hell forever. He could lose faith in God's will, as he nearly does, for example, at the gates of Dis (lower hell) when even Virgil is unable to defeat the demons without divine aid. Either way, he would then be among those who have "lost the good of the intellect". However, hell is "innocuous", as Beatrice describes it, to those who accept the protection God offers. In the dark forest of the first Canto, Dante has only himself to rely upon, having lost the way to God. His hope is crushed when he is so alone, and his intellect is weakened. But once he accepts God's offer of aid, Dante can hope even as he crawls down Satan's hairy body in deepest chasm of hell.

I just got it!

I feel disgustingly triumphant at the moment. I was randomly reading Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams (in what was unequivocally my spare time) and a watershed of realizations about Dante's Divine Comedy hit me all of a sudden.

This was provoked by the single quote, "that strange identification of Beatrice with Theology". It's amazing how much an appropriate line, read at the right time, can clarify and enrich an entire work of literature. I had had some hazy comprehension of this interpretation back when I was first reading it, but the ramifications of this simple "identification" never seemed this clear before.

I don't remember enough about the epic to back up my general ideas with a profusion of specific examples. But I do remember what is probably the most widely-known fact about the poem, namely, Beatrice's and Virgil's respective roles as Dante's guides throughout the afterlife.

In the arduous journey through hell Dante's guide is Virgil - a virtuous pagan who can nonetheless not move out of the outer (non-punishing) circle of hell. Virgil, who has been guided only by human reason in his pursuit of virtue throughout life, can only take Dante so far. He can discover through reason the necessity of punishment for those who are wicked on earth. The justice of hell is comprehensible and clear to Virgil's mind, as is the punishment in Purgatory.

Mercy is not so apparently comprehensible. Theology - the study of God and His relation to the world - presupposes revelation, and it is this Theology in the form of Beatrice, that reveals to Dante the beauty of a mercy which cannot be understood by unaided reason. Beatrice must show Dante the intended relation of mankind to God, a relation that culminates in an intimacy with the perfection of the very virtue which Virgil so consistently sought.

This development could go far beyond this; I'm only barely scratching the surface here. I can't wait to re-read the Comedy for my literature class.

"The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe"

This poem is so incredibly awesome.

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.

If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

More Thought-Provoking Chesterton

He never really fails to do it, does he? Even when his style is at its most jocose, Chesterton can give you something to think about.

The latest book of his to hit my "books in progress" shelf is his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's only my first read through of course, but I think it may become a favorite of mine, largely because I find it one of his most convincing.

The chapters exploring Thomas' philosophy are worth reading by themselves, being admirably succint. Chesterton manages to distill the main points driving Thomas' philosophy, and to really explain them, with all the clarity of a teacher who genuinely understands the subject matter. Although his arguments do suffer occasionally from generalizations, this results merely from the brevity of his treatment, and none of these generalizations are lacking plenty of arguments in their favour made by other authors.

Anyway, one such philosophy chapter particularly struck me. Chesterton focuses on the distinctive character of Thomas' thought. According to him, this distinction lies in Thomas' emphasis upon the permanency of being. Thomas' starting point could perhaps be summed up in the very common-sense statement "There is and IS". The world and the realities it contains are solid and true. (I say the "realities it contains" because the influence of evil certainly has left an imprint in the form of absence of good, absence of beauty, absence of reality.)

For Thomas, a single object such as a plain rock is true, not because it is a symbol of some abstract reality, or is a rock in spite of its gray-ness or hardness or any other physical characteristic. It has genuine existence as a rock; its essense is that of a rock and its physical characteristics are in integral part of that identity.

Many ancient philosophers focused entire schools of thought around the concept of the constancy of change. According to some the only consistent truth was the fact that everything was constantly changing or "in flux" - really, this was a wicked common idea, it seems if Fr. Copleston's "History of Philosophy" is accurate. The general impression schools like these would give is that the material world is untrustworthy at best, and that to put faith in things like the senses or even common sense, is a rather naive gesture.

Considering that the majority of even more Catholic philosophies subsequent to these have concentrated on the intellectual life, the soul, or the superiority of the mind, it's likely enough that some of this tendency results from the aforementioned ancient Greeks and their contemporaries.

Fortunately for us, we have Thomas, showing in his dry, matter-of-fact, penetrating prose the Catholic view on the constancy of being. We see change all the time in this world, not because change is the supreme reality, but because the intensely real "is-ness" of every created thing is flawed by some absence of its intended perfection. Evil produces imperfections, but God, in bringing creation back to Himself, allows change in order to return everything to its intended state of being.

Moreover, change (in the ideal form of growth rather than regression or some such thing) exists because even in any object's ideal state of being, it is not Being itself. A created object is not at any time all that it could BE. These are very imprecise terms; they give only the barest approximation of what Chesterton is talking about. Chesterton himself puts it: "Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete. It is God."

Being is real, there is and IS. God is the Supreme Being, as trancendentalist and the term may sound. He is I AM. Acceptance of this fact provides a jumping off point for Thomas.

The amazing thing is, although Thomas' view may require leap of faith, what is in the end more common-sense than his premise: "There is an IS"?

Helena

I read this novel by Evelyn Waugh in one day. It's a very short book and rather a strange one. But a very good one it is in my opinion. Centering around the legend of St. Helena's discovery of the true Cross, its tone is oddly detatched, like the tone of a fairy tale. It doesn't delve into it's characters' personalities, but delineates them with the utmost brevity - a line or two sufficing to express many of the characters. Important events are only briefly touched upon before the book skips to the next scene, which often takes place years later.

In brief, it's a model of brevity. Whether you are more fond of Victor Hugo's wandering style (remember the innumerable essays on the Battle of Waterloo tossed into the middle of "Les Miserables"?) or, like me, enjoy a happy medium of the Dostoevskian type, you have to admit that Waugh pulls this brevity off remarkably well. I came away from the book with a very definite sense that I had read a book. Not some shoddy attempt at a book thrown together with not enough development. The "lack" of development here is studied and is harmonious with the tone produced throughout the book.

On to the theme of the book. (What an absurd practice it is to always dissect books for themes. I rather think the story is what counts in the end. Nevertheless, a good understanding of the theme - I cringe at the word - does help me enjoy the story a little more.) Waugh has plenty of enjoyable comments and memorable quotes about a variety of subjects: power, society, etc. I think the two most definite points the book centers around, however, are the relationship between temporal power and the power of religion, and the solid reality of Christianity as opposed to the myriad of cults and sects around around the time of the Roman Empire's decline.

The former "theme" plays a larger part in the first chapters of the book than in the last. You see the ancestral pride of Helena's father, the old British chieftan and his resulting disregard for Constantius' Imperial lineage. "Apart from their divinity, who were they? Some of the emperors we've had lately, you know, have been - very literally - nothing to make a song about." You see Constantius' obsessive fixation with his claims to power, the resulting destruction of his amiable qualities, and his thoughtless discarding of Helena for a more politically advantageous wife. You watch Constantine and his wife Fausta carry on their own machinations, their more direct attempts to control the Church. Helena responds by simply and quietly becoming a saint. And as a saint, she pinpoints the tragedy of all this power grabbing: "Think", she says "of the misery of a whole world possessed of Power without Grace."

In Imperial Rome, in high society, religion is a mishmash of cultic ritual, of esoteric "answers", of confusing and contradictory pseudo-philosophy. Only Christianity is different. This difference is something which Helena comprehends, but which Constantine and Fausta do not. They view Christiaity as being on the level with any other cultic religion of the day. What the latter do not see is that the similarities between Christianity and these popular religions ends with the simple fact that both have ritual and mysteries. In Christianity alone do these rituals and mysteries have substance. The Gnostics in the book pour out empty sentences in profusion when preaching, but nothing is ever really said in their lectures because the Gnostics believe (essentially) that nothing is real but their own abstract ideas.

For Christians there is the Incarnation. The world is real to Christians. Helena grasps this and takes as her vocation a quest to find the true Cross of Christ. Others like Eusebius and Constantine spend their time in Theological arguments - a similarity to the Gnostics and others which is too pronounced to be missed. (I don't know whether Waugh was meaning to condemn Constantine and Eusebius and concern with minute points of theology. I rather think that he wasn't. It's a literary device in the book which gets his point across without seriously attacking Catholic theology.) Constantine, in a surge of high enthusiam about his theoretical version of Christianity puts down Rome to the Pope's face with the words, "You can have your old Rome, Holy Father, with its Peter and Paul and its tunnels full of martyrs. We start with no unpleasant associations; in innocence, with Divine Wisdom and Peace."

But for Helena their is no rejection of the intrinsic reality of Christianity and of the pain and suffering often involved without there being a rejection of Christ Himself. "Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there's a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I'm going out to find it."

A Very Wonderful Essay on Tolkien by Joseph Pearce

Joseph Pearce is da man! I love his books!!!!

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the world's best-seller The Lord of the Rings, qualifies, technically, as a "literary convert" because of his reception into the Church as an eight-year-old following his mother's conversion to the faith. It could be said, therefore, that he joins the ranks of the literary converts by creeping in through the back door or, perhaps more correctly, through the nursery door. With beguiling ambiguity he is neither a cradle Catholic nor a full-blown convert, but a charming mixture of the two — a cradle convert.
Wordsworth reminds us, "the child is father of the man," and since in Tolkien's case this is particularly true, the eight-year-old's "cradle conversion" was destined to shape the remainder of his life in a profound manner. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Tolkien's conversion was crucial to both the making of the man and the shaping of the myth he created.

Following the death of her husband in February 1896, a few weeks after her son's fourth birthday, Mabel Tolkien began a new love affair that would soon estrange her from her family. She became passionately devoted to Christianity, taking her two sons every Sunday on a long walk to a "high" Anglican church. Then one Sunday they were taken by strange roads to a different place of worship. This was St Anne's, a Roman Catholic church amidst the slums of Birmingham. Mabel Tolkien had been considering conversion for some time, and during the spring of 1900 she received instruction and was received in June of the same year.

Her conversion incurred the immediate wrath of her family. Her father, who had been brought up Methodist but had since lapsed further from orthodoxy into Unitarianism, was outraged. Her brother-in-law withdrew the little financial help that he had provided since she had become a widow, plunging her and her children into poverty. She also met with considerable opposition from her late husband's family, many of whom were Baptists with strong anti-Catholic prejudices. The emotional strain affected her health adversely but, undaunted, she began to instruct her sons in the faith.

Tolkien made his First Communion at Christmas, 1903. The joy, however, was soon followed by tragedy. Less than a year later his mother died after lapsing into a diabetes-induced coma. In her will, Mabel Tolkien had appointed her friend, Fr. Francis Morgan, to be the guardian of her two orphaned sons. He arranged for them to live with their Aunt Beatrice, not far from the Birmingham Oratory, but she showed them little attention and the brothers soon began to consider the Oratory their real home. Each morning they served Mass for Fr. Morgan at his favorite side altar in the Oratory church. Afterward they would eat breakfast in the refectory before setting off for school. Tolkien remained forever grateful for all that Fr. Morgan did for him and his brother. "I first learned charity and forgiveness from him . . ." The Oratory was a "good Catholic home," which contained "many learned fathers (largely 'converts')" and where "observance of religion was strict."

The virtues of charity and forgiveness that Tolkien learned from Fr. Morgan in the years after his mother's death offset the pain and sorrow that her death engendered. The pain remained throughout his life, and 60 years later he compared his mother's sacrifices for her faith with the complacency of some of his own children toward the faith they had inherited from her:

"When I think of my mother's death . . . worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away."
Tolkien always considered his mother a martyr for the faith. Nine years after her death he wrote: "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it was not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to His great gifts as He did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."

Tolkien preserved his mother's legacy and kept the faith, not only in his life but also in his work. In particular, and crucially, Tolkien's encounter with the depths of Christian mysticism and his understanding of the truths of orthodox theology enabled him to unravel the philosophy of myth that inspired not only the "magic" of his books but also the conversion of his friend C.S. Lewis to Christianity.

Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."

"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies." Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

"In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology," wrote Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, "Tolkien had laid bare the center of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion." It is also the creed at the heart of all his other work. His short novel, Tree and Leaf, is essentially an allegory on the concept of true myth, and his poem, "Mythopoeia," is an exposition in verse of the same concept.

Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their "mythopoeia" to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.

Such a revelation changed Lewis' whole conception of Christianity, precipitating his conversion.

Lewis was one of the select group of friends, known collectively as the Inklings, who read the manuscript of Tolkien's timeless classic, The Lord of the Rings, as it was being written. This work, which has been voted the greatest book of the 20th century in a succession of polls, was described by its author as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."

Space does not permit a full exposition of the depths of Christian orthodoxy in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, or Tolkien's other work. Those wishing to discover more are referred to my books, Tolkien: Man and Myth and Tolkien: A Celebration, in which the relationship between Tolkien's faith and the myth he created are examined at greater length.

In brief, however, the power of Tolkien lies in the way that he succeeds, through myth, in making the unseen hand of providence felt by the reader. In his mythical creations, or sub-creations as he would call them, he shows how the unseen hand of God is felt far more forcefully in myth than it is ever felt in fiction. Paradoxically, fiction works with facts, albeit invented facts, whereas myth works with truth, albeit truth dressed in fancy disguises. Furthermore, since facts are physical and truth is metaphysical, myth, being metaphysical, is spiritual.

The writer and poet Charles A. Coulombe concluded his essay, "The Lord of the Rings: A Catholic View," with the following incisive assessment of Tolkien's importance. It was a fitting conclusion to his essay on the subject. It is also a fitting conclusion to mine:

"It has been said that the dominant note of the traditional Catholic liturgy was intense longing. This is also true of her art, her literature, her whole life. It is a longing for things that cannot be in this world: unearthly truth, unearthly purity, unearthly justice, unearthly beauty. By all these earmarks, Lord of the Rings is indeed a Catholic work, as its author believed: But it is more. It is this age's great Catholic epic, fit to stand beside the Grail legends, Le Morte d'Arthur and The Canterbury Tales. It is at once a great comfort to the individual Catholic, and a tribute to the enduring power and greatness of the Catholic tradition, that JRRT created this work. In an age which has seen an almost total rejection of the faith on the part of the Civilization she created . . . Lord of the Rings assures us, both by its existence and its message, that the darkness cannot triumph forever."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Joseph Pearce. "J.R.R. Tolkien: Truth and Myth." Lay Witness (September 2001).