Sunday, February 9, 2014

A Word About Tolkien's Religiosity and His Sub-Creation

Edit: A friend just sent this.  So, there's really not much we can add in words in apologia of the Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien whose appeal is so far and wide, that it has earned him some small amount of poor regard among his co-religionists.  As to whether anyone had never been converted by his works, I've known dozens personally over the years who've found him a bridge to the Latin Mass and Tradition.  I'm one of those.  In fact, the first time as an adult I saw a Latin Mass in Salzburg, Austria some 20 years ago, I was reminded of the beauty of his work almost immediately, and the holiness it inspired:

“Dear Sir,” I said—Although now long estranged, 
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. 
Disgraced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, from "On Fairy Stories"
in answer to C.S. Lewis who argued that myths were "lies breathed through Silver"


Photo Credit.

8 comments:

Geremia said...

What do you think of this sermon, which—although I haven't heard it yet—apparently argues that Tolkien's works are a sort of gnosticism.

Tancred said...

He started off with some gratuitous assertions like what is a myth, and that he knew no one who'd ever been converted by his work, and I didn't get any further than that.

Geremia said...

Perhaps that's why it was pulled off AudioSancto.org, which is where the sermon originally came from.

Anonymous said...

I do not find the Audio Sancto sermons to be without error and so have ceased listening to them.

Anonymous said...

That is to say error as far as what they do not say due to the fact that they are not permitted to speak against the council god. So the truths which they preach are incomplete.

Geremia said...

@Anonymous: Yes, especially the one on how JPII can commit public acts of apostasy like kissing a Koran and still be canonized.

Anonymous said...

Personally speaking, if it were not for Tolkien and CS Lewis, I would have lost my faith long ago. They both spoke to that older, catholic (but not necessarily Roman!) consciousness that once suffused Europe.
- Fr. John+

Tancred said...

Sure, CS Lewis liked him, so heretics, schismatics, many different kinds of people lived his work.