Tolkien: The undiscovered Christian

 C.S. Lewis is beloved by many "Christian" intellectuals for his wit and ability to peddle Christian beliefs to the masses. A lot of Protestants who would not touch a statue of Mama Mary with a ten foot pole now consider Lewis a "saint" and he got into Poet's corner for his writings.

Sort of a professional Christian.

I rarely can get thru his theological writings because they are... brittle.  The same could go for his fiction.

Lewis' fictional women are missing something: Perelandra's Eve is stupid, Jane is neurotic and don't get me started on Narnia.

But like most college age students in the 1960s, I got to read Tolkien and loved his books. If Lewis' books are harsh and simplistic, like a Marvel Comic, the Tolkien books remind me of filigree work, or a celtic knot: beautiful when you first look at it, and then even more beautiful as you look again and go into the design. 

That beauty struck me as Catholic, long before I ever heard of the Inklings or found out that Tolkien was Catholic because his world view was that of Catholicism. 

To quote Andrew Greeley:

Catholics live in an enchanted world: a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace.

One of the problems with Vatican II is that the literal minded liturgists and theologians tried to destroy these things, which enabled Catholics to see God in every little thing around them, and replaced it with bad translations, bad music, and the idea if what you do is not social work or "helping the poor" you are not a good Catholic. 

Well there goes the idea of St Therese (and Martin Luther) that even a housewife or factory worker could be holy if they did the duties of their daily life as a way to serve God.

Sigh.

But in Tolkien, the idea that people try to do the right thing but sometimes fail or get sidetracked (e.g. Saruman) is there, as is the idea of forgiveness (Galadriel and Boromir). The tale insists that there is a pattern behind what happens, and that small choices are important. (I told my grandson, who was puzzled about the destruction of the ring, that it was God who arranged Gollem to destroy it, rewarding the decisions of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, not to kill him when he was defenseless because they pitied him, even though they knew he might harm them later).

However,overt religion is missing from the LOTR because Tokien deliberatly removed any open theology in his work: maybe because as a Catholic working in an anti Catholic and even atheistic culture of Oxford, he decided to follow the example of the Beowulf poet, and make the Christian theme implicit in the story instead of open and preachy.

Anyway,  TeaAtTrianon, herself an author, links to an article discussing if the Catholic church should start the process to declare Tolkien a saint. Not because of his writings, but because of his quiet devotion and love of God that pervaded everything he did. 

Tolkien takes inspiration from the Old English Gospels, in which Jesus himself teaches his disciples (literally “learning knights”) that “ge synd middengeardes leoht,” which directly translates as “you are the light of Middle Earth.” In this way Tolkien embraced a sacramental vision in which the holiness of the Holy Spirit or the Secret Fire, as he puts it, could be seen to illuminate his heroes in their quests and journeys against the forces of Hell.

 But it is in his letters that his faith is more explicit. 

an excerpt) From letter 310 to Camilla Unwin

We ask HOW, perceive patterns and ask WHY, and this implies reasons and motives and a MIND. Only a Mind can have purposes. This introduces the question of a God, a Creator-Designer, a Mind that is partly intelligible to us. This leads to religion and its moral ideas, which are bound up in the bonds we have with others... 

If you do not believe in a personal God, "What is the purpose of life?" is unaskable and unanswerable, since there is no one to whom to direct the question. ...So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.

 One reason Tolkien is so beloved by environmentalism is that he insists that nature is beautiful; but he insists nature is not a God, but that nature echoes the beauty of God. again from his letter:

To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour. And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. PRAISE THE LORD ... all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.

 Tolkien’s thought on mythology, fairy stories, and the Gospel are also expressed in poem he composed to explain to C. S. Lewis, who had previously struggled with the idea that myths could contain truth, that myths and stories show a fragment of the light of truth, so that we can find in classic pagan authors a glimpse of God.

 

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