Creation and Beauty in Tolkien's Catholic Vision

A Study in the Influence of Neoplatonism in J. R. R. Tolkien's Philosophy of Life as "Being and Gift"

Michael John Halsall

• Éditeur: Pickwick Publications
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532641121
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

This book invites readers into Tolkien's world through the lens of a variety of philosophers, all of whom owe a rich debt to the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition. It places Tolkien's mythology against a wider backdrop of Catholic philosophy and asks serious questions about the nature of creation, the nature of God, what it means to be good, and the problem of evil. Halsall sets Tolkien alongside both his contemporaries and ancient authors, revealing his careful use of literary devices inspired by them to craft his own "mythology for England."

1

Prolegomenon to the Sub-Creative Genius of Tolkien and His Contemporaries

1.1 Tolkien and the Edwardian Legacy

The opening stanza of T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from the Rock” (above), originated in a 1934 pageant called The Rock, which was commissioned in order to raise funds for building churches in the new suburbs in the diocese of north London between the wars. The building projects were aimed at creating sacred spaces in the expanding ‘waste lands,’ where Eliot perceives London as a ‘time kept city’ of commerce and shipping trade: hallmarks of early-mid-twentieth-century secularism. In this problem of secularized loss of transcendent meaning, Frank Sawyer notes that Eliot uses words where composers of the day might have used musical notation, in that “all his poems play with intellectually discordant thoughts, discordant sounds, and unexpected juxtapositions, often depending on word-plays and half-hidden meanings or pointers.”2

It is these themes of discordance amidst order and harmony that contemporaries of Eliot, such as Tolkien and Britten, used in order to juxtapose beauty and ugliness, unity and difference, perfection in God and a lapse from that transcendent ideal. Eliot was writing at the same time that Tolkien was redrafting elements of his own cosmo-genesis and, like Tolkien, begins the above work with a cosmogonic drama, Neoplatonic in its stylizing of whirling stars in planetary motions, producing cycles of ‘awareness’ from eternity to finitude. There is here an ideal in God’s unity and simplicity, but much is lost as temporality proceeds from the cosmic drama into reality and experience.

We know that Tolkien was aware of, and read Eliot, and that Britten put Eliot’s words to music, in particular, those with a religious theme.3 This cultural interplay, therefore, alongside his well-documented literary interchange with his friends in the TCBS and the Inklings, sets Tolkien amongst an intellectual and cultural milieu, which is striving to bring meaning, enchantment, and wonder out of the mythology and biblical imagery of the English literary canon on the one hand, and the horror and disillusion caused by the Great War on the other.4 There is no evidence that Eliot was a direct influence on Tolkien, but I make the point that they had a similar literary intention, as presented to an English-speaking audience.5 In the foreword to The Book of Lost Tales, Christopher Tolkien explains that his father’s writings originated in 1916–17, during convalescence from his sickness and combat experiences during the Battle of the Somme, and left incomplete several years later.6 During this hiatus, he turned to composing the long poems of The Tale of Tinúviel and The Children of Hurin in alliterative verse. However, over many revisions and compilations, they existed and were still being edited in early versions of The Silmarillion in 1937. It was in this decade that Eliot wrote and first performed The Rock (1934). Tom Shippey includes Tolkien as one of a number of “traumatised authors” writing fantasy, but voicing in that fantasy “the most pressing and immediate relevant issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century.”7 One might ask why can’t Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings be simply what they are—fantasy—a story of journey and quest, of brotherhood and friendships forged in the face of adversity? The answer is quite straight forward: for the author, written into that fantasy are things which are, at an altogether different level, very real. Tolkien utilizes a variety of resources with which he constructs a world of imagination, enchantment, and reality. This reality points to what things are in their relation to God: being and gift. Things are what they are/are not (ontologically and meontologically) precisely because something has willed that they be so, and are ordered hierarchically in a great chain of being.

In his 1992 Encyclical Letter Fides Et Ratio, Pope (now Saint) John Paul II recognized that:

Men and women have at their disposal an array of resources for generating greater knowledge of truth so that their lives may be ever more human. Among those is philosophy, which is directly concerned with asking the question of life’s meaning and sketching an answer to it.8

This investigation is partly in response to that quest towards meaning in terms of life’s createdness and giftedness, as it may be discerned from the complex linguistic strands of Tolkien’s entire corpus. It is also in part to St John Paul II’s appeal to

philosophers and to all teachers of philosophy, asking them to have courage to recover, in the flow of an enduringly valid philosophical tradition, the range of authentic wisdom and truth—metaphysical truth included—which is proper to philosophical enquiry.9

The extent to which Tolkien was working towards that end in his own time will be explored here. As a Catholic, Tolkien believed in the Fidei Depositum—a body of faith, based on right reason and revelation, but based also upon the writings of Christian scholars who utilized in a variety of ways the philosophy of Plato. Tolkien’s belief in an objective truth about life and the world rises out of his own faith and life-experience, and St John Paul II sums up what I am postulating concerning Tolkien’s entire project: “Only within this horizon of truth will people understand their freedom in its fullness and their call to know and love God as the supreme realization of their true self.”10 The claim of human freedom, constituted as ‘being and gift,’ is supported throughout this investigation in both their physical and metaphysical aspects.

Tolkien’s genuine ambition was to create a ‘mythology for England’ using ancient literary sources, devices and idioms.11 Consistent with classical and Neoplatonic method, Tolkien introduced his mythological world through the agency of music—divine music, to create and evolve a landscape, and people it with a plenitude of (apparently) substantially good creatures. He was not alone in this project. In a different and yet equally v...