Leaf by Niggle | Tolkien and Short Story

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What happens to subcreation when it is beatified in Heaven? It doesn't become less real. It becomes more real. What happens to us, right, if we get to heaven, we will be fully real as fully whole human beings. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Welcome to the Catholic Theology Show, presented by Ave Maria University. This podcast is sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle, a community that supports the mission of Ave Maria University through their monthly donations of $10 or more. If you'd like to support this podcast and the mission of Ave Maria University, I encourage you to visit avemaria.edu slash join for more information. So welcome to the Catholic theology show. I'm your host Michael Dauffine, and today we have Joseph Pierce, visiting professor of literature at Ave Maria University, who had taught full time with the university over a decade ago. And so we're so happy to have you back. And today we're going to be talking about a story by Tolkien called Leaf by Niggle. So thank you so much for being on the show. [00:01:11] Speaker A: It's great to be back, Michael. Thanks for having me. [00:01:13] Speaker B: Right, so you're actually going to be teaching a course on Tolkien and Lewis for our students. So we're so glad to have you here and do that. So before we dive into Leaf by Niggle, maybe just for some listeners who might not be as familiar with Tolkien or might know a little bit about Lord of the Rings, just kind of stepping back, big picture, why is Tolkien worth reading today? [00:01:39] Speaker A: Well, from a Catholic perspective, first of know, he was a lifelong Catholic and a committed, devout Catholic, and that informs everything he does. That's the first thing we need to know. He also described The Lord of the Rings, which is certainly one of the greatest works of literature ever written. I'm quoting him word for word here. The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work. So if you've got a work which is one of the greatest works of all time, which is fundamentally religious and Catholic according to its own author, which model the point was written in the 20th century and not in the Middle Ages, right. That speaks to modern problems as well as perennial truths. That's obviously something that every Catholic should want to know more about. And so those that haven't read Tolkien, that don't know much about him, I would encourage them to actually to dive in. [00:02:27] Speaker B: I also think that in a way, all great authors and intellectuals kind of see something that help us to see things, right? They see parts of reality. And so one of the beautiful things is that even just beginning to learn, say, about Thomas Aquinas, we begin to see certain things that even if we never read Aquinas, we see certain things that he saw because it was about reality. And I feel like the same thing for Tolkien. It's that I definitely think reading Tolkien is excellent, but I find that even if we simply begin to talk about what he did, or that we're already kind of opening ourselves up to a deeper reflection upon ourselves and the world. And I definitely think Tolkien really has that gift, and it's kind of fascinating. Tolkien, of course, was close friends with C. S. Lewis and in many ways was the proximate kind of cause of his conversion. It was after a late night conversation with Tolkien about myth and about Christianity. And Tolkien, or Lewis would later say that Tolkien explained to him that, well, what he loved about myths was the same thing, in a way, about Christianity. It was just that in Christianity, it actually happened. Right here you actually have a God who enters into history. So this idea, in a way that myths could be truthful, could disclose something about the human experience and the world in general, and that specifically, Christianity was a true myth, a true story, god's story. Not our story about ourselves or about the world or about God, but in a way, God's story about us. I think this is something that, you know, held and really helps us to see. I also find it fascinating, if you think about that, that Tolkien, therefore, was friends with Lewis when Lewis was an atheist. [00:04:20] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. And this also shows the power of friendship. Because of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, tolkien eventually manages to persuade Lewis of the truths of Christianity. And it's largely due to Tolkien, as you say, that Lewis embraced the Christian faith. So we can say that if it wasn't for Tolkien, we might not actually have the Chronicles of Narnia. So this is the power of friendship. And Tolkien said of his friendship with Lewis, he said Lewis was not an influence in the way that word is usually understood, but he was a great encourager, and if it wasn't for Lewis's encouragement, he probably would not have finished The Lord of the Rings. So we see the power of good Christian friendship that basically we have, in some sense, Tolkien to thank for Narnia and Lewis to thank for Middle Earth. So that's the glory, if you like, of brotherly love. [00:05:08] Speaker B: No, that really is wonderful. And so it's interesting that even though, say, in The Lord of the Rings are the things where you get these stories, in many ways are great friendships that they know, in part, certain things that Tolkien himself was able to experience. Right. And that is a great gift. So today we wanted to focus on kind of an obscure story, one that's less well known. Most people haven't heard of it, even people who've heard of The Lord of the Rings. But a short story, what's, about, like, ten pages or 20 pages called Leaf by Niggle? Right. So for people who haven't heard the story or haven't read the story, would you just offer kind of a brief summary what happens in the story? [00:05:53] Speaker A: Yeah, so Tolkien himself calls it his allegory. So there's certainly a fairly obvious allegorical content. And the character of Niggle is taken from an English word. Niggle is to be fastidious, very precise and perfectionist. But when I was growing up, also to be niggled was to be irritated. And so I don't know if that was just the vernacular idiom of the time and place I was brought up, whether it's part of universal English. But certainly the character of Niggle is both fastidious and perfectionist and also irritated by his neighbor. And so Niggle is, in one sense, I think, an everyman figure. So he can be applicable to all of us, particularly all of us in our creative dispositions. But also, this is certainly an autobiographical allegory that, in a sense, that Tolkien is talking about himself. And Niggle is a painter and he's trying to paint a landscape. Tolkien is a writer who's also trying to paint a landscape, though he's doing it with words and not with paint. And at the end of his life, Tolkien had numerous unfinished works because he was such a perfectionist. So this image in the story of this huge landscape painting, of which the only thing that's really finished is the tree in the middle and everything else sort of is only partly finished. Now I think we can see the tree as The Lord of the Rings and the rest of the landscape painting as Tolkien's other unfinished works that were works in progress when he died. So I think that Tolkien obviously had a day job. He's professor of Philology at Oxford University. He's also pata Familias, so a husband and a father of four children. So he had to write The Lord of the Rings in the middle of the night often, right? And so I see know the other character in the novel. The other main character in the short story is a character called Parish, and it says an allegory. So, of course, Parish is our neighbor. And I think insofar as Leaf by Nigger is autobiographical, the neighbor includes his wife and his children, right? Because he wants to get on with his painting. He wants to get on with his work, with his Middle earth. But he also knows he has responsibilities that really in the hierarchy of love, trump his desire to finish his work of art. He has to be a good neighbor. He has to be a good husband and a good father. And the commandments Lord of the God, to love the Lord their God and love their neighbor come before everything else. But does that mean that this work of creativity is a waste of time or should be abandoned for better things? And this is the tension in it between Niggle, the artist, and Parish, the sort of man who doesn't understand creativity or beauty. He's a very much utilitarian. We just got to get by on a day to day basis and not worry about big visions of things. And so it's a tension between these two approaches to reality that's at the heart of it. And, of course, which I'm sure we'll get to that in the middle of the story, in fact, towards the beginning of the story, that the central character, Niggle, dies. So the bulk of the story is actually set after his death. So it's also a wonderful story about the afterlife. And again, I'm fascinated by great writers'view of the afterlife. From Homer to Virgil to Dante to John Henry Newman to C. S. Lewis. And this is Tolkien's venture into the afterlife. And I find it fascinating. [00:09:27] Speaker B: And I've also heard that the story is kind of know. It's a retelling, in a way, of Dante's Divine Comedy, especially the Purgatorial, right? This purgation both the purgatory as purgatory, right? The purgation of our sins and defects after death, but also, in a way, the purgatorial element that ought to shape our lives, of the progressive purification and the journey. And it's interesting, of course, it speaks in the story of just there was a long journey coming. Niggle knew it was coming, but he kept putting off getting ready for it. Right. So it is that story. We all know we're going to die, but none of us, or we rarely want to get totally ready. And in a way, it's almost like almost in a way, we can't be completely ready as you get into this, and just to kind of at least first describe what happens. So when, after he goes on, somebody arrives and takes him on the journey, the journey of death. I think there are like two or three main kind of parts of that story. Could you just describe them relatively briefly? [00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So the first part of the story is when Niggle is still alive. So before he takes that long journey and the actual journey, the moment of death is a tunnel, and then he comes out the other side of the tunnel, and now he's obviously in the afterlife. And you're completely correct that it is about purgatory. I see parallels, actually, perhaps more satisfying to me than Dante's Divine Comedy with C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, because that's really also set in purgatory. And there were parallels. Dante has the courage, or the fullheartedness, depending upon your point of view, to ascend all the way to heaven. Tolkien and Lewis a bit more coy. They suggest heaven, Lewis. Particularly in the Last Battle. So, anyways, the first part is before Niggle dies and then after death. It's when he finds himself in the workhouse, which is obviously a place of purgatory, where there are two voices, the voice of the love of God and the mercy of God and the justice of God, the first and second voice. And then he emerges for the final part of the story, where he is let out of the workhouse and finds himself working in his own painting, which has become more real. And again, this is, I think, something we need to really stress here. Everything which is authentically good and is a mark of the dei. What Tolkien's saying here is, it's not going to cease to exist. Evil won't exist. There'll be no evil in heaven. But that which is good will be, in some sense, will still exist. So all the fruits of our imagination that are authentically good will still exist, but be perfected and become more real, become more alive. So one of the most beautiful parts of all of literature for me is when he finds himself cycling through a landscape and he has this weird sense of deja vu. He seems familiar, but he knows he hasn't been here before, but seems familiar, and he looks up and falls off his bicycle because there in front of him is his tree, the tree that he had labored so much subcreatively artistically to recreate. In a secondary sense, this beautiful tree. Well, in heaven, it doesn't become less real. It becomes more real. It is a real living tree, and the landscape around it is his landscape except, whereas he didn't manage to finish it, that God, if you like, has taken his creativity, has blessed it, beatified it, so that it's now real, a real landscape, and he continues to work on it, using his creative gifts thereafter just to re encapsulate again. First part is before Niggle dies. Second party goes through the sort of the painful part of purgatory. And then the third part is, if you like, the joyful part of Purgatory, where you're still actually being healed, but it's something which is not painful anymore. It's something which is, if you like, an anti chamber, a suggestion of heaven. [00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that line. When he as he puts it here, right, he saw that the tree was alive, its leaves opening, its branches glowing, bending in the wind, right, as he'd always wanted to see but couldn't fully capture, he gazed at the tree. Slowly, he lifted his arms and opened them wide. It's a gift, he said. Right. He was referring to his art and to the result, but he was using the word quite literally. It's a gift. And this sense that all that we have, again, is a gift, and all that we do with it is a gift. This is the fullest expression, is to turn our lives into seeing everything as a gift and then to kind of give everything. And this idea, in a way, because I think this language of gift and self gift has become I don't know, it's kind of been re entered into the Catholic imagination and mind of the contemporary age through John Paul II. Right. And this goes back to Gaudian Mitzbez. But this idea of that man can only find himself in a sincere gift of himself, in a way, because God gives himself to us in Jesus Christ. But this gift of self is really kind of at the heart of what it means, in a way, to be in the right. God gives himself in creation and in redemption. And so we have at our heart the true image of God is not the perverted image of it's mine precious, but it's to kind of see everything as a gift. So could you say a little bit about that idea that in a way, art is a gift of self? [00:15:30] Speaker A: Yes. So basically, first of all, he said it's a gift. He's talking about his art, but he's also meaning quite literally, so the subcreative gift is exactly that. It's a gift from God. And because it's a gift from God, we're meant to take it as a gift, but also to give it back, like you see self gift. So the giving back to the giver of the gift, the fruits of the gift given. And we bring through our sub creative gifts, secondary worlds into being. So Tolkien as a writer brings Middle earth into being. Nigger, the artist, is bringing this landscape, which is an imaginary landscape, into being, but he's only able to do it because of the inspiration, the gift of creativity that he gets as being made in the image of God. So it's a gift in essence, but then it's a gift. He means it literally. So you mentioned about God's self giving in Jesus Christ that this tree is literally a gift. And what happens to sub creation when it is beatified in heaven? It doesn't become less real, it becomes more real. What happens to, right, if we get to heaven, we become the fully human person, because the perfect human person is Jesus Christ, right? And we can't be like him this side of the grave because of our fallenness, our brokenness, and this is the shadowlands. It's not the fullness of the light, the fullness of reality. But if and please God, we actually get to heaven, we will be fully real as fully whole human beings. So the tree, in this sense, if you like, is the work that's finished, right? Not the work in progress. And all of us are works in progress, as our works of art are works in progress, but they won't be fully finished until they're fully blessed by God in heaven. [00:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah, there's that line when the inspector comes to take him on his journey, and he says something like, but I'm not finished with it. And he goes, Or I'm not finished yet. And I love the way he puts it, he goes, oh, yeah, it's not even finished. Well, it's finished with, as far as you're concerned, at any rate. Come along, right, and kind of this idea that all of our works, all of our loves in this life are never going to be kind of finished, right? Our own work at self improvement isn't going to be finished, right? Our works of charity, all of our projects are going to end up unfinished in a way. There's kind of a sense of I don't always say not even the full virtue of humility, but just there's a kind of humility that we ought to have of just recognizing the truth of that. That yes. What we do is and I think that's kind of like one of the paradoxes, in a way, I wanted to ask you about is this certain sense in which kind of like all that we do is incomplete and imperfect and unfinished. And yet at the same time, what we do has this immense value, right where both the works of charity that he does that get mentioned by the first voice. But he did. He got sick going to trying to get the doctor for his neighbor, who's the husband has a lame leg and the wife is sick, and he actually gets sick biking in the rain, in the cold rain and trying to go get a doctor. So he does these things. And those things he does, in a way, demonstrate that he was kind of aligned with the gift of God in Jesus Christ, the grace, and also the unfinished painting he does. So somehow, like, the works that we do, the works of love and the works of art are real and necessary. Right. God, in a way, isn't going to save us against our will. [00:19:15] Speaker A: Right. [00:19:16] Speaker B: He's not going to save us if we don't want to be saved. Even if it's a gift of God in grace, we have to receive it. And so could you just say more about this certain sense in which kind of again, the radical, unfinished character of the Human Project, in a way, in terms of art and love, and yet at the same time, this deep understanding that in a way, what we do in art and love have eternal? [00:19:45] Speaker A: I mean, I think the way we can see this, and the deepest metaphorical and mystical level perhaps, is if we see Niggle's art. So Tolkien's art our art as obviously something which is given by God to be given back to God and to be fair to Niggle, and I think we could be fair to Tolkien. I think that was absolutely his intention, because the art is pure, right? So let's just say the work of art, whether it be the painting or the story, our creativity, our creative gifts, giving back to the giver of the gift, the fruits of the gift, given this pure practice of creativity as an act of praise, right? So this we can be seen metaphorically as the love of God, right? But that sort of vertical love for God is actually insufficient because we have to love the Lord thy God and love our neighbor. We have to love God in our neighbor. So parish right, our neighbor in the story is always preventing Niggle from being able to give his life in praise to God, because he has to learn to give his praise to God in his love of neighbor as well. And so that tension, you say it's tension to the cross, the vertical and the horizontal is what's at heart in Niggle's world and parishes, because Parish doesn't understand this creative stuff at all. He just wants to get on with things. And so when they come together in Purgatory, that Niggle has to learn to do the ordinary things. I mean, part of the Purgatory experience is painting bores one color, right? Now, for an artist, right? Something monotonous, he's got to learn the ordinary things, not the great creative gift things. But on the other hand, Parish has to learn to see beauty, because I think the messenger, the angel in it says, but it was there as a glimpse. You could have seen this heaven. You can see this heavenly vision as a glimpse in his art, if you care to look, which he didn't. So he was blind to beauty. So it's this tension between the love of God and the love of neighbor. We have to get both right and in balance, right? Of course, we're always loving God in our neighbor. It's not either or, it's both. And but if we think we can just this is my vocation. I'm an artist, right? And all my other responsibilities are negligible or secondary. My job as a husband or a father or a colleague, they're all sort of secondary. And I do them if I have to, like Niggle does. I mean, he does do them, but it's always with the element of begrudging. It because he'd rather be doing something else, right? So I think there's a real metaphor for the tension in our lives this side of the grave, right? [00:22:29] Speaker B: It reminds me a bit of Psalm 19, beautiful psalm. The heavens are telling the glory of God, right? The firmament proclaims his handiwork, but the heavens are telling the glory of God. But in a way, who's listening, right? There is a beauty of creation. Do we learn to see it? There's a beauty of creative art. Do we learn to see it? And I think, again, we also might want to just step back for a moment for our listeners or viewers and consider again, art is really any creative enterprise. So it could be the masterful art of Tolkien, who writes The Lord of the Rings, or of Niggle in the story, who paints this gigantic canvas, right, so large that it ends up, after he dies, becoming like the roof, or they use it to patch the roof of the neighboring house. But I think it could also be maybe the way, say, a mother at home organizes the house and takes care of children or somebody at work who kind of by doing their work well with a certain kind of creative impulse or something. So this idea, in a way that each of us, in any a teacher, whether or not you're teaching elementary school children or seminarians, right. That there's a kind of artistry at work. And I think, in a way, maybe each of us kind of can learn to kind of discover that sense of art. And so it is interesting towards the end of the story when they've gone through the hard work of Purgatory, but now they're on the soft, the gentle work, right. And they're around the tree. And it's interesting. Tolkien has Niggle doing the gardening, and you're right. Paris just walks around and looks at the tree. He has, in a way, to learn to, you know, maybe there's a little bit of what he's saying, is that each of us will discover maybe one part of ourselves. Maybe we're more the creative person who needs to both love that but also attend more joyfully to our duties, or we're the person who only focuses on our duties and needs to recover the sense of wonder and beauty. [00:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. To be fully rounded, fully whole. I mean, take Jesus Christ, the perfectly rounded, fully whole person. Basically, holiness, wholeness and holism really are synonyms. We need to become fully whole, fully holy, and that really whatever defects we have in us. And so I think this is a profound meditation that Tolkien, of course, himself knows that his creative gifts that he has are meant to be given. And he does give them, of course, superbly. But he also knows he's a Christian. He's a Catholic man. He's a husband, he's a father, he's a colleague, he's a friend. Right. He knows that he has to love the Lord thy God and love his neighbor. And he knows that some of those things he neglects. He neglects because of his own preferences and his own desires that might not necessarily be whole or holy. So those sorts of things are the things that are perfected. When we get to Purgatory, we become fully whole through that Purgatorial process. And that's, I think, the beauty of this story. It's a mystical look at how we become whole. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Well, thanks so much for introducing us to that great story. So what I want to do in the second half of our show is kind of come back and maybe look at a few more kind of specific examples, and maybe we'll kind of pick out an example or two for each of those different phases. A couple things from his life, his both discovery of art and his work, and then also some things of the various stages of Purgation, and then even that final scene at the end when he kind of begins to go off to the mountain. So look forward to talking about this more after our break. [00:26:20] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:26:29] Speaker C: You're listening to the Catholic Theology Show presented by Ave. Maria University and sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle. Through their generous donations of $10 or more per month, annunciation Circle members directly support the mission of AMU to be a fountainhead of renewal for the church through our faculty, staff, students and alumni. To learn more, visit avemaria.edu slash join. Thank you for your continued support. And now let's get back to the show. [00:26:58] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Catholic Theology Show. I'm your host, Michael Dolphine. A and today we are joined by Joseph Pierce, visiting professor of literature at Ave Mar University. [00:27:08] Speaker A: It's good to be back. Thanks for having me, Michael. [00:27:10] Speaker B: Great. We've been discussing Tolkien and his storytelling and one short story that he tells called Leaf by Niggle. We've talked a little bit about how it's autobiographical in parts of his own life. It's also somewhat about purgatory, but in a way, as all secondary worlds of a good artist, it also takes on a life of its own, right? It's not merely representational. And so we actually begin in the story to kind of develop affection for Niggle. We almost feel his irritation at the demands of his neighbor, Know, with the lame leg who can't take care of his wife. So he has to help out as he goes on. He doesn't want to go on the Know. We kind of sympathize with him. So Niggle also becomes a real character, which I think is one of the important points, is that art within the secondary world becomes, you know, this idea that even Know say, if you look at Lewis for a Know Aslan is a real character. He's not merely a stand in for Jesus Christ, right? He's well, what would it be like if the Lord had become incarnate in another world like Narnia that needed redemption, as Lewis will describe it? So there's this element that the art of the story, Leaf by Niggle, becomes real when we read the story. But I wanted to kind of look at a few, maybe scenes from his life, his purgation, and then kind of the end of his purgation, and even at the very end, when then they glance back at our shadowlands, what happens? But so one of the things I thought that was very interesting was that Tolkien describes Niggle as a painter, and he describes him as he says that he was a painter who could paint leaves better than trees. And he would spend a long time on a single leaf trying to catch its shape, its sheen, the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he also wanted to paint a whole tree with all the leaves in the same style and all of them different. So, what do you think Tolkien is trying to create kind of in our own minds when he says that he was a painter who could paint leaves better than trees? [00:29:30] Speaker A: Well, again, there's so much in that passage that you've read there. We could spend the rest of the show just talking about it. But obviously, there are some people who are much more detail oriented, much more fastidious. The word Niggle, as we've said, means basically fastidious. So he's one who's into. Detail and perfectionism. There's a wonderful story, by the way, that I should tell because it appertains to this. Tolkien was out hiking with Lewis and his brother Warney and another friend, George Sayer, and it's from him we get this story. And Tolkien and Lewis and his brother hike energetically, right? They brisk. You get to the pub and you have a hearty meal, and it's great. And what they're enjoying, apart from the exercise, is the sweep of the landscape, right? The whole landscape, the whole tree, should we say, in the context of this conversation. But they got increasingly irritated by Tolkien because every hundred yards or so, tolkien would stop to look at a flower, and he'd be looking at that particular flower and be fascinated by it, while Lewis and his brother just want to get on. And at some point, Lewis said to George sayer, look, you walk with toleras with know, meet us at the pub when you eventually get there. So if you incarnate, this is Tolkien. Tolkien is someone is much better at detail, and that's why he finished relatively little. And what he spent the last years of his life doing was trying to cross the T's and dot the I's to make sure that the whole landscape of his own mythology was theologically coherent. So he was someone very detail oriented. So that's very important. But I think the other thing here the other key thing. He doesn't mass produce. God doesn't mass produce, right? So we in our own subcreativity. If we want to try to give that gift back to God in the spirit which is given, we don't mass produce. So he wants to make every leaf of the same pattern but unique. And I know I think this takes us off on a tangent, which we don't have to pursue very far, but I certainly think very much the pattern is the substance, right? The quidity. The quiditas, right. Every oak leaf has the same quiditas. It follows the same pattern. That's what it is. But also, God doesn't mass produce. So every oak leaf is also a unique embodiment of the oak leaf, right? It's like our own personhood. We have the quiditas of our humanity, but we have the hechaitas, the thisness of our particular unique personhood. So I think, again, this is talking being fully Catholic and insufficar as we are being subcreators, we should try to subcreate in the manner in which the Creator creates with this pattern, the whole landscape, the whole tree, but also the detail oriented. Each leaf has to be of the pattern, but also unique, with bits of dew on it, and it's not the same as the others. Right? [00:32:27] Speaker B: That is really a beautiful image, and I definitely think that is very true. And when we begin to see that, we see kind of like maybe our work day in and day out is very similar, right? We do roughly the same things. I'm a professor. So I teach similar courses. The semesters bleed into one. But in a certain sense, the gift is to see each day as utterly unique. And so it's similar. It's of the same pattern, but it's also distinct. And I think that's, again, in family life, in friendship, we often find ourselves doing almost the same thing. But instead of seeing life as monotonous, we kind of see life as this thrilling adventure. And I think that's kind of a great way of describing that. So I thought maybe we'd turn a little bit more then into the next phase when he goes into his kind of purgatorial element and in there talked about, there's kind of like two major parts. The first is the hard work of his purgation and then eventually he gets the gentle treatment later on with his own tree. But in the hard work I just loved the way that this was described. He says, like, he basically has to do work every day under a very severe doctor. He says it was more like being in a prison than in a had. Like he had to do this sort of stuff. But he just describes this where he says, well, at any rate, poor Niggle got no pleasure out of life. Not what he had been used to call pleasure. He was certainly not amused. But it could not be denied that he began to have a feeling of, well, satisfaction, bread rather than jam. He could take up the task the moment the bell rang and lay it aside promptly the moment the next one went all tidy and ready to be continued. Right. So this kind of fascinating movement from pleasure to satisfaction, could you describe that and how that plays a role in the story? [00:34:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think part of the tension we see in the story, particularly prior to Niggle's death is this tension between what we might call rights and responsibilities, right? It's Niggle wants to do what he wants to do. He's seeking pleasure. What he finds pleasant is to carry on working with his painting. Everything else is unpleasant by comparison. And in consequence, he neglects things he should be doing because he's fixated on the one thing that he wants to do. So here he learns to put responsibilities before rights. He learns actually to become selfless. And insofar as he learns to be selfless, which is basically learning to love, right. That he gains satisfaction. He realizes, this is enough to give myself to this task, to this object, to this good thing, isn't it? Self, satisfactory, satisfying. It's enough with actual fact. Of course, his painting was never finished. He was never satisfied in the pursuit of his art. Even if the art might in itself be a good thing. It was not finished. But he's learning to finish things. Right. And this is satisfying what's art? Is the Latin enough? Well, if you finish something, it's enough. Right. It's accomplished. [00:35:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And in a way, maybe that the path to satisfaction comes through love. Exactly. When we seek pleasure through work or through kind of the things we are going to do within the world, to manipulate the world either in the name of art or techne, right? Whether or not it's out of kind of love, of beauty or even just the good things we can do, those things kind of on the surface are never going to be completed. They're never going to be finished. So they're always going to be somewhat unsatisfactory. We're always going to have something in our inbox, so to speak. But if we look at love in a way, then love is satisfying, love is complete. Right? [00:36:36] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:36:37] Speaker B: Put it did you get all the jobs around the house you wanted to get done? No. But today, did you love your wife? Maybe, you know what I mean? Or at least I did my best to try. And if you did that, then you put your head down to that night satisfied, right? So there is this kind of satisfaction that comes through love. And I think it's interesting he even says he describes it as he had no time of his own and yet he was becoming master of his time. Yes. And so it's that irony that when we want our own time, maybe me time or something, that we are ironically, not master of our time, when we see that in reality, our time is a gift. And as we see our time and our talents, our rights and responsibilities all as gifts. And we begin to meet them. We actually begin to find kind of true freedom, true agencies. But I love that image of becoming a master of his time. So let's go in a little bit further then, as we get in, then to the later part of this purgatorial element where they're up at the tree. He's gardening parish is beginning to learn to see what would you say is, what's the kind of transformation that happens here as they're in this kind of higher state of seeing the beauty of his tree, learning to work and enjoy life? [00:38:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I sometimes see that the character of Niggle and the character of Parish as being the two types of subcreation that Tolkien talks about in On Fairy Stories, which we've discussed already. There's true art, which is using our sub creator gifts, give back to the giver of the gifts, the fruits of the gift given, right. That's art as praise. And then there's using our creative gifts innovatively to make things that are useful, that can be done pridefully and produce harmful technology and empower self empowerment at the expense of others. We see that all the time, but not necessarily right. There's good technology, which we use all the time, and thanks be to God for it. So I think that Niggle is the artist, right? The sub creator for the glory of god who's pursuing beauty because he sees beauty and wants to represent it. And then you've got parish who's just really interested in what's useful, how to get by. He likes his garden, but it's mostly to grow vegetables he can eat. So it's these two types of subcreativity. Subcreative use of man. So parish cannot see beauty. He's blind to beauty, but then Niggle's blind to the necessity of taking care of the things that have to be taken care of. Right. So the two of them, if you like, become more like the other in order to become fully both. In other words, fully real. [00:39:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Also, it almost reminds me a little bit of, like, Martha and Mary in the you know, Martha's work that she does is wonderful and necessary in many ways. But there's also a sense in which right is the better part. It's the one that shows we have to kind of become both Martha and Mary. And there's a beautiful tradition that Martha and Mary are both saints. Right. So we have to kind of be able to figure out when it is appropriate to sit at our Lord's feet and when it's appropriate to do the. [00:40:11] Speaker A: Dishes or at labora. [00:40:13] Speaker B: Right, yes. [00:40:14] Speaker A: Work and labor, prayer and labor. We need both. [00:40:19] Speaker B: That's so helpful. So they actually go up this journey. They go up a mountain. And it does remind me of Dante's Purgatorio, which you keep going up and up the mountain and finally you get into Eden, which is Mount Eden. People may not be familiar with or think of Eden as a mountain, but in a certain sense, all the great spots in the Old Testament are mountains. Right. Mount Eden. It's not described as such, but certainly Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb and you know Jerusalem, so even Mount Tabor. Right. All these elements. And so they go up and up and up, and they keep going farther. And you do get this sense of this kind of perfection of earthly creation which is not attainable in our world. It's only somehow attainable after death. But that's only kind of the foretaste of the new heavens and the new earth that will be in the Beatific vision. But as they go up there, then they begin kind of like kind of looking back. So they begin to look back at our world. And what do you think is significant about the fact that he doesn't just leave the story with them going up to heaven, but he has them look back. [00:41:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think it's one of we've talked think in an earlier episode about how ultimately, as Lewis would say, these are the shadowlands. So in some sense, this primary world is also, from the perspective of God in heaven, a secondary world. Right. Because the primary world is to be in his presence. So that's where they are. That's where they're moving towards at the end. They move towards the high places. It's quite clearly moving towards heaven. They're far beyond the shadowlands now. But we look back and we see all the things that are so important to us the socialist government, Niggles art. Now, all that's left of it, because damaged and used repair houses, is one solitary leaf, and it's framed up, put in an obscure niche of an obscure museum that one or two people notice, right? This is where all of our efforts, all our earthly efforts, come three or four generations after we're dead, right? And who's going to actually remember the particular things that we did during our lifetime? So I reminded of the Latin phrase sick transit gloria Monday. Their past is the glory of the world, right? And so the socialists are in charge, and they don't care about art, and only if it's in propaganda. And they believe in killing people that disagree with them. And it's obviously that England's become a totalitarian it's horrible, but also it's irrelevant. And it's not that important from the perspective of eternity, right? It passes away. It's transient. It's a secondary world. So we see where they look back, as Niggle and parish look know, they're told about the fact, the good thing that their work is doing in Purgatory, right? Niggle's, parish. So they brought this landscape alive, they've done things with it, and now the other Purgatory souls can be sent there as part of their healing process. They hear that and they laugh. And so this is heavenly laughter in contradistinction to this mean spirited, propagandistic secularism, which is passing away and by comparison, pathetic. [00:43:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's really, of course, something I mean, again, there's this kind of profound paradox that the little works we do or the great works we do will often be forgotten or suppressed in this world. They will be forgotten. A little bit of ecclesiastes in here, right, that whatever is built up will decay. There's nothing new under the sun vanity of vanities. But at the same time, the little work we do will be remembered in heaven, right? And the good acts we do and the acts of authentic beauty and creativity and love are somehow eternal. And so there's this profound I don't know, in a way. So therefore, each of our moments have the ability to have this kind of incredible divine meaning. It reminds me of St. Jose Maria Scriva, who 20th century saint who founded Opus Day, would speak about the quid divinum, the divine thing, the divine element, the divine whatness that's hidden in each aspect of our ordinary life. And I think this is really something that, in a way, leaf by Niggle kind of like, shows that whole thing, that little leaf, that artwork that he did that no one cared about, is actually kind of eternal, and it creates a space for other souls. And also, even in his own way, the honest love of perish for his wife and trying to get her the help she needs also becomes basically a little place that helps Niggle grow. But at the very end, of course, we have this element, right? It says that where do we call this? We end up calling the place Niggles Parish. I sent a message for both of them to tell them. What did they say? They both laughed, right? Laughed. The mountains rang with it. So the story ends with laughter. Say more about that. [00:45:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'm reminded here of the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, the 7th book, right? At the end of the book, when Lewis says that all of our life in this world, what Aslan says is all your adventures in Narnia and all of your life in your world were like the COVID and the title page of the Great Book of Life. But the real story hasn't even begun yet. The real story begins now, in other words, after death, because they're dead. And henceforth the story goes on forever and every chapter is better than the one before. So we have this not just happy ever after, but happier and happier ever after. And that happier after also happy laughter, right? Happy ever laughter, because laughter is one of the things which is a mark of the Dei. How do we know what the Dei is in us? What is it about us that no other creature has? That's why Chesterton, at the end of orthodoxy, says the one thing that was so secret that Christ couldn't reveal even when he walked on our earth was his mirth, was his laughter. Chesterton has this vision, know that Christ goes up into the mountains to pray, but also to laugh, right? Like the humor of God, because this laughter is something divine. And so, ultimately, this happy ever after is going to be a happy ever laughter. And Hilaire Baloch says, there's nothing worth the wear of winning than laughter and the love of friends. And I used to think, well, that's not true. Some things are more important than laughter and the love of friends, like heaven and God, for instance. But what is heaven? It is laughter and the love of friends. It's the friendship of God, it's the friendship of our neighbor in a place where laughter is going to as it does at the end there, the mountains are going to ring with that's, you. [00:47:38] Speaker B: Know, really so beautifully put. And it reminds me, I think Chesterton also said, right, how do the angels fly? They take themselves so lightly. And why did the Satan fall? He fell through the force of gravity. He took himself too seriously. And in a way, the ability to learn, to have a sense of humor, right? To laugh at ourselves and to kind of laugh with God, to recognize, yeah, all of our efforts in this world are going to pass. And there's a scene in The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis where at one point, the mother who wants to get her son and the angel or her brother is trying to tell her that at one time she says, So everything I did was wrong. And he goes, of course. He goes, that's the great joke, right? Everything we all did was wrong. Once we begin to admit that, then we can begin to live. And so there's great joy and freedom that comes from kind of recognizing in a way that in a way, God is going to bring us home, and that God is our surety, god is our hope, and that in that, we can find great joy. So anyway, thank you so much, Joseph Pierce, for being on our show. For people that are interested in learning a little bit more about you and your work, is there a place that you direct them? [00:48:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So anybody wants to keep up with what I'm doing, what I'm saying, my podcast, et cetera, should go to my personal website. And that's Jperce Co. So J-P-E-A-R-C-E-C-O. [00:49:08] Speaker B: Excellent. And again, we've been discussing A Leaf by Niggle, a short story, and one that's kind of it's interesting, even though it's very short. The more I've been reading it and even talking about it today, I find again, it's one of those stories in which kind of you like to kind of live and dwell because it helps you to see yourself a little bit more clearly. And I'll definitely walk away with that image of focusing maybe a little bit less on pleasure, right. The pleasure of getting my way or getting my work done or doing what I want, and maybe a little bit more of that satisfaction, right. Becoming a little bit more master of our time by recognizing that it's not ours. Right. It's a gift. So thank you so much, Joseph, for being on the show. [00:49:50] Speaker A: I can say my pleasure what shouldn't be my pleasure. It's a joy to be with you. God bless you, Mike. Great. [00:49:56] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:49:58] Speaker C: Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our annunciation circle so we can continue to bring you more free content. We'll see you next time on The Catholic Theology Show.