Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We are given the instruments to play in the great music of God's symphony of creation. And, of course, we have to learn to play well. Obviously, we need freedom to create, right, to be creative, to actually join in this creative process. God wills us to be willing participants in his great music.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: You 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 join for more information.
I'm your host, Michael Doffiney, and today I am pleased to be joined by Joseph Pierce, author, writer, speaker, and also visiting professor of Literature for this semester and next semester at Ave Mar University. So welcome to the show.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: It's a joy to be Michael great.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: And so Joseph Pierce has been a frequent guest on our show, and we've spoken about many things with respect to Chesterton C. S. Lewis and Tolkien today. What I wanted to do is the catechism calls for a catechesis on creation. And I want to talk a little bit about the idea of creation, providence and sin, what the catechism calls for and then how we can see in kind of Tolkien's background to the Lord of the Rings and his Silmarillion and some other writings that he does. Tolkien can kind of be like a guide to recover an authentic understanding of creation. So before we dive into that, I just want to say a couple of things about this, what the Catechism teaches. So first, the catechism in paragraph 282 says, catechesis on creation is of major importance. It concerns the very foundations of human and Christian life, as it puts it. Basically, it tells us where we come from and where we're going. And if we don't know that, we just simply don't know how to act, says these questions that creation answer basically are decisive for the meaning and orientation of our life and action. So maybe just to start with that kind of idea, catechesis on creation is of major importance. It's foundational for understanding how does it put it, the meaning and orientation of our life and actions. So could you just maybe say a word about how you started reading maybe Tolkien?
What did you think about creation before you came to the Catholic faith? What did the Catholic faith help you learn about creation, and how did Tolkien help you to deepen that understanding?
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. So, obviously, I'm a convert to the faith, and when I was young, I believed that faith and reason were severed. You had to basically choose one or the other. You can be religious and therefore irrational, or you can be rational and therefore irreligious. And it was basically discovering St. Thomas via GK. Chesterton that I came to see faith and reason as being united. So that, if you like, answered the Razio. But as regards creation, what I didn't see at first, but also saw first of all through Chesterton, god was the great artist, the great poet. And in the Silmarillion by Tolkien, god is introduced to us right at the very beginning. In the beginning was the one capital O Iluvata, the father of all. And he presents immediately to the angelic beings the firstborn of his creation, the great music. So we have this presentation of the cosmos as a great work of art. So we have God as creator in the fullest understanding of the Word, as an artist, as one who brings beautiful, good and true things into being. And so this understanding of God as the ultimate poet or composer of the great music of the cosmos, again, C. S. Lewis has narnia sung into being. So this understanding of God as the God of creation, not just merely the God of Logos of Razio, was very important to me. And Chesterton Lewis and Tolkien were probably the key figures for me in bringing me to that understanding.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And if we go to Genesis itself, I think there's something about Tolkien's image of music and Lewis's idea of singing that is really helpful in a way, because what Genesis does is when Genesis has these lines, these famous lines about God's creation through His Word, right? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God saw the light and it was good. Right. God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And he separated the waters from the waters.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered. And so God said, Let there be lights in the firmament. Let there be waters, let there be birds, let there be fish, all these different elements. But in a way, if we think about God speaking creation into being, god's speech is not in the past, right? Because if God's act of creation is not something that happened at the beginning of time, it's something that happens at each and every moment. God speaks creation into being, but he holds it in being through his very Word. And so I think it's interesting if we think about music, there is something about music that is ongoing, right? If a song that is sung continues to be resonant. And so the very harmony and fabric of creation is at this very moment being sung and held into being in its kind of fabric by God's ongoing activity.
So it kind of shows, in a way, if we think about this in terms of this musical and vocal understandings, then we can think about God creating all things through His Word, by his speech, but in a way that doesn't kind of err in this side of God created the world and now we're on our own. So could you talk a little bit about how that sense of God's ongoing presence as creator was important for you having a better understanding?
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah, so basically it was a key part of the process of growing, if you like, in the theological understanding of God for me was this development of the understanding of omnipresence. Because I first of all thought omnipresence meant God was present everywhere and of course he is. But in a much deeper sense, it means everything's present to God. So as you say, you can't talk about God's actions in the past tense.
He speaks creation into being at all times.
Everything is present to him. There's no past, no future to the presence of God. So that's absolutely crucial. And of course, when we say God doesn't speak prosaically, right. So God's speech is a we can talk about the music of the spheres. Right? Again, Boethius, in his workday, musica speaks about three different types of music, right? The musica universalis or the musica mandana, the music of the spheres, the music of the cosmos. And you have the musica humana, the music of the human soul, and then you have the music instrumentalists. How this is voiced forth first of all by God as the great music, but also by us subcreatively, as Tolkien would say, by us as artists emulating the imago day, the imagination, by being creative ourselves. So our own songs, our own creativity, our own works of art, of our own works of literature are themselves a shining forth of this voicing, forth by God and God's voice. Say we could talk about God speaking, but God doesn't speak, he sings. Right.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: That's really a great way of putting it. And it is interesting if it said the catechism in that 282, where it speaks about this catechesis on creation, it says this is decisive for finding meaning and orientation in our life and action. And in a way, if we think about ourselves as this kind of deistic God, as a deistic clock maker who simply winds up the clock and lets it run down, then in a way we're really separated from God. And maybe the other extreme, if we're kind of a pantheistic sense where God and the world are the same, well, in a way that means we always have God's presence, which is good. But the problem is then God can't transcend the world, so God can't save the world, which is bad. So we really do find meaning and orientation by recovering the sense of God as the creator who's intimately present aquinas will say that God, in a way, the being that we have is a participation or a sharing in God's own being. Which means that God is more, as he puts it, is he's more inmost to ourselves almost than we are to ourselves? Right. So this is kind of a sense that if God is singing creation into being, then I have a kind of purpose, aquinas will even say that everything that God creates has not only his knowledge, but his knowledge of approval, because he not only knew it, but he willed it to be.
So if we see ourselves, then not only the world and the cosmos and the Andromeda galaxy or these sorts of created things or waterfalls or national parks, but we see ourselves and other human beings, right, as created and loved by God into existence, then in a way I don't have to kind of reason to my purpose and meaning. I can just discover it and receive it. So I think that's really a very decisive moment. Now, one of the things that we also though, discover is that God's creation doesn't supplant or replace human agency. I think it was Jean Paul Sartre, one of the 20th century existentialists, that basically said something along the lines of, there's no room for God and for me in the universe, that if God is in control, then I am not, and I lose my freedom and my agency. So God is seen as a threat, as a competition to human freedom. So would you talk a little bit about how Tolkien at least gives us an image of God creating? You were beginning to talk a little bit about this certain sense that human beings, this music humana or the music that the Valar, right, the angels in Tolkien's myth, how is it that creation itself has the dignity of sharing in God's creative activity?
[00:11:26] Speaker A: Well, right at the beginning of the Silmaridian, in what we might call the Genesis, according to the elves, that we've given the account of creation. And I've already said that in the beginning was the one iluvata, and he declares the great music. But the key thing there is he speaks at this point in the cosmos, there's nothing physical. There's no physical cosmos. We haven't been created. Only the angelic beings exist. But he says to them, behold the great music. But he doesn't say hearken, doesn't say listen. He says play. So we have our own participation in the great music. So we are given the instruments to play in the great music of God's symphony of creation. And of course, we have to learn to play well, and we have to want to play well. So if we refuse to learn to play well, or if we want to play badly, we can bring disharmony into the cosmos. And God gives us the freedom to do that because obviously we need freedom to love. We also need freedom to create, right? To be creative, to actually join in this creative process. So God wills us to be willing participants in his great music.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: So within this idea, then, of creation, right, as Tolkien will describe it, and just to read this a little bit right there is, eru the one who in Arda is called Levatar, and he made the first anwir, the holy ones that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with Him before aught else was made. He spoke to them, propounding them the themes of music, and they sang before him, and he was glad.
Right. He even talks about how that then they deepened their understanding. Yet ever as they listened, they came to a deeper understanding and increased in unison and harmony. So that over time, their singing begins to develop the music. And I think this is maybe something that's maybe counterintuitive. If God is perfect and he creates, then how could he create angels that further his own creation?
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Yeah, because I say that he wants us to be in his image. And insofar as he wants us to be in his image, he wants us to be like Him. And one of the things about him is the fact he is the Creator. So we also have to be creators, or, as Tolkien would say, subcreators. And this is a crucial distinction. So I sometimes talk about and you can derive all this from reading Tolkien's work. It's what I call Tolkien's philosophy of myth. So the love of wisdom be found through the power of story. But what we can derive from that is what I call a hierarchy of creative value. And at the top is the Creator, God Himself, and below that is creation. And these are things made by God Himself, ex nihilo from nothing. And the reason that Tolkien distinguishes that creation from subcreation, as he calls it, is we are subcreators, not creators. God can bring things forth from nothing, ex Nihalo. We can only make things from other things that already exist. That's why it's subcreation. And you can also tell from Tolkien, there are two types of subcreation. There's subcreation to the glory of God, which is true art, and then there's subcreation for the use of man utility, which we might call technology. And these are all goods, right? But obviously, using our subcreative gifts to the glory of God is a higher use of it than using them for our own utility. But then, of course, the other thing about us, because we're fallen, is that subcreativity can be poisoned by pride. So we can use our creative gifts to actually bring discord and disharmony into the cosmos, as well as participating in God's providential music.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And that idea of art, then, in a way, what you're really getting at is the notion of worship, right? That human beings and the angels have this OD capacity that allows them to use their creative, free gifts to give back to God creation in some form or other through their own praise, through their own actions. Adam and Eve in the garden, right? Working and tilling and keeping the garden, but taking all of that and then offering that on the Sabbath of worship. So still doing things that both are oriented to the world, but all of those things can be oriented to God. And so, as this Silmerillion though describes it, I think it's really beautiful just to listen a little bit to the words that he describes. Right. So he's talking to the angels again. He says of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that you will make a harmony together a great music, right? Since I have kindled you with the flame imperishable, you shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and desires, if you will. And I will sit and hearken and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song. So this capacity of the angels and of human beings, through our own thoughts and devices, our own creativity, that we can sing God's song back to him and somehow render it more complete, that as aquinas will say, when God creates causes, they truly are causes. So this is technically with the understanding of secondary causality, instrumental causality, that God is not in competition with the world. So when he creates, truly become causes. But I love the way that Tolkien kind of just expresses, right, that they get to sing things into being based upon their own thoughts and devices.
So within that, of course, that begins to create though the problem. Right, and I think this is the other issue within our age, is that many people have a hard time acknowledging creation, at least in part because they see the presence of sin and evil. How could a good God have created a world that has gone so wrong?
I think I would say that at least when I was a young man, when I was an atheist, as a teen, in that time period in my life, I was that seemed to me to be kind of obvious. The world was I had a kind of an evolutionary mindset. The world evolved for no reason, right, randomly. And the sheer evil within the world was a sure sign that it didn't come from this, at least what I had heard about Christianity up until that point in my life. So could you say a little bit more about how Tolkien then introduces within this theme and this kind of angelic choirs of creation, the theme of sin and the Fall?
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Yes. So basically, our creative gifts, our subcreative gifts are meant to be, as you rightly say, a song of praise. We are meant to give back to the giver of the gift, the fruits of the gift given. So true art should be an act of praise. It should be a prayer, but it requires will. And again, God, thanks be to God, did not create us as mere automatons, as robots. He made us capable of loving and subcreating. And in order for that to be possible, he had to make us free. And of course, if we have freedom, there's the potential to refuse to choose the good and that's what pride does. The absence of humility causes us to refuse to choose the good, and that brings disharmony into the cosmos. So we see that in the Silmarillion, Melkor, the mightiest of the angels, who's basically he is Satan. It's the Elvish name for Satan. Melkor, the mightiest of the angels, refuses to play in accordance with the score, with the providential design of the great music, and wants to bring his own angry, powerful, dark prideful themes in. So this discord enters the cosmos and his aloud and about self empowerment. But God actually, at first he smiles, this is an act of disobedience, but he then weaves that back into the great music. And then in the end, he confronts Melchor and says that Melkor has to understand, and we have to understand this is applicable to us as well as Satan. That there's nothing that we can do, however evil or wicked, that brings discord into the great music of God's divine providence, that he will not in some way weave back into the grand design of the score itself in ways beyond our imagining or beyond the imagining of Satan. In other words, God can and does and will bring good from evil, and ultimately we see it. So Tolkien talks about the Eucatastrophe, the good turn, the sudden joyous turn that comes from disaster. So we have the eucatastrophe of the redemption as a consequence of the fall. We have the eucatastrophe of the resurrection as a consequence of the crucifixion. So we see God in practice doing this, bringing ineffable good from unutterable evil.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: So this is described by Tolkien in this element, right, that it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of ilavatar. Right. For he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself.
And maybe within at least this providential order, that is the only order that we know that to have freedom to love is this risk of right, because.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: To love is to freely choose to give yourself to another, but you can freely choose to refuse to do that. And that's the act of pride.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Yes. And so you can see right from the very beginning, Melkor is basically setting himself up as a rival God.
The self, discovering itself as a right, can then want to be the center. And just two themes that I want to develop is this idea of this musical harmony that you have, the original harmony you have then the discord, which is not really original, but it's a twisting of the original themes. And because it's not actually original, but it's just a twisting of the original themes, then the original creator can create a third wave of music that somehow reharmonizes the whole.
And he even mentions here where he said, never since have the Anwer made anything like to this music. The original music, though it has been said that a greater still shall be made before the Ilavatar by the choirs of Anwir and the children of Ilavatar after the End of Days. So somehow the final harmony is suggested that it may be greater than even the original, because in the final harmony, even the greatest discord will be overcome.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Yes, and obviously, this is a vision of Heaven.
St. John's revelation is that following the whole playing itself out of the great music of cosmic reality, we have the ultimate reality, which is the eternal presence of God, which is Heaven. And there, there will be no discord, there will be no evil. It's the consummation of everything into the fullness of the good, which is God himself, the singing of men and angels. And Tolkien would say, in terms of his know before God is the final consummation of this new music which supersedes the great music. We're experiencing what we call time and space.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: So one final question before we get to our break in a couple of minutes, but I guess it'd be this. Is that. So it's pretty clear that you have the one. You have god. God creates the Heaven and the Earth, invisible and invisible. So he creates the angels first. You have the highest of the angels, lucifer, who turns.
So we have the same thing, becomes Melkor. He becomes Satan. You have then the manwe who's the Michael character, who's not necessarily the highest by nature, but becomes the highest because he most aligns and understands the will of God. So in a certain sense, why is it helpful to enter into kind of Tolkien's world where he reimagines the creation story and the fall story from our Christian faith in this secondary world of his own imagining of myth?
[00:24:40] Speaker A: Well, first of all, of course, we are made in the image of God as creators or more technically, subcreators. So we are meant to subcreate. And one way we subcreate is by the telling of stories.
These stories are fictional in one sense. They didn't happen in historical fact, but they convey great truth. So again, this has been sanctified by Christ in the parables. So why does Jesus Christ invent a fictional character who runs away from his home in order to enjoy himself and then comes back with his towel between his legs, the prodigal son story? Because it teaches us valuable lessons, analogically. So what Tolkien is doing is showing us something to make us see something fresh. So in his essay on fairy stories, he talks about the necessity of recovery, of regaining. And he hyphenates it and makes us think about it, regaining a clear view. And he gets this from Chesterton and others. But Chesterton was always talking about you have to stand on your head to see something from a fresh angle. So sometimes we can read Genesis and not really think about it and take it for granted because we've read it too often. I thought about it perhaps not enough. And then we read Tolkien's analogy of Genesis in The Silmarillion, and we're seeing Genesis again from a fresh angle. We've regained the clear view, and I.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Think that's the purpose there's that powerful image from C. S. Lewis, and is surprised by joy from his childhood when he says that when he was maybe about four, warney, his older brother is about six, he makes him a toy garden. And he remembers it his whole life, that somehow this toy garden that his brother had made in a tin box with this little stuff somehow awakened in him.
He began to see the garden, but somehow he said that seeing the representation of the garden allowed him to discover the freshness that the actual garden didn't fully right. And so somehow this sense in which, right, we not only are creative beings and therefore it's appropriate for us to tell stories and to imitate God's story in another way, we're also beings, though, who have a hard time really encountering reality.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And also we find, because of our weakness, our inherent weakness, our brokenness, that we find it difficult to continue to see things repeatedly freshly. So if we see things something too often, we cease to see it at all. So that's why we have to see it from a new angle. And a story that offers an analogy can help us to see the original, the primary reality, more clearly. So that, again, this is how The Silonian can help us to see Genesis freshly, whereas otherwise we might be just taking it for granted.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: So we're going to take a break now. When we get back, I want to focus on so Tolkien has this letter from 1951 where he kind of describes why he thinks all of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are all one.
And interestingly, in a way, he kind of sees them all as one through some kind of they're united in a certain sense because of a problem, something that he will call, right, the fall. And so I think as a way of further diving into the catechesis on creation, we really then have to consider not only God's providence, but the way in which our providential order is intertwined. Now, with this discordant note, this fall, tolkien will even go so far as to say, right, you simply can't have a story without a fall. So let's talk a little bit more about that after the break.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Indeed.
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[00:29:01] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Catholic Theology Show. I'm michael, doffner your host. And today we have Joseph Pierce with us. And we've been talking about this notion of creation, providence and sin, and how Tolkien's writings, especially at the beginning of the Silmarillion, can help us to recover those understandings. We began with considering the Catechism of the Catholic Church 282 catechesis on Creation is of major importance. Discovering where we come from and where we are going is decisive for the meaning and orientation of our life and actions. Now, as the Catechism goes further, we have two ideas that I think are very important. The first one is the idea that God creates a world in process, right? He creates a world, as the Catechism puts it, in a state of journeying in Statu VA that creation is not, as the Catechism puts it, creation has its own goodness and proper perfection, but it did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator. It was created in Statuvier in a state of journeying toward an ultimate perfection. So in a way, you could think about this as really the risk, in a way, the risk of the journey, the risk of evil, but also, therefore, the risk of goodness and beauty, and then it goes into the Providence and the scandal of evil, right? Why does evil exist? And the Catechism has this kind of beautiful line. There's not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part, an answer to the question of evil.
So then I think in some ways, really trying to have a serious, thoughtful understanding of evil, the Fall is simply necessary, because if we don't get that understanding of the Fall proper, then we will ascribe evil to creation itself or to God or in a way, to our end. So life becomes hopeless or we, in a way, become doomed, right? Really two ways of putting it, whether or not we come from evil or we're heading to evil.
So this is what Tolkien writes, then. How does Tolkien help us understand this? Well, in this letter from 1951 that he wrote to Milton Waldman, in which he is trying to show that the Silmarillion and all these earlier tales are one with The Lord of the Rings.
Anyway, so this is what he says, though. He says his basic myth or fairy tale is it's not an allegory, but it must use allegorical language. So it's not a technical allegory, but it is allegorical.
He says it's mainly considered with fall, mortality and the machine. So he says with the fall, as you're going to talk a little bit more about that, because in the fall, something always goes wrong.
In almost every instance, the moment there is a blessing or a new creation, there is some kind of fall and disruption. But he also then speaks about mortality, that within the world there is somehow the desire that ought to lead us to do great things for God, but somehow becomes disordered. And he says especially because after the Fall, with mortality, then we seek to find ways on our own to solve the problem of the Fall and mortality. In a way, we try to overcome sin and death on our own. And that's when he moves to what he calls the machine, or what he will also call power, or simply magic, right? We use power to try to overcome the Fall and mortality. Or we use the machine in modern terms. Or he says the machine is basically closely related to magic. Both are simply ways of trying to manipulate the world for power.
So could you say a little bit about what does Tolkien mean by the Fall and mortality and the machine?
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Yes. So these are as he says there.
He also says in a letter someone wrote to him following the publication of Lord of the Rings, is The Lord of the Rings an allegory of atomic power? And he said no. But he said it is an allegory of power, particularly power usurped for domination? And he said, more than that, it's an allegory of death and immortality. So in this same letter, he basically echoes what he says in this letter. The two key themes, first of all, are power, particularly power usurped for domination. So he says in that letter that the only way that power is used in his work in a positive sense is the power of God and those angels who serve God and therefore also, by extension, those beings such as ourselves who serve God. So power is only good insofar as it's virtuous, insofar as it's in accordance with the will of God Himself. All other power, particularly all efforts, are self empowerment, which is basically the goal of pride. And this is sort of brought to, should we say, cankerous fruit in the ideas of Nietzsche. There's no such thing as good and evil. It's only about power and self empowerment. So that basically is exactly what Tolkien's addressing here, that the Fall is a consequence of our desire to be our own gods, that we want to empower ourselves in defiance of the will of God. And that's the way that power is used. And death and immortality.
We have to understand that. Again, in Christian art and theology and symbolism, there's a recurring memento mori, right? The reminder of death. And always in Christian art, and that includes The Lord of the Rings and the silveradian, which is Christian art, the memento mori. The reminder of death should remind us of the four last things death itself and then judgment that follows death and then either Heaven or hell. So in that sense, when he says, which he does, that death is the gift of God to man, two things you have to understand about that. A gift is something given. This doesn't necessarily mean it's a reward, right? It's something given, and it's given for a purpose. But basically, we are meant to see our own limitations. We are not God. And death, our own mortality is meant to bring us to our senses to remember that we will die that when we die, we'll be judged and that following that judgment will either be with God in heaven or God will be absent from us for eternity. So the reason that death is a key factor in The Lord of the Rings is exactly because that memento mori is necessary for us.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: So this idea, then, of the gift of death that's really fascinating to think about. That sense in which death is given right? It's not always welcome, but it's given to human beings.
That we may recognize, in a way that we've gone astray.
That we may recognize that our only hope is in God. That we may recognize our fundamental impotence to do the one thing that we would love to do, which is to love God and love our neighbor for all eternity.
But one of the problems then, as the story unfolds and as some of the examples he gives we end up especially, I think, with the men, the Numenar, as it's described.
He says that instead of seeing death as a gift from God which we will use to somehow journey home to God to recognize that this world is not our home that we are created to use this world to come home to God.
The problem is we begin to see death not as a gift but death as almost like a new God to whom we will sacrifice everything in the name of escaping it. And he describes this, I think, when the as he describes it, the early men, the Numenoreans as I think he says that they have this desire to escape death and therefore produced a cult of the dead. They lavished wealth and art on tombs and memorials. They made settlements on the west shores. But these became strongholds and factories of lords seeking wealth. The Numenoreans became tax gatherers carrying off over the sea even more and more goods in their great ships. They began the foraging of arms and engines.
So speak a little bit more about how the desire to escape death can create what Tolkien calls a cult of the dead.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So basically, you said it there that if death becomes the one thing to be feared the danger is it becomes the one god to be feared. And therefore we sacrifice things to death itself or to the dead. So you have this cult of the death. But what we need to see is what Tolkien does there. And he says it's an allegory of death and immortality. So deathlessness, so he allows us to do. We talked in the first part about how the Chestertonian way of seeing things is to make us stand on our head. So how can we see death in a fresh light? Well, let's present a race of beings who don't die.
Let's have Elves who are immortal. And if we were deathless, if we got our wish, our sinful wish to be immortal, not to die, to spend forever for millennia and millennia and millennia in this veil of tears right in this land of exile, how would it feel? So it's the Elves that say that death is the gift of God to man because the Elves are trapped in this veil of tears in this land of exile forever. They're immortal. And they know that when men die they're going somewhere else, escaping this veil of tears because, as Galadriel says, the Elven queen that she and her husband have fought the long defeat for ages of this world and have won many fruitless victories. In other words, if the fabric of the cosmos is broken and fallen evil cannot be defeated within time. The final defeat over evil is beyond time. So if you're within time, you are living this long defeat. And Tolkien echoes that in one of his letters where he says that as a Christian, I see history as the long defeat with only occasional glimpses of final victory. And those glimpses of final victory are beyond the world. Right. So the Elves are stranded in time. So Tolkien allows us to see don't be so desirous of immortality because that thing which you would see as a gift actually could be a curse.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really a beautiful way of putting it. In some ways, the nature of humanity gets the children of Ilavatar, as are described here, are both the Elves and man. So you have both the Elves that have immortality but then human beings that have death. But in a way, the Elves are our kind of that's our wishful thinking. And even today, there's a huge amount of technology, a huge amount of investment that's somehow trying to extend our lives. Almost any article that says what's the secret to living an extra five years? Or what's the secret to longevity? What should you eat? What should you not eat?
Is there screening? You should get in. And not that these things are bad because our earthly life is a good but when it becomes the good or when we want to freeze ourselves so we could wake up in 500 years.
Lewis, in one of his Chronicles of Narnia and the Magician's nephew at one scene, Diggery and Polly. But Diggery is with basically kind of like the tempter the Temptress Queen Jadis in the story, but the Satan figure. And she offers him this apple or this fruit that will give know everlasting life. And he says, right. Why would I want to keep on living after everyone I know has died? I'd rather die and go to heaven. Right? And so that sense in which, what would you rather do? Die and wake up in 500 years?
Or would you rather die and go to heaven? And a lot of people today, I think, would kind of say they'd rather die and wake up in 500 years. But what would that be?
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: That would be a nightmare.
[00:42:32] Speaker A: It would. And that's the trouble, of course, if we don't choose heaven, we choose hell. And that's the trouble. Most people don't. If you don't believe in God and you don't believe in heaven, then what you have left, you have what you think is immortality. But when that shall just be everlasting hell, whether it's in time or whether it's beyond time.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: And this, I think, also is that the catechism, when it talks about hell, speaks about it's the definitive self exclusion from God. It's not so much that God casts us into hell, although that language is used. It's kind of that we cast ourselves in hell. We get what we want, but what we want is just this life and more of it.
And over time, it becomes less and less satisfying. Right. That and this is already something we experience within our own lives. Often, if people have certain kinds of unhealthy pleasures their short term gratification actually becomes long term pain and long term unhappiness. And in a way, if you extend that, that really becomes this never ending immortality of separation from God and an inability to somehow overcome or to forget or to turn away from the hurts and wounds of our past and of our own things that we've done to hurt and wound ourselves and other people.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: Exactly, absolutely. We see it in Tolkien's work because what happens if we're given immortality or a suggestion of it? So, for instance, the Ring doesn't convey immortality to mortals, but it does prolong their lives. But what sort of prolongation is it? It's basically a fading so that Bilbo can say that, yes, he's living much longer than he should do, but it's like Bate being spread over too much bread. Right? That basically it's getting thinner and thinner and thinner sort of fading.
It's not anything that brings any and then other you have the Ring wraiths. These are mortal men that have sold their souls and they're now doomed to be servants of the Devil forever. And Gollum, who's basically addicted to the power of the Ring, to the power of sin. And he shrivels and shrinks into a shrunken wreck that's completely addicted to his own sinfulness.
We seem to forget this. And Paul tells us basically that sin is addictive, that we become slaves to sin. And the whole idea that we can live a sinful life because it's an expression of our freedom is a lie which we must know ourselves if we try to put it into practice because we become addicts. And who is really going to say, then addict is free?
[00:45:21] Speaker B: So I think in these different ways, we really see how Tolkien begins to try to emphasize this sense of the fall mortality, the Machine magic power, as an attempt to solve the problem of the fallen immortality, sin and death that's rooted in a discordant, disordered desire for really the aggrandizement of the self on the self's own terms, rather than the surrender of the self to God our creator on his terms. So before we finish, I wanted to kind of come back then to the full, in a way, kind of circle of Providence, where we do have this promise in Tolkien's at the beginning of The Silmarillion, that somehow the final harmony will be even greater.
And I also think when he has that quote about the final victory, that we get glimpses of final victory. And I recall at least one version I saw of that, where he says more often in fiction, and I think he sees his own work, that in The Lord of the Rings we're supposed to get not only glimpse. Of the fall and of mortality and of the ring and power and machines and magic that's destructive. We're also supposed to get this glimpse of final victory. So could you say maybe a word about how this focus on The Fall actually frees us to discover that final victory and maybe some ideas that Tolkien leaves before us?
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Yeah, first of all, if I may say, as a love of language, that I enjoyed your alliteration disordered, discord and desire. I like that. Thank you very much. I should probably steal that myself at some point, but yeah. So Oscar Wilde said that we're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. So, in other words, that we have to, first of all be aware of the gutter. And so there's no doubt at all that Lord of the Rings has a pervasive darkness as a backdrop, right, the presence of evil. But that's in order for allow us to actually, first of all, recognize the fact that we're in a fallen cosmos. We are in the gutter. We're not in heaven, but we should not be face down in the gutter. If we face down the gutter, we'll have nothing but nothing but. We're meant to look up. So we see the words of Samwise Gamji, above all shadows rides the sun. And that's one of the darkest moments in the story. She Lob's in the background there, that Frodo is apparently dead. It looks like the whole quest has failed and it'd be very easy having to sit down, get his head down and despair right, to lose all hope. But what does he do? He looks up and he says, above all shadows rides the sun. So what The Lord of the Rings allows us to do is say, yes, of course there's a pervasive darkness in this broken, fallen cosmos, but we need to look up again, the Greek word anthropos, to turn upwards, to look up, to gaze upwards, we have to do that. And I think The Lord of the Rings shows us that. And that is itself the glimpse of final victory. As soon as we look up and to see that above all shadows, above all evil, above all darkness rides the sun and the Son of God in this case, right then we realize that all we have to do is to be good soldiers for Christ in the war. And while we're in time, we're with the church militant, the church at church, at war with Milas Christie. We're in a war against darkness, but we have to keep our eyes on Heaven. And if we keep our eyes on Heaven, that's the glimpse of final victory. Then the final victory will be ours. And I think that's what the Lord of the Rings is showing us.
[00:49:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's it really is kind of beautifully put that sense of it's, when we actually recognize that our situation is as bad as it is.
Lewis, in mere Christianity says faith has to recognize the bankruptcy of our own efforts.
If we don't really recognize that actually when I really try to be as good as I can and I try to do the right thing, I still don't very.
So if I can begin to well, like, what's wrong with the world? As Chesterton once said, right? I am. So that's why I know that we can't solve all the world's problems is because I'm part of the problem. And so when I begin to discover that and then, of course, I look at the cosmos and see that wait a second. Our entire cosmos, the entire created cosmos, as we understand it, the visible creation, at least of the earth and our own experience, is almost like was created off kilter because it was already created with the discordant note of Satan and the fallen angels. So we cannot expect redemption to come from ourselves. We cannot expect it to come from other human beings, from societies, from political movements. These can all be good. We can all work on them, right? We all ought to try to have houses that don't leak. We all ought to try to have judges that don't accept bribes. I mean, these are all good things, but they are all going to fail at giving us what we need. Pope Benedict in his 2000, and I think it was 2008, encyclical on space alvi and by hope we are saved. He says basically right to believe in the just really says to think rightly about the world. We have to recognize no political solution will ever be ultimate and the most dangerous will be the ones that say they are. And so if we see that, then I think we have that freedom in a way to look back to the only one who can actually restore us and save us, who is the one who created us. And that's why I think it was so important in the Gospels and in Paul to show that Jesus Christ is not simply our savior, our redeemer, which he is through the resurrection. He is also the same one through whom the world was created, right? So that our Creator has become our Redeemer and our Redeemer is our Creator. And in that sense, then we can truly cast ourselves into the arms of the Creator as one. Peter 57 say. So is there maybe just one final image that sticks with you when you think about this whole emphasis on creation, fall, redemption, and in from Tolkien that you would like to leave your students with or your listeners today?
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Well, I think the most important thing you mentioned about the fact that we can't gain our own salvation, right? Self empowerment is a dead end, literally.
Tolkien shows us in the story that in order to be first, we have to be last. We have to lay down our lives so the freedom only comes through surrender. And that's why at the end of this, one of the greatest moments in the whole Lord of the Rings is the fact that Frodo Baggins cannot defeat the power of evil by himself. He can't cast the ring into Mount Doom without some providential intervention, right? He needs the grace of God, and that comes as a reward for his sparing Gollum's life. So this is this deep, providential design going on, but it requires our surrendering to the will of God that we may actually be genuinely free.
[00:53:00] Speaker B: Well, that's so well put. So thank you so much for that great insight and again, recovering this catechesis on creation, providence and sin with Tolkien as a guide. So thank you, Joseph Pierce, for being on our show. Really appreciate your time with us.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: My pleasure, as always.
[00:53:17] Speaker B: And for listeners or viewers who'd like to learn more about Joseph and his work, you can go to is it Josephpearce Co?
[00:53:25] Speaker A: Good guess. Jperce. J-P-E-A-R-C-E-C-O.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, thank you very much and thank you again for listening to The Catholic Theology Show. We appreciate your support.
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