Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Tolkien says in On Fairy Stories that fairy stories hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves. And when I say this is not the physical mirror, right, the mirror of facts, but story can hold up a magic mirror or a mystical mirror that shows us who we should be and who we shouldn't be.
[00:00:24] 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, I'm your host at the Catholic Theology Show, Michael Doffiney. And today we are joined by one of our regular guests, Joseph Pierce, who's teaching at Avemer University again this semester. And we're delighted to have you here.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: It's good to be back, Michael.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Thanks for having so, Joseph, you've written countless books on Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and the Catholic literary revival. So many different aspects, and that's only to name a few. But today we really wanted to dive into some of Tolkien's kind of his way of helping us to reimagine, in a way, the power of story, right? What is it that stories can tell us? What is it in a certain sense? How is it that stories help us to see certain truths that in a way, we can't see apart from stories? And so we really want to dive in today to one of his just amazing essays called On Fairy Stories. So that's the essay we're going to be focusing on today. Listeners need not have read it and need not read it, right? But if you're interested, that's the essay we're going to focus on. So maybe if we could just start with how does, say, Tolkien's approach to stories, how does it help us to kind of rediscover, in a way, the power of stories and also, in a right, the power of human reason to come to know the truth through story?
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think that Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy Stories, normally included in the book called Tree and Leaf, and this is a little slim volume, and it's a wonderful slim volume. It sometimes has bonus material. But the three essential ingredients are his essay On Fairy Stories, which was originally a lecture given in 1938, just before World War II, his poem Mythopoia, which is basically really a succinct distillation of the arguments in On Fairy Stories, and then the wonderful allegorical short story Leaf by Niggle. And when you put those three things together, you get sort of what I call Tolkien's philosophy of myth. We need to break that down as well, because philosophy obviously means philosophia, the love of wisdom. But myth, Tolkien never, ever uses the word myth in the modern, pejorative sense of something which is not true or a lie. You say something's a myth, it means it's not true. Tolkien never uses the word myth in that sense. Tolkien used the word myth in its original sense as story. So Tolkien's philosophy of myth is the love of wisdom to be found through story. And in those three works, the essay on fairy stories, the short story Leaf by Nigel, and the poem Myth of Poirier, tolkien elucidates that love of wisdom to be found through story.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think we can fall into the trap when we think about kind of reason and imagination, thinking that reason is when we're thinking logically in this mode, maybe scientifically, and then imagination comes into play in our stories. But sometimes I tell students, right, just try to tell your dog a story. Right?
No, it doesn't work. The dog can't follow the story, following the story, following a story. In a way, writing a story, telling a story, painting, art, all these different things is actually right. The highest kind of mode of rationality.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's essential because from St Augustine in Day doctrine of Christiana and other places, we learn that we can't even think without the use of allegory, because every word is actually a conventional sign. It's a signifier. So if I just say the word dog and you don't speak English, that's a meaningless monosyllabic grunt right? But if you speak the language of the sign, then in your mind, immediately, you have the image of a four legged canine. So Tolkien says that when we think of the word spell as a noun, we think about this power of enchantment over someone or something.
But we forget that the same word in old English, spell is to spell a word. And the thing is, when we spell a word, we actually cast a spell. We have power. So with the Anglo Saxons didn't sort of use an abstract word like vocabulary. They used a concrete word, like a word hoard. Every individual person has his own unique word, hoard. And every new word that we learn is real wealth, because it gives us more power, first of all, to understand the cosmos to ourselves, but then to convey that understanding to someone else. So to spell a word, you cast a spell. And Tolkien begins with this. And we need to remember. The on fairy stories is an academic lecture, originally. And Tolkien's day job was a professor of philology at Oxford University. So he brings this understanding of language to bear on our understanding of story. And I think that's very, very helpful.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Yeah. It reminds me a little bit, too of in Chesterton's Everlasting man, when he's looking at the beginning and he's trying to discover, in a way, the difference between human beings and other animals. And he does that by trying to, well, imagine they're all the same. And if you imagine they're the same, you can't do it, because human beings are just very strange. So right. From the beginning. They start painting on caves, right? They start painting on cave walls. And these have been discovered, actually, all over the world today. And this idea and he says there that art is the signature of man, that this ability to create art, to represent it, goes back, in a way, to Genesis, right? Let us make man after our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion in the image of God. He created them, male and female, he created them. So somehow to be human is to imitate God, god, who is fundamentally a creator. So we become kind of creators in response.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Exactly. So, I mean, we are made in the image of God, the imago dei, and our imagination is that, as he says, a facet of that imago Dei in us. The imagination is part of that imago dei, and it's the way we actually manage to bring to our mind something talking defines it in unfair stories. Use the word fantasy. And, again, you have to get our terms right here we think about the word fantasy as something which is basically maybe an escape from reality. Tolkien uses the word fantasy as the ability to make present to our mind something which is not physically present. So that's the process of imagination. And it's necessary, by the way, not just for telling stories. It's necessary for the physical sciences, the word innovation, right? Innovation is impossible without the use of the imagination. So, as I've said, even the use of words requires the use of the imagination, the reading of signs, the telling of signs. And so it's something which is very heart of who we are in our very being. So it is the margo day in us, the imagination, creativity. And that's why we need to see know absolutely as a poet, as an artist, as the great composer of the symphony of creation, to use the term. See, tolkien has Middle earth created by when God enunciates the great music to the angelic beings. So God is the composer of the symphony of the cosmos, and aslan in Narnia, of course, sings Narnia into being. Narnia is a song. So we have to see creation in that sense. God is this wonderful musician, poet, storyteller. History is his.
So the day in us is our representation, if you like, of that divine gift that God's given us, of this ability to imagine.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it really shifts our understanding out of, in a way, what Tolkien will describe almost as kind of the prison of modern empiricism. He doesn't exactly use the word modern empiricism, but what we mean by that is a kind of rationality, a rationalism that traps us in what only reason can know and what reason can only know through its kind of tactile, touchable, senses, what reason can measure and weigh. And in that way, you kind of see the universe in a static state. What it is now is what reason can know and what it will be is what reason can know. And this may sound abstract at first, but the difference is, therefore, if evil is in the universe and you're a rationalist, you're kind of stuck with evil, right? And so you either blame God for evil and then reject the only one who could ever solve the problem or overcome the problem of evil, or you simply reject evil and say, oh, it's just all part of the world. It's just our perspective. Whereas if we think about God as a storyteller and we think about the creation as a drama, then we are in a much truer perspective to think about evil as something that is genuinely real. Within the drama of creation, it's created a discordant note, right? The disharmony of the rebellious valar.
But it also then means evil is not original. Evil is not original. And so God, who creates the world good, there's a drama in which sin and evil death have entered, but in a drama, we always wait for the final resolution. We wait for the end of the story. And we can almost, right? It's like when you're watching a movie or reading a book, as long as the main character doesn't die, you're kind of happy because you know somehow that eventually it can work out. And so I think if we see God as telling a story, then the fundamental problem of evil gets shifted because there's hope, and we can try to discover meaning, but in a way, it's a meaning that we can only see when we understand God as a storyteller.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. And God shows us that himself. First of all, by presenting Himself to us, he does present Himself to us in abstract terms as well. I mean, theologians grapple with mysteries such as the Trinity. So there's an abstract approach, a purely rational approach, in that sense, to understanding God. But God reveals Himself most deeply through the telling of story. First of all, the telling of his story, which is history. And then, of course, by entering the story Himself, the storyteller enters the story in the incarnation. And that's the only way that we can understand God on the deeper level than the sort of abstract level on which Plato and Aristotle understood Him, is if God takes that next step for us and in Revelation, shows Himself to us. So God is a storyteller who shows us Himself most potently through being in the story. And it's through his participation in the story that we come to know Him and through Him, ourselves and each other.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, when Tolkien talks about this in On Fairy Stories, he introduces the idea of sub creation. So could you say a little bit about the idea of sub creation?
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Yes, very much. For me, I talk about Tolkien's hierarchy of creative value. So at the top of this hierarchy is the creator, God Himself. And then beneath that is creation, that which is made directly by God, ex nihilo from nothing. We can't make things from nothing. We don't have that ability. We're not God. But what we can do using that imago dei in us, our imagination, is to make new things from other things that already exist, which is why Tolkien distinguishes between creation, which is God's way of bringing things into being ex nihilo, and man's way of bringing new things into being from other things already exist, which is sub creation. And he really also then I think there's two ways of sub dividing sub creation. There's a way which is a part of the hierarchy of goods. One is subcreation to the glory of God, which is true art. The other is subcreation for utility of man, which is technology, and that's also good. We need to have clothes on and roofs above our heads and heating and what have you. But this is a hierarchy. But obviously, using our creative gifts to give back to the giver of the gift, the fruits of the gift given, right? That's true art rather than using it merely for our own personal use, although that's also a good, albeit a lesser good. But there's also another type of looking at subcreation, I think there's subcreation, which is giving back to the given gift, the fruits of the gift given, right, true art. But it's also using those imaginative gifts to dominate others. So Tolkien talks about the Lord of the Rings being an allegory of power, particularly power usurp for domination. So we can use our subcreative gifts to actually dominate others as something which, rather than giving back to the giver, the gift, the fruits of the gift given is something we take to ourselves as our own precious, if you like. And we use that power to wield it over others for our own self empowerment. So because, of course, we're fallen. How do we use this imago dei gift? We've got this gift of the imagination, subcreation. Do we use it with humility and give glory to the giver of the gift, or do we use it with pride and use it for our own self empowerment?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: So in that sense, right, the same thing in a way that makes it possible for us to give glory to God through the active exercise of our imagination and creativity and our reason, and also to make useful things in the world that are good also. It gives us the ability to kind of try to create a little kingdom to our own.
In the words of the Our Father, instead of trying to make his name holy or his kingdom come or his will be done, we have our ability to at least kind of like, step into a false world of our name, our kingdom, our will.
So that is really kind of fascinating, right? It's the imago in a way that gives us the ability to sin, because there we have freedom and love, which of course the angels have as well. How could we take kind of this idea of because I think this sense of subcreation also means that there's a reality to our stories, right? And even our false stories, in a way which are only kind of perversions or twisted versions of reality also turn out. I mean, they have impacts, right? They impact the world, as I think C. S. Lewis says in mere Christian one time, right? It's not a toy world. When we act, things happen for good or for ill. And so could you talk a little bit about this idea of the primary world that God has created and then the secondary world that maybe we can create and how it is that this also allows then, fiction not to be kind of merely made up, but to a certain extent, fiction then can be true or false. So could you talk a little bit more about that distinction between the primary and secondary worlds?
[00:15:42] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think there are people we've all met people that say that they're not going to waste their time reading fiction. Just give me the facts, right? I only read nonfictional books because I only want the facts. I don't want to be being fed fiction. And I sometimes my rejoinder to that is a paradox of Chesterton's, which is very provocative because it appears like all paradoxes to be a contradiction until you think about it more deeply. Chesterton said, not facts first, truth first. So our immediate reaction to that is, well, that's nonsense, right? Because surely facts are true. That's why they're facts, right? And of course that is true. Facts are true, but they're not the whole truth. That's the point. So Chesterton's using the word here facts, as in something which is quantifiable, measurable, physical. So the facts are the world of physics, if you like, but there are certain parts of that which is true, which is not physics. It's metaphysics, such as the transcendentals, the good, the true, and the beautiful. And these are also part of the truth. And that can't be brought out just by a list of a catalog of facts. You have to bring it out in some other way. And the most powerful way of doing that is through story. And speaking of secondary wells, which are fictional wells, I'm going to use the most authoritative author that we know, and that's Jesus Christ.
He teaches us some of the most important and powerful lessons through the telling of fictional narratives. So the parable of the prodigal son, he creates a secondary world. The prodigal son never existed, nor did his father, nor did his brother, nor did the servants, nor did the pigs. Right? It's a fictional narrative, but we learn from that so much about ourselves that we don't actually say that the prodigal son is like us. We say we are like the prodigal son. So in some sense, this fictional character is the archetype of which we are mere types, even though we are facts. And that's merely true. Right? So I think the key thing here for us to understand, and I say this sometimes, is that Tolkien says in On Fairy Stories that fairy stories hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves. And when I say this is not the physical mirror, the mirror of facts. If you look into a physical mirror, all you see is your surface, right? You see your atoms, your molecules, but you're not seeing your emotions. You're not seeing your desires. You're not seeing your loves and your hates or your history. You're just seeing that physical surface. That, to me, is a metaphor for philosophical materialism. That's all. It believes in. Nothing but that. But story can hold up a magic mirror or a mystical mirror. That shows us more than that. It can show us, first of all, that can show us what our emotions are, what our desires are, what our loves are, what our hates are. But it can also show us not just who we are on that deeper level. It can also show us who we should be and who we shouldn't be. And of course, that brief parable of the Prodigal Son has all of those ingredients who we shouldn't be, who we should be, and who we are all in the space of one brief story, which our Lord tells us.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: So if our stories, the stories we remember, the stories we hear, the stories we tell are mirrors to us and they help us to see us, then it's also very important that the stories we remember and treasure are good or true because also there are a lot of false stories.
And it's interesting, almost not exactly, but you can almost think about even the serpent in the garden starts telling Adam and Eve a false story, right? On that day, you will not die.
And then all of a sudden believing that story, then they begin to act discordantly and enter into his own rebellion. So rather than kind of maybe focus on stories we shouldn't read today right. Or the danger with what kind of stories predominate in modernity and post modernity, I would ask you, how would you say that what we've been talking about here, the importance of stories. Stories and mirrors. The ability to create a secondary world that's real because it's patterned after the primary world. How do we see that kind of at work or at play or in play in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings?
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Yeah. I think one of the important things I talked earlier about this two types of subcreation that which is an outpouring of humility and that which is the product of pride. And so what a true subcreator does is basically to know that the gift is something which is given with a purpose, which is ultimately to glorify the giver and to bring other people to the giver, to evangelize, and in talking at the end of unfair story, states explicitly that it can show us evangelium, right. The good news.
So a work of art, a work of subcreativity, of the imagination, is a relationship between the giver of the gift and the recipient of the gift. And the work of art is the child of that relationship. So even a pagan like Homer, at the beginning of the Iliad of the Odyssey begins with Sing Muse, right? He's praying to the spirit of creativity to give him the inspiration needed to tell the story well. So even a pagan like Homer knows there's this mystical relationship between the artist and the giver of the gift of inspiration. And even Shelley, an atheist, during his essay A Defense of Poetry, says that the moment of inspiration is like a burning coal, but the moment that a poet tries to do something with it, the coal is fading. So even the atheist realize there's something pure and burning that enters that once it enters our personhood and we start doing things with it, that some of that purity and potency is lost. And T. S. Eliot says, between the potency and the existence falls the shadow. So the shadow is us. Right. So the gift is something potent and pure, but then it passes through our personhood, and that filters the purity of the gift. And what comes out the other side is going to be the consequence of that relationship between the two parents. If you like the father of the gift, God, and if you like the mother of the gift, the artist and the child is the work of art. Now, the more that the artist is prideful and proud and is trying to dominate the gift for his own purposes, the more distorted and perverted the product of that gift will be. So that's why we get good stories and bad stories. Tolkien, of course, a lifelong practicing Catholic, he's aware of all that, and he accepts his gift with humility and wants it to be a true story.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really so kind of beautiful and also, in a way, humble as well, because we begin to see that no one is a pure storyteller other than Jesus Christ, right? So if the apostles and the evangelists were true storytellers, it was by a gift, the gift of inspiration, of the Holy Spirit, because otherwise, even the best of our stories are still somewhat kind of imperfect, and yet they can still reflect something true in the world. And I think Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, for so many people, has kind of done that, right? In a way, even people who don't see the catholic elements or even the predominant elements of creation, sin and redemption are still somehow appropriately enchanted by the beauty and the story of the Middle earth, right of Lord of the. So let's take a break in a minute, and what we're going to do when we come back is Tolkien speaks specifically about three things in a way that fairy stories, that good stories give us, and he speaks about escape, recovery and consolation. So I'd like to talk a little bit about what those three things are, how they function in stories, and then maybe we can get to that final thing, which is how then does the Christian story offer, right, escape, recovery, and consolation as well. So we'll return to that after the break.
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[00:24:23] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Catholic Theology Show. I'm your host, Michael Doffiney, and today we have Joseph Pierce, writer and professor this fall and spring at Ave Marie University, who's going to be teaching courses on Tolkien and Lewis and Chesterton. And we're so delighted to have you on the show.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: It's good to be back, Michael. Thanks for having me.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: And today we've been talking about Tolkien's essay on fairy stories and how it can help us to really see the world more accurately, more as the world is to somehow recover a bit of our vision through stories when they function in their proper sense of somehow creating a secondary world that's an authentic imitation of the primary world, but also genuine. Right. When God creates things, they become true causes. So when God creates us in his image, we become true creators, right? Not rebellious creators who create our own imaginary world as though it's a false world, it's a false creation, but a true kind of imaginary, an imaginative world that helps us to reflect upon our own world and this whole idea, right, that stories help us to see ourselves better, right. After Jesus tells the story of the prodigal Son, you see yourself better than you did before. So art allows us to see ourselves and each other better than we could without it. So I said at the end of the first part that Tolkien identifies at least three key areas. There are other areas for stories, right? It's a huge field. But this idea that stories, especially fairy stories, which he says are not just for children, right, they're really for human beings, but that they offer escape, recovery, and consolation. So would you say a little bit about that word escape? Because I think a lot of people will actually say and do say, right, that something like Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia. These things are just escapist literature for people who don't want to deal with the real problems of life.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So basically, something that I would recommend that people do and encourage people to do is to read on fairy stories side by side with the chapter The Ethics of Elf Land from Orthodoxy. Because you can see the influence of Chesterton on Tolkien. And this is certainly the case when he's talking about escape, because both Tolkien and Chesterton used the metaphor of a prism to talk about philosophical materialism. Atheism. So if you live in a culture where there's nothing but matter, nothing but three dimensions moving through time.
My favorite definition of atheism was given by evening war in Brideshead. We visited when Charles Ryder turns his back on Brideshead, which is a metaphor for the Church in many ways, for what he thinks will be the last time, he says, henceforth I've ceased to believe in illusion. I will now believe only in three dimensions perceived with my five senses. So philosophical materialism, there is nothing but three dimensions perceived with five senses. Now, for Tolkien and Chesterton, this is a prism, because quite clearly, there's much more to reality than merely three dimensions moving through space and time. So for them, this is a prison, and it's our duty to escape from that prison and to think, as I think Chesterton says, to think of something other than prison waters and walls, that there's a light beyond this. In fact, you bring C. S. Lewis into the conversation in the silver chair when the White Witch tries to convince them there is no overworld, that there is no sun. The artificial light above their heads in the cave is the only light that there is. So the idea of escape is to allow us to escape from the confines and constraints of a materialistic culture and a materialistic philosophy into the fullness of metaphysics. So to go beyond the physical to the metaphysical, that's the escape which they're talking about, which great stories can actually enable us to do.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah, he makes the distinction between there is the escape of the prisoner versus the flight of the deserter. And he says that, no, actually, when you're immersing yourself in great stories, whether or not they're fairy stories or The Lord of the Rings or these sorts of elements, it's actually right, the escape of the prisoner. And he gives the example, too, where he says, at some point, somebody says something like that, we need to stop with these antiquated stories and turn to motor cars. Motor cars are real life. But he then makes a note that says, actually, like cars, automobiles are actually not alive. So that's our notion of life now is mechanical things that move and then that they're real now. They are real insofar as you can touch them, but they are artificial. They're things that we have made. And so he says, in a way that it's like this, of course, is actually not real life because it's neither alive nor is it kind of fundamental and foundational. It's something that we've made out of other. Things. And so, in a way, escaping outside of cars and going back, say, remembering a story when we rode on horses well, horses are real, and they're alive.
Even if yes, okay, we're not necessarily going to be able to go back and have the whole world go back to riding horses. That's not what he's claiming. But in a certain sense, we need to kind of remember that there are certain things that are more fundamental and primary to the things we've made. In a way, the things we've made, our technology becomes, in a way, judged by how it conforms to reality, and I think it's just a great image that he develops. And this sense in which I think you find that a lot in just if you look at studies today or surveys I read somewhere that I think among people, like, 20 to 30, maybe 57% or 73%, I don't remember, but of people plan to quit their jobs within the year.
People do not find their day to day work really enchanting right now. What do you do with somebody like that? One is, well, they're going to quit, or what if they could find a way to recover a sense of meaning and purpose, to kind of escape from seeing the cubicle as a cubicle, but see it as a kind of a drama right, that in this work, I can find meaning. So if you could just say a little bit more about this sense of what else is, in a way, is important for escape and maybe say a word about The Lord of the Rings, specifically as a mode of escaping from the prison of this three dimensional space, as all there is.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that the key thing when Tolkien distinguishes between the escape of the prisoner, which is good, and the flight of the deserter, which is bad. The flight of the deserter is the people, the prison guards, right? So the atheists the atheist, guardians of the materialistic culture, do not want people to believe in God, do not want people to be talking, thinking, and telling stories about things that are truly alive, such as metaphysics. They want you to be comfortable and content in the prison of materialism. So that's why these people don't like The Lord of the Rings. That's why these people don't like these sorts of stories, because they invite us to escape, which they see as a and Tolkien used the word any other the Reich or any other totalitarian state. In other words, this materialism has been responsible for killing millions of people, but they still don't want you to escape from it because you're deserting this paradigm, ideological paradigm. So where you were leading at the end of what you were saying before is about modern young people being discontent in their lives and in their work and restless and want to move on. Not only, of course, that's a commentary upon the modern world and modern life. But the other thing that Tolkien talks about one of the other things he talks about in all fairy stories is recovery. And again, we need to escape from the prison of materialism or to recover a clear view of things. And he actually mentions Chesterton in that Chesterton famously says that we have to stand on our heads because we see something so often that we cease to see it at all. It becomes trite. We sort of possess it in our minds, and therefore we don't even look at it.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: Right?
[00:33:39] Speaker A: It's ours. So if we stand on our heads and see it upside down from a new angle, then we're startled into an appreciation of this thing which we're taken for granted, and that needs to be true of our lives. We needed to see every sunset and every sunrise as something a startling unique work of art that we should not ignore. So this idea of recovering a clear view, in other words, to understand the goodness, truth, and beauty of the cosmos and God's creation that surround us and not be somnambulating our way through life, but not opening our eyes to the beauty that's surrounding us, right?
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And in some ways, maybe that's why if you are working, so to speak, only for money, only for material pleasure and comfort, then in a way, work begins to seem meaningless because ultimately, those ends of physical comfort just aren't that they aren't that captivating. I think he has one line in here that I really love, which he says, it is indeed an age of improved means to deteriorated ends. We're very efficient at getting to kind of very limited goals, right? Our biggest goal is basically to try to stay alive longer and be more comfortable. Right. The problem is that this is actually one a very low view of being human, just to kind of avoid physical pain and have physical comfort. But it also turns out to be very elusive because we still end up dealing with sin and crime and with disease and old age.
No amount of whether or not it's cosmetic surgery or filters on instagram or wishful thinking about utopias take away the fact that the world's actually a place of illness and of harm. And so this in a way, then so that is, in a way, a trap that we've fallen into.
I almost think that Tolkien is kind of saying, wait a second. Who's the deserter? It's actually the modern world has deserted kind of the enchantment of Christianity. Right?
And he also talks about one time where he's not only can think about, well, we need to escape from just thinking about the world as just motor cars or automobiles. But he also says, what about the notion of he calls it hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice and death.
These are genuinely hard things. And to escape from them for a moment, to recover a sense of meaning, purpose, beauty, maybe the person you've loved does not love you back or falls in love with someone else. Maybe you've experienced great poverty or illness, but in stories, you can kind of have a sense of at least vicarious sense of beauty, purpose, meaning, right? I think that's what we see when we like the Lord of the, you know, Samwise faithfulness to Frodo. It's just ennobling. It's beautiful. I may never really act like that, but I'm inspired by right, I can't carry the ring, but I'm going to carry you up the mountain. I mean, there's that kind of sense in which the world becomes and it's like either we find this through sports, which I think a lot of people try to do today, they become obsessed with sports and they live vicariously, or we somehow begin to recover a sense of meaning and purpose through this notion of story and kind of immersing ourselves in those stories.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the the irony and the paradox is that we we can't escape suffering, and those who spend most time trying to do so end up suffering more than those who don't. In other words, we are all going to have to take up our cross, whether we like it or not. We are all going to suffer whether we like it or not. But what are we going to do with it, right? Are we going to accept and embrace and ask for help? Most importantly, of course, the help of God of grace? Are we going to be absolutely miserable but utterly dejected in our sufferings? And so that's the trouble with the modern world, without that consolation, which we haven't got to yet because it progresses on progresses naturally. But you mentioned comfort.
If we remember the very opening sentence, the opening paragraph of the Hobit, how do we define if we're going to define a Hobit hole in one word, what is it? It's comfort, right? So the whole point is that Bilbo Baggins has to leave his comfort zone so he can actually be fully alive, right? So he has to, if you like, escape from that comfort zone in order to recover a fullness of life.
And that, of course, is an embrace of suffering.
To forsake comfort is to accept suffering. And so this journey, which is a metaphor of the journey of life that all of us are on, that we have to embrace the fact that just trying to be as comfortable as possible and hide ourselves away in our comfort zone does not actually allow us to escape from the dangers of life or the miseries of life. On the contrary, it's going to heap even more upon us. We have to go out there and take the adventure. And Chesterton said, and something I think we all should remember, an adventure is an inconvenience, rightly? Considered, in other words, that we shouldn't look upon inconveniences as something to be avoided, but something actually which is part of the adventure of life.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Yeah. So to welcome all things. And I remember reading an essay you'd written in which you described Bilbo Baggins at the beginning of The Hobit as kind of sitting on his own horde of his own gold, that he had been kind of Hoarding gold in the way that Smog the Dragon had, ironically. And he has to leave that and grow. And so I do think that element of adventure, I love that. And inconvenience. Rightly. Considered. So Tolkien then, talks about this not only the escape, but he calls it the Great escape. What's the escape we really need is the escape from death. Right? And so this is where this idea that in some sense, even just stories, create some kind of image of life beyond death, life after death. But let's talk a little bit about this notion, then, of consolation, right? And he kind of, at least to my knowledge, introduces a word. He says, I will call it eucatastrophe, U-E-U from the Greek word meaning good, like a eulogy, a good speech about someone who has passed away. But a EU catastrophe that just as almost everything is falling apart, there's a sudden and joyous turn.
I think it was Robert Browning had said something know, for sudden, the worst turns the best for the brave. The worst turns the best for the brave. And that this happens suddenly. And this, in a way, is many of the great fairy stories and certainly the ones that he writes or that Lewis writes, these have a kind of this eucatastrophic moment. And just could you talk a little bit about that idea that in a way that there is not ultimately universal final defeat, right? This idea like they lived happily ever after or something, even though people criticize that at times at being unrealistic. What is it about the consolation that stories give us?
[00:41:23] Speaker A: Well, first of all, the fact that we're in need of consolation is because of the sort of word that we're in, the world that we're in. I mean, the prayer, the Salvador Regina, we talk about this veil of tears. And I actually prefer to say veil because it's a play on words, V-E-I-L as well as V-A-L-E because we live in the shadowlands, as C s. Lewis would say. We're not seeing the fullness of the light of God, and it's a word of suffering and sorrow. So it's a veil of tears in V-E-I-L as well as a veil of tears, as in a valley of tears. But it's also a land of exile, right? It's not our true home, and we know it or we sense it instinctively. So that's why we need consolation. And then what Tolkien says about eucatastrophe, which is a word, as you say, that he invented, it's a neologism introduced into the language by Tolkien himself. And it's a paradoxical word because catastrophe, of course, we know that word. That's an old word from the Greek. It means bad turn. Bad turn. In the story, something goes catastrophically wrong.
And I don't like to possibly disagree with Tolkien. It's a dangerous thing to do. But he defines a eucatastrophe in on fairy stories as a sudden joyous turn. Now, if something's a sudden joyous turn, it's a eutrophy or a eustrophy, it's a good turn, right? It's not a eucatastrophe. But in actual fact, although it doesn't state this explicitly, eucatastraphy paradoxically is much, much stronger because the sudden joyous turn only has great power if it's following upon a catastrophe. So we would not have the EU catastrophe of the Redemption if it wasn't for the catastrophe of the fall. We wouldn't have the EU catastrophe of the Resurrection if it wasn't for the catastrophe of the Crucifixion. So the real power of the sudden joyous turn is the fact it follows on from a catastrophic turn, which we think everything is lost, and then, no, it isn't. There's this sudden joyous turn, this ucatastrophic turning of things.
[00:43:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And even in Lord of the Rings, right, there's that moment when, at the very end, Frodo's standing in Mount Doom above the fire, ready to cast the ring in, and he puts it on his finger and says, It's mine, right? And you're ah, everything's lost. Everything is lost. And yet, you know, Gollum comes up and bites off his finger and falls, takes the ring in, and everything works out. Right? But it's also this element, then, of grace is that the great good that we need and the great good that has been given is all a gift. It's a grace. It's not something that we could earn by our own efforts. And I think that's partly why the eucatastraphic moment, the eucatastrophe is so important, because we really have to recognize that on our own. Even if I could run the country, if I could run the university, if I could run the UN, I would still make a mess of things. Like, we really have to believe that. And Lewis in Mirka Shane with Time, describes faith as the recognition of our own bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of our own efforts. And I think this is kind of again, it's a paradox when we finally recognize that we are powerless to do the good we want to do, to love God and to love ourselves and to love our neighbors as we would want to.
That's, in a way, when we can begin to recognize how amazing it is that God has nonetheless loved us to the end, loved us to the resurrection. So as we're talking about these three themes, we've already been kind of like Tolkien would see that the Christian story has influenced the way Christians tell stories. So much of the development of fairy stories and the development of his stories, of course, are both stories at the level of human beings, but they're also stories that human beings tell about the secondary world or in light of the primary world, which includes the Christian story. Right. So we've already kind of go there. But let's talk a little bit more about how it is that the Christian story itself is an escape, recovery and consolation. And just one thing that I love the way he puts it this is that he says kind of like when you're reading a story, when you start getting near the end of the book you start getting kind of sad because you want to stay in the story you've been reading. Whether or not it's austin's pride and prejudice or the lord of the rings or something. While you're reading the story, there's a home, there's a place that you're living in a world, and he says that you kind of have a natural desire to want to go into it and live there. But he says that in the Christian story, the irony is that we actually do. We get to live in that story. We get to read and hear about the story of Jesus because that story, though, is written not by the subcreator, not creating a secondary world, but it's written by the Creator and therefore it enters into into it reshapes the primary world. And so we can actually live in that. And we should, in that sense, have that great joy, as if we could live in Middle earth. We actually do get to live in the new earth created by the resurrection. So just maybe say a little bit about how you see the Christian story specifically as offering escape, recovery and consolation.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Yeah, well, obviously, as regards escape, there's an irony here as well, because, yes, this is the primary world in the sense this is the world in which we find ourselves. This is the world we know, that world of fact that we can touch and it's tangible. But we do have this sense of exile. And in some sense, I see that this is God's secondary world because obviously the fullness of reality is to be in God's presence in paradise, in heaven. This is a testing ground. It is a story in which we find ourselves as if we were in Jane Austen's world on Middle earth. We are in this earth and it is a story of which we are a part. But the purpose of the story ultimately is to leave the story. And so that's why a large part of The Lord of the Rings is this parable between death and immortality. The elves are imprisoned in time because they're immortal. And so they see death as the gift of God to man because this allows man to escape from the confines of the veil of tears in the land of exile into something which may well very probably be much more like home, not a place that you're exiled from. Of course, heaven is the definition of that. So I think that the Christian story enables us, first of all, this promise of escape from the veil of tears from the land of exile. That in itself is a great consolation and the consolation of the happy ending, the Eucatastrophe. And so we need to recover a sense of God's presence, which means we have to somehow see the presence of God in the valley of tears in the land of exile or in what Tolkien called the long defeat of human history with only occasional glimpses of final victory. Or it's the glimpses of final victory. We have to be keeping our eyes out for all the time and looking towards and to remind ourselves. As Chesterton says, we don't live in the best of all possible worlds. We live in the best of all impossible worlds. We're in the midst of a miracle, a miraculous creation which, because of the gift of freedom, has been marred by evil. But still we are made in the image of God, and we're made for God. And if we keep our eyes on God and keep that sense of recovery with us all the time, then we will have the consolation of the happy end in the sudden joyous turn which is being lifted up into heaven in the presence of Jesus Christ.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: Well, that is a beautiful place to finish the show today. Thank you so much for summarizing all that. I love that idea that the primary world is heaven, where the saints and the angels dwell with God and where he longs for us to be and has kind of opened up the way that the way to heaven is Jesus Christ. And what a great gift. So thank you for being on the show today, Joseph, and for people who are listening. We've been talking especially about Tolkien's on Fairy Stories, his essay, if you're interested in reading it's, about, I think, about 15 pages online, so it's relatively short. Also, for those who are interested as well, we have a number of prior episodes with Joseph Pierce talking about Chesterton and C. S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia. And again, if you're enjoying The Catholic Theology Show, please consider sharing us with your friends and family. So thank you so much and we'll look forward to another show.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Thank you.
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