July 25, 2007
Stories, good stories, always borrow from the Christian worldview- always- a variation on a theme- A good and pleasant life is disrupted by some devastating circumstance that seems nigh to impossible to overcome. Evil plays its most horrific hand, yet, when all is said and done, Good overcomes Evil by direct confrontation. The heart of Evil is pierced and Evil's deathblow itself dies.
To simply say that seeing Christian themes in any story is "reading into things" is a misunderstanding of stories in general and the Christian story in particular. JRR Tolkien described the fairy-story as "one of the highest forms of literature" (Letters 220), and "a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which indeed it is exhibited" (Letters 188). This act of "sub-creation" was an opportunity for Tolkien to forge entire worlds which may not possess their own life, but would still honor the real creation of God. Joseph Pearce explains, "We have come from God, ... and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God." Tolkien himself explains, "...The peculiar quality of the "joy" in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. ...It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be "primarily" true, its narrative to be history."
"This implies the unreal fantasy world can be just as real as everyday reality, or even more so. If that is so, then the primary world must be less than real, i.e., it too must be a sub-creation, a secondary world. Reality is revealed to be just another fantasy" (George Aichele - Tolkien's Faerie Stories).
Fantasy scholar Jack Zipes explicitly states, "...The fantastic projection of religious hope in the Bible lays the foundation ... for the formation of secular hope that demands a reverence for the utterly different as good and sets ethical and moral markers to lead us to our final destination of home."
"...the fantasy of Jewish and Christian messianism, by way of its chief biblical instigators, Moses and Jesus, opens the way to paradise on earth, the promised land or
kingdom of God. Fantasy projects hope, and hope leads us home. This "solves" Tolkien's apparently paradoxical inversion of real and unreal by asserting that the presently unreal (the no-place of utopia) will become real in the future, at which time our present realities will have become unreal" (George Aichele - Tolkien's Faerie Stories).
Tolkien explained,
"… I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of truth…. It perceives– if the story has literary ‘truth'…–that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest fairy story– and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love…" (Letter 89)
He explains elsewhere,
"The peculiar quality of the ‘joy' in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation' for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?' . . . In the ‘eucatastrophe' we see in brief vision that the answer may be greater–it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world . . . The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels–peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story [i.e. the Christian Story] has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation [those who write and enjoy fanatasy literature] has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality'. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true" (Peculiar Joy and the Christian Story).
The Christian story is the real mythic story- true reality. It is first the original with all other stories a copy and shadow (*2 Tim. 1:8-10, Eph. 3:8-9, 11, Acts 2:22-23). I believe Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it best, "There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is the reality of God, which has become manifest in Christ in the reality of the world." Stories, good stories, always borrow from this Christian worldview- always. A good and pleasant life is disrupted by some devastating circumstance that seems nigh to impossible to overcome. Evil plays its most horrific hand, yet, when all is said and done, Good overcomes Evil by direct confrontation. The heart of Evil is pierced and Evil's deathblow itself dies. This, in effect, is the Gospel.
Therefore, The Chief Purpose of Life, according to J.R.R. Tolkien, "...for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks." ~J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to Camilla Unwin - May 20, 1969. This includes creating and reading good fairy-stories.
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* These passages are used to demonstrate that the historical events and effects of redemption were planned and foreordained before the foundation of the world. Therefore, even though this point will be expanded upon, for now we can properly assume all other "fairy-stories" are mere copies and a shadow.
continued....