A Minister of the Secret Fire: Pavel Hošek’s take on J. R. R. Tolkien (review) (original) (raw)
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Christianity & Literature, 2003
Persistent in Tolkien criticism is the question of to what extent, if any, Tolkien's Middle-earth fiction expresses his personal Christian commitment. Some readers love the Middle-earth stories but are disappointed that Tolkien is not more explicitly Christian in these works; others love them and object to the idea of there being anything Christian in them; yet others perceive clear indications of the author's faith to the degree appropriate in an imagined world that apparently predates the recorded history of our world. In Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of!. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Garbowski approaches the question obliquely and, though drawing heavily on previous studies, makes a significant new contribution. Garbowski's focus is on the "spiritual dimension;' which he defines as not specifically Christian nor even necessarily religious, but he is quite clear that Tolkien's Christian world view is what enabled him to give his reader, of any creed or none, an enrichment or recovery of perception and an ethical imperative. Garbowski is concerned equally with the substance of Tolkien's spiritual vision and the artistry by which it was developed; indeed, he considers Tolkien's conception of the artist and his spiritual vision to be inseparable. He looks to two European thinkers for his theoretical framework. The psychologist Victor Frankl identified a "will to meaning" (not a "drive") as the quintessential mark of the human and thereby offered a "hermeneutics of affirmation" (12), more hope-filled than the determinism of Freud and more in tune with the transcendent than the self-affirmation advocated by Maslow. His is "one of the few schools of psychology that does [sic] justice to the religious aspect of an artist's work" (16). The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin provides the concept of "dialogism," an insistence that the artist avoid solipsism and take cognizance of the Other, allowing both characters and audience their own contributions to the ultimate work of art. By approaching his project in this way, Garbowski implicitly addresses as well a second recurrent issue in Tolkien criticism: can anything this popular merit being taken seriously as art? Like a fair number of previous critics, Garbowski does take Tolkien's work seriously, and again the work meets the challenge. So much for the in-group narrowness of the literary establishment that could not accept the verdict of the famous Waterstone survey calling The Lord of the Rings the book of the century. In Frankl and Bakhtin, then, Garbowski finds a high valuation on self-transcendence, which for him is central to both ethics and aesthetics. And he finds this value abundantly illustrated in Tolkien, not only in his characters such as Frodo or (negatively) Melkor but also in his approach to artistic creation. Tolkien's "fecund" imagination is of less concern to Garbowski than "the search for meaning he was engaged in, and which he stimulates in the reader" (18). Moreover, in many ways his work as
2014 The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction‐based Religion (full text)
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and development of the spiritual Tolkien milieu, a largely online-situated network of individuals and groups that draw on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology for spiritual inspiration. It is the first academic treatment of Tolkien spirituality and one of the first mono¬graphs on fiction-based religion, a type of religion that uses fiction as authori¬ta¬tive texts. Adopting a semiotic approach to religion, the book raises questions about the persuasive power of narrative, about religious blending, and about rationalisation of beliefs. How can some readers come to believe that supernatural agents from fictional narratives are real? How do fiction-based religions emerge when their authoritative texts lack important religious building-blocks, such as descriptions of rituals? And how do adherents of fiction-based religions legitimise their beliefs, given the fact that their religion is based on fiction? In short, with Tolkien religion as a case the dissertation aims to uncover the semio¬tic structures and processes involved in the construction and maintenance of fiction-based religion, and the social structures that sup¬port the plausibility of such religion.
A Further Step into the Theological Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien
2024
Guglielmo Spirito When he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not "Who are you?" but "So it was you all the time" … C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape letters