V. Beauty and Barriers: The Mountain of Paradise

This post is the first in a series of meditations on hierarchy as the fundamental grammar of the Language of Beauty. My original intent was to look at the iconographic layout of an Orthodox Church as an illustration of how this worked, but in the process I found I needed to go deeper into the "roots of the mountain"--the mountain itself, as it turns out, being the Mountain of Paradise.

For much of this post I will be relying on the writings of St Ephraim the Syrian. St Ephraim is a 4th century Church Father from Mesopotamia. Unlike the Greek Fathers, St Ephraim read and wrote in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. And although he treats on many of the same theological issues as the Greek Fathers, he does so primarily in the same Semitic poetic idiom which is prevalent in the Hebrew Scriptures. In these, and particularly Genesis and the prophets, St Ephraim demonstrates a great fluency, mining them for rich imagery which he employs in theological meditations on a number of subjects.

St Ephraim the Syrian, Legacy Icons

Although he is little-known in the West, St Ephraim has over 300,000 lines of verse attributed to his hand (some of these are probably pseudoepigrapha, but it remains a fact that his poetic output was prodigious). He is probably best-known for the lenten prayer attributed to him, which the Eastern Orthodox Church uses many times a day during the season of Great Lent:

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.

One of St Ephraim's most significant works is the Hymns on Paradise, a series of 15 hymns which together form a meditation on Genesis 2-3. In these hymns Ephraim draws on a deep well of the Hebrew scriptures, Second Temple Judaism, Syriac rabbinical traditions, and early Christian understandings of the Cross, the Tree of Life, and Paradise to express the sacramental character of the created world, and the Triune God as the ultimate source of all beauty.

The Mountain of God

Following a very old interpretive tradition which predates Christianity, St Ephraim (in keeping with the prophet Ezekiel) understands Paradise, or Eden, as both mountain and sanctuary, seeing in it the basic pattern on which Moses' tabernacle was later modeled. In this he is perfectly in keeping with a Second Temple Jewish tradition concerning God's command to Moses:

And look that thou make them [the fittings and furnishings of the Tabernacle] after their pattern [in the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures this word is typos], which was shewed thee in the mount. (Exodus 25:40)

Today we would probably be inclined to understand pattern as something like a set of blueprints which Moses was shown, and then commanded to execute. Second Temple Judaism, as well as later rabbinical traditions and the early Church Fathers, all understood this to mean that Moses has been shown the heavenly sanctuary which Isaiah, Ezekiel, and John the Revelator saw, and commanded to build an earthly image of the heavenly original. There exists a truly staggering amount of rabbinical and Patristic commentary on the detailed instructions for the Tabernacle found in these chapters.

All of this forms the backdrop for the direct parallels which St Ephraim draws between Paradise and the structure of the Tabernacle/Temple. To quote from the excellent edition from SVS Press which I have linked to above:

The Paradise Hymns provide us with a number of topographical details which, taken together, can give us some idea of how St Ephrem conceptualized this Paradisiacal mountain. We learn that the mountain is circular (I.8) and that it encircles the "Great Sea (II.6), enclosing both land and sea (I.8-9). The Flood reached only its foothills (I.4), and on these foothills is situated the "fence" or "barrier"...guarded by the Cherub with the revolving sword (II.7, IV.1, based on Genesis 3:24). This fence demarcates the lowest extremity of Paradise. Halfway up is the Tree of Knowledge which provides an internal boundary beyond and higher than which Adam and Eve were forbidden to go (III.3); this Tree acts as a sanctuary curtain hiding the Holy of Holies, which is the Tree of Life higher up (III.2). On the summit of the Mountain resides the Divine Presence, the Shekhina...

In this structure St Ephraim saw the model for the Old Testament Tabernacle and Temple, as well as for the physical layout of the Christian Church--but also (as I shall discuss in the next post in this series) the threefold structure of the human person. There are also frequent comparisons made to the progression of Moses up Mount Sinai (an important image in Christian thought, cf. the Epistle to the Hebrews, St Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses). Expanding on one of the charts found in the SVS edition, I would make a feeble attempt to plot the relationships between these hiearchies thus:

	Paradise	Sinai	The Tabernacle/The Temple	The Christian Church	Human Person
summit:	Shekhina/Tree of Life	the Glorious One	Shekhina/The Mercy Seat/Cherubic Throne (Holy of Holies)	The Cross (new Tree of Life) and its fruit (the Eucharist)/The "Warm Mercy Seat"	divinity (1 Cor 16:19)
heights:	Tree of Knowledge	Moses	Sanctuary Veil	Iconostasis/Templon	intellectual Spirit
slopes:	Fig Tree/Fence	Aaron priests	Holy Place	Nave	soul
lower slopes:	Thorn Tree	tribes	Porch/Outer Court	Narthex	body

As noted in my previous post, the idea of barriers or veils within a hierarchy is something which is likely to raise the hackles of those raised in a democratic, individualistic society. Since we are looking at hierarchy as a source of beauty, I am going to take the liberty of a somewhat long (and theological) digression to consider how these barriers function.

Barriers and Veils

Of particular interest in the Hymns on Paradise is the connection between the Tree of Knowledge and the sanctuary veil which hung before the Holy of Holies. A veil is something which both conceals and reveals--one might even say that it reveals by means of concealing. One common way of understanding this is the bridal chamber: the bridal chamber is concealed, private, intimate, and therefore "holy." It is a place of revealing intimacy to those within, but by its privacy it also reveals the sanctity of the place to those without. Understood this way, the tearing of the sanctuary veil at the hour of the crucifixion (Matthew 27:50-51) is neither a signal of the abolition of all holy places (no-one prior to the Protestant Reformation thought of it this way) or some kind of censure on the Jerusalem temple specifically (where the Apostles continued to worship after the Resurrection until the establishment of the Church).

The Sanctuary Veil, credit: https://steve-creitz-kreh.squarespace.com/

This moment is best understood in light of the Genesis narrative. Following his rabbinical and Second Temple sources, Ephraim and other early Church Fathers interpreted the Tree of Knowledge as something which had been placed in the Garden as both a test and a reward for mankind. If Adam and Eve obeyed the command to abstain from the Tree, they would be given to eat of it, and their "eyes would be opened" to see the Tree of Life, allowing them to progress further up the mountain, into closer communion with God, becoming in fact "like God." The Serpent promises them this godlikeness on their own terms, and being deceived, they partake of the fruit. The Tree of Knowledge works as intended and the veil is torn, but where the vision of the inner sanctuary ought to have given them joy, now it gives them only sorrow, and they are driven outward beyond the Fence of Paradise in order to prevent their seizing the Tree of Life on their own terms:

When the accursed one learned

  how the glory of that inner Tabernacle,

as if in a sanctuary,

  was hidden from them,

and that the Tree of Knowledge,

  clothed with an injunction,

served as the veil

  for the sanctuary,

he realized that its fruit

  was the key of justice

that would open the eyes of the bold

  --and cause them great remorse.

Their eyes were open--

  though at the same time they were still closed

so as not to see the Glory

  or their own low estate,

so as not to see the Glory

  of that inner Tabernacle,

nor to see the nakedness

  of their own bodies.

These two kinds of knowledge

  God hid in the Tree,

placing it as a judge

  between the two parties.

But when Adam boldly ran

  and ate of its fruit

this double knowledge

  straightway flew toward him,

tore away and removed

  both veils from his eyes:

he beheld the Glory of the Holy of Holies

  and trembled;

he beheld, too, his own shame and blushed,

  groaning and lamenting

because the twofold knowledge he had gained

  had proved for him a torment.

Whoever has eaten 

  of that fruit

either sees and is filled with delight

  or he sees and groans out.

The serpent incited them to eat in sin

  so that they might lament;

having seen the blessed state,

  they could not taste of it--

like that hero of old

  whose torment was doubled

because in his hunger he could not taste

  the delights which he beheld.

For God had not alllowed him

  to see his naked state,

so that, should he spurn the commandment,

  his ignominy might be shown him.

Nor did He show him the Holy of Holies,

  in order that, if he kept the command,

he might set eyes upon it

  and rejoice.

These two things did God conceal,

  as the two recompenses,

so that Adam might receive, by means of his contest,

  a crown that befitted his actions.

God established the Tree as judge,

  so that if Adam should eat from it,

it might show him that rank

  which he had lost through his pride,

and show him, as well, that low estate

  he had acquired, to his torment.

Whereas, if he should overcome and conquer,

  it would robe him in glory

and reveal to him also

  the nature of shame,

so that he might acquire, in his good health,

  an understanding of sickness.

(Hymns on Paradise, III.5-10

Templon at Church of St. Eleftherios in Athens, photo credit Wikipedia

The moment of Christ's crucifixion is thus shown, by the rending of the temple veil, to be the moment of revelation, revealing the new "Tree of Life"--the Cross, made available to us by the obedience of the Second Adam [note: the Cross as the Tree of Life is one of the most fertile subjects for hymnody within the Eastern Tradition of the Church, and it is an image to which St Ephraim returns over and over again]. Whether this moment of revelation is a source of joy or sorrow depends, as it did for Adam, on the disposition of the viewer. 

The Nave and Iconostasis of St Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Dallas, TX

For Christians worshiping in the Eastern Rite (myself included), the opening and closing of the Holy Doors of the iconostasis (or the opening/closing of the veil of a templon) functions in this way. The presence of the barrier reveals the Sanctuary as holy. For the Faithful, the opening of the doors at particular moments in the Liturgy (most of all during the consecration of the Eucharist) reveals the promise of greater joy, deeper communion, the way made free to go "further up and further in." For the penitent, the excommunicated, the vision is one of sorrow--what is denied and must be reclaimed.

But someone reading St Ephraim closely--or for that matter, anyone who has ever attended a Mass or read a good story--will realize that while beauty uses hierarchy as a framework, the hierarchy alone is not inherently beautiful. Movement--up and down, in classical terms "comedy" and "tragedy"--is necessary for beauty to be found and experienced.

In the next post we'll examine the series of contrasts and movements in Paradise, and find them in the layout, iconographic scheme, and Liturgical movements of the Church. In the post that follows that, we will consider how the same grammar of beauty is present in a Western dialect in Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments.


Currently reading: Hymns on Paradise, St Ephraim the Syrian
Current audio book: The Silmarillion, Tolkien

IV. Beauty and the Kingdom of Heaven

In my previous post, I concluded by setting myself this question to answer:

"The second difference is an artistic question of how--if Christ is the icon of the Father, and therefore the only reliable means by which we can know and commune with the God who is Beauty--all of the other arts (particularly those which are non-liturgical or not specifically religious) can be arranged so as to be transfigured by the Light of Tabor."

In the many weeks which have transpired since writing that post, I have had time to contemplate the salutary phrase "the artistic question of how..." For it is exactly a question of art--"the art remaining with the artist." Here I am not so much interested in the question of art as a "thing" ("but is it art?!") as I am in ars as craft, such as "the art of cheesemaking" or "the art of storytelling" or "the art of Iconography." I am enough of a traditionalist to insist that while cheesemaking, storytelling, and iconography each have their own distinct associated skills and techniques (the combination of which defines the "art" of the thing), yet too they each have a capacity to which they can (according to their kind) be integrated into a world which is not merely fallen, but which has been redeemed.

The best pattern for understanding the arts is that of the hierarchy. All the arts contain a hierarchy within themselves, relate to each other in terms of a hierarchy, and produce artifacts which move the human person towards a specific place in a hierarchy. We may think of a hierarchy in terms of a mountain--as St Gregory of Nyssa understands the progression of the human person toward God in The Life of Moses. We may also think of it in terms of a king's court, or of the Ptolemaic model of the universe (concerning which, more later)--Dante uses all of these models in The Divine Comedy.

Some of us may find the notion of hierarchy repulsive, for any number of reasons which point to any number of disorders in the human condition. Some of us have been wronged by evil hierarchies, some others of us have spent so much time staring at inverted hierarchies that they have begun to look normal to us--thus the Inferno is always the most popular book of The Divine Comedy with any audience, with interest waning as Dante purges more and more of his sin and comes closer and closer to God. I have never believed the fault lay with Dante's genius.

Still others of us have been formed by habits of thought, culture, and education to explicitly reject traditional hierarchies, having become oblivious to those present within our own society which we accept without question. Once, beginning a long-running study on the books of the "Kingdoms" (1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles) I asked a room full of evangelical adults what sort of government or society best mirrored or imaged Heaven (these are the sorts of unfair, troublesome questions which young and arrogant teachers like to use to break the ice). The answer, given nearly unanimously and without hesitation, was "democracy" (though one clever person suggested a "representative republic" instead). This, despite the fact that Christ has very little to say about "the Democracy of Heaven." Like most Evangelicals, they considered themselves "people of the book," but they had always been taught that the American model of government was the most inherently biblical and therefore the most like Heaven.

I am of course neither interested in nor qualified to set out any kind of political theory. The fact that congregationalists equate democracy with the Divine order is not really a comment which requires much consideration, nor am I keen on the idea of elevating any of our current political leaders to the status of absolute monarch. Much more important to the Fathers of the Church--and in my view, much more immediate to us--is the fact that each of us contains, as human persons, a microcosm--a whole cosmos in miniature--within ourselves. This microcosm, because it images the Divine, is inherently hierarchical. Learning to perceive beauty requires the restoration of this hierarchy to its proper order (which is the goal of asceticism).

There is of course the danger that you have already tuned me out due to the repeated use in this post of words such as "hierarchy" and "tradition," all of which we have been taught to think of as stale, dead, and irreparably corrupt. Over the course of the next four posts, I will attempt to show how when we engage with and participate in these things we find them living and breathing, dynamic and attractive. For true hierarchies are not static things--rather, they are processions, or parades: as stately as a coronation; as ecstatic as David dancing before the Ark; as festal as any triumphus through the streets of the Eternal City.

We will consider four works of art: two visual, one poetic, and one literary. The artistic hierarchies I intend to examine are, in order:

1. The Multi-Dimensional Iconography of the Orthodox temple
2. Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments
3. The Divine Comedy
4. The Silmarillion

Currently reading: The Person in the Orthodox Tradition, Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

Current audio book: Bread, Water, Wine, and Oil: An Orthodox Experience of God, Meletios Weber

III. On the Unreliability and Reliability of Incarnate Beauty

So far in this series of posts, I've taken some shots at Iconoclasm and especially at the form of "soft" or "accidental" Iconoclasm which exists within American evangelicalism (which has its roots deep in the intentional Iconoclasm of the Puritans) as I've experienced it.

But the incidents of Iconoclasm within the first millennium--notably of course the two great Iconoclast persecutions, which have contributed more martyrs and confessors to the Church calendar than any of the persecutions under pagan emperors--surely show that this is a perennial concern, something which we cannot take for granted. Like every heresy, after all, Iconoclasm seems to be concerned mainly with the preservation of God's honor, a motivation that no person of faith should despise.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has in fact acknowledged this in the feast, commemorated on the first Sunday of Lent, of the "Triumph of Orthodoxy" which celebrates the return of the icons in 843. As part of this celebration, every Orthodox parish in the world reads the decrees affirming the place of beauty in Christian worship:

As the prophets beheld, as the Apostles have taught,... as the Church has received... as the teachers have dogmatized,... as the Universe has agreed,... as Grace has shown forth,... as Truth has revealed,... as falsehood has been dissolved,... as Wisdom has presented,... as Christ Awarded,... thus we declare,... thus we assert,... thus we preach Christ our true God, and honor as Saints in words, in writings, in thoughts, in sacrifices, in churches, in Holy Icons; on the one hand worshipping and reverencing Christ as God and Lord; and on the other hand honoring as true servants of the same Lord of all and accordingly offering them veneration. 

This is the Faith of the Apostles, this is the Faith of the Fathers, this is the Faith of the Orthodox, this is the Faith which has established the Universe.

Note that the emphasis placed here is not merely on aesthetic beauty itself (though no one would argue that there is not present in Eastern Orthodox worship a high standard of aesthetic beauty), but on beauty as a means to two things: faith (confession in and worship of Christ as God and Lord) and love (the physical embodiment of the Communion of the Saints). Inasmuch as one Patristic view of the Church is as a "communion of faith and love," icons affirm both.

All of this is by way of saying that classical "traditioned" Christianity has always acknowledged that some uneasiness exists about the use of beauty, with objections ranging from "this could have been sold, and the money given to the poor" (need I remind anyone who said those words first?) to genuine concern about graven images. By the same token, the Holy Trinity has seemed too much like Polytheism for some, while the idea of the Incarnation of the uncontainable God has proven difficult for philosophers and theologians right up to the Protestant Reformation. The Church acknowledges this uneasiness and both addresses it and re-orients herself through celebration.

According to the Tradition, icons (taken in the broadest sense to include crosses, vestments, architecture, etc.) are an extension, an implication, and a necessary consequence of the Incarnation. Thus, uneasiness about beauty (and it really is just about beauty--few Evangelicals today would object to spending money on a larger auditorium which would seat more people; it always seems to be the money that could be spent beautifying the Church, not the money spent enlarging it, which ought to have been given to the poor) may be understood as a larger and quite reasonable uneasiness about human nature and the things which it produces.

Concerning this uneasiness, the Patristic tradition is not silent. One of the first and most important stops for anyone trying to articulate a "language of beauty" must surely be The Life of Moses by St Gregory of Nyssa. In this work, St Gregory introduces a multi-level reading of the life of the prophet Moses that views it at the literal/historical, typological, and allegorical levels. One of the important images that St Gregory sees in the life of Moses (as a type of the ascent of the soul towards God) is the concept of the "garments of skin," something typified both in the clothes God gave Adam and Eve to wear when they were expelled from Paradise, as well in the shoes which Moses must remove so that he can come into the presence of God:

The light instructs us in what we must do when we stand within the rays of that true light. Feet that have sandals are unable to ascend to that lofty height where the light of truth is seen. Rather the dead and earthly skin coverings which clothed our nature at the beginning when we were discovered to be naked on account of our disobedience to the divine will, should be taken off the feet of the soul.

Moses and the Burning Bush; fresco, St Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Dallas, TX

These garments of skin are not bad or evil, in fact at some point they may even be necessary for our survival. Moses' shoes do take him a long way up the Mountain, after all. But in the end they are those things which we must lay aside in order to truly encounter God. They are the pharmakon, the things (including both technology and "thought constructions" such as metaphors) which extend our ability to act in the world, even to have power over it, but which also ultimately set greater limitations upon ourselves. For example: writing, and much later the Internet, have extended the human ability to process and disseminate information in a dramatic way, but they have come at the cost of a reduced capacity for memory in most people. It is worth remembering in a similar vein that the prohibitions against idolatry in the Old Testament are always prohibitions, not simply against making an image, a work of art, but against making an image of the invisible God after our own understanding. Thus the prophet Isaiah prefaces his tirade against idolatry with the question "To whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare to Him?"

St Gregory elsewhere extended this metaphor of the "garments of skin" to techne, a word at once encompassing both technology and art (Christ is referred to in the New Testament as a tekton, a word often translated "carpenter," though the broader sense seems to have been "skilled artisan"). One argument which could be therefore made against the arts--and first and foremost the liturgical arts--is that they are a "garment of skin," a finite and therefore unreliable way of coming to know a God who is Infinite. Since they are made by human beings, this line of thinking goes, they can never bridge the unutterable gap between the human and divine. Their place is as amusement, or at best on the periphery of our religious experience.

Here, something pernicious seems to have poisoned the well in regards to the visual arts. Most modern "accidental iconoclasts" are more than willing to acknowledge the role music plays in worship, but balk at the employment of at least traditional visual arts--though one should note that the Puritans were at least more consistent on this point, destroying both musical instruments and sheet music (and driving all of England's best organists into exile) during the years of Cromwell's rule.

To answer this question we could look some of the ways we see the "garments of skin" transfigured and redeemed in Scripture and elsewhere in the Tradition--first and foremost, Noah's ark. Ultimately of course there is the whole paschal mystery of Christ, the transfiguration (foreshadowed by his literal transfiguration, the whole content of which was the Passion and the Resurrection) not only of human nature, but of all created things.

The Transfiguration of Christ

It is only in this understanding of the purpose, and destiny (one might say the final cause) of the created order that St Paul speaks of "bringing all things in heaven and on earth together in Christ." St Gregory of Nyssa, within the same breath of speaking of the garments of skin, sees in the burning bush a foreshadowing of the transfiguration of the garments of death into garments of light:

The fact that the fire which enlightened the soul of the prophet was lit from the thorny bush will not be without value in our examination. Because if truth is God and truth is light, and the Gospel affirms these splendid and holy names apply to God who made himself manifest to us in the flesh, such direction in virtue directs us to the knowledge that a light has descended, even upon human nature. For fear that one suppose that the brilliance did not emanate from a material substance, this light did not come forth from a star but rather from a bush of the earth and it excelled all the heavenly stars in its brilliance. From this we discover also the mystery of the Virgin. The radiance of divinity through whose birth shone from her into the life of men did not consume the burning bush, just as the flower of her virginity did not fade by giving birth.

The essential grammar of our "language of beauty" is, as I have said, that image of the Virgin and Child, for the Mystery of the Virgin is the Mystery of the Incarnation, of the God-become-man. The difference between this--the flesh of the Virgin which becomes the flesh of God, and becomes the flesh of Christ in the chalice--and the "garments of skin" which we must discard to know God is really a twofold difference: it is a difference in who makes the image, and in what and who is the center.

The first difference is really an epistemological question: are there any metaphors or analogies by which we can know God, and if not, but what can He be known? As far as this question goes, classical Christianity entirely insists that God is only known reliably by his Word, who is a person, and who reveals both the written Scriptures and the whole of creation as a epiphany of God by means of his paschal mystery, of which and of whom we are not merely the audience, but actual participants through Baptism, the Eucharist, and the whole Mystery of the Church. God is therefore an image (eikon) maker, and the most ultimately reliable "eikon of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15) is is Son, Jesus Christ. Much more could be said of this; in a way it is the only thing that classical Christianity ever tries or needs to say. If I do not spend more on this point, it is only because it has been said so much better and so much more elegantly many other places, and what is more, one can only begin to understand it in terms of a living context. Christ is not a subject, he is a person.

The second difference is an artistic question of how--if Christ is the icon of the Father, and therefore the only reliable means by which we can know and commune with the God who is Beauty--all of the other arts (particularly those which are non-liturgical or not specifically religious) can be arranged so as to be transfigured by the Light of Tabor. This question of arrangement will be the focus of the next post in this series.


Currently reading: Great Lent, by Fr Alexander Schmemann
Current audio book: St Francis of Assisi, by G.K. Chesterton

II. Can the Singer Enter the Tale? Tolkien and the Sacraments, Part 3

In this series of posts, I am trying to articulate what might be called a "language of beauty."

In the first post in the series, I shared a rather autobiographical prologue of my early awakenings to beauty in the world and in the Word.

In the second post in the series, I laid some groundwork in the form of a thesis: The classical Christian approach to art, poetics, and wonder must be understood in light of the Incarnation. The great Christian artists have possessed something I have called the "sacramental imagination" that was born out of the basic confidence that the world (created or sub-created) could be a real means of communion with God. In other words, if there is a Christian "language" of beauty, the sacraments are its grammar.

In the previous two posts, I began an examination of how this "sacramental imagination" works itself out in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Today's post concludes those reflections.

---

I would argue, the thing that held all of this together for Tolkien was the Blessed Sacrament itself: the Holy Eucharist. Writing once to one of his sons, who was undergoing a crisis of faith, he said,

“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth…” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p.53)

Elsewhere, speaking of a dark period in his life and of his own failings as a father, he wrote,

“But I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning – and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again: but alas! I indeed did not live up to it…Out of wickedness and sloth I almost ceased to practice my religion – especially at Leeds, and at 22 Northmoor Road. Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger. I regret those days bitterly (and suffer for them with such patience as I can be given); most of all because I failed as a father. Now I pray for you all, unceasingly, that the Healer (the Hælend as the Saviour was usually called in Old English) shall heal my defects, and that none of you shall ever cease to cry Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.” (Ibid. no. 250).

Between this, and the Reformed-Puritanical-Protestant approach to worship, there lies a fundamental epistemological difference. As a devout Roman Catholic (and particularly a pre-Vatican II Catholic), Tolkien did not go to Church to meet God merely in a sermon, but in a sacrament--not with his head only, but with his whole being. The Eucharist, like every Sacrament (and perhaps especially as the Sacrament of Sacraments), is the Recovery of the ordinary to its proper place. In it, the materials of bread and wine are caught up into the true myth of the God-Man who gave himself for all and on behalf of all. And even though the elements be changed, yet we are never quite able to look at "ordinary" bread and wine the same way again.

Flannery O’Connor, another Catholic author who wrote numerous times on her deep love for the Eucharist (and who attended Mass daily), said once that anyone who expects a writer to preach does not believe in the sacredness of the writer’s calling. The Evangelical really does expect the writer to preach just as he expects the preacher to preach. But for Tolkien, creation and sub-creation require not just a mind, but an Incarnate mind. To really experience truth we must live it, we must meet it in the flesh.

So Tolkien didn’t make sermons. He made myths. In doing so he worked out his absolute confidence in the Incarnation, of humanity caught up into the Godhead, and he had the virtue to Hope that by doing so he might restore his own humanity—and ours—to its priestly role by partaking in the sacramental act of sub-creation.

That is what he means by the closing lines of On Fairy Stories,

So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.

Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemann
Current audio book: The Brothers Karamazov
Currently translating: The Aeneid, Virgil

II. Can the Singer Enter the Tale? Tolkien and the Sacraments, Part 2

In this series of posts, I am trying to articulate what might be called a "language of beauty."

In the first post in the series, I shared a rather autobiographical prologue of my early awakenings to beauty in the world and in the Word.

In the second post in the series, I laid some groundwork in the form of a thesis: The classical Christian approach to art, poetics, and wonder must be understood in light of the Incarnation. The great Christian artists have possessed something I have called the "sacramental imagination" that was born out of the basic confidence that the world (created or sub-created) could be a real means of communion with God. In other words, if there is a Christian "language" of beauty, the sacraments are its grammar.

In the previous post, I began an examination of how this "sacramental imagination" works itself out in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Today's post continues those reflections.

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III. THE LONG DEFEAT

No discussion of Incarnational theology in Tolkien’s works would be complete without a discussion of suffering. For the Christian, there is no Incarnation without suffering. When St Athanasius the Great writes his landmark work on Christian theology, probably the most important extra-Biblical Christian text which has ever been written, he calls it On the Incarnation. But what does St Athanasius mean by “Incarnation?” He calls it that which is “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks,” the same phrase which Paul uses to describe Christ crucified in the first Epistle to the Corinthians.

We usually think of the Incarnation as the act which took place in the womb of Mary (and quite rightly, as I have pointed out in a previous post), but whenever Athanasius talks about it he always means the cross. When he asks “why did God become man?” what he always means is “why did God have to become a man and suffer?” And the only way for us is to follow Christ’s example, to suffer and die to this world, to bear witness with our blood, to participate in the living sacrifice which Christ offered up once and for all to the Father. For the Christian, the distance between earth and heaven is measured by the Cross.

Tolkien knew this very well—in fact, I think he knew it better than a lot of his critics acknowledged. Critics at the time as well as subsequent fantasy authors (people like Michael Moorcock) have criticized The Lord of the Rings for being morally simplistic, a kind of happily-ever-after fantasy in which everything comes out all right in the end. One wonders which copy of The Lord of the Rings they were reading.

If Tolkien develops a theology of sub-creation, we must not think he is blind to the potential abuses of the artistic gifts. One could argue that the whole history of his legendarium is a working-out of what happens when the sub-creative urge is malformed or disordered: when it mutates into the desire to possess and control. Melkor “the strong,” mightiest among the Valar, becomes Morgoth “the dark enemy of the world” ultimately because he wants to create in isolation instead of community, because he wants to control what he makes rather than give it over to the Children of Illuvatar who will inherit it. Later, the seeds of sin in Feanor’s heart—and the whole long and sad history of the Noldor as it plays out in The Silmarillion—are sown when he crafts the Silmarils, and desires to possess rather than to share them.

The impulse to create alone instead of in community is a marring of the image of God: for God does not create alone. The Holy Trinity is persons in communion, not an individual, a lonely genius, producing works for his own pleasure. One might say in Tolkien’s economy, as in Dante’s, all the individualists are in hell (or in this case, Angband).

The ultimate icon of corrupted art is, of course, the One Ring, which is the supreme work of art in The Lord of the Rings, and also the weapon of ultimate control. It’s telling, I think, in an age where the highest good is to “be all you can be,” that rejecting the One Ring always means rejecting your full potential. Gandalf, Frodo, even Sam could all be much more than they are—more effective, more efficient, more dreadful, more lordly, more deadly—if they would just use the Ring.

We see this most vividly in Galadriel’s test. In my opinion, it’s one of the most powerful scenes in literature. Galadriel can take the Ring which Frodo has offered. If she does, she’ll be a Queen—not just of Lothlorien, but of all Middle-earth. But if she rejects it—and this is what we can sometimes forget—she won’t merely stay where she’s at. Right now she’s Galadriel, Lady of Lothlorien, wielder of one of the three Elven rings, the greatest of the elves who yet remain in Middle-earth. She’s the daughter and sister and grandmother of kings and queens, perhaps the greatest and fairest of the Children of Illuvatar in the world since the time of Luthien. And if she lets the One Ring out of Lothlorien, she loses all of that. She has to go away into the West, where she will be “only Galadriel.” When you think about all of the good things she might still do for Middle-earth, the waste seems almost criminal, and I think that is one of the reasons that the elves’ leaving Middle-earth at the end of The Lord of the Rings feels so tragic.

There’s a line that’s easy to miss that I think says everything we need to understand about Tolkien’s attitude towards suffering. It’s in Galadriel’s description of Celeborn and the three ages that they have spent together in Middle-earth. She says that “together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” Tolkien lived through two World Wars, through the collapse of modernism, to the death of every close friend he had in the trenches of France during WWI. Tolkien lived as a Roman Catholic in an age when Christendom was coming apart at the seams. He was no defeatist, but at the same time he knew that to live in this world—to be Incarnate in it—is to suffer and to die. His whole work is shot through with that tension. What the Christian story has done—the myth become history, the ultimate Eucatastrophe—is given all of our suffering a purpose. Here is what he says in the epilogue of On Fairy Stories:

The Gospels contain a fairystory, 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 has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation 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… The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.

The good news of the Gospel is this: everything that we are as humans made in the Image of God now has a purpose, not just to vaguely “impact the culture for Christ,” but to actually assist in the salvation of the universe. I want to recall once again our working definition of Recovery: An Incarnate Mind, working with the materials of Primary Reality, creates a work of Fantasy, by which Primary reality is restored to is proper place. And I think now we are prepared, or nearly prepared, to see how Tolkien believes this concept has its ultimate fulfillment in Christ.

IV. THE SINGER ENTERS THE TALE

Something which is clear in the very first iteration of the Silmarillion material is the idea that things have gone wrong, and that some sort of intervention is needed if they are ever to be set right again. This idea plays out in the “themes” of Illuvatar, the second music he makes and which the Ainur [the angelic powers and demiurges who sub-create within the themes of Illuvatar/God, though The Flame Imperishable (the Logos) which gives real substance to creation resides only with Illuvatar] do not understand.

The core idea, expressed and developed in a variety of ways throughout Tolkien’s lifetime, is that the Children of Illuvatar (men and elves), and not the Ainur, will be the means by which the hurts of Arda are finally healed. In the earliest versions of the Legendarium, this included a Ragnarok-like battle at the end of time in which Turin Turambar would (with a little help) be the one to strike the final blow against Morgoth, taking vengeance for all the hurts of men and elves. Tolkien eventually scrapped that idea, but the role of the Children of Illuvatar—and particularly that of Mankind—remains in Tolkien’s eschatological vision. As stated in The Silmarillion,

Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy. But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope. Yet of old the Valar declared to the Elves in Valinor that Men shall join in the Second Music of the Ainur; whereas Ilúvatar has not revealed what he purposes for the Elves after the World's end…

This is pretty vague, and it hits upon one of the main “problems” for any Christian who digs deep into Tolkien’s Legendarium. You and I and Tolkien know that death, at any rate human death, is an aberration. It is a wound inflicted by sin upon the world. It is only in Christ’s trampling down of death by death that it becomes something more than us. How then can Tolkien say that death is a gift? I think that answer, at least in part, is that Tolkien isn’t really saying that. The elves (who are the authors of the Quenta Silmarillion within Tolkien’s narrative frame) are saying that. One might see how, to the elves, death might come to be viewed as a gift.

When Tolkien’s elves die, they don’t really die. They go to the Halls of Mandos, in the Undying Land, from whence after a time they are given new bodies and reincarnated in the world. The lives of the elves are bound up with the life of Arda (the world), and when it comes to an end—and they know it is going to come to an end—they don’t know what will happen to them. From that point of view, the nature of man to “seek beyond the world,” and to not be bound within its circles after their death, might truly be viewed as a gift.

But if you aren’t entirely satisfied with that answer, you aren’t alone. Almost nobody in Tolkien’s fiction ever is. One of the most remarkable examples of this is in a short story memorably called the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. Athrabeth means “debate,” and The Athrabeth is a debate between Finrod Felagund, an elven-king (who features prominently in The Silmarillion) and Andreth, a mortal woman who is counted among the Wise of her people. It’s a deeply beautiful, sad, and hopeful story, and it is typical of the sort of metaphysical and theological bent that Tolkien’s writing took towards the end of his life. I can’t summarize it all here, but it begins with Andreth’s bitterness over her love for Finrod’s brother Aegenor, whom she loves, and with whom she cannot be because he is immortal and she is not, and he is soon to die in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (which he has foreseen).

As far as Andreth is concerned, the Shadow of Morgoth and the fear of death are one and the same. The Wise among men do not believe that men were made to die, she explains, the elves have heard wrong. She believes they were made to be always undying as the elves are, but that something has gone wrong and death has been imposed upon them. It was this Shadow in the East that the Three Houses of Men were fleeing when they first came to Beleriand (the westernmost lands of Middle-earth, where most of the action of The Silmarillion is set). The clear implication is that the Wise have retained a cultural memory of Eden.

[It may bear explaining at this point that Tolkien always envisioned his Legendarium as a sort of pre-historical mythology for Northern Europe, so it’s always meant to be set in the “real world.”]

The debate goes back and forth. Finrod assumes death is a normal part of human existence. Andreth believes it’s an aberration of nature. Elves are intended for Arda (the physical world); now that it is marred, they wear out faster than they should. Humans are intended for life beyond Arda in some kind of eternal state. Untainted “death” (leaving the circles of the world) would be a good end, says Finrod. Death has been imposed upon humans as a punishment, says Andreth, and is therefore not good. Are our bodies part of the problem, wonders Finrod? No says Andreth, the body is intended for its dweller, it is a part of the dweller, and not to be despised. If that’s the case, why do bodies (human or elvish) wear out? Finrod ultimately suggests that perhaps the purpose of humanity, before their fall, was to uplift the whole world beyond its time-bound existence and so fulfill its eschatological purpose. That’s the context for the remarkable exchange that follows:

‘Alas, lord!’ she said. ‘What then is to be done now? For we speak as these things are, or as if they will assuredly be. But Men have been diminished and their power is taken away. We look for no Arda Remade: darkness lies before us, into which we stare in vain. If by our aid your everlasting mansions were to be prepared, they will not be builded now.’
‘Have ye then no hope?’ said Finrod.
‘What is hope?’ she said. ‘An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none.’
‘That is one thing that Men call “hope,’ said Finrod. ‘Amdir we call it, “looking up.” But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is “trust”. It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of his own, not by any Enemy…”

In this, Finrod could be anticipating St Athanasius. Andreth is not convinced, though she admits that there are those among men of the “Old Hope” who believe that not “the might of Men, or of any of the peoples of Arda” will be their salvation. But rather,

‘They say,’ answered Andreth: ‘they say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end. This they say also, or they feign, is a rumour that has come down through the years uncounted, even from the days of our undoing.’
…
‘…the saying of Hope passes my understanding. How could Eru enter into the thing that He has made, and than which He is beyond measure greater? Can the singer enter into his tale or the designer into his picture?’

I will leave the end of the story for you to go and read. It is a story of sorrow and healing, and here I have only told a small part. In the Athrabeth, then, Tolkien tries to wrestle with what is, what was, what might have been, and ultimately with what will be again through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Matter is not evil, it was made to be brought up into the divine, not to be obliterated. Through the Incarnation, man is restored to his place as the priest of creation, offering up in thanksgiving what God has made. In the Divine economy of Tolkien’s Legendarium, even the elves are waiting on Christ.

Let’s return to our working definition of Recovery one last time: An Incarnate Mind, working with the materials of Primary Reality, creates a work of Fantasy, by which Primary reality is restored to is proper place. Tolkien saw our role in creation as exactly this, but in order to accomplish it, the Mind of God had to become Incarnate, working with the materials of material reality, and make myth become fact, so that all creation could be restored to its proper place in the Divine Order.

This, I would argue, is the theology which underwrites all of Tolkien’s mythopoeia. It is the premise for all of his own subcreative acts, and it is the idea he is constantly working out through the Valar, the Elves, and the men of his mythology. It is the basis of the Hope for which he struggled through the senseless destruction of the West and the collapse of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, and it is the basis of the Hope which gave meaning to the languages and poems, the hobbits and elves, the wars and woes of Middle-earth.

The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.

Tolkien worked. He suffered. He died. But he thought he could see that all of these things had a purpose which was not just “useful.” It was salvific.

In my next post, I will look at some of Tolkien's more explicit statements about his own sacramental theology, and offer a few concluding thoughts before moving on to my next case study.

Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemann

Current audio book: The Brothers Karamazov

Currently translating: The Aeneid, Virgil

II. Can the Singer Enter the Tale? Tolkien and the Sacraments, Part 1

In this series of posts, I am working towards trying to articulate what might be called a "language of beauty." In the previous post I laid out a core thesis which might be expressed as follows: The classical Christian approach to art, poetics, and wonder must be understood in light of the Incarnation. The great Christian artists have possessed something I have called the "sacramental imagination" that was born out of the basic confidence that the world (created or sub-created) could be a real means of communion with God. In other words, if there is a Christian "language" of beauty, the sacraments are its grammar.

Over the course of the next few posts I want to explore how this works itself out in art--both in the liturgical arts, but also in poetry and storytelling. The next two or three posts will be dedicated to examining the sacramental imagination in the works of the 20th century Christian sub-creator par excellence, J.R.R. Tolkien.

The following thoughts on Tolkien were first developed in a talk I gave at the Eighth Day Institute in October of 2018. This is the first time they have appeared in Print, digital or otherwise.

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I want to begin with a quote from Tolkien’s famous (and famously difficult) essay On Fairy Stories. This essay is usually the first stop along the way for any Tolkien fan who wants to read beyond the Finarfins and Fingolfins and Finrods and Finduilas’s of The Silmarillion and tries to understand just how Tolkien’s art succeeded so supremely where the vast majority of his many imitators have failed. It’s one of the three primary attempts Tolkien makes to work out his philosophy and theology of “sub-creation,” the idea that as humans made in the Image of God, who is first a Creator, to make things—and most of all to make stories—is not just our God-given prerogative, it is our God-given right. This essay is not about On Fairy Stories per se, but since I’ll be referencing the essay a few times it might help to give a very high-level overview.

The essay is divided into three basic parts: The first part tries to answer what a “fairy story” is and why people have made them for longer than we have recorded history. This is the hardest part of the essay, mainly because in it Tolkien makes many oblique references to a variety of mythographical theories which were then in circulation. These references can be difficult to track.

The second part of the essay tries to argue for why making fairy-stories is both necessary and “useful.” Tolkien identifies three main things which fairy-stories can accomplish better than other kinds of stories: Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. By Escape, Tolkien means the escape of the prisoner from his cell, not the escape of the deserter from the front lines. Real Escape allows us to confront evil in the world rather than be imprisoned by it. By Recovery, Tolkien means “regaining a clear view” of reality, something we’ll come back to more in a moment. By Consolation, Tolkien has in mind the all-important idea of Eucatastrophe, the sudden breaking-in of Grace or Joy into an otherwise hopeless situation, which culminates in the “happy ending.”

The third part of the essay is neglected in every academic presentation I have ever heard given on On Fairy Stories. It’s the Epilogue, in which Tolkien explicitly ties these ideas to the Christian experience of “True Myth” through the Incarnation and the Resurrection, by which means the human vocation of storytelling is given not just a “Christened,” but a salvific role. That’s where I’d like to end this series of reflections. But to get there we’ll have to go the only way we could possibly go with Tolkien: the long way.

I. RECOVERY AND THE INCARNATE MIND

The quote with which I want to begin is usually cited as, “the mind, the tongue, and the tale are coeval” has been popularized within Tolkien studies by Verlyn Flieger’s “bumper-sticker” formulation found in an earlier draft of the essay: “mythology is language, language is mythology.” What both quotes mean to say is simply this: literature and language cannot, should not be divorced. If we don’t understand the words people use to make stories, we won’t be able to come to an understanding of the stories themselves even if we study them in translation. That’s an audacious claim (though one I agree with) but it isn’t what I want to focus on. Instead, I’d like to point out that the quotation is usually misquoted. In fact, in context it reads like this:

The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent.

According to Tolkien, stories aren’t created apart from language. But they’re also not created apart from matter. According to Tolkien, the “incarnate” mind is the mind that produces language and story. It is only a mind incarnate in matter which can see green-grass for being green as well as being grass, only a mind bound to a world which has the faculty to imagine other worlds. It is difficult to avoid hearing in this echoes of the Gospel of St John: Christ the Word, Christ the Logos—by whom all things are made and upheld—became incarnate to dwell among us. God, who exists always and forever outside of time, actively participates in His own creation.

The Incarnation underwrites all of Tolkien’s sub-creative activities. Tolkien’s thesis about sub-creation is best summed up in a single line from Mythopoeia, a poem which states clearly in verse what is sometimes buried in Tolkien’s prose: “We still make by the law in which we’re made.” In other words, we are incarnate minds made in the image of a Mind who became incarnate. We are sub-creators made in the image of a Creator. God can make something out of nothing, and as His image-bearers we rightly make something out of something. Our sub-creation must use the tools of reality: green grass, cold iron, bread and wine.

In fact, Tolkien would argue, doing so is the only way to reclaim and redeem reality. In the second half of On Fairy Stories, he suggests that there are three things which imaginative literature accomplishes: Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. By Escape, Tolkien means not the escape of the deserter from the front lines, but rather that of the prisoner from his cell. By Consolation, Tolkien means the absolutely crucial idea of Eucatastrophe, the sudden breaking in of grace, the happy ending. These two ideas, and especially the latter, are so important that I think Recovery is often overlooked. Here’s what Tolkien says about it:

Recovery… is a re-gaining… of a clear view… I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves… Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory… It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.

Like any child I climbed trees; in my teens I occasionally worked at a horse camp during the summers; but I did not really see trees until I met Treebeard. I did not really see horses until I met Fledge the Flying Horse, and Bree the Talking Horse, and Jewel the Unicorn. It was the bread and wine at Coriakin’s table that was my first glimpse of the truth of the Christian sacrament. That is what Fantasy does for us. That is what sub-creation does for us, as both writers and readers. It takes the familiar things which we think we know, we think we possesses, and so we have “written off,” and it sets them free.

We could formulate Tolkien’s idea of Recovery this way: An Incarnate Mind, working with the materials of Primary Reality, creates a work of Fantasy, by which Primary reality is restored to is proper place. Tolkien’s classic example of this is the idea of the “Green Sun,” an image he returns to again and again throughout his essays. The basic idea is this: if you could imagine a world with a green sun, and then work out all of the possible implications of a sun where the world is green, you’d have recovered something about the sun and something about greenness which you would have otherwise taken for granted.

Perhaps we can think of other examples from our own experience and reading: It’s Aslan, awakening the trees to dance. It’s the song of the elves when they first wandered in the starlight of the primeval world, teaching the trees and rocks and pools and valleys to speak and to sing.

II. THE LANGUAGE OF CHANGE

Following the elves is always a good strategy when you are trying to understand Tolkien, and particularly when you are trying to grasp his philosophy of sub-creation. For although he is often meandering and obtuse as an essayist, he is a master myth-maker, and nowhere is he more at home than when he tells stories about the sub-creators of Middle-earth. There are the Valar, of course, and there are the sub-creative activities of humans in his mythology (which we shall come to in a moment), but it’s in the activities of the elves, the Incarnate Minds to whom the greatest artistic gifts have been given of all the children of Eru, that we see his ideas most clearly.

One of the real problems for Tolkien—which would probably not have occurred to a less detail-oriented person—was Elvish linguistic development. Human linguistic change happens for lots of reasons—we hear things imperfectly, we remember things imperfectly, we repeat things imperfectly. Over time these changes lead, by small developments to their own idiolects, then dialects, then languages, then language families. Tracing these developments by regular and irregular sound shifts—particularly within the Germanic and to a lesser extent the Celtic language of families—was part Tolkien’s day-job as a Germanic Philologist. And Tolkien enjoyed using that same skillset to create not merely dialogue for a few TV episodes, but entire families of languages for which he could demonstrate the “family-tree” of regular sound shifts which resulted in a single proto-language becoming the Quenya and Sindarin (or Noldorin) languages which we readers encounter in The Lord of the Rings.

[He was actually much more interested in this sort of development than he ever was in publishing a dictionary of conversational Elvish, which is why you can’t really pull together dialogue in Elvish for a film without mashing up vocabulary and grammar from several different stages of his linguistic development. But I digress.]

The problem with all of this is that Tolkien established that elves don’t have the same reasons for language change that humans do. For one thing, Elves have perfect recall, or at least something approximating to it in human terms. When Legolas stops midway through the Lay of Nimrodel, he is lying, or at least not telling the whole truth when he says he does not remember the rest (actually, Elves don’t even experience time the same way we do, but that’s another essay). Why then does Elvish language change? The answer seems to be that the Elves need to change their words the same reason you and I need to make new words and languages and stories: to recover enchantment.

Tolkien explores this idea in the Dangweth Pengoloð, a short story he wrote in the early 1950s. In it, Pengolod—an elven philologist and author in the Dangweth's narrative frame—answers this question in a way which sheds important light not only on why Elvish languages change, but on Tolkien’s thoughts about language change in general:

Weak indeed may be the memories of Men, but I say to you, Ælfwine, that even were your memory of your own being as clear as that of the wisest of the Eldar... your speech would change.... For Men change both their old words for new...and this change comes above all from the very changefullness of Eä; or if you will, from the nature of speech, which is fully living only when it is born, but when the union of the thought and the sound is fallen into old custom, and the two are no longer perceived apart, then already the word is dying and joyless...and the thought eager for some new-patterned raiment of sound. (PME 397)

According to Pengolod, the motivation for creating new words is the same for both races: when the union of sound and sense falls into “old custom,” the word and sound are no longer perceived as separate things. The word becomes “dying and joyless,” and a new sound is needed. The primary difference between human and elven language change lies in the latter’s skill. The elves consciously change whole sound patterns instead of individual words, in a manner reminiscent of how Christopher Tolkien described his father’s language invention process. (LR 378-9)

So the “tongues of the Quendi [the elves] change in a manner like to the changes of mortal tongues” albeit more artfully and deliberately. (PME 398, 400) This is in fact an echo of an idea Tolkien developed much earlier in his Secret Vice lecture and essay, which is the clearest he ever states his philosophy of language development. It is the first appearance of the “green sun” motif we mentioned earlier. In this essay, Tolkien develops what one scholar has called his “linguistic heresies,” two of which are: that human language change is often deliberate, not accidental, and that we do it for a specific reason (even if that reason is not always known to us):

And with the phonetic pleasure we have blended the more elusive delight of establishing novel relations between symbol and significance, and in contemplating them... as soon as you have fixed even a vague general sense for your words, many of the less subtle but most moving and permanently important of the strokes of poetry are open to you. For you are the heir of the ages. You have not to grope after the dazzling brilliance of invention of the free adjective, to which all human language has not fully attained. You may say green sun or dead life and set the imagination leaping. 

Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it. Who shall say whether the free adjective has created images bizarre and beautiful, or the adjective been freed by strange and beautiful pictures in the mind? (Monsters and the Critics 218-19)

Earlier, we defined Tolkien’s idea of Recovery as An Incarnate Mind, working with the materials of Primary Reality, creates a work of Fantasy, by which Primary reality is restored to is proper place. I would argue that if Tolkien’s philosophy of language invention is the purest development of this idea, his actual glossopoeic activities are among its most successful applications. I can still remember as a young boy, thrilling at the sound of the name “Gondolin” and the teasing references to the Elven wars of old, long before I knew that Gondolin was a “real” place (go on, tell me it isn’t!) with a history which predated The Hobbit not just in the fiction, but in the real world. Tolkien’s kings and wars and swords and lineages and names and languages “baptized” my imagination in a way that has always made me love the real world—with its histories and kings and wars and lineages and names and languages—much more than I would have otherwise. And the cosmic struggle, the frequent losses, the heartache and pain which evil causes in Middle-earth has helped me to understand the sin which is at the root of all of our pain and suffering in this World Under the Sun.

In my next post, I'll continue my examination of how Tolkien's sacramental imagination works itself out, this time specifically in his treatment within the legendarium of the problem of pain.

Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemann

Current audio book: The Brothers Karamazov

Currently translating: The Aeneid, Virgil

Towards a Language of Beauty: I. Beauty and the Incarnation

"Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men... for we cannot forget that beauty."
- The Primary Chronicle, account of the conversion of the Kievan Rus

I. THE WAY OF WONDER

It is the classical Christian conviction that all of history, time, creation, and meaning begin and end--and "live, and move, and have their being" in the Logos of God, who is the second person of the Holy Trinity, and for our sake was "incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man." It is for this reason that, for most of church history, one of the primary objects of Christian art--one might say the favorite meditation on beauty--is that of the Christ child seated on the lap of the Virgin.

Madonna and Child, Catacombs, c. AD 150

The Adoration of the Magi, detail from sarcophagus, c. AD 200

Theotokos Hodegetria "She who shows the way", Hagia Sophia, c. 9th Century

In the typical image, the Christ child--who appears in Eastern iconography not as a normal baby, but with an enlarged forehead to show him as the Word and Wisdom of the Father--sits enthroned upon the lap of the Virgin Mary, she (the source of his humanity) framing him, directing our eye toward him, "showing us the way" to worship him.

It must be stressed first and foremost that such images are icons of the Incarnation. Christians do not believe that God became every man, or just any man, but a particular man who like all particular men had a particular mother. And it was only in that particularity that the real universality of the Gospel was achieved. The fact that attempts have been made--and indeed are still being made--to erase the mother from the image entirely perhaps says something about our inability to come to terms with this particularity, and with our confused and damaged sense of individualism in which we seek to know each piece of the mosaic apart from all the others. But we do not know Christ apart from his full humanity, and that humanity is not an abstract idea. It is a person.

The hymnography of the Church has never tired of meditating on this image, poetically understanding Christ as the same God whom Ezekiel saw enthroned in glory upon the cherubim:

I behold a strange and wonderful mystery:
The cave a heaven, the Virgin a cherubic throne,
And the manger a noble place in which hath lain Christ
The uncontained God.
Let us therefore praise and magnify him.
- Katabasiae of the Nativity

This paradox--what Tolkien described as the "singer entering into the tale"--is the whole basis of the classical Christian understanding of beauty and wonder. It is the source of the absolute Christian confidence that finite creation can be the means of knowing an infinite God. Thus, by extension, bread and wine, water and oil are not merely things, nor are they some kind of an audio-visual aid to our teaching, but rather the real means of real participation and communion with one who is unknowable, and yet makes Himself known.

II. "WHY PROTESTANTS CAN'T WRITE"

I have begun with the Incarnation and the Sacraments due in part to a set of articles by Peter Leithart, published in First Things back in 2016. The provocative title of the article series was, “Why Protestants Can’t Write.” You could sum up Letihart’s argument in his very first sentence: “Blame it on Marburg.” For those who don’t know, the 1529 Marburg Colloquy was the first major “church split” of the Magisterial Reformation, between the German Martin Luther—and his followers—and the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli and his followers. The dispute was over the Eucharist: Luther held with a fifteen centuries-old reading of the New Testament and argued that that Eucharist was really the body and blood of Christ, although rejecting explanation of Transubstantiation.

To Zwingli, on the other hand, “myth or ritual… was no longer literally and symbolically real and true.” The traditional understanding of the Eucharist was, in other words, superstitious nonsense. And the vast majority of Protestantism followed Zwingli’s view that “literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods.”

That brings us to Leithart’s thesis, which he offers “in a fit of gleeful reductionism”:

“Modern Protestants can’t write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism.”

And, if my own story is anything to judge by, any Protestant writer who can survive the immediate spike in his blood-pressure long enough to read Leithart’s argument to the end will see that he has a point. But the problem goes back much farther than Marburg. Anti-sacramentalism is really part of a distinctively Gnostic way of viewing our relationship with the God who is Truth.

This is probably easiest to illustrate when we consider the differences in corporate worship between the average evangelical service and the churches of catholic tradition: The focus of evangelical protestant worship is the sermon, because God can only be apprehended mentally. Terry Johnson, a contemporary Reformed theologian, puts it this way:

“the worship of Reformed Protestantism is simple. We merely read, preach, pray, sing and see the Word of God… True faith comes through the word (Rom. 10:17). True worship then must be primarily (though not absolutely) non-material, non-sensual, and non-symbolic.” (Johnson, Reformed Worship, pp. 38 & 47.)

At more than one point in Protestant history, this tendency has extended towards docetist beliefs about the Incarnation itself; Puritan catechist, iconoclast, and Bishop of the Church of England Gervase Babington made it very clear that the Incarnation was at best a temporary occurrence:

Where the scripture spoke of Christ having parts such as feet, hands and face, these were merely temporary forms in which he appeared to men and in which ‘he lay hid even when he was seen’…

By contrast, the focus of Christian worship everywhere before the Reformation (and still in the
churches of more orthodox Christology) was and is the sacrament: meeting God and communing with him with our whole being, our bodies as well as our minds. In this sense Christ is truly the mediator--he "mediates" the experience of the Holy Trinity and the experience of humanity, enabling real participation, right now and in the flesh, with the Life which is the source of all life.

III. THE SACRAMENTAL IMAGINATION

So how does this affect our understanding of beauty? For the Puritan, the Incarnation was a hat-trick that God pulled off at one point in time—Christ folding himself down into physical space for a little while, or only "seemed" to be human, so that he could pay for the wrath of the Father on our behalf. Beyond this, it does not have any kind of ongoing implications. We therefore meet with truth by learning about and then agreeing to true things.

At its worst, this line of thinking leads to some of the ugliest examples of iconoclasm as illustrated by Cromwell and his Roundheads. At best, art produced by this mindset will tend towards moralism and sermonizing. Its most successful contemporary expression is probably the half-dozen or so films by the Kendrick brothers. It has been said that the Kendrick brothers themselves do not consider what they are doing to be art: they are preaching through the medium of film.

For the classical Christian, the Incarnation makes possible the heavenly liturgy and the perfect sacrifice offered once and for all “at the end of the ages.” Because it is eternal, it is ongoing, and therefore it continues to have ongoing implications. It is the catching up of the physical into the spiritual, the earthly into the heavenly, so that there is a real man with a real body offering a real sacrifice really seated at the right hand of the Father. All of physical creation, therefore, but especially human activity, is potentially salvific if it participates in the work of Christ. That is why theologians such as Alexander Schmemman have characterized the Church not as an institution with sacraments, but as the sacrament itself, one with the institutions and rites necessary for taking everything human and earthly and bringing it up into the life of the Holy Trinity.

This understanding of the Incarnation was used by St. John of Damascus in a series of three treatises he wrote defending the use of sacred art (which included not only icons, but vestments, crosses, and beautiful church buildings) in Christian worship. Writing against the iconoclast heresy of the 8th Century, St. John eerily anticipated Evangelical worship in America today:

If you say that God ought only to be apprehended spiritually, then take away everything bodily, the lights, the fragrant incense, even vocal prayer, the divine mysteries themselves that are celebrated with matter, the bread, the wine, the oil of chrismation, the form of the cross.

The Incarnation, St. John argues, has confirmed the use of holy things in worship—something prefigured by the tabernacle, cherubic images, the ark, the rod of Aaron, the tablets of stone, the manna and the shewbread of the Old Covenant, but brought to its fullness in Christ. Perhaps the words of Holy Scripture itself are most revealing: in the Bible, the Word of God is a person, not a book; the New Covenant is bread and wine, body and blood, not a contract or an agreement. We apprehend the Truth with our whole being, not just our intellect.

To put it another way, in her article on the sacramental imagination in the writings of George
MacDonald, Heather Ward argues that “we can regard Christian fantasy-writing as the outcome of an imagination that works in sacramental terms, seeing the material world as participant in, and mediator of, the divine.”

This view of the Incarnation has, to one degree or another, underpinned the greatest monuments of Christian art, both in literature and in the fine arts. It produced Mozart and Bach, Rubilev and Da Vinci, Notre-Dame de Paris and St. Basil’s Cathedral. It gave us Dostoyevsky and Dante. And, I would argue, it gave us Tolkien and Lewis, though they articulated and implemented it to different degrees and in different ways. In the next post in this series, I will begin an examination of the sacramental imagination in Tolkien's legendarium.


Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemann
Current audio book: The Brothers Karamazov
Currently translating: The Aeneid, Virgil