Monday, October 26, 2020

Tolkien the Realist

 From the Eighth Day Institute:

Whereas Lewis acknowledges in Surprised by Joy that he was deeply influenced by neo-Platonism, Tolkien absorbed, as by osmosis, the Thomistic realism that hung in the very air of the Birmingham Oratory (founded by John Henry Cardinal Newman). Here Tolkien gained his early religious instruction. Here too, he and his brother Hillary served as altar boys. Both were raised there after his mother’s death. Mabel Tolkien, who died when Tolkien was eleven, appointed Father Morgan from the Oratory as the boys’ legal guardian. The Oratory was his philosophical and spiritual home.

When Pius XII, in his 1950 Humani Generis, declared Thomism the Church’s official philosophy, it was less an imposition than an acknowledgment of the status quo. The catechisms of that day and the preaching (think of Fulton Sheen) reflected how deeply ingrained Thomism was in the intellectual formation of the pre-Vatican II Church.

Romanticism does not come easily to someone formed in philosophical realism.

Tolkien’s fiction certainly constitutes a work of great imagination. But that does not make his work Romantic. All fiction is created from the imagination, including the greatest works of the Realists. Tolkien does not move us by heaping up emotive words or florid imagery. He lets the story itself move us. (Read more.)
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