Tea at Trianon: Tolkien the Realist

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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.)