Tea at Trianon: Tom Bombadil in Narnia

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

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Tom Bombadil in Narnia

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Tom, Prof. Wiley explains, is the master of the forest, but he does not own it. He holds dominion over the trees and rivers and woodland creatures, but he does not dominate them. While Saruman uses nature, manipulating and exploiting it to secure his power, Bombadil knows and loves and communes with it. Tom, like Gandalf, is a steward; Saruman, like Sauron, is a possessor.

In that sense, Saruman is like “the modern world [whose] quest for knowledge is premised on the belief that the natural world is nothing more than a vast machine. Since it is merely a machine, learning how it works entails disassembly, breaking things down into their constituent parts.” Bombadil, in sharp contrast, will not so reduce the natural world that it becomes merely the sum of its parts.

Lewis shared Bombadil’s, and Tolkien’s, holistic vision of creation and of the rational creatures who live upon and within it. In chapter 14 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a product of modern empiricism, materialism, and logical positivism, learns that the magician Ramandu is a star, he falls back into the same kind of reductive thinking that corrupts Saruman. “In our world,” he exclaims, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

Ramandu’s reply is one that our age, blind as it is to transcendent truths and metaphysical realities, needs to hear: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” Once a civilization objectifies nature, robbing her of her mystery, wonder, and integrity, it is only a matter of time before it does the same to man. True conservatism must ever resist the commodification of God’s creation and the dehumanization of God’s image-bearing creatures. When virtue-based wisdom that seeks to unite and edify morphs into power-based knowledge that seeks to dissect and deconstruct, the industrial appropriation of nature and the social engineering of man is at hand.

Come, Master Bombadil, and teach us again how to be rulers and not conditioners. (Read more.)