Category Archives: Literature

Relativism Reloaded

(No, this post is not about the Matrix.)

Recently, Joshua Gibbs of The Cedar Room wrote this thoughtful piece, “Skip the Introduction: It Does Not Matter Where the Author Is Coming From.” You should read it for yourself, of course, but in the interest of time, I’ll summarize it this way.

At some point in the comparatively recent past, those who publish classic books decided that readers were too ignorant to be able to simply read the books and understand them well enough to profit from them, so moving forward most editions of the classics would now feature very long, very intricate Introductions (sometimes 50 pages or more) written by Academically Recognized Scholars In the Field of The Particular Old Author. What has come of this interjection of introductory material, Gibbs says, is this:

Nine times out of ten, knowing “where the author is coming from” is simply leverage for dismissing all the stickiest, most confrontational claims the author makes. “Where the author is coming from” means that none of his claims about truth is objective or transcendent but materially connected with his experience. All of his assertions and claims invariably arise from demographics. The introduction offers information on the author’s race, income, upbringing, religion, thus readers can tie whatever they don’t like in the book to something external to it.

This paragraph struck me hard in light of much personal experience of my own as a teacher of classical books. Perhaps it’s only because every version of a classical book I have been handed to teach has contained one of those Necessary Introductions.

Perhaps it’s because I tend to be more of a Big Picture thinker myself and tend to find all the connections and cross-connections and historical minutiae of author’s lives and circumstances terribly interesting.

Perhaps, shamefully, I may have always been worried that without a lot of introduction first, I might run out of things to say when faced with a room full of young minds that too often are disinterested in the book or else pretty literally have no idea what to say or ask about it.

Whatever the case, I myself have tended as a classical teacher to rely a great deal on prefacing the reading and discussion of books. It’s always made me uneasy, especially given that too many times I’ve engaged in such pedantry, most students have rapidly done the very thing I did not want them to – lose interest, check out, and so, miss out.

It’s made me uneasy for another reason, though, and I didn’t put my finger on it until I read Gibbs’ essay and had a sudden flash of insight connecting his words with a particularly noxious sort of criticism I’ve frequently received from other classical educators: the criticism that, “Come on, man, you can’t really think this Book from a Very Long Time Ago and Another Very Different Culture is actually saying something objectively true that requires us to take action? I mean, can you?”

I think the first inkling I got of this sort of criticism was my first year teaching in a classical school, when I was happily chattering away about how dangerous classical books can be to young minds because, well, they teach those minds how to ask different questions than they might otherwise ask, and the admin staff to whom I was chatting seemed to just nod perfunctorily and dismiss the whole topic.

I got another dose of it a few years later when substitute teaching for a high school class reading Augustine’s City of God. I was attempting to walk the students through Augustine’s very sophisticated understanding of the relationship of faith and politics when a culture is openly Christian. My intention was to use Augustine’s principles to talk about our own culture, which is, of course, not openly Christian, yet containing many Christians who either believe that it is or else want to work hard to make it so. What could be better than letting Augustine help us talk about our own problems, I thought.

Alas, I suddenly realized that the sons of the Board President, all staunch Christianity=Republican Politics types, were staring at me as if I’d grown a third eye in the middle of my head. What could Mr. Enloe possibly be suggesting here?, was the look they were giving me, That we should subject our family’s precious political beliefs to criteria found in a 1,500 year old book that wasn’t even written in English, let alone by Conservative Protestants who live in constant mortal fear that the Libs are going to take over and make us all Socialists?

(Of course, as high school students they didn’t say any of that, and likely couldn’t have articulated it that way, anyway. But the whole cultural environment of that school was such that I am virtually certain some such horror as I’ve described was in their minds, however inchoately. No! Augustine is just a book we’re reading around this Harkness table so we can check off the Unit in our textbook, get our grades for quizzes and an essay, and move on to the next book. Certainly we’re not supposed to actually take this book seriously as maybe offering correctives to our own views!

Flash forward a few more years. (Yes, I’m being anecdotal, and most people, it seems, figure that just saying “That’s anecdotal” deprives a statement of any meaning outside the person’s own head. Ah well. Relativism wears all kinds of strange disguises these days, even disguises that appeal to the hallowed category of “logical fallacy.”) I was in one of those usually ultimately fruitless internet debates over some political topic, trying to bring to bear on the issues various concepts drawn from ancient authors such as Aristotle, Plato, and Plutarch. Somewhat naively, as it turns out, I figured that all this would advance the discussion, especially since several involved were also classical educators. For what else ought one to do when speaking with classical educators about some contemporary topic than say, “Hey, let’s find out what the classical tradition thinks about this.”?

The sharpest criticism I received – again, from a classical educator – was most instructive. It amounted to this (not a direct quote): “Wait – you do understand, right, that historical literature is essentially just a witness to what conditions were like at certain times in the past? You’re not really saying, right, that something Aristotle or Plutarch said could be true for everyone, everywhere, at all times? You know, don’t you, that we Moderns have managed to correct the errors of the past, which is why we ought to just trust ourselves rather than let the ancients cross-examine us.”

I could probably dredge up more such instances, but the point should be clear. Gibbs, though highlighting the specific phenomenon of supposedly necessary introductory work prior to reading a Great Book, is right: all of this is just a convenient, painless way to dismiss the book and so deprive ourselves of the philosophical, though painful, benefit of being forced to justify, rather than simply assume, what seems obvious to ourselves.

Once you see the “contextualizing” interpretive tactic this way, it’s almost impossible not to see it as just another mode of relativism. You know, that bogeyman we were all warned about in the 80s and 90s by hordes of Christian apologists and popular authors who all wanted to make sure that we Evangelicals never fell into the modern quandaries of having No Place for Truth ((I refer here to an important 1993 book of that title by David Wells on the collapse of theology as a truth-seeking discipline.)) and so having nothing to say to the world but “True for You, but Not For Me” (I refer here to a 2009 book of that title by Paul Copan.))

We should stop and take a long moment to think. What is going on if we, as classical educators find it uncomfortable to treat the material of our tradition – which, by the way, we teach to young people, running the risk, as all teachers of any metaphysical or moral topic do, of endangering their souls – as conveying significant truth?

No doubt we don’t wish to impersonate the Sophists, those yapping relativistic hounds who chased Socrates around, by in effect teaching kids only how to make their own ideas sound better than those of someone else – to win a battle rather than find the truth.

For anyone who hasn’t had enough time with the Sophists to really get what they were about, understand that they posited a sharp distinction between Nature and Convention, a distinction within which the former was objective and concerned only with effectual power relationships while the latter was purely subjective and concerned only with ineffectual moral posturing.

The Sophists were the ones who took their own personal views for granted as being superior, more enlightened, more rational, than those of others. The Sophists were the ones who started from the true and obvious empirical point that the laws of different cities differed (so the laws of one city could not and did not apply within another) and expanded that point into the metaphysical-epistemological dogma that no standard not originating from one’s own conformity to Nature’s power-seeking impulse could ever make any action tied to a particular city’s situation true. “Oh, that’s just how they do it in Sparta – doesn’t mean anything for us.”

Does this sound familiar yet? For what is this so-called classical education business of forewarning the students about what a book really means before we’ve even read it with them? “Everyone should understand that every claim this book makes is relative to its own time and place, and so by the time we’re done we should all still be precisely where we were intellectually and spiritually when we picked it up.”

Isn’t this just another, newer face of Sophistry?

There is, of course, a proper rejoinder to how I said that, and it consists of engaging – really engaging! – the Nature / Convention distinction, not just as the Sophists presented it, but as the Philosophers (=the not-Sophists) did. For there is something true about the distinction, namely, that as Cicero would put it centuries later, although there are different Conventions, culturally-bound laws, for different cities at different times, there is above all the cultures an objective Natural Law that judges them all and ensures the cause of justice won’t be lost in the competing cross-chatter.

On this basis, it would be possibly fine to pick up an old book, and, after reading it very carefully and slowly ((Maybe more than once – anathema, alas, to bureaucratic scope-and-sequence documents and the impatient American idea of “progress”)) make substantial arguments that this or that part of it (1) is wrong, or else (2) doesn’t apply to us, or else (3) doesn’t apply to us in precisely the same way as it applied to them.

These are all respectable dialogical options when critically engaging an old text we’ve read. Why, then, would anyone ever choose to simply dismiss the text by claiming, in however a sophisticated Introductory way, that “That was then; this is now.”?

Why not, as Gibbs cheerily recommends, just read the book and see what it does to us?

The answer is, of course, painfully obvious once we’ve thought through the issues: we can’t afford to do that with classical books because, as I was saying in my very first year of teaching in classical schools, it’s dangerous to treat them that way.

We might find out that some notion we privilege as obviously true is just the same sort of culturally relative hooey that all those 50-page Learned Introductions try to convince us of before we even read and engage with the book itself.

Tolkien’s Christian Detractors

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[NOTE: This short essay assumes as important context the several introductory articles for this section of the site, most especially The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects.]

In my experience as a long-time reader of Tolkien, objections to his work come in two basic varieties.

The “Bible Only” Objection

Usually attacks not just on Tolkien and his good friend C.S. Lewis, but on all fictional products, come from the quarters of “Bible Only” Christians, believers whose thoughts about everything are (they think) totally controlled by their personal mastery of a handful of “clear” Bible verses that interpreted in a “face value” manner unanswerably support whatever objection they feel led to come up with to anything fictional.

So mythology of any type is off-limits because it features “gods” but The Bible says that there’s only One God. Stories that use words like “witch” and “sorcery” are off limits because The Bible has many verses that condemningly use those words. Angelic-like characters purporting to be servants of the One True God but who don’t look and act exactly like the very few appearances of angels in The Bible must be avoided. For the really extreme advocates, just the very notion of any beings not mentioned in The Bible (Elves, Orcs, Hobbits, dwarves, aliens, etc.) might as well be blasphemy.

Another important angle for this type of critique is that it is almost always wedded to a militant variety of Young Earth Creationism which isn’t conceptually able to consider any other options for how God created the world and governs it. I make no assertions here about whether Young Earth Creationism is true or false, but one thing I have noticed is that as a literary interpretation it is almost always articulated in an extremely weak and question-begging manner.

Basically, as it is commonly articulated, YEC amounts to the sort of wooden interpretation that would require a consistent thinker to say that Jesus is a vine and is a door and is a shepherd, that God Himself is a bird having feathers (Ps. 95), and that Revelation 6:13 really does mean that physical stars will fall down from the sky and, presumably, totally burn up the earth. Thankfully this sort of believer really isn’t ever consistent – but contrary to his piety, that’s not a virtue.

These things said, I don’t wish to hang too much on the YEC angle. For it is possible, of course, to distinguish one’s well-grounded belief in Young Earth Creationism from a strictly literary appreciation for and advocacy of Tolkien. It is quite possible to hold YEC as being the hermeneutically proper (≠ “literal” as I’ve been using it), to not be wooden literalist, and to be a serious enthusiast of Tolkien and other imaginative works.

Nevertheless, the YEC angle remains important as a species of “Bible Only” critique because its highly restrictive understanding of chronology and history really do stand in serious contradiction to the eschatologically practical literary implications of Tolkien’s system of “Ages of the World.” (But this will have to be covered elsewhere.)

My conclusion is that the “Bible Only” criticism of Tolkien (and other such imaginative works) is an intellectual, literary, and spiritual dead end.

The “Light of Nature” Objection

Whatever else may need to be said about the “Bible Only” type of objection to Tolkien and similar works of Christian imagination, there exist an altogether different sort of Christian critique of such. This is a critique emanating not from the Bible, which theologians call special revelation because it was given specially to Israel and to the church in a special way. The new critique emanates rather from what theologians call general revelation because it was given to all human beings in general.

This newer critical claim, in short, is that imaginative writing of the type we see in Christians such as Tolkien and Lewis is, on the criteria of general revelation, blameworthy in most or all of the same ways that all Christians should blame merely pagan and idolatrous imaginations.

As I write this (Dec. 2021), I should acknowledge that I’ve only recently become aware of this mode of critique, so I am myself in the process of reading up on it and digesting it so as to more adequately respond. Consequently, I can here only give the barest of outlines of how I’ve thusfar seen it presented – and I have to restrict it to the single issue of Tolkien’s idea of subcreation. So here goes:

This newer critique, just as Scripture says the pagans ought to have known better because general revelation is clear, rendering them culpable before God, so too ought Christians like Tolkien and Lewis have known better, rendering them culpable before God for leading unbelievers and believers alike astray. In particular, the very idea of subcreation upon which the coherence and literary purposes and effects of these imaginative works totally depends, appears to have a few major problems.

One angle of the criticism is that subcreation is repugnant to reason. Since there is only one God, only one Creator, it must follow that any other acts by creatures of God can’t be called “creative.” Behind this objection there appears to be a (for lack of a better term) puristic definition of “Monotheism” such that the quality divinity can only be ascribed to the Self-Existent, Eternal, Immutable One from Whom all else derives its finite being.

Moreover, there are types of of Christian theology that are animated by a very jealous regard for the sole glory of God and so which see the notion of creatures “helping” God do creative works as a gross elevation of creatures at God’s expense.

Consequently, Tolkien comes under fire because his Silmarillion prominently features what seem to be angel-like beings whom God created and to whom he then sort of “farmed out” the duties of actually physically shaping and governing the created world. Critics of this literary representation sometimes seize upon phraes of Tolkien’s such as in the early sentences of the Valaquenta describing the Ainur, “The Great among these spirits the Elves name the Valar, the Powers of Arda, and Men have often called them gods.” (emphasis mine).

This whole conceptual apparatus seems to evoke Israel’s long history with chasing after idols instead of after God, and so not only the zeal of the Old Testament prophets against everything from Ba’al to Nehushtan may be called to witness against Tolkien’s stories of the Valar, but also the Apostle Paul’s charged polemic in Romans 1 and his less scathing, but still firm, rebuke of idolatry in Acts 17.

Yet, as I have tried to show near the end of my essay Genesis 1 Compared with the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, this mode of attack is hardly obvious, let alone inherently persuasive. A great deal of substantive argument has to be made in defense of all the items of this critique, and for many of us, at the last some critical pieces of it may be beyond our ability to prove or disprove apart from gaining expertise in the Hebrew language so as to thoroughly analyze its terms that get translated, as context seems to require, as “God” or “gods.” Again, a topic for much further elaboration elsewhere.

A second angle of the general revelation-based criticism – though it may be more of an addendum to or elaboration of the first rather than a distinct second point – is that subcreation is inconsistent with the main principles of Christian theology and philosophy. For there are no lack of historic, venerable Christian theologians whose writings may be marshalled in defense of what I earlier called the “purist” view of Monotheism, the necessity of stamping out idolatry, and the pious duty of defending the glory of God. Only rash enthusiasts of Tolkien would simply dismiss any such historic Christian witnesses, so these will have to be interacted with at appropriate points.

A third angle of the general revelation-based criticism as I’ve seen it articulated is that subcreation is almost certainly productive not of legitimate piety but of a corrosive downward slide into an entirely counterfeit mode of religion. What is to keep the Christian who, say, accepts as a legitimate theological and philosophical possibility the existence of angelic “subcreators” of the world from the sorts of dualistic or naturalistic falsehood found in pagan religions such as Zoroastrianism or the Babylonian Enuma Elish?

Essentially this assertion flows from the first two, for if the Valar are simply detractory of God’s sole glory as Creator and simply inconsistent with Christian theology and philosophy, it should follow that believers who enjoy and defend Tolkien’s work are skating on thin ice on a slippery slope to bowing to golden calves or of “offering strange fire” (improper, sinful modes of worship) before the Lord.

Admittedly, this sort of criticism ought not to be dismissed out of hand. For we have it as the ipsissima verba (“the very words of God”) that we are to have no other gods before Him, nor make any images of anything He has created so as to offer it worship. When it comes to idolatry, the human heart is, as the Reformer John Calvin said, “an idol factory.”

As I outlined in my opening essay The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects, there exists an enormous danger of ourselves as image-bearers of God possessing signficant (sub)creative powers of making verbal and conceptual images of an idolatrous nature. All I can say here is that Tolkien himself was quite aware of this problem, for in explaining his idea of subcreation he wrote, “Great harm can be done, of course, by this potent mode of ‘myth’—especially wilfully.The right to ‘freedom’ of the sub-creator is no guarantee among fallen men that it will not be used as wickedly as is Free Will.” (Letters, p. 194)

If Tolkien was aware of this danger, any Christian who highly values his work ought to be as well. I will close this essay with an appropriate quote from Tolkien which, to me, opens up important theological and conceptual “room to maneuver” for the imaginative Christian. Again speaking of the Valar as more or less a sort of subordinate type of “god,” he wrote:

“On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.” (Letters, p. 146)

Genesis 1 Compared with the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta

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As noted in the brief opening for this section of the page, Tolkien has many Christian detractors. These may be divided into two broad classes: those who object to his mythology on the basis of special revelation and those who object on the basis of general revelation. (Of course, the same objector may have objections in both categories of revelation.)

On this page I begin – but can by no means complete! – a textual analysis of what Scripture tells us about the creation of the world and what the Silmarillion tells us. Are the two sources contradictory? Does Tolkien use his important idea of subcreation in a way that violates either or both general and special revelation in his mythic account of the world’s creation? Is Tolkien presenting us with some sort of thinly “Christianized” variant of polytheism, an idolatrous system which we must reject in order to preserve the sole glory of God Himself?

I think not, and here is my first effort at showing why this is so. I invite the reader to carefully read, perhaps several times, these three passages placed in parallel:

Genesis 1	Ainulindalë	Valaquenta
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.	There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought,and they were with him before aught else was made. Then those of the Ainur who desired it arose and entered into the World at the beginning of Time; and it was their task to achieve it, and by their labours to fulfil the vision which they had seen. Long they laboured in the regions of Eä, which are vast beyond the thought of Elves and Men, until in the time appointed was made Arda, the Kingdom of Earth. Then they put on the raiment of Earth and descended into it, and dwelt therein.	In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him. In this Music the World was begun; for Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness. And many among them became enamoured of its beauty, and of its history which they saw beginning and unfolding as in a vision. Therefore Ilúvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it was called Eä.

Textual Comparison of Genesis 1:1-5 with The Silmarillion

Where to begin, since the three sources at first seem vastly divergent? Perhaps the best way to begin is to question that very premise – that the three sources are vastly divergent.

Over a number of years of working with Tolkien and observing Christian objections to his work I have noticed that many believers think inside a very “wooden” box-like concept of biblical inspiration.

That is, an extremely powerful but quite unliterary understanding of “the literal interpretation of the Bible” tends to control their thinking, especially about issues of creation. I make no apologies for saying up front that this variety of literalism must be understood as both a product of and a reaction to the prevailing intellectual winds of evolutionary theory that have for so long captured our general cultural mindset.

Now it may very well be that when all the necessary interpretive factors are well taken into account we will find that Genesis does in fact teache that the universe as we now observe it was created very recently, on the order of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. It may very well be that humankind is therefore a very young race, and that all the unpleasantness of whatever kind that we see about us through all of our recorded history are simply and finally the result of the Fall of man in the Garden. It may be very well be that the waters of the Flood covered every square inch of the planet. And so on.

Items like this are typically what the type of Christian I’m referring to here means when he speaks of “interpreting the Bible literally.” And it is usually in the grip of such thinking that objections to Tolkien’s creation account as found in The Silmarillion arise. For on the basis of such thinking, isn’t it just obvious that Tolkien’s writing contradicts the Bible?

Well, er, no, it’s not obvious. Or rather, it’s only obvious if this type of Christian is allowed to simply beg the question about what exactly”the literal interpretation of Scripture” consists. This is far too big an issue to diverge into in this essay, but I will note (with the caveat that much further explanation must be given) that the Bible, though coming to us from God and so constituting the only infallible rule of our faith and practice, essentially is a piece of literature written in human languages, and so the interpretive task must follow the established conventions of literary interpretation.

The Bible is indeed sui generis (it’s own unique thing) in terms of its origin, but it is not so in terms of how it is to be read. The Christian who has not had his mind significantly shaped in literary manner – including the serious study of history, at least one or two languages other than the English he reads the Bible in, and a wide variety of genres of literature – is just flat not in a position to lecture those who have had such formation as to what “literal interpretation” must mean.

But let me return to the parallel texts above. Are the creation accounts given in the second and third columns (The Silmarillion) contradictory to that given in the first (Genesis 1)?

No, because contradiction means “opposite” or “conflicting,” and disallowing that wonderfully begged question about so-called “literal interpretation” it’s going to turn out to be pretty difficult to prove Tolkien’s words have those two qualities as compared with Genesis. Let’s take just a few of the fronts of argument that must be worked through.

First, Genesis 1 states that in the beginning God “made the heavens and the earth” while The Silmarillion states that in the beginning God made some spiritual beings called the Ainur as “the offspring of his thought.” Now the hasty reader will jump to “Contradiction!” without realizing that if God made the heavens and the earth He certainly made the beings contained in it – and these Ainur are nothing more than a species of those created things. There is no contradiction here, though there is certainly a difference.

And herein we see one major way that the wooden literalism I noted above infects the interpretation of Scripture, particularly the first 11 chapters of Genesis. The so-called “literal” interpreter gratuitously assumes that if the Bible doesn’t say a thing exists or happened in very clear and exact words, well, that thing cannot be real or true. (A pastor’s wife I knew once claimed, on the grounds of such illogical, universal negative reasoning, that because the Bible never mentions the word “aliens” we can know that there is no such thing anywhere in God’s created universe.)

So the problem with asserting contradiction between Genesis and The Silmarillion appears right in the beginning of the compared accounts, and is rooted in nothing more than the assumption that “heavens and the earth” can’t be expanded, even if only as a literary device, and the expansion treated only in terms of mentioning a few items not mentioned by Scripture.

But this is just simplistic and flatly unreasonable, since “heavens and earth” are catch-all terms necessarily implying all the vast array of individual beings contained therein. The Bible never mentions hamburgers or art galleries or tyrannosauruses or laptop computers, either. Perhaps sentences in fictional works that speak of such things are therefore “contradictory” to Scripture?

Second, purely textually, Genesis 1:3 tells us that “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The hasty so-called biblical literalist again jumps to “Contradiction!”, for he has apparently not noticed that the Ainulindalë specifically states, “Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.” Whereas Genesis speaks in the third person singular of God Himself, “God separated the light from the darkness,” the Ainulindalë speaks in the third person plural from the point of view of God’s creatures, “and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.” Moreover, somewhat later than the part I cited above, Iluvatar tells the Ainur that He is going to make their song about the world a reality: “Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be!”

It would take a particularly obtuse reader – or at least one who has an agenda not related to what the text itself says – not to see the parallel ideas and language in the two accounts. “Let there be light!” / “Let these things Be!”, and so forth. The Ainulindalë does not here “contradict” Genesis 1 so much as it expresses the same truths about the all-powerful, eternal God’s unilateral creation of the finite world in language different from that of Scripture. Difference is not necessarily the same thing as contradiction. The burden of proof lies here on the so-called “literalist,” not on the literary reader of both the Bible and Tolkien.

I have above given two text-based reasons why it is improper to assert that the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and The Silmarillion are “contradictory.” A third, which I consider possibly more important than the other two, consists of the fact that Tolkien himself tells us the Silmarillion is not a literary work that can be judged by criteria that arise from the experiences of human beings. Quite simply – though there are profound depths here! – the Silmarillion is a collection of Elf-centered legends and tales about Elf experiences with humans, other creatures in the world, and God Himself.

A crucial explanation from Tolkien himself appears on pp. 194-196 of his Letters, where, explaining the whole literary purpose of his mythology is to explore “the physical effects of Sin and misused Free Will” he adds of the Valar subcreating the physical world, “in this myth, it is ‘feigned’ (legitimately whether that is a feature of the real world or not) that He gave special ‘sub-creative’ powers to certain of His highest created beings…” Note the word “feigned” and the phrase “whether that is a feature of the real world or not.”

These are Tolkien’s own qualifications, and they express his recognition, first, that his imaginative universe has a carefully theologically circumscribed didactic purpose and second, that he himself is quite aware that none of what he wrote may have any factual connection with the world God actually created. As he himself put it in one of his letters, “On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.” (Letters, p. 146)

The Valar as agents of God in the creative shaping of the world, then, need not be taken as Tolkien attempting to detract from God’s sole glory as Creator by setting up a possibly (or likely) idolatrous chain of other objects of worship. Any critique which doesn’t take Tolkien at his word here, granting him maximum charity of interpretation, is a critique I won’t find persuasive.

Again, there is a great deal more that needs to be said – I have hardly even begun to scratch the surface.

For instance, on the basis of the parallel texts above, the literalist Christian will next jump to attacking the very concept of God using other beings which He Himself made to perform the actual physical creative works of shaping the world. The objector may urge that such a concept somehow diminishes the sole glory of God as Creator, or that it borrows from anti-Hebrew and anti-Christian paganisms, setting up a thinly-veiled variety of polytheism for the believer to become enamored with (as Israel of old with her golden calves and Asherah poles) instead of God and His revealed truths in nature and Scripture.

These are objections worthy of exploration, but they will have to be taken up in another essay.

General Revelation: An Indispensable Christian Category!

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A faithful use of the imagination by Christians must begin with recognizing and upholding the historic theological distinction between two types of God’s revelation: special and general.

Many Christians today seem to recognize only one type, special, (which they often don’t realize even has a name) and only one exemplar of that type: the Bible. Negatively, nothing can be true that contradicts something found in the Bible, and positively, the Bible has something definite to say about pretty much everything with which human beings might have to deal.

Yet this is actually a reduction of the category revelation which is not supported even by the Bible. The Bible, in fact, though the only example of special revelation, itself teaches us pretty clearly about the other type, general revelation.

The classical passages from Scripture that outline the existence and operation of general revelation are two:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
Psalm 19:1-4

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Romans 1:18-20

The reader will note that these biblical descriptions of general revelation are themselves pretty general. Insofar as the words of the Bible itself go, we aren’t told exactly what are the contents of this mode of revelation to all mankind. We are only told a description of the contents, namely: “the glory of God,” “knowledge,” “what may be known about God,” and “God’s invisible qualities.” In the Romans passage, the last of these items does break down into the dual category “his eternal power and divine nature,” but even so, no further elaboration comes.

The clincher, it seems, is the precise way in which Paul tells us that people know these things and so are without excuse: His invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, are all “understood from what has been made.” It is by observing with our senses the created world and pondering with our minds what we observe in the created world that Paul says clearly show all human beings everywhere and at all times certain general truths about God. No special revelation (like the Bible) is needed for this general knowledge about God, and this is exactly why all human beings everywhere and at all times have no excuses for denying God.

As it turns out, the substantial difference between the nature, content, and mode of reception of these two types of revelation is crucial for the proper use of the human imagination. Arguments from special revelation must marshal specific texts of Scripture to support their points, after which the complex process of textual interpretation begins. By contrast, arguments about the implications of general revelation must take place on the grounds of setting forth observable features of the created world and then drawing from them philosophical and theological inferences.

Of course the question begs to be asked: What might these inferences be?

The Apostle Paul was not, of course, writing in an intellectual vacuum. For several centuries Greek philosophers had gradually articulated a broad and deep systematic understanding of the created world as rationally ordered and governed. Some of them even came to call this rational principle the Logos – which certainly ought to interest us since the first chapter of John’s Gospel articulates the incarnation of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, in terms of “The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Though none of the Greek schools of thought came to full knowledge of the truth, the broad outlines of a metaphysic and epistemology that was at least not simply inconsistent with special revelation existed, and it is clear that Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, appealed to these things in many of his theological arguments.

Not merely in Romans 1 do we see this appeal, but in Romans 2 also (“the law written on their hearts”) and in the justly famous Areopagus sermon of Acts 17, in which Paul deals directly with several ideological descendants of Socrates, the Stoics and Epicureans. In this latter passage, indeed, we find Paul noting, quite interestingly, that the philosophers, not having special revelation, nevertheless didn’t get everything wrong, and that is why God rightly now calls them to repentance and belief in Christ.

The Knowable Truths of General Revelation

Later generations of Christians (Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages) developed these premises and implications further, refining propositional expressions of the specific contents of general revelation. For the sake of space, I will only refer to one such later Christian treatment, that of John Calvin at the time of the Reformation.

In his Commentary on Romans, Calvin explains the contents of what all men know about God from observing and thinking about the things that have been made with these headings:

Eternity – God, having no beginning or end, is the uncaused maker of all things
Power – God at all times actively upholds all of existence
Wisdom – God providentially arranges and governs the world
Goodness – Nothing outside God constrains Him to create or preserve the world
Truth – God is immutable and unchangeable; therefore truth doesn’t change
Righteousness – God punishes the guilty and defends the innocent
Mercy – God, who is slow to anger, bears with the perversity of fallen men

Given a list like this, we may certainly say that the contents of general revelation are not at all vague, let alone difficult to understand. Obviously, each one to be “unpacked” and exposited in much detail – a task which has already been done for us by numerous Christian authors of the past (necessitating that we will take the time to read those authors.)

We may certainly say, also, that all people everywhere at all times have this knowledge, whether they have ever encountered a Bible or a Christian – and also no matter how vehemently they may deny having any knowledge of God. And again, it is their actual possession of this very substantial and clearly seen knowledge about God that renders them “without excuse.”

All of this really should be uncontroversial for the biblically literate and reasonably historically informed Christian. The knowable phenomenon of general revelation, inclusive of at least the above list of clearly knowable truths about God’s nature, ought to be just “givens” of our approach to unbelievers.

When we are asked a reason for the hope that is within us (1 Pet,. 3:15), there is no need for us to play the skeptics’ game, granting them that the basic truth about God is really quite hard to find and there are just so many legitimate reasons why a person might not see it. Let alone is there any reason for us to retreat to subjective appeals to our own private devotional contemplation of the Bible and our own personal spiritual experiences.

The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects

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As will often be noted in the materials found here, many Christians harbor great suspicions about the imagination. Their suspicions, expressed in a variety of ways both vulgar and sophisticated, cluster around two of the most important theological truths of our Faith: special revelation and general revelation. These two are covered in their own articles on this site, so referring you to those I here move straight to the topic of the pitfalls and prospects of the imagination for Christians. I begin with a bold assertion:

At its root, an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality.

Now this remark may seem contradictory at first. Aren’t the two items listed, imagination and reality, simply opposites? The real is, well, that which is the case, while the imagination, as its etymology shows, consists of an image. And isn’t an image at its best only an artificial imitation of something real and at its worst an attempt to copy something real which ends in falsification of the real?

What can it mean, then, to assert that an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality?

I would begin to explain it by making an important distinction: (1) the imagination as such and (2) the imagination as application.

The former category picks out the thing itself, our God-given ability to mentally image things in the world (just as we ourselves most essentially image God Himself) and think about, manipulate, and communicate those images. It’s difficult to see how this category of imagination could be intrinsically a bad thing, since it’s just part of our created nature itself.

We can no more avoid imaging things in the world than we can avoid thought itself.

In this sense, then, an attack on the imagination as such is an attack on the reality that God made and into which He has put us and commanded us to live for Him. This seems an odd thing to say since we so often associate the imagination with fiction, which we (falsely) think means “that which is not true.” Since we are Christians, we think that we must shun whatever is not true. And so many of us are tempted to shun the imagination because we think it stands in opposition to Truth – either the truth found in the pages of the Bible or the truth found in the “pages” of general revelation.

One thinks here of well-meaning Christians who think it their Stoical duty to inform other people’s children that, for Really Reals and In Real-Not-Fake Reality, there just absolutely aren’t any such beings anywhere in all of creation as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Alas, such well-meaning Christians have probably never carried out the quite illuminating exercise of taking seriously the title of that book on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf which Lucy saw on her first night in Narnia: Is Man A Myth?

What I mean is just this: one of the chief values of the imagination for Christians is how it enables us to come at our own personal views, which are so comfortable and “obvious” to us, from a vantage point that is so different it makes us aware that we might just be assuming too much, or at least assuming some things that aren’t accurate.

What if those among us who vehemently contend that there cannot possibly be any such thing in God’s universe as fauns (either “Because the Bible doesn’t mention them” or “Because weird creatures like that violate the Nature which God gave us to look at so we could know His truth clearly”) found themselves the topic of a learned book in another world questioning whether there could be any such thing as human beings in God’s universe?

Maybe there is no answer to this sort of question. Maybe it will turn out to be a ridiculous question after we’ve examined it thoroughly from every angle we can. But just the activity of asking it exposes as merely an assumption – and quite an overconfident one! – that we already have the answers to any questions about possibilities that could be thought of to be asked.

Which attitude amounts, really, to just simple arrogance. God has not deigned to tell us everything about His creation, nor is He obligated to do so. He has told us just what we need to know to accurately know Him and seek salvation from our sins.

Other inferences we may wish to draw about what can or can’t or does or doesn’t exist somewhere else than our small world at some other time than our own limited lifespan are just that – personal inferences or prejudices that we should never hold with the sort of dogged temerity we would actual Articles of the Faith.

And yet, to try to be fair to the multiple types of Christian detractors of the imagination, surely one can see through their pious zeal for a hyper-literal concept of “Truth” (whether appealing to the Bible or to Nature) to the more general and quite real danger it is trying to recall: the danger of idolatry.

And this brings me to the second part of the distinction above: imagination as application.

It doesn’t take much reflection on Scripture to realize that thanks to sin breaking the world, our God-given and good ability to make images – indeed, our very desire to make images – has itself become fundamentally skewed. What is the Second Commandment, after all?

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.
Exodus 20:2

And from there, of course, we must never forget the powerful lesson of Israel’s history which were “written for our instruction” (Rom. 15:4, 1 Cor. 10:11), that a major source of God’s own people departing from His clear instructions was, precisely, chasing after images that they had set up in idolatrous competition with God – sometimes even culpably confusing those very images with God.

Whether with Aaron (Ex. 32:1-35) or with Jeroboam (1 Kgs. 12), the people confused images made by hands with God Himself. Hezekiah had to destroy the brazen serpent that Moses himself had made, for it, too, had become an object of sinful worship (2 Kgs. 18:4).

But if we need a crowning biblical proof of the great danger that attends the human tendency not just to be interested in images but to actively pursue them in spite of God Himself, the Apostle Paul condemns the whole human race because they had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom. 1:23).

So here is another bold assertion to offset the one with which I began:

The use of the imagination in terms of making non-physical images is an inherently dangerous thing, not to be done without first engaging in serious reflection about the substance of God’s revelation to us in Nature and in Scripture.

Having said that, I still maintain that when we reject the imagination outright, we do so at a terrible price. Wanting rightly to avoid the idolatry-snare to which our fallen capacity for imaging is prone, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Although many among us, operating with a constricted understanding of “truth” as consisting only of literal statements, are dogmatically convinced that such things as myth and magic are evil and have nothing to do with “true spirituality,” I think we can find and defend a positive vision of the imagination in the Christian’s life.

In the sense that I want to defend it here, imagination should be seen as a creative reconfiguration of the things we find at hand in God’s world, an activity undertaken first to glorify Him by expressing the creative ability He Himself built into us as His image bearers, and second to explore points of contact we as believers can and do have with unbelievers.

Writing of just this activity, Tolkien explained that “sub-creating” worlds by taking actual things God has made and imagining them in different modes or forms is, contrary to a kneejerk polemic about idolatry, rather to be seen as:

“a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which it indeed is exhibited…I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic—there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones—that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!
Letters, pp. 188-189

Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote similarly of what he did in his Narnia books:

“[Aslan] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’
The Letters of C.S. Lewis, pg. 283

Although much more needs to be said on this topic, I will close this article by reiterating – with Tolkien and Lewis at my back! – that attacking imaginative work in any “totalizing” manner, as if the thing itself is wrong rather than just abuses of it, amounts to fighting against the goodness and beauty of the real world that God Himself has made.

“Sixty Centuries Are Looking Down On Us”

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A few years ago, I wrote a short critique about optimism in classical education circles, an issue I feel strongly about because I think that for the most part that type of optimism may be evidence of an intellectual and spiritual hubris unbecoming of anyone who really and thoroughly tries to ground himself in the classical tradition. On the other hand, at another point, trying to deal with the opposite error, extreme cultural pessimism, I wrote a short “balancing” piece “Is Western Culture Worse than Sodom and Nineveh”. Here I want to take up the large theme behind both posts yet again, but give it more development.

Writing about the section of Aeneid Book II in which Aeneas realizes the weight of how he must lead a “wretched band” of refugees to a new home, Stanley Lombardo comments:

“Yet it is not for the dispossessed alone that this passage has extraordinary resonance; any student of human history knows that Aeneas’ speech represents an event all too familiar in human experience and captures an unhappy truth of the human condition: however secure the present may seem, our deepest intuitions…recognize our communities to be fragile, vulnerable, contingent.”
The Essential Aeneid, p. x

One of the greatest benefits of classical literature consists in how, thoughtfully engaged, it exposes the dichotomy between what we know to be true in our heart of hearts and the fantasies we read onto the present out of a motive of desiring security.

Consider: we all have a tacit belief (at least if we’re remotely thoughtful about anything beyond our immediate present) that what happened to other societies in the past can’t also happen to us. At the same time as we realize our society is experiencing many grave trials, we really do tend to get so caught up in the moment that mostly what we see is our fantastic material prosperity – which we easily assume entails actual cultural might.

Yet in truth, we need only to spend a while pondering the fate of Troy as read in Homer’s Iliad and continued in Vergil’s Aeneid to gain perspective and point us toward a desperately needed moderation of attitude and practice. (A moderation most sadly lacking, in my estimation, over the last year and a half of COVID, which exposed to the bone the rank materialism and scientifictitious blindness of our culture – even of many purportedly “conservative” Christians.)

Someone has to say it in this age of overweening prideful assumptions of our “exceptionalism,” and since the classical authors already said it, all I have to do is report their words. The actual truth of the matter, borne out by six millennia of recorded history, is that civilizations come and civilizations go, and where this cycle stops, no one knows.

At a point not really all that far from the dawn of recorded history, we read the opening lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh extolling the great city of Uruk that he, the great semi-divine king, had caused to be built. It’s a stirring scene (at least, for anyone who bothers to think about how unbelievably fragile a thing a city really is), and it’s followed up by many pages of fantastic heroic adventures pushing back monsters and gods and even throwing down the gauntlet in the very face of Death Itself. Yet after all is said and done, Gilgamesh’s friend is dead, Gilgamesh himself realizes he, too, will die, and the poem closes with the exact same lines it began with – extolling the great marvel of a city that, whatever it looked like fifty centuries ago, now looks like this:

Uruk, Iraq | Ancient | Pinterest | Sumerian and Ancient ...

So then. Given the uniform testimony of history, it is actually just ludicrous for any generation – for we ourselves! – to act as if we living in the 21st century, surrounded by technological whiz-bangery and material glut and apparent freedoms greater than that of any ancient kings are somehow the goal toward which all of history has been pointing. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and all the rest – we will escape their fates for we are just really Super Special People. Like Midas, doesn’t everything we touch turn to gold – or at least, promise that it will as soon as we can apply our sciences, our mastery of nature, to it in just the right way?

Scarcely only 200 years ago – a mere drop in the bucket of history – Napoleon is reported to have said to his troops as they prepared to fight the British in Egypt near the pyramids, “Forty centuries are looking down on us.” Ponder that for a moment. Napoleon blazed like a shooting star across European culture, and left a seemingly indelible mark on all of human life. Yet, like Caesar, Napoleon “came, saw, and conquered” and like the builders of the pyramids he, too, is now gone, leaving only fragmentary traces of his “exceptionalism” behind.

Judged in the light of history, we living in the 21st century are just more temporary actors passing across the stage, most of us almost never conscious that, to borrow Napoleon’s words, “Sixty centuries are looking down on us.” Don’t judge the happiness of your life by your prosperity now, the Athenian statesman Solon warned one of the most powerful men of his day, Croesus of Lydia, “But look to the end, for only when it’s all over can other people judge whether you were trully happy.” It never ceases to be odd to me how many classical educators tell this story as part of classes on Herodotus, but fantastically fail to draw the moral lesson out to their own selves and our own time.

When you get right down to it, NO, we are not somehow better than other cultures in terms of what the nature of the world and the nature of humanity itself can allow to happen. We ought not to assume that whatever comes our way we are not only ready to meet it but able to decisively overcome it. The end of such hubris stands revealed in the stark, resigned words of Aeneas to his men as the Greeks ravage once proud, prospeous Troy:

Brave hearts – brave in vain
If you are committed to follow me to the end –
You see how we stand. All the gods
Who sustained this realm are gone, leaving
Altar and shrine. You are fighting to save
A city in flames. All that is left for us
Is to rush onto swords and die. The only chance
For the conquered is to hope for none.
Aeneid II.409-416 (Lombardo)

True, Aeneas survives that battle and, after seven years of bitter wandering and a horrifically bloody war in Italy, founds the race that would one day produce Rome. Proud Troy fell, but shreds of hope carried Aeneas forward to a new destined greatness. Troy was reborn, after a fashion, and many centuries later, so too was Rome when the barbarian tribes swept in and refashioned her legacy into a dozen “Romish” localisms whose influence persists even today in our architecture, our languages, and our literature.

So, then. To try to see where all the Optimists are coming from for a moment, let’s not be Johnny Rain Clouds, since as that old pop song from 1986 enthusiastically proclaims, “Things are going great, and they’re only getting better….the future’s so bright / I gotta wear shades.”

And yet, where is Rome, that grand, fantastically ordered and prosperous place that no less than the god Jupiter himself declared would possess an imperium sine fine – an “empire without end”? It’s arguable, as noted above, that Rome changed forms and so is in a whole lot of smaller, less ostentatious ways still hanging around. But even so, consider that Cicero lived and breathed and walked and talked and spun out the most epic speeches you’ll ever read about ethics and philosophy and about how he, by the passionate fire of his own incredible forethought and industry, almost single-handedly saved the Republic from ruination at the hands of Catiline in this place: