Thanks for this one, David. The eucatastrophe has been on my mind lately. There's a great essay on Tolkien that Rowan Williams wrote for the New Statesman a few years ago, where he says, "Tolkien believes in a God who doesn't intervene, but interweaves." I've found that a helpful thought.
Yes, Tolkien's God/Illuvatar is so autonomous and unanswerable, and kind of inaccessible, that they are never mentioned after the mythic pre-text of the Silmarillion (I don't think). And yet, namelessly present all the time, to my feeling. Sort of implicit rather than explicit. Reminds me of Illich's refusal to explain certain matters.
The place where hopes and prayers reside. We could use a little eucatastrophe over here in the land of burgeoning catastrophe and insane arch-villainry. 🤲
The ideas of faith without hope of reward and "sudden and miraculous grace... poignant as grief" are at the heart of Tolkien's work I think, a moving and beautiful way to live.
"It reflects the glory backwards". I like this sense of gaining the true picture of the territory we crossed to come to the boundless point. All that time caught up with our hurts, resentments, aching for control. To have it in front of us, a great painting where light and shade play out.
Benjamin says something like this in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. He says something about the Messiah redeeming, not only the present, but also the struggles and injustices of all times past also. It sounds wildly mythic when he says it, I guess because he's in dialogue with a rather disenchanted Marxist tradition, but it makes (to me) intuitive sense of something of earliest memory. I can never remember not having some sense of that sort of time-folding hope.
Thanks for this one, David. The eucatastrophe has been on my mind lately. There's a great essay on Tolkien that Rowan Williams wrote for the New Statesman a few years ago, where he says, "Tolkien believes in a God who doesn't intervene, but interweaves." I've found that a helpful thought.
Yes, Tolkien's God/Illuvatar is so autonomous and unanswerable, and kind of inaccessible, that they are never mentioned after the mythic pre-text of the Silmarillion (I don't think). And yet, namelessly present all the time, to my feeling. Sort of implicit rather than explicit. Reminds me of Illich's refusal to explain certain matters.
Love.x
The place where hopes and prayers reside. We could use a little eucatastrophe over here in the land of burgeoning catastrophe and insane arch-villainry. 🤲
Aye, Maranatha, it's spiralling. Thinking of you and everyone you know.
Thank you David 🙏
The ideas of faith without hope of reward and "sudden and miraculous grace... poignant as grief" are at the heart of Tolkien's work I think, a moving and beautiful way to live.
"It reflects the glory backwards". I like this sense of gaining the true picture of the territory we crossed to come to the boundless point. All that time caught up with our hurts, resentments, aching for control. To have it in front of us, a great painting where light and shade play out.
Benjamin says something like this in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. He says something about the Messiah redeeming, not only the present, but also the struggles and injustices of all times past also. It sounds wildly mythic when he says it, I guess because he's in dialogue with a rather disenchanted Marxist tradition, but it makes (to me) intuitive sense of something of earliest memory. I can never remember not having some sense of that sort of time-folding hope.