The Christian Mythos

"I tried. I tried to come back. I'm just too old, too Web 1.0. Godsbody is archaic, a relic - finished."

"Nonsense. People need Godsbody. You need Godsbody. The Church Militant needs Godsbody. Western Civilization..."

"Okay, that's about enough."

Ah, but what to post? Thank God for the New Mexico Nurse and the Manhattan Lawyer. The former gave me the Brawling Buddhists, the latter, this story about that new Tolkein book:

"Tolkien is a writer of greater theological depth than his Oxford colleague C S Lewis, in my judgment. Lewis is a felicitous writer and a diligent apologist, but mere allegory along the lines of the Narnia series can do no more than restate Christian doctrine; it cannot really expand our experience of it. Tolkien takes us to the dark frontier of a world that is not yet Christian, and therefore is tragic, but has the capacity to become Christian. It is the world of the Dark Ages, in which barbarians first encounter the light. It is not fantasy, but rather a distillation of the spiritual history of the West. Whereas C S Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a children's masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the work of our hands and the hone of our swords must avail us."

I'm not ready to go all the way with this piece in its assessment of Lewis: I think the Narnia allegory serves to reveal, not simply comfort. But there's stirring stuff here, all the same:

"Tolkien's popular Ring trilogy, I have attempted to show, sought to undermine and supplant Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle, which had offered so much inspiration for Nazism. With the reconstruction of the young Tolkien's prehistory of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose: to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is the pagan's tribal identity. Tolkien saw his generation decimated, and his circle of friends exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace the cult of Christ during World War II. His life's work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West."

Do go read the whole thing. Heck, you might even want to go ahead and read the book. I've heard that some people are into that sort of thing.

(Image courtesy of John Murphy, available for purchase here.)