Even More Hobbit Disappointment

Don't try and explain yourself. I'm pretty sure we're done.

So, on top of doing away with miniature photography, on top of the insanity of it now being a Hobbit Trilogy!, this list of companion figurines from Games Workshop contains quite a few SPOILERS as to the specific characters and contents in these clearly misguided movies. Here are a few of the highlights:

Drogo Baggins (Frodo's father) and the Tavern Maid
Dís, Mother of Kili and Fili
Gimli (Stubble) (More Gimli comic relief, I take it, 'cause that totally does justice to the character.)

Grinnah & Mirkwood Werewolves ('Cause wargs weren't enough, I guess.)
The Werebeast
The Willowhags
Bloodwraiths
The Necromancer / Flesh Avatar
Narzug & Orc Summoner Coven
Tomb Wights
Mounted Tomb Wights
Saruman & The Ringwraiths
Vampire Bat Swarms
Galadriel (Water Steed)
Radagast’s Chariot / Spellfire Cart
Fire-wyrms (more dragons, great)
Braga & Goldscale Worshippers (some kind of dragon cult??)
Venomblade Assassin
Goldscale Priest (I guess so.)
Bofur on Cold-Drake (Yes, apparently Bofur will be riding a dragon.)
Dragon Thrall (whatever that is)
Fell Hatchlings
The Beornings (even though they didn't exist at the time of The Hobbit)
Turin, The Dragonslayer (as in the Turin Turambar from The Silmarillion, 'cause that makes sense.)

And, finally, this cryptic and very disconcerting heading:

Galadriel (Barrel)

I vow to you now, if Peter Jackson puts Galadriel in a barrel I'm walking out of the theater.

Catharsis: Why We Care What Happens To Frodo

Is there a point to any of this? Or was Macbeth right?

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing," (V.5.19-28)

There is no doubt that, as Kant says in the Critique of Judgment, life seems "purposive," it seems to have meaning. In the question on Divine Providence in the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas quotes Holy Scripture as evidence that the universe has meaning: "[Divine Wisdom] reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly," (Wis. 8:1).

He goes on to explain that, because all agents undertake actions for a reason, and God is the agent in the creating and sustaining of all the exists, all that exists does so for the reason he intended it to. To put it another way, when I do something, I do it for a reason. Everything that ends up happening as a result of my action (everything that's under my control), then, happened for that reason. But everything that exists, God caused to be; therefore, everything that exists exists for the reason God created it.

We can know, then, using reason alone, apart from faith, that everything has a purpose. Unfortunately, we can't know what that purpose is. Why not? Because we don't know everything. Gandalf said it right, "Even the very wise cannot see all ends," (The Fellowship of the Ring, 74). Because we can't know how everything is connected, and because we can't know how everything will end up, in our own lives or at the end of time, we can't know why things happen the way they do.

Say I built a machine that turned peanuts into peanut butter. Now say you were a sentient peanut. As you went through the machine you would be able to learn a little bit about how the machine worked, but not everything. Also, as you went through the machine, you would have no idea where you were going to end up. Only once you got turned into peanut butter would you realize what it was all about.

In the Poetics, Aristotle called Literature "cathartic," meaning that the reading of Literature (or watching of plays or movies, or listening of music, etc.) purges frustrations pent up as a result of conflict and tension in the narrative. He also says that art imitates life and reality (the Greek is mimesis, as in English "mimic"). In other words, the emotions that we live through in microcosm in works of art be they literary, musical, architectural, or what have you) are the same emotions we live through in real life.

Literature gives us the opportunity to live a second life, to put ourselves in the characters' shoes and do what they did and see what they saw. This is why, as Joseph Campbell points out, protagonists must be relatable. They must be down-to-earth and believable like Luke Skywalker or Frodo or Clark Kent. Or a peasant carpenter from Nazareth, for that matter. Either that or they must be champions, larger than life heroes that can fight on behalf of us little guys and do the things we never could, like Achilles or Superman. Or Christ, the King of the Jews and God Incarnate.

Literature is cathartic because it also allows us to see the ending, to see the meaning behind everything that happens in this second life, to learn lessons about life and reality from the people and events we encounter in art. It's like getting to regret bad decisions and glory in good ones without having to actually make them. This is not to say that the purpose of Literature is to teach us lessons; it is to say that it does, as a result of what it is, potential reality, imagined and given form by an artist.

An Artist's Rendition Of Lake-Town From The Hobbit

In case the lack of news of late has let you forget, here's something to keep you excited about The Hobbit:

Click the image for the full-sized version.

The Top Ten Creatures I Can't Buy A Good God Created, Part Three

Last post we discovered that we contributed to the downfall of Nature when we sinned in the Garden. We also realized that, because fangs and poison and death and other bad stuff seem to have been around before us, they must be due to some other evil influence on the world.

There can only be one answer to who that could be, seeing as, before us, there's only one other source of evil: the Devil and his fallen angels. But why should the Devil have anything to do with God's Creation?

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien recounts his creation myth, called the "Ainulindalë," meaning, "Music of the Ainur." The Ainur ("Holy Ones") are Middle Earth's angels, beings of pure spirit, issuing out of the mind of God before time itself. Together, they perceive God's plan for Creation, and begin to sing their respective parts in harmony with one another, which causes the universe, in all its splendor, to jump into being.

Granted this is a work of fiction, but what Tolkien has done is to synthesize two seemingly contradictory myths of creation, the classical and the Judeo-Christian. God is still the Creator of the universe, and exterior to it, as in Genesis, but his creative act is performed through others, each of which has a domain which they create in accordance with the will of God, and later rule on his behalf. In the end, then, there are Ainur of the sky, and sea, and craftsmanship, and so on, just as in the pagan pantheons.

All of this is to say that God's act of Creation needn't be direct in order for it to be his. It is entirely consonant with Christian theology and what we know from the Book of Genesis for God to have created via the angels, whom he has given charge over the disparate categories of Being.

C.S. Lewis picks up on this idea in his Space Trilogy, when he has different angels (he calls them "eldila") as the caretakers of the various planets in the Solar System. The hero discovers that the rest of the universe refers to Earth as "the silent planet" because Lucifer its caretaker, and when he rebelled against God, he cut us all off with him.

In Tolkien, this notion of the fallen angel occurs when Melkor decides to rebel against the will of God for Creation and begins singing his own, discordant tune, and thus bringing a level of disorder and chaos to the things being made. I think something similar happened at the beginning of time, the Devil doing his best to mess things up even as God and the angels were creating the universe. "Really?" Really:

Last time we saw pictures of messed-up mammals. Today we're obviously looking at birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Technically speaking, I would put birds in between mammals and reptiles, but since they're basically just slightly less terrifying, slightly more highly-evolved reptiles anyway, I decided to include them here.

More than just this list of horrible animals, we see in Genesis that things had already gone wrong long before Mankind showed up. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This verse is likely more of a title than a verse. Oftentimes Jewish literature begins with a short summary of the story it will tell in detail. The story really begins with Genesis 1:2: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep."

"Formlessness," "void," "darkness," does that sound like the work of God to you? It seems to me that Satan was there from the beginning, trying to corrupt everything as best he could. The story of history, then, turns out to have been a rescue mission from the beginning, God fighting a war with the Devil for Creation, in order that he might fashion a world fit for his Son to inhabit, and thus undergo the ultimate act of redemption on behalf of the fallen universe.

UPDATE: Part Four to be found here.

The Big In The Small, The Form In The Matter: Starting With The Literal In Tennyson's Tears, idle tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh at the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ad, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

What is art? It begins as something imagined. An artist imagines something and turns that imagined thing into something concrete. The thing imagined can be a scene, a character, an event, or a whole bunch of these strung together in relationship to one another to make up a story. The medium by which it is made concrete can be marble, sound, movement (as in the case of dance), or spoken or written words. This concretezation (or we can even say incarnation) is what makes it possible for others to share the artist's vision. The artist's skill is greater or lesser depending on the level to which he is able to convert his interior vision into his medium. This is what makes the difference between an artist and the rest of us. We all have imaginations. One is only an artist when one can accurately incarnate a vision into stone, music, or words.

This is the sense in which God is the first artist. It was he who had a vision of Creation and caused it to come into being. Of course, rather than making the universe out of something, God made his art out of nothing. So in fact we should not be comparing Creation to art, but our work to God's. J.R.R. Tolkien did just that when he called the artistic process "sub-creation."

The artist's vision is not the art. The work of art itself is the art. Nevertheless, if the artist is successful, the nature of the concrete work of art flows out of the artist's vision. As such, if we are to truly understand the nature of the work of art, we must come to understand the artist's vision. That being said, it is only by studying the work of art itself that this can occur, since it is the work of art which expresses the artist's vision. It is as the work of art that the vision exists.

This is called the "literal level" of the work of art. It is the incarnated, material form of the artist's imaginal vision. To be sure there are deeper, more spiritual levels of meaning. Nevertheless, if they are truly there, they must develop by way of analogy out of the literal level, for that is what the art truly is. As such, in works of art (like some poetry) where it is not immediately evident what exactly is going on in the poem, the first job of the interpreter is to determine of what the poem itself actually consists.

In Tennyson's poem Tears, idle tears a man looks "on the happy Autumn fields," and the vision conjures up thoughts "of the days that are no more." These thoughts give rise to "idle tears," because it's not like crying over heartbreak or the death of a friend, it's just crying. T reason he can't figure out why exactly the tears are coming is that they're "from the depth of some divine despair." The sadness is too profound, too fundamental to understand completely. All he knows is they have something to do with days gone by. Not sad days, but happy days. The sadness comes in realizing they're gone forever.

He goes on to compare the sadness of lost time to that "fresh" pang "as the first beam glittering on a sail" when one is waiting at the dock for a loved one to return by sea. It is like those tears of "joy" upon reuniting with a long lost friend, which rise because, even if one doesn't realize it at the time, deep down it is always a bittersweet reunion knowing that it will eventually come to an end. It is also like the sadness that accompanies the farewell when the reunion does come to an end.

Tintern Abbey, "the casement"

It is like the birds' first morning chirps with the sunrise for which one has waited up all night. Sad because it too is but a fleeting moment, gone too soon. It is like "remembered kisses after death," or imagining what it might be like to kiss a beautiful woman one will never. It is "deep as first love, and wild with all regret." Is there anything else the realization that time is passing us by can make us do but regret? Regret how poorly we spent it, and how little we have left? "Life" itself is "Death," for all living is really only dying.

By describing a single imaginal and emotional experience, Tennyson has hit at the "deep," "divine despair" at the heart of what it means to be human. This is the essence of humanity: temporality, passability, transitoriness, loss, lamentation, death. For all humanity, all life is an ache for immortality, for eternity, for a perfect world. For all Creation, all life is a longing for the Garden that was lost and that shall be remade better even that it was: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail," (Rom. 8:22-3) awaiting the coming of the Kingdom.

One Night Only

For those in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a special seminar presented by The Walsingham Society. It's the last in a series on the Anglican Patrimony and will focus on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, the other Inklings and Anglicanism in the 20th century.

Tonight, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 at 7:00pm

Church of the Holy Cross, Dallas

Click for Map

Servi Servorum Dei - Servants Of The Servants Of God

In a recent article over at the Catholic Herald, the Holy Father is quoted as saying that his generation did not evangelize enough:

"We, who have been able to know [Christ] since our youth, may we ask forgiveness because we bring so little of the light of his face to people; so little certainty comes from us that he exists, he's present and he is the greatness that everyone is waiting for."

But what does it mean to "evangelize"? What does it mean to "bring...the light of [Christ's] face to people"?

Dr. Peter Kreeft once compared Blessed John Paul II to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. It's almost too easy to remember the days when the Holy Father was quite literally bent over, bearing the weight of the world around his neck. If John Paul was Frodo, Dr. Kreeft said, then Benedict is Samwise, his loyal and lowly companion in the background, who was, in fact, always shoring up his dear friend and bearing the weight himself, silently.

This is the legacy these two Pontiffs, surely two of the greatest the Church has yet seen, will leave behind them: Love as hard work, suffering; The presence of God lived out in a day-to-day life of penance and service; Worship as self-sacrifice in adoration of others and God; "The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise," (Psalm 51:17).

This is the essence of the "New Evangelization," the lesson Blessed John Paul and Benedict teach us with their words, yes, but above all with their very lives and selves. One does not argue or lure people into the Church, one loves them into it, by being present to the world and those in it, living the life of Christ, day in and day out, and thereby becoming a conduit of grace and love.

The Tolkien Diet

Starry Night Over Mordor - Courtesy of The UniBlog.

Um, so I am definitely an advocate of incorporating The Lord of the Rings into child rearing as often as possible.

Courtesy of BabyCenter...

“I’m still hungry,” my youngest said roughly five minutes after he didn’t finish his breakfast. It was an issue. He had developed the bad habit of playing with his food rather than eating it, and it was something that needed to be addressed. Luckily, I had foreseen such a moment and took the proper steps needed to combat it. Basically, I set said breakfast aside and played Words With Friends on my iPhone while the world went spinning on.

“Then you,” I replied, “are in for a treat.” I slid his breakfast across the counter as he climbed onto the same stool that he had only recently vacated. The stool was still warm, his food was not.

“This is my breakfast,” he said. “Again.”

He’s pretty quick.

“It’s your second breakfast,” I explained. “Like a hobbit.”

“What’s a hobbit?”

“You, but hairier.”

“They eat two breakfasts?”

“That’s what I’ve read.”

“Do you know any hobbits?” he asked.

“I suspect a few,” I told him. “But I can’t prove anything.”

His breakfast was colder than he remembered it. I assured him that was the way it was supposed to be. The hobbit way. One hot, one cold. The ying and the yang of a balanced diet(s).

“Do hobbiths get beg and strawng from eating so munch?” he asked.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I answered.

Time passed.

“Do hobbits get big and strong from eating two breakfasts?” he asked.

“I can see why one might think that,” I started, “but the fact-ish is they don’t. They don’t grow much at all.”

“Why not?” his concern was palatable and smeared with jelly.

“Well,” I took a breath and looked him squarely in the plate. “The popular theory is they might get bigger if they actually ate one healthy breakfast the first time it was served and didn’t waste food.” I let the time and money go — everybody wastes those.

“Healthy is good for you,” he said.

The light above his head glowed warm and knowingly.

“I only want one lunch,” he stated, “a good one.” I nodded accordingly.