May the Holy Spirit make you creative in charity, persevering in your commitments, and brave in your initiatives, so that you will be able to offer your contribution to the building up of the “civilization of love”. The horizon of love is truly boundless: it is the whole world!--Pope Benedict XVI

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Tolkien: Lover of the Logos

From the Spring 1993 issue: Mark Sebanc, JRR Tolkien: Lover of the Logos (pdf).
From the text:
Tolkien’s is an exquisitely proleptic art that takes a pagan, pre-Christian universe and suffuses it discreetly with a sacramental holiness stemming implicitly from what Balthasar makes bold to call a Christian form. . . . . Like a colossus, Tolkien bestrides the abyss which separates the ancient and medieval worldviews from that of modern man, who has utterly lost sight of the Christ form as the primary means of access to the noumenal world. The power of the Word has been repudiated, and all around us now we see only its debased and slatternly distortions, hideous and mass-produced, like Tolkien’s Orcs. Tolkien’s art restores the incarnational, Christo-logical inclination of language. . . .  (full text).

No comments:

Post a Comment