Christ is truly Risen - FANTASTIC!

In his guest editorial, "An Easter Meditation" at An Easter Meditation: A Guest Editorial
www.faithandaction.org, Nick Olsen writes:

Generally speaking, theological conservatives understand the necessity of boundaries because they understand man’s propensity to make a mess of things. And they emphasize what Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection accomplishes for the individual’s soul because they understand the extent to which he or she is lost, and, thus, incapable of saving his or her self.

Generally speaking, theological liberals emphasize a different kind of grace. Taking Christ’s life as a model, they seek to love others by providing for the lowliest and becoming low with them. They see the beauty in creation, and desire to preserve it with care. In other words, they see momentary glimpses of the New Earth here on this broken one, and wish to be agents of grace and reconciliation here and now – in preparation for and in anticipation of that New Earth.

Olsen goes on to quote Timothy Keller's comment about "secondary belief" as argued by J.R.R. Tolkien:

... one compelling argument that J. R. R. Tolkien used to lead C. S. Lewis to faith in Christ. It had to do with Tolkien’s notion of “secondary belief.” When a story that is fictional and yet is so compelling and well told that it generates the feelings in us as if it were true, it is producing secondary belief. In other words, stories about victory, sacrificial love, escaping death, and the like are myths that speak to deep human longings. And, thus, Tolkien believed that these secondary stories which speak to something in us all actually point to a primary story. God’s narrative of Creation, Fall, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Redemption, and Glorification is the actual underlying reality that brings about our greatest stories.

My friend, Randy O'Bannon, reminded me that

Tolkien helped Lewis recognize the the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as "true myth" -- a real event with meanings/implicationis/impact on many levels beyond just the surface happenings (yet in which the "surface events" were still essential and real.

My response in consideration of Randy's reminder set me thinking about this. What follows is the fruit of that consideration. Tolkien's notion about "true myth" is explained well by Joseph Pearce at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0107.html:

Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."

"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies." Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

"In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology," wrote Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, "Tolkien had laid bare the center of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion." It is also the creed at the heart of all his other work. His short novel, Tree and Leaf, is essentially an allegory on the concept of true myth, and his poem, "Mythopoeia," is an exposition in verse of the same concept.

Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their "mythopoeia" to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.

Such a revelation changed Lewis' whole conception of Christianity, precipitating his conversion.

As for "secondary belief," this is how it is explained at http://www.festivalintheshire.com/journal5hts/5tolkienprofessor.html :

Tolkien was dissatisfied with some of the vocabulary that people often use to talk about both the writing and the reading of stories. The common term used to describe a reader’s engagement with a story, for instance, is “willing suspension of disbelief.” This concept suggests that when we read a story, we are aware of the unreality of what we read, but that we make the conscious choice to set that recognition aside and go along with the story. Tolkien thought this was a very insufficient description of the experience of reading a good story. If we are consciously suppressing skepticism when we read, Tolkien asserts, then the story has plainly failed to draw us in: “The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed”.

What really happens, Tolkien explains, is that a good story-teller “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world”. A good story draws us imaginatively out of the Primary World, the “real” world that surrounds us, and into its own Secondary world, enabling us to invest in it. Tolkien calls this investment “secondary belief.” Willing suspension of disbelief is simply the means by which we tolerate a poor performance; a successful story-teller will usher us into the world of the story. Such a story-teller, the maker of a Secondary world, Tolkien calls a sub-creator.

The writer of the article goes on:

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and clearer is the reason, the better the fantasy will it make.

Not only is fantasy not in conflict with reality, Tolkien insists, but it is dependent upon it: “For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it”. If you are willing to let go of the dogmatic insistence on realism, you will find that your relationship with reality is not weakened, but enriched. You will be enabled to be Nature’s “lover, and not her slave”).

The article concludes as follows:

Fantasy and fairy-stories can give of that higher Truth. This is Consolation, specifically the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Tolkien could not find a word that expressed this idea of the happy ending which is the exact opposite of Tragedy, so he invented one: eucatastrophe. This “good catastrophe” is “the sudden joyous ‘turn,’” at the end of a fairy tale, a “sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur”. A eucatastrophe is not “fugitive” or “escapist,” for it does not “deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure.” Rather, a eucatastrophe denies “the universal final defeat,” giving to readers “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief”. If it opens for readers a window into Truth, Fanstasy is genuinely “derived from Reality” in a way which may be transformative for writer and reader alike, for it is an “echo of evangelium,” the good news.

These final contemplations lead Tolkien, in his Epilogue, to one of the most open discussions of his Christian beliefs that that he undertook in any of his published writings. The Christian Story is, in a sense, a fairy-story, a Fantasy story which points perfectly to that higher Reality and which, through the Primary Art of the Creator, is embodied in the Primary World itself. In the Gospel, according to Tolkien’s famous words to C.S. Lewis, Myth became Fact.

Tolkien’s emphasis in the Epilogue is not just a declaration of his Christian beliefs, but an explanation of the final significance that he believes sub-creation and Fantasy may have. Tolkien suggests that “God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature”, giving the final affirmation to the sub-creating impulse. Since “Redeemed Man is still man,” then “story, fantasy, still go on”. In the end, the Fantasy of human sub-creators, Tolkien hints, may through God’s grace be made actually to assist in the “multiple enrichment of creation”.

Interesting quote:

Fantasy literature is human exploration and creativity pushed to their literary limits. It is true that good works of fantasy create worlds “as rigid as realism,” but it is equally true that those good works grant possibility to the impossible. Fantasy speaks to the human desire for more than the empirical world of the familiar ...

This quote is taken from an article exploring Peter Beagle's THE LAST UNICORN; http://www.csustan.edu/honors/documents/journals/elements/Kamp.pdf

The following is excerpted from Tolkien's own essay "On Fairy Stories" (the whole of which may be read on-line at http://www.pathguy.com/ofs.htm). I found especially interesting what Tolkien wrote about Drama:

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested.” They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.

But the error or malice, engendered by disquiet and consequent dislike, is not the only cause of this confusion. Fantasy has also an essential drawback: it is difficult to achieve. Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more sub-creative; but at any rate it is found in practice that “the inner consistency of reality” is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of “reality” with more “sober” material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains undeveloped; it is and has been used frivolously, or only half-seriously, or merely for decoration: it remains merely “fanciful.” Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. It is a misfortune that Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or “imagination” that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy. This is, I think, well illustrated by the failure of the bastard form, pantomime. The nearer it is to “dramatized fairy-story” the worse it is. It is only tolerable when the plot and its fantasy are reduced to a mere vestigiary framework for farce, and no “belief” of any kind in any part of the performance is required or expected of anybody. This is, of course, partly due to the fact that the producers of drama have to, or try to, work with mechanism to represent either Fantasy or Magic. I once saw a so-called “children's pantomime,” the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful it would either have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn, and quartered.

In Macbeth, when it is read, I find the witches tolerable: they have a narrative function and some hint of dark significance; though they are vulgarized, poor things of their kind. They are almost intolerable in the play. They would be quite intolerable, if I were not fortified by some memory of them as they are in the story as read. I am told that I should feel differently if I had the mind of the period, with its witch-hunts and witch-trials. But that is to say: if I regarded the witches as possible, indeed likely, in the Primary World; in other words, if they ceased to be “Fantasy.” That argument concedes the point. To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art.

A reason, more important, I think, than the inadequacy of stage-effects, is this: Drama has, of its very nature, already attempted a kind of bogus, or shall I say at least substitute, magic: the visible and audible presentation of imaginary men in a story. That is in itself an attempt to counterfeit the magician's wand. To introduce, even with mechanical success, into this quasi-magical secondary world a further fantasy or magic is to demand, as it were, an inner or tertiary world. It is a world too much. To make such a thing may not be impossible. I have never seen it done with success. But at least it cannot be claimed as the proper mode of Drama, in which walking and talking people have been found to be the natural instruments of Art and illusion.

For this precise reason—that the characters, and even the scenes, are in Drama not imagined but actually beheld—Drama is, even though it uses a similar material (words, verse, plot), an art fundamentally different from narrative art. Thus, if you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.

One wonders what Tokien would have thought of the movie trilogy made from his book? Or, for that matter, what God thought of Mel Gibson's version of THE PASSION OF CHRIST?

I wonder how much a reader/viewer must guard one's mind when engaging any fictional world. The serpent in the Garden slyly contrived to make Eve re-imagine God's certain Word - "Did God really say ...?" C.S. Lewis often wrote of the "Real" as something good, that which is rightly ordered to God. For example, in THE GREAT DIVORCE, the constantly falling rain is real, putting the lie to all the falsely fantastic constructions of that hellish town in which the book's beginning is set. False fantasy cannot withstand confrontation with what is real - truth ruthlessly destroys all lies.