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Theolog of Incarnation As Cultural Protest )ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2020 A Theology of Incarnation as Cultural Protest: G. K. Chesterton and Christopher Dawson's Influence on J. R. R. Tolkien Jonathan Parker Durrance Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES A THEOLOGY OF INCARNATION AS CULTURAL PROTEST: G.K. CHESTERTON AND CHRISTOPHER DAWSON’S INFLUENCE ON J. R. R. TOLKIEN By JONATHAN PARKER DURRANCE A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: Spring, 2020 2 The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Jonathan Durrance defended on April 13, 2020. Dr. Maximillian Scholz Thesis Director Dr. Martin Kavka Outside Committee Member Dr. George Williamson Committee Member 3 Introduction “The springtime of a new culture is seen in the rise of a new mythology, which finds its expression in the heroic saga and epic.”1 - Christopher Dawson When Christopher Dawson penned these words in his most acclaimeD work Progress and Religion (1929), J. R. R. Tolkien was still laying the groundwork for his mythological worlD. Ten years later, and after publishing his highly popular The Hobbit, Tolkien had begun fashioning his expansive mythological work, The Lord of the Rings, which was intended to fulfill Dawson’s words. While bringing Frodo out of the Shire and into the heart of Middle Earth, Tolkien also delivered his lecture, “On Fairy Stories.” The lecture was largely a defense of fantasy writing against its modern critics and an explanation that “fairy stories” had something crucial to offer a modern, “disenchanted” society.2 Within the lecture, Tolkien discusses mythology, religion, and the usefulness of imagination, finishing it with a confident epilogue that displays Tolkien’s belief that his Catholic faith and his fantasy writing were inextricably connected. To Tolkien, his fantasy writing was grounded in a worldview that was fundamentally opposed to those of his cultural milieu; his writing professed his hope in Christ rather than in materialism. 1 Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 37. 2 Tolkien, On Fairy Stories ed. by Verlyn Flieger anD Douglas A. AnDerson (LonDon: Harper Collins, 2014), 130. 4 Tolkien once described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” claiming that the “religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”3 The central contention of this thesis is that the religious element suffusing Tolkien’s magnum opus is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which posits that God entered the material world through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Importantly, a worldview grounded in this doctrine holDs both the spiritual and material realities of existence together, emphasizing their union. This doctrine significantly influenced his worldview and his writing, and yet, few have noted how the Incarnation colored his work. Furthermore, there has been little discussion on how his theology of Incarnation challengeD his cultural environment. The religious themes in Tolkien’s work have not escaped scrutiny, but while works such as Ralph Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien and Alison Milbank’s Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians highlight specific religious features and currents; they do not adequately demonstrate how Tolkien's theology protested his culture. Wood's work is all-encompassing, and he offers much in detailing the symbolism of Aragorn's coronation, but he fails to connect this to Tolkien's broader context. In other words, he does not explain that Aragorn is an embodiment of Tolkien’s theology in response to the events of the twentieth century. Milbank provides a lucid explanation of how Tolkien’s writing attempts to “mediate the divine” but again, she does not connect this to Tolkien’s protest against his culture.4 Others have noted Tolkien’s anti- modernism but have failed to see how his protests are theological in nature. Patrick Curry, for example, defends Tolkien against his modernist critics in Defending Middle Earth, yet, he 3 Tolkien, eD. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien ed. by Humphrey Carpenter (London: Houghton Mifflin, 200), 172. 4 Alison Milbank, Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (LonDon: T&T Clark, 2008), 168. 5 misunderstands Tolkien’s theology in the process. In regard to Christianity, Curry claims that "given a belief in a transcendental creator, outside and above His creation, it is impossible for the earth, its places and beings to have primary and ultimate value."5 In fact, as this thesis will demonstrate, Tolkien saw his own religious beliefs as expressing the exact opposite. He believed that the Incarnation demonstrated God’s care for the material world and offered a different path than the one walked by warmongers and fascists. His theology of Incarnation was the very source of his critique on modern society. Perhaps the clearest way to observe Tolkien’s theological criticism of his culture is to examine those who deeply impacted his theology and his worldview as a whole. Among the several quotations and references in Tolkien’s lecture “On Fairy Stories,” two names stand out among all of the others. One is the aforementioned Dawson, a historian who fused a wealth of knowledge with an undeniably Catholic perspective. The other is G.K. Chesterton, a Christian apologist who also developed his own fantastical stories. Born towards the end of the nineteenth century, these two writers were from quite different disciplines but shared a Catholic worldview and an understanding that modern society was headed down a destructive path that could only be saved by the hand of God. Both saw themselves as prophets, denouncing their cultural milieu and proclaiming a hopeful Christian orthodoxy in a society they saw as progressively losing its life and culture.6 5 Patrick Curry, Defending Middle Earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 105. 6 ADam Schwartz, The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Green, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones, (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 224. Schwartz Details the lives of several Catholic writers who uphelD orthoDoX beliefs while their society was starting to divert from them, Schwartz emphasizes the crises of faith that these young men experienced, as well as how their thinking developed throughout their lives. 6 Having read Dawson’s Progress and Religion, and numerous works by Chesterton, Tolkien was well acquainted with their worlD-views and saw their works as essential to his views on fantasy writing. He would have been familiar with Dawson’s adage that, “a society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture”,7 as well as Chesterton’s belief that orthodoxy provided sanity in a society he believed was losing it. An examination of Tolkien’s lecture notes confirms that he felt at home with Chesterton and Dawson and used them as a "springboard" for his understanding of religion and fantasy.8 Furthermore, if Chesterton and Dawson influenced Tolkien's understanding of mythmaking, it can be confidently deduced that this influence would appear in his other writings. While the influence of the two writers on Tolkien has been briefly discusseD in prior literature, it is puzzling that few have highlighted their influence on Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings. Furthermore, Dawson’s influence on The Lord of the Rings has remained undisclosed, and I intend to reveal traces of his thinking within the novel. A closer study of Chesterton and Dawson’s thinking, acknowledged by Tolkien in “On Fairy Stories”, affirms that Tolkien’s magnum opus owes much to the Catholic writers. To understand what Tolkien was attempting with the Lord of the Rings, it is necessary to grasp Chesterton and Dawson’s own rebellion against modernity. After detailing the ideas of Chesterton and Dawson, I will explain how their work influenced Tolkien’s magnum opus. To do so, I will use his lecture “On Fairy Stories” as a framework by which to understand Chesterton and Dawson’s influence on The Lord of the Rings. 7 Dawson, Progress and Religion, 180. 8 Tolkien, On Fairy Stories, 130. 7 This is necessary because Tolkien not only references their work but uses their ideas to lay out three essential ways in which he challenges modernity. First, he joins Chesterton and Dawson in their protest against materialistic worldviews, deeming materialism a precursor to destruction. Secondly, Tolkien offers an Incarnational worldview as a replacement for a materialistic one. The doctrine of the Incarnation was Tolkien’s compass for navigating the terrifying landscape of the twentieth century. If Jesus was God in the flesh and inhabited the material world, then the cure for such a materially devastated century was spiritual in nature. Lastly, he details how recovered vision naturally seeks to join with God in renewing the present world, while ultimately resting in the fact that true progress will be realized in Jesus’ future redemption of the cosmos. Within these three aspects, Tolkien identifies himself with the prophetic voices of Chesterton and Dawson, while similarly looking to the Incarnation of Jesus for his ultimate inspiration. To all three, their present historical circumstances were extremely distressing and only strengthened their belief that the Christian God was the last hope for a world that was succumbing to previously unimagined chaos. Chesterton and Dawson’s Rebellion Against Modernity In 1932, Chesterton opened his mail to discover a copy of Dawson’s The Making of Europe, accompanied by a short letter. In offering thanks to Chesterton, his contemporary and interlocutor, Dawson wrote: Years ago, when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought the breath of life to this period for me when I was fed up with Stubbs and Oman and the rest of them.
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