Old-fashioned entertainment and the value of getting out more


Last night, I attended a lecture sponsored by the Ottawa branch of the Prayer Book Society. About 50 people turned up for a lecture on "The Lord of the Rings as a Christian Epic" by Dominic Manganiello , who is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa, and an adjunct professor (and one of the founders) of Augustine College.

As I surveyed the crowd sitting in the fellowship hall of an Anglo-Catholic church, facing a wall of AA pamphlets "AA and the Lesbian/Gay Alcoholic" "AA and the Woman Alcoholic" I thought how rare it is these days for people to get out to hear a challenging lecture on any subject.

The topic was so rich and eye opening that I don't have time to delve into it fully now. Just a few highlights.

Prof. Manganiello is an expert on J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, and described how these two and others, such as Charles Williams, used to meet in a pub and read aloud their works to each other. They called their little group "The Inklings" and Tolkein especially liked that name because "it gives the impression of people dabbling in ink" and "gives readers the impression there was an inkling of something better."

Oh, how my imagination wandered to that smokey fellowship over pints of ale, and their reading aloud to each other. The closest approximation I have to that now are some online critique groups. I'm especially enjoying "The Fiction Workout" where we share short stories and critique them.

Prof. Manganiello said that Tolkein was profoundly influenced by the following quotation (I'm going to quote a little more of it for context) from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy

I'll put in bold the portion that Prof. Manganiello quoted last night.

To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? -- that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, "Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an impatient. He must be personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.

Wow. It was worth going to the lecture just to be steered back to this wonderful book written in 1908.

Prof. Manganiello told about how Tolkein was a scholar who loved the epic poem Boewulf, but one thing the pagan epics had in common was the inevitability of fate, of death, of doom. One could act heroically in the face of that doom, exhibit virtues of courage, but the end of serious drama was always tragic. Death.

Tolkein coined a new word to try to get across the unique contribution that the Christian story gave to literature. That word is "eucatastrophe", the "Eu" prefix meaning "good".


Tolkein considered "fairy stories" or fantasies to be not quite comedy and not quite tragedy in the old fashioned Greek definition of the term but "something in between."

"We have to have the possibility that it won't end in catastrophe. That it might end in a sudden joyous end.

"We have a primal desire for a great escape. An escape from death. A sudden and miraculous grace. Sorrow and failure always a possibility."

For Tolkein, fantasy was meant to deny a universal or final deffeat and give a "glimpse of joy beyond the walls of the world."

Tolkein considered the Gospel, the story of the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, as the great "eucatastrophe" because it begins and ends in joy.