Tolkien’s Sub-Creation and Secondary Worlds: Implications for a Robust Moral Psychology
Journal of Tolkien Research
Tolkien's Sub-Creation and Secondar y Worlds: Implications for a Robust Moral Psycholog y
Nathan S. Lefler 0 1
0 Part of the Catholic Studies Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons , Epistemology Commons, Esthetics Commons, Ethics in Religion Commons , History of Philosophy Commons, Metaphysics Commons, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons
1 University of Scranton
Introduction
The great Dominican moral theologian, Servais
Pinckaers (1995)
, argues that
there are novelists capable of helping us “to rediscover truth’s riches and
reintegrate them in moral theology” (p. 35). In his seminal work on Christian
ethics, however, he only specifies one such author (Georges Bernanos) and offers
no analysis of his works. In the same vein, the renowned contemporary American
Protestant moral theologian, Stanley
Hauerwas (1994)
, says that the novel is “a
school of virtue” (p.53), and “an irreplaceable resource for training in moral
virtue” (p. 31). Hauerwas provides a detailed sketch of some of Anthony
Trollope’s works as exemplifying what he has in mind. Yet even Hauerwas only
appeals to the novel as a sort of imaginative mirror, albeit perhaps a necessary
mirror, of human life and action, arguing that such virtues as forgiveness are
understood “only when they are depicted through a narrative”
(Hauerwas, 1994,
p. 53)
. Though Hauerwas’s account goes significantly further than Pinckaers’s,
through the inclusion of detailed analysis of particular examples, it remains
essentially empirical. There are demonstrable good effects of reading novels,
Hauerwas would seem to say, so read them. What neither Pinckaers nor
Hauerwas seems especially concerned to do is to show how good fiction does
what it does, when goodness of some kind is brought about in the reader through
the act of reading. As unsatisfying as these two limited accounts may be, they
nevertheless demonstrate that eminent scholars across the theological spectrum
recognize and increasingly give voice to the intuition that fiction, or in other
words, story-telling, can bear importantly on our moral life.
While J. R. R. Tolkien would surely have agreed with both Pinckaers and
Hauerwas about the power of the novel to form human character, he goes much
further in his considerations of precisely how the human imagination functions
through the event of fiction, on both the author’s and the reader’s part. In what
follows, I shall argue that Tolkien’s theory of the relation between author and
reader of fantasy deploys a provocative anthropology: to be human, Tolkien
asserts, is to tell stories. Furthermore, I contend that Tolkien derives this
anthropological conviction directly from Christian theology, namely, from the
doctrine of imago Dei: the claim that man is made in the image of God. Properly
understood and implemented, Tolkien’s theory indicates imagination’s power to
dispose us to right moral action, in the course of natural human development, but
at the same time within an eschatological trajectory, primordially orchestrated and
constantly superintended by divine providence. In support of this claim, it will be
useful initially, however cursorily, to situate Tolkien’s narrative theory against a
wider background. Providing such a comparative context will help to illuminate
one end of a bridge between Tolkien’s theory and the realm of moral psychology.
Moreover, this bridge will gradually become discernible as the analogy between
two relationships: Reader-Author and Self-Other, or Neighbor, in Christian
theological terms.1 In order to build this bridge, however, it is necessary first to
look somewhat closely at the principal work in which Tolkien sets down his
theory. Consequently, having established a point of departure within the broad
realm of literary theory, I shall undertake a careful analysis of Tolkien’s argument
in the essay entitled “On Fairy Stories.”
Story-Telling as Imitation: Tolkien’s Narrative Theory in Wider Perspective
According to Aristotle (350 BCE/1984), all of the various kinds of poetry are
“modes of imitation,” differing from each other in “means, object or manner” of
imitation (1447a15-18). Insofar as the objects Aristotle has in mind are “actions,
with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad” (1448a1-2), it is evident
that one of the earliest systematic treatments of literary narrative, and still one of
the most influential, identifies the depiction of moral action, whether good or bad,
as central to the crafting of narrative. Prior even to his specification of object as
moral action, however, is Aristotle’s basic insight that narrative is mimetic, or
imitative. Remarkably, this insight has stood the test of twenty-three centuries, no
doubt with variation and qualification along the way, until Claude Lévi-Strauss, a
thinker in many ways quite different from Aristotle, affirms imitation as
fundamental to the human mind (...truncated)