Tolkien’s Sub-Creation and Secondary Worlds: Implications for a Robust Moral Psychology

Journal of Tolkien Research, Jun 2017

In his work, “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien offers a detailed account of what he calls Sub-creation, along with the corresponding notions of Primary and Secondary Worlds. In this paper, I suggest that Tolkien’s concept of Sub-creation can be creatively appropriated in the realm of moral psychology and there applied to the fundamental relationship between self and other – or in Judeo-Christian terms, “I” and my neighbor. Through appeal to Tolkien’s thought and to the wider Christian theological tradition, and in constructive tension with the contemporary psychoanalytic attention to “intersubjectivity,” I attempt to elucidate the power and appropriate function of the human imagination to dispose us to good moral action, and so to bring us closer to ultimate happiness.

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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)


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Nathan S Lefler. Tolkien’s Sub-Creation and Secondary Worlds: Implications for a Robust Moral Psychology, Journal of Tolkien Research, 2017, Volume 4, Issue 2,