The Necromancy of the Word, & the Prophecy of the Image - LOTR 74
Reconstruction, Regeneration, or Renovation? What shall we name it, how shall we envision it?
Author note: Apologies for the hiatus. The Squire is resuming emailings. You can read ahead on the Cassiodorus and Quadrivium Blogspot. There are some plans for the future, including an online “One Cabin College” on the Internet. Higher Education is done, stick a fork in it. Not even Trump can bring it back, he can only stop the worst madness, and he hasn’t found the radix yet anyway. We are going to have to rebuild America from the ground up, one homestead and one church and one log cabin school, at a time. The Internet is useful while it still exists, to connect people that need to then build the new world, which will belong to the Seed Savers and the Suttlers. High Culture in America will always get short circuited, until it grounds out to the roots, like an apple tree that has to grow back from a stump.
Link Tolkien's Worcestershire County
"Though a Tolkien by name, I am a Suffield by tastes, talents, and upbringing, and any corner of that county [Worcestershire] (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable way 'home' to me, as no other part of the world is." Letter 44
This sentiment is unpardonably parochial, naive, and gauche by today's standards. Who in the world would want to be shackled to a little patch of ground, or a community of very peculiar hobbits? And the rinky-dink podunkness of it all should appall the properly modern man. All of the drift of our world today, is towards universality of Time & Space - the unity of Space, and the genericity of Time (Space as a Blob, Time as fragments). Tolkien, however, pursued the separateness of Space (The Shire is not The Old Forest, which is not Lothlorien, etc.) and the reunion of the Times (The Shire has a role to play in the End of the Third Age).
We have seen how Tolkien made the astounding claim that Reality and the Word Co-Arise.
Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry. Max Müller's view of mythology as a “disease of language” can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent.
He wasn't the only one to do so. Peter Leithart explains how it was with Rosenstock-Huessy-
“Without speech, the phenomena of time and space cannot be interpreted. Only when we speak to others (or, for that matter, to ourselves), do we delineate an inner space or circle in which we speak, from the outer world about which we speak. . . . And the same is true about the phenomenon of time. . . . By human speech, space and time are created. The scientific notions of time and space are secondary abstractions of the reality of grammatical time and space. Grammatical time and space precede the scientific notions of an outer space or of a directed time. For they presuppose an inner space between the scientists and some contemporaneity between them, too. Without the pre-establishment of one inner space of ‘science,’ no scientific analysis of time and space holds water, or even can take place at all.” Rosenstock surpasses even the most radical post-structuralists in his claims about the power of speech, while remaining utterly concrete. Link
All of these ideas are quite unfashionable today. The Word has been replaced by the Image. See, here, for example: Don't be a "book helot". The Word is "dead" - the Image beckons us to Life.
George Steiner at 90 - he knew Western man was tempted to abandon books for false images...
It might be said that today, we believe that the Word is necromantic, whereas true prophecy proceeds from the Image. That is, reading old books is just speaking with "Dead, White, European males", a form of necromancy, which is not only evil and vile, but very uncool and boring. On the contrary, the Image is full of Life & Art, and comes to life in moving pictures on celluloid, or the pixels of the screen. Virtual Reality (of course) has everything to do with images and sensations, and almost nothing to do with Mind or Word. The Image, for us, prophesies of great things to come.
"Progress" (for us) is the mirror of the Word (turned into an Image) of the original Word of God in Christ. There has to be endless improvement in the edifice of an Idol, built up and imaged properly. Without this Image or Idol of the Word, the people despair.
"The Word" is Necrotic and Necromantic; the Image is Prophylactic and Prophetic.
Such is our dogma, today, as uncritically and unconsciously held as any doctrine of Torquemada or myth of the Pygmies. Tolkien (obviously) was not against the Image - he wrote in fantasy and new myths, after all, and even illustrated it himself. But the pre-manifestation and background of the Image came as the Logos or Word. First comes silence, then comes speech, and then comes image and art. If one dislikes Speech or Word, try "Idea".
What happens when this Silence or Zero-Space of pre-manifestation is elided or dropped away, or flattened out into pure Meme space or flashing Images? Well, comedy ensues, at least Comedy to Thought. To the feelings, it is more tragic. It is tragic because it is unconscious of Tragedy, and either leaves it out (repression) or makes it trivial (suppression). By Tragedy, I don't mean that Life is terrible, but that we are capable of integrating the uncomfortable facts of human existence into an overall Divine Comedy.
It's our calling.
What if we turned things around, and Prophesied with the Word, and condemned the Necromantic Image of the World, re-making it into an Image of the real Word? It could not be a Gnostic hatred of the World that animated us, or a Baptistic (semi-Gnostic) retreat into another world or afterlife. Instead, the motivation would be that God pronounced Creation Good, in Genesis, and therefore it (must be) made into that good Word and Image.
God's benediction and blessing, "it is Good", is not of no effect. It is the cause, the means, the effect. It is all and everything. Do we believe what the Lord spoke about His Creation, in Genesis? Was He unaware of the coming Fall? We think not.
This is why all things pass away but Love. For we find it "not so", or "not good". The task, as then given, is to work with the Father, in the world, to bring about "on earth, as it is, in heaven".
But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. John 5:17
Love is what bridges the gap between the "now, but not yet". Faith, Hope, Knowledge, Prophecy - there are no need for them in the fulfillment of the Eschaton. We will see face to face. Love is deathless, and crosses over. Love is compatible with the Eschaton and remains.
Love is able to face death, change, suffering, uncertainty - it has no impatience. It already possesses the keys to the kingdom, the kernel and essence of things to come. It sees into, not just what will be, but what is already there.
Let us behold again, The Shire, more closely, or something like it:
Ivan Maxwell Jones, Walking the Malverns Link
"J.R.R. Tolkien found inspiration in the Malvern landscape[82] which he had viewed from his childhood home in Birmingham and his brother Hilary's home near Evesham.[83] He was introduced to the area by C. S. Lewis, who had brought him here to meet George Sayer, the Head of English at Malvern College. Sayer had been a student of Lewis, and became his biographer, and together with them Tolkien would walk the Malvern Hills. Recordings of Tolkien reading excerpts from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were made in Malvern in 1952, at the home of George Sayer. The recordings were later issued on long-playing gramophone records.[84] In the liner notes for J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Ring, George Sayer wrote that Tolkien would relive the book as they walked and compared parts of the Malvern Hills to the White Mountains of Gondor."
The painter, like Tolkien, sees "more" than either you or I, in a certain way. But we can see too, more, in our own way. More is relative, in order that all might come to know the absolute, the Perfect. Pausing here, as we return home to The Shire, we contemplate part of what made up the Shire for Tolkien, and how it felt to him, and what it signified. Certainly (we feel absolute in saying) Tolkien had no problem with a "Scouring of the Shire". Something worth dying for, is possibly and even probably, worth killing for, too. Under certain conditions, both conformity and rebellion can be the authentically moral choice (Dr. John Reist). If we're cornered, & it's just our own skin and carcass, versus the death of all that is worth dying for, you fight. For although an unjust peace is always preferable to a just war, there are those final dead ends, where resistance (whether futile or not) is all that's left for the Christian. And that may include self-defense. The Squire is a practical pacifist, but not an ideological one. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." (Romans 12:18) This obedience hastens the coming of The Kingdom.
Link Ted Sandyman, Local Quisling
"If what I've seen turn out true, somebody's going to catch it hot!" - Sam Gamgee
Christian theology often says, of The Kingdom, it is "now, but not yet". Being mostly binary, and of short attention, what lingers in our spiritual taste (more often than not), is the "not yet". Christians emphasize the incompleteness, futility, and even evil of the "World". Although they don't like the word "afterlife", it is Christian attitude and ideas that cause people to speak as if this one was not worth very much. It is because Christians have blurred the distinction between "the World" as it is, and Creation, that all the trouble has come in.
For if one is paying attention, one can (and ought) to turn the old saying around. The Kingdom is also "not yet, but it is NOW". The sacrament of the present moment is not the same thing as having a short attention span. In the past lies guilt, in the future lies stress. It is only "here and now" that God is present, now or nowhere. God is the only bridge to the past and the future, from "now". God is Love, and like Love, bridges all gaps.
But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach. Romans 10:6-13
Although this awareness of God in the now brings some strange additional awareness, it is all throughout the Good Book like a red thread. We know that God pronounced Creation "Good" in Genesis. The Psalmist confessed that God is in Sheol, and that one cannot hide from Him there. The prophets hoped against hope in the Messiah. It saturates the written Scriptures.
Why is there such suffering and Evil, now?
For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. Romans 11:32
God circles back around to the Beginning, since He constitutes both the Beginning and the End. The primordial Shire, or Garden, is our home, and always will be. God loves the "shields of the earth", for He made them both. We don't fear returning home to the Shire. We do not fear returning to our primordial loves and hopes and dreams that the World has crushed. For God is not in "the World" as a system, for the World is not a completed Cosmos. The human heart, and the Shire it longs for, is already complete. The telling of the tale, is the telling of its completion again, in fact - the remaking or new creation of the world.
In the new heavens and earth, Time will be united and Space divided, opposite to what it is now. All will be well, and all manner of things, will be well. In our current mess, Space is mingling with no proper boundaries or garden walls, and Time is fragmented. The Word is considered toxic, and the false Image reigns.
To change it, the start (now more than ever) begins in the heart. Scripture tells us that the heart is wicked beyond and above all things, who can know it? Christ came to earth to cleanse the heart, and He did it. The Spirit searches the deep things of God, and testifies in the heart to what the eternal mystery is. Put on the mind of Christ, and discern the spirits. Reality will wake up, and change, as we do.
British Camp, Malvern Hills, may resemble (also) the great Took hideouts