Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians

by Alison Milbank

This book takes Chesterton's 'natural theology' through fairytales seriously as a theological project appropriate to an intellectual attempt to return to faith in a secular age. It argues that Tolkien's fiction makes sense also as the work of a Catholic writer steeped in Chestertonian ideas and sharing his literary-theological poetics. While much writing on religious fantasy moves quickly to talk about wonder, Milbank shows that this has to be hard won and that Chesterton is more akin to the modernist writers of the early twentieth-century who felt quite dislocated from the past. His favoured tropes of paradox, defamiliarization and the grotesque have much in common with writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce and their use of the demotic as well as the 'mythic method'. Using Chesterton's literary rhetoric as a frame, the book sets out to chart a redemptive poetics that first decentres the reader from his habitual perception of the world, then dramatizes his self-alienation through the grotesque, before finding in that very alienation a sort of pharmakon through paradox and an embrace of difference. The next step is to change one's vision of the world beyond the self through magic which, paradoxically, is the means by which one can reconnect with the physical world and remove the fetishism and commodification of the object. Chesterton's theology of gift is the means in which this magic becomes real and people and things enter into reciprocal relations that reconnect them with the divine.

Genres: Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, Christianity, Literary Criticism

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2007

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating and delightful read. There's still so much to sit on and stew over...Milbank covered a variety of topics in-depth, from Chesterton and Tolkien's use of the grotesque to gift theory/theology and even Father Christmas himself.

I found it interesting how she returned multiple times to a pushback against capitalism, though most specifically a utilitarian way/view of life that it can lead to. Her chapter on gift-giving was, I thought, quite unique (at least from books I've read before), and so all the more delightful to explore!

I was a bit turned off when she related the hobbits' birthday party traditions to Freud's theories, but that was only a brief paragraph and nothing more!

Milbank really is able to tie in a wealth of theology, philosophy, and mythology into a deep discussion of the works of Tolkien and Chesterton. Ultimately she argues that both writers offer a theology of art as practice - they "show how making - poiesis - opens the way to God and the way to encounters with the world.Their theurgic theology is practical in taking the reader into an intution of being through the enchanted experience of art. I tis a theology therefore that is inseparable from its instantiation and in which writing becomes mediation just as it reveals mediation. As a gift it likewise cements social relations and draws attention to the exchanges between people, and with the sacred."

This is a great book (full warning - it is fairly academic) for anyone who wishes to dive into and wrestle with the deeper and foundational thoughts that formed Tolkien and Chesterton's art.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

To what extent is Lord of the Rings an imaginative work of Christian theology, and to what extent is it a reworking of multiple mythologies set in Tolkien's own obsessively detailed Middle Earth? This is the sort of question that could set Tolkien-fans arguing for hours - and indeed I've been part of such a heated discussion on more than one occasion.

Milbank would answer "both" to the question, but comes down very clearly on the significance of Christian theology in Lord of the Rings. It is certainly no allegory, but this, she explains, is not because Tolkien dislikes allegory but because he was concerned that allegorisation separated too distinctly imagination and reality, as though a reader can say "Oh well this is what it really means..." and move on.

Milbank marries Tolkien's imaginative theology to equally well known, though less popular, Chesterton, explaining how the world of Faery was crucial to both of them in understanding and presenting the divine. It's a book that has much to commend it and will provoke a great deal of thought (and doubtless disagreement also).

[Andrew Stout · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful in a number of ways, but I particularly enjoyed Milbank's discussion of the way that Tolkien uses Christian redemptive typology in multi-faceted and paradoxical ways in Lord of the Rings. There is neither a straight-forward Christ figure nor one definitive redemptive action. Rather, as a pagan anticipation of the Christian, there are many different themes, figures, and actions which give a shadowy picture of the era that will later be inaugurated in the Incarnation.

[Adam Shaeffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I found much of interest and much to enjoy in Milbank’s work, two concepts arrested my attention, both of which occurred toward the beginning of the book and were woven throughout it: sub-creation as an avenue for approaching God and the need to re-enchant the world.

Milbank writes, “And it is in the ability to create — fiction is linked to the Latin verb facere, to make — that the artist comes closest to God” (64). It seems to me that this idea is laced through Leaf by Niggle as he carefully draws a tree that is never completed in life, but when at last he reaches heaven he sees the very tree complete and in the flesh before his very eyes. Niggle has participated in the ongoing creation through his art and in that way has contributed something real and lasting to eternity itself, for the material world and eternity are equally real for Tolkien (53). For Niggle, his making has opened the way to God (166).

The idea of approaching God through art — through storytelling for Tolkien — gives us a view of the end for which art is created and life is lived and that is God himself. In a sense, the end of sub-creation has echoes of the beatific vision. We create because we were created and in creating we most resemble our Father the Creator. There is formation and transformation happening here. We are being remade into His image. In our participation with God in our sub-creation we, like Tolkien’s Ainur in The Silmarillion, are shown ourselves (19), are set free to be ourselves (20, 51, 123), and are even empowered to transcend ourselves and become more than what we were (51).

Tolkien, like Chesterton before him, saw the world as both storied and gifted, but more importantly he recognized it as other than himself (12). The world was not something to be claimed and appropriated as both Sauron and Saruman attempted to do. Rather, it was offered to us as a gift and one of our tasks is to see it as such. But this is not our default mode of seeing. The world must be re-enchanted for us so that we might see it as the gift of God that it is. And this is one thing the gospel achieves in our lives. It makes the world new in reality, but also in our perception. We see it differently. We see it, perhaps not as it really is, but at least as we were meant to see it (18).

This too is the task of spiritual theology: the re-enchantment of the world. For the aim of spiritual theology according to Simon Chan is “to discover the transcendent within every sphere of life and every area of experience,” (Spiritual Theology, 19) which is just another way of saying that the world is enchanted if we only have eyes to see it. Or to put it another way, when all of experience is rendered fantastic, we can finally see as we were meant to (164). For the world is somehow both “utterly real and enchanted at one and the same time,” and when the world is made strange to our eyes and re-enchanted we are able to “receive the world back as a gift” (121). This enables us to recognize that in being created, we are not the center. We are not the focus. When we receive the world as a gift our eyes are drawn back to the giver: the one who formed us in our mothers’ wombs and continues to form us even now.

[Luis Grandson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great analysis of the techniques and ideas behind the writings of Chesterton and Tolkien that results in a better understanding of the men themselves. Even though it's academic in research and form, the book can be as poetic and beautiful as the writing they produced.

[David Mosley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last Read 2011 (4 November)

[Jeremy]

Alison Milbank was the keynote speaker at the Mideast Conference on Christianity and Literature at Patrick Henry College where I read a paper on Tolkien (Oct. 31, 2014).

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 stars. Packed full of insights on Tolkien, Chesterton and the imagination. Just great stuff.