The Eucatastrophe of Eowyn and Faramir

'Yes, we wait for the stroke of doom,' said Faramir. And they said no more; and it seemed to them as they stood upon the wall that the wind died, and the light failed, and the Sun was bleared, and all sounds in the City or in the lands about were hushed: neither wind, nor voice, nor bird-call, nor rustle of leaf, nor their own breath could be heard; the very beating of their hearts was stilled. Time halted.

And as they stood so, their hands met and clasped, though they did not know it. And still they waited for they knew not what. Then presently it seemed to them that above the ridges of the distant mountains another vast mountain of darkness rose, towering up like a wave that should engulf the world, and about it lightnings flickered; and then a tremor ran through the earth, and they felt the walls of the City quiver. A sound like a sigh went up from all the lands about them; and their hearts beat
suddenly again.

'It reminds me of Númenor,' said Faramir, and wondered to hear himself speak.
'Of Númenor?' said Éowyn.
'Yes,' said Faramir, 'of the land of Westernesse that foundered and of the great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness unescapable. I often dream of it.'
'Then you think that the Darkness is coming?' said Éowyn. 'Darkness Unescapable?' And suddenly she drew close to him.

'No,' said Faramir, looking into her face. 'It was but a picture in the mind. I do not know what is happening. The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. Éowyn, Éowyn, White Lady of Rohan, in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!' And he stooped and kissed her brow.

And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air. And the Shadow departed, and the Sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the City men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts from what source they could not tell.

And before the sun had fallen far from the noon out of the East there came a great Eagle flying, and he bore tidings beyond hope from the Lords of the West, crying:

Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,

for the realm of Sauron is ended for ever,

and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard,

for your watch hath not been in vain,

and the Black Gate is broken,

and your King hath passed through,

and he is victorious.

Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West,

for your King shall come again, 

and he shall dwell among you

all the days of your life.

And the tree that was withered shall be renewed,

and he shall plant it in the high places,

and the City shall be blessed.

Sing all ye people!

And the people sang in all the ways of the city.

The Return of the King, J R R Tolkien

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love."" J R R Tolkien - Letter 89

Last night I attended my first Easter Vigil - this is only partly out of lack of motivation to go - I am a cradle Catholic, but my parents never went or took us, and I never really was taught the importance of it or the triduum until I started more consciously and more seriously trying to live my Catholic faith. I actually first became intrigued by a reference to it in Evelyn Waugh's novel Sword of Honour where the soldier mentions the exsultet being sung at that moment around the world. For me it was a deeply moving experience, in which a rite with very ancient origins immerses you in the profoundest mysteries of the faith - without which the suffering and death of Good Friday, nor the joy and glory of Easter Sunday would make sense - Alexander Schmemann says this of Holy Saturday:

The "Great and Holy Sabbath" is the day which connects Good Friday, the commemoration of the Cross, with the day of Christ’s Resurrection. To many the real nature and meaning of this "connection," the very necessity of this "middle day," remains obscure. For a good majority of churchgoers, the "important" days of Holy Week are Friday and Sunday, the Cross and the Resurrection. These two days, however, remain somehow "disconnected." There is a day of sorrow, and then, there is the day of joy. In this sequence, sorrow is simply replaced by joy . . . But according to the teaching of the Church, expressed in her liturgical tradition, the nature of this sequence is not that of a simple replacement. The Church proclaims that Christ has "trampled death by death." It means that even before the Resurrection, an event takes place in which the sorrow is not simply replaced by joy, but is itself transformed into joy. Great Saturday is precisely this day of transformation, the day when victory grows from inside the defeat, when before the Resurrection, we are given to contemplate the death of death itself... all this is expressed, and even more, all this really takes place every year in this marvellous morning service, in this liturgical commemoration which becomes for us a saving and transforming present. (Source here)

So I had spent my life with a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Easter, of my faith really. The Easter Vigil - and this is an argument for the central importance of the liturgy if anything ever was - enabled me to more fully enter into the reality of my faith, staving off some of the 'grey veil of doubt' which Ratzinger says has cast its shadow over Christendom.

 Schmemann's explanation of Holy Saturday echoes what Tolkien says about the Eucatastrophe in the quotation above - "Joy and Sorrow at one, reconciled" - in the Easter Vigil sorrow is transformed into joy as Christ 'tramples death by death'. From the readings which talk of the yearning of fallen creation for deliverance, of the types and prefigurements of the saviour in the Old Testament, like scattered sparks of light which find their consummation in the great light of Christ, to the joyous acclamations of 'this blessed night' in the exultet, these all connect you to the great cosmic movement of fall and redemption, which Ratzinger calls in The Spirit of the Liturgy, the exitus and reditus - the going out and coming back - the great overflowing generosity of God as Love.

I have been re-reading the Lord of the Rings, and have fortuitously come upon the great triumphant climax of the story where the ring is cast into the crack of doom and Sauron is defeated and the King returns and vanquishes evil at Eastertime! But the passage above which I read today really struck me as a beautiful and moving portrayal of the way this eucatastrophe feels when mediated through a 'fairy-tale' - the tale of Eowyn and Faramir set against the backdrop of the defeat of Sauron, set against the even more remote backdrop in Tolkien's cosmic drama of the destruction of numenor (essentially a myth of Atlantis story).

In fact I saw in the passage direct echoes of the Easter Vigil - the waiting - the stillness of time coming to a halt - the reality of evil and darkness and then the great joy which no reason can deny. In fact the Eagle's song of joy and exultation could be a paraphrase of the exsultet! (And the reference to the Black Gate being broken and the King passing through is very clearly an echo of Psalm 24 which says:
"Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up O ancient doors! That the King of glory may come in"
Ratzinger again says: "...this is the content of the message of Easter. Not only is there a door in, there is also a door out. Death is no longer a house with no exits, a place of no return." Therefore God becomes as we are that we may be as he is.)

More than this, there is an eschatological feel to it - Faramir feels that he is in the end of days and wonders if another great cataclysm is coming like the great wave that swept over Numenor. But the expectation and feeling that no darkness could endure in this hour; this is also part of the Holy Saturday vigil - to quote Schmemann again:

But this life between the Resurrection of Christ and the day of the common resurrection, is it not precisely the life in the Great Saturday? Is not expectation the basic and essential category of Christian experience? We wait in love, hope and faith. And this waiting for "the resurrection and the life of the world to come," this life which is "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:34), this growth of expectation in love, in certitude; all this is our own "Great Saturday." Little by little everything in this world becomes transparent to the light that comes from there, the "image of this world" passes by and this indestructible life with Christ becomes our supreme and ultimate value.

Every year, on Great Saturday, after this morning service, we wait for the Easter night and the fullness of Paschal joy. We know that they are approaching — and yet, how slow is this approach, how long is this day! But is not the wonderful quiet of Great Saturday the symbol of our very life in this world? Are we not always in this "middle day," waiting for the Pascha of Christ, preparing ourselves for the day without evening of His Kingdom?

Happy Easter to you all.

On Renunciation, Liberation, Sin, and Death

This follows on from my previous post, which was a simple expression of desire and yearning for liberation in the song Fisherman's Blues by the Waterboys. But liberation from what? What are the chains which hold you fast? It is the big question - and different religions answer in different ways. Religions such as Buddhism usually characterise those chains as ones of ignorance and desire and suffering. In Hinduism the word Moksha expresses the idea of freedom from these marks of reincarnation. In Christianity the emphasis is more moral - the chains are ones of sin and thus death. As often happens, the reading I was doing today was saying a lot about this yearning for liberation, and the entrapment of the human being.

As usual I have been doing one of my favourite things - reading about Tolkien! In particular the excellent 'Tolkien's Sacramental Vision' by Craig Bernthal. I have based much of what I say here on his chapter 'Penance, Reconciliation and Their Refusal' in that book.

For Tolkien evil is something by which we are caught. There is a strong element of addiction in all those who are caught by evil in The Lord of the Rings - not just those who are caught by the Ring, but for instance Pippin with the Palantir etc. This is something especially fresh to me at this moment because in preparation for Lent - and hopefully beyond it - I have decided to try and break my dependence on mobile devices and social media by selling both my smartphone and my tablet.

This may seem extreme - 'haven't I got any self-discipline?', people have said to me; 'just stop checking them so much, there's no need to go that far.' My answer to that is - would you say to an alcoholic 'just have a little glass of whisky - have you no self-control?' Of course they haven't, that's the point, and whilst I don't think my compulsion to check my phone and go on social media is quite that bad yet, I have become aware over the last few months of a rather negative impact of all these things on my life. Quite apart from the fact that I have not really read any actual books for years, when I used to a lot, (no time to - I have twitter to check!) my sleep was cut down because I would be on my phone until the early hours, I found myself forced by Facebook into a projecting a distorted version of myself and recognised rather a lot of ego investment and pride in what I was doing, which sometimes made my interactions with others negative. These are probably just some of the negative effects of having constant access to social media on mobile devices. I'm sure there are limited positive effects, but for me they have been massively outweighed by the downside mentioned above.

I mention all this not to further mire myself in pride - look how abstemious I am! - but to give a practical example of the results of effectively chosen renunciations. I have been more productive, at peace, calmer and happier this week than I have for a long time, all by giving stuff up. It will become more difficult as I realise that I cannot rely on things like Google Maps or Kindle on journeys! But as renunciation goes this has been fairly easy! I'm not quite ready for the hair shirt and bread and water yet!

My point is it is very easy to become caught in the technological age. You find whole hours have gone by just staring at your phone. For many people this is fine. They are happy playing candy crush saga or whatever. But I have too much that I want to do. I don't want to obliterate myself, to numb my awareness. I want to stay awake. I need to stay awake - to be vigilant in a moral sense, but also to create - you cannot create without life making some kind of sharp and shocking splash against your skin every now and again. Those who create, be it art or poetry or whatever, I would guess have found working ways of allowing life to sabotage their carefully planned and controlled creative environments, but not sabotage too much. It's a tightrope walk, creativity.

But once you remove the external traps that are there to catch you, it is not all plain sailing. A subtler form of trap lies in wait within, a tendency which the external technological traps were just there to exploit once it manifested. This is the inner disposition of restlessness. This is a much more difficult trap to renounce. [see Josef Pieper - Leisure; the Basis of Culture]

Returning to the Biblical basis of this, the Old Testament Covenant was a life or death choice. The choice of evil meant you were ensnared by death, and as Bernthal points out St. John says much the same thing: "He that loveth not, abideth in death" (1 John 3:14)

"Death is a condition you enter while alive, and you abide in it - you accept it, you don't struggle, and your conscience grows numb" - The way Bernthal puts it echoes my fear that midway on my life's journey I begin to blunder off the path, being full of sleep:

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard--so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well

I'll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder

Off the true path.

Dante, Inferno, Canto I

The entrapment, the capture, is a slow process; you don't presumably realise where you have started to go wrong until it's too late. Persistence in sin makes you go spiritually blind, as Feser puts it here (Sex Part II - Aquinas on the daughters of lust), which explains a lot.

That abiding can be turned around - he that loveth, abideth in life, clearly, and this is the 'life to the full' that Jesus speaks of, which comes from drinking of the waters of eternal life that He gives us. Graham Ward says:

"The goal of contemplation is a mutual discerning - to know even as I am known. The knowing is a condition of being, a condition in the Johannine texts that is often described as abiding ('meno' - to stay, to stand, but transitively, to await, to expect.)"

The paradigmatic case in all Tolkien's work of this abiding in death is Smaug. This dragon is possessed by what he possesses: his hoard of gold. He abides with death - a reign of pure quantity as Guenon put it - every last gold piece counted, and unable to rise from the hoard in case something goes missing. He is therefore bound to the tomb of his cave. This grasping or appropriation Tolkien uses as an analog of our epistemological appropriation, our inability to let the known be known without somehow attempting to make the known into an image of ourself, is a reverse case of that 'knowing as we are known' which is abiding in love. We must constantly practise renunciation in order to allow things to be as they are, not what we want them to be.

Heidegger takes the moment of death, cutting as it does across all our plans and intentions, as a spiritual opportunity, as it presents us with the possibility of absurdity and therefore invites us to live life authentically. At least, this is what I take him to be saying! Heideggerians correct me if I'm wrong! When life is lived 'as rite not as flight' then we are learning how to die well, which is surely the aim of a good life.

In the Silmarillion, men, when rejecting death, enter into a deeper spiritual death. They lose vibrancy and joy. The mark of being captured by evil is joylessness, lack of merriment or gaiety. How do we avoid this? Interior battle is Tolkien's answer - look at how many battles there are in the Lord of the Rings - but most of them go on in the inner forum of conscience of the characters. We need all the spiritual weapons we can muster for these battles - waybread, the phial of galadriel, the elven rope - all of these gifts which save Frodo and Sam are sacramental or prayer related. We have been given help in the battle.

To go back to Dante, in the Inferno, the negative gravity of sin pulls him into hell - he cannot ascend the hills he has come down, and must go through hell to escape. 'Sin creates a proclivity to sin'. In the Catholic tradition, this is why confession is so important. Herbert McCabe:

"The fire of hell is God. God is terrible and no man can look upon him and live, he is a consuming fire. To be safe in the presence of God you must yourself be sacred, you must share in God's power and life. To have come into the presence of God without this protection is damnation. That is one picture of hell, the fundamental biblical one...

But hell is also the inability to accept death. The damned man is he who does not die in Christ, for whom death is therefore not a means of resurrection to new life. He is not able to make the act of self-sacrifice required of him. He is unable to see why he should. I picture the damned as spending their time continually justifying themselves to themselves, constantly showing how right they were and why they have no need to repent...

All the souls in hell, I think, are quite convinced that they have been damned unjustly. The analogy I find most useful is that of the child who has lost his temper and is sulking. He wants of course, to return to the affection of his friends, but he is blowed if he is going to apologize, his pride keeps him out even though he wants very much to return. Everybody is fully prepared to have him back if he will only make the gesture of returning, but this he finds himself unable to do. He cannot perform the self-abandonment required. He is unable to die.

Anyone in hell who was sorry for his sin would of course instantly be in heaven; the point of hell is that this does not happen."

Church Attendance

Geoffrey Korz: “Church attendance in the West today is not hit by persecution, but by seduction” - http://wp.me/pKoCE-2HT

The Grand Inquisitor; 'Freedom' and Terrorism

"As a good number of commentators have noted in recent years, the opposition, now canonical in the public language of many governments, between the "freedom" of the North Atlantic cultural milieu and the nightmare of terrorism and fundamentalism that exists outside this enclave is more and more vacuous. Freedom as a designation for maximal consumer choice (including the consumerizing of public service and personal care) combined with an economic jeu sans frontieres is an indifferent rallying point for moral conviction, conviction about the goodness or justice rather than simply the comfort of a society. ... Faced with a global ideology of resentment, as wholly modern in its formation as is western secularism, an ideology equally determined to end history in its preferred way for the sake of an absolutely manifest social good, our rhetoric of defending freedom does not make a very persuasive showing.

One of the things that makes Ivan's Inquisitor such a perennially haunting figure is that his voice is clearly audible on both sides of the current global conflict. He is both the manager of a universal market in guaranteed security and comfort for a diminished human soul and the violent enforcer of a system beyond dialogue and change. And we may feel a similar unease at the way in which the profiles of terror are sketched in Devils: the selfless fanatic and the solipsistic libertarian are pushed together, at the mercy of anyone with the material and communicative resources to manipulate them. Repeatedly, he [Dostoevsky] insists to his readers that this is what a world without icons, without presence, will mean."
Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky; Language, Faith and Fiction

The Grand Inquisitor, a famous passage in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, presents us with a conflict between heroic freedom and comfortable enslavement. You can read it here (Book 5, Chapter 5; p221 of the pdf)

The Grand Inquisitor throws into stark relief the incoherence of the modern notion of freedom post-Enlightenment. The Islamists know that the West's talk of freedom is empty, based as it is on a system of absolute abasement before the gods of the marketplace. We have chosen comfortable enslavement rather than freedom, or freedom to choose between many different products:

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
(Karamazov again)

The problem is that freedom in the west today is actually freedom-from, in which case it is a value that is founded on a negative, on a repudiation of something else, and thus, is at the outset a reactive rather than an active quality. The act of liberation that our ideals of freedom are founded on was actually itself a violent and reactive act. It was a tearing-away of state from religion in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Rather than any more of my own poor rambling, I shall leave here some links to articles which expand on this last point.

This blog post by Artur Rosman on how The ‘Wars of Religion’ were actually ‘Wars of the Birth of the Nation-State.’

Over at Gornahoor, Cologero continues his defence of Tradition with his usual acuity: "One use of intelligence, or rational thought, is to determine how best to achieve a goal. This is instrumental intelligence. True intelligence, however, is to know what goals to aim for."

An Office for the Dead

An Office for the Dead

Leave me you workers of iniquity:
for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
The Lord has heard my supplication:
The Lord has received my prayer.

So let all my enemies be ashamed
and very much troubled.
Let them be turned back,
and be ashamed very speedily.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine on them.

First Reading
My dear people, since God has loved us so much, we too should love one another. No-one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us and his love will be complete in us. We can know that we are living in him and he is living in us because he lets us share his Spirit. We ourselves saw and we testify that the Father sent his Son as saviour of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him, and he in God. We ourselves have known and put our faith in God's love towards ourselves. God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him. Love will come to its perfection in us when we can face the day of Judgement without fear; because even in this world we have become as he is. In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love.

V. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord hear my voice.
R. Remember me O Lord, my life is but a breath.

Let us pray.
O Lord, whose nature it is to have mercy and spare, we humbly beg your mercy on the souls of the faithful departed, that through your mercy and our feeble prayers, they may attain to that glory which they have always desired. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I Dreamed I Saw Robin Williams

Last night I dreamt that Robin Williams came back to tell me what the afterlife was like. He warned me that I would not escape God's wrath without prayer and good works. He said to pray vigilantly to become emptied of all desire and earthly vanity so that I might be filled with God's grace.

He showed me a place where souls were bound to the earth by the weight of their sin, some of them flattened by it, and the great fire of God's love was blowing on them, but instead of being caught up in ecstasy by it, it was a great torment to them, and they struggled to escape its heat. Robin Williams said that God's wrath was the flipside of his love, exclusively the result of a constant rejection of love both of God and neighbour in this life.

This worried me somewhat, and I awoke in distress, and I put my head against the window and looked out at the cold sad new year's day, and thought about all the worries of the coming years, and wondered what this year and all the years in my future would bring.

Dare To Step Forward

Sooner or later it becomes alarmingly clear: Yes, I am Israel. I am the ox that does not know its owner. And when, appalled, we get down from the pedestal of our pride, we find, as the Psalmist says, that our soul lifts itself up; it rises, and God's hidden presence penetrates ever deeper into our tangled lives. Advent is not a miracle out of the blue such as is offered by the preachers of revolution and the heralds of new ways of salvation. God acts in an entirely human way with us, leading us step by step and waiting for us. The days of Advent are like a quiet knocking at the door of our smothered souls, inviting us to undertake the risk of stepping forward toward God's mysterious presence, which alone can make us free.

From 'Seek That Which Is Above' by Joseph Ratzinger