As I have studied over the years and generally grown in my experience of life there are a few realizations that I have come to. For me these realizations have been profound and I believe that they chart a course away from the standard assumptions and core beliefs of the modern world. They mark out the beginnings of a path and I would follow where it leads. I share my thoughts with you as an invitation to join me on this journey, if you should so choose. There is, of course, every possibility that the things which have been profound for me will seem less meaningful to you. Perhaps you will disagree with my assessments, my conclusions, or possibly both. If that proves to be the case, I wish you well in your way and I shall go happily on in this other.
My first inklings of this other path began when, as a young boy, I was introduced to the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings I was unknowingly inducted into another view of the world. The sub-creation of Tolkien presented me with a different way of seeing the Primary Creation. I did not know then that I was being given my first glimpse of the world through the lens of classical metaphysics, or that I was experiencing a fundamentally different, and older, philosophy of language than that which dominates the modern world. I knew only that what I saw was beautiful, and good, and I loved it.
I did not love it in that sense in which we flippantly say we love a good steak, or an episode of our favorite TV show. I found in the vision presented something immensely attractive. There was in it, something lovable. Likewise I do not say that it was good merely in that sense which means it suited my personal taste, or that I found it enjoyable, though I certainly did. Rather I mean that there was about the vision presented something wholesome and even healing.
Almost at once, I found myself hoping that what I saw and experienced in Middle Earth could really be true. Not that I hoped to discover Hobbits and Elves still abroad in the world under the sun. In Middle Earth I was presented with a world full of meaning and of life, a world full of virtue and of heroism. Not only was there meaning in every tree and leaf but the deeds of men were so laden with import that they could forever mark the world itself, leaving behind the imprint of meaning in a place long after the deeds were done and the people who did them passed beyond the circles of the world.
This is a point at which many people go wrong with works of fantasy like Lord of the Rings, both those who like and those who dislike fantasy. In Tolkien’s work we are not ultimately presented with the choice between a fantasy world and the real world. It isn’t Middle Earth vs. the Real World. For Middle Earth IS our Earth. The world of the fantasy is not a fantasy world. It is simply the real world seen differently. Middle Earth is not another world; rather it is a lens through which we may see our world in a new and perhaps a truer way. Of course I would eventually discover that this “new” way of seeing the world was not new at all. Quite the contrary, it is a very old way of seeing the world. One we have simply forgotten.
This truth is why Tolkien himself happily embraced the charges of escapism that were leveled against him in his day. He recognized that what his books offered was not an escape from the real world, but an escape from the stifling oppression of a false vision of the world. This only seems like escapism to those who believe that the worldview provided by modernity is true. Tolkien did not.
It was the contrast provided by Tolkien’s view of reality that first made me aware of a distinct lack in modernity. On the one hand, whether the otherworldly allure of the Elves or the earthy and homelike charm of the Hobbits, I was presented with a world that was overflowing with beauty, and alive with wonder. On the other hand, the view of the world presented by society around me, the world of modernity, was deliberately drab and unbeautiful. It preferred efficiency to beauty, control to wonder, equality to excellence, and profit to honor. Tolkien told me that the world was bigger than I thought and more than I knew. Modernity insisted it was less.
But the reductionism of Modernity has not done its work only on our view of the world; it has reduced and atrophied our understanding of beauty as well. When I speak of beauty I do not mean merely that which is appealing to the senses. Nor even only that which evokes a certain emotional response. Though these are functions of beauty, they are only the surface. These are only reactions within the observer; they are the response to beauty, not beauty itself.
To say that beauty is merely an expression of individual taste or “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is the same as saying that beauty does not objectively exist within the things themselves. This has a number of important implications, but perhaps the most important is that nothing is beautiful within itself, it is only made beautiful by whether I, the observer, like it or not. This points us towards an extreme form of egotism where value and meaning do not exist within things themselves, rather only I as the observer can imbue things with them. While this view promises power, self-exaltation, and a certain kind of freedom, it ultimately puts us in a prison of emptiness. No matter how far I journey outward into the world I can never find anything but myself. In this view reality becomes a house of mirrors in which the self and nothing but the self is endlessly reflected. I can hardly imagine a more boring, insignificant, and unappealing world.
Tolkien opened my eyes to a world that is full of wonder precisely because it is not an endless reflection of my own self. In every corner there are things alien and strange, wild and free to be themselves. At the time, of course, I was not aware that what Tolkien presented was an imaginative introduction into the ancient worldview that was, for more than a thousand years, the foundation of Western Civilization. As C.S. Lewis once said of the stories of George MacDonald, Professor Tolkien baptized my imagination. He did better than simply teaching me the truths of the Ancient Way, he allowed me to fall in love with them.
For the next article in this series – Finding the Ancient Way: Part 2
