Yet again my pride is destroying me. The scope of my thesis is no longer a niche commentary on a chapter of the Lord of the rings but an expansive all encompassing essay on art, humanity, and grace.

For those of you friends who follow me you have probably heard me ramble about these things in bits and pieces, now I am being forced to fit the incoherent parts together.

So, here is the first version of my introduction (advice welcome)

Thesis

It is strange to think how deeply man is moved by art: sonnets and symphonies, grand murals and guitar solos. These things do not seem, at first glance proportionate to the response they elicit. CS Lewis describes this sensation as a longing, both secret and inconsolable, for a far-off country. The disproportionate power of art suggests that it mediates something beyond itself, that its effects are not from it but that which flows through it. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory: “It was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing,” and further “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard” (quotation). Lewis’ claim is not that these things are those which we long for, but that they awaken the desire for something greater and more real. Long before Lewis, Plato offers a philosophical analogue to this intuition in his account of the forms, he calls this higher reality “the intelligible realm”, the realm of the forms(quote). In this realm reside the transcendent forms: truth, beauty, and goodness. These transcendent forms draw man beyond the immediate sensory and the merely rational, awakening a desire for something higher than either can contain.

This mediating action is not only vertical, connecting the earthly to the heavenly. Human beings are not only distant from transcendent reality; they are also divided within themselves. One can understand something abstractly or participate in it experientially, but seldom at once. As Lewis observes, one either understands pain as an idea or feels it concretely, but the two modes of knowing always pull apart(quote). The art of myth, Lewis proclaims, can bridge this divide, working horizontally, uniting meaning with experience.

Poet-Priest Malcolm Guite articulates that man’s sight is veiled so that he cannot behold this radiant reality. As Guite suggests, the solution to the obscuring veil of perception is not through transparency but through artistic coloration. The walls of the cave are not smashed through and made into skylights, neither are they replaced with TV broadcasts of the outside. To help his brethren in the cave, the artist creates a stained-glass window: carefully shaping and constructing the colorful panels, never pretending to show the true world and yet allowing diverse and true light to shine into the cave.

Among these redemptive and liberating arts storytelling, and the genre of fantasy in particular, often come under attack for being unreal, childish, and even mere escapism. All art which works through image and symbol is vulnerable to this attack. The accusation rings: why not simply make a clear window out from the cave? Furthermore, can any art be more than mere shadows of shadows? Plato himself gives the classical form of this suspicion. On Fairy Stories is a forceful correction of these accusations by JRR Tolkien. He succinctly rejects the very premise of these accusations saying that these accusers “confuse… the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”(quote) This claim is that man’s rightful place is not in the enslaving darkness of ignorance but in the emancipating radiance of awareness, and that the artist, just as the philosopher, has a real part to play in this liberation. This essay will endeavor to prove that properly understood, creative art does not confuse or sever man from reality but connects him to it.

At stake in this paper is the claim that Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation is one of the fullest articulations of what art is and does when it functions redemptively bridging the gap between the ineffable reality and man’s tangible lived experience. Plato raises the original suspicion of these bridge-making poets. Lewis names myth as the form this bridge takes and explains its workings. Guite gives name to this crossing, revealing its imagination as its faculty. From a different tradition, Norman Maclean wades the banks of a Montana river, building a bridge of his own to try to understand, confirming that such bridges are real: that story is the way to understand what direct experience cannot. Finally, Middle-Earth is the proof, a fantastic secondary world so true the reader encounters it not as a proposition but as lived reality.