March 25

Eucatastrophe. n. a sudden and favorable resolution of events in a story; a happy ending. From the Greek ευ- "good" and καταστροφή "destruction."

March 25.

On this day in history: the One Ring was destroyed. At the moment of direst defeat came sudden and unexpected victory. Eucatastrophe.

Also on this day in history: at the “yes” of a young Jewish woman, God Himself became a man.

Also on this day in history (so tradition goes): the God-man died. In a horrifying defeat, the very men He had come to save nailed him to a cross and killed him.

Think about this from the Dark Lord’s point of view for a moment. Satan had already messed up God’s plan for humanity by causing Adam to fall. That fall was not intended. God had a different plan for humans, but Satan worked on Adam’s free will, and Adam made his free choice and screwed the whole plan up.

Now, thousands of years later, there’s this man walking around that Satan can’t touch, who resists all temptation, who doesn’t commit even one little sin. Satan knows God has another plan, one involving a Messiah, to restore humanity’s connection to God. A totally sinless man is pretty suspicious. Satan’s not dumb. He figures this guy must be the Messiah, the instrument of God’s new plan.

But this isn’t Adam, willfully choosing himself over God. This man resists all temptation. And he’s preaching, converting, gaining followers. Which is God’s plan, obviously. And Satan can’t touch him.

But that doesn’t mean Satan can’t mess up the plan. God might be omnipotent, but as long as He allows humans to have free will, God’s plans can, and will, be foiled. Satan has done it once already. No reason to think he can’t do it again. This man might be untouchable, but the people around him aren’t. He can’t touch the sinless man? Fine. He’ll just use the people round him to remove him from the picture.

And he does. He incites the people to jealousy and suspicion. He works on their pride and greed. And three days after the sinless man entered Jerusalem to acclaim and triumph, He is hanging on a cross, abandoned by almost everyone, gasping as he slowly suffocates and bleeds out.

Satan is on the cusp of his greatest victory. God’s plan appears to have been foiled, again.

And then the man dies.

And suddenly, the whole universe is different. There is a bridge, a path, between humanity and God. Because a man who is also God willingly offered himself as a sacrifice to atone for man’s rebellion. His humanity allowed Him to represent humankind, and His divinity made his offering infinite — an infinite recompense for humanity's rebellion against the infinite God. And by willingly entering into suffering and dying for humanity, He made even suffering, that natural result of man’s separation from his Creator, contain redemptive value when accepted in imitation of Him. And by offering His life for every human as though there were no other, He made every human infinitely precious.

And Satan realizes: this was God's plan. He himself — Satan himself, the angelic power whose actions had brought about the downfall of the human species, whose pride was that he could spit in the face of his Creator and destroy, destroy, what the Creator had created — Satan himself brought about God’s victory, a victory snatched at the last second from what seemed certain and dire defeat.

And three days later, the murdered God-man walked out of his tomb.

Eucatastrophe.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” . . . It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. . . . 

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. 

- J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Serendipitous Synthesis

Anthony here again. I've been preparing for a Tolkien class that I hope to teach this summer (need a few more kids to sign up yet). At the same time, I've been talking about evolution. And I've been running a creative writing club at work. All of these things suddenly collided in my mind today in a surprising and kind of awesome way.

In my writing club yesterday I was trying to explain to the kids that to make their writing satisfying they need to make sure everything that happens in the story has an explanation within the world of the story. If, for instance, the author needs a character to do something for the plot, that character has to have his own reasons for doing it that make sense to him. Otherwise the reader will feel like the author is cheating, imposing his will from without, and the character ceases to seem like a real character with his own desires, motivations, and free will but instead is only a marionette manipulated by the author.

In the evolution post I wrote yesterday, I talked about how God’s causality is different from natural causality, and a mistake that both atheists and some religious people make is to assume that if a process like evolution is completely natural God had nothing to do with it. Actually God underlies the entire natural order and makes it what it is. It relies on him at every moment for its very existence. So we should expect a natural process to be explicable entirely in terms of natural cause and effect, even though the natural order itself requires something outside of it to explain it.

It stuck me that this is basically the same sort of thing that I had been talking about when I had said that elements in a story need to be explainable within the story itself. Even though the story is created by an outside author, everything within the story must make sense in terms of its own series of internal causes and effects.

And that made me think of Tolkien’s philosophy of subcreation. Tolkien believed that our ability to create stories is one way that we are made in the image of God. As God created the world, so we are able to sub-create our own imaginative worlds. By making stories we are, in our lesser, analogous way, mimicking what God did when he created the universe. We have something like the immanent yet transcendent relationship to our creations that God does with his.

All those things hit me at once today, and suddenly I got God’s relationship to his creation in a way I hadn't before. I’d already understood these things intellectually, but now it went home on some deeper, more fundamental level. I understood God’s complete independence of creation, and how far above it he is. And yet I also understood his love of it and his intimate involvement with it. And I understood creation’s complete dependence on God, and how much creation glorifies its Creator in its beauty and perfection. And I was amazed in a new way at the knowledge that God entered into his story – his-story – and become one of the characters, so to speak, bounded by his own creation of natural cause and effect. The author stepped into his work.

I’m doing a poor job putting into words what hit me in one wordless moment. But I love it when disparate things suddenly come together and give you a moment of understanding that is greater than you could get from any of the things alone. I haven’t had a moment like that since my undergrad, when I was studying C.S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas and Big Bang cosmology all at the same time.

Tolkien's Letter

So I've been re-reading the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien lately to prepare for the possibility of teaching a class on the great Catholic writer (pray for that to come to fruition!), and I came across one letter that moved me with its beauty and insight into so many things: the attention of God, guardian angels, miracles and "real life," happy endings, sanctity. The letter is so beautiful that I’m going to reproduce it here. Read slowly and savor it. :)

______________________________________

Letter 89   To Christopher Tolkien 7-8 November 1944 (FS 60)   20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

. . . . Your reference to the care of your guardian angel makes me fear that 'he' is being specially needed. I dare say it is so. . . . It also reminded me of a sudden vision (or perhaps apperception which at once turned itself into pictorial form in my mind) I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory's before the Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant’ Ore [Forty Hours Devotion] was being held there. I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God's very attention itself, personalized.

And I do not mean 'personified', by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since – for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love) – it has occurred to me that (I speak diffidently and have no idea whether such a notion is legitimate: it is at any rate quite separate from the vision of the Light and the poised mote) this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic. Anyway, dearest, I received comfort, part of which took this curious form, which I have (I fear) failed to convey: except that I have with me now a definite awareness of you poised and shining in the Light – though your face (as all our faces) is turned from it. But we might see the glimmer in the faces (and persons as apprehended in love) of others. . . . .

On Sunday Prisca and I cycled in wind and rain to St Gregory's. P. was battling with a cold and other disability, and it did not do her much immediate good, though she's better now; but we had one of Fr. C's best sermons (and longest). A wonderful commentary on the Gospel of the Sunday (healing of the woman and of Jairus' daughter), made intensely vivid by his comparison of the three evangelists. (P. was espec. amused by his remark that St Luke being a doctor himself did not like the suggestion that the poor woman was all the worse for them, so he toned that bit down). And also by his vivid illustrations from modern miracles. The similar case of a woman similarly afflicted (owing to a vast uterine tumour) who was cured instantly at Lourdes, so that the tumour could not be found, and her belt was twice too large.

Lourdes

And the most moving story of the little boy with tubercular peritonitis who was not healed, and was taken sadly away in the train by his parents, practically dying with 2 nurses attending him. As the train moved away it passed within sight of the Grotto. The little boy sat up. 'I want to go and talk to the little girl' – in the same train there was a little girl who had been healed. And he got up and walked there and played with the little girl; and then he came back, and he said 'I'm hungry now'. And they gave him cake and two bowls of chocolate and enormous potted meat sandwiches, and he ate them! (This was in 1927). So Our Lord told them to give the little daughter of Jairus something to eat.

"I'm hungry!"

So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are. They are intrusions (as we say, erring) into real or ordinary life, but they do intrude into real life, and so need ordinary meals and other results. (Of course Fr. C could not resist adding: and there was also a Capuchin Friar who was mortally ill, & had eaten nothing for years, and he was cured, and he was so delighted about it that he rushed off and had two dinners, and that night he had not his old pains but an attack of plain ordinary indigestion). But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have – though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation. And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain – in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it 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 (for which see the essay) – 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.

Eucatastrophe

Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But since the author if it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us. I was riding along on a bicycle one day, not so long ago, past the Radcliffe Infirmary, when I had one of those sudden clarities which sometimes come in dreams (even anaesthetic-produced ones). I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction: 'But of course! Of course that's how things really do work'. But I could not reproduce any argument that had led to this, though the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning). And I have since thought that one of the reasons why one can't recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply because there was not one: but there was (often maybe) a direct appreciation by the mind (sc. reason) but without the chain of argument we know in our time-serial life. However that's as may be. To descend to lesser things: I knew I had written a story of worth in 'The Hobbit' when reading it (after it was old enough to be detached from me) I had suddenly in a fairly strong measure the 'eucatastrophic' emotion at Bilbo's exclamation: "The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!'. . . . 

And in the last chapter of The Ring that I have yet written I hope you'll note, when you receive it (it'll soon be on its way) that Frodo's face goes livid and convinces Sam that he's dead, just when Sam gives up hope.

And while we are still, as it were, on the porch of St Gregory's on Sunday 5 Nov. I saw the most touching sight there. Leaning against the wall as we came out of church was an old tramp in rags, something like sandals tied on his feet with string, an old tin can on one wrist, and in his other hand a rough staff. He had a brown beard, and a curiously 'clean' face, with blue eyes, and he was gazing into the distance in some rapt thought not heeding any of the people, cert. not begging. I could not resist the impulse of offering him a small alms, and he took it with grave kindliness, and thanked me courteously, and then went back to his contemplation. Just for once I rather took Fr. C. aback by saying to him that I thought the old man looked a great deal more like St Joseph than the statue in the church – at any rate St Joseph on the way to Egypt.

He seems to be (and what a happy thought in these shabby days, where poverty seems only to bring sin and misery) a holy tramp! I could have sworn it anyway, but P. says Betty told her that he had been at the early mass, and had been to communion, and his devotion was plain to see, so plain that many were edified. I do not know just why, but I find that immensely comforting and pleasing. Fr. C says he turns up about once a year.

This is becoming a very peculiar letter! I hope it does not seem all very incomprehensible; for events have directed me to topics mat are not really treatable without erasions and re-writings, impossible in air letters ! . . . .

Your own father.

The Final Victory

Anthony here. I recently saw the movie The Hunger Games. I thought it was well done. Well acted. Very intense in parts. And quite true to the book.

I read the Hunger Games trilogy a few years ago, and thought the books were interesting. A lot of the themes, especially in the first book, made savvy points about our own culture’s love of spectacle, especially as exemplified by “reality” TV. We tend to filter out morality, to suspend our judgment of right and wrong in the service of a show. This has led people like Miley Cyrus to decide (not incorrectly) that what people want is spectacle, and remake themselves in that image.

Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, also links her imaginary world to ancient Rome. The name of her country, Panem, is the Latin word for bread, a reference to the phrase “panem et circenses,” or “bread and circuses” — give the people food and entertainment, and you can effectively control them. As Bill Watterson observed when he turned Karl Marx’s famous phrase on its head: television is the opiate of the masses. In many way we have already descended to the level of ancient Rome.

Are you not entertained?

So I think that Suzanne Collins creates a very compelling dystopian future in which disturbing trends in our society are carried forward to a logical, and chilling, conclusion. Unfortunately, what Collins can’t give is any solution. At the end of the trilogy (SPOILER ALERT) no true victory is won. Katniss, the heroine, is a shell of her former self, slowly recovering after having gone almost insane. But there is no true recovery. The best she can do is fall back on her survival instinct. She will go on living because, hey, it’s what she’s good at. But she is thoroughly disillusioned. The new society is not any better than the old. She might have set them back a bit, but they have the same urges as the overthrown Capitol, the same darkness inside, and she knows that sooner or later it will come out again.

It is very bleak.

And I can’t help but contrast it to my favorite writer, J.R.R. Tolkien. A lot of what is presented in The Hunger Games Tolkien would have agreed with. He sensed that evil seems to constantly overpower what is good. He wrote in a letter, “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat.’” In another letter, he expounded on the theme: “If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil . . . [E]vil labours with vast powers and perpetual success . . .”

Not exactly an optimist.

Vast powers and perpetual success. Observation would appear to bear this out. Evil seems more powerful than good. Good seems to be involved in a constant defensive struggle. A long defeat.

But I haven’t given you everything. In both those passages, Tolkien wrote more:

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples of the final victory” (Letter 195).

“If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects.’ No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in” (Letter 64).

It is this glimpse of the final victory that Tolkien has, and Suzanne Collins seems to lack. There is a moment in The Lord of the Rings in which we find Frodo and Sam struggling through the benighted, dying lands of Mordor, trying to accomplish a task so utterly beyond them that they have no room for hope. They keep going because to oppose evil is the right thing to do, even when victory seems impossible. They hide under some brambles against a rock face, and Frodo, weary from his burden, goes to sleep while Sam keeps watch. Struggling to stay awake, Sam looks out from the hiding place and glimpses, just for a moment, hope:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

That moment hits me hard every time I read it. I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful passage in all of fiction.

Ironically, what makes that passage possible is also what Tolkien’s critics have in mind when they speak of his story as being “simplistic” and “black and white.” They say that the characters are either all good or all evil, but this is manifestly untrue (Boromir, Denethor, Gollum . . .). So where does the accusation come from? From the fact that while the characters in Tolkien are not either all good or all evil, good and evil do exist (well, technically good exists – evil exists in the same manner that a hole does, as a lack or privation of some existing good. But that’s a topic for another post). Tolkien treats good and evil not as ideas that we create, but as objective, independent realities that we conform to. The characters in Tolkien’s story align themselves to these definite realities. So while a character might not be wholly good, he may still serve Good. And while a character might not be truly evil, he may still serve Evil. But this philosophy is alien to our modern world. The materialist worldview which characterizes modernity reduces everything to physical cause and effect, and thereby reduces good and evil to human ideas that do not correspond to any greater reality. In this worldview, to think too deeply about the human capacity for evil leads ultimately to nihilism. There is no solution, because there is no meaning at all.

Oh, the emptiness!

I don’t know Suzanne Collins’ background, but I suspect that she subscribes to this worldview. Most people do, to one extent or another, even if they don’t think about it directly, simply because it’s the dominant worldview of our time. Her story, especially in the final book, Mockingjay, conforms much more closely to the expectations of the critics of Tolkien: moral dilemmas without apparent answers, good characters doing evil things, et cetera. There doesn't seem to be a true, transcendent good that can be grasped and held onto, even in the midst of evil. Good is overpowered by darkness. That is why there is no transcendence or hope in the story. Ultimately, the best that the main character can do is simply survive. And even that’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Tolkien, on the other hand, believed in a final victory. While good appears to be fighting a defensive battle, it continually subverts evil, turning it to good in surprising moments. Tolkien coined a word: eucatastrophe, which he defined as a sudden happy turn from darkness to light, from defeat to victory, from sorrow to joy. The happy ending. In a letter to his son, Tolkien wrote:

“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" (Letter 89).

Eucatastrophe

Make no mistake: Tolkien understood evil. In The Lord of the Rings, even the victory over Sauron is just a respite. Sauron is defeated, but much good that existed before has been lost forever. Evil endures, and will rise in other places and other ways. But here’s the kicker: it will be defeated again. And again. And though it may seem that evil is constantly winning, still it will turn to good, again and again, until the final victory.

“Evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.” Even if we suffer defeat now, even if we suffer it repeatedly, still we know that good will ultimately prevail. That may strike Tolkien’s nihilist critics as simplistic, but I, for one, am willing to live with it.