Good Interviewers interviewing other Good Interviewers is becoming my favorite type of podcast. This one is Tyler Cowen interviewing Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think.
For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don’t challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment.
I would add the religious-appearing psychedelic experiences, the similarities and differences of meditation and near-death experiences across various cultures, and how kinds of polytheism and demiurgic beliefs might be compatible with monotheism, all of which are covered here. Cowen is not a believer and is relentless in his questioning - and in particular, returning to the question. But Douthat is also very comfortable casting his net wide and then gathering back in and even does it to Tyler a couple of times when he has gone down a side trail.
I kept sensing a strong familiarity with CS Lewis behind some of Ross's arguments, and the Tolkien and L'Engle references reinforced that. He gets more specific about that deeper in. A very satisfying listen on the way out to a Tolkien discussion in Western MA last night.
The Tolkien discussion focused on The Two Towers, BTW, and last night was Aragorn and leadership. Most of it was introductory, I thought, but two things stood out. Aragorn has a priestly role that shows up quite vividly in places, such as his last words to Boromir, but he can change to other leadership aspects in a flash: deliberative, commanding, exhorting, ceremonial. When you see how quickly Tolkien switches from one to another you see what fine writing it is. I am especially looking forward to the discussion of Frodo and suffering.
There was also the rather obligatory repetition of how the book is so much better than the movie, which I agree with but am tired of - yet this was different. The speaker pointed out how all the nuanced and spiritually deeper sections he was quoting for this lesson were left out of the movie. Even Peter Jackson can't put everything in, but noticing how often, even how reliably, the deeper meanings were excluded did cause me to wonder whether Jackson did not in fact even particularly notice them in his desire to get other things right - the atmospheres, for example.
The first time I read Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse the religious sections grated on me; why interrupt such a fine adventure epic poem with preachy religion?
ReplyDeleteBy perhaps the third time I began to realize that those parts were the real core of the work, and the place of greatest meaning. You have to develop your palate so to speak; our culture doesn’t prepare you for it.
Thank you, I shall listen while walking the dog. I hope aural alone will impart what you got.
ReplyDeletePersonal preference, for depth, are collections of letters from author to people he knows well. Absurd and obsolete for most, perhaps. (I know a superior book store when it has a section 'collected letters'. These are few. )
Not to contradict your encomium, but to provoke your interest, JRR Tolkien in ?Sept 1950 wrote a v long letter to publisher Milton Waldman, which he says: "I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language." ( sev more pages follow of him doing just this)
And for real Tabasco, his letter to son Christopher overseas in RAF, Dec 1944, on 'Democracy'.
If interested, how anyone might get it without his book, would be hard. But not impossible.
No one should expect bland easily issued and digested output from such a mind.
Kevin, true. The part about allegorical language being necessary must come from either Chesterton or Barfield, and Lewis states the concept in a few places also. I therefore imagine it was discussed among the Inklings in general. As for democracy, Tolkien was an anarcho-monarchist, so I imagine the letter likely is Tabasco. Thank you for the reference.
ReplyDeleteYou can read that and the other letters here:
ReplyDeletehttps://bibliothecaveneficae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf
It’s letter 94.
Thanks. The Republic of Letters is maintained by gratitude.
ReplyDeleteSome further thoughts that shine light on this topic, from ‘The Great Code’ by Northrop Frye:
ReplyDeleteTheoperations ofthe humanmind are also controlled by words of
power, formulas that becomea focus ofmental activity. Prose in this
phase is discontinuous, aseries ofgnarledepigrammaticandoracular
statements that are not to be argued about but must be accepted and
pondered, their power absorbed by a disciple or reader. Pre-Socratic
philosophers such as Heraclitus or Pythagoras seem to have been
essentially oral teachers or gurus; and what has survived from them
consists mainly of discontinuous aphorisms with a cosmological
reference, like the "all things flow" ofHeraclitus. Weshall return to
this feature ofdiscontinuity at the end ofthe book.
With Plato we enter a different phase of language, one that is
"hieratic," partly in the sense of being produced by an intellectual
elite. I amspeaking here not ofordinary language but ofthe cultur-
ally ascendant language, a language that, at the time or later, is
accorded a special authority by its society. In this second phase
language is more individualized, and words become primarily the
outwardexpression ofinner thoughts or ideas. Subject andobject are
becoming more consistently separated, and "reflection," with its
overtonesoflooking into a mirror, moves into the verbal foreground.
Theintellectual operations ofthe mind becomedistinguishable from
the emotional operations; hence abstraction becomes possible, and
the sense that there are valid and invalid ways of thinking, a sense
which is to a degree independent ofour feelings, develops into the
conception oflogic. What Homeric heroes revolve in their bosoms is
an inseparable mixtureofthoughtand feeling; whatSocrates demon-
strates, more especially in his death, is the superior penetration of
thought when it is in command offeeling.
and
In metaphorical language the central conception which unifies
human thought and imagination is the conception ofa plurality of
gods, or embodiments of the identity ofpersonality and nature. In
metonymic language this unifying conception becomes a monotheis-
tic "God," a transcendent reality or perfect being that all verbal
analogy points to.
and
monotheism in which one god is supremeoverall othergods exists in
a different linguistic context from a monotheism in which "other
gods" do not and cannot exist at all, at least as fully divine beings. In
Homer, however, there is sometimes the suggestion that Zeus is not
merely the king of gods but contains all the other gods, as in the
passage in the Iliad (viii) where he tells the squabbling subordinate
deities that he holds heaven andearth, including them, on a gigantic
chain that he can at any time pull up into himself. This form of
metaphor, which unites thegroupand the individual, will beofgreat
importance in our argument later, and the passage is also a portent of
the great metonymic conception ofthe chain ofbeing, ofwhich also
more later. In any case the word "God," howevergreat its numberof
referents, is practically a linguistic requisite for metonymicthinking.
There is no point in makinganalogical constructsout ofwords unless
we have something to relate the analogy to.
…
This was normally done through allegory, which is a
special form ofanalogy, a technique ofparalleling metaphorical with
conceptual language in which the latter has the primary authority.
Allegory smooths out the discrepancies in a metaphorical structure
by making it conform to a conceptual standard.
For those interested.
Thank you.
ReplyDelete