J.R.R. Tolkien spent a lifetime painting a portrait of good and evil, heroes and monsters, light and darkness. Perhaps our modern world is too sophisticated for such, but only at its own peril. (The world "sophistication" is derived from the same Greek root as Sophist and sophistry.) Reason without moral imagination results in what C.S. Lewis called "men without chests," that is, men who have nothing (heart or soul) to prevent their brains from being controlled by their appetites.
I am reading The Fellowship of the Ring now to my daughter. Frodo and his hobbit friends are being pursued by the Ringwraiths, a.k.a. the Nazgul. These nine men possess evil rings created by Sauron. They are consumed by evil; they have no warm flesh left. They are horsebackriding forms of men covered by dark cloaks. They are lost souls. Their souls have been freeze-dried and extracted from their bodies by evil.
Sometimes I wish the evil in our world was as stark as the Nazgul, though it would be frightening if it were. We would need a steady stream of light to overcome such darkness.
I am not one to the predict the end of the world. I grew up around apocalyptic evangelicals. All I know is that the world as we know it will end one day, and that God is in charge, not I. Nonetheless, the evil afoot in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and N. Korea is startling. Humorless men dedicated to an ideology containing a perverted religion, if any at all, convinced that death is better than life and hateful of everything that is beautiful, are capable of every kind of cruelty. They are also capable of provoking a nuclear war because they believe that the Apocalypse is better that life, not because they have a beatific or heavenly vision, but because they have despaired of life.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.
1 comments:
Indeed. And may our leaders be given the grace to stand up to evil in imaginative ways.
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