C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Faith and Reason in a World under Siege | Prof. Carol Zaleski

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given to the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Santa Barbara on February 24, 2021.

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About the speaker:

Carol Zaleski is the Professor of World Religions at Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts, where she has been teaching philosophy of religion, world religions, religion and literature, and Catholic thought since 1989. She is the author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of NearDeath Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford University Press) and The Life of the World to Come: NearDeath Experience and Christian Hope (Oxford University Press); and she is coauthor with Philip Zaleski of Prayer: A History (Houghton Mifflin), The Book of Heaven (Oxford University Press), and The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Transcript

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0:00.0	So I'm going to start with a quote that I think you will probably recognize.
0:05.0	It goes like this.
0:06.0	I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo.
0:11.0	So do I, said Gandalf.
0:14.0	And so do all who live to see such times.
0:17.0	But that is not for them to decide.
0:20.0	All we have to decide is what to do with the time that has given us.
0:26.4	You know, during the early months of this pandemic that we're in, I kept seeing this dialogue all over
0:33.7	the Internet, all over social media. This is a dialogue, of course, from J.R.
0:37.8	Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I have a feeling that to many people that were posting it,
0:44.4	tweeting it, retweeting it, what it sounded like was that kind of neo-stoic uplift that you
0:50.1	can find in popular How to Live books. But of course, those of us who are deeply into Tolkien know there's more going on in this dialogue
0:59.3	than advice on how to keep calm and carry on.
1:03.8	And this more is the subject I want to speak about today.
1:09.3	Like Frodo, Tolkien himself must have often wished that he could
1:13.7	have lived in different times. The death of his mother when he was 12 left him doubly orphaned,
1:20.3	as he had lost his father, long before. He served in the catastrophic some offensive of the First World War, and he likely wouldn't
1:30.3	have survived if he hadn't been invalided out by trench fever. He lost his dearest friends.
1:37.4	He wrote, by 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead. And among these friends, there were the three schoolmates
1:46.3	with which Tolkien founded the T-Club and Borovian Society,
1:50.6	that's the TCBS, which was dedicated in fun,
1:55.5	but also in earnest, to art, faith, and fellowship.
	...

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