Daaaaang! Peter Kreefts book, Jesus Shock, is a brilliant take on the INTANGIBLE LIFE of Faith and Spirit: Christ alone explains those cathedrals. Stonemasons did not build them; faith built them. His Real Presence built them…They had to be transgressions of the possible, and imports of the impossible (p.59-60). Kreefts Youtube commentary on Tolkien, below, takes off into the stratosphere from this kind of thinking. In awe, I follow Kreefts every angle like a cat follows a butterfly. I want to listen to this recording, below, one hundred times. Kreeft is speaking about the POWER of words, much more than he speaks about Tolkien. POWER: When things come to us in their names, then the power of things come to us in the power of their names. This is because a name is the souls own picture. No one but God can give such a name. Words effect what they signify: I love you. [Who would not want to follow more here…] Frodo calls out for Tom Bombadil--His words are stronger songs and his feet are faster.…just like prayers… With that name Frodos voice grows strong. Tom comes…like the James Taylor song: Just call out my name, I will be there. This is an armor piercing projectile. Moses asked the burning bush who he is: I am. Words have a magic power to produce physical effects. Gandalf will not utter the words inscribed on the ring while in the innocence of the Shire… In words, things first come into being and…are. In Tolkien, words are lovable and beautiful. In HERALDIC LANGUAGE, the threatening castle will always have ugly accoutrements, and the safe refuge will likewise always have restorative symbolism, seeping from touchable clues of Gods language of beauty and goodness and truth. Beauty and goodness and truth are absolute and timeless and universal and essential [FORM--Being--Logos]. …but then, our sophisticated world today makes the atmosphere of airports--and even sub-divisions--so bereft of every semblance of such a noble order…that there is slight trace as to the threatening or the graced character behind any given door. Kreeft goes on and on about the fertility of words, as cabinets of such heraldic and noble purposes. The archetypal language of Heraldry is SOLEMN with POMP--pomp: the opposite of the familiar and ordinary…and, not vain--written for nobility ensconced in Royal Glory. The Celebrant at Mass, or the Princess led out to dance by the King MUST wear unusual clothes. This language of Heraldry necessitates a humility which is foreign to moderns in their encapsulated inability to forget the self. [This work of Kreeft is the aesthetic and theological talk which finally fits and varnishes all the clues I worked with for decades]. > Enter The Lord of the Rings, and you feel you are inside a song, as Sam would say on entering Lothlorien. Tolkiens words are heavily capitalized, like the Hebrew language, that words might sink column-wise into a sentence…not skipping across a dynamism from preceding words. In silence, words strike like lightning and meaning stays like glaciers. It is the Anglo-Saxon way that great syllables sound like castles. https://youtube/watch?v=-7fQs5-pjhA
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 10:31:25 +0000
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