Reviewing Alison Milbank’s Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real:
The Catholic and analogical quality of Tolkien’s and Chesterton’s work is what Milbank most convincingly demonstrates. Unlike much modern art that revels in the macabre and the bizarre—self-referential, solipsistic, nihilistic—the fantastical work of these two Catholics is not such a sorry project. Chesterton and Tolkien have not autonomously invented their own imaginative worlds so much as they have reordered the existing world in accordance with their fundamentally Aristotelian/Thomistic perception of it. Their common conviction is that everything has its own entelechy, its own end within itself that pushes it toward completion and fulfillment within a larger, indeed a final telos. This classic Catholic outlook is clearly voiced by Chesterton in his splendid little book on Thomas Aquinas, wittily entitled The Dumb Ox. Because all “things [tend] to a greater end,” Milbank quotes Chesterton, “they are more real than we think them. If they seem to have a relative unreality (so to speak) it is because they are potential, not actual; they are unfulfilled, like packets of seeds or boxes of fireworks. They have it in them to be more real than they are. And there is an upper world of what the Schoolman called Fruition or Fulfillment, in which all this relative relativity becomes actuality; in which the trees burst into flower or the rockets into flame.”
See here and here for two posts in which I explore this idea of entelechy and mythopoesis. The review also raises some interesting questions about defining the line that distinguishes the retrievalist from reactionary. I'd argue that both Chesterton and Tolkien were more the former. But there's a lively discussion to be had on the question.
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