Faërie

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

David Russell Mosley finishes his series on how human creativity participates in God’s creativity. Tolkien fans will enjoy Mosley’s exploration of the idea of subcreation, articulated in Tolkien’s essay “On Faerie Stories.” Tolkien argued that human creativity is a gift from God to those made in His image, and that when a human writer imagines something, that writer is “sub creating,” crafting a fictional setting in a small and respectful imitation of God’s creative abilities. Today, Mosley explores Tolkien’s idea that God gave humanity hints of the Gospel through mythology and fairy tales, so that when Christ came His historical appearance fulfilled the desires expressed through human storytelling: Myth became Fact. 

Quotation

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way that is fitting to this respect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels––peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But the story has entered History and the primary world; the desires and aspirations of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. – J. R. R. Tolkien, “Tree and Leaf” [Read more…] about Scholar’s Compass: Myth Made Fact