CatholicVote: Happy 119th Birthday, Professor Tolkien

Today, 119 years after Tolkien’s birth, we would do well to remember the words and ideas of this brilliant (and, perhaps, saintly) Roman Catholic.

Happy Birthday, Professor Tolkien.

By the end of his own life, Tolkien feared the ideological world that had sprung up during his own life time.

“The spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations,” Tolkien wrote in 1969, “that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads.”
The world, he thought, seemed little better than a new Tower of Babel, “all noise and confusion.”

Yet, armed with Grace, citizens of the City of God should remain constant in their defense of all that is good.
In the famous conversation between Gandalf and Frodo, early in The Fellowship of the Ring, it dawns on Frodo how violent and unremittingly dark the world seems to be.

Gandalf: “Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”
Frodo: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
Gandalf: “So do I. . . . and so do all who live to see such times.  But that is not for them to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

“We were born in a dark age,” Tolkien wrote to Christopher in 1943.  But, Tolkien reflected, there were two benefits to be found with this.  First, such overwhelming darkness forced the good to recognize what to love, and, second, “we have still small swords to use.”

Read the whole thing from Brad Birzer