Tolkien, Philosopher of War

Summary

In popular imagination, Tolkien is a Luddite, but recent scholarship has identified Tolkien's extensive modern sympathies. Tolkien, Philosopher of War contributes to this growing literature. His is a modern critique of Enlightenment thinking, specifically those philosophies that wrest the initiative from God in divinizing man. His worry is apocalyptic politics—political movements that take Christ's word out of the realm of grace and make it a platform for political action.

Tolkien took note of a tight analytical connection between the vanity driving commercial civilization and the vanity driving the Promethean fantasies of apocalyptic politics. War is a predictable outcome of this analytical connection. The book's three core theses run: 1) metaphysical: the apocalyptic anxiety of Tolkien's lore is traceable to the gnostic rejection of the analogy of being typical of the philosophies of history that dominated his day; 2) political: in the English context, Tolkien sided with the Tories against Whiggery, defending monarchy as a counterweight to the vanity driving progressive philosophy of history; 3) aesthetic: Futurism's philosophy of history celebrated the Machine; inverting the value order, the Futurism art movement encoded anti-Christianity, fascist politics, and apocalyptic war. Tolkien's "cosmogonical drama" dramatizes an aesthetic resistance to Futurism.