Tolkien’s Clash of Civilizations

National Review Online ^ | December 18, 2002 | Rod Dreher

[beckett]

The metaphor of a line through each human heart is biblical in origin and has been used so often by so many authors over the centuries that no single writer can claim credit for it.

I'M calling it blurred. I believe Tolkien would agree.

[ArrogantBustard]

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart."
I believe the rest of the quote is"...and who is willing to cut out a piece of his own heart?

As Somebody said, once: "And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than thy whole body be cast into hell."

[don-o]

As Somebody said, once:

Perzactly!

That is the unspoken answer that I expect that Alexey had in mind, when he said what he said.

Good on you, AG.

[don-o]

The metaphor of a line through each human heart is biblical in origin

Really?

Just grabbed the Strong's Concordance. Looked up "heart." Cannot find references to any line through it. There is a lot about hard, wicked, evil uncircumsized heart, as well as letting it not be troubled.

Nothing about a line, though.

(Not a flame. I am enjoying all the Tolkien discussion on line today.)

[yianni]

...pride, and the all-consuming craving for power it fosters when unchecked, as the root of human evil.

kinda describes the senatrix from NY

[beckett]

The sentiment is so pervasive throughout Christian (and Judeo) biblical teaching (at the heart of it, one might say), that, the absence of the exact phrase in Strong's concordance notwithstanding, Solzenitsyn certainly can't claim to have come up with it.

If memory serves, Augustine, Aquinas and Pascal all wrote the on same theme.

[VOA]

bump...to read later...

I was suprised that our PBS affiliate ran a biography of Tolkein last night...

...must be trying to lure back viewers after airing that recruiting video for Islam
"Muhammad, Legacy of A Prophet".

[The Iguana]

What a load of crap this is. They were office space, nothing more, built tall so that they could fit more square footage in a place where real estate is precious, and, like any building designed by any architect, made with an eye to appearance. If Tolkien would have looked on them as symbols of tyranny, then Tolkien's would have read too much into them. I think the authore is the one making a few leaps of logic.

Frankly they were ugly, staid slabs of modernist crap.

As such they did represent the leveling sterility of rapcious capitalism - something Tolkien cared little for.

Obviously this does not justify in any sense whatsoever vile acts of terrorism like 9/11. There's no question whose "side" we are on or should be on or whose side Tolkien would immediately identify himself with.

It's just a warning to us to be aware of the corrosive elements in our own culture - as Dreher points out.

[Library Lady]

The thing with the trees was cartoonish; they needed to think about that one a bit more.

I agree with that. I expected to see a forest.

There were some variations from the book that I didn't think were necessary, too. . . like Fararamir's character which was more noble in the book than on the screen.

[Oberon]

They were office space, nothing more...

I beg to differ. Muslim extremists didn't give up their lives for the cause of destroying some office space, or even the people who worked in those offices. They took out the towers in order to assault what the towers stood for.

[Oberon]

If someone comes on here and says they are a Tolkien Ph.D, and they believe that Tolkien would have thought the WTC was a Symbol of Tyranny, then I will have to revise my view of Tolkien downward.

In order to get an idea of what Tolkien would have thought of the World Trade Center towers, you might read That Hideous Strength, the third novel in C.S. Lewis's Perelandra trilogy. Lewis and Tolkien were colleagues and friends, and shared a strong suspicion of technology, industrialization, and bureaucracy.

I suspect that Tolkien might have seen the United States in 2003 as being something like Numenor--a strong and fundamentally good nation of men and women, but lately given to cultural excesses, not the least of which is pride. The ruins that we see in both Jackson films were left by a civilization that--technology aside--might have been very much like our own.