As He Imagined Rather Than As He Made

“The curves of the land were familiar somehow. Yes: the ground was becoming level, as it should, and now, of course, it was beginning to rise again. A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle.

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.

‘It’s a gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.

He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them; and there were others that had only budded in his mind, and many that might have budded, if only he had had time. Nothing was written on them, they were just exquisite leaves, yet they were dated as clear as a calendar. Some of the most beautiful – and the most characteristic, the most perfect examples of the Niggle style – were seen to have been produced in collaboration with Mr Parish: there was no other way of putting it.”

[J. R. R. Tolkien, “Leaf By Niggle” in Tree and Leaf, 110]

A Well-Intentioned Business

“Do you understand what monotheism in the Christian faith means? God knows, not the number ‘one,’ but with this subject in His sheer uniqueness and otherness over against all others, different from all the ridiculous deities whom man invents. Once we have realized this, we can only laugh, and there is a laugh running through the Bible at these figures. Once the true God has been seen, the gods collapse into dust, and He remains the only One. ‘I am the Lord thy God…thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ This ‘thou shalt not’ has the force of ‘thou canst not.’ He who calls himself god alongside Him becomes the mere shadow of man’s extravagant longing, which has ill results.

And the Second commandment also becomes quite clear then: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image nor any sort of likeness. Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.’ that too is not a sign of Israelite ways of thinking and there is no philosophical concept of invisibility in the background. But God has Himself done everything in order to present Himself. How should man make an image of Him after He has presented His likeness Himself? A well-intentioned business, this entire ‘spectacle’ of Christian art, well-intentioned but impotent, since God Himself has made His own image. Once a man has understood ‘God in the highest’, it becomes impossible for him to want any imagery in thought, or any other kind of imagery.”

[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 40 - 41 (not sure I agree with the extreme conclusion, though)]

Salvation Changes Not Garden Nor Gardener

“I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends –
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not tread your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden scepter down.

   **

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Then looking on the Blessed Land ’twill see
that all is as it is, and yet made free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden nor gardener, children nor their toys.
Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes,
and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.”

[J. R. R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia]