Avoid Both Pride and Sloth

“Those who would be honest to God must strive to avoid both pride and sloth in their God-talk. Theological pride overestimates the adequacy of human language and thought; theological sloth underestimates the importance of responding to the provocations of God’s self-revelation. The one goes before destruction; the other pre-empts instruction. Yet it is hard to miss the recurring biblical theme that God wills to communicate and make himself known: ‘The word of the Lord came to …’; ‘the Lord said …’. Theology is ultimately irresponsible if it fails either to attend to what God says or to think about the nature of the one who addresses us.”

[Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, xvi]

The Work of Our Hearts

“In fact the elves seem much more susceptible to a specialised variety of pride not at all present in Paradise Lost, not quite Avarice or ‘possessiveness’ or wanting to own things (as has been suggested), but rather a restless desire to make things which will forever reflect or incarnate their own personality.… One might rewrite Lewis’s phrase to say that in Valinor, as opposed to Eden, the Fall came when conscious creatures became ‘more interested in their own creations than in God’s.’…

There could be several reasons why Tolkien chose to write about fascination with the artefact. The most obvious is that he felt it himself: to him his fictions were what the Silmarils were to Fëanor or their ships to the Teleri, ‘the work of our hearts, whose like we shall not make again.’”

[Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, 241]