/lit/ - Literature

>>20602902

>>20424403
Dune is anti-Catholic

>>19905597
There’s no doubt that Tolkien was personally a devout Christian from everything I’ve read about him. After all one feels more comfortable speaking publicly to people about something that isn’t very personal and paganism was apparently something not personal for him.

But actual faith is very personal and many devout Christians can be quite personal about their faith to those who they sense aren’t religious like them or know they won’t understand. For instance, I was just reading about the Victorian hero, Charles George Gordon, who was a fanatical Christian, but knew to tone down his fanatical Christianity among people who weren’t religious like him.

> Gordon lived alone. In his solitude, he ruminated upon the mysteries of the universe; and those religious tendencies, which had already shown themselves, now became a fixed and dominating factor in his life. His reading was confined almost entirely to the Bible; but the Bible he read and re-read with an untiring, unending assiduity. There, he was convinced, all truth was to be found; and he was equally convinced that he could find it. The doubts of philosophers, the investigations of commentators, the smiles of men of the world, the dogmas of Churches—such things meant nothing. Two facts alone were evident: there was the Bible, and there was himself; and all that remained to be done was for him to discover what were the Bible's instructions, and to act accordingly. In order to make this discovery it was only necessary for him to read the Bible over and over again; and therefore, for the rest of his life, he did so….Gordon’s tone was not the intimate and religious tone which he would have used with the Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old friends or fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more ordinary caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms.

And one has to remember that both Tolkien and Charles George Gordon were raised in the same Victorian environment so it was probably also just good manners. Either way, I still think Tolkien’s works are a confused mess. They fail to convey the Christian spirit and somehow also fail to convey the pagan spirit as depicted in the Iliad.

>>15807431
Cope seethe dilate

Reminder that Eru is literally the biblical God