What Others Are Saying

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WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING
(or, somebody who's caught what I'm "after doing," as
the Irish say)

"I believe Coulombe’s writings are worth a slightly deeper reading. I’m not saying it won’t require a certain intellectual leap, but I believe what Coulombe has asserted in some of his articles is not that there is an “occult influence” in Tolkien’s work -but rather- that it is informed by an underlying “world-view” (born of Neo-Platonism) -a philosophical paradigm shared by many writers, poets, artists, and religious- not the least of which being “such Neoplatonic Church Fathers as St. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine... Ultra-Realist scholastics such as John Scotus Eriugena, Pope Sylvester II, William of Auvergne, Roger Bacon, Bl. Raymond Lully, St. Bonaventure, and St. Albertus Magnus...” (Coulombe)

The Neo-Platonic also happened to be the philosophical springboard for lots of heretical and occult movements (whose members included many artists and poets), starting from the time of the renaissance “Rosicrucian” craze. So, that’s the “link,” if you will. Does this mean a traditional Catholic author (Tolkien) is somehow “infected” by association via a shared world-view with european metaphysicians?

Coulombe has coined a term for Neo-Platonism’s expression in art and literature as the workings of the “Hermetic Imagination.” It’s his term, and I think he probably thought it sounded just provocative enough to spark discussions such as these. Coulombe, we must remember, is a professional writer -and if he’s a “Knight” of anything, it’s simply the Order of St. Sylvester. He likes to write on lots of different topics. If you don’t like his writing style, think his knowledge of history is weak, his grasp of Catholic theology faulty -or worse- subversive, don’t buy his books. For myself, I quite enjoy him. Though, maybe I’m suffering from Coulombitis?

I like to think of Coulombe’s “Hermetic Imagination” like this: We go into a movie theater (let’s say, to see The Return of the King). We get comfy in our seats. We start to relax. As the lights go down, thoughts of the outside world, our troubles, etc., start to fade. We know that, for a time, we have leave to enter another world (in this case, film) in which reality as we know it is suspended. It is a world that operates on another, deeper and more subtle, level of mind. Thanks to this ‘magical’ shift in environment, we effortlessly slip into a whole new set of rules governing “reality,” where anything can happen. It is, as C.S. Lewis held fantasy literature to be, an “objective dimension.” When the lights come back up, we’re back from (what was hopefully) a satisfactory “magical” journey.

In this (admittedly weak) metaphor, I equated the Hermetic Imagination with the effect of the darkened, plush, old-fashioned, movie theater as a functioning crossroads between worlds. When we abandon the approach of the Hermetic Imagination, we are left with something roughly equivalent to watching a DVD in a brightly lit, bare, room with no chairs, filled with an audience of popcorn throwing jibber-jabbers. There is no “escape” into the film because no one cares to go. There is nothing to facilitate the experience, and no recognition of that other world as worth one’s fully entranced attention.

But the point where my metaphor breaks down is that in Neo-Platonist thought, the “film” is the primary reality -the supernatural realm where exist Heaven, the Saints, Purgatory, angels, spirits, demons, and Hell- not the theater (or worse, the parking lot). Where Neo-platonism meets art, writers like Tolkien become (to beat my metaphor to death) like filmmakers. I believe, as Tolkien describes it, “sub-creators.” Tolkien: "the artist is a creator working in exactly the same way as God the Creator works; the artist becomes a mini-creator, his world a sub-created world reflecting God's creation." It’s not that Tolkein’s works are “allegories” of the gospels, but rather narratives happening in a self-contained world of his creation, based on Catholic principles. Sounds pretty Neo-Platonist to me.

So, what are we left with in this discussion? It seems, perhaps, not so much a matter of ‘occult subversion’ or ‘kabbalistic’ contamination (whatever exactly that is?) on the part of Coulombe, but a reaction to a coined term (Hermetic Imagination) which not too surprisingly raises the hackles of some who have apprehensions about broaching a subject matter it would seem many of our Church Fathers fostered.

Is this a fair assessment?"

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