Situates the life and fiction of Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic,... more
Situates the life and fiction of Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams’s seven novels of supernatural fantasy. From this specific analysis, he develops more broadly applicable approaches to the serious expression of religious experience in fiction. Roukema shows that esoteric knowledge has frequently been blurred into fiction because of its inherent narrativity and adaptability, particularly by authors already attracted to the syncretism, multivalence and lived fantasy of the modern occult experience.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s response to modern rationalism and scientism, which is characterized by the Kantian domination of the understanding, was to have imaginatively sub-created the mythopoeia of Middle-Earth. The cosmos of Eä is structured by... more
J.R.R. Tolkien’s response to modern rationalism and scientism, which is characterized by the Kantian domination of the understanding, was to have imaginatively sub-created the mythopoeia of Middle-Earth. The cosmos of Eä is structured by the metaphysics of Christian Neo-Platonism, and historically directed by providence. Within the history of Middle-Earth, Tolkien illustrates a philosophy of history, or a theory of historicism, characterized by repeated historicist cycles, in which the societies of Elves and Men suffer from steady decline that is remedied by miraculous restoration. These historicist cycles are Neo-Platonically determined by the providence of Ilúvatar. The characters’ and the readers’ reflections upon the historicism of Middle-Earth serves to impart the dramatic significance the whole historical narrative of Middle-Earth into the partial narratives of Tolkien’s Legendarium. The readers’ imaginative participation in the sub-created mythopoeia of Middle-Earth effects Tolkien’s philosophic purpose: to facilitate reconciliation between readers and the majesty of universal being - the subject and the object – so as to liberate the intellect from the domination of the understanding.
