Sunday, October 2, 2022

Was God's Motive Ethic or Aesthetic When Creating?


1) Can a Christian Author be indebted to an Anti-Christian one? , 2) What does Subcreator Mean?, 3) Was God's Motive Ethic or Aesthetic When Creating?

Big spoiler, my position is, it was both. Generosity is both an ethic and an aesthetic motive.

I was just watching, yesterday, John Bowen for BBC programme Bookstand (1962) interviewing Tolkien. And one of the things they seemed to disagree on was this.

J.R.R Tolkien 1962 interview (subtitles)
7th of Jan. 2022 | Sîdh Aníron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi8q1Eopk2U


At 4:01 Tolkien says that as sub-creator (his highest comment on being an artist, doesn't mean being a magician) - because he is NOT the Creator - he rearranges the primary material into a "form that pleases, which maybe isn't necessarily a moral pleasing, it's partly an aesthetic pleasing."

Bowen, at 4:11 says "God, we may assume, made a moral rather than an aesthetic choice."

We are only, says Tolkien by 4:25 "looking at facets of one whole, but certainly an aesthetic whole"

So, Bowen tries to make it out that Tolkien is somehow in disagreement with how God created. Tolkien says he isn't, as far as he knows.

Let's take three books. God's of Pegana, by Lord Dunsany has definitely a very large overweight of the aesthetic over the ethic. Lord Dunsany was in fact an Atheist, and as such, the only function he ascribed to gods of mythologies would be an aesthetic one. Look Back in Anger has a high overweight for the ethic. It's one big exploration of how to be angry when being angry becomes unavoidable, by John Osborne (I had to read it in school). And Lord of the Rings, or Silmarillion, has a double edged blade on this issue, and so has The Hobbit.

If we assume that the best of these three authors, namely Tolkien, is more like God than the other two, we must imagine God's choice in creating as being both aesthetic and ethic. Generosity is the quality that is high in both of these domains.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
17th Lord's Day after Pentecost
2.X.2022

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