Rulavi

This discussion is ringing all sorts of bells with me.

As I've thought about what "awe" is, it is clear to me that it (paradoxically, if you like) includes generous doses of what we tend to think of as antithetical ingredients: namely the two you mention in the quotes above —fear/terror and love/desire. You called it a "desire to know more", Davem, and there's something right about that. But it is not a desire to know as our culture desires to know, a Sarumanian desire to subjugate and control and use through our science/knowledge. It is rather a desire to experience, a willingness to be overwhelmed by and caught up in, what we love and fear. "Perfect love casts out fear", or perhaps transforms it into the joy that is awe, but, a love that knows no fear because it does not even respect what is loved is a pretty shallow love. Awestruck love is totally humble when it is not feeling frankly terrified.

I think awe, although it is in my view central to true humanity, is a very dangerous and subversive attitude or emotion for the values of our culture. It is inherently contradictory to the self-sufficient, I'm-as-good-as-you-are, I-demand-my-rights, I-will-not-bow-down, lese-majestic stance so prevalent in our society and so encouraged by our political philosophy. By nature it leads to a kind of worship of what is high above us, while our culture loudly insists there is nothing high above us in that way. We may be permitted to feel awe if we want to or get a kick out of it (there's freedom of religion, after all), but we must not believe, much less say out loud or insist, that it corresponds to anything real, or ought to be felt by everyone. The "fear of the Lord" which "is the beginning of Wisdom" is precisely what the wisdom of our world cannot stand.

(fwiw, it was the culturally voguish debunking of awe that prompted C.S. Lewis to write "The Abolition of Man", his major contention being that such debunking turns us into sub-human "men without chests".)

Someone asked earlier in the thread if Tolkien and Lewis were trying to "pre-baptise" (as they would spell it ) us for the same thing. I think they were. They were both Christians, of course, and believed the Reality they wanted us to respond rightly to is ultimately God in Christ. But much more than most Christians, I think, they saw and loved the fearsome beauty of that Reality, and saw that fearsomeness and beauty wonderfully reflected down through the many levels of creation below the One. And they talked to each other for years about these sorts of things and discussed their writings, including LOTR, in the light of them. In their experience the desire for the Awesome Reality was often wakened through mythology, most definitely including the kind of mythology they aspired to write. The notion of pre-baptism of the imagination was [first?] used by Lewis to describe the effect on him of George MacDonald’s myths. Lewis speaks of "the Numinous", and has Merlin (in That Hideous Strength) speak of even the knowledge of the existence of Numinor and the True West as dangerous knowledge. (Numinor, as the preface makes clear, is Tolkien's Númenor.) Narnia fans may remember the bedragoned Eustace’s encounter with the Lion: “I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn’t that kind of fear. I wasn’t afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it--if you can understand.”

Lewis' essay/sermon "The Weight of Glory" (which is one piece of prose I can hardly read without wanting to weep and shout--it has the same effect on me as seeing Saturn through a telescope) is full of this theme. Forgive (/enjoy) the long quote:

[following discussion of Glory as "fame" or "recognition", being acknowledged and accepted into the heart of things] "this brings me to the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more […] We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words--to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. … That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't. Or, not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. ... We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.”

I think Lewis and Tolkien hoped their works might a pre-baptism for that, not of course for Lewis’ words, but for the Reality they believed lay behind them.