The Return of the King and the Eucatastrophe

Avalon Mentors

This episode is a discussion of Tolkien's third book in the Lord of the Rings series, “The Return of the King.”

The episode introduces Tolkien’s concept of The EUCATASTROPHE as an embracing of suffering. We also discuss the nature of kingship especially as it involves this embracing of suffering & the confrontation with nothingness.

How is The One Ring an escape from suffering?

How might mythology offer us a response to the temptation of the Ring of Power?

And why was Tolkien so adamantly opposed to C.S.Lewis’ statement that myths are “lies breathed through silver”?

Myths, Lewis once told Tolkien, were "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."

"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies."

THE EUCATASTROPHE

Tolkien invented the word EUCATASTROPHE to describe the workings of grace in life (and in mythology). It is taken from Greek ευ- "good" and καταστροφή "destruction".

Tolkien writes in Letter 89,

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love."

Most commonly the Eucatastrophe is equated with felix culpa; or a happy fault (paradoxically) – a bringing good out of evil. But it is more than that. The word “Catastrophe” signifies a “sudden and widespread disaster”; from Grk kata (over) and strophe (turning). Most everyone would see catastrophe, esp. the catastrophes of failure and death, as insurmountable.

Tolkien held it as a great truth that our self-mastery, our Kingship comes from facing the Eucatastrophe, going through it, and eventually experiencing the joy of the Resurrection.

This echoes the ancient Greek phrase:

“Drasanta pathos; pathei mathos”

The experience brings suffering; the suffering brings wisdom.”

Only by embracing the suffering can we eventually come to the wisdom of knowing ourselves, and thus to the self-mastery of kingship.

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