Chapter Twelve: The Heart’S Desire: Longing For Significance
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE HEART’S DESIRE: LONGING FOR SIGNIFICANCE
1. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 87. For the idea in Reformed theology, see Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1917), 1:200. Hodge here argues that God is the true goal of “our religious feelings, our sense of dependence, our consciousness of responsibility [and] our aspirations after fellowship with some Being higher than ourselves, and higher than anything which the world or nature contain.”
2. John Paul II, encyclical letter Fides et Ratio, 24. Text at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html.
3. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 87.
4. Czeslaw Milosz, “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,” New York Times Review of Books, 19 November 1998, 17–18. For his best and most influential book, see Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
5. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Collins, 1989), 138.
6. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1995), 133.
7. For an assessment of Dawkins’s arguments at this point, see Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008).
8. For a full discussion, see John Haldane, “Philosophy, the Restless Heart, and the Meaning of Theism,” Ratio 19 (2006): 421–40.
9. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Penguin, 1995), 45.
10. Here see Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002), 9–10.
11. Christopher Garbowski, Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (Lublin, Poland: Marie Curie-Sklodowska University Press, 2000).
12. Jane Chance, The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
13. C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 1–21, with quote from 15–16.
14. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 1.1.1.
15. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, and Other Pieces (London: Collins Fontana Books, 1965), 94–110, with quote from 97.
16. Lewis makes significant use of this image in The Silver Chair, the sixth of the Chronicles of Narnia. See William G. Johnson and Marcia K. Houtman, “Platonic Shadows in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles,” Modern Fiction Studies 32 (1986): 75–87.
17. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 98–99.
18. Ibid., 106.