Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Tolkien, Philosopher of War

Tolkien, Philosopher of War

McAleer, Graham James
Walsh, John Patrick

Audio Book

Literary CriticismReligion General

ISBN13: 9798228612167
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: Oct 7 2025
Language: English
In popular imagination, Tolkien is a Luddite, but recent scholarship has identified Tolkien's extensive modern sympathies. Tolkien, Philosopher of War contributes to this growing literature. His is a modern critique of Enlightenment thinking, specifically those philosophies that wrest the initiative from God in divinizing man. His worry is apocalyptic politics--political movements that take Christ's word out of the realm of grace and make it a platform for political action. Tolkien took note of a tight analytical connection between the vanity driving commercial civilization and the vanity driving the Promethean fantasies of apocalyptic politics. War is a predictable outcome of this analytical connection. The book's three core theses run: 1) metaphysical: the apocalyptic anxiety of Tolkien's lore is traceable to the gnostic rejection of the analogy of being typical of the philosophies of history that dominated his day; 2) political: in the English context, Tolkien sided with the Tories against Whiggery, defending monarchy as a counterweight to the vanity driving progressive philosophy of history; 3) aesthetic: Futurism's philosophy of history celebrated the Machine; inverting the value order, the Futurism art movement encoded anti-Christianity, fascist politics, and apocalyptic war. Tolkien's cosmogonical drama dramatizes an aesthetic resistance to Futurism.

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