 cutting into the time he committed. Hey friends, Dan and Stephanie Burke, Divine Intimacy Radio, here we go. This is Dan and Stephanie Burke. Welcome to Divine Intimacy Radio, your radio haven of rest. Your hermitage of the heart. Your monastery of the mind where we lift our hearts and minds to heaven to draw on the wisdom of the saints and the glorious traditions of the church to help us navigate the tumult of this life. And today we have back again, Joseph Pierce, who is a marvelous author, writer, speaker, teacher, and now a friend, God be praised because we did the Camino together. But Stephanie, why don't you tell folks a little bit about him who may not know some of the details? Okay, so Joseph Pierce is the author of over 30 books. He has presented two 13-part TV series for EWTN on Shakespeare's Catholicism and is hosted for our long specialist for EWTN on the Catholicism of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I highly recommend it, it's amazing all that's there. He is a visiting professor of literature at Ave Maria University and visiting chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas Moore College of Liberal Arts. And we wanna make sure that everybody can get to their website. So his personal website is jpears.co. So J-P-E-A-R-C-E dot C-O. Welcome, Joseph, welcome back. My pleasure, thanks for having me. So for those who missed the first segment, you don't wanna miss it. We talked about his conversion. We didn't walk through the book, it's covered in his book, The Devil, My Journey from a Racial Hatred to Rational Love, published by Tan. Today we're gonna be making a transition to something that happened to me on Kamino with Joseph and talking about Catholic literature and thinking and how fiction can powerfully permeate our hearts and minds to reveal the truths of the gospel and help people to convert. Those who are already converted to go to a deeper conversion and those who are not as with Joseph to discover God in many ways through the beautiful literature that the church offers, preeminent among which, of course, is J-R-R Tolkien and his writings. But what happened to me on Kamino with Joseph, so he gave us seven lectures, we just got back recently. And I would already been moved very powerfully by the shows in the movie or the television, whatever the, however you call it, how that's delivered series and how it reinvigorated the early love and the touching of the heart of where I connected with Jesus and he gave me hope in a very personal, powerful way. But because I tend to be more like you, Joseph, not, I don't pretend to be as smart as you are, but definitely on the intellectual side of things, I just never delve into fiction. It's always just logical, rational, doctrine, dogma, systematic theology and all of that. Of course, the mystical tradition has affected me a lot with experiencing God. But in your lectures, you reminded me or opened me up more deeply to this idea that we need holy stories and ideas presented to us in non-linear logical ways to really help us to convert more fully. Do you agree with that? And if so, how does that work? Yes, very much so. And I think it's actually expressed most brilliantly, perhaps, by C.S. Lewis. Now, C.S. Lewis wrote a book, it's an allegory of his own conversion journey, mostly an intellectual process. And that book is called The Program's Regress. It was published just two years after Lewis became a Christian. But in that, Lewis, the character of John, who's the sort of every man Lewis bigger, meets someone who father history. And so this person obviously represents history itself. And he said that God's people, the Jews, were the only people who remembered how to read. In other words, the only people that knew the law were the Jews, right? So they were obsessed or preoccupied with writing down the rules because they knew how to read. But everybody else, all the Gentiles, had forgotten how to read. But what Father History says is that God did not neglect them or ignore them. Because they had forgotten how to read, he sent them pictures. And so this is exactly what stories are. They present pictures of realities, analogs that we can actually see metaphors for our own life, our own existence, our experience in the lives of others as told to us in stories. And that, of course, can be nonfiction. Now, I write a lot of biographies. Now, someone's life story is also a story. But of course, it can also be fictional stories such as the Lord of the Rings. You know what I find fascinating about that, Joseph? And you mentioned it in some of your lectures is that the Lord, Jesus, when he was here, he taught through story. So it's actually really crucial for us in encountering God is we need that. We need to be able to see ourselves in the stories of others. Yeah. Jesus actually reveals himself ultimately in the story, which is his own life. The way that we know God most intimately is because God shows himself to us. Before that, we were grappling with theology and trying to understand who God was. But God revealed himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ through a story. And the beautiful nativity story, which is at the heart of Christmas and then his life and his suffering and his miracles, his healing, his death, his resurrection, his ascension to the heaven, his set of the Holy Spirit, the founding of the church, which continues the journey of the story of his mystical body through time. So the way that God shows himself to us is through entering his story, which is history, himself. And then within that story, as you might say, Stephanie, he tells us stories. Some of the most powerful lessons that Jesus tells us are in his parables. And we do need to remember that stories such as the prodigal son of fictional narratives, right, that Jesus Christ made them up as a story to teach us truths. So fictional stories such as parables can tell us very powerful truths about the world in which we live. You know, one barrier I want to get over before, I know Stephanie has another question directly about the Lord of the Rings. But the one barrier I want to get over is when people often read John of the Cross, they read a piece of what he's written and they don't read the whole corpus. They can misunderstand and misrepresent what he teaches. That's really happens very commonly with Tolkien. Of course, that's on the issue of analogy. And you talked about that on the road. I think it's, I'd love for you to repeat that problem because in the Simaroleon, if I'm pronouncing that right, you know, he talks about the value of allegory, but in the intro to the Lord of the Rings, he sort of rails against it. Why that tension and contradiction? Yeah, basically that we have to understand that there are different types of allegory and Tolkien sort of shows us this. So the sort of allegory that he said he didn't like was the sort of allegory where the imagination has no freedom. So my favorite example is again in C.S. Lewis in that same work, actually, the Tolkien's Regress that I mentioned earlier, that there's a hideous monster who's called the spirit of the age. And that hideous monster called the spirit of the age imprisons people with bad ideas. And the only, those people are freed by the power of the spirit of the age by a beautiful woman in shining armor who's called reason. And reason has two sisters called theology and philosophy. Now, no, that's fine. As a teaching tool, it can be very effective, but a story should, if you start preaching in a story, destroys the story as story. So that's why Tolkien was opposed to that sort of allegory being in a story. But what Tolkien talked about was something which he called applicability. In other words, things that are happening in the story are applicable to our own world. And we can see what's happening there and apply them to the world in which we are living and to help us to understand the world in which we're living with a new light. So that is also allegorical, but in a very different sense to that strict or formal allegory. He was also reacting at that time of the writing of the Lord of the Rings to the use of his stories, Lord of the Rings in particular, as if it was a commentary on political strife. Was that, am I wrong about that? No, you're completely correct about that. And that was, I think what caused him to write that introduction to the second edition of Lord of the Rings because when the first edition came out, people tried to reduce it, so this sort of political reductionism to it being about World War II. And Tolkien's work is an epic that works on the level of theology and philosophy and on the permanent things, the perennial things, not the temporal things. Now, however important World War II is or was, it's a passing thing. And the Lord of the Rings transcends and supersedes mere reduction to some sort of political allegory. So that's why he was opposed to that and quite rightly so, because the Lord of the Rings is obviously much richer in meaning than merely being applied to one particular historical event. So before we get to your question, Steph, I just wanted to remind folks, Joseph's work can be found at jpears.co, j-p-e-a-r-c-e dot c-o. And I'd recommend, if you've never encountered Joseph, either his race with the devil book about his personal journey or Frodo's journey, discovering the hidden meaning of the Lord of the Rings, I'd strongly recommend, but why don't we jump into the Lord of the Rings stuff? Yeah, so many people, and I was included, I was one of them, I was deeply surprised to learn that the Lord of the Rings has anything to do with Catholicism. So in what way might it be said that it's Catholic if you can give us some examples of that? Yeah, so they're numerous. That's why obviously I've written a whole book on it. So this is going to be the soundbite version. But the key thing is to quote Tolkien, he Tolkien himself, and he knows the work better than anybody, he wrote it. The Lord of the Rings is, of course, fundamentally religious and Catholic work. They are Tolkien's own word. So our task, our quest, if you like, is to discern the depth of the Catholicism in it. And I could go anywhere, but the best way to start, I think, is the date on which the Ring is destroyed. And that's March the 25th, which of course Catholics will certainly know as the feast of the Annunciation. And as Catholics also know, life does not begin at birth but at conception, which means that the Annunciation is actually a more important feast day than Christmas, because it's on March the 25th that God becomes man, that the word becomes flesh, not December the 25th. But what even Catholics don't know, most of them, is that the March the 25th is also according to church tradition, the historical date on which the crucifixion happened. Now, of course, we don't assign a particular date to the crucifixion because Good Friday and the Easter Triduum and the Easter season are movable feasts. But the historical event of Christ being crucified on Golgotha obviously happened at one moment in history. And according to tradition, that's March the 25th. So the fact that Tolkien has the ring destroyed on the date both of the incarnation and the crucifixion, which couple taken together with the resurrection is our redemption. And what our redemption means is that we are redeemed from original sin and for the power of that original sin. So what is the original sin? Original sin is the one sin to rule them all and in the dark it is bind them. What's the one ring? The one ring to rule them all and in the dark is bind them and the one sin and the one ring are both destroyed in the same significant date. That is at the heart of the Catholicism of the Lord of the Rings. Fascinating, when we get back from the break, I know Stephanie wants to talk about the power of the ring and the power of sin. We'll be right back with Joseph Pierce. Perfect, so second segment 1230 and then we'll be done. Welcome back to Divine Intimacy Radio. Dan is Stephanie Burke with Joseph Pierce. New friend, I just couldn't recommend his lectures, his teaching more, we're gonna get him on the Avala Institute teaching on some of the things we're talking about here, which I'm very excited about at some point, but you can find out more about Joseph at jpears.co, p-e-a-r, j-p-e-a-r-c-e.co. And I'd recommend, you know, if this is interesting to you, Frodo's journey, discovering the hidden meaning of the Lord of the Rings. Who published that? Was that Ignatius? That's also 10 books. Also 10 books, all right, great. Steph? Yeah, so one of the most fascinating aspects of Lord of the Rings is the ring itself, right? And the power of it, the lure of it, what happens when you put it on, how you automatically become visible to that eye. So what does that represent? How is there a connection between the power of the ring and sin, and how does that tie into our faith? Yeah, so again, Tolkien gives us the connection in the date of its destruction. So, we can say that the ring is synonymous with sin, it signifies sin, but in what way? Well, what we see with the ring, first of all, it gives us the illusion of power. So we commit a sin because it empowers us, right? Self-empowerment, we can do what we want and what other people want us to do, what other people think we should do. It's self-empowering, but when we do that, we actually, that ring, that sin is addictive. And the more that we do it, the more addicted to it we are. And of course, an addict is, by definition, not free. So when we choose to sin, when we choose to put the ring on, the putting the ring on is the act of sin. Then we put the ring on, we are actually opening ourselves up to becoming addicted to its power. And I think one of the big lessons of Lord of the Rings is that the thing possessed, possesses the possessor. We become possessed by the things that we've possessed. So Matthew's gospel, you know, that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And of course, the ring is the precious, right? This is where our treasure is. And when you put the ring on, you become visible to the good world that God made because you excommunicate yourself. You're immortal sin. You've now become more visible to the dark Lord Sauron's world. He can see you because you're in his domain. The longer you're in it, the more you begin to shrivel and shrink like golem. We golemise ourselves when we become addicted to the sin and become just a shriveled shrunken wreck. And ultimately we end up in hell like the ringwraiths where we have no personality that's separate from the will of the dark Lord as expressed in the power of the ring, the power of sin. When we were bringing up our, I'm sorry, when we were bringing up our kids, one of the things that we would go to the movies and we would talk about Christ figures and, you know, what's going on. And certainly in CS Lewis's works, it's a clear analogy as we've talked about. It's Aslan is God. But in Lord of the Rings, there is no central Christ figure. I mean, correct me, but there are multiple Christ figures that partially represent him. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, absolutely. So yes, Tolkien is much more subtle than CS Lewis and I love Narnia and I love CS Lewis. I would have been quoting him in today's show. But in all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia stories, Aslan is the son of God. So he's Christ figure at all times in all stories. In Lord of the Rings things are much more subtle. Nobody's a Christ figure in that way, but certain characters are Christ figures in aspects of who they are, what they do. So for instance, if the ring is synonymous with sin, if the ring signifies sin, then wearing the ring, to be a ring wearer is to be a sinner. But instead of wearing the ring, we choose to bear the ring. If we're a ring bearer and not a ring wearer, we carry the burden of sin without sinning, right? And that's the sin name of carrying the cross. So insofar as Frodo Baggins is the ring bearer, he can be seen as a cross bearer and therefore as a Christ figure. And again, Tolkien makes this clear because apart from the fact that Frodo Baggins arrives at Mount Doom, Golgotha, on March the 25th, the date of the crucifixion, he actually leaves Rivendell with the company of the Fellowship of the Ring on December the 25th. So Frodo's journey as the ring bearer, as the cross bearer is Christ's journey from his birth in Bethlehem to his death on Golgotha. So we certainly see that in Frodo Baggins as the ring bearer, we see a Christ figure. But we also see a Christ figure in the death, resurrection and transfiguration of Gandalf. So he dies and we told him that in the story, he really dies, it's not pretending, he's not gonna wait to take a rest. He dies and when he's resurrected, he's resurrected and simultaneously transfigured because he's no longer Gandalf the gray, he's Gandalf the white and he has to put his gray cloak over him because he's too dazzling to even look at. So he puts the gray cloak on and it's like a cloud covering the sun. So in the death, resurrection and transfiguration of Gandalf, we see a Christ figure and at least as important in the return of the king. So Aragorn is the true king and we're told that the hands of the king are the hands of a healer and Aragorn in his kingship has great healing powers. And also only the true king can take the paths of the dead and survive. Everybody else takes the paths of the dead, this valley where the accursed dead live. They die, but the true king, it said, can take the paths of the dead and survive. Aragorn takes that path, he doesn't only survive, he has the power to release the dead themselves from their curse, which of course has to remind us of the power of Christ descending into hell following the crucifixion. Fascinating. Just absolutely fascinating. And going back to the ring bearing, Frodo's the weakest, the least of them, the smallest, it's just absolutely fascinating. So Tolkien wrote that great stories, especially fairy stories hold up a mirror to man. You spoke a lot about this on our Camino. How do we see a reflection of ourselves in the Lord of the Rings? Yeah, so basically, in a general sense, the Lord of the Rings is perhaps one of the finest, perhaps the finest example of it, but Tolkien talks about this as being true of fair stories in general and fairy stories in particular. So if you look at a physical mirror, and I see this as a metaphor for materialism, we look at a physical mirror of ourselves, all we're seeing is the physical image of ourselves. What we're not seeing is what we're feeling, our emotions, our spiritual beliefs, our intellect. We're seeing nothing metaphysical, we're only seeing the physical. What a great story can show us, and the Lord of the Rings shows us to a profound degree, is that it holds up not just that physical mirror, but a metaphysical mirror, which is also a mystical mirror. Because it shows us, first of all, who we are in our fullness, which is in our spirit as well as our flesh, but also shows us not just who we are, but who we should be and who we shouldn't be. So it's also a moral mirror. So this is really a magical mirror that's great stories, including Lord of the Rings can hold up to us to show us ourselves. And there are various figures in Lord of the Rings who we can see actually see as every man figures, as those who in some sense represent us in the story. Beautiful, we're Joseph Pierce. You can find more about him at jpears.co. I strongly recommend his book, Frodo's Journey, Discovering the Hidden Meeting of the Lord of the Rings by Tan Books. And also what we talked about in our first segment was Race with the Devil. Stephanie, I think we have time for a few more questions. And I know you were, I could always tell when you're wanting to ask. So can you tell us something about Tolkien's own faith, like his journey and where he was in all this? Yeah, so basically, he didn't have an easy childhood. So his father died when he was only three years old. And that plunged his mother and Tolkien and his brother, Hilary, into poverty. So they were very poor. And then the Tolkien's mother becomes a Catholic in 1900 when Tolkien's only eight years old and has both her sons baptized and receiving the church at the same time. So I sometimes refer to Tolkien as a cradle convert. So not neither a cradle Catholic nor adult convert. And then his mother dies in 1906 when he's only 14 years old. And thereafter, his legal guardian, it becomes a father Francis Morgan who was a friend of Tolkien's mother. And she entrusted her two sons to father Francis Morgan who was an oratorian. So part of the order established in Birmingham by St. John Henry Newman, following the practice of St. Philip nearly. And then Tolkien said to Father Morgan, he was a father to me much better than most real fathers or many real fathers. He also considered his mother to be a martyr because following her conversion, both her own family and her husband's family disowned her and withdrew the financial support. So the family were thrown from poverty into penury. And Tolkien said, it's not to everybody that God gives such an easy path to his great mercies as giving us a mother who died for love and to ensure that we keep the faith. And later on, many years later, he said, when I think of my own mother who died to ensure us keeping the faith, who was a martyr, it hurts me when I see my own children stray away from the faith. So he saw his mother's martyrdom as something which showed the love of God. And he remained a Catholic throughout his life. And although I can't remember the whole quote, there's a glorious quote about the Blessed Sacrament with which I end my book photos journey where he says, I will show you the one great thing to love on earth, the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honor and fidelity and the true way of all your loves on earth. And he carries on. So he had a great love for our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Well, Joseph, I couldn't imagine a better time to spend, better morning than to spend time with you talking about the beauty and the wisdom and the goodness of what comes out of the heart of the man who's converted, both you and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the saints, you know, that we talk so much about on this show. So thank you for your great work. Folks can find out more about it at J-P-E-A-R-C-E dot C-O. It's J-P-E-A-R-C-E dot C-O. Ignatius Press publishes many of his works, Tan Frodo's Journey, which we've been talking about discovering the hidden meaning of the Lord of the Rings is a great place to start and really want you to get out there and support his work. It will help you to grow spiritually and mature in your faith. Joseph, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh, it's been my pleasure, Dennis, Stephanie. Thanks so much for having me and keep up the great work that you're doing. Until next time, may the God of peace make you perfect in holiness. May he preserve you whole and entire, spirit, soul, and body, irreproachable at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.