Is Magic Real?

While I’ve greatly enjoyed the Harry Potter series, the inspiration for this blog, and have re-read the series several times, my all-time favorite realm is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, famous from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I’ve regularly played boardgames based on Tolkien’s book, but have yet to play any of the commercial Harry Potter boardgames. Tolkien’s world and the way magic is displayed is subtle, not overt, and giving it the time it deserves could take volumes of writing and thinking. I’m much too lazy for that – hence, I blog instead of writing detailed articles. Or better yet, I just read and write about someone else’s thoughts.

 

For those who would like a little more meat in exploring Tolkien’s world and, more importantly, the world-view that emanates from the characteristics of Middle-Earth, I highly recommend Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I read it probably fifteen or so years ago, but am finding it refreshing to work my way through it once again. Kreeft is a philosopher, so that’s where the emphasis lies, but he’s an excellent and engaging writer with thought-provoking ideas.

 

What makes Tolkien so beloved, argues Kreeft, is that his world seems true, deep and real at its very core. Tolkien’s masterful use of descriptive language certainly helps, and there is something about creative art that so moves us. It’s magical in the deeper non-spellcasting sense. In his chapter on metaphysics, Kreeft distinguishes art and science:

 

Art is very different from science in that it creates worlds; it creates meaning and beauty and forms and structures and natures, while science discovers them. In science, the world is the standard for our ideas about it. If we believe the earth is flat, we are wrong. But in art, it is the reverse: the artist’s ideas are the standard for the world he creates. For example, in Tolkien’s world, Elves are tall and formidable… In art, the world conforms to the creative idea; in science, the idea conforms to the world. Truth in science is the reverse of truth in art. If God created the universe, all science is reading God’s art.

 

Now as a chemist, I beg to differ with Kreeft about his distinction. Chemists delight in both discovery and creation (by synthesizing new molecules and materials). But I agree that chemistry as a science has certain strictures in what can be created (at accessible temperatures and pressures). I also suspect that art – truly great art – has strictures of a sort. There’s something about it that “rings true”. Kreeft will say it better than I can.

 

It is because we look at the things in the universe in this Platonic way that we can rank them. For example, one lion can seem truer, more lenone than another (say, a weak, scruffy, cowardly lion)… [that] is false,, fake, or inauthentic, like counterfeit money. Counterfeit money is as physically real as real money, yet in the most important way it is not real: it does not conform to the [Platonic] Idea of money. In the case of money… it is man-made, temporal and changeable. But in the case of… a real lion… all cultures and all individuals judge a cowardly lion to be less authentic, less true, less real, than he ought to be… and Tolkien’s Elves are more real, more elvish than any other writer’s elves have ever been. We can’t help believing in them.

 

I’m inclined to agree with Kreeft, although I’m likely as biased as he is in that I love the books and continue to enjoy re-reading them over and over again. They have a ring of authenticity that most fiction I’ve read does not. (Admittedly, I don’t read much fiction.) Kreeft will go on to explain why this is, but you’ll have to read his book to enjoy it for yourself. Instead I will move on to the title of today’s blog post, and also the title of a section in Kreeft’s chapter on cosmology: Is magic real? Kreeft begins his argument in the following way:

 

In Tolkien’s cosmology, as in all pre-modern cosmologies, everything is more alive. Where the modern cosmology reduces the life of a dog to the life of a complex machine, Tolkien’s cosmology expands the life of a mountain (“cruel Caradhas”) to something like the life of an animal. Nothing is mere matter. Nothing is ‘mere’ anything. Reductionism is repudiated. More than that: there is so much life in things that we would call it ‘magic’.

 

He’s preaching to the choir, given my growing disillusionment with the reductionist paradigm in the sciences. Not that it isn’t useful, but we’re limiting ourselves as scientists by being locked into the paradigm. But then Kreeft makes a surprising turn:

 

Magic is potency, and power. But there are two very different kinds of magic… not just different, but opposed… and our civilization is in crisis because of the war between these two kinds of magic. One kind of magic, Enchantment, is our healing, and the other – the kind exemplified by the Ring – is our destruction… The magic of enchantment means entering the holy city of beauty, truth, and goodness and letting it conquer you. Ultimately it means letting God conquer you, since beauty, truth, and goodness are divine attributes; they are what God is. But the magic of the ‘laborious, scientific magician’ (that is, technology or, rather, the philosophy that makes ‘Man’s conquest of Nature’ by technology the summum bonum) means playing God, like Sauron.

 

I’ve heard this diatribe before. Sauron represents the evils of technology and machinery, and we need to turn away from this to embrace the good. In one sentence, I’ve simplified or reduced it – and Kreeft would argue that I shouldn’t do this so he spends some time clarifying the relationship between the two magics. They have much in common.

 

Both are natural to man. Both can be either good or (when misused) evil. Technology becomes evil when it is turned from a means to an end. Fantasy becomes evil when it is turned into a create-your-own-reality philosophy. The ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy… is the first mark of sanity… The two magics have… a common origin in the power of abstraction that makes possible the invention of the adjective…

 

But their ends are different. Enchantment is surrendering “the soul to the beauty of nature” while Technology seeks “the conquest of nature by power”. Kreeft argues that the key has to do with time.

 

Technological magic works immediately. It attempts to reduce the gap between desire and satisfaction… [but] plunges us deeper into the shadow because time becomes more and more important to us, and more problematic, as we become more technologized… the chief effect… has been to destroy leisure rather than enhance it. No one has any time anymore. But Enchantment makes time irrelevant. The Hobbits lose track of time in Tom Bombadil’s house, as we do when we read The Lord of the Rings…

 

Magic is real. But its effect on us as humans may be quite different depending on which magic we embrace. We’ve built ourselves into a technological system prison from which escape will prove very difficult. Enchantment feels like a waste-of-time in today’s go-getter world, but all that striving may be for a castle built on a foundation of sand rather than bedrock. I’m reminded of the need to slow down. But it’s not just a matter of pace-of-life. Kreeft will go on to argue for the paradoxical philosophy of self-giving choices exemplified by Frodo and Sam, the ringbearers, in contrast to the self-serving Gollum and Sauron – consumed by their own inward desires, they become slaves, inhuman, and lose reality in the process.