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Book: Frodo's Journey: Discover the Hidden Meaning of The Lord of the Rings
Quotes of Book: Frodo's Journey: Discover the
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  1. Joseph Pearce _ Frodo's Journey: Discover the

    Gollum is, however, a fully embodied image of the sin addict's soul. He brings to life with monstrous vigor the words of Christ that everyone who sins is a slave to sin10 and the teaching of St. Paul about the slavery of sin.11 As a mirror of scorn and pity toward man, he is so powerful that we only have to visualize Gollum as the shriveled wreck of our sin-enslaved soul to shiver in horror and disgust at the vision being presented to us. It's as though the English language needs a new verb, to gollumize, so that we can express the grim and graphic reality of this vision of the reality of sin. It
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  2. Joseph Pearce _ Frodo's Journey: Discover the

    There is, however, one other figurative representative of humanity in which we fail to recognize our own scornful and pitiful selves at our peril. That pathetic figure reflecting the readers back to themselves very uncomfortably is Gollum. Seldom or perhaps never in the field of human literature has the human soul in a state of addiction to sin been portrayed with such psychological realism and spiritual brilliance."
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  3. Joseph Pearce _ Frodo's Journey: Discover the

    For the Christian, every man is homo viator, whose sole purpose {and soul's purpose} is to travel through the adventure of life with the goal of getting to heaven, his ultimate and only true home, facing many perils and temptations along the way. The enemy of homo viator is homo superbus {proud man}, who refuses the self-sacrifice that the adventure of life demands and seeks to build a home for himself within his "self." Such a man becomes addicted to the sins that bind him, shriveling and shrinking to the pathetic size of his gollumized self. The drama of life revolves around this battle within each of us, between the homo viator we are called to be, and the homo superbus we are tempted to become. This drama is mirrored in Middle-earth in the struggles between selflessness and selfishness within the hearts of hobbits and men.
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  4. Joseph Pearce _ Frodo's Journey: Discover the

    For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be. We do not condone selfishness merely because it is normal, nor should we. A healthy perspective always judges selfishness-most especially our own selfishness-from the perspective of selflessness. In the language of religion, we always judge sin from the perspective of virtue, that which is wrong from the perspective of that which is right. Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.
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