Tolkein’s Guide to Good Preaching
December 12th, 2009 by Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.
J.R.R. Tolkein was a man with an acute awareness of the profound truth of Christianity, and a great artist’s sense of how to make that truth come alive in surprising and stirring ways (as a careful reading of his Lord of the Rings trilogy reveals). As preachers of the Catholic faith — which we as Dominicans are by vocation and profession — we could do worse than his advice about how to preach well. (Indeed, it seems to me that Tolkein is recommending both the kind of training and living that the Dominican vocation is specially tailored to produce! I hear echoes of St. Dominic in Tolkein’s prescription . . . .)
What follows is from a a letter Tolkein wrote to his son Christopher on April 24, 1944:
“But as for sermons! They are bad, aren’t they! Most of them from any point of view. The answer to the mystery is prob. not simple; but part of it is that ‘rhetoric’ (of which preaching is a dept.) is an art, which requires (a) some native talent and (b) learning and practice. The instrument used is v. much more complex than a piano, yet most performers are in the position of a man who sits down to a piano and expects to move his audience without any knowledge of the notes at all. The art can be learned (granted some modicum of aptitude) and can then be effective, in a way, when wholly unconnected with sincerity, sanctity, etc. But preaching is complicated by the fact that we expect in it not only a performance, but truth and sincerity, and also at least no word, tone, or note that suggests the possession of vices (such as hypocrisy, vanity) or defects (such as folly, ignorance) in the preacher.
“Good sermons require some art, some virtue, some knowledge. Real sermons require some special grace which does not transcend art but arrives at it by instinct or ‘inspiration’; indeed the Holy Spirit seems sometimes to speak through a human mouth providing art, virtue and insight he does not himself possess: but the occasions are rare. In other times I don’t think an educated person is required to suppress the critical faculty, but it should be kept in order by a constant endeavour to apply the truth (if any), even in cliché form, to oneself exclusively! A difficult exercise . . .”
Amen!
