Craig Boyd, “Saruman’s Sophistry” @ Urbana Theological Seminary's Tolkien Conference - 2021 скачать в хорошем качестве

Craig Boyd, “Saruman’s Sophistry” @ Urbana Theological Seminary's Tolkien Conference - 2021

Saruman’s Sophistry and Gandalf’s Wisdom: Augustinian Rhetoric in Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings Craig A. Boyd, Professor of Philosophy & Humanities Saint Louis University A number of scholars have documented Tolkien’s Catholicism ranging from his metaphysics to his sacramentalism to the influences on his thinking. Alison Milbank, Peter Kreeft, and Ralph Wood have all documented various narrative themes indebted to Christianity, the virtues Tolkien employs, and his understanding of good and evil. Others like Stratford Caldecott have developed more sacramental elements in the work. My earlier work has analyzed various elements of Tolkien’s moral commitments with reference to Thomistic themes and the traditional virtues and vices as they appear in his characters. However, an interesting feature—not addressed in any of the Tolkien literature—concerns the Augustinian elements in the rhetoric employed by Saruman and Gandalf. That is, these two wizards represent—respectively—the evil and good orators in Augustine’s de Doctrina Christiana. In this project, I argue that an appeal to Augustine (and augmented by Cicero) may offer an approach that demonstrates Tolkien’s appreciation of the classical rhetorical tradition and its Christian commitment to the integrity of the speaker and his spoken word.