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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5.4 (2002) 5-13



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Preface


WE ARE CREATURES OF THE MIDDLE. The rich implications of this truth are explored in grand terms in the famous "Oration on the Dignity of Man" by Pico della Mirandola, where the human person is portrayed as "the intermediary between creatures," a being of "indeterminate image" whom God set "in the middle of the world" to participate in freedom in both what is above and what is below. Pascal in his own account of this topic helps us guard against the danger of arrogance in claiming our middle position but he also fends off despair: contemplating the infinite magnitude of the universe, Pascal wants us to feel "lost in this remote corner of nature"; but contemplating the approach to nothingness in the infinitely small, we are to recognize that the human body is "a world, or rather a whole," so that finally the human person in nature is "A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with Nothing." Pascal examines myriad aspects of this truth of the middle: the human person is merely a feeble reed, and yet a thinking reed; we are neither angels nor brutes.

Many fruitful insights into the richness of human culture emerge from this recognition of our middle position in space and time. We could say that human culture occupies a middle territory even in the ontological order, since the products of human culture are neither real in the same manner as objects of nature (although a cultural product such as a sculpture depends on the stone from which it is [End Page 5] carved) nor purely ideal because our cultural works always carry marks of their historicity. Tolkien captures our position as makers of culture in the middle realm with striking precision in his little work, "Mythopoeia," when he uses the term "sub-creator" to describe our cultural activity in a middle state in which we are "Dis-graced" but "not dethroned." Our works of culture are subordinate to and dependent on our state as creatures ourselves and yet "We make still by the law in which we're made."

It was an observation made by author Michael Torre in an essay in this issue of Logos that initiated this line of reflection as I considered the articles collected in the pages that follow. In his study of the depiction of evil in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Torre captures well the relationship between the imaginary world envisioned by Tolkien and the everyday world of Tolkien's readers, claiming that the world of "Middle Earth" in Tolkien depicts "our time, the time of the Church" as Tolkien in his portrayal of evil shows the "various ways the Enemy must be fought, now, in our middle time of Middle Earth." The heightened sensitivity in Tolkien to the significance of the middle position of human life provides a clue to understanding the importance he saw in the world of the imagination:

Blessed are the men of Noah's race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith. ("Mythopoeia" 88)

Defying Freud's attempt to reduce the products of imagination to "wish fulfillment,"Tolkien boldly affirms the act of wish fulfillment in the work of the imagination, but then elevates such wishes to the level of Christian hope: "Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream, / or some things fair and others ugly deem?"

Could it be that a key to understanding our human responsiveness to the world can be found in this conception of our middle position? Approaching this issue from a different perspective, philosopher Helmuth Plessner in Laughing and Crying finds that these [End Page 6] two distinctive modes of human expression are grounded in the "eccentric" character of the human position in the world, a position determined by the necessity both to experience one's body as the center of perception but also to surrender the absolute claim of...

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