In The Three Body Problem (2006, Netflix 2024), Chinese computer engineer turned sci-fi novelist Cixin Liu turns to outer space to solve humanity’s problems.1 2 3 The East-Asian set sci-fi novel exposes humanity’s dark side while scouring the universe for some form of salvation; a global sense of intellectual hospitality must be exercised to appreciate Liu’s message. Many of the problems that Liu identifies are not novel, but have been with humanity since time immemorial, particularly the fundamental problem of evil, the central theme of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. We can forge global community amidst the chaos of human evil by finding the similarity in the dilemmas addressed by both the Chinese sci-fi and the British fantasy authors, and applying to Liu’s proposals Tolkien’s timeless insights regarding humanity’s Great Escape from evil.
In I Beg to Differ: Navigating Difficult Conversations with Truth and Love, Tim Muehlhoff suggests four steps, or questions to consider, when engaged with people from another perspective. What do they believe? Why do they believe that? Where do we agree? Finally, based on the answers, how should one proceed? With these in mind we examine Liu’s opening book of his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which includes The Dark Forest (2008) and Death’s End (2010). Liu’s The Three Body Problem has garnered critical acclaim, becoming the first Asian-authored novel to win a Hugo Award in 2015. President Obama praised it for its “immense” scope and for just being “fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with the United States Congress seem fairly petty.”4 It has been lauded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame (his Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series having been adapted by Game of Thrones). Claimed as one of China’s most successful full-length novels of the past two decades, Liu has been hailed as China’s version of Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), but with Eastern and Chinese rather than Western and American themes.5 6
Liu’s China: Struggling But Persistent
In place of such election year discussions as who is stealing jobs from whom, or debates on weightier matters such as human rights and government actions, considering The Three Body Problem allows us to build a sense of global community, as we find that eyes both East and West often see the same evils. Having just taken a first trip to China (and Japan) myself, I am reminded of my many friends there and the distinction between actions of governments and the character of the people. Some cultural characteristics seem to have endured for centuries: where we see over a billion workers vying for our jobs, in the 1740s Montesquieu wrote that in China, population pressure and lands cultivated “scarcely sufficient[ly] to support the inhabitants” led to such a sense of industry that even a solitary idle worker was expected to result in someone’s suffering.7 Skip forward to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the earnest efforts become more ideological: Marxist-inspired class warfare led Mao to send workers, students, and intellectuals to farms for manual labor. Such actions were reversed by Deng Xiaopeng (Pres. of China from 1978-1989), whose reforms included aggressive annual economic growth rates of 10% which lifted an unprecedented 800 million people from poverty, and who quipped that “to get rich is glorious;” Deng could yet be highly authoritarian, such as when suppressing the 1989 Tiananmen Square student demonstrations.8 Nowadays, the phrase “9-9-6” is popular, referring to the expectation that young urban elites forge their careers by working from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., 6 days a week, and pressure to achieve is impressed at an early age.9 In The Three Body Problem, Liu questions not just the excesses of China’s revolutionary past, but the value of any human effort, given the evils that can be committed in the service of such causes.
Liu’s stories are fueled by not just his scientific imagination, but also by growing up in a China wracked by poverty, and the revolutionary efforts to amend it. Liu traces his inspiration to write science fiction to an evening in 1970, when he was seven years old, in a village in Henan Province, watching China’s first satellite, Dongfanghong I (“The East is Red I”) slowly glide across the sky like a star. Unaware that the Soviets had launched Sputnik thirteen years prior, a cosmonaut four years later, or that Apollo 13 had just returned from the moon, his other memory from that night is the hunger he felt, the “constant companion of every child” in the “extremely poor” region around his village; he considered himself fortunate that he was among the privileged children who had shoes to wear.10 His parents worked at a coal mine a thousand kilometers away, which had been a “combat zone for the factional civil wars of the Cultural Revolution” (1966-1976).11 A few years later, an astronomy book enchanted the young boy with such ideas as light years and galaxies while others taught him of beyond-microscopically small quarks and strings, arousing in him “an ineffable, religious feeling of awe and shock;” shortly after learning of such things 100 cm of rain arrived which collapsed fifty-eight dams and drowned 240,000 people.12
Ye Wenjie’s World: Evil and a Cry for Help
Scientific solutions have their limits, however. While it was Jules Verne’s 1864 classic Journey to the Center of the Earth which introduced Liu to the science fiction genre, it was Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, found alongside Verne’s classic (as well as Moby Dick and an anthology of Tolstoy) in a box under his bed, which alerted him to science’s failings, as it documented the environmental damage done by the pesticide DDT used during World War II.13 The book is lent to Ye Wenjie, a leading character of The Three Body Problem, while she downs trees with her chainsaw for the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, causing her to question the massive deforestation program in which she was employed during the Cultural Revolution. The book “shook her to the core,” as she equated the destructive pesticides of WWII to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and wondered “how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”14 Ye Wenjie likens the relation between humanity and evil to that of an ocean and an iceberg, both made from the same material. The solution she envisions is drastic: “It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling
up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force
outside the human race.”15 Ye Wenjei is a central figure to the story. In a scene buried deeper in the Chinese version of the book to avoid the ire of government censors (but placed at the beginning in the English book and Netflix series), Ye’s father, the physics professor Ye Zhetai, is publicly denounced then beaten and killed by overeager young Red Guards for such trumped-up charges as teaching a non-Marxist version of relativity theory. Ye Zhetai later meets a kindred soul, Mike Evans, an environmentalist and scion of an oil magnate, in whose honor a colleague recites a Chairman Mao essay about the “noble-minded and pure” man of “moral integrity and above vulgar interests.”16 Evans later heads an Adventist faction which calls for the extinction of humanity; the means of such destruction is a distant Trisolarian species, whose fleet speeds towards Earth from four hundred and fifty years away in the galaxy. While working at Red Coast, the Chinese science station secretly probing for extraterrestrial life, Ye Wenjei responds secretly to their signal probing for distant civilizations, in hopes they can save humanity from itself, despite a second signal begging her to not respond as the Trisolarians were known to destroy planets’ inhabitants.
Liu questions science itself, and its handmaiden technology, through the novel. While the Netflix movie introduces a group of former physics students of Ye Vera (Ye Wenjei’s daughter) at Oxford, in both versions scientists commit suicide seemingly due to the futility of their research, as the Trisolarians have managed to sabotage scientific progress in the civilization they intend to conquer. Whether laws of science are universally or just locally true is questioned as Wang asks “Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness?”17 Biologist Pan Han is a utopian of Chinese stripe, as his “Pastoral China” movement resides in the cities of China with common ownership and people scavenging food from the trash. Han’s belief is that “technological progress was a disease in human society,” like a cancer, “exhaust[ing] all sources of nourishment.”18
Solutions from Outer Space? The Trisolarans
Liu makes clear that “Science for Science’s sake” is not a humane option. Wang Miao, nanotechnology Professor (criticized online as the most boring man ever; character development in the novel lacks the sci-fi wizardry, and thus is replaced in the Netflix series by young female materials scientist Auggie) is asked (forty years in the future) to help investigate the suicides of various scientists, including Ye Wenjei’s daughter Ye Vera. Wang discovers a virtual reality headset of Ye Wenjei’s which simulates the struggle of a civilization to survive its three-sun solar system and the resulting variable length eras of extreme heat and cold. After various attempts by such virtual reality characters as Aristotle, Chinese philosopher Mozi, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton to either divine or calculate the timing of the eras, Wang finally realizes that, like the classic physics problem of three bodies with their own independent gravitational pulls, the problem cannot be solved; science does not have the answers. Where science fails, however, humanity must begin, as it is realized that the problem is to save civilization, not just to solve a scientific problem.
The human dimension of evil is also depicted candidly. The authoritarian King Zhou, the last king of the Shang Dynasty and a tyrant, rules the virtual reality world. Just as scientists in The Three Body Problem are committing suicide, Liu draws the parallel to how inhumane revolutionary zeal resulted in respected intellectuals committing suicide during the Cultural Revolution, rather than endure death by beating which took seventeen hundred denounced leaders. Evils of a more workaday variety are also depicted, as Ye Wenjei’s colleague seeks to steal credit for her work. Human suffering exacted by “cycles of vengeance” is not the sole prerogative of the Chinese however, as Liu notes by mentioning the Middle Eastern situation.19 Ye Wenjei admits that reading Silent Spring was only the beginning of her understanding of “the bloody history of humanity” and the “madness and irrationality of the human race [that] were constantly on display.”20 It was at the peak of this realization that she was “faced with an ultimate loss of purpose and sank into another spiritual crisis” before she discovered the signal from the Trisolarians, to whom she turned for Earth’s salvation; Ye finds that even she is willing to murder to achieve this.21 When Ye finds the guards who beat her father to death a few years later, relocated to the countryside and wearing the same, now faded, clothes, she finds them in a pitiful state (as happened after Mao reassigned such youth to the countryside due to their excessive zeal), young women ravaged by revolutionary battles. Hoping to find repentance and a restored humanity rather than seek revenge, Ye finds the girls “had lost not only their youth, but also something more:” gone were both their idealism and the dignity they projected when propelled by the “demonic spiritual energy” of the revolution, and some had lost limbs or even their lives.22 Ye thus despairs, and finds hope only in a superior solution from a more advanced civilization than those found on Earth.
The Trisolarian fleet’s impending arrival prompts the formation of an Earth Trisolaris Movement and its organizing body, the ETO, which ponders various paths to Earth’s salvation. Radical Adventists believe humanity must be eliminated and replaced by their civilizational and moral superiors, the Trisolarans, while Redemptionists plan to save a portion of humanity while worshiping the ways of the Trisolarans, and even their leader, the “Lord.” The factions must yet process the final, and threatening, Trisolaran message to humanity, that “you’re bugs.” Liu reminds the reader that in the history of humanity, bugs have never been entirely eliminated, though Ye ponders that at stake is a sunset for all of humanity; the means of salvation is not yet clear, however.
The unmistakable message of The Three Body Problem is that humanity indeed has a problem: namely, evil. The same message can be found in such tales as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as Sauron, a restless malice, actively carries out the program of subjugation and dehumanization begun ages back. Tolkien’s Ents, slow-as-molasses denizens of accumulated wisdom and, in fact, quite tree-like, are in risk of extinction by forest-leveling minions of Saruman in a symbolism that must be appreciated by Liu, as Ye Wenjei’s occupation in the cultural revolution is also one of massive deforestation. When Galadriel refuses the one Ring of Power, she explains that “the evil that was devised long ago works on in many ways,” some of which included the transformation of gracious and wise elves into malicious orcs, and wise tree-beings, the ents, into cave-dwelling, man-hunting, trolls.23 The price of power is often a cost exacted on its victims, a truth well-known to Liu and his Chinese audience, and the cost is paid with human suffering. Muehlhoff’s first three questions are thus answered, namely, “what do they believe?” “why do they believe that?” and “where do we agree? ”It is only the fourth question — “based on these, how should one proceed?” — that is up for debate.
Liu envisions salvation from such evil, best expressed when Ye is interrogated about her response to the Trisolaran signal and explains her hope that “a society with advanced science must also have advanced moral standards.”24 When the Trisolaran who sent Ye a warning is interrogated, he offers a glimpse of what restored humanity might look like:
everything is devoted to survival . . . for me, the most intolerable aspects are the spiritual monotony and desiccation. Anything that can lead to spiritual weakness is declared evil. We have no literature, no art, no pursuit of beauty and enjoyment. We cannot even speak of love . . . Princeps, is there meaning to such a life?25
But Trisolaran civilization, despite Ye’s hopes, will offer the most meager of redemptive provisions, as Liu explains their limited emotional range:
Emotions, such as fear, sorrow, happiness and appreciation of beauty — were things that the Trisolaran civilization strove to avoid and eliminate. Such emotions caused the individual and society to be weak spiritually and did not help with survival in the harsh environment of this world . . . calmness and numbness . . . the past two hundred-some cycles of civilization proved that civilizations that relied on these two states as their spiritual core were the most capable of survival.26
How then does Liu propose that humanity can manage to survive, and regain its full flourishing in the face of evil? His solution is pragmatic, tempered by the persistence of reality. Admitting that he revels in using the imagination of science to unveil the “poetry of Nature,” Liu admits that every era has its “invisible shackles” so that “I can only dance in my chains,” looking to science to mitigate or possibly reverse evils.27 The form of salvation may take one of two shapes, Liu explains: either we someday discover an alien force, an “Other,” which may challenge our ways, or we apply the same effort (and even kindness) that we exert toward understanding the stars to our relations with other humans.
Solutions from Oxford: Storytellers Over Scientists
While the Netflix version of The Three Body Problem introduces a group of Oxford physicists to flesh out Liu’s tale of cosmic woe, it is a pair of Oxford storytellers, Professors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who can show us how humanity’s tale can find its solution. The problem of evil is central to Tolkien’s tale of the one Ring of Power; for Lewis, it was the problem of evil which drove him to the Christian faith, as he realized he must have gotten from somewhere his sense of good by which to judge things evil.28 Tolkien felt that the struggle against evil was the most fundamental theme of any story, and thus of history itself. In a 1939 lecture “On Fairy-stories,” he explained that while most accept the inevitability of such evil, thus the genre of “Tragedy, the true form of Drama, its highest function,” there is also the fairy tale, with its “Consolation of the Happy Ending,” marked by its “Great Escape: the Escape from Death” itself.”29 When such redemption is found in a story, humanity is restored and paradise regained; thus instead of Sauron’s Mordor overrunning Middle Earth, a craggy, ashen landscape described as a “featureless, colorless gloom” and “a land of darkness, where all who entered were forgotten,” the fertile, peaceful, and joyous Shire is saved.30
Lewis described the dehumanization by evil in a more explicitly theological sense, substituting for Tolkien’s Sauron the devil — namely the master demon (Screwtape) from The Screwtape Letters, whom Lewis imagines writing a series of letters to his young apprentice demon. Lewis depicts Screwtape as admitting that “we want cattle who can finally become food;” this is in contrast to “the Enemy” (God), who instead desires that humanity reach its full potential made in God’s image, the imago dei: “He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself — creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own . . . He wants servants who can finally become sons.31
The re-humanization envisioned by Tolkien is clarified by Lewis, as in obedience man regains his sense of divine origins and character. The causes of beauty and art and love, extinguished by the Trisolarans, are regained, but only through the moments of joy found by opening ourselves back up to our divine origins, our divine source. In such moments we apprehend true beauty, though Lewis warns that “the books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.32 Lewis described his longings as “only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”33 Liu can be dismissive of religion, quipping that faith in the Trisolaran fleet arriving is “unlike other human religions, they worshiped something that truly existed.”34 But for such Christians as Tolkien and Lewis, salvation comes from within as we apprehend the true source of joy, and source for the kindness Liu advocates. Or,the divine dimension might be envisioned in terms of Liu’s “Other,” a race (or Being: God) who arrives from outside of Earth to provide redemption.
The (moral) battles that Liu’s characters face can also point to a divine intrusion, Lewis would explain. In an essay seeking for a rationality, both scientific and moral, to the universe (in much the same way Ye and Liu seek), Lewis posited why it is that we bother to search at all:
The more seriously we take our own charge of futility the more we are committed to the implication that reality in the last resort is not futile at all. The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as Infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims . . . [we] could not go on being indignant. The fact that [he, the atheist] arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still.35
Lewis even has Screwtape admit that God is at work in our moral struggles:
In peace, we can make many of them [humans] ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them . . . in the last war, thousands of humans . . . discovered the whole moral world for the first time. . . . This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s [God] motives for creating a dangerous world. . . . He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.36
The Real Problem: Physics or Humanity?
Just as Wang Miao realizes that, instead of seeking a scientific solution to predicting the orbits of the three Trisolaran suns, finding a way to save civilization is the real problem, so do Tolkien, Lewis, and even Liu highlight that the real problem is that of the evil committed by humanity, against humanity. The Three Body Problem builds from assumptions found in nearly every religion, the fallen nature of man and the need for redemption. The Christian doctrine of sin is widely regarded as the one doctrine that needs no further proof, as it is (sadly, painfully) self-evident. Writing a half-century before Liu, cultural critic Russell Kirk articulated the problem in universal terms, explaining that anyone concerned for humanity must
at least do inner obeisance to something higher than his ordinary self, whether he calls this something God, or, like the man of the Far East, calls it his higher Self, or simply the Law. Without this inner law of restraint man can only oscillate violently between extremes . . . The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.37
The evils faced in Liu’s world and ours can be both overt and subtle. As I reflect on the industrious nature of today’s China, I am reminded of Joseph Pieper’s post World War II book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, in which he reflects on what went wrong in the highly educated and even highly religious Germany. He found a mindset similar to that faced today in all sorts of places, not just in China’s achievement-oriented “9-9-6” culture: a devotion to one’s work that can become unbalanced by greater considerations. Pieper reminds us that the word “culture” derives from “cultus,” a term indicating worship of the divine, the true basis of culture. Thus, one should balance “live to work” with “work to live,” understanding that there are two types of reasoning: ratio which is useful for accomplishing tasks, and intellectus which contemplates the divine.38
Lewis and Tolkien each explain that the first step to such contemplation lies in the experience of joy. As discussed, Lewis claims that experiences of beauty lead to a longing for more enduring joy. Tolkien shows that in contemplating the deepest meaning of the best stories, the “Consolation of the Happy Ending” is the only avenue of redemption, providing “the joy of final deliverance,” denying “universal final defeat,” so that the good news (evangelium) of deliverance gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”39
The battle is very real, of course. It was this very battle against evil, and its companion death, that led to Tolkien’s love of Norse literature such as Beowulf. He claimed that “it is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced [the problem of death], put the monsters in the center [of their stories], gave them victory but no honor, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.”40 Even so, Tolkien admitted “but we may remember what the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death.”41 But Tolkien did not end on such a note of abject despair, as he embodied a solution in LOTR’s Aragorn character, King of the Race of Men and a Christ-figure. Tolkien describes Aragorn in a manner to evoke the image of Christ:
Thus he became at last the most hardy of living Men, skilled in their crafts and lore, and was yet more than they; for he was elven-wise, and there was a light in his eyes that when they were kindled few could endure. His face was sad and stern because of the doom that was laid on him, and yet hope dwelt ever in the depths of his heart, from which mirth would arise at times like a spring from the rock.42
Beyond the call to humanity taking up moral arms, as described or depicted by Liu, Lewis, and Tolkien, Aragorn illustrates how a God-man can both empathize with our struggles, as well as say to us, “don’t worry, I’ve got this.” Humanity is a particularly blessed participant in such a process, as Peter declares that not even angels are privy to such fifty-yard-line seats: “Of this salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you . . . [testifying to] the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow . . . Things which angels desire to look into.43
Liu’s tale (only the first third of which is discussed here) is one of a desperate but noble struggle of humanity fighting for its very survival, for survival from its own evils as well as from conquest by an unfriendly alien race. The battle is one that has been faced throughout history, both Eastern and Western. In realizing that we all face a common enemy (ourselves), a sense of global community can be established, though chaos will yet reign. It is only in finding a solution that lies outside of ourselves, not in an alien race but in a divine creator into whose image He intends to return us, can we find redemption, and a true community in which chaos is subdued.
Notes:
1 Liu is his family name, which is given first in Chinese tradition; for the English-speaking audience his family name is given last in this article. Other Chinese names are given as in the book, family name (ex. Ye) first.
2 Cixin, Liu, The Three Body Problem, trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2014)
3 The Three Body Problem, directed by Rosamund Pike (March 21, 2024), https://www.netflix.com/title/81024821?trg=fbm&trkid=13747225&s=a&vlang=en&clip=81735571
4 Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books,” The New York Times, January 16, 2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html.
5 Xian Chen, ”U.S. Translator Selected for English Version of ‘Three Bodies’,” November 30, 2012, https:web.archive.org/web/20130301010705/http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2012-11/30/c_124025659.htm.
6 Joshua Rothman, “Liu Cixin is China’s Answer to Arthur C. Clarke,”The New Yorker, March 6, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chinas-arthur-c-clarke.
7 Baron de Montesquieu, “The Spirit of the Laws,” in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003), Book VII, Ch. 9.6, Vol. 35, p. 46.
8 Tony Walker, “‘To get rich is glorious’: how Deng Xiaoping set China on a path to rule the world,” The Conversation, July 9, 2021, https://theconversation.com/to-get-rich-is-glorious-how-deng-xiaopeng-set-china-to-rule-the-world-156836.
9 Like “9-9-6,” it was also reported to me on my trip that parent-teacher meetings are said to have parents often angry at teachers for not working students hard enough, as the competition is stiff for the 50% acceptance rates into (non-trade school) high schools, let alone entrance into the universities.
10 Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem, “Author’s Postscript for the American Edition,” trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2014), 391. Digital Edition.
11 Ibid., 391-2.
12 Ibid., 392.
13 Olivia Geng and William Kazer, “Writing China: Cixin Liu, ‘The Three-Body Problem,’” The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-24699.
14 Ibid., 27.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 307.
17 Ibid., 73.
18 Ibid., 84.
19 Ibid., 253.
20 Ibid., 269.
21 Ibid., 270.
22 Ibid., 300.
23 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), 473.
24 Liu, The Three Body Problem, 345.
25 Ibid., 353.
26 Ibid., 352-3.
27 Ibid., 394.
28 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), which he opens with “Book One: Right and Wrong as a Clue to Meaning in the Universe.”
29 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 153.
30 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 228.
31 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 39.
32 C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 30.
33 Ibid., 31.
34 Liu, The Three Body Problem, 319.
35 C.S. Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 70.
36 C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 161.
37 Russell Kirk, “Conservators of Civilization” in The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, ed. George A. Panichas (Wilmington: ISI, 2017), 516.
38 Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1963), 28.
39 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 153. Tolkien calls such a tale with a happy ending a eu-catastrophe, “eu” signifying “good,” thus a “good event,” instead of the dys-catastrophe found in tragedies.
40 J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 25-26.
41 Ibid., 26.
42 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine, 2001), Appendix A.v, 374.
43 1 Peter 1:10-12. These points were emphasized in summary of a summer long preaching series titled “Broken Yet Chosen,” by drummer-turned-NASA-astrophysicist-turned-preacher Mike Castelli, and colleagues Happy Peterson, Walt McCord. The series used the Japanese art of Kintsugi to illustrate the beauty and strength of redeeming broken vessels, similar to Leonhard Cohen’s lyric, “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” in “Anthem,” The Future, Columbia, 1992. Castelli’s sermon can be found at https://tcig.org/message/broken-but-why, August 18, 2024. Another astrophysicist advocating a Christ-for-the-cosmos-type solution is Hugh Ross, arguing for instance in Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home (Baker Books, 2017) that Earth is uniquely designed in the cosmos to provide and sustain life for millions of souls; online site for his Reasons to Believe group at www.reasons.org.
