I Have Called You Friends

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

Available on-demand

Ever felt your imagination crave a deeper sense of wonder? Step directly into a rich world where mythic landscapes awaken your soul and ancient faith reshapes everyday life. By reconnecting truth with beauty, this immersive experience rekindles your spirit, lifting you out of modern isolation into a radiant, sacramental vision.

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The de Nicola Center’s symposium serves as a critical intervention in the modern crisis of fragmentation. By revisiting the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, and their peers, the presenters argue for the strategic necessity of reintegrating the transcendentals—Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In an age where these concepts are often bifurcated, this session offers a cohesive vision of how the imagination serves as a primary faculty for perceiving the wholeness of reality.

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Liturgical Imagination
Professor Ben Reinhard dissects the leaf mold of the mind—Tolkien’s own metaphor for the organic process of creative gestation. Reinhard evaluates how Tolkien’s immersion in Catholic liturgy, fostered from his youth at the Birmingham Oratory, served as the nutrient-rich soil for his mythopoesis. This liturgical imagination is not merely a thematic preference but a fundamental cognitive structure. Reinhard interprets the Easter imagery in Samwise Gamgee’s awakening on the fields of Cormallen as a reflex of the Paschal liturgy. This connection is made explicit through Tolkien’s choice of March 25th for the destruction of the Ring—a date which, in the medieval English calendar, marked both the Annunciation and the Crucifixion. The transition from Mordor’s Dark Night to the ravaging rediscovery of the universe mirrors the movement from Good Friday to the Resurrection.

Reintegrating Truth through Beauty
Addressing the truth problem in modern education, Professor Jon Balsbaugh evaluates the rise of expressive individualism and the buffered self, which isolates students from transcendent reality. He synthesizes a pedagogical solution by invoking Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, which warns that Beauty, if separated from her sisters Truth and Goodness, will take them with her in an act of mysterious vengeance. Balsbaugh dissects the distinction between experience for—where the self treats the world as data for its own meaning-making—and experience of—a vulnerable encounter where the person is moved and possessed by an external reality. By fostering these encounters, educators can help students escape the gravitational pull of pervasive isolation and move toward a humble pursuit of truth.

The Sacramental Imagination
Professor Siobhan Maloney Latar interprets the veiled unveiling dynamic of the Incarnation as the cornerstone of George MacDonald’s and Tolkien’s work. Drawing on Paul Claudel’s diagnosis of the modern crisis of a starved imagination, she synthesizes MacDonald’s view of the imagination as both a gift (an obediential faculty) and a task (creative participation). Latar evaluates the distinction between poesis (making) and trouver (finding), noting that the imagination’s duty is to follow and find the Divine imagination. Fantasy reveals spiritual truths precisely through the mediation of material symbols, where the veiled aspect of Christ’s human form paradoxically allows His glory to be revealed. This sacramental approach facilitates recovery, escape, and consolation, enabling the reader to see the world as a fundamentally figurative reality.

What is the relationship between Catholic Liturgy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction?
The Liturgy serves as a formative storehouse of images that shapes the writer’s imagination. Tolkien internalized the patterns of public worship—such as the transition from sorrow to the Christian Joy of the Gloria—to create stories that are fundamentally religious. This is most evident in the timing of the Ring’s destruction on March 25th, the liturgical date of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion, signaling a deep Eucharistic and Paschal structure within the narrative.

How can Catholic aesthetics solve the truth problem in modern education?
In an age where truth claims are viewed as battlefields, beauty acts as a disinterested entry point. Because encounters with beauty often move people regardless of their background, aesthetics can serve as the first step in a pedagogy of reintegration. This involves bumping into a sign—an objective reality that moves the student toward their destiny—opening the mind to truth by first fostering a capacity for wonder.

What is the distinction between experience for and experience of in modern philosophy?
Modernity encourages experience for, where we treat the world as empirical data for our own personal projects. In contrast, an experience of requires a vulnerable encounter where we set aside our own meaning-making and allow an objective reality to move and possess us. This shift is essential for escaping the isolation of the buffered self and reconnecting with transcendent being.

How does fantasy reveal spiritual truths through the works of George MacDonald and Tolkien?
Fantasy uses a veiled unveiling dynamic to help readers recover a true vision of the world. By presenting familiar truths under the guise of new images—such as the Ents representing a fusion of treeness and humanness—fantasy allows us to escape a reduced view of reality. It enables us to see the sign character of the world, where the material manifests the spiritual.

What role does the Incarnation play in the Catholic imaginative tradition?
The Incarnation is the full flowering of God’s work in creation, revealing that human flesh and the material world are capable of disclosing the Divine. This provides the mandate for human sub-creation; because God revealed Himself through physical form, our creative acts use material symbols to point toward spiritual realities, participating in the ongoing unveiling of truth.

“Tolkien’s works are most profitably read as products of a specifically lurgical imagination.” — Ben Reinhard
“For tolken the entire purpose of life is lurgical: to love, glorify, give thanks to God, to lead all creation in a hymn of praise to the Creator.” — Ben Reinhard
“A genuine experience of a living thing… requires that I set aside my project of constructing meaning and open myself to receive meaning coming from outside of me.” — Jon Balsbaugh
“The veiled unveiling dimension of reality described by McDonald is the same foundation for the value of fantasy.” — Siobhan Maloney Latar
“Only by acknowledging his dependence can man be truly said to create.” — Siobhan Maloney Latar