Cornerstone Presbyterian Church
Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)
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“This wonderful book offers us all a rich banquet of insights about good, evil, freedom, choice desire, love, death, and happiness. Wisdom leaps from every page.”
–Tom Morris
Choosing to Die: The Gift of
Mortality in Middle-earth, a 15 page article by Bill
Davis in the book The Lord of the Rings and
Philosophy, edited by
Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, Open Court, 2003.
Bill and Lynda Davis were members of Cornerstone for several years while Bill was on the faculty of Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio. Presently he is a professor at the denomination’s Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia where we support him as our missionary to the children of the denomination and others there.
This review covers only Davis’s article in this book.
Those who have not read The Lord of the Rings might wonder whether this article will have any interest. I haven’t read that book myself, but I found the article sufficiently self-contained that I could profit from it. Some of the references to Tolkien are to the movie, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which is available on DVD.
The introduction to the article presents the questions being discussed. Here are parts of it:
“Arwen’s love for Aragorn, however, is … more complicated. The movie … shows the two of them discussing their future during Aragorn’s stay at Rivendell. On a bridge in a lush garden they speak tenderly of their commitment to each other. She asks if he remembers her promise. He does, saying, ‘You said you’d bind yourself to me, forsaking the immortal life of your people.’ Her reply is unwavering, ‘And to that I hold. I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone. I choose a mortal life.’ She clearly loves him, but what does death have to do with her choice? … Why would Arwen choose to pay such a high price?
“Questions like these can be answered on two levels that ultimately converge. On the first level, we might look for answers that would make sense to Tolkien’s characters inside his story. … Answers on the second level concern death and immortality in our own lives.”
Davis explores various speculations about life and death put forth by philosophers in our world. Many are still current. He also explores these matters in the rather different world of Middle-earth. Once these are understood, it seems to me, the realities and implications about life and death as set forth in God’s word become more meaningful than ever.
I have not read the many other articles in this book, but they may be of interest.
See also on this website the review of another Davis article, Extreme Makeover: Moral Development and the Encounter with Aslan, in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy, another in this same series. Another recent Davis publication, not in the library, is Thomas Reid's Ethics: Moral Epistemology on Legal Foundations (Continuum Studies in British Philosophy), 2006. Amazon sells this 158 page book for $120.
— Dean Brown
Bill Davis is Professor of
Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Covenant College.
He has contributed articles on moral philosophy in several recent books.
The book’s editors are at King’s College, Pennsylvania, and Berkeley
College in New York City.
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email: info@cornerstonepch.org