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We will never know, this side of heaven, where 9/11 fits in the larger story God is writing. But our literature and our history testify that it does.

Deep in the stream of Western literature runs a current J. R. R. Tolkien called "eucatastrophe"—literally, "good catastrophe." Tolkien served as a lieutenant in WW I and saw action in the offensive of the Somme before succumbing to trench fever. In a famous essay written many years after the armistice, he described how our favorite stories often bring us to the "sudden joyous 'turn'" that in the face of horrific events "denies … universal final defeat," giving "a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."

Far from functioning as illegitimate escapes from reality, Tolkien argued, these tales of joy snatched from the jaws of tragedy point towards the central True Story of Christ's passion and resurrection—"the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe." All stories that hold out hope in the cataclysmic struggle between Good and Evil—from the first fairy tale to the Lord of the Rings to Star Wars and beyond—echo this greatest eucatastrophe.

For Tolkien, no evil event, however horrible, is outside the story of salvation-history. God bends them all to his purposes. In the creation account found in Silmarillion, Tolkien has the spirits sing Middle-earth into existence. The melody of Illuvatar (God) was "deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came." Melkor (Satan) interfered with a loud, brash tune, trying to "drown the other music by the violence of its voice." But the "most triumphant notes" of Melkor's discordant song were "taken up by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern." Those things the devil intended for evil, God turned to good—from the very beginning.

All very well for literature. But what about history?

The eucatastrophic song echoes through church history.

It echoes from Joseph, who came out of enslavement and imprisonment to redeem his people, to Jonah, who emerged from the belly of the fish bearing a powerful word from God that saved a city, to Paul, whose imprisonment in Rome opened unparalleled opportunities to spread the gospel.

It echoes from the fall of Jerusalem, which sparked the spreading flame of the gospel throughout the Roman Empire, to the martyrdom of the early Christians, whose blood became the seed of the church, to the fall of Rome, after which the victorious barbarian tribes were in turn vanquished by the gospel, carrying its message across Europe.

And so on through the history of the church, down to the 20th and 21st centuries.

C. S. Lewis, who himself knew the horrors of the front lines, saw echoes of the True Story in World War II. He put them brilliantly into the mouth of the wily demon, Screwtape.

This European war … has certain tendencies inherent in it which are, in themselves, by no means in our favour. We may hope for a good deal of cruelty and unchastity. But, if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy, while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self.

And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46