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Is Evil Real? Peter Kreeft

March 21, 2013
Anders Behring Breivik leaves the courthouse feeling pleased with himself. He is the perpetrator (whacko) of the 2011 Norway attacks. In a sequential bombing and mass shooting on 22 July 2011, he bombed government buildings in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths and then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers' Youth League (AUF) of the Labor Party on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers. He was convicted of mass murder, causing a fatal explosion, and terrorism in August 2012

Anders Behring Breivik leaves the courthouse feeling pleased with himself. He is the perpetrator (whacko) of the 2011 Norway attacks. In a sequential bombing and mass shooting on 22 July 2011, he bombed government buildings in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths and then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) of the Labor Party on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers. He was convicted of mass murder, causing a fatal explosion, and terrorism in August 2012

Tolkien’s classical Christian theology avoids two opposite errors, two oversimplifications. One is a Rousseauian optimism: the denial, or ignoring, of evil’s reality and power, and consequently a kind of spiritual pacifism, the denial of spiritual warfare. The other would be the Manichean error, the idea that evil has the same kind of reality as goodness, equally powerful and equally substantial — in fact, that evil is, in the last analysis, a second God, or an equal, dark “side” of God, as Shiva the Destroyer is forever equal to Vishnu till Preserver.

For half a century our culture has been as embarrassed by words like “sin” “wickedness”, and “evil” as a teenager is embarrassed at being seen with his parents in a mall.

Some of our Deep Thinkers think that evil is only a temporary evolutionary stage, a hangover from ancient barbarisms of race, class, or gender that we will grow out of we grow out of diapers. We are still waiting for the toilet training to take place.

Others say that evil is just ignorance, and therefore curable by education. After a century of universal education, we are still waiting for the cure to take. A study of which Nazis were most willing to kill Jews in Hitler’s death camps revealed that this evil was indeed related to education, but not in the way expected: the more educated they were, the more willing they were.

Some say that evil against others is only the acting out of a lack of positive self-esteem. So Hitler did not esteem himself enough.

Most of our culture actually admires F.D.R.’s famous nonsense that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It sounds somehow healthy and even pious.

And then we saw the events of 9/11. In the chorus of voices that filled our media for the next few months, one was conspicuously silent from the babble: psychobabble. Where had all the gurus gone?

Tolkien’s Christian theology told him that since the good God is the only creator of all beings, therefore all beings are ontologically good. But that theology also told him that God had given man free will and man had fallen into sin, which corrupts goodness and therefore corrupts beings (since being is the place where goodness can be found). Finally, his theology also told him that a man may, through evil choices, go to Hell, where he is hopelessly and forever evil.

The first of these three doctrines — ontological goodness — grounds Tolkien’s “optimistic” cosmology; the other two — man’s sinfulness and the reality of Hell — ground his “pessimistic” psychology. Both are shocks to secular philosophies: How can mud, mosquitoes, and even hemorrhoids be good, and how can we be so bad?

Yet, though he takes evil very seriously, Tolkien is not a pessimist, even about human nature. In fact, it is his moral optimism, his faith and hope in divine grace and in the triumph of good over evil, that deeply offends the modern secular critic. These critics label the heroes of The Lord of the Rings as simplistically moral, yet the antiheroes of most modern novels are much more simplistically immoral or amoral. It is the critics who are one-sided; Tolkien sees both the good and the evil sides better and deeper than they do. He is like a giant with both arms outstretched, one into the heights and the other into the depths. He scandalizes some small, simplistic souls by his glimpses of Heaven and others by his glimpses of Hell.

Think of the first time you saw the spectacular images of September 11th. Now, remember not the images outside but the feeling inside. It was a sudden change from a peacetime consciousness to a wartime consciousness. It was a lot like the change from sleeping consciousness to waking consciousness, which your alarm clock triggers in you each morning. It was a sudden light, a sudden enlightenment. The world you woke up to was not brought into being by your waking up; it was always there. But you were not always there. You were dreaming. God sent prophets to wake you up, like alarm clocks.

That vision of life as a spiritual warfare between good and evil is the vision of life presupposed in every great story. For any great story must take both good and evil very serious in order to generate great drama; and the fundamental theme of every great story is always this spiritual warfare between some particular good and some particular evil. The conflict between good and evil is the source of all conflict within each characters. The source of all external conflict between characters is the internal conflict between good and evil within each character.

But Tolkien is not a Manichee: this war is not between equally powerful powers. It is not even between equally real powers. It requires a little philosophical clarification to make this point clear.

Good and evil are not equally powerful, because they are not equally real – even though evil appears not only equal to good but even stronger than good (“I am Gandalf, the White, but Black is mightier still”). But appearance and  reality do not coincide here, and in the end evil will always reveal its inevitable self-destruction (although often after a terrible price is paid: e.g., Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin) The self-destruction of evil is not just something to believe in and hope for, but to be certain of. It is metaphysically necessary, necessary because of the very kind of being evil has by its unchangeable essence. For evil can only be a parasite on good. It depends on a good host for it to pervert.

“Nothing is evil in the beginning” or by nature: Morgorth was one of the Ainur, Sauron was a Maia, Saruman was the head of Gandalf’s order of Wizards, the Orcs were Elves, the Ringwraiths were great Men, and Gollum was a Hobbit. And whenever a parasite succeeds in killing its host it also kills itself. So if evil succeeds, it fails; it commits suicide.

The philosophical argument for evil being a parasite on good is simple: evil can exist only in some being, and all being is ontologically good, good for something, desirable somehow. Evil is the perversion of some version, the unnatural twisting of some nature; and all nature is good.

The argument for all being being good, in turn, is simply that “good” means “desirable”, and everything real is desirable for something. Even the murderer’s shot must be a good shot; moral evil can happen only by using ontological goodness.

The theological argument for the same conclusion is that every being is either the good God or a creature of this good God Who, being totally good, cannot will or create anything evil (though He can allow it, for a greater good, as He allows human sin in order to preserve human free will).

Yet though evil is not as real as goodness, it is real, terribly real; and life is spiritual warfare — there are snakes in the grass. And they come not just from the next yard. They come not from earth but from Hell. “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers” (Ephesians 6:12). You do not need to commit the sin of allegory to see who the Black Riders are: “They come from Mordor,’ said Strider in a low voice. From Mordor, Barliman, if that means anything to you,” Strider’s laconic: “They are terrible!” is more suggestive than any detailed description could be.

More evils come from Mordor than we think. “All those arts and subtle devices for which he [Saruman] forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor.” And so did the little local evils in the Shire that had to be “scoured”:

“This is worse than Mordorl” said Sam. “Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say, because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.”

“Yes, this is Mordor,” said Frodo. “Just one of its works”

Tolkien certainly believes in the goodness of goodness all the badness of badness. He is not a moral relativist. But that does not make him a legalist or a fundamentalist. A common but indefensible error of some critics is to see The Lord of the Rings as morally “simplistic”, as a “white versus black, good guys versus bad guys” story. This is so far from the truth as to be literally absurd. With the exception of Tom Bombadil,  there is hardly a character in The Lord of the Rings who is no tempted by evil. The war is not just external, between the white chess pieces and the black, but within every single piece on the board, even while there is an external war going on between two sides that really but imperfectly represent the good (the Fellowship) and the evil (Mordor). Tolkien certainly would approve Solzhenitsyn’s famous remark about the line between Good and Evil not dividing nations or cultures or ideologies but running through the middle of every human heart.

Tolkien is not a psychological absolutist but a moral absolutist: no person is absolutely good or evil; but goodness and evil themselves are absolutely distinct. He believes that “there’s a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us”; but not that there’s a little good in evil and a little evil in good. He believes in human moral complexity but not in logical moral complexity. He believes in the law of non-contradiction, in the goodness of goodness and the badness of badness. If that is his offense in the eyes of the critics, that tells us little about Tolkien but much about the critics.

Indeed, moral doubleness or “relativism” in the concrete does not contradict, but presupposes, moral singleness or absolutism in the abstract. If good and evil are not objectively real and absolutely distinct essences in the abstract, then the judgment that a concrete character is partly good and partly evil becomes meaningless.

Tolkien’s moral absolutism contradicts the worldview of modern post-Christian moral relativism. But it also contradicts the pagan pre-Christian religious relativism. To see this, consider Tolkien’s primary pagan source, Norse mythology. Odin, their supreme god, is not morally good, like the God of the Bible. He is addicted to power, like Sauron. The Vikings would never have understood the philosophy that “power corrupts.”

In fact, all the pagan gods, Northern (Germanic) or Southern (Mediterranean) are, like us, partly good and partly evil. They are “divine”, or superior, not in goodness but only in power — in fact, in three powers: power over nature by a supernatural or “magical” technology, power over ignorance (cleverness, farsight and foresight), and power over death (immortality). (Exactly modernity’s superiority over the past! If that is all divinity means, we are now approaching divinity.) The Jewish and Christian claim that the one God is totally good and not evil was as much of a shock to the old paganism as it is to the new.

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Is The Supernatural Real? – Peter Kreeft

March 15, 2013
Morning in Enedwaith. The wide lands that lay between Arnor in the north and Gondor in the south. Originally deeply forested, the great forests of this region were cut down by the Númenóreans during the Second Age. In the years after their founding, Enedwaith lay between Arnor to the north and Gondor to the south, and so the people who lived here were known as the 'middle-folk'. Though Enedwaith did not belong to either Kingdom, it was jointly administered by the Dúnedain, and the Wild Men who lived here ultimately did so under their control. Tolkien goes so far as to hint that, in the earliest days of the Two Kingdoms, Enedwaith was considered to fall within the boundaries of Gondor.

Morning in Enedwaith. The wide lands that lay between Arnor in the north and Gondor in the south. Originally deeply forested, the great forests of this region were cut down by the Númenóreans during the Second Age. In the years after their founding, Enedwaith lay between Arnor to the north and Gondor to the south, and so the people who lived here were known as the ‘middle-folk’. Though Enedwaith did not belong to either Kingdom, it was jointly administered by the Dúnedain, and the Wild Men who lived here ultimately did so under their control. Tolkien goes so far as to hint that, in the earliest days of the Two Kingdoms, Enedwaith was considered to fall within the boundaries of Gondor.

C. S. Lewis explains what supernaturalism means as clearly as anyone has ever done:

Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering about what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think…. The other view is the religious view According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe … to produce creatures like itself — I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds.’`
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The supernatural is not the same as the magical. Magic can be part of nature. There is as much magic in The Hobbit as in The Silmarillion, but The Hobbit is not about the supernatural, while The Silmarillion is.

What difference does it make whether you are a naturalist or a supernaturalist? All the difference in the world. It makes a difference to everything. Imagine you are acting in a play. The supernaturalist is like one who believes that the play is not the whole of reality, that there is a far greater reality outside it. The naturalist denies that. Even though the supernaturalist and the naturalist may speak the same lines in the play, their meaning is not the same. Context makes a difference, and the supernatural is the ultimate context.

Tolkien, as a Christian, was of course a supernaturalist. As we shall see when we treat the topic of religion, Tolkien kept the supernatural hidden in The Lord of the Rings; yet it is ubiquitous, and he himself explicitly told us so.

Tolkien claims that fantasy naturally treats the supernatural:

[F]airy-stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural, the Magical towards Nature, and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories

Fantasy treats the supernatural not because it is fantastic but because it is real.

C. S. Lewis gives the following “aesthetic” argument for supernaturalism in Miracles:

As long as one is a Naturalist, “Nature” is only a word for “everything” — And Everything is not a subject about which anything very interesting can be said or (save by illusion) felt…. But everything becomes different when we recognize that Nature is a creature, a created thing, with its own particular tang or flavor…

The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.
C. S. Lewis, Miracles

The capacity to evoke wonder, which is the great power of fantasy, almost requires supernaturalism. It is inconceivable that a worldly pragmatist like John Dewey or Karl Marx could write fantasy. Only a supernaturalistic metaphysics has room for it. It says that our world has edges, that it is not all there is, that there is more. In such a world you can never say, with the bored, jaded author of Ecclesiastes, “I have seen everything” (Eccles 1:14).

In Tolkien’s Silmarillion the world is flat (until its fall) and therefore has an edge. A flat world is a physical symbol for a supernaturalistic metaphysics. It points to a “beyond” beyond its edges, a “more”. But a round world is self-contained, and absolutely relative. In The Silmarillion the world is changed from flat to round as a divine punishment. This is far from fantastic; it is symbolically quite accurate. For, in fact, the divine punishment was that our worldview, rather than our world, was changed from supernaturalism to naturalism.

Yet one edge, one absolute, remains even in our round, relative world, though not in space but in time. There is death, personal time’s absolute edge Supernaturalism’s practical payoff is the hope of divine grace. Grace is needed because evil is powerful. We are far too weak to have much hope without it. Frodo is wise because he knows this. The whole of Middle earth — souls as well as bodies — depends on his mission, and he knows he is not strong enough to fulfill it.

Yet, because of an implicit trust in grace, he volunteers: “I will take the Icing, though I do not know the way” (Lord of the Rings, p. 264). It was a Marian moment. St. Luke showed us the same thing at the Annunciation. Mary’s mission was strikingly similar to Frodo’s. The salvation of the whole world depended on it. And the words of her acceptance of her mission were also similar to Frodo’s: “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

Neither Tolkien nor St. Luke tells us what invisible force in the soul motivated this visible choice. But there are only two possibilities: pride or humility. When we hear “I will take the ring”, we may think we hear pride, but when we hear “though I do not know the way”, we know we hear humility. Tolkien kept explicit religion out of The Lord of the Rings, but here is a powerful example of implicit religion. No one but an arrogant fool could do what Frodo did without throwing an anchor out into the deep of supernatural grace.

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The Size of Tolkien’s Reality – Peter Kreeft

March 14, 2013
"In making a myth, in practicing “mythopoeia,” and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a story-teller…is actually fulfilling God's purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light.” J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters

“In making a myth, in practicing “mythopoeia,” and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a story-teller…is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light.” J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters

Introduction
“Philosophy” means “the love of wisdom”. It should be what it means. The fact that it has largely ceased to be that in modern “philosophy departments” does not mean that its essence has changed, but that its disciples have. Similarly, the fact that most Christians in North America are not martyrs or saints like the early Christians does not mean that the meaning of Christianity has changed, only that Christians have.

Metaphysics is the most important, most foundational, part of philosophy. It is rational, not irrational; it is a “science” in the broad, ancient sense of the word: a body of knowledge ordered through explanations and causes. Like the rest of philosophy, it does not use the modern scientific method. (Neither does anything else except modern science!) But it is a science, and it should not be classified under “the occult”, as it is in some bookstores.

Unlike all other sciences, including other philosophical sciences, metaphysics explores reality as such, all of reality, not just some part or dimension of reality, such as living things, chemicals, human history, or morality. It seeks the truths, laws, and principles that are true of all being. (“Being” is the traditional term, but “reality” sounds more concrete and less occultic than “being”.)

Here are a few sample questions of metaphysics:

  • Is all being one, true, good, and beautiful?
  • Is evil real?
  • Is matter real?
  • Is spirit real?
  • Is God real?
  • Is chance real?
  • Is causality real?
  • Is time real?
  • How can a being change, that is, be both the same being it was, and also different?
  • What is the relation between a thing’s essence (what it is) and its existence (that it is)?
  • Does language reflect reality? Are there in reality things (nouns), acts (verbs), qualities (adjectives), relations (prepositions and conjunctions), etc.?
  • Are “universals” like justice, human nature, squareness, and redness real things, or real aspects of things, or only concepts, or only words?

The Lord of the Rings illuminates at least three important metaphysical questions:

  1. How big is reality? Is it larger or smaller than our thought?
  2. Does it include the supernatural?
  3. Does it include universals, “Platonic Ideas”, or “Jungian archetypes”?

We shall take up the first in this post and give you the other two later on.

How big is reality?
There are only three logically possible answers to this question.

  1. The first is that “there are more things in heaven and earth ( i.e., in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e., in thought).” That was Shakespeare’s philosophy, as expressed by Hamlet to Horatio, who found it hard to believe in ghosts. This is the philosophy of the poet and of the happy for whom nature is a fullness, a moreness, and therefore wonderful. It is the philosophy of all pre-modern cultures.
  2. The second possible answer is that there are fewer things in reality than in thought; that most of our thought is mere myth, error, convention, projection, fantasy, fallacy, folly, .dream, etc. This is the philosophy of the unhappy man, the cynic, the pessimist: “Trust nobody and nothing.” This philosophy is hardly ever found in any pre-modern culture, except in a small minority.
  3. The third possibility is that there are exactly the same number of things in reality and in thought, that is, that we “know it all”.

What difference does it make to your life which philosophy you believe?

It makes a total difference, a difference to absolutely every single thing in your life. It colors everything.  For if you believe the first philosophy, as Shakespeare did, as Tolkien did, and as most pre-modern peoples did, then your fundamental attitude toward all reality is wonder and humility. You are like a small child in a large house. As Tolkien said in one of his letters, “You are inside a very great story.”

You expect mysteries, you expect moreness: terrors to stop your heart and joys to break it. Reality is big. I think of the simple, haunting line in Ingmar Bergman’s movie The Seventh Seal: “It is the Angel of Death that’s passing over us, Mia, it’s the Angel of Death, the Angel of Death. And he’s very big.” In this big world there may be not only things like dragons, but even heroes.

The larger-than-life world is the one our ancestors lived in. Our culture’s greatest sadness is that we no longer live in this world. Tolkien’s greatest achievement is that he invites us to inhabit this world again. He shows us that this world is our home. He even shows us heroism: he not only shows us heroes but he also shows us that we ourselves believe in heroes. For after we have read Tolkien’s unashamedly heroic epic, we do not say, “Well, that was a pleasant little escape from reality”, but, “Hey! That was real!”

If you believe the second philosophy, that there are fewer things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies, then you are cynical, skeptical, suspicious, bored, jaded, detached, ironic, and definitely non-heroic. You are a reductionist: you reduce mystery to puzzle, love to lust, thought to cybernetics, reasoning to rationalizing, ideals to desires, man to ape, God to myth.

In other words, you are a typically modern or post-modern man. (Is there much of a difference?) You buy into the first step of the scientific method: “Doubt everything that is not proved; treat every thought as guilty until proved innocent, false until proved true.” The older philosophy treated thoughts as we treat people in court: innocent until proved guilty. (Compare Socrates’s method with Descartes’s on this score.)

The third philosophy is rationalism, in fact, arrogant rationalism:  Everything in my thought is real, and everything real is in my thought. In ancient Greece Parmenides said, “What is thought and what is real is the same”, and in modern Germany Hegel said, “The real is the rational and the rational is the real;” but I think only those with a divinity complex can actually believe that. And even pantheists, who believe that the whole cosmos is only a thought or dream, believe it is not our dream but God’s, and therefore still “more”, or transcendent to our thought — unless there is some confusion between us (or me) and God, in which case a shrink or a smack will serve the soul better than a syllogism.

Thomas Howard calls good fantasy a “flight to reality” because, though its details are fictional, the nature of its world, its universal principles and values, are true. Tolkien shows us the nature of the real world by his fantasy. He is making a statement about reality, about being, about metaphysics when he says:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered.
J R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories

The fundamental reason for the popularity of The Lord of the Rings is that people sense it is real. No mere escape from reality can be voted “the greatest book of the century”.

And that is why Tolkien does not tell us half of what he knows about his world. You can tell everything about your fantasies, your dreams, or your thoughts, but not about anything real.

That is also why The Lord of the Rings bears endless rereading: it is heavy enough to bear the mind’s journeys into it, like our world. In fact, it is perhaps the most “heavy”, full, detailed, complex, real invented world in all of human literature.

Tolkien himself tells us that he felt, in creating it, as we feel in reading it: that it was discovered, not invented, that it had always been there, and it was as much a surprise to Tolkien to discover it as it is to us: “I had the sense of recording what was already `there,’ somewhere; not of `inventing.’ Great authors often say that about the experience of writing their masterpieces.

C. S. Lewis wrote from the same point of view:

We must not listen to [Alexander] Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man.” The proper study of mankind is everything.

We should never ask of anything “Is it real?” For everything is real. The proper question is, “A real what?”

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Heroism and the Journey of Sanctification – Bradley J. Birzer

July 11, 2012

J.R.R. Tolkien in a photograph by Billett Potter

As philosopher Eric Voegelin has argued, great thinkers have often provided their communities with an anamnesis, or the recovery of past encounters with transcendence. Aristotle, Cicero, and St. Augustine, for example, all served their contemporaries in this way.

Much as St. Augustine had, Tolkien confronted a world and culture that seemed to many on the verge of collapse. And, as with St. Augustine, Tolkien hoped that his myth would serve as an anamnesis, a return to right reason. Both Augustine and Tolkien viewed this world and its history as irredeemable through sheer human will or reason. In Tolkien’s mythology, as he stated in writings published posthumously, all of earth has been corrupted by Morgoth.

In the end, though, evil will fail to corrupt the good, which to Tolkien meant those saved and sanctified through Christ. Paraphrasing and baptizing the words of Cicero, St. Augustine wrote: “For the good man is neither uplifted with the good things of time, nor broken by its ills; but the wicked man, because he is corrupted by this world’s happiness, feels himself punished by its unhappiness.”

Aragorn speaks in a similar fashion when encountering the Riders of Rohan in The Two Towers. When one of the riders asks Aragorn how to discern right from wrong in complicated times, Aragorn responds: “As he ever has judged,” for “[g]ood and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” To discern good and evil, and to suffer the ills of this world, serves to make one better, more sanctified, and more able to serve as a fire that “causes gold to glow brightly.”

For neither Tolkien nor St. Augustine does this fact mean that it despair one should simply abandon this world to the enemy and his allies or isolate oneself from society. To the contrary, one of the most prevalent and important themes in all of Tolkien’s work — whether; academic or fictional — is the importance of heroism, not as an act of will, but as a result of grace. Through his mystery, majesty, and grace, God allows evil to happen so that the good may do good. “Evil labors with vast power and perpetual success,” Tolkien wrote. Ultimately, though, evil works “in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.”‘ St. Augustine contended that the world ultimately destroyed the wicked, as they could not suffer reverses in the world they revered with too much pride.’

Tolkien believed that as a part of one’s preparation for heaven, or. one’s sanctification, one should perform acts of Christian heroism. For Tolkien, that meant doing God’s will and being a part of Christ’s army. As the great medieval theologian Hugh of St. Victor described, it:

For the Incarnate Word is our King, who came into this world to war with the devil; and all the saints who were before His coming are soldiers as it were, going before their King, and those who have come after and will come, even to the end of the world, are soldiers following their King. And the King himself is in the midst of His army and proceeds protected and surrounded on all sides by His columns. And although in a multitude as vast as this the kind of arms different in the sacraments and the observance of the peoples preceding and following, yet all are really serving the one king and following the one banner; all are pursuing the one enemy and are being crowned by the one victory.

Christ’s army is “the church” traversing time and space, the continuance of Christ incarnate. James Patrick claims that Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring is the mythological equivalent of the church, “moving across the dark landscape, enduring every privation, frightened but full of courage, fulfilling the providence of God.” The church’s many parts, the unique gifts and the bearers of those gifts, collectively form the body of Christ.

While God may not be directly visible at all times, he is always and intimately involved in the formation and guidance of his Church and his creation. As we saw in the previous chapter, Tolkien firmly believed that God intervenes directly and indirectly in the real world, as well as in Tolkien’s subcreated world. The Silmarillion, for example, provides a mythical account of God’s creation and intervention in the affairs of men. Iluvatar works through his agents, specifically the loyal Valar and Maiar. Iluvatar, though, distributes his gifts of grace to all his servants — Valar, Maiar, Elves, men, Dwarves, and hobbits. And he distributes them in surprising ways, ways known only to him, which makes life endlessly complex and fascinating.

The “great policies of world history,” Tolkien wrote, “are often turned not by the Lords and the Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak — owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama.” Thus, within Morgoth’s ring — that is, Arda itself — Iluvatar depends on his army to do his will. He aids them directly at times, relying on the “Flame Imperishable,” Tolkien’s mythological equivalent of the Holy Spirit, to spark creativity and the moral imagination in his creation. But ultimately, whether through his gifts of grace or direct intervention, all good activities come from Iluvatar alone.

All this Tolkien thought clear enough, which is why he was frustrated by readers who failed to find God in his mythology. The “religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism,” Tolkien explained to a Jesuit friend. One may find God in the plot itself. Indeed, the elements of true Christian heroism are severally represented in the four major characters of The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf, the prophet; Aragorn, the king; Frodo, the priest; and Sam, the common man and servant. 

An Australian academic, Barry Gordon, was the first critic to demonstrate the presence of the Christian offices of priest, prophet, and king in Tolkien’s work. Tolkien forwarded Gordon’s article, “Kingship, Priesthood and Prophecy in The Lord of the Rings” to Clyde Kilby. Tolkien admitted in the letter to Kilby that the Gordon thesis was true, but that such a scheme had been unconscious on Tolkien’s part.”

In his own notes expounding on the Gordon thesis, Kilby wrote: “M-e.[Middle-earth] is saved through the priestly self-sacrifice of the hobbit Frodo, thru wisdom and guidance of Gandalf and mastery of Aragorn, heir of kings. Also forces beyond these. As each agent responds to his `calling’ he grows in power and grace. Each  becomes increasingly `Christian.” In other words, Tolkien echoes Christian teaching in that once one accepts one’s specific calling or vocation and employs one’s gifts for the good of the Body of Christ, the journey of sanctification begins.

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Evil and the Ring – Tom Shippey

June 15, 2012

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Translated, the words mean:
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

In The Lord of the Rings the deep-seated contradictions between its Boethian and Manichaean interpretations, between authority and experience, and between evil as an absence (‘the Shadow’) and evil as a force (‘the Dark Power’) drives much of the plot. It is expressed not only through the paradoxes of wraiths and shadows, but also through the Ring. In our final post on the nature of evil in The Lord of the Rings, we look at the Ring itself.

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The Ring’s ambiguity is present almost the first time we see it, in `The Shadow of the Past’, when Gandalf tells Frodo, `Give me the ring for a moment’. Frodo unfastens it from its chain and, `handed it slowly to the wizard. It felt suddenly very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it.’

Either it or Frodo. It may not seem very important to know which of these alternative explanations is true, but the difference is the difference between the world-views I have labelled above as ‘Boethian’ and `Manichaean’. If Boethius is right, then evil is internal, caused by human sin and weakness and alienation from God; in this case the Ring feels heavy because Frodo (already in the very first stages of addiction, we may say) is unconsciously reluctant to part with it. If there is some truth in the Manichaean view, though, then evil is a force from outside which has in some way been able to make the non-sentient Ring itself evil; so it is indeed the Ring, obeying the will of its master, which does not want to be identified.

Both views are furthermore perfectly convincing. In the earlier scene of Bilbo’s inability to part with the Ring — not realizing it’s in his pocket, getting angry when pressed, unable to make up his mind, dropping the envelope with the Ring on the floor –all readers realize that these are not accidents, but manifestations of Bilbo’s own unconscious wishes: Freudianism has taught us all at least that much.

However the whole plot of The Lord of the Rings is permeated with the idea of the will of Sauron operating at a distance, stirring up evil forces, literally animating the Ringwraiths and even the orcs; Gandalf talks repeatedly of the Ring as animate, betraying Isildur, abandoning Gollum, and says in explanation that according to Bilbo the Ring `needed looking after … it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight’.

The ideas that on the one hand the Ring is a sort of psychic amplifier, magnifying the unconscious fears or selfishnesses of its owners, and on the other that it is a sentient creature with urges and powers of its own, are both present from the beginning, and correspond to the internal/Boethian and external/ Manichaean theories of evil. The ambiguity is more prominent and more important in later scenes. Frodo puts on the Ring six times in The Lord of the Rings.

The first time is in the house of Tom Bombadil. This does not seem to count, for Tom, characteristically, is quite unaffected: he neither becomes invisible himself when he puts it on nor fails to see Frodo when he puts it on. The next time is in the Prancing Pony, when Frodo feels a `desire … to slip it on and vanish out of the whole silly situation’. This, of course, could be entirely his own doing; but `It seemed to him, somehow, as if the suggestion came to him from outside’.

In any case `He resisted the temptation firmly’. He makes a speech, sings a song, and then, falling off the table on which he has been capering, finds he has put on the Ring. By accident? Frodo at least works out an explanation of how this could have happened. But at the same time `he wondered if the Ring itself had not played him a trick; perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room’. We never learn the truth about this, and the second explanation does not seem especially plausible. Who in the room could have given such a command? The likes of Bill Ferny seem too low-rank and too ignorant to be capable of projecting such orders. But this is not the case on Weathertop, when the Ring-wraiths attack.

Here the Manichaean view is much more evident. Frodo remembers all his warnings, but `something seemed to be compelling him’ to disregard them. The situation is different, again, from the moment in the Barrow-wight’s mound, when Frodo thought for a moment of using the Ring to escape, but put the thought aside without difficulty. On Weathertop he has `no hope of escape … he simply felt that he must take the Ring and put it on his finger’. He struggles against the urge for a while, but in the end `resistance became unbearable’.

The feeling here is that Frodo’s will has just been overpowered by superior force, no doubt that of the wraiths, using some mental power of the sort Gandalf hinted at. And yet, and on the other hand, the word used at the start of the attack (just as in the Prancing Pony) is `temptation’: Frodo is tempted. Furthermore, we are told that it would have made a difference if he had yielded to the temptation. Gandalf says later on that his heart was not pierced by the Morgulknife `because you resisted to the last’. He might mean just that Frodo dodged, shouted, struck out, in an entirely physical sense putting the Ringwraith off his aim.

But more likely there is a psychological sense. The knife works by subduing the will, and if the will does not co-operate it works less well — though it does not lose its power entirely and altogether, as it would if evil were entirely a matter of inner temptations. Gandalf keeps up the ambiguity of the scene by remarking that `fortune or fate have helped you … not to mention courage’. But here he clearly means not either/or but both, fate and courage: the same may be true of the nature of the Ring.

Frodo uses the Ring twice on Amon Hen (II/10), and both times he has to, first to escape Boromir, then to get away from the Fellowship without being noticed. On the first occasion, though, he sees the Eye of Sauron, and becomes aware that it is looking for him. And as he does so:

He heard himself crying out Never, never! Or was it: Verily, I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring.

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger.

This is an especially mysterious scene on first reading, though it is cleared up slightly when we learn (as has been said above) that the third voice is Gandalf’s, in a `high place’ somewhere striving against the mental force of the `the Dark Power’.

But whose are the other two voices? The first one seems to be `himself’, i.e. Frodo. The second one could be, perhaps, the voice of the Ring: the sentient creature obeying the call of its maker, Sauron, as it has been all along. Or could it be, so to speak, Frodo’s subconscious, obeying a kind of death-wish, entirely internal but psychically amplified by the Ring?

For that, after all, is how we are told the Ring works. It gets a hold on people through their own impulses, towards pity or justice or knowledge or saving Gondor, and gives them the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. There has to be something there for it to work on; but, like the worms in Bilbo’s father’s proverb, everyone has some weak spot. They may `writhe’ between the external and internal powers, but that is surely how one gets to be a `wraith’.

The Manichaean images of the Ring become stronger as it moves closer to Mordor. Sam’s uses of it — he puts it on twice — are conditioned by immediate necessity, like Frodo’s on Amon Hen, but he too feels it both as an external power, `untameable save by some mighty will’, and as an inner temptation. Here, though, it seems obvious that the temptation to become ‘Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age’ is mostly the Ring’s, amplifying whatever petty selfish urge it can find. Sam hardly feels the temptation, and puts it aside as a `shadow’, mere `phantoms’.

In a similar way, on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, Frodo hides from the Lord of the Nazgul, but is sensed by him. Frodo feels `the beating upon him of a great power from outside’, which takes his hand and moves it `inch by inch towards the chain upon his neck’. But this time `There was no longer any answer to that command in his own will’, so that he can force his hand back, to the phial of Galadriel. `No longer’ of course implies that there had been such an answer previously, on Amon Hen, on Weathertop, or in the Prancing Pony. But this time there is no doubt that the `power’ is from `outside’.

The last and critical scene, however, is the one on Mount Doom, in the chambers of the Sammath Naur. In the approach to this the sense of an outside power has grown stronger and stronger. Sam sees Frodo’s hand creep again and again towards the Ring, only to be withdrawn `as the will recovered mastery’. It is a surprise, then, that when Frodo at last glimpses the Eye, reaches for the chain and the Ring, and whispers to Sam, `Hold my hand! I can’t stop it’, Sam can take his hand away and hold it without effort, indeed `gently’. The force that is operating on Frodo is not a physical one, like magnetism, which would be unaffected by personality; what is unstoppable to Frodo is imperceptible to Sam.

In the same way, the Ring is a crushing burden to Frodo, but when Sam picks him up, expecting to feel the same `dreadful dragging weight of the accursed Ring’, it is no weight at all. Meanwhile the outside power is having an effect on Sam, but it operates once again (as in the scene on Amon Hen) by creating a kind of dialogue. Sam finds himself holding `a debate with himself’. One voice is optimistic, determined, set on destroying the Ring. The other voice — it is `his own voice’, but it twice calls him `Sam Gamgee’, as if it was someone else – says he can’t go on, doesn’t know what to do, and `might just as well lie down now and give it up’. Whose voice is this?

It could, of course, just be Sam’s own feelings of downheartedness: most people talk to themselves mentally at some point. On the other hand, it could be the Ring, once more amplifying inner feelings and this time giving them a voice. When Sam finally rejects the second voice, whoever’s it is, the ground shakes and rumbles, as if some outside power had recognized and resented his decision. All this builds up to the question of what makes Frodo fail at the last hurdle. He reaches the Sammath Naur, leaving Sam behind to deal with Gollum, and when Sam follows him in, he finds that even the phial of Galadriel is no longer any use to him. In this place, `the heart of the realm of Sauron … all other powers were here subdued’. At that moment, standing on the very edge of the Crack of Doom, Frodo gives up. His words are:

`I have come … But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine.’

With that he puts it on for the sixth and final time. It is a vital question to know whether Frodo does this because he has been made to, or whether he has succumbed to inner temptation. What he says suggests the latter, for he appears to be claiming responsibility very firmly: `I will not.. . the Ring is mine.’ Against that, there has been the increasing sense of reaching a centre of power, where all other powers are `subdued’.

If that is the case, Frodo could no more help himself than if he had been swept away by a river, or buried in a landslide. It is also interesting that Frodo does not say, `I choose not to do’, but `I do not choose to do’. Maybe (and Tolkien was a professor of language) the choice of words is absolutely accurate. Frodo does not choose; the choice is made for him.

The question becomes an academic one, of course, in that the result is achieved by Gollum, fulfilling Frodo’s own words a few moments before, `If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom’. But Tolkien was an academic, and academics often see importance in academic issues where others do not. Is Frodo guilty? Has he given in to temptation? Or just been overpowered by evil?

If one puts the questions like that, there is a surprising and ominous echo to them, which suggests that this whole debate between `Boethian’ and ‘Manichaean’ views, far from being one between orthodoxy and heresy, is at the absolute heart of the Christian religion itself. The Lord’s Prayer, which in Tolkien’s day everyone knew, and which most English-speakers know even yet, contains seven clauses or requests, and of these the sixth and seventh are:

Lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

Are these variants of each other, saying the same thing? Or (much more likely) do they have different but complementary intentions, the first asking God to keep us safe from ourselves (the Boethian source of sin), the second asking for protection from outside (the source of evil in a Manichaean universe)? If the latter is the case, then Tolkien’s double or ambiguous view of evil is not a flirtation with heresy after all, but expresses a truth about the nature of the universe denied to the philosopher Boethius, and possibly even to the rationalist Lewis.

There is no doubt that the Lord’s Prayer was in Tolkien’s mind As he wrote the Sammath Naur scene, for he said as much in a private letter to David Masson, with whom he had been discussing the criticisms made of him, as mentioned above. In this letter (kindly shown to me by Mr. Masson, of the Brotherton Library in Leeds), Tolkien quoted the last three clauses of the Lord’s Prayer, including `Forgive us our trespasses’, and commented that these were words which occurred to him, and that the scene in the Sammath Naur was meant to be a “fairy-story” exemplum’ of them. Tolkien did not comment on the Prayer’s apparent tautology, nor on the ambiguity of his own presentation of evil throughout, but they are of a piece. One can never tell for sure, in The Lord of the Rings, whether the danger of the Ring comes from inside, and is sinful, or from outside, and is merely hostile. And one has to say that this is one of the work’s great strengths.

We all recognize, in our better moments at least, that much harm comes from our own imperfections, sometimes terribly magnified, like traffic deaths from haste and aggression and reluctance to leave the party too soon: those are temptations. At the same time there are other disasters for which one feels no responsibility at all, like (as Tolkien was writing) bombs and gas-chambers. They may in fact all be connected, as Boethius insisted: no human being can ever see enough to tell. But our experience does not feel like that. It is a mistake just to blame everything on evil forces `out there’, the habit of xenophobes and popular journalists; just as much a mistake to luxuriate in self-analysis, the great skill of Tolkien’s contemporaries, the cosseted upper-class writers of the `modernist’ movement.

And, of course, things would be much easier for the characters in The Lord of the Rings if this uncertainty over the nature of evil were to be withdrawn. If evil was just the absence of good, then the Ring could never be more than a psychic amplifier, and all the characters would need to do would be to put it aside, perhaps give it to Tom Bombadil: in Middle-earth we are assured that would be fatal.

Conversely, if evil were only an external force without echo in the hearts of the good, then someone might have to take it to Orodruin, but it would not need to be Frodo: Gandalf could take it, or Galadriel, and whoever did so would have to fight only their enemies, not their friends or themselves.

But if that were the case (and most fantasies are far more like that than The Lord of the Rings), then the work would be a lesser one, just a complex war-game of `Dungeons and Dragons’; as it would be a lesser one if it veered instead in the direction of philosophical treatise or confessional novel, without relevance to the real world or war and poltics from which Tolkien’s experience or evil so clearly originated.

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Two Views of Evil in The Lord of the Rings – Tom Shippey

June 14, 2012

The modern use of the English term orc to denote a race of evil, humanoid creatures has its inception with J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s earliest Elvish dictionaries include the entry Ork (orq-) ‘monster’, ‘ogre’, ‘demon’, together with orqindi ‘ogresse’. Tolkien sometimes used the plural form orqui in his early texts. Tolkien sometimes, particularly in The Hobbit, used the word goblin instead of orc to describe the same type of creature, with the smaller cave-dwelling variety that lived in the Misty Mountains being referred to as goblins and the larger ones elsewhere referred to as orcs.

Two Views Of Evil
The word which goes with `wraith’ from Gavin Douglas’s time is `shadow’, and it is a word which Tolkien uses repeatedly and pointedly. In the verse of the rings which Gandalf quotes to Frodo in `The Shadow of the Past’, the concluding lines are:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

When Gandalf falls into the abyss, Aragorn says that he `fell into shadow’; Gandalf says that if they lose, `many lands will pass under the shadow’; sometimes `the Shadow’ becomes a personification of Sauron, as when Frodo tells Sam that `the Shadow can only mock, it cannot make … not real new things of its own’. The last statement goes far towards explaining why Tolkien used the word so often and with such emphasis. One might think that the main associations of `shadow’ are darkness, or menace, or perhaps oblivion, but the real point may be a more metaphysical one. Do shadows exist?

In the Old English Solomon and Saturn poem from which Tolkien drew Gollum’s riddles, Solomon indeed asks Saturn, `What is that is not?’ And though the answer is expressed riddlingly, it contains the word besceadeð, `shadows’ (here a verb). Saturn seems to be saying that shadows both are and aren’t. Aren’t, in that a shadow is not a thing, but an absence caused by a thing. Are, in that they have shapes, and physical effects, like cold and dark. In folklore at least they can be detached, even stolen. Particularly ominous, therefore, is the slight variation on the line from the rings-verse given by Sam, when he recites the elvish poem about Gil-galad in I/11. This ends (my emphasis):

For into darkness fell his star,
In Mordor where the shadows are.

Just as the wraiths are both substantial and insubstantial, in Mordor (though Sam does not realize the ominousness of what he says), absence can take on a kind of life, can become presence — as it does for instance in Milton’s presentation of Death in Paradise Lost II, 666-73, also a `shape’ poised between `substance’  and `shadow’, and like the chief Ringwraith, bearing `the likeness of a kingly crown’ on `what seemed its head’.

By saying things like this, however, Tolkien sets up a running ambivalence throughout the whole of The Lord of the Rings, which acts as an answer at once orthodox and questioning to the whole problem of the existence and source of evil in a universe created (as both Tolkien and Milton were sure it was) by a benevolent God. One can sum Tolkien’s characteristically twentieth-century position up by saying that there are two opinions about the nature of evil, both old, both deep-rooted, both still relevant, neither easy to deny, but apparently irreconcilably in contradiction.

One is that of orthodox Christianity, repeated and put into modern language by, for instance, Tolkien’s close friend and associate C.S. Lewis, whose exposition of it in Mere Christianity was composed at the same time as Tolkien was writing the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings, and eventually published in 1952. One of Lewis’s avowed motives in writing the book (in which `mere’ means `common’ or `central’) was to state doctrines which both he, an Ulster Protestant, and Tolkien, a Catholic, could agree on.

Furthermore, as both Tolkien and Lewis would certainly have known, the most famous statement of this view of evil was made in a work written by a Christian, which however never at any point mentions Christ or any specifically Christian doctrine, trying at all times to reach its conclusions through logic alone: the De Consolatione Philosophiae written in the sixth century by Boethius, a Roman senator at the time of writing under sentence of death on charges of plotting to restore Imperial rule (a sentence in the end carried out: Boethius was tortured to death in AD 524 or 525).

The Boethian view is this: there is no such thing as evil. What people identify as evil is only the absence of good. Furthermore people in their ignorance often identify as evil things (like being under sentence of death) which are in fact and in the long run, or in the divine plan, to their advantage. Philosophy tells Boethius that `all fortune is certainly good’, omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam.

Corollaries of this belief are, as Frodo says to Sam in `The Tower of Cirith Ungol’, that evil cannot create, `not real new things of its own’, and furthermore it was not created; it arose (and here we switch over to `Mere Christianity’) when human beings exercised their own free will in withdrawing their service and their intentions from God; in the end, and when the divine plan has been fulfilled, all evils may be annulled, cancelled, brought to good, as the Fall of Man was by the Incarnation and Death of Christ.

As all readers of Boethius have observed — and his translators into English have included King Alfred, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth the First — whatever one may think of the truth of Boethius’s opinions, no one can deny his fortitude in writing them on Death Row while waiting for execution. His view of the non-existence of evil has great authority, both in its own right and through its ratification by orthodox Christianity.

There is also a certain amount of evidence for it, put into colloquial language by Lewis and fictionalized by Tolkien through the rather unlikely medium of the orcs. To put Lewis’s argument first, a point he made with characteristic simplicity at the start of Mere Christianity is that even evil-doers are liable to excuse themselves in terms of what is good: breakers of promises insist that they do so because circumstances have changed, murderers claim that they were provoked, atrocities are excused as retaliation for earlier atrocities, and so on.

Lewis claims that `in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad’; and since bad and good are not symmetrical in this way, evil is an absence, as Boethius said, and also `a parasite, not an original thing’, rather as Frodo had said. The argument remains, however, rather abstract’ One can see Tolkien here and there doing his best not only to make it more realistic, but even, for those with a robust sense of humor, even funny.

A clear but unnoticed example comes from the orcs. We hear ores talking six times in The Lord of the Rings; I consider their conversations in more detail in the article in the. Clark and Timmons collection mentioned already, but the point can be made from one conversation alone.

In the last chapter of The Two Towers Frodo has fallen paralyzed by the venom of Shelob the spider, and although Sam takes the Ring from him, he then falls into the hands of the orcs. Sam, wearing the Ring, can hear the dialogue of the two orc-leaders, Gorbag from Minas Morgul and Shagrat from Cirith Ungol. Gorbag warns Shagrat that while they have captured the one `spy’, Frodo, it is clear that someone else, presumably `a large warrior … with an elf-sword’, wounded Shelob and is still loose. The `little fellow’ they have caught:

`may have had nothing to do with the real mischief. The big fellow with the sharp sword doesn’t seem to have thought him worth much anyhow — just left him lying: regular elvish trick.’

There is no mistaking the disapproval in Gorbag’s voice. He is convinced that it is wrong, and contemptible, to abandon your companions. Furthermore it is characteristic of the other side, a `regular elvish trick’, they do it all the time. Nearly everything Gorbag says is factually wrong, and it is less than a page before this orcish view of morality is also exposed. For Shagrat knows something which Gorbag doesn’t, which is that Shelob has `more than one poison’. She usually paralyses her prey rather than killing it outright. Shagrat asks:

`D’you remember old Ufthak? We lost him for days. Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed! she’d forgotten him, maybe, but we didn’t touch him — no good interfering with Her.’

What can one say but `regular orcish trick’? It is true that it is Gorbag who expresses disapproval of abandoning one’s companions, when other people do it, and Shagrat who laughs at doing exactly that, when he does it, but on this matter there seems to be no disagreement between them. Orcs here, and on other occasions, have a clear idea of what is admirable and what is contemptible behavior, which is exactly the same as ours.

They cannot revoke what Lewis calls `the Moral Law’ and create a counter-morality based on evil, any more than they can revoke biology and live on poison. They are moral beings, who talk freely and repeatedly of what is `good’, meaning by that more or less ‘ what we do. The puzzle is that this has no effect at all on their actual behavior, and they seem (as in the conversation quoted) to have no self-awareness or capacity for self-criticism. But these are human qualities too. The orcs, though low down on the scale of evil, the mere `infantry of the old war’, quite clearly and deliberately dramatize what I have called the Boethian view: evil is just an absence, the shadow of the good.

The trouble with this view is that it is both highly counter-intuitive, and in many circumstances extremely dangerous. One might, for instance, conclude that the proper response to it, if you accepted it, would be to become a conscientious objector,and to refuse to resist what appears to be evil on the ground that this is just a misapprehension. Evil after all is, according to Boethius, more harmful to the malefactor than to the victim and those who do it (or appear to do it) are more to be pitied than feared or fought.

King Alfred, dictating his Old English translation of Boethius in the intervals of fighting a desperate war against heathen Vikings, in which he hanged both pirates taken prisoner and also on one occasion his own rebellious monks, certainly found it impossible to go along with Boethius all the way; while at the time that Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, surrender to his country’s enemies would have meant handing over not only himself but many others to the whole apparatus of concentration camps, gas-chambers, and mass murder. A brave man might be prepared to be Boethian himself. But did he have the right to impose the results of that stance on others more defenseless? Neither Tolkien nor King Alfred would have thought so.

In any case there is an alternative tradition in Western thought, which has never risen to the status of being official, but which generates itself spontaneously from common experience. This says that while it may be all very well to make philosophical statements about evil, nevertheless evil does exist, and is not merely an absence; and what is more, it has to be resisted and fought, not by all means available, but by all means virtuous; and what is even more, not doing so, in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills, is a dereliction of duty. The danger of this opinion is that it swerves towards being a heresy, Manichaeanism, or Dualism: the belief that the world is a battlefield, between the powers of Good and Evil, equal and opposite — so that, one might say, there is no real difference between them, and it is a matter of chance which side one happens to choose.

The Inklings, as it happens, may have had a certain tolerance for Manichaeanism — in Mere Christianity II/2 Lewis awards Dualism second place, so to speak, after Christianity, before going on to make the case against it – but Tolkien certainly less than Lewis. It annoyed him very much when the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement asserted that in The Lord of the Rings all that the good and the bad sides did was try to kill each other, so that they could not be told apart: `Morally there seems nothing to choose between them’ (this comes from a letter in the TLS for 9th December 1955, in which the reviewer, Alfred Duggan, defended himself against challenge; Tolkien later corresponded with David Masson, who had made the challenge precisely over the issue of the (dis)similarity of the good and evil sides).

Tolkien was a more orthodox Christian than Lewis, and less tolerant of anything like heresy. Nevertheless, his education, his faith, and the circumstances of his time, all set up what seemed to be a deep-seated contradiction between Boethian and Manichaean opinions, between authority and experience, between evil as an absence (‘the Shadow’) and evil as a force (‘the Dark Power’). In The Lord of the Rings this contradiction drives much of the plot. It is expressed not only through the paradoxes of wraiths and shadows, but also through the Ring.

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Evil in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – Tom Shippey

June 13, 2012

“In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.

“You cannot enter here,” said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. “Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!”

The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

“Old fool!” he said. “Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!” And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of war nor of wizardry, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.”
 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

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Reading selections from Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien:Author of the Century.

Wraiths And Shadows: Tolkien’s Images Of Evil
There is something extremely convincing, for very many people, in Tolkien’s presentation of evil; but it is worth re-stressing that his concern with the topic is highly contemporary, and by no means unique. Many authors of the mid-twentieth century were obsessed with the subject of evil, and produced unique and original images of it. I have mentioned already Orwell’s torturer O’Brien, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, declaring, `If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face  –  forever’; and Ursula Le Guin’s parable of `The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, with its shining city whose power and beauty depend entirely on the continuous and conscious tormenting of an idiot child; to which one can add Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, working in the corpse mines’ of Dresden, with their stink `like roses and mustard gas’; or T.H. White’s Merlyn denouncing humanity as:

“Homo ferox, the Inventor of Cruelty to Animals, who will … burn living rats, as I have seen done in Eriu, in order that their shrieks may intimidate the local rodents; who will forcibly degenerate the livers of domestic geese, in order to make himself a tasty food; who will saw the growing horns of cattle, for convenience in transport; who will blind goldfinches with a needle, to make them sing; who will boil lobsters and shrimps alive, although he hears their piping screams; who will turn on his own species in war, and kill nineteen million every hundred years” (etc.)
(The Book of Merlyn, Section 5)

All these images are based, sometimes obviously as with Vonnegut, sometimes less obviously as with Le Guin, on personal or recent experience. The authors are trying to explain something at once deeply felt and rationally inexplicable, something furthermore felt to be entirely novel and not adequately answered by the moralities of earlier ages (keen medievalists though several of these authors were).

The end of the quotation above from White suggests that this `something’ is connected with the distinctively twentieth-century experience of industrial war and impersonal, industrialized massacre; and it is probably no coincidence that most of the authors concerned (Tolkien, Orwell, Vonnegut, but also Golding, and Tolkien’s close colleague C.S. Lewis) were combat veterans of one war or another. The life experiences of many men and women in the twentieth century have left them with an unshakable conviction of something wrong, something irreducibly evil in the nature of humanity, but without any very satisfactory explanation for it.

Nor can they find such an explanation in the literature of previous eras: Billy Pilgrim’s friend Rose-water in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five agrees that, `everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoyevsky. `But that isn’t enough anymore’. Twentieth-century fantasy can be seen as above all a response to this gap, this inadequacy. One has to ask in what ways Tolkien’s images are original, individual, and in what ways typical, recognizable.

The orcs, whom we meet or overhear several times in The Lord of the Rings, form one image, and there is a conclusion to be drawn from them (see the next section). However, they are relatively low-ranking evil-doers, what Tolkien called in his Beowulf lecture `the infantry of the old war’; and in some ways they resemble fairly conventional fairy-tale images, like the `goblins’, which was Tolkien’s original word for them. More individual and more original is Tolkien’s concept of the ‘Ringwraith’. This is, one has to say, a word of exactly the same type as ‘wood-wose’ or *hol-bytla: a compound, the first element completely familiar, the second more mysterious.

What is a `wraith’? If one looks the word up in the OED one finds a puzzle of just the kind which always attracted Tolkien’s attention. The dictionary has no suggestion about the word’s etymology, but comments `Of obscure origin’. As for its meaning, the OED gives two senses, which appear to contradict each other, and cites the same text, Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Scots, as the source for both. I have no doubt that Tolkien and the other Inklings — for Lewis has a very clear image of a fictional wraith as well — discussed the matter, and in the end found a solution which makes sense both of Douglas’s old text, and of the modern reality to which `wraiths’ refer.

To begin with the etymology of `wraith’, an obvious suggestion which the OED compilers should have thought of is that it is a form derived from the Old English verb wrðan, `writhe’. This is a class 1 strong verb, exactly parallel to ridan, `ride’, and if it had been common enough to survive in full form, we would still say `writhe — wrothe — writhen’, as we do `ride — rode — ridden’ or `write – wrote — written’ (Tolkien does in fact use the form `writhen’, see Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus).

It is characteristic of verbs like `ride’ or `write’ to form other words by vowel-change, like `road’ from `ride’ or `writ’ from `write’. `Writhe’ has given rise to several: `wreath’ (something that is twisted), but less obviously and more suggestively, `wroth’ (the old adjective meaning `angry’), and `wrath’ (the corresponding noun which still survives). What has anger got to do with writhing, with being twisted? Clearly — and there are other parallels to this — the word is an old dead metaphor which suggests that wrath is a state of being twisted up inside (an Inkling thesis expressed by Owen Barfield and mentioned by Tolkien, see Letters p. 22. The word wraithas, `bent’, was also of special importance to Tolkien’s personal myth of `the Lost Road’, see pp. 287-8 below.)

That Tolkien was aware of this sort of variation between the physical and the abstract is suggested by a word Legolas uses in `The Ring Goes South’. There, when the Fellowship’s attempted crossing of Caradhras is foiled by the snow, Legolas goes ahead to scout out their retreat. He returns to say that the snow does not reach far, though he has not brought the sun back with him: `She is walking in the blue fields of the South and a little wreath of snow on this Redhorn hillock troubles her not at all’. By `wreath’ here Legolas clearly means something like `wisp’, something barely substantial, and though the OED does not record it, that is also part of the meaning of `wraith’ — one could say, `a wraith of mist’, `a wraith of smoke’, just as Legolas says `a wreath of snow’. It seems likely, then, that `wraith’ is a Scottish form derived from writhan in exactly the same way as `raid’ is derived from ridan.

Meanwhile the two Gavin Douglas quotations from which the OED derives its two senses are these:

To illustrate sense 1, `An apparition or spectre of a dead person: a phantom or ghost’, the OED offers Douglas, `In diuers placis The wraithis walkis of goistis that are deyd’. For sense lb, though, `An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being’, it offers Douglas again, ‘Thidder went this wrath or schaddo of Ene’ (i.e. Virgil’s hero Aeneas).

The obvious question is, are wraiths, then, alive or dead? — for Douglas uses the word both ways. And, one might add, are they material or immaterial? The latter is suggested by the equation with `shadow’ (another important word for Tolkien), and by the idea that wraiths and wreaths are defined by their shape more than by their substance, a twist, a coil, a ring; the former, however, by the fact that wraiths can be wraiths of something, even if that something is as fluid (but not insubstantial) as snow or mist or smoke.

Tolkien’s Ringwraiths, of course, answer all the questions posed, and also demonstrate once more that apparent mistakes or contradictions in old poems may simply indicate an understanding that the self-confident nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionary compilers had not reached. Are the Ringwraiths alive or dead? Gandalf says early on that they were once men who were given rings by Sauron, and so `ensnared … Long ago they fell under the dominion of the one [Ring], and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants’.

Much later, in `The Battle of the Pelennor Fields’, we learn that the Lord of the Nazgul, the chief Ringwraith, was once the sorcerer-king of Angmar, a realm overthrown more than a thousand years in the past. He ought, then, to be dead, but is clearly alive in some way or other, and so positioned neatly between the two meanings given by the OED. As for being material or immaterial, he is in a way insubstantial, for when he throws back his hood, there is nothing there. Yet there must be something there, for `he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set’. He and his fellows can furthermore act physically, carrying steel swords, riding horses or winged reptiles, the Lord of the Nazgul wielding a mace.

But they cannot be harmed physically, by flood or weapon — except by the blade of Westernesse taken from the barrow-wight’s mound, wound round with spells for the defeat of Angmar. It is the spells that cleave `the undead flesh’, not the blade itself. So the Ringwraiths are just like mist or smoke, both physical, even dangerous and choking, but at the same time effectively intangible.

All this is highly original. But the important question is, how far is it recognizable, even psychologically plausible? And here the answer returns us very firmly to the twentieth century. Tolkien did not perhaps develop his image of the Ringwraiths very quickly, for as has been said above, the Black Riders to begin with make relatively little impact. In `The Council of Elrond’, though, Boromir gives them what is to be one of their leading characteristics, the ability to create panic: wherever the `great black horseman’ came, `a madness filled our foes, but fear fell on our bravest’.

This is increasingly what the wraiths do from the time the Fellowship emerges from Lothlorien. When they pass overhead, over Sam and Frodo, over the Riders, over Gondor, we have some combination of the same elements: shadow, cry, freezing of the blood, fear. The moment when Pippin and Beregond hear the Black Riders and see them swoop on Faramir in `The Siege of Gondor’, V/4, is typical:

Suddenly as they talked they were stricken dumb, frozen as it were to listening stones. Pippin cowered down with his hands pressed to his ears; but Beregond … remained there, stiffened, staring out with starting eyes. Pippin knew the shuddering cry that he had heard: it was the same that he had heard long ago in the Marish of the Shire, but now it was grown in power and hatred, piercing the heart with a poisonous despair.

The last phrase is a critical one. The Ringwraiths work for the most part not physically but psychologically, paralysing the will, disarming all resistance. This may have something to do with the process of becoming a wraith yourself. That can happen as a result of a force from outside. As Gandalf points out, explaining the Morgul-knife, if the splinter had not been cut out, `you would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’. But more usually the suspicion is that people make themselves into wraiths. They accept the gifts of Sauron, quite likely with the intention of using them for some purpose which they identify as good. But then they start to cut corners, to eliminate opponents, to believe in some `cause’ which justifies everything they do.

In the end the `cause’, or the habits they have acquired while working for the `cause’, destroys any moral sense and even any remaining humanity. The spectacle of the person `eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction has been so familiar throughout the twentieth century as to make the idea of the wraith, and the wraithing-process, horribly recognizable, in a way non-fantastic.

The realism of this image of evil is increased by the examples we have of people on their way to becoming wraiths themselves. We have just the start of this, enough to be ominous, in the cases of Bilbo and Frodo, and the others mentioned above. Gollum is much further along the road, though in The Lord of the Rings Gollum, detached from the Ring many years before, is possibly beginning to recover, as is shown by the fact that he has started to call himself by his old name, Smeagol, the name he had when he used to be a hobbit, and is also occasionally and significantly able to say `I’. There is a striking dialogue between what one might call his hobbit-personality (Smeagol) and his Ring-personality (Gollum, `my precious’) in `The Passage of the Marshes’, which makes the point that the two are at least connected: one can imagine the one developing out of the other, pure evil growing out of mere ordinary human weakness and selfishness.

However, the best example of ‘wraithing’ in The Lord of the Rings must be Saruman. As was pointed out earlier, his language and behavior are the most contemporary of any in `The Council of Elrond’, or indeed in the whole work. Saruman’s goals are knowledge (no one can object to that); organization in the service of knowledge (there are certainly many researchers, and far more administrators, who see this as desirable); but finally control. In the pursuit of control Saruman is prepared to co-operate with forces he knows perfectly well are evil, but which he thinks he can use for his own much more admirable purposes, and later suppress or discard. The failure of beliefs like this is all too familiar from war after war, and alliance after alliance, during the past century. Moreover Saruman’s main advantage, we learn in `The Voice of Saruman’ (III/10) is indeed his voice:

Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast…

Different people will have different real-life experiences to match this too, but it is again a common experience in the world of the twentieth century to find oneself enmeshed in some professional jargon, whether it is that of Vietnam generals with their body-counts or of literary theorists with their différances and ratures, and to be unable to break free of it, or to shake off the assumptions it tacitly embodies; the experience goes further back than either of the examples just cited, as one can tell from Orwell’s repeated criticisms of early twentieth-century military and political language. Saruman is becoming a wraith, then, partly by merging himself with his own cause, discarding any sense of means in pursuit of some increasingly impossible end, and partly by the self-deceptions of language. He too becomes physically a wraith in the end, for when Wormtongue cuts his throat, the wraith rises from him:

about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.

The body that is left once the `mist’ and the `smoke’ have departed seems in fact to have died many years before, becoming only `rags of skin upon a hideous skull’. There was still some humanity in Saruman — the figure which wavers, looking towards the West, is perhaps hoping for some forgiveness from the Valar, as the dissolving sigh perhaps indicates some sort of grief or repentance — but it had been steadily eaten up.

By what? C.S. Lewis might have replied, by nothing. One of the striking and convincing assertions made by his imagined devil, Screwtape, is that nowadays the strongest temptations are not to the old human vices of lust and gluttony and wrath, but to new ones of tedium and solitude. At the end of number XII of The Screwtape Letters Screwtape remarks that Christians describe God as the One `without whom Nothing is strong’, and they speak truer than they know, he goes on, for:

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them … or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish.

Sinners of this kind, of course, hate all those who appear to have `got a life’, in the revealing modern idiom; it is essential that they persuade others to join them in their dreariness and despair. And so we have the many modern literary images of evildoers as above all `hollow’ (T.S. Eliot wrote a poem called `The Hollow Men’); of evil as essentially pointless or bureaucratic (see Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or Heller’s Catch-22); of the power of language to conceal unmistakable evil (the inhabitants of Le Guin’s Omelas, most of them, talking themselves out of what they have seen with their own eyes); of something dreadful underneath the routines of daily life, as in Conrad’s prosaic Marlow coming upon the `heart of darkness’ and Kurtz’s never-explained `The horror, the horror’.

No one ever wrote anything like that in the Middle Ages. Tolkien may have taken his word `wraith’ from the sixteenth century and Gavin Douglas, but the concept of the Ring-wraiths themselves, and the hints as to how you get to be one, are responses to something found in his own, and our, life-experience. That is what has given them, not their literary originality, but their dreadful conviction.

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J.R.R. Tolkien On Entering Faerie — Bradley J. Birzer

May 8, 2012

Edward Robert Hughes “Midsummer Eve” ca. 1908

To enter faerie — that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation — is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence. One arrives in faerie only by invitation and, even then, only at one’s peril. The truths to be found within faerie are greater than those that can be obtained through mere human understanding; and one finds within faerie that even the greatest works of man are as nothing compared with the majesty of creation. To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien firmly believed.

The last story Tolkien published prior to his death, “Smith of Wootton Major,” follows a normal but charitably inclined man who has been graced with the ability to make extraordinarily beautiful things while metal smithing. Smith, as he is known, discovered the gift of grace on his tenth birthday, when the dawn engulfed him and “passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world.”2 Like the earth at the end of Eliot’s “Wasteland,”

Tolkien’s Smith had been baptized, and through this gift he receives an invitation to faerie. While visiting that world, he discovers that in it he is the least of beings. Its beauty, however, entices him, and he spends entire days “looking only at one tree or one flower.” The depth of each thing astounds him. “Wonders and mysteries,” many of them terrifying in their overwhelming beauty and truth, abound in faerie, Smith discovers, and he dwells on such wonders even when he is no longer in faerie. Nevertheless, some encounters terrify him:

He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eye. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wooten major and Farmer Giles of Ham

And yet, despite the fact that he portrayed the man Smith in prostration before such grand visions, the rest of the story reveals that it was not Tolkien’s intention to denigrate Smith’s importance, but only to emphasize his place — and therefore the place of humanity in general — in the economy of creation. The English Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that “[h]e not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.” Likewise, Tolkien shows in “Smith of Wootton Major” that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to fully become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.

For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. In an essay describing the greatness of the medieval poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Tolkien wrote:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it received part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories — of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale, and not a thinly disguised moral allegory).’
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. As Chesterton wrote, “[B]eauty and terror are very real things,” but they are also “related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.”

Certainly myth, of which faerie is one kind, holds an estranged place in the modern world, as Tolkien well knew But, he believed, so much the worse for the modern world. Indeed, myth might just be the thing needed to save the modern world from itself, as Tolkien suggested in his famous poem, “Mythopoeia,” which echoes the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).’°

Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology.” Myth can emphasize the beauty of God’s creation as well as the sacramental nature of life. “Our time, sick nigh unto death of utilitarianism and literalness, cries out for myth and parable,” American novelist and political philosopher Russell Kirk explained. “Great myths are not merely susceptible of rational interpretation: they are truth, transcendent truth.” Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society.

In his inimitable way, Chesterton once wrote that

Imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does not know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. “It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad,” Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy. Communities “share symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order,” political theorist Donald Lutz explains. “The shared meaning and a shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people.” The man “who has no sympathy with myths,” Chesterton concluded, “has no sympathy with men.”" One cannot, it seems, separate men from their myths.

Yet many of our contemporaries — a bizarre combination of those who have embraced secular modernity as well as those who abhor it, the Christian fundamentalists — have rejected the importance of myth. For the modernist, imbued with the doctrines of Jamesian and Deweyite pragmatism, myth is a lie. One cannot, after all, see, feel, smell, taste, or hear myth. Myth remains just beyond our material and physical senses, and we most certainly cannot scientifically verify it. Though myth is essential to man qua man, as Chesterton rightly contended, one of modernity’s chief characteristics is the watering down of richly felt and imagined reality, and the substitution of cheap counterfeits and thin shadows for the mythic vision.

“In this new sphere,” wrote theologian Romano Guardini in the mid-1920s, “things are no longer directly detected, seen, grasped, formed, or enjoyed; rather, they are mediated by signs and substitutes.”‘ To the modernist, “myth,” like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

For religious fundamentalists, myths also represent lies. Myths, the argument runs, constitute dangerous rivals to Christian truth and may lead the unwary astray, even into the very grip of hell. Why study The Volsunga or Homer, for example, when the Christian Gospels tell us all we need for salvation? It is likely, the fundamentalist concludes, that all myth comes from the devil and is an attempt to distract us from the truth of Christ. The ancient gods and demigods of Greece, Rome, and northern Europe, after all, must have been nothing more than demons in disguise.

For Tolkien, however, even pagan myths attempted to express God’s greater truths. True myth has the power to revive us, to serve as an anamnesis, or way of bringing to conscious experience ancient experiences with transcendence. But, Tolkien admitted, myth could be dangerous, or “perilous,” as he usually stated it, if it remained pagan. Therefore, Tolkien thought, one must sanctify it, that is, make it Christian and put it in God’s service. Medieval believers had the same idea, and the story told of the early-medieval saint Boniface of Crediton exemplifies one such attempt.

The story (a non-factual myth, certainly!) of Boniface claims that while evangelizing the pagan Germanic tribes in north-central Europe, he encountered a tribe that worshiped a large oak tree. To demonstrate the power of Christ as the True God, Boniface cut down the tree, much to the dismay of the tribe. But rather than seeing Boniface struck down by their gods, the pagan tribe saw an evergreen instantaneously spring up on the same spot. So that Boniface could continue preaching to the astounded pagans, the story continues, his followers placed candles on the newly grown evergreen, which eventually became the first Christmas tree. This motif of “sanctifying the pagan” has been repeated throughout history by Christians in a multitude of ways, and was instrumental in contributing to the wildly successful spread of the faith.

Christmas and Easter, for example, were placed on high pagan holidays; St. Paul attempted to convert the Athenians with reference to their statue of the “Unknown God”; St. Augustine re-read the works of Plato and Cicero in a Christian light in his City of God; St. Aquinas uncovered the synchronies between Aristotelian and Christian thought; and on our own continent, we see that Catholic monks built a monastery on top of the highest mound-temple in Cahokia, Illinois, former site of the priest-king of a vast Native American empire. Indeed, churches throughout Europe and North America sit on formerly sacred pagan sites. In building churches in such places Christians sought, in essence, to baptize the corrupt ground, just as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas baptized pagan ideas.

It was Tolkien’s understanding that man’s role in the sanctification of the world is a cooperative and limited one. Given the constraints of his materiality, man ultimately only catches a glimpse of the highest things, and his attempts to emulate them in their truth, beauty, and excellence are but meager. When Smith of Wootton Major discovers to his embarrassment that a doll of a beautiful woman his village has revered is horribly shabby and trite when compared to its transcendent model, the Faery Lady, whom he has just met, she calms his fears: “Do not be grieved for me… Nor too much ashamed of your own folk. Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awakening.” As an artist, a scholar, and a mythmaker, Tolkien gave us a glimpse of the truth, beauty, and excellence that lies beyond and behind our tangible world. That glimpse, which leads to real joy, Tolkien labeled the euchatastrophe.

Throughout his entire mythology — The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and the other works on Middle-earth — Tolkien stubbornly affirmed that the hope of the modern world lay in a return to some form of the Christiana Res Publica. “Someday Christendom may come/Westward/Evening sun recedent/Set my resting vow/Hold in open heart,” cries the poet Mark Hollis. What form such a transfigured world would take, of course, is unclear. After all, Tolkien believed, man’s job is not to plan the universe, but to use the gifts God has given him for the betterment of all.

“The awful Author of our being,” one of Tolkien’s favorite thinkers, Edmund Burke, wrote, “is the author of our place in the order of existence.” He, “having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the part assigned to us.”

In his thinking about truth, reason, science, art, and myth, and in his hope for a renewal of Christendom and an end to the ideologically inspired terror of the twentieth century, Tolkien fits in nicely with a group of twentieth-century scholars and artists which we might collectively label as “The Christian humanists.” The Christian humanist asks two fundamental questions:

(1)  What is the role of the human person within God’s creation? And

(2)  How does man order himself within God’s creation? Christian, or theocentric, humanism, as opposed to anthropocentric, secular, Renaissance, or Enlightenment humanism, argues that one cannot understand man’s position in the world until one first acknowledges that man is created in the image of God and lives under the natural law as well as the divine law

The ranks of the Christian humanists include such poets and scholars as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Romano Guardini. (You will find examples of their writings under our Categories) Tolkien should be counted as one of their foremost thinkers and spokesmen.

Posted in G. K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Understanding Mythopoeia | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Mythopoeia — J.R.R. Tolkien

May 7, 2012

In his masterful essay “On Fairy Stories,” J. R.R. Tolkien describes the vital role played by these tales in the cultures of the world. They contain rich spiritual knowledge. The sun may be green and the fish may fly through the air, but however fantastical the imagined world, there is retained in it a faithfulness to the moral order of the actual universe. The metaphors found in the literary characters are not so much random chimeras as they are reflections of our own invisible world, the supernatural.

Whether in dreams or conscious imagination, the powers of the mind (and one must see here the powers of the human spirit) are engaged in what Tolkien calls “sub-creation”. By this he means that man, reflecting his divine Creator, is endowed with gifts to incarnate invisible realities in forms that make them understandable.

For example, magic has been used traditionally in fairy stories to give a visible form to the invisible spiritual powers. But a crucial distinction must be made between the use of “good magic” and “bad magic” as they appear in fairy stories, because for us in the real world, there is no such thing as good magic, only prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and abandonment to divine providence. “Good magic” in traditional fairy stories represents these very realities, symbolizing the intervention of God in the lives of good men put to the test. It is actually a metaphor for grace and miracle, the suspension of natural law through an act of spiritual authority culminating in a reinforced moral order.

Bad magic in traditional stories represents the evil power that the wicked use in order to grasp at what does not rightly belong to them — whether worldly power, wealth, or even love. It is also a metaphor for the intervention of the enemies of God the evil spirits, in the lives of wicked men. As Saint Paul says, “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Michael D. O’Brien, Just a Fairy Story

The following poem Tolkien wrote on a fateful evening following a long discussion with his friend C.S Lewis. Another view of it here. Benedict XVI on the One True Myth here.

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To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though “breathed through silver”
PHILOMYTHUS TO MISOMYTHUS

You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are `trees’, and growing is `to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o’erwitten without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
and endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees,
tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these
homuncular men, who walk upon the ground
with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound.
The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs,
green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,
thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry,
slime crawling up from mud to live and die,
these each are duly registered and print
the brain’s contortions with a separate dint.

Yet trees and not `trees’, until so named and seen -
and never were so named, till those had been
who speech’s involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgment, and a laugh,
response of those that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves,
and looking backward they beheld the Elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind,
and light and dark on secret looms entwined.

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath the ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Yes! `wish-fulfillment dreams’ we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem ?
All wishes are not idle, not in vain
fulfillment we devise – for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
through small and bare, upon a clumsy loom
weave rissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

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 rumor of a harbor guessed by faith.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things nor found within record time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have turned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends -
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden scepter down.

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Then looking on the Blessed Land ’twill see
that all is as it is, and yet may free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden not gardener, children not their toys.

Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not been dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.

Posted in J.R.R. Tolkien, Poetry, Understanding Mythopoeia | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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As We Wait and Ponder on Holy Saturday…

April 7, 2012

Statue of Jesus lying in the tomb (Monastery of San Joaquín y Santa Ana, Valladolid)

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Posted in J.R.R. Tolkien | Leave a Comment »

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