Clinton: I never had sexual relations with that woman.

Just to get a sense of context, and how convincing politicians can make their lies, check out this famous clip of Bill Clinton's denial about having sex with Monica Lewinsky. He makes you feel darn guilty that the reporter ever asked the question, poor guy, time being wasted, America suffering:

Clinton Lies About Lewinsky

Today's Press Conference About Benghazi

Before the election:

Obama on Letterman Characterizing the Benghazi Attack

Obama on "The View"

Obama, months after the attack, is still characterizing it as mob action that went violent, still fingering the video, etc. He mentions terrorism, but it virtually sinks into a few terrorists inside a mob. The fog of war is emphasized. He puts terrorism into a context where it is still linked to a spontaneous demonstration about a video that no one could have expected. So he's smart, he covers himself on terrorism but downplays it as much as he can

But given Gregory Hicks testimony, it is very hard to believe that Obama did not know exactly what had happened by the day after the attack, that it was a flat out Ansar al Sharia operation. This, I believe, he judged was too strong to acknowledge during an election campaign. Hillary Clinton must have known all of this as well. Also, they absolutely wanted to put off the lack of response to requests for more security, and the stand-down order only became known last week. Had that come out, it would not have played well in November. Now, it appears, they also pressured people like Hicks, Nordstrom, and others to keep quiet, and even demoted Hicks.

Today, after last week's hearings, Obama gave a press conference: He said that at the time, nobody understood "exactly" what had happened in Benghazi, and apparently he still didn't know "exactly" months later on Letterman. That we didn't know "exactly" what was going on is something I could truthfully say about cooking dinner last night--even though it turned out well. "Exactly" is an impossible standard in application to anything, as Obama well knows. The question is whether State and Obama had any reasonable cause to believe there was a mob involved or that the attack was in response to a video. They did not, and they knew it. Obama is not exactly lying in this press conference. He's just refusing to engage the issues while making it look like he is.

May 13, 2013 Obama Press Conference

The American Religious Creed

The American Religious Creed

            To be said on the Sunday of each week and at the start of every school day:

1.     I’m entitled to my opinion and you’re entitled to yours. (With certain exceptions; see below.)

2.     All truth is culturally relative. (Please don’t ask whether this truth is culturally relative.)

3.     We should never make judgments about other cultures or religions, but should always exercise tolerance no matter how intolerant the aforementioned seem to be. (Actually, we shouldn’t even be judging whether they are tolerant or not, which is judgmental itself, so please don’t even get to the “but” phrase. And please ignore contradictions with anything that follows.)

4.     Everyone should be nice to everyone else.

5.     Being nice to everyone means that people who are paying 60% of their income in state and federal income taxes should pay more, otherwise they are being selfish. (Corollary: niceness requires that everyone be part of the 98%; second corrollary: “I’m not selfish; I vote for Democrats.)

6.     Being nice to everyone means that abortion on demand should be funded by the government. (Unborn children are not “everyone”.)

7.     Being nice to everyone means that mounting government debt doesn’t matter because people need government help. (Unborn children are not “everyone”.)

8.     Being nice to everyone doesn’t apply to “the 2%,” who are selfish bastards anyway.

9.     Being nice to everyone means letting any combination or number of people who want to get married, get married, so long as they’re all down with it, and Christians who have objections should just shut up because they aren’t being tolerant. See #3.

10. All Western discourse up to this point is just a mask for power to hide behind—this creed excepted.

The Marian Galadriel of Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit"

In several letters, Tolkien acknowledged his readers' connection of Mary to both Galadriel and Elbereth, saying it was from Mary from that he learned all he knew about grace. In Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel's Marian features are barely on view. Rather, she's a scary figure, especially at the beginning, becoming Marian only at the end, when she sends the Fellowship on its way with her gifts.

In The Power of the Ring, Stratford Caldecott mentions the loss of Galadriel's Marian features as a flaw in Jackson's film. (By the way, Caldecott liked Jackson's movie version a lot, as did I.) When I watched recently released The Hobbit, and saw the parts incorporating Galadriel (from The Silmarillion and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings), I was struck by how Marian she looked and sounded, especially given the context of Gandalf's conversations with her. Growing up in a Polish Catholic part of Michigan, I was no stranger to the "bathtub Mary" shrines, which I saw in plenty of big Michigan front lawns.) Compare the following images of Mary to this clip of Galadriel from the Peter Jackson movie. I think you'll see an attempt to create a deliberate, if somewhat understated, resemblance:

("Bathtub Mary")

(Statue of Mary, Jesuit Retreat Center, Los Altos, CA)

(Another Mary as Los Altos. Notice how she is framed.)

(Watch the framing of Galadriel; then, of course, there's the conversation.)

(Gandalf meets Galadriel--and Saruman--in Rivendell)

In this last picture, the connection of Galadriel to Mary is powerfully emphasized. She wears the traditional blue. The moon is behind her. This is Mary, as the Queen of Heaven.

"Don't be hasty."

Jesuit Retreat Center, Los Altos

“Haste is the enemy of the spiritual life.” More than that, it is the enemy of all the inner life—the intellectual life, the artistic life, the affectively responsive life. That was one piece of wisdom that I took away from the Jesuit Retreat Center this week, from Fr. Joe Fice, S. J.. Treebeard concurs: “Don’t be hasty,” he tells Merry and Pippin. Of course, you can always throw “He who hesitates is lost” back at someone who tells you to slow down. The point is to move in sync with the requirements of the situation. But mainly, we are trained to go as fast as possible, all the time, and it is very bad for us. We assume that fast and more is better.

Back in the days of John F. Kennedy, “speed reading” was in vogue. Kennedy was said to be able to read a book as fast as he could turn the pages. (He wasn’t reading. He was skimming—a useful art when perusing the Washington Post but not of much help when reading Robert Frost.) Maybe we were under the influence of Kennedy or Sputnik, but when I was growing up, there were reading contests in elementary school, first prize to the person who read the most books during the marking period. We praised elementary school kids for volume, but I don’t recall ever hearing any praise for reading one book really slowly. That would have been a worthy prize: Jane Doe took 10 weeks to read Little Women! I could get behind a prize like that.

Why slow down? If you don’t slow down and take the time you need, your work gets shoddy, or if not shoddy, not as good as it could be, so your satisfaction in what you do decays. If you expect to accomplish tasks quickly, and you don’t, you get discouraged, and you might quit and accomplish less. Because you miss stuff if you don’t. I wonder if Kennedy listened to Beethoven records at 78 rpm instead of 33 and 1/3 to save time? Did he bolt through gormet dinners? Should people sprint through the London Portrait Gallery? Going fast burns our spirits out.

In the spiritual life, haste is deadly because we don’t set the timetable. We have to be attentive to the God who sets the timetable. The specific message I got this week was slow down. Read slowly, write slowly, think longer. Mull things over. Be like Mary and ponder things in your heart. Take time. Tolkien did. He niggled his way through The Lord of the Rings for about 15 years. He started on what became The Silmarillion during World War 1. No one could hurry him. “Don’t be hasty.”

Tolkien’s Eucharistic Messengers

“Friendship functions as the fundamental life activity in which men and women live now, however incompletely, the wholeness human life is given to achieve,”[1] Paul J. Wadell

Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

No longer do I call you servants. . . . but I have called you friends. (John 15:15)

Chapter 8: Tolkien’s Eucharistic Messengers

            Tolkien said that the main subject of The Lord of the Rings was death, which is to say that he was concerned with the world of time, in which all passes away. To sharpen the issue, he examines it from two perspectives, that of elves and men:

The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult [than Power]: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the heart of a race ‘doomed’ not to leave it, until its whole-evil aroused story is complete.[2]

“Its whole evil aroused story” is a reference to the Fall, showing that a biblical view of man was never far from Tolkien’s mind when he thought about history, whether in the primary or his own secondary world. That Tolkien pits the “mystery of love” against the “doom” of loss goes to the heart of The Lord of the Rings. The doom of loss—of life, the world, of everything—is a universal theme of literature on which Tolkien brings Norse and Anglo-Saxon myth and poetry to bear together with Old Testament wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes. Christian hope, fulfilled in eucatastrophe, is what he pits against it.

Although elves have the lifespan of Middle-earth itself, they must live to watch Middle-earth itself pass away. Their doom, unlike men’s, is an eventual living death, and then death itself, when the world dies. Elves can die of grief or in combat or by accident, but if they do, they go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor, where they await reincarnation,[3] to continue for the lifespan of the world. “The Elves were sufficiently longeval to be called by Man ‘immortal’. But they were not unageing or unwearying.”[4]

Men, who are not bound to the fate of the world, also go to the Halls of Mandos after death, and from there, no one knows. Unlike the elves, their exit is permanent. Yet the elves of Middle-earth are doomed to leave it, as Tolkien says, before they die—to either diminish to nothing, in a world that can no longer sustain elves, or to take ships from the Gray Havens back to Valinor. The doom that elves face is the limited lifespan of Middle-earth; for men, it is their own limited lifespan. Seemingly, Tolkien says. That important word suggests that the Music of Ilúvatar may have eucatastrophic surprises for both elves and men, and once again harkens to the New Testament as a subtext of The Lord of the Rings.

In a world that men and elves are doomed to pass out of and which passes away itself, inevitable sacrifice can either be futilely denied or actively embraced, and rightly seen, death is a blessing, “a release from the weariness of time.”[5] The world of The Lord of the Rings teaches that, paradoxically, we must love the things of this earth and also let go of them.

Time as the School of Sacrifice

            The dominant tone of The Lord of the Rings is elegiac. It begins in a birthday party for a very old hobbit, passing out of the Shire for good, and leaving his property to the nephew who will sorely miss him, to that same hobbit and nephew, leaving Middle-earth for good, on a healing voyage toward death. In between, the passing away of things—people, kingdoms, species, ages of history—crowd the book with a sense of sublime loss. St. Bede compared the duration of a man’s life to the time it takes a sparrow to fly in one window of a mead hall and out the other.[6] The constant bass thrum of desolation in Beowulf and it’s portrayal in “The Wanderer” provide Tolkien with a pervasive counter-melody to hope:

So this middle-earth each day fails and falls. No man may indeed become wise before he has had his share of winters in this world’s kingdom. . . . The wise warrior must consider how ghostly it will be when all the wealth of his world stands waste, just as now here and there through this middle-earth wind-blown walls stand covered with frost-fall, storm-beaten dwellings. . . . Where has the horse gone? Where the young warrior? Where is the giver of treasure? What has become of the feasting seats? Where are the joys of the hall? Alas, the bright cup! Alas, the mailed warrior! Alas, the prince’s glory! . . . Here wealth is fleeting, here friend is fleeting, here man is fleeting, here woman is fleeting—all this earthly habitation shall be emptied. . . .[7]

So speaks the Anglo-Saxon poet, like Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes, and countless other poets thereafter. Tolkien makes a gift of horses to his Anglo-Saxon Rohirrim and adapts the poetry of “The Wanderer” as the song of a “long forgotten” poet of Rohan:           

            Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was

                             blowing?

            Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

            Where is the hand on the harpstring and the red fire glowing?

            Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?

            They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the

meadow;

            The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

            Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,

            Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning? (508)

Different poets and philosophers have proposed different solutions to the problem of time: slowing it down, stopping it, speeding it up. Tolkien considers all of them in The Lord of the Rings. But it is clear that his solution, enacted through the book again and again, is submission to time. Time pries our fingers loose from whatever it is we want to grasp; it is the very school of sacrifice, and time itself seems to be a lesson, forced upon us, until we realize a joyful submission. Since we cannot hold onto our lives, no matter how tightly we clutch them, pouring ourselves out and into the world, kenotically, is the only answer.

For Tolkien, this solution was reaffirmed daily in the sacrament of Holy Communion, the Eucharist. For Catholics, the Eucharist does not just memorialize Christ’s death and resurrection, although it does that. It breaks the barriers of time and space and makes each communicant a participant in those events; the Eucharist anchors time in eternity. As Tolkien said, the Eucharist is always Itself. By taking the body of Christ into himself Tolkien took Christ’s time transcending sacrifice into himself. His death and resurrection enacted a solution to the problem of time: the sacrificial giving out of what human beings could not keep. For Tolkien, the Eucharist was the other side of the dark reality expressed by the Anglo-Saxon poets, the side of Johannine light.

            Since time itself is also a creation of the Logos, the attempt to evade its imperatives is almost always sinful. The Ring in part is a technology for evading time because it gives its wearer unnaturally long life; however, the side effect is to destroy the soul. Bilbo, aged 111 when the book begins, tells Gandalf that he is not “well-preserved” at all, but badly preserved: “I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over to much bread” (32). Bilbo struggles to let go of the Ring despite its attraction because deep down, he realizes the Ring is doing this to him. The Ring is stretching him out on the rack of time, beyond the span he was meant to live. Those who deny the sacrificial aspect of time, as manifested in aging, begin to lose their souls and become wraiths.

            Bilbo ages very rapidly once he gives up the Ring because he hasn’t been significantly damaged by it, but Gollum doesn’t age at all. His soul, which wasn’t healthy when he got the Ring, has been permanently stretched. It can no longer “snap back” into shape as Biblo’s does. It has been stretched so far that it is rent in two, the necessary sacrifice of aging having been refused. Gollum becomes schizophrenic, so wretched that he hates the Ring as much as he loves it. He wants to die even as he grasps for life.
            Galadriel faces a more complex moral problem with regard to time. As the bearer of the Ring Nenya, whose power it is to preserve Lothlórien, she must decide how to deal with time for an entire civilization. Lothlórien is a realm apart. It is ringed by a darkness which it has been able to exclude, and inside it, time moves differently than in the larger world.[8] Using Nenya, Galadriel has put Lothlórien into a time capsule to preserve it from the evil outside. It is not an immoral act, under the circumstances, but it is a dangerous one, for the nature of the world is change, and the elves have excluded themselves from that as well. They do not have the capacity to adapt to what is coming. Even if the Ring is destroyed, they will have to either leave Middle-earth or dwindle into a much-diminished race. Galadriel’s refusal of the Ring is a multiple sacrifice: she sacrifices the power the Ring would give her and also the power of Nenya to perpetuate Lothlórien, so she sacrifices Lothlórien itself, “the heart of Elvendom on earth” (352). She is, then, sacrificing her own heart and the hearts of her people. It is the greatest sacrifice in The Lord of the Rings, and finally achieves Galadriel’s repentance for pursuing the Silmarils with Fëanor. In making this sacrifice, Galadriel realigns herself with time, and although she doesn’t age like Bilbo, since she is an elf, she begins to become a relique of the past. When the Frodo meets her on the river, as the Fellowship leaves Lórien, she is already sinking into time, fading into a dream:

Already she seemed to him, as by men of late days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.” (373).

At the end of the book, in the chapter “Many Partings” (the parallel opposite of the early chapter “Many Meetings”), Tolkien returns to this elegiac image in describing Gandalf, Galadriel, Celeborn and Elrond, talking late into the night after the hobbits have gone to sleep:

If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro. (985)

Time has already turned this group of heroes to monuments, their thoughts outside the range of human comprehension, silent, inaccessible. Finally, the grey-cloaked elves leave Gandalf and the hobbits, and ride into the mountains and mist and a lightening flash: “Frodo knew that Galadriel had held aloft her ring in token of farewell.” The flash from Nenya, whose power is dying, puts a period on the elves’ chapter in Middle-earth. We have passed from the third age and entered the fourth, the age of men. Grey is perhaps the least assertive color, a color for the acceptance of loss and for blending in. The elves have accepted sacrifice and blended in, once more, with time.

            Gondor has much the same problem as Lothlórien—it has grown decadent because it has fallen in love with the past and sees no future for itself. It would like to make time stand still, or even retreat. The people of Gondor are descendants of the survivors of Númenor; they seem to have once again caught the Númenorean desire to want to live forever, which Tolkien describes in The Silmarillion:

The fear of death grew ever darker upon them, and they delayed it by all means that they could; and they began to build great houses for their dead, while their wise men labored incessantly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at the least of prolonging men’s days. . . yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of men, and they filled all the land with silent tombs in which the thought of death was enshrined in the darkness. But those that lived turned the more eagerly to pleasure and revelry, desiring ever more goods and more riches. . . (266)

The Númenoreans are Tolkien’s ancient Egyptians—and his moderns, all in denial of time and death. Many of the features of old Númenor, which the Dúnedain (Elvish for Númenorean) fled it to avoid have once again caught up with them under the stewards of Minas Tirith. The visibly depopulated Minas Tirith, with its low birthrate, has lost half its population (752); yet the throne room is lined with great statues of former kings, and like Númenor, tombs are one of the city’s most impressive features. The emblem of Minas Tirith is now a dead tree. Certainly, there is some despondency about the state of Britain in Tolkien’s description; Tolkien’s Britain was embroiled in the Second World War, clearly losing its empire, it’s birth rate contracting. (The fertility rate of England and Wales had been in decline since 1900 and in the 1930s was 1.78.[9]) Gondor needs Aragon, the true king, who will take it into the future rather than sit on the past.

            Speeding up time is as much a refusal of its sacrificial nature as slowing it down. In English literature, John Donne and Andrew Marvel offer both as playful alternatives to the pressure of time. Donne’s lovers would like to stop the sun cold in its tracks, while in “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvel’s lover suggests to the lady that if they cannot slow time down, they can speed it up:

            And tear our pleasures with rough strife

            Through the iron gates of life

            Thus, though we cannot make our sun

            Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Tolkien, the English countryman and hobbit, rejects both alternatives. The trick, as Niggle learns in Purgatory, is to become the Master of Time, and he learns the paradoxical truth that mastery is learned through obedience and submission. Tom Bombadil is Master, as Goldberry says, because he has never been caught. All the traps of Time, whether Niggle’s procrastination or Saruman’s ambition to speed the future, come from the refusal of sacrifice. Niggle would rather paint pictures in his head than get down to work; Saruman would rather impose a technocratic future on the present than allow the world to develop at its natural pace.

            Treebeard is the spokestree for Tolkien’s position: “Don’t be hasty” he keeps telling Merry and Pippin, who come from a folk that are anything but hasty according to present standards. Hobbits liked to have books “filled with things they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions” (7) and hobbits have originated the smoking of pipeweed, a leisurely activity. If anyone in Middle-earth has happily accommodated themselves to the flow of time, it is the hobbits of The Shire. Treebeard, the oldest living thing in Middle-earth[10], is who we go to for chronological advice, however. He sees that “young Saruman” is too fast, and the Elves' Lothlórien artificially slow. Of Saruman he says, “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” Of Lothlórien he says, “’They are rather behind the world in there, I guess . . . Neither this country, nor anything else outside the Golden Wood, is what it was when Celeborn was Young.’” Saruman does not have the patience for natural growth. The slow things of the world, trees, are fodder for his dream of ever accelerating technological development. But trying to live outside the Logos-centric reality of time eventually catches up with him, as Tolkien undoubtedly believed it would catch up for the modern world in ecological disaster. Treebeard’s final assessment of Saruman: “He always was hasty. That was his ruin” (980). The Elves, on the other hand, having sealed themselves from time will eventually feel its impact all the harder. Neither want to submit to a cosmic time scheme: a world of cyclical planting and harvest, of seasons, but also a linear progression of beginnings, middles, and endings. The hobbits, in their staid agricultural existence and distributist economy come closest to mastering time in the cyclical sense, however, they are somewhat like the elves. They have been protected for so long by the rangers, without knowing it, that they too have forgotten the linear trajectory of time and are only reminded of it when Saruman, as “Sharkey,” takes over the Shire.

            Treebeard, part of a dying race in which ent-wives and ent-husbands have seemingly achieved a permanent divorce, feels the end is not far off and accepts it. In a line which he speaks to Galadriel (and which is not inappropriately spoken by Galadriel at the beginning of the Jackson movie trilogy), he says, “[T]he world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.” Although Celeborn hesitates to accept this, Galadriel’s reply indicates that she has: “Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarian we may meet in the Spring. Farewell!” (981).

            Among the most courageous of Tolkien’s characters are the elf-women who sacrifice their relative immortality to marry human men: Lúthien who weds Baren; Elwing, Eärendil; and Arwen, Aragorn. In taking human husbands, they accept a short (by Elvish standards) life in return for love. In effect, they lay down their lives for the love of another, fulfilling the ideal of John 15:13. For love, Arwen goes out of sync with the time decreed for elves, and although as I’ve argued, working contrary to time is generally a very bad decision for Tolkien’s characters, in these few instances Tolkien may be hinting there is one exception: that love was made to transcend time, and it is best to follow love. This is another instance in which Tolkien’s faith forms the inscape of his story, as he shows Arwen’s love informing her fidelity to Aragorn. “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38 – 9). The elves who marry men demonstrate the boundary crossing character of love, which exists at a higher level of reality than time.

            Aragorn is given the “grace to go,” at his own will. He lives to the age of 210, after a 120 year reign as king, and then decides to die. But in consolation to Arwen, he prophecies before he dies, “Behold! We are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!” (1063). It is a Christian promise, delivered in the timbre of Norse myth. But Aragorn’s words are ratified by what happens next—Tolkien describes the transformation of Aragorn’s body to what it may be like after resurrection, and according to Paul in Corinthians 15:

Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world. (1063)

Arwen dies that winter, in Lothlórien, “alone, under the fading trees,” but with the prophecy of Aragorn that we are not “bound to the circles of this world.” Arwen’s love of Aragorn is part of Tolkien’s realized eschatology. Sacrifice, like the eucharist, connects us within time to eternity.

The Eucharistic Messengers

Gandalf does not at first refer to those sent with the ring as a fellowship, but as “messengers” (270). A messenger is not only one who bears a message, but also one who has an errand. The errand of these messengers is to destroy the Ring in the Cracks of Doom, but they are Eucharistic messengers in the sense that they will all put their lives on the line to do it. The willingness to make this sacrifice eventually characterizes all members of the Fellowship and most of the people pulled into their orbit.

Shared meals are a universal way of human coming-together and community formation. In Roman Catholicism, that shared meal is the Eucharist, the “sum and summit of Christian life,” recognized as such by Tolkien in his long letter to his son, Michael. It binds the Church together as a “fellowship,” a sacrificial community that becomes one, “in the unity of the Holy Spirit,” as each member takes in Christ’s sacrifice through his body and blood. Ideally, the community formed by the Eucharist fosters friendship with God and between its members, so that the virtues, and particularly love, can flourish.

            This ideal, one that perhaps was never achieved anywhere for very long (as Paul’s letters indicate), is surprisingly like Aristotle’s ideal of the polis as a seedbed of virtue based on friendship. The city-state could only flourish if it was virtuous, and individuals could not become virtuous without the support of a virtuous community. Aristotle himself had to recognize that this was an ideal that had not been achieved, so he relied on groups of friends—fellowships—within the polis to be the nursery of virtue.

The sacraments all require the choice of one thing over another, a commitment to a quest that rejects other paths. Love cannot be imagined without sacrifice, and one cannot imagine love flourishing without friendship to nourish it. In a consumer society, connected by “social media,” where the intimacy of friendship is harder than ever to achieve, The Lord of the Rings is all the more poignant for its portrayal of what is essential to a good life: the deep friendship that leads to the cultivation of virtue and willingness to sacrifice for others.

The Lord of the Rings is built on self-sacrificial love. In the many Christian readings now available, the most explicated episodes are Gandalf’s death and resurrection, Frodo’s failed attempt to save Gollum, and Frodo and Sam’s march up Mt. Doom to destroy the Ring. Sacrifice is a central concern in all three, Eucharistic self-sacrifice in the first and third, and sacrificing security for the sake of mercy in the second. The elements of comparison between Tolkien’s myth and the account of Christ given in the gospels are obvious for biblically literate readers. Gandalf goes into Moria, a virtual tomb, knowing he may have to give his life to protect the rest of the Company. Aragorn warns him, “if you pass through the doors of Moria beware” (297) and tells the rest of the Fellowship, “He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself” (330). Gandalf pays the cost, at the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm, where he plunges into the abyss with the Balrog, protecting the retreat of his friends. Later we find that Gandalf didn’t die in the fall, but in his epic combat with the Balrog, which Gandalf fights in tunnels that go even deeper than Moria, “gnawed by nameless things,” older even than Sauron. In this darkness and despair, Gandalf can only escape by sticking to the heals of the monster, who he kills on Mt. Celebil before he dies: “Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell. Naked I was sent back—for a brief time, until my task is done” (502). At first, when Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas meet him in Fangorn Forest, they do not recognize Gandalf, whose death has been a voyage of transformation—he comes back as Gandalf the White, much changed, more powerful, and full of light.

            Here, we have a sacrificial death and resurrection: not a resuscitation—Gandalf really dies and comes back in something akin to Paul’s description of a resurrection body; he is immensely more powerful than he was before. Also, like the transformed Jesus on Easter morning, Gandalf is not immediately recognized.[11] Tolkien, of course, is not portraying Christ in Gandalf, but is creating a character who acts in imitation of Christ, and to a particularly medieval version of the Christ who dies as a bloody but victorious combatant over the Enemy of mankind.[12]

            The parallels between Christ’s passion and Frodo’s journey into Mordor and up Mt. Doom are many and obvious. Frodo’s via Delarosa starts on Amon Hen, his Garden of Gethsemane, when he goes off by himself to find the courage to go by himself to Morder, the land of death, and struggles with the evil spirit of Sauron. He is stripped, scourged, and mocked by orcs in the Tower of Cirith Ungol (910). He gives up violence once and for all after fending off Gollum’s last attack: “’I’ll be an orc no more,’ he cried, ‘and I’ll bear no weapon, fair or foul. Let them take me, if they will!’” (937), recalling Jesus statement to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, “all that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26: 52). The Ring weighs more and more on Frodo as he goes up the Mt. Doom (the mountain of judgment), becoming a symbol whose “applicability” at least includes the weight of sin endured by Christ; and when Frodo can go no longer, Sam becomes his Simon of Cyrene, carrying him up the mountain. Frodo is a fictional character shown to be acting in imitation of a Christ unknown to him—except that he lives in a Logos-centric universe which is lit by the Christianity of its sub-creator. That the Eucharistic mystery is especially incorporated in the last stage of Frodo’s trek is emphasized by a long passage about lembas in the chapter “Mount Doom”:

The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travelers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind. (936)

Even the rational for fasting before taking communion is implied here, and the allusion of “waybread,” to “wayfarers,” a traditional name for Christians, who see themselves on a lifetime quest. The potency it has for those who rely on it alone alludes to Jesus many sayings about offering “living water” so that people will never thirst and “the bread of life” so they will never hunger, and recalls God’s provision of mana in the wilderness to the Hebrews. We actually see Frodo and Sam empowered by something very much like communion bread so that they can commit the necessary Eucharistic act of sacrificing themselves, for the love of Middle-earth, to destroy the Ring. Tolkien shows us Holy Communion and the way it works by the usual technique of fairy story; by defamiliarizing the Communion wafer as lembas, we come to understand Communion again, more profoundly. We recover it.

            It is after eating the lembas, on his way into the Emyn Muil, that Frodo begins to pity Gollum. He stops wishing for Gollum’s death and hopes for his redemption. When Frodo looks at Gollum, he sees his own eventual corruptibility, which is finally realized at the end, at the Cracks of Doom, when he cannot give up the Ring. So finally Frodo can forgive Gollum, who saves him by biting off his finger. Peace comes into Frodo’s eyes: “He felt only joy, great joy”; “Let us forgive him,” he tells Sam. It is not as sweeping a statement as Christ’s “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but what Tolkien gives us is a literary representation of the imitation of Christ, by a character who doesn’t know Christ—a pre-figuring.

Friendship as the School of Sacrifice

            Friendship is the school of sacrifice in The Lord of the Rings because it fosters the love that makes one willing to die for friends. Friendship starts with the hobbits. Sam is hauled through the window by Gandalf to accompany Frodo, but he would never let Frodo leave without him anyway. Sam tells Frodo after they meet Gildor Inglorion and his elves, “Don’t you leave him! They said to me. Leave him! I said. I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon” (87). Out of love for Frodo, Sam is says good-bye to the Shire and Rosie Cotton. Frodo’s young friends Merry and Pippin are just as adamant about sticking to him: “You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin. . . . You can trust us to keep any secret of yours. . . . But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone. . . . We are your friends, Frodo” (105). The core of the Fellowship is thus set, and it will hold together through love or not at all. Elrond does not create the Fellowship by requiring the members to swear an oath; he knows that love will either hold it together or not. And although Boromir temporarily betrays the love of the Fellowship, he dies defending Pippin and Merry, who Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli pursue after they are captured. It is the love of the Fellowship that is in metaphysical conflict with Sauron’s hate. Gimli and Legolas become fast friends in Lothlorien; perhaps because of Gimli’s love for Galadriel, Legolas begins to see Gimli as a person of worth. Their friendship grows to such an extent that, after many years pass, they are allowed to leave the Gray Havens together to voyage to Valinor (1098).

            The love of the Fellowship is not exclusive, but grows to universal proportions: philia, the love of friends, includes more and more people until it becomes universal love, agape. The Fellowship is joined, in spirit, by Elrond, Galadriel, Celeborn, Théoden, Éomer, Éowyn, Faramir, Beregond, and finally, all those who fight at the Black Gate. All offer themselves to almost certain death, out of friendship.

The Friendship of Merry and Éowyn Defeats Death

            In the Battle of Pelennor Fields, Merry and Éowyn, under the guiding hand of Providence, confront the Nazgûl King and destroy him. They are the only two people who could kill him, Éowyn being a woman and Merry having the right weapon. They have both disobeyed Théoden to be there, and Éowyn has gone to war for the wrong reasons; but in the end, the bond of love between Éowyn, Merry, and Théoden redeems disobedience and skewed motives. Éowyn goes from being a shieldmaiden of Rohan with the battle character of a valkyrie, to being a Marian valkyrie, engaging the great dragon—the Nazgûl King and his dragon-like steed—for the love of Théoden. Éowyn and Merry are, as Tolkien describes it, in a “sacrificial situation.”

Tolkien seems to have based the Nazgûl King, to some degree, on John Milton’s “Death.”  In Paradise Lost, Book 2, as Satan is looking for a way out of Hell, he meets his daughter and paramour, Sin, with whom he has conceived a child, Death. Death in turn has raped his mother who has given birth to a pack of Furies who gnaw at her guts. Sin, Death, and the Devil form Milton’s demonic trinity. Death is described as follows:

                                                The other shape,

If shape it might be call’d that shape had none

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,

Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,

For each seem’d either; black it stood as Night,

Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell,

And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head

The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on. (lines 666 – 673)

Milton’s piles up the word “seem’d” because Death is so substanceless. What is really there but a voracious black hole? The likeness to the Nazgûl King is obvious. A wraith, the former witch-king of Angmar no longer has a physical form, yet clothing fits him as if he were a man. He too wears a crown, which sits atop virtually nothing. His steed is a flying horror that has the characteristics of both a lizard and a bird. In his confrontation with Gandalf on the walls of Gondor, Tolkien describes him as Death:

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. . . .

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! 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. (829)

            Death arrives in person and claims the hour for his own as the flames of dying Gondor fill the gap between his shoulders and crown, and flame runs up his sword. He is the king of death, and the first words out of his mouth announce what he is. “Die now,” he commands, and it isn’t just a physical death that he desires but a spiritual one as well: “curse in vain!” Death can be distracted, however, and when the horns of the arriving Rohirrim sound, the Wraith King leaves Gandalf and turns his steed to the battlefield, where he descends on Théoden and his horse Snowmane, flinging the horse on top of its rider. Then the Wraith King advances on Théoden so that his dragon may devour him. Only “Dernhelm”  stands in the way.

            In this tableau, Éowyn is the primary sacrificial figure. Initially, her intention is to die in battle out of despair, to achieve “reknown,” for herself, and to redeem the injured glory of her people. Her objective is as bad as her reasons. She is broken-hearted because Aragorn has refused her love. He is committed to Arwen and he recognizes that Éowyn is not in love with him but the idea of martial valor. Théoden has ordered her to stay home, with the women, children, and old men, who she is to govern in his place and may have to die defending. Aragorn tells her that that her duty is to her people:

‘Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?’

‘Few may do that with honour . . .’

‘A Time may come soon,’ said he, ‘when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.’ (784)

Most of the good deeds in Tolkien’s story do enter the collective memory and are rightfully praised. Self-sacrifice never goes wrong, is never in vain. All are meaningful and contribute to the salvation of Middle-earth. When critics like Edmund Wilson complain that The Lord of the Rings is a boys’ book, one of their reasons is that Tolkien is sentimental, blind to reality. However, it happens to be the Catholic belief that self-sacrifice is the highest form of love, that suffering is meaningful and redemptive, and that neither are in vain. Tolkien was a veteran of the Somme who lost two of his three best friends in battle[13] and was evacuated with long hospitalizations for trench fever; he was an orphan who lost his last parent at the age of 12. He was not naïve or inexperienced about suffering; he had seen far more, perhaps, than most of his critics. But he interpreted suffering and sacrifice with a belief in hope, and hope’s fulfillment is his testimony.

In this short exchange between Éowyn and Aragorn, Tolkien offers consolation to the millions who died and went to mass graves and had no witnesses for their ending. He acknowledges the value of uncelebrated courage. It is the Christian consolation that good deeds do not go unnoticed by God, however unpraised by men. It is the assurance that what we do is meaningful, even if no one sees.

Tolkien’s tempers the Germanic mythos in which great deeds that are not witnessed do not count. Even in Beowulf, written by a Christian poet sometime in the 8^th century, courage motivated by pride is criticized, and in the end, gets Beowulf killed. Early Christians made the same criticism of classical heroes, like Achilles or Hercules. For them it was the martyrs, however unsung, who truly defined courage, because theirs was motivated by love. Referring to Wiglaf and Sir Gawain as heroes who display this Christian understanding of courage, Tolkien writes, “It is the heroism of obedience and love not of pride or willfulness that is the most heroic and most moving.”[14]

            Éowyn willfully rides off to battle, leaving her post with the women, children, and old men, disguised as Dernhelm. She takes Merry, whose desire also is to go to battle. Merry does not recognize who she is until she takes her helmet off to face the Nazgûl King. When he first sees her as Dernhelm, he shivers because the face is “of one without hope who goes in search of death” (803).

Merry’s motives are purer than Éowyn’s. He tells Théoden, “I do not want to be parted from you like this, Théoden King. And as all my friends have gone to the battle, I should be ashamed to stay behind” (801). Merry truly loves Théoden, and he knows the great danger of Frodo, Sam, and Pippin. His courage arises from the love of his friends. (Peter Jackson’s movie gets this exactly right. In the movie, Merry recognizes the Dernhelm is Éowyn immediately, and Éowyn’s motives seem somewhat purer: “Courage, Merry, courage for our friends,” she tells the hobbit as the Rohirrim prepare to charge the massed orcs at the walls of Minas Tirith.)

The battle with the Nazgûl King is described through the dazed consciousness of Merry, who has been thrown with Éowyn from their horse. Tolkien can put us in the place of the shocked hobbit as he realizes Dernhelm is Éowyn:

Then out of the blackness in his mind he thought that he heard Dernhelm speaking; yet now the voice seemed strange, recalling some other voice that he had known.

‘Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!” (841)

The Nazgûl King tells “Dernhelm” that no man can kill him, but Éowyn takes off her helmet and discloses that she is a woman. It is one of the most piercing moments of apotheosis in The Lord of the Rings; Éowyn’s love for Théoden and Merry’s for both herself and Théoden transfigure the two heroes:

[T]he helm of her secrecy had fallen from her, and her bright hair, released from its bonds, gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders. Her eyes grey as the sea were hard and fell, and yet tears were on her cheek. A sword was in her hand, and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy’s eyes.

            . . . into Merry’s mind flashed the face of one that goes seeking death, having no hope. Pity filled his heart and great wonder, and suddenly the slow-kindled courage of his race awoke. He clenched his hand. She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone unaided. (841)

            Significantly, Éowyn begins the fight by hacking off the head of the dragon ridden by the Nazgûl. “A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.” The King rises from the wreckage of his beast, smashes Éowyn’s shield with a mace, and moves in to finish her, when Merry pierces him behind the “knee,” allowing Éowyn to drive her sword through the Nazgûl’s helmet, causing him to vanish, or stunningly in the Peter Jackson movie, to implode.

            There are several important sacramental aspects in this scene. First, Tolkien portrays Providence working with freely committed love to accomplish the good. The only two people on the battlefield capable of defeating the Nazgûl King are Éowyn and Merry—Éowyn because she is a woman and Merry because he pierces the Nazgûl King with the only blade capable of cleaving his undead flesh, “breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.” It is the blade that Merry acquired, “by chance, so it may seem” in the Barrow-downs when he and the hobbits were rescued by Tom Bombadil, a blade with a spell on it. Although the two are on the battlefield against orders, and Éowyn partly motivated by despair and the desire to die with glory, they both offer themselves in sacrifice out of love and for a moment are transfigured by it.

In this scene, Éowyn becomes another of Tolkien’s Marian women. There is a long Catholic iconographic tradition, based on Jerome’s translation of Genesis 3:15, in which Eve crushes the serpent’s head. "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." Mary is taken traditionally as the New Eve, the one who could defeat Satan in a way the first Eve could not, and she is depicted in battle with her heal on a serpent’s head. Examples are Our Lady of Succor by Giovanni da Monte Rubiano and The Immaculate Conception by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, below.

Monte Rubinano's Our Lady of Succor 

Tiepolo's' The Immaculate Conception

Both of these pictures capture an aspect of Éowyn in battle. In Rubiano’s painting, she is a sword-wielder, going up against a satanic figure, a being close to Death itself. She is in the role of a protector—of children (and Merry, as a hobbit, has a child’s stature) in these pictures. She is an intercessory figure, as she puts herself between the children and Satan in the first picture. One of the meanings of intercede is “to interpose a veto,” which is certainly what Éowyn does when she places herself between the Nazgûl and Théoden. Finally, Éowyn’s action elevates her from an unhappy shieldmaiden looking for death and glory to a Marian self-sacrificer; Tolkien underscores this with the language of light and brilliancy, describing her “bright hair” which “gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders”: “A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.” That she catches the beams of the rising sun puts her in a special relation to Christ, the son / sun metaphor being widely used throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the Rising Son being a potent Eucharistic image of both the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ to defeat Death and the Devil.

Compare these pictures to the way that Peter Jackson depicts Éowyn in battle:

Revelations 12 is also important here: A woman “clothed with the sun” wearing “a crown of twelve stars” confronts the great dragon Satan, and although she does not kill him, with divine help, she protects her son. The woman is Mary, the Queen of Heaven; her confrontation with the dragon, her brilliancy, and her function as a protecting figure all link her to Éowyn. Tolkien is not asking us to see Éowyn as Mary; rather, he is asking us to see that all women, in the courage of self-sacrifice, particularly when interceding for the helpless, become like Mary. He is also asking us to see Mary again, to “recover” one aspect of her motherhood—her willingness to sacrifice, even in battle. “Let it be done unto me according to your will.” Catholics are told to conform their lives to Christ—and to his great human reflector, Mary. Tolkien shows us how this happens for Éowyn. It happens throughout history because people at their best do conform to the Marian potential the Logos has given them.

---

[1] Paul J. Wadell, Friendship and Moral Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1989), xvi.

[2] Letters, p. 246.

[3] Letters, 246 and 204 – 5; Morgoth’s Ring, 365; Glorfindel, who helps Aragorn and Frodo at the Ford of Bruinen is a reincarnated Elf who had died fighting a Balrog; see J.R.R. Tolkien, The People’s of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (New York: Houghton Miffline, 2000), 380.

[4] Letters, 325

[5] Letters, 205.

[6] Bede records in Ecclesiastical History of the English People that the young king Edwin, before accepting the Christian faith, was advised by one of his councilors: “The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.” (Book 2, Chapter 13)

[7] “The Wanderer,” Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8^th ed. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 111 -- 113. 

[8] See Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 90 – 115.

[9] David Coleman, “The Road to Low Fertility,” Ageing Horizons, Issue No. 7, 7 – 15. Oxford Institute on Aging, 2007. http://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk/files/ageing_horizons_7_coleman_fd.pdf accessed February 4, 2013.

[10] Bombadil is “Eldest,” he says (131) but Tom perhaps does not fall in the classification of a normal “living thing” in Middle-earth.

[11] In Luke 24: 13 – 33, the difficulty in recognizing the resurrected Christ is captured in the Road to  Emmaus story, and his first appearance to the disciples in Jerusalem, 24: 36 – 45; in John 20: 15, Mary Magdalene takes him for the gardener.

[12] Gustave Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2003; SPCK, 1931).

[13] Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, members of the “T.C.B.S,” the “Tea Club and Barrovian Society” of Tolkien’s youth. See Tolkien and The Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). On Tolkien’s trench fever, see p. 200 and 207 et seq.

[14] J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” Essays and Studies 6 (1953): 1 – 18; 13 – 16.

The Logos of St. John and Tolkien’s Creation of Arda

Chapter 2

The Logos of St. John and Tolkien’s Creation of Arda

Following Genesis, which has two creation stories, Tolkien offers two of his own in The Silmarillion, framing them as Elven texts: the Ainulindalë, which in Elven (Quenya[1]) means “The Music of the Ainur,” and the Valaquenta, which means “The History of the Powers.” The Ainur are the Holy Ones (or Powers), first created by “Eru, the One, who in Arda [the Earth] is called Ilúvatar.” Tolkien starts with monotheism.  Ilúvatar, God, first creates beings who are very much like angels and who will form something like a Greek pantheon of lesser but powerful spiritual beings. Essentially, they are the guardian angels and sub-creators of the world in which we live. The Valaquenta describes these “powers” and their functions.

In the Ainulindalë, an angelic choir under the direction of Ilúvatar, sings the universe (Eä) into being. In Tolkien’s myth, God is first a composer and choir director. Also, He is the ultimate Creator, since all of the angels have their being through Him. Yet He is a Creator who gives his creatures free will, allowing them to add their own creative energy and ideas to the world. At the moment of completion of the celestial music, Ilúvatar transposes the music into light, displays the light to the angels, and says, “Let it be!” The music, turned into light, becomes the potential physical realization of the world, and the angels who desire to continue with the creative process are given leave to bring the world of their music into physical being.

Although Tolkien uses many sources from Northern European mythology and Anglo-Saxon literature in the construction of his own mythology, he acknowledged, as we have seen, that The Lord of the Rings is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” and that Christianity illuminates it “like light from an invisible lamp.” The Gospel of John throws much of that light. Aside from what can be inferred from The Lord of the Rings itself, there are two independent sources that alert us to Tolkien’s interest in John. One is a short letter, in which Tolkien acknowledged John as his patron saint: “I was born on the Octave of St. John the Evangelist, I take him as my patron. . .”[2] The other is an essay that includes some painful memories of C. S. Lewis.

            Sometime in 1964, after he had published The Lord of the Rings, and after the death of Lewis on November 22, 1963, Tolkien wrote the “Ulsterior Motive.” It was a review of Lewis’s book, Letters to Malcolm, which Tolkien found “distressing” and “in parts horrifying.”[3] Although bits of this unpublished essay are often considered by critics whose interest is the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien, I offer the following anecdote from the essay, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, because it provides insight into the relationship between Tolkien and St. John:

“We were coming down the steps from Magdalen hall,” Tolkien recalled, “long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St. John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.” We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family” taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:

Bot Crytes mersy and Mary and Jon

            Thise arn the grounde of alle my blysse.

–The Pearl, 383—4; a poem that Lewis disliked – and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.” [4]

The “Evangelical clergyman of good family” was Lewis’s satirical label for his father, who was a lawyer. Tolkien’s “great-rood screen” refers to the person of Mary and the saints, through which, in the Catholic tradition, Christ is not obscured or displaced, but actually seen more clearly. The “rood screen” of Catholicism includes taking a saint’s name at confirmation and having one’s favorite saints—for Tolkien, John the Evangelist. (That Tolkien was christened “John” might have been taken by him as a spiritual pointer—he was open to such signs.) The Holy of Holies behind the screen is Christ, of course, but the suggestion is Christ especially as he appears in John’s gospel, for there would be little other reason to take John as one’s patron.  That Christ’s mercy, Mary, and John are all Tolkien’s bliss does more than hint at the importance of John’s gospel and letters to Tolkien.[5]

Tolkien and the Logos

Genesis 1:1 – 5 establishes a framework within which John 1:1 – 5 dwells. Here is the Douay-Reims translation:[6]

In the beginning God created heaven, and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning one day.

The first creation account, which goes through Genesis 2:3, establishes that the world’s creation was peaceful, the world was brought into being through speech over time, and that creation was good. It is Catholic theology that the world, however damaged by sin, is still primarily good. The Genesis account also establishes a mild light / dark dualism.

John’s creation story retains all of this, by implication, but brings in revolutionary ideas about Christ’s part in creation. John 1:1 – 5 reads as follows:

In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him: and without him was made

            nothing that was made.

                        In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

            And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

John assigns the creative activity to Christ, “the Word,” who is not only the designer and enactor of Creation, but the supreme human manifestation of God’s creative power in the world. This is consistent with Hebrews 1:3, “In these days [God] hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world,” (my emphasis) and with Christ’s speech in Revelations 21:5, “Behold, I make all things new.” As in Genesis, John introduces the duality of light and darkness, which he emphasizes as a strong, continuing motif throughout his gospel.

The Greek logos is translated as “Word” in all English versions of John1:1.[7] The Logos refers to God’s entire creative action through Christ, both the plan of Creation and God’s continuing execution of that plan throughout time. The idea of the Logos has two long genealogies, one in Greek philosophy and the other in the Old Testament.

According to the Liddell-Scott Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon of 1889, the word logos includes the following meanings: “a ground,” “a plea,” “an opinion,” “an expectation,” “an account,” and most importantly, “reason.” Before John used the word, it already had this broad array of meaning, and also a complex set of meanings in Greek philosophy. Sophists used the term to mean “discourse” and Aristotle, “reasoned discourse.”

Heraclitus of Ephesus is the first known Greek philosopher to use the word “logos” as a philosophical term. For him it is the eternal divine law, moral as well as natural:

He who speaks with understanding must take his foothold on what is common to all, even more firmly than the city stands on the foothold of law; for all human laws are nourished by the divine law. Though this Word (Logos)—this fundamental law—existeth from all time, yet mankind are unaware of it, both ere they hear it and in the moment that they hear it.[8]

For the Stoics, the logos was the principle of active reason that both permeated and animated the universe and engaged in creation. They associated it with God, and it is in this context that the word became influential in Jewish philosophy. Philo of Alexandia, a Jewish Platonist, saw the logos as an intermediary between God and man, the intermediary closest to God in a platonic system that had a succession of intermediaries. Because it was the highest intermediary, Philo called it “the first born of God,”[9] and he associated it with the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament. Philo wrote that “the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated." He identified the Logos as the instrument through which God created the universe.[10] Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christian theologians, associated the Logos not only with Christ, but with the Angel of the Lord and Wisdom: “God begot before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos.”[11]  

There is a remarkable correspondence between the Stoic idea of Logos as active reason and Proverbs’ depiction of Lady Wisdom portrayed as the master craftsman of the universe:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning.

I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made.

The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived, neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out:

The mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established: before the hills I was brought forth.

He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world.

When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law and compass he enclosed the depths:

When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters:

When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits: when he balanced the foundations of the earth;

I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times;

Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men.[12]

Wisdom is described in a similar way in the books of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon, all of which see Wisdom as existing before time and having a fundamental role in the creation of the world.[13] The Old Testament adds the additional dimension of attaching the concepts of “breath” and “life” to the concept of word. There are obvious reasons for associating the inspiration and expiration of breath with life, since when this process stops, life comes to an end. In Genesis breath comes to be associated with life when God breathes into the dust to create Adam “And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7) and in John’s gospel when Jesus similarly breathes on his disciples, imbuing them with new life:  “When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22). Additionally, when one speaks, one expels breath, so the spoken word becomes associated with the breath of life and life itself. God speaks the universe into existence by saying “Let it be,” and the Word, as both breath and meaning, is the essence of life, and hence, creation. Breath becomes wind, the wind of the Holy Spirit, bringing new life.

Included for John are all of these Old Testament associations that give “Word” immediate spiritual significance as creative power. Taking both Hellenistic and Judaic strands, the word logos compresses an astonishing array of harmonious ideas, all focused on creation: it is all at once the power to create and the meaningful blue print by which creation is structured. Moreover, the world is not morally neutral but “good” (on the basis of Genesis 1), and since God is love, God “loves” the universe into being. This means that the physical world is not just a morally neutral realm of matter and forces, working in scientifically comprehensible manner, but a realm brought into existence and ordered by love.

In this understanding, there can be no division between a secular world and a holy, spirit-filled world, between the natural and supernatural—reality is all a spiritual production. Alexander Schememann expresses the idea this way:

Each ounce of matter belongs to God and is to find in God its fulfillment. Each instant of time is God’s time and is to fulfill itself as God’s eternity. Nothing is “neutral.” For the Holy Spirit, as a ray of light, as a smile of joy, has “touched” all things, all time—revealing all of them as precious stones of a precious temple.[14]

This sacramental vision is thoroughly incorporated into the theology of Thomas Aquinas and is the lynchpin of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the last two lines of the great poem, Dante recognizes that the love which orders the universe and the love which impels human beings are the same and have the same source: “My will and my desire were turned by love, / The love that moves the sun and the others stars.”[15] David L. Schindler provides a less poetic, but nevertheless beautiful statement of the idea: “Love is the basic act and order of things. . . . Love is that which first brings each thing into existence, and that in and through and for which each thing continues in existence.”[16]

Part of what follows from Logos-centric creation is that all creatures, i.e., created things, participate in and point toward a loving creator as their source. Schindler sets forth the significance of this in a Thomistic form that was fully available to Tolkien:

The most basic fact or truth of all things is at once their analogically

conceived goodness or value as gift, a giftedness that is intrinsic to each thing by virtue of its being generated by the generosity of God. The goodness of things in the cosmos is not rooted most basically in human freedom or intelligence, and thus in human spirit, nor it is first granted by human freedom and intelligence. On the contrary, it is rooted in the creative freedom and intelligence of the creator in which all things of the cosmos truly participate, and which they just so far “image,” each in its own analogical creaturely way.[17] (original emphasis)

Since love is the “basic act and order” by which the universe is made, the universe will “image” God, making it fundamentally sacramental, sacraments being the way in which human beings participate in God’s creative love. “God is love,” John says (1 John 4:8); the Logos is love ordering the universe; God’s love is available through the specific sacraments of the church and the general sacramentality of the world. This understanding of St. John’s Logos, as developed through 2,000 years of Christian culture, was part of Tolkien’s intellectual DNA.[18]

The Logos and Music

One way to think of the Logos is as the composer of a grand symphonic score that orders creation, the score itself, and the playing of that score: the formulation of a plan, the plan, and the plan in action. As the idea of the Logos developed in early Christianity, it became associated with Greek speculation about music and angelic song. This begins with Pythagoras, appears for the Hebrews in the angelic choirs of Isaiah and for mankind in the Gospel of Luke when the angels announce Christ’s nativity. In “On Music,” St. Augustine locates mathematical and musical harmony in Christ as the Logos, and this idea appears continuously in European thought until the Enlightenment.[19] Knowing this history, as well as Tolkien’s myth, C. S. Lewis has Aslan sings Narnia into being.[20]

            Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, connects Logos to beauty and art in a manner which virtually explicates the Ainulindalë. This is no accident, for Benedict is summarizing the tradition that Tolkien understands and draws on throughout his work:

For Christians there was a spontaneous turn at this point [the time of Augustine], from stellar deities to the choirs of angels that surround God and illumine the universe. Perceiving the “music of the cosmos” thus becomes listening to the song of the angels, and the reference to Isaiah chapter 6 [“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory,” Isaiah 6:3] naturally suggests itself.

But a further step was taken with the help of the Trinitarian faith, faith in the Father, the Logos [the Son], and the Pneuma [Holy Spirit]. The mathematics of the universe does not exist by itself, nor, as people now came to see, can it be explained by stellar deities. It has a deeper foundation: the mind of the Creator. It comes from the Logos, in whom, so to speak, the archetypes of the world’s order are contained. The Logos, through the Spirit, fashions the material world according to these archetypes. In virtue of his work in creation, the Logos is, therefore, called “art of God” (ars = techne!). The Logos himself is the great artist, in whom all works of art—the beauty of the universe—have their origin.

To sing with the universe means, then, to follow the track of the Logos and to come close to him. All true human arts is an assimilation to the artist, to Christ, to the mind of the Creator. The idea of the music of the cosmos, of singing with angels, leads back again to the relation of art to logos, but now it is broadened and deepened in the context of the cosmos. Yes, it is the cosmic context that gives art in the liturgy both its measure and its scope. A merely subjective “creativity” is no match for the vast compass of the cosmos and for the message of beauty. When a man conforms to the measure of the universe, his freedom is not diminished but expanded to a new horizon.[21] (my emphasis)

The music of the Ainur is mythopoetic theology in an imagined world millennia before Christian revelation. But one can see a shadow of the Trinity in it. The Trinity is a society based on love, indeed, the Holy Spirit is the Love that flows between the Father and Son. The Trinity is inherently kenotic—self-giving—in that for all eternity it has engaged in a mutual communion of love. Creation flows out of Trinitarian love to a world made for the purpose of participating in that love.

Ilúvatar’s outpouring of love to the Ainur, through the gift of creative participation, can only be returned by their free outpouring as well. The creation of Eä takes place as an exchange of love, but also, to use Benedict’s language, “as an assimilation to the artist, to Christ, to the mind of the Creator.” In Tolkien’s myth, the Ainur have freedom, but it is subordinate to the overall plan of Ilúvatar, and although there is one angel who holds out against “assimilation,” this is ultimately impossible, because all have their origin and are held in being by Ilúvatar. The nature of Ilúvatar and his ultimate plan remain mysterious even to the Ainur. Tolkien does not demand that his reader connect Ilúvatar to the Triune God of Christianity. He stops just short and puts up no obstacles.

The Logos in the Ainulindalë

            Tolkien begins with the Ainur singing, but by themselves, like a room full of two-year-olds who haven’t learned to play together yet. They are discovering, in a necessary solitude, the song that is particularly their own, but will come to be enriched in communication with others. It is a continuing theme, in all of Tolkien’s work, that God’s gift of sub-creation to individuals, the ability as a creature to actively participate in the creation of the world, is only perfected in community with others. This is part of the Trinitarian aspect of reality: God, as a triune multiplicity, is already a creative community of love. The universe of sub-creators reflects the nature of its Creator. In “Leaf by Niggle,” for instance, Niggle will not be able to perfect his painting without the collaboration of Parish the gardener.

            The equivalent of the Word or the Logos in Tolkien’s myth is music, and it begins in heaven with Eru “propounding” to the Ainur “themes of music,” which they sing before him. Music is a language that displays both complexity, order, rhythm, and beauty: it is a satisfying metaphor for the structure of the universe and, as we have seen, an idea with a long tradition and part of the collective Catholic imagination.

            The Ainur sing for some time, if time means anything at all in this context, as if Eru is tuning up his angelic choir. But then he gets down to the real business by proposing a theme that eventually will be actualized as creation:

And it came to pass that Ilúvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful

than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Ilúvatar and were silent.

            Then Ilúvatar said to them: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.”[22]

There are many remarkable ideas in this passage that open gateways into the understanding of everything Tolkien wrote. Tolkien continues to theologize his idea of sub-creation as a gift from God, impossible without the additional gift of freewill. The first expression of of Ilúvatar’s love for his creatures is to give them the capacity and opportunity to join in chorus and creation. Ilúvatar is not obligated to do this, but one of his characteristics is overflowing, gratuitous joy, which he wants to share. In Greek, the word is kenosis (ke/nwsij), the gratuitous pouring out of oneself in creation. Everything that goes wrong in Middle-earth will result from a denial of kenosis—a greedy dragon-like appropriation and hoarding of what one can create and acquire.

Without freewill, participatory joy in creation would be impossible. So Ilúvatar also kindles within his creatures “the Flame Imperishable,” which confers life, free will, and like Pentecostal Fire bears resemblance to the Holy Spirit. It is always a temptation in reading Tolkien to see allegory where he intended “application,” a distinction he makes in his “Prologue to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings.[23] I do not want to assert any one to one correlation between “the Flame Imperishable” and the Holy Spirit, although in The Lord of the Rings the similarities are suggestive. In Note 11 of his “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” [24] Tolkien offers this extended definition, though I suspect he does not intend this as more than a sketch, as his tentative language shows:

. . . in the Ainulindalë . . . reference is made to the ‘Flame Imperishable’. This appears to mean the Creative activity of Eru (in some sense distinct from or within Him), by which things could be given a ‘real’ and independent (though derivative and created) existence. The Flame Imperishable is sent out from Eru, to dwell in the heart of the world, and the world then Is, on the same plane as the Ainur, and they can enter into it. . . . It refers rather to the mystery of ‘authorship’, by which the author, while remaining ‘outside’ and independent of his work, also ‘indwells’ in it, on its derivative plane, below that of his own being, as the as the source and guarantee of its being.

Here, Tolkien is coming very close to giving a description of the Holy Spirit. The phrase “In some sense distinct from or within Him” invites us into the mystery of the Trinity, three in one. On the basis of Psalm 103 (v.30), Catholics see the role of the Holy Spirit in the act of creation as giving life to creation.[25] The Holy Spirit makes the inanimate become animate, and in Tolkien’s creation myth, is the kindler of free will.

            Finally, the Ainur “assimilate” their singing to the great theme of Ilúvatar, doing exactly what Pope Benedict says all “true artists” to, finding their freedom within the boundaries of the all-encompassing divine scheme of creation.

Without free will, the Ainur could add nothing to creation that Ilúvatar had not given them. He does not want them to be spiritual player pianos, but composers in their own right. Still, Ilúvatar doesn’t give them complete freedom, for he has proposed “the Great Theme” which will furnish the framework for their improvisations, and of course, he has created the Ainur themselves. Their freedom as creatures will reach its full potential only through this framework.

The account of free will offered by Milton and most apologists is that without it, no genuine relationship with God would be possible. Tolkien includes this by implication, but adds an important and highly original idea—that for a creator to have a full, joyful relationship with his creatures, they also must have the genuine power to create. Freewill, therefore, is a necessary gift to creatures who are to participate as creators themselves. In Tolkien’s myth, freedom without constraint is not only bad, but delusional; the Ainulindalë is fully consistent with the Catholic understanding that true freedom and full actualization of the self blossoms out of obedience to God.

As we shall see, Gandalf is the representative of the Flame Imperishable on Middle Earth. He will be the unidentified bearer of the Ring of Fire in The Lord of the Rings, given to him by the elf, Círdan:

‘Take now this Ring,” he said; ‘for thy labours and thy cares will be heavy, but in all it will support thee and defend thee from weariness. For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill. (my emphasis; The Silmarillion, 303)

Gandalf’s main function in Middle Earth will be to rouse people—to throw Bilbo out of his Hobbit hole and send him on the road for an adventure, to give heart to those who have given in to despair. Gandalf is the catalyst of spiritual response.

            The Ainur produce beautiful music, as you would expect from angels of the highest order, “endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights.” Tolkien is channeling Keats here: “Heard melodies are Sweet, but those unheard are Sweeter.” This music that passes beyond hearing represents a truth and beauty so deep and profound that it goes into the imperceptible corners of the world, and it comprehends the deepest levels of natural and moral law. It is consistent with Heraclitus original understanding of the pervasiveness of the logos.

Despite the beautiful harmony, Tolkien mythologizes that the Ainur do not fully understand Ilúvatar’s intent, even when they sing their own parts, and they will not know it until the end of days, when they make an even greater music. The music is teleological—it will achieve a fulfillment at some point, with a new movement, but knowledge of this is closed to all but Ilúvatar. This is fully consistent with the Christian understanding that God is the only omniscient being and that history is a story whose Providential outline is written by God. The logos is beguiling, beautiful, and finally, mysterious. Even the Ainur don’t know the entire song. Mystery is a component of holiness, and thus at the bottom, Christianity is built on mystery which we interpret as paradox.[26]

To go back a step, when Niggle conforms himself “to the measure of the universe” he achieves his fullest success as an artist, and it was his failure to do this before he died that prevented him from realizing his God-given potential. In The Ainulindalë, Tolkien asserts the same thing of angels, for as long as the angelic choir sings “according to the measure” of the theme propounded by Ilúvatar, the music they create is harmonious, deep, and beautiful. But when angels sing “out of measure,” cosmic evil is born. (Characters throughout The Lord of the Rings will be trying to find their part in the music; the Ignatian term for this process is “discernment.”)

At this point, Tolkien gives us his version of Lucifer’s fall—a story he will repeat in variation after variation, throughout The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Here, Tolkien’s predecessor is Milton, Lucifer being replaced by the fallen Ainur, Melkor, but Tolkien adds to Milton’s thought by focusing on the dangers of sub-creation. Melkor, the most powerful of the angels, becomes envious of Iluvátar’s capacity to create—and especially to bestow freewill, the one creative power which is denied him: “To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren.”  Melkor, who wants to produce beings of his own, has “gone often alone into the void places seeking that Imperishable Flame” (16), with which he could give life to his creations. (He cannot find it, I would suggest, because it is “within” Ilúvatar, or in more Christian terms, in Trinitarian relationship with Him. Melkor’s quest is ironic, based on his ignorance of Ilúvatar’s nature.) This desire grows hot within Melkor, and it preys on him:

Some of these thoughts he now wove into his music, and straightway, discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew despondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had at first. Then the discord of Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent sound. But Ilúvatar sat and hearkened until it seemed that about this throne there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war upon one another in an endless wrath that would not be assuaged.” (16)

Melkor, it would seem, has introduced evil and discord into the world, though perhaps not wittingly. His music reflects his mind, which is turbulent and frustrated, full of envy and desire, and more or less out of his control. His effect on many of the other Ainur is to entrain them in this turbulence. He is powerful enough to set a dominant tone that takes possession of those around him, and they begin to play more in sync with him than with the theme that Ilúvatar has propounded. He is “out of measure” with God, and at this point, he begins to diminish. Moreover, some of the other Ainur grow despondent. Melkor has the power to reduce them, to take away their joy in creation. His attack induces depression, and here we have the ultimate progenitor of the Nazgûl, whose presence alone, in The Lord of the Rings, causes despondency and despair. Moreover, the force of Mielkor’s will controls the Ainur nearest him, a foreshadowing of the fall of Sauron, Saruman, and the power of the Ring.

            Oddly, Melkor’s attempt to sabotage the chorus does not bother Ilúvatar, who merely smiles, lifts his hand, and begins a new theme, “like and yet unlike to the former theme, and it gathered power and had new beauty.” He is working with Melkor’s dissonance, playing off of it, incorporating it into the larger composition. Ilúvatar’s smile is not explained in the myth. Is he smiling because he knows Meklor cannot win, or because he is pleased that Melkor has used his freewill to break new ground, to add something original and unexpected to the composition? I think it is more likely the later. Ilúvatar may have something of a father’s pride in Melkor, who is a headstrong and wayward son, perhaps, but one who also shows a lot of potential and who has taken the work in an interesting direction. Further, everything that Melkor does only serves to make the music more beautiful—which is Ilúvatar’s intent.

            Melkor, however, rather than seeing opportunities to incorporate dissonance into a unified composition, simply competes even more dreadfully with the rest of the Ainur, who are weaving music around the second theme: “the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of sound more violent than before, until many of the Ainur were dismayed and sang no longer and Melkor had the mastery.”

            Now, Ilúvatar rises for the second time, but his countenance is stern. Melkor is dominating the other angels, removing their freedom to create. In the first movement, Melkor had done this by entraining the angels with his dissonance, but in the second instance, he completely silences many of them. Melkor’s sub-creation is destroying the community of sub-creators, exactly what the One Ring of Sauron is meant to do.

            Ilúvatar’s third theme is unlike the others and grows amid the confusion created by Melkor:

[I]t seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity. And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice. (The Silmarillion, 16 – 7)

What is the content of this beautiful, deep, unquenchable theme played out against the narcissistic and nihilistic pandemonium of Melkor? I would suggest that in Tolkien’s mind it is salvation history, moving inexorably through a damaged world toward sacrifice and redemption, a story that Tolkien plays out again and again in The Lord of the Rings.

Ilúvatar arises for the third time and his face is “terrible to behold.” He raises both his hands, and in one chord “deeper than the abyss,” brings the music to a halt. This is the “let there be light” moment. Ilúvatar gives the Ainur a vision of the entire musical composition. “Behold your music,” he says to them, and they see their music translated into a new World, “globed amid the Void.” The “Valaquenta,” Tolkien’s second creation myth, refers to the music made visible with Johannine poetry: “they beheld it as a light in the darkness” (25). What the Ainur see is the multi-dimensional design, their music turned into a sculpture of light; as they watch this creation unfold, it seems to them alive and growing. Ilúvatar tells them “This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added” (17).  It includes Melkor’s dissonance also, which Ilúvatar assures him will only add to the glory of the whole:

“Thou Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” (17)

Certainly, we are meant to see the similarities between Melkor and Satan, and here Tolkien puts his poetic stamp on the felix culpa, the fortunate fall which leads not to final disaster, but to eucatastrophe, the unexpected happy ending, love abounding through Christ’s death and resurrection. This, Tolkien is asserting, is the Logos beneath the telos—the narrative—of the world. (I am not mixing mythologies; Tolkien deliberately puts his Middle-earth on our Earth, in our time-line, ca 6,000 B.C.; we should think of him as creating a myth that contained Christian truth before Christian revelation. This is how he saw myth in general.) Having given being to the design, Ilúvatar sends the Ainur who desire it, into the world to “achieve” the vision, and the “powers” become the builders of the world.

This is Tolkien’s mythopoetic riff on John 1: 1 –5, the Music that was in the beginning. It is a retelling and commentary upon key creation and wisdom texts. It offers a short mythic explanation of the origin of freewill and its relation to the fixed frame of God’s order. It also contains an explanation of the origin of evil as an expression of the freewill that God allows. Significantly, Tolkien associates the first sin with the act of creation. Melkor’s frustrated desire to create with the power of God makes him an envious destroyer—or attempted destroyer—of God’s creation. Ilúvatar’s gift of sub-creation, because it entails a powerful grant of freedom, has an equally powerful potential to be abused, and it is the tendency of sub-creation to go wrong, because the sub-creator can grow envious of the works of others and fall idolatrously in love with his own works; this misdirected love becomes the archetypal pattern of sin in Middle Earth. In opposition, Tolkien sets an equally archetypal pattern of sacrifice and redemption. Tolkien’s mythic theodicy makes a promise, at least, that all evil will produce even greater glory and goodness. But how this is possible is not obvious to the Ainur, and perhaps not to us either.

Thus, the unfolding of the history of fall and redemption in Arda is contained in the music depicted in the few pages of this myth: its crescendos and decrescendos, the conflict between harmony and dissonance, and its movements, are analogs of the story Tolkien will go on to tell in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Each new movement in the music alters the tempo somewhat.  Although it would be neat to correlate the three “ages” Tolkien depicts in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings with the three movements of the Ainulindalë, there seems little possibility of doing so, since Tolkien himself was unsure about how many ages there were between the end of The Lord of the Rings and our time. But the mysteriousness of the Music’s relation to the world is part of what Tolkien wants to convey.

The Ainur know the themes they have sung; they have some knowledge of the musical lines sung by the other Ainur, and learn more through time. But only Ilúvatar sees the entire composition and fully understands the three themes that he propounded. The Logos does not just yield a mechanical system of material cause and effect or provide a detailed map of history, even to the angels. It delivers surprises which cannot be accounted for by mere calculation: “for to none but himself has Ilúvatar revealed all that he has in store, and in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past” (my emphasis; The Silmarillion, 18). Tolkien’s myth asserts God’s continued surprising and creative involvement in the world and the promise that the pattern of human history in the music is eucatastrophe, the unexpected happy ending.

Tolkien is quite aware that his creation myth differs from the Jewish and Christian versions in one important aspect—evil is built into the world from the beginning rather than brought in, by Satan, from the outside. Tolkien explains this in a draft of an unsent letter to Rhona Beare, who had written with a number of questions about The Lord of the Rings:

I suppose a difference between this Myth and what may be perhaps called Christian mythology is this. In the latter, the Fall of Man is subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary consequence) of the ‘Fall of the Angels’: a rebellion of created free-will at a higher level than Man; but it is not clearly held (and in many versions is not held at all) that this affected the ‘World’ in its nature: evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may ‘go bad’ as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still the World could at least err; as the Great Valar did in their dealings with the Elves; or as the lesser of their kind (as the Istari or wizards) could in various ways become self-seeking.[27]

            The difference this makes for Tolkien’s creation is that the built-in darkness of the world gives it more the flavor of Northern myth. Tolkien never specifically presents “The Ainulindalë” as the truth of his world. In The Silmarillion, it is framed as an Elvish book—their explanation of cosmic origins, and by that move, the authorial “Let it be,” even for The Lord of the Rings, becomes less emphatic. Also, Tolkien assiduously avoids presenting anything like the Fall of Man, since he does not want to come into conflict with revelation, though he darkly alludes to The Fall in The Silmarillion and approaches it in a later dialogue, “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.” In The Silmarillion, one of the first men, Bëor, tells the elves as his tribe journeys west, “A darkness lies behind us and we have turned our backs upon it, and we do not desire to return thither even in thought. Westward our hearts have been turned, and we believe that there we shall find Light” (141), recalling the words of 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a chosen race. . . a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” Tolkien wants us to draw the conclusion that Bëor’s tribe is running from The Fall and its consequences, however we want to imagine that aboriginal disaster, and toward the Light. Tolkien gives them an understanding verging on the Christian, and his capitalization of “Light” brings us back to the Logos of St. John, the Light that enlightens all men and cannot be quenched by darkness. Unlike the elves, who first woke to see the stars, men woke to see the “Sun,”—a slight allusion to the Son of God as the model of mankind, based on the medieval pun.

Melkor is never able to attain the “Flame Imperishable,” because it cannot be appropriated. It is the love of God, and can only be gratefully accepted. As a result, Melkor can never create anything, love being required for any true creation. All he can do is mar the world by subtracting the good from it, “creating” waste through destruction. Melkor is a complete nihilist, declaring his own hopeless war against the beauty of the world. Illuminative fire is never associated with Morgoth or any of his perversions. Rather, his fire is always dark and consumes without illuminating. At the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm, when Gandalf makes his stand against the Balrog, he declares, “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. . . The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow!” (330). Gandalf pits the weapons of the illuminative Flame Imperishable—his ring Narya and his sword Glamdring—against fire from which Melkor has subtracted light.[28] Gandalf simply has more “being” than the Balrog, more light and love, although less hate, and he prevails. The One Ring, forged by Morgoth’s disciple Sauron, is also a black hole: when throne into Frodo’s fire, it doesn’t get hot—light goes in but doesn’t come out. Rather than illuminating the world, like Galadriel’s ring Nenya, is obscures, by making its wearer invisible, subtracting that portion of the wearer’s being. The Flame Imperishable, the Love flowing among the members of the unrecognized Trinitarian God, Ilúvatar, is the secret ingredient of all Creation. In the widespread iconography of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Jesus’ heart is shown in flame and great illuminative light, the light of life, the light of the Logos.

The Music of the Ainur is brought into being by Ilúvatar’s command, “Let these things Be! . . . I shall send forth the Flame Imperishable, and it shall be at the heart of the World, and the World shall Be” (20). How closely can the Music of the Ainur be compared to the Logos of St. John, who represents Christ and perfect creation? The short answer is that the match-up is perhaps not perfect, but it does little to undercut what Tolkien describes as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Tolkien’s aim is to imagine a pre-Christian myth as it captures Christian truth before the comparative clarity of revelation. Tolkien believed that all myth did this to some degree, and he presents one that does it to a great degree. Tolkien himself seems to suggest the differences are not great when he tells Rhona Beare, “I suppose” there’s difference between “this Myth and what may be perhaps called Christian myth.” For John, creation was brought into being and ordered by Love throughout time. It was the Word that guaranteed the world’s comprehensibility and communicability in language. As the Logos, God was immanent in the world, which points back to its Creator and reflects His glory. To be in the world, therefore, is already to have a share in divinity, to be inside a sacrament and to have access to some measure of grace. For John (and for Tolkien), Christ was not only the Creator, the Word that permeated history and did not return to God without accomplishing its purpose,[29] but also the point at which the Logos enters history and presents itself as story.[30]

The origins of evil remain mysterious even in the first three chapters of Genesis, and like Milton, people go on trying to “justify the ways of God” to mankind, for the problem remains that God allows evil. Tolkien provides one traditional answer to that problem, and it is the same as John Milton’s: God allows evil only so that even more good can come of it. God does not create evil, but once it is there, he creates with it. If we believe with Julian of Norwich that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well," then the point at which evil enters the Music, in Eden or before, is not important. The Logos is not just the enemy of evil, but the subverter of it, using what was meant to undo creation as the catalyst for an even more glorious creation. The felix culpa, the fortunate fall which makes God’s love abound, was in his mind from the beginning.

In 1959 or 1960, Tolkien completed his “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” which contains the following revelation by Andreth to the great Elf Finrod, Galadriel’s brother: “They say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the marring from beginning to end. This they say also, or they feign, is a rumor that has come down through years uncounted, even from the days of our undoing.”[31] Andreth doubts the legend, because she finds it hard to conceive how the Author of creation can enter his own work: “The saying of hope passes my understanding. How could Eru enter into the thing that He had made, and than which He is beyond measure greater? Can the singer enter into his tale or the designer into his picture?” In response, Finrod becomes a virtual Christian theologian, recognizing both God’s immanence in Creation and his transcendence of it; “He is already in it, as well as outside. . . But indeed the ‘in-dwelling” and the ‘out-living” are not in the same mode.”[32] Finrod’s point is that Eru already does what Andreth thinks he cannot do. Andreth replies, “But they speak of Eru himself entering into Arda. . . would it not shatter Arda?” In a sense, yes. With this premonition of the Incarnation, but bafflement with the mechanics, Tolkien joins his myth to the Christian true myth and completes his indebtedness to the prologue of John’s gospel: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth,” John 1:14. Tolkien believed in one reality, and in his mythology, he imagined how it might be perceived by Elves and Men in a world which precedes our recorded history. Andreth’s inability to take it in is perhaps not very different than our own, 2,000 years after the event.

The Logos is at the foundation of everything Tolkien wrote. Tolkien himself thought it was at the foundation of world myth, and certainly foundational for his own mythopoesis from start to finish. So our next step is to examine Tolkien’s explications of Truth in myth and fairy-story: “Mythopoeia,” “On Fairy-Stories,” and “Leaf by Niggle.”

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[1] Quenya is “high-elven,” the original Elvish language.

[2] Letters, 397.

[3] The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 352.

[4] Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 51 – 2 .

[5] I doubt that Tolkien would have been unaware of controversy concerning the authorship of the traditional Johannine corpus: John, the letters of John, and Revelations. I assume that “a special devotion to John,” however, includes the idea that John is at least the founder of a “school” that produced this material and taken to be the “beloved disciple” of the gospel. Otherwise, a special devotion to John has virtually no content.

[6] The Douay-Rheims Bible would have been Tolkien’s until publication of the Jerusalem Bible, which he helped translate. All quotations from the bible will be from the Douay-Rheims unless otherwise noted.

[7] I make this statement of the basis of the 19 parallel translations listed on Biblos. http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm, accessed on February 11, 2013.

[8] Diels-Kranz 22B1 and 22B2

[9] Frederick Coppleston, Greece and Rome. Vol. 1 of A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 458 – 462.

[10] Philo, De Profugis, cited in Gerald Friedlander, Hellenism and Christianity (London: P. Vallentine, 1912), 114–115.

[11] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 61. New Advent. http://

www.newadvent.org/fathers/01285.htm (accessed 10 October 2012).

[12] Proverbs 8: 22 – 31; The Jerusalem Bible’s translation is quite beautiful and adds to the understanding of these verses:

Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, /Before the oldest of his works. / From everlasting I was firmly set, / from the beginning, before earth came into being/ The deep was not when I was born, / there were no springs to gush with water. / Before the mountains were settled, / before the hills, I came to birth; / before he made the earth, the countryside, / or the first grains of the world’s dust. / When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there, / when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep, / when he thickened the clouds above, / when he fixed fast the springs of the deep, / when he assigned the sea its boundaries / —and the waters will not invade the shore— / when he laid down the foundations of the earth, / I was at his side, a master craftsman / delighting him day after day / ever at play in his presence, / at play everywhere in his world, / delighting to be with the sons of men.

[13] See the following Old Testament passages: Wisdom 7:22 to 8:1; Sirach 24:1 – 29;

[14] Alexander Schmemann. For the Life of the World (Crestwood: St. Vladamir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 76.

[15] Dante Alighieri. Paradise, vol. 3 of The Divine Comedy. Translated by Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1986), 394.

[16] David L. Schindler, Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 1.

[17] Schindler, 5.

[18] Tolkien would have inhaled these connections during his boyhood at the Birmingham Oratory, as we will see; more explicitly this is available in Aquinas Summa Theologica which Tolkien studied and in Dante, whom he and Lewis read together; these ideas were also in Charles Williams’ works on Dante. see Letters, 377.

[19] Isidore of Seville (560 –636) wrote: “Nothing exists without music; for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tones of that harmony”; John Davies explicates this idea in his 1594 poem, “Orchestra,” and John Dryden uses it in his 1687 poem, “A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day.”

[20] This occurs in The Magician’s Nephew.

[21] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 153 – 4. For an excellent quick summary of the tradition Tolkien draws upon for the music of creation, see Bradford Lee Eden, “’The Music of the Spheres’: Relationships between Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory,’ Jane Chance, ed., Tolkien the Medievalist (London: Routledge, 2008), 183.

[22] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 15. All further references to The Silmarillion will be parenthetical

[23] The Lord of the Rings, xxiv.: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but one resides in the freedom of the readers, and the other in the purpose domination of the author.” Although Tolkien doesn’t want to force a meaning on his readers, it is evident from his letters that he often has Catholic meanings in mind, which he is content to imply.

[24] Morgoth’s Ring (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 345.

[25] Douay-Reims numbering.

[26] Ross Douthat, in Bad Religion (New York: Free Press, 2012) Kindle Electronic Edition, Prologue, Location 310 – 26, gives this delightful list of the paradoxes at the heart of Christianity: “[O]rthodox Christians insist that Jesus Christ was divine and human all at once, that the Absolute is somehow Three as well as One, that God is omnipotent and omniscient and yet nonetheless leaves us free to choose between good and evil. They propose that the world is corrupted by original sin and yet somehow also essentially good, with the stamp of its Creator visible on every star and sinew. They assert that the God of the Old Testament, jealous and punitive, is somehow identical to the New Testament’s God of love and mercy. They claim that this same God sets impossible moral standards and yet forgives every sin. They insist that faith alone will save us, yet faith without works is dead.” G. K. Chesterton loves the paradoxes and irresolvable mysteries of Christianity. See “Paradoxes of Christianity” in Orthodoxy, 87 – 108.

[27] Letters, 286 – 7.

[28] I am indebted to Stratford Caldecott’s excellent section on Gandalf’s combat with the Balrog. See The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the ‘Lord of the Rings’ (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 103 – 4.

[29] Isaiah 55: 10 – 11.

[30] According to Herbert McCabe, the Word becoming flesh is the only event which could make a narrative about God possible. See his book, The Good Life (London: Continuum, 2005), 73 – 78.

[31] Morgoth’s Ring, 321.

[32] Morgoth’s Ring, 322.