Wow! My favorite Hamlet, and an excellent print!
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
Light from an Invisible Lamp: J.R.R. Tolkien, Catholic Novelist
“I take my models, like anyone
else—from such ‘life’ as I know.” J. R. R. Tolkien, 1956, letter to Michael
Straight.
“My subject of fiction is the
action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” Flannery O’Connor
Chapter 1
“Light from an Invisible Lamp”: J. R. R.
Tolkien, Catholic Novelist
The Lord of the Rings, though panned by
many academics and intellectuals, has for half a century been one of the most
popular books in the history of English literature.[1]
Those who dislike Tolkien’s work tend to dislike both it and him intensely;
some associate Tolkien with an atavistic and authoritarian Catholicism, and all
the baggage they assume goes with it; others see him, usually in addition, as
the constructor of an infantile and escapist fairy-story, naively patriarchal,
and misogynistic.[2] I find among
my students that those who enjoy Tolkien are initially drawn in by an exciting
adventure with hobbits, elves, wizards, and orcs; but there is something more
in Tolkien that attracts his huge audience and my students: his creation of a
world that is meaningful all the way down. As they begin to understand the
religious and metaphysical underpinning of Middle-earth, students become even
more attracted to it. There is a good reason for this. They come to the
humanities looking for meaning—they want to understand what a good life is and
how to live it, whether there is “truth” and what it might be; and maybe more
than anything, they want beauty. Although it used to be the province of the
humanities to offer wisdom and beauty, during the last several decades, under
the influence of thinkers like Frederich Nietzsche, J. P. Sartre, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, and a battalion of their lesser disciples, we
professors have mainly occupied ourselves in challenging the idea that
“goodness,” “truth” or “beauty” mean anything whatsoever. In contemporary
literary studies, they are routinely taken to be the camouflage in which
malevolent power clothes itself and are considered “under erasure.”
In this cynical
intellectual climate, Tolkien alerts us to a deep hollow in our lives and a way
it might be filled. It is a hollow many nineteenth- and twentieth-century
English writers felt and resisted: Eliot, Auden, Waugh and their immediate
predecessors, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and G. K. Chesterton,
all of whom held out for a meaningful universe in which the three
transcendentals were assumed to exist, objectively, not according to taste.
These men, with Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy on the American side, are
either Roman Catholics or “Catholic” in the broad sense of the word. They
believed in a Christian reality that just was reality, period.[3]
A secularized literature, by excluding God, was a maimed literature; it could
only present a maimed and distorted view of the world, for it had sliced away
the most real thing in it.
Tolkien’s
main contribution to the “recovery” of reality in art was, he claimed, to write
not a novel, but a heroic romance, “a much older and quite different variety of
literature,”[4]
of which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien edited, and Morte
D’Arthur are examples. The Lord of the Rings is in many ways a novel—the
hobbits of necessity bring in the level of mundanity which is the novel’s
hallmark—but it is also full of the elements of chivalric romance: great
martial deeds, fiercely loyal lovers, wizards, strange creatures, the eruption
of the supernatural into the natural. Tolkien creates with a pre-modern sense
of reality—a mythopoetic sense—and Middle-earth, though under attack by evil
forces and deathly assumptions, is so alive that trees talk and even mountains
can have malevolent dispositions. “Mythopoesis,” a word of his own coinage,
refers simply to myth-making, whether by an individual or through long
tradition. It is the process through which the numinous dimension of reality is
set forth in story. Tolkien gives us a world, 6000 years in the past, which he
positions theologically between man’s fall and ultimate redemption[5]—a
world which has not yet been “disenchanted,”[6]
which is uninformed of Christian revelation and yet informed by it.
Whether his
readers realize it or not, Tolkien’s meaningful world is specifically embedded
a Roman Catholic Christian account of what reason is and more importantly, what
is real. This account combines Hellenic and Judaic thought to give an
explanation of why we assume the world can be rationally understood in the same
way, day after day. Andrew Davison gives a thumbnail description of the
genealogy of Western rationality that might make even atheists like Richard
Dawkins and Daniel Dennett feel uncomfortably Christian:
As Einstein is
said to have put it: ‘what is most incomprehensible about he world is that it
is comprehensible’. In other words, why does the world make sense? What right
have we to assume that it should? Christians can make sense of he universe’s
sense, saying that it is God’s creation, made after the pattern of the Son, who
is Word, Reason, or Logos. There is logic because there is Logos; the world is
open to reason because there is Reason in God. . . . It is part of the
Christian faith that we have an account of why it is so.[7]
Tolkien’s universe
is not only meaningful but graceful. A universe created by the Logos runs on an
economy of grace, and graceful transactions—sacramental transactions—fill The Lord of the Rings from beginning to
end.
In this book, I
will argue for four general propositions: 1) The Lord of the Rings is a “Catholic Novel,” written by a Catholic
author; 2); The idea of the Logos, as set forth in the prologue to John is
largely incorporated into Tolkien’s creation myth, The Ainulindalë; 3)
Although influenced by wide biblical understanding and imagery throughout,
Tolkien is significantly influenced by the Gospel of John and other books
traditionally attributed to John; 4) Tolkien’s Logos-centric universe in the Ainulindalë becomes the
foundation for his portrayal of Arda (Earth) from a sacramental perspective.
None of the
support for these propositions leads an existence independent of the others.
However, The first proposition will be the main burden of this chapter. The
second proposition will be discussed in the second chapter on The
Ainulindalë. The third and fourth
propositions will be the matter for part of the third chapter and the rest of
the book. Tolkien had strong ideas about the relation of truth to myth, and it
is necessary to understand these in order to understand the relation of the
“true myth” of Christianity to his mythopoetic works, The Silmarillion
and The Lord of the Rings. I set forth his ideas about myth and story
and their relation to truth in the third chapter. Those who are already
convinced that The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Christian work
may find, in the first three chapters, additional reason for thinking so.
Although many
people have written books on the Christian content and orientation of J. R. R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,[8]
it is not a universally accepted
way of approaching his work. A recent collection of essays, The Ring and the Cross[9]
takes up the issue of whether Christianity in general and Catholicism in
particular have a substantial presence in the book. No one challenges the fact
that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, but Tolkien’s love of Anglo-Saxon
literature and Norse legend is a massive presence in the book, and those who
reject a Catholic dimension hold that his myth is grounded in those sources to
the exclusion of others. To me, this initially seemed the kind of issue which
academics devise to generate conference papers. I recognized the presence of
Christianity when I first read The Lord
of the Rings: Gandalf’s resurrection, Frodo and Sam’s trip up Mt. Doom, the
Ring as something like the Edenic apple—all seemed to have easy biblical
connections. Disagreement, however, is so substantial that it must be taken
seriously.
Before
arguing about Tolkien’s status as a Catholic novelist, it makes sense to define
the category. What might a Catholic novelist be? At least for my purposes,
Flannery O’Connor provides the most guidance in two essays from Mystery and Manners.[10]
A Catholic novelist is not an apologist, because an apologist is not a
novelist. A Catholic writer is not an evangelist, because novels are not
concerned with evangelization. A Catholic novelist is a writer who sees reality
from a Catholic perspective:
What we roughly
call the Catholic novel is not necessarily about a Christianized or
Catholicized world, but simply that it is one in which truth as Christians know
it has been used as a light to see the world by. . . . [11]
The novelist is
required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it,
and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and
the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in
a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the
supernatural. And his doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural
is less; it means it is greater. . . .[12]
A minor example of how Tolkien uses
Christian light to see the world is his perception that Frodo’s very humility would
him the strongest person to carry the Ring, and that Gandalf would see this: “Blessed
are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.” The obligation to the
natural is greater because it is through the natural that the action of
grace—divine aid—is discerned; and it is in nature that the supernatural
comfortably resides. Tolkien makes the reader feel that the soil of the Shire
and the trees of Lothlórien are full of grace. Closely related to the presence of the
supernatural, at least as something whose reality is assumed, is the presence,
in some way, of the Catholic sacramental view of the world:
The Catholic
sacramental view of life is one that sustains and supports at every turn the
vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any
depth.[13]
. . . Every
mystery that reaches the human mind, except in the final stages of
contemplative prayer, does so by way of the senses.[14]
Open and free
observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is meaningful,
as the Church teaches.[15]
The Catholic vision is that the
holy is not located outside of a material universe that is corrupt, but within
a material universe that is mainly good, though fallen, and this means that
holiness can enter through the senses, that the world at large has a
sacramental quality. Christianity makes spiritual goods out of the most mundane
materiality: bread, water, wine, oil, but everything is meaningful. As Gerard
Manley Hopkins says, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Finally,
O’Connor says, this way of seeing is so habitual a part of the Catholic
mindset, that it works unconsciously:
The tensions of
being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the
Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about
her—in the sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.[16]
In sum, a Catholic
novel, like Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock
or O’Connor’s Wise Blood, may not
look Catholic at all on their face. One deals with a small time thug in
Brighton, the other with an atheist evangelist in the Protestant South. Both
bring a supernatural reality into the novel, both assume a meaningful universe.
All of these can be said of Tolkien’s work. Additionally, Tolkien is scrupulous
in his portrayal of nature, and by his own statement, in the first composition
of The Lord of the Rings, he was
largely unconscious of Catholic content. O’Connor’s main point, that a Catholic
novelist sees a world that illuminated by the light of Catholic culture and
thought—or more specifically by commitment to Christ—is the important one, but
although this illumination may touch everything, it may not establish itself in
symbols or action readily identifiable as Catholic. O’Connor has one important
addition in her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”: all fiction writers
need to have an anagogical vision, “the kind of vision that is able to see
different levels of reality in one image or situation.”
Anagogical visions goes hand in hand
with having a “sacramental view” of life, for the sacramentality of the world
is apprehended through such vision. Fr. Andrew Greeley describes a general
Catholic imagination into which O’Connor’s view of Catholic novelists fits very
neatly:
Catholics live in
an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive
candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these
Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious
sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics,
we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events,
and persons of daily life are revelations of grace. . . .
This
special Catholic imagination can appropriately be called sacramental. It sees
created reality as a “sacrament,” that is, a revelation of the presence of God.
The workings of this imagination are most obvious in the Church’s seven
sacraments, but the seven are both a result and a reinforcement of a much
broader Catholic view of reality.[17]
Tolkien’s letters
are a treasure trove for anyone trying to understand his habits as a writer or
the multiple ways in which his Roman Catholic beliefs shaped his view of
reality and his sub-creation of Middle-earth. He had comparatively very little
to say about these topics in interviews or other public forums. He did not want
to steer the interpretation of his own work, and this, perhaps, is a general
characteristic of serious novelists. It is not hard to understand why writers
are reluctant to become their own interpreters. They are already communicating
in the medium that allows them to say what they want. A novel or poem cannot be
recast as an essay and mean the same thing. It has to stand on its own, and interpretation,
however illuminating, also narrows. The “heresy of paraphrase” recognizes that
something is always lost in translation.
Moreover, readers
have an important part to play in the creative process of realizing a
narrative; authorial interpretation is, perhaps, an infringement of the
reader’s prerogatives. Tolkien
explicitly recognizes this in his “Foreword to the Second Edition” of The Lord of the Rings, though at the
same time, he cannot help but give some directions to readers who have
mistakenly taken the path of allegory:
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 the one resides in the freedom of the reader,
and the other in the purposed domination of the author. (Emphasis added; xxiv)
So the reader gets freedom to
“apply” the work as he will. If you want to apply Sauron and the Ring to the
Cold War and see Stalin and the H-Bomb, more power to you. Just don’t imagine
that I want you to limit the meaning of my book to that association. I’m not
Edmund Spenser.
Yet,
the temptation to interpret one’s work, especially when readers are not
“getting it,” and are asking for help, must be intense, especially to a
literature professor whose raison d’etre
is furthering the understanding of literary texts. When people wrote letters to
Tolkien, expressing an interpretation that delighted him, he had no compunctions
about affirming it, sometimes with enthusiasm and sometimes with restraint.
When they wrote letters to him, and he clearly believed they had gone wrong or
needed a suggestion to go right, he also responded, sometimes with restraint
and sometimes with amazingly lengthy and forthcoming letters. This may seem to
contradict his “Foreword to the Second Edition,” where he also says of The Lord of the Rings, “As for any inner
meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none” (xxiii). Now,
in one sense, this is true of all good novels. The message is not “inner,” as
if the novel were a nut that needed cracking—the message is the entire novel
itself. “Inner” is the problem
word for Tolkien, but that he had a message is made quite explicit in his
letters. Let us see what some of them have to say about Catholicism’s impact on
his imagination and The Lord of the
Rings.
Tolkien’s
letters reveal a writer who used Christian concepts not only as commonplaces
for the construction of fictional reality, but as the ideas through which he
understood his own life and analyzed the meaning of The Lord of the Rings. This occurs in so many places that a
complete listing and analysis would take a book in itself. What I offer here is
a representative sample as partial warrant for my specifically Christian and
Catholic reading of Tolkien’s work. For those who want more, I can only commend
them to The Letters.
The
most direct letter authorizing a fundamentally Catholic reading of The Lord of Rings is to Robert Murray,
S. J., where Tolkien simply declares the work to be fundamentally Catholic.
Murray, I suspect, has brought up the question of Marian influence on Tolkien’s
creation of Galadriel, and perhaps an association of Galadriel with Grace.
Tolkien replies:
I think I know
exactly what you mean by the order of Grace; and of course by your references
to Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty
and simplicity is founded. The Lord of
the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work;
unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out,
practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices,
in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story
and the symbolism.[18]
Such a letter to a critic is as a
red flag to a bull. “A fundamentally religious and Catholic work?” “The
religious element . . . absorbed into the story and the symbolism?” Let the
games begin! Yet there are cautions in this response. What does “fundamentally”
mean to Tolkien? When he says that the book was unconsciously Catholic at
first, but consciously so in revision, what does that imply? In what sense does
cutting out “religion” as an element of his imaginary world allow the
fundamental Catholicism more visibility? Tolkien does not answer these
tantalizing questions in his letters, but we can be sure that he is not going
to portray, for instance, formal sacraments or even allegories of sacraments.
But he may portray events that reveal a sacramental reality because he just
sees the world that way; he may construct plots and characters out of the
models furnished by deep Catholic belief, which Tolkien certainly had. To do so
would be to match Flannery O’Connor’s description of the Catholic novelist.
We
get some clues as to how this “Catholic imagination” might inform The Lord of
the Rings in a 1958 letter to Deborah Webster who inquired about Tolkien’s life
and its relevance to The Lord of the
Rings. Tolkien first says that he doesn’t like biographical criticism (bad
for me!) because it only distracts attention from the author’s works and
because “only one’s guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the
real relationship between personal facts and an author’s works.” Yet, perhaps Tolkien draws a
distinction between personal facts and beliefs, especially those which might
provide models:
[M]ore important,
I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman
Catholic. The later ‘fact’ perhaps cannot be deduced; though one critic (by
letter) asserted that the invocations of Elbereth, and the character of
Galadriel as directly described (or through the words of Gimli and Sam) were
clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary. Another saw in waybread
(lembas)=viaticum and the reference to the feeding the will (vol. III, p. 213)
and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is:
far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a
fairy-story.)[19]
Tolkien clearly
believes that Christianity is in his stories to be deduced, and
although he says Roman Catholicism “perhaps”
cannot be deduced, he cites two correspondents who have deduced it, to which
Tolkien does not object. I suspect the letter writer who found Marian influence
in Elbereth and Galadriel is Fr. Murray, of the previous letter. Tolkien
provides us with interpretive clues about how to read him when he discusses
lembas as like a communion wafer because of its Eucharistic associations: it
feeds the will and is more potent on an empty stomach. Tolkien does not say
that lembas is a communion wafer, or
that it allegorizes the communion
wafer, but lembas has a spiritual reality which is Eucharistic in a broad
sense. Like a communion wafer, lembas gives one the power to stay on the
journey. It communicates grace. Tolkien never gives a catalog of specific
characters, items, or scenes which could be deduced as products of a Catholic
imagination at work. One would never expect him to. But what this letter
reveals is a facet of how his imagination operates—that he creates with a
Catholic mind.
How
does a Catholic understanding of reality affect Tolkien as the creator of plot?
He gives a very detailed discussion of this in a 1956 letter to Michael
Straight, in which he discusses Frodo’s “catastrophe,” the moment in which
Frodo decides not to destroy the Ring, but keep it for himself. The plot,
Tolkien says, can be understood as exemplifying (a word he italicizes) two
petitions from the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them
that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil.” Tolkien says, the Quest is “the story of humble Frodo’s development to
the ‘noble’, his sanctification” (my
emphasis). He explains that the prayer, not to be led into temptation, is a
prayer that one retain the power to resist temptation, but finally, at the end,
Frodo’s will is completely overborne. Then, using Eucharistic language, he
describes how Frodo has been confronted with a “sacrificial situation”:
[T]here are
abnormal situations in which one may be placed. ‘Sacrificial situations I
should call them: sc. Positions in which the ‘good’ of the world depends on the
behaviour of an individual in circumstances which demand of him suffering and
endurance far beyond the normal—even, it may happen (or seem, humanly
speaking), demand a strength of body and mind which he does not possess: he is
in a sense doomed to failure, doomed to fall to temptation or be broken by
pressure against his ‘will’: that is against any choice he could make or would
make unfettered, not under duress.
Frodo
was in such a position: an apparently complete trap. . . [20]
What is striking about this passage
is how thoroughly theologized it is. Tolkien is not saying Frodo is a
“Christ-figure,” but he is saying that Frodo acts very much like a disciple who
takes up his cross to follow Christ. Frodo’s trek into Mordor sanctifies him, sanctification being a
specifically Christian term referring to one’s growth in grace as a result of
commitment to Christ, a commitment that always has a sacrificial aspect. To
carry Frodo’s imitation of Christ further, his sacrifice brings about the
salvation of the world.
As this point,
another petition of the Lord’s Prayer that brings Frodo’s plot-line to
conclusion: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against
us,” for it is Frodo’s forgiveness of Gollum which finally saves the day when
Frodo’s will gives out and Gollum has to bite off his finger to get the Ring.
Tolkien explains:
[A]t this point
the ‘salvation’ of the world and Frodo’s own ‘salvation’ is achieved by his
previous pity and forgiveness of
injury. At any point any prudent person would have told Frodo that Gollum would
certainly betray him, and could rob him in the end. To ‘pity’ him, to forbear
to kill him, was a piece of folly, or a mystical belief in the ultimate
value-in-itself of pity and generosity even if disastrous in the world of time.
He did rob him and injure him in the end—but by a ‘grace’, that last betrayal
was at a precise juncture when the final evil deed was the most beneficial
thing any one cd. Have done for Frodo! By a situation created by his
‘forgiveness’, he was saved himself and relieved of his burden. (234)
Here, Tolkien gives us the
imaginary scaffolding of the central plot line of the Lord of the Rings, which extends from the beginning of the book,
when Frodo wishes that Bilbo had killed Gollum, to the point where Frodo’s pity
for Gollum loses him a finger and saves the world. Pity, forgiveness,
self-sacrifice, grace, salvation, the Lord’s Prayer: these are all part of the
Christian lens through which Tolkien is envisioning his story. Tolkien does
very little to foreground or “flag” characters, scenes, objects, events, plot
lines, or places as having a Christian valence. But he clearly believes that
Christian categories of all kinds are tools that he is using in the
construction of Middle-earth, and the product is a sub-creation that is “fun
damentally religious and Catholic.”
In
several letters Tolkien declares, in so many words, the Christian orientation
of The Lord of the Rings. In his
private notes on W. H. Auden’s review of the book, Lewis noted, “In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is
basically not about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about
God, and His sole right to divine honour.”[21] In a subsequent letter to Auden, Tolkien
wrote: “I don’t feel under an obligation to make my story fit with formalized
Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with
Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere . . . where Frodo
asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin.”[22]
Frodo in that scene tells Sam that Mordor can create nothing, only mar what is
already created—a thumbnail description of the Thomistic idea that evil has no
positive existence, but is an absence, a deformation of something by
subtraction.
This
is perhaps enough to at least establish that looking for a Christian and more
specifically Catholic subtext in The Lord
of the Rings is not only legitimate, but the very thing which Tolkien’s
letters, if not Tolkien himself, would goad a reader to do[23].
But the task does not promise to be a simple one that will yield precise
results, for as Tolkien says, he wants the religious element “absorbed” in
story and symbol. Tolkien gives no announcements, waves no flags, and claims to
shun allegory (with some reservations yet to be discussed). Still, to read
Tolkien well, we cannot ignore the religious element of the book, which many
have sensed on their own and which he clearly intended. Here, the freedom of
the reader may well come into play, accommodating an applicability that can be
sustained by the text, even if not mandated by it.
Tolkien’s intention,
in part, is to give the reader this freedom, and, as he says in his prologue, it
is not his intention to determine outcomes. My goal as a reader is to stay
within the playing field of Tolkien’s texts, as inferred from the texts
themselves, his letters, and the artistic program he sets forth in
“Mythopoesis” and “On Fairy Stories.” My goal as a critic is to say something
about the Catholic subtext of the book that marshals enough evidence to be
convincing. I hope not to take Gollum as my role model in dealing with the
inevitable tensions between these roles.
Let us look at two
of the most personal of Tolkien’s letters to see get a sense of where the
Catholic apparitions in Tolkien’s story may reside. These letters deal with
religious experiences of Tolkien that border on the mystical. The first, a
letter to Carole Batten-Phelps in 1971 deals with the origin of The Lord of the Rings and spiritual
power in the book itself:
A few years ago I
was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten (though I believe he
was well-known). He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old
pictures seemed to hi to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. He brought one or two
reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my
imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of
literature and language. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I
had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial
Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly
he said: ‘of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book
yourself?’[24]
This rather jolted Tolkien, who
relates in previous letters that he had long felt he wasn’t making up his story
about Middle-earth but discovering it.[25]
Pure
Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask
what he meant. I think I said: ‘No, I don’t suppose so any longer.’ I have
never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old
philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should
puff any one up who considers the imperfections of ‘chosen instruments’, and
indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.
Indeed! But look
what Tolkien, even if imperfect (as, after all Moses and Jeremiah claimed to be
as well), is considering: that he is writing with inspiration, perhaps even
divine inspiration. This implies
that he has produced a book that contains “divinity,” at least in the less
exalted sense that it is about divine truth. But where does that truth reside?
For his visitor, in Tolkien’s descriptions, perhaps of landscapes. But even in
Tolkien, rivers and mountains do not announce their doctrinal preoccupations or
allegiances. Yet I, and perhaps millions of others, have felt what Tolkien’s
visitor felt. Tolkien goes further yet, to address his correspondent’s sense of
“sanctity” in the book:
You
speak of a ‘sanity and sanctity’ in the L.R.
‘which is a power in itself. I was deeply moved. Noting of the kind had been
said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this
letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as ‘an unbeliever, or at
best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling . . . but you’, he
said, ‘create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere
without a visible source, like light form an invisible lamp’. I can only
answer: “Of his own sanity no man can securely judge. If sanctity inhabits his
work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him. And
neither of you would perceive it in these terms unless it was with you also.
Otherwise you would see and feel noting, or (if some other spirit was present)
you would be filled with contempt, nausea, hatred. “Leaves out of the
elf-country, gah!” “Lembas—dust and ashes, we don’t eat that.”
This
correspondence concerns itself with the taste of The Lord of the Rings, the overall impression that it gives
Batten-Phelps and the two people Tolkien writes about. “Sanctity” and “grace”
and “light” are the words they apply. Tolkien doesn’t refuse them, and I don’t
think it’s an act of pomposity on his part. He also feels The Lord of the Rings has been given to him a gift. Moreover, to
react to the book with violent disgust, as Gollum does to the communion
wafer-like lembas, is to refuse grace. (The phrase “if some other spirit was
present” is probably derived straight from the language of Ignatian
meditation—“discernment of spirits.”) These are speculations verging on
enormous Christian claims, and a critic who wants a full understanding of The Lord of the Rings must account for
this response, which I doubt is unusual, on the basis of the text.
The
last letter to consider is an account by Tolkien of a religious experience that
is independent of The Lord of the Rings,
or any of his writings, but sheds light on the kind of mind he
possessed—acutely visual, symbolic, attentive to detail, and mystically
inclined. The letter is to his son Christopher, in the RAF, who has written
about his guardian angel. The date is November 1944.
I had [“a sudden
vision”] not long ago when spending half an hour in St. Gregory’s before the
Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant’ Ore was being held there. I perceived or
thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of
motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white
because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not
that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence
of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and
the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a
thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself,
personalized. And I do not mean ‘personified’, by a mere figure of speech
according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person.
Thinking of it since—for the whole thing was very immediate, and not
recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that
accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or
any other human person that I might think of with love)—it occurred to me that
(speak diffidently and have no idea whether such a notion is legitimate: it is
at any rate quite separate from the vision of the Light and the poised mote)
this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and the
Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person [the Holy Spirit], so the love and
attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in
Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic.
This mystical
experience may well have something to teach us about scenes in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien describes
its demonic reversal in the scene on Amon Hen, where the eye of Sauron searches
for Frodo, attempting to connect to him and then does connect. Its more angelic
equivalent is the opening of the dawn sunlight on the Rohirrim before Théoden
leads the charge against the orcs at the Fields of Pelennor, or perhaps the
blazing light around the White Rider in Fangorn Forest, the guardian angel of
Middle-earth. These scenes do speak of grace or its reverse, and Tolkien’s
letters provide a warrant for talking about them, and the rest of The Lord of the Rings, in the language
of Catholic spirituality. In fact, Tolkien seems to guarantee that it is there
to be found, in one way or the other.
[1] Tom Shippey,
J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2000.) Shippey’s “Foreword” has an excellent
summary of Tolkien’s popularity and the vitriolic intellectual response.
[2] Edmund
Wilson was one of the first detractors in “Oo, Those Awful Orcs,” The Nation (April 14, 1956); For more
current examples, see Jenny Turner’s ironically titled “Reasons for Liking
Tolkien,” London Review 23, no. 22
(15 November 2001), in which she credits Tolkien and his work with paranoia,
soggy-sentimentality, and male supremacy. My favorite detractor is Germaine
Greer: “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most
influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized,”
in ‘the book of the century—’, W: The
Waterstone’s Magazine (Winter/Spring 1997) 8: 2—9; W. H. Auden, on the
other hand, hardly a sentimentalist, loves the book. See his two reviews, “The
Hero is a Hobbit,” The New York Times (October 31, 1954), on The Fellowship of the Ring; “At the End
of the Quest, Victory,” The New York
Times (January 22, 1956), on The
Return of the King.
[3] This group of
artists and thinkers was mainly powered by Catholic converts such as Newman,
Hopkins, Chesterton, Waugh, Graham Greene and at a very young age, through his
mother, Tolkien himself. Christopher Dawson, the historian, was one of the most
influential. On the American side, converts included Orestes Brownson, Dorothy
Day, Thomas Merton. Books about this efflorescence of Catholic thought, which
passes unnoticed by the big literary anthologies or departments of English, are
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
(New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2003) and Peter Allitt, Catholic
Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997).
[4] Letters, 414.
[5] Letters, 387: “The Fall of
Man is in the past and off stage; the Redemption of Man in the far future.”
[6] The famous
phrase is Max Weber’s, adapted from Frederich Schiller. See H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills, “Bureaucracy and Charisma: A Philosophy of History,” in Charisma,
History and Social Structure, ed. Ronald Glassman and William H. Swatos,
Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 11.
[7] “Christian
Reason and Christian Community,” in Imaginative
Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition, Ed. Andrew
Davison (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012); Kindle Location 680 – 97.
[8] See Bradley
Birzer, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying
Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2002);
Stratford Caldecott, The Power of the
Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings (New York:
Crossroad, 2005); Matthew Dickerson, Following
Gandalf: Epic Battle and Moral Victory in The Lord of the Rings (Grand
Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003); Matthew Dickerson, A Hobbit Journey: Discovering
the Enchantment of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press,
2012); Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of
Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2005); Louis Markos, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to
Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis (Chicago: Moody, 2012); Joseph Pearce, Tolkien, Man and Myth: A Literary Life
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998); Joseph Pearce, Ed. Tolkien, A Celebration: Collected Writings on a
Literary Legacy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999); Richard Purtrill, J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984); Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-earth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); Ralph
C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien:
Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (London: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2003)
[9] Paul E.
Kerry, Ed. The Ring and the Cross:
Christianity and The Lord of the Rings (Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2011).
[10] Flannery
O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1961)
[11] O’Connor,
“Catholic Novelists,” 173.
[12] O’Connor,
“Catholic Novelists,” 175.
[13] O’Connor,
“The Church and the Fiction Writer,” 152.
[14] O’Connor,
“Catholic Novelists,” 176.
[15] O’Connor,
“Catholic Novelists,” 178.
[16] O’Connor,
181
[17] Andrew
Greeley, The Catholic Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1 – 2.
[18] Letters, p. 172.
[19] Letters, 288
[20] Letters, 233.
[21] Letters, 243
[22] Letters, 355
[23] And many
people have done it.
[24] Letters, 413.
[25] Letters,
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