Literary Giants Literary Catholics (34 page)

   
But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying.

Perhaps it is more than a little encouraging that a work by a self-confessed “reactionary back number” should emerge as the most popular and influential work of literature of the twentieth century, continuing to win converts to its wisdom and charm fifty years after it was first published. Its power lies in the way that he succeeds, through myth, in making the unseen hand of providence
felt
by the reader. In his mythical creations, or subcreations as he would call them, he shows how the unseen hand of God is felt far more forcefully in myth than it is ever felt in fiction. It is paradoxical that fiction works with
facts
, albeit invented facts, whereas myth works with
truth
, albeit truth dressed in fancy disguises. Furthermore, since facts are physical and truth is metaphysical, myth, being metaphysical, is, in its very essence, spiritual.

The writer and poet Charles A. Coulombe concluded his essay “
The Lord of the Rings
: A Catholic View” with the following incisive assessment of Tolkien’s importance. It was a fitting conclusion to his essay on the subject. It is a fitting conclusion to mine:

It has been said that the dominant note of the traditional Catholic liturgy was intense longing. This is also true of her art, her literature, her whole life. It is a longing for things that cannot be in this world: unearthly truth, unearthly purity, unearthly justice, unearthly beauty. By all these earmarks,
Lord of the Rings
is indeed a Catholic work, as its author believed: but it is more. It is this age’s great Catholic epic, fit to stand beside the Grail legends,
Le Morte d’Arthur, and The Canterbury Tales
. It is at once a great comfort to the individual Catholic, and a tribute to the enduring power and greatness of the Catholic tradition, that JRRT created this work. In an age which has seen an almost total rejection of the Faith on the part of the Civilisation she created. . .
Lord of the Rings
assures us, both by its existence and its message, that the darkness cannot triumph forever.

33

_____

T
OLKIEN’S MAGNUM OPUS
,
The Lord of the Rings
, has emerged as the most popular work of literature of the twentieth century. Popularity aside, it is also, in my judgment and in the judgment of thousands of others who have registered their opinion in several national opinion polls, the
greatest
work of the century It is indeed unusual, particularly in the midst of the junk culture regurgitated by modernity, to find that the most popular is also the best. This marriage of quality and quantity, in which the best is also the best seller, is particularly gratifying because the work in question is so Catholic in its inspiration and so traditionalist, and consequently antimodernist, in its message.

Thankfully, much has been written in the past few years about the underlying theology and philosophy of
The Lord of the Rings
. Tolkien’s assertion that “The
Lord of the Rings
is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” has served as the springboard for a number of excellent studies of the spiritual dimension of Middle Earth. One aspect of this spiritual dimension is that pertaining to the place and role of the individual within the community—or what may be termed the sociopolitical or sociocultural applicability of Tolkien’s vision to the problems facing the individual and the community in a secular age.

Bearing in mind Tolkien’s assertion that his work was fundamentally Catholic, we should not be surprised to discover that the vision of
communitas
in
The Lord of the Rings
was shaped by the social teaching of the Church, at least indirectly. This influence seems to have come via the distributist social vision of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who in turn had distilled their distributism from Pope Leo XIII and from the social vision of Cardinal Manning.

In his essay “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien confesses the influence of what he terms “Chestertonian fantasy” on his own formulation of the nature, and supernature, of mythology. It is, indeed, no wonder that Chesterton should have been so important to the young Tolkien. The towering influence of the legendary Chesterbelloc upon the intellectual life of England in general, and upon the intellectual life of Catholics in England in particular, was at its most potent and profound in the years from 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This is significant because it coincides with Tolkien’s youth and, presumably, with the most crucial years of his own intellectual and spiritual development. He was eight years old when Chesterton burst upon the literary and intellectual scene in 1900 and was twenty-two at the outbreak of the war. (Incidentally, although Chesterton’s influence on Tolkien is well documented, there is little direct evidence of Belloc’s importance—though for the reasons just stated, it can be deduced implicitly. It is, however, my belief that the graphic description of the blizzard on the heights of Caradhras in
The Fellowship of the Ring
is derived from Belloc’s description of his near-fatal efforts to cross the Alps in
The Path to Rome
. Certainly Tolkien had no direct experience of hiking in mountains in such treacherous conditions, and his powerful evocation of the elemental power of nature bears a striking similarity to Belloc’s treatment of the subject.)

Why, one might ask, is Chesterton’s and Belloc’s influence on Tolkien so relevant to a discussion of the individual and the community in Middle Earth? Put simply, it is my contention that Tolkien was greatly enamored of the distributist ideas of both these men and that this animated the sociopolitical and sociocultural vision of his work. Chesterton’s distributist novel,
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, and Belloc’s seminal critique of sociopolitical history,
The Servile State
, were published during the formative years of Tolkien’s life, the former in 1904, the latter in 1912. These works were themselves inspired by the social teaching of the Church, as expounded in Pope Leo XIII’s celebrated encyclical
Rerum novarum
, published in 1891. The vision of society presented in these works, combined with their denunciation of the encroaching artificiality of industrialization, harmonized with Tolkien’s romantic desire for what he called “a pre-mechanical age”.

It must be stressed that the social teaching of Leo XIII and the distributism of Belloc and Chesterton are rooted in
philosophical
first principles. They do not subsist within the sphere of ideology; that is to say, they are not merely sociopolitical or sociocultural responses to other sociopolitical or sociocultural realities. The same is true of Tolkien’s vision of
communitas
in Middle Earth. His position is that of a Catholic responding to the ills of society in accordance with the theological and philosophical principles of the Church. Thus, if we are to understand the vision of the individual and the community in his work, we need to understand the first principles from which that vision springs. The fundamental tenets of what may be termed Tolkien’s “philosophy of myth”, rooted as it is in the teachings of the Church, are to be found in three crucial though often overlooked works, namely, his essay “On Fairy Stories”, his “purgatorial” allegory “Leaf by Niggle” and his poem “Mythopoeia”. Essentially, Tolkien’s philosophy is rooted in the principle that human beings are made in the image of God. Man is not merely
Homo sapiens
, he is
Homo viator
; that is to say, he is not merely created “wise”, he is created with a purpose. Furthermore, he is created with free will, enabling him to obey or disobey the purpose for which he is created. This, in turn, means that he is responsible for his actions. He is responsible for his obedience and for his disobedience and must face the consequences of his choices. This mystical equation is thrown into turmoil by the Fall, the primeval act of disobedience for which we are still suffering the consequences. Thus, in his essay “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien writes of “the great mythical significance of prohibition. . . . Thou shalt not—or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret.” Given our gift of freedom, this prohibition can either be heeded or ignored. Thus, says Tolkien, “the Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation”.

So where does this “locked door” fit into the relationship between the individual and the community? Quite simply, it shows the necessity of resisting temptation, the necessity of self-sacrifice. Our freedom is the key to the locked door. As such, the door will remain locked only if we choose not to use the forbidden key that is entrusted to us. The temptation is rooted in the fact that we have the freedom to break the rules but the duty to refrain from doing so. The applicability of this principle to the sphere of the sociopolitical is obvious and is perhaps best expressed in two paradoxically convergent political maxims. The first is a so-called liberal maxim by the Catholic historian Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” The second is a so-called conservative maxim by Edmund Burke: “Liberty itself must be limited in order to be possessed.” Put bluntly in the modern vernacular, the first of these could be translated as “power corrupts, and big power corrupts big time”. No wonder E. F. Schumacher declared that small is beautiful! Similarly, Burke’s maxim could be restated bluntly as a warning that unrestrained liberty, otherwise known as anarchy, would not result in widespread freedom but in the rule of the most brutal and the enslavement of everyone else. Imagine a world in which rapists, murderers and thieves were at liberty to do as they please. No wonder Solzhenitsyn insists that “self-limitation” is the key to a healthy society!

This is how Tolkien discussed this issue. He is speaking specifically about marriage, but, after all, the relationship between the individual and the community is the mystical “marriage” at the heart of Christ’s Great Commandment that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. Think of the individual as the bridegroom, and the community, or his neighbor, as the bride. If this is done, Tolkien’s advice to his son about marriage takes on great sociopolitical significance:

The essence of a
fallen
world is that the
best
cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called “self-realisation” (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification.

In another letter, Tolkien discussed this principle of self-limitation or “abnegation” in the specific context of the allegorical treatment of the issue of Power in
The Lord of the Rings
:

Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of
Power
(exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false. The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in
abnegation
. When you say A[tomic] P[ower] is “here to stay” you remind me that Chesterton said that whenever he heard that, he knew that whatever it referred to would soon be replaced, and thought pitifully shabby and old-fashioned. So-called “atomic” power is rather bigger than anything he was thinking of (I have heard it of trams, gas-light, steam-trains). But it surely is clear that there will have to be some “abnegation” in its use, a deliberate refusal to do some of the things it is possible to do with it, or nothing will stay! However, that is simple stuff, a contemporary & possibly passing and ephemeral problem. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story. . . . The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality.

It is intriguing that Tolkien passes beyond the discussion of power, at least in its purely physical and secular sense, to the perennial questions of life itself: “death and immortality”. Tolkien perceived, as all Christians must, that politics and economics are merely a derivative of theology and philosophy. Change the philosophy and you change the politics. If your philosophy has God as its first cause and center, His commandments will be obeyed and the locked door will remain secure. A belief in God
demands
self-limitation or “abnegation”. Remove God, however, and the commandments will be ignored or ridiculed. The locked door will be opened, and like a Pandora’s box, its woes will be released on a heedless and hedonistic humanity. No God means “no limits”, and no limits leads to the anarchy, which leads in turn to the rule of the most ruthless: the political rapists, thieves and murderers known as dictators. The fact that Tolkien perceived these primary realities of sociopolitical life is evident from further comments that he made in the same letter as the one just quoted:

I am
not
a “democrat” only because “humility” and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanise and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power—and then we get and are getting slavery.

These words, written in 1956, were indeed written in an age when Orcs wielded the rings of power: the age of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao. These theoretical “socialists” of one sort or the other, national or international, were in practice moral anarchists whose wielding of the ring of power heralded not merely slavery but slaughter—tens of millions massacred in the bloodiest orgy of power-wielding in human history.