Literary Giants Literary Catholics (36 page)

If the Ring is sin, it follows that Tom Bombadil, as the only living being in Middle Earth who is unaffected by the Ring’s power, represents unfallen Adam or unfallen Creation, a timely and timeless reminder of the way things could and should have been if we had remained obedient to the will of God. Similarly, the example of Gollum shows us the effect of falling into sin habitually. When we put on the ring, or commit sin, we become invisible to the eyes of the good world created by God and, simultaneously, more visible to the eyes of the infernal world inhabited by the forces of evil. Quite literally, when we put on the ring / sin, we enter Satan’s world. If we leave it on, we stay there. If we leave it on long enough, we stay there forever. Gollum is fading and is in dire danger of falling into the infernal pit. The ring-wraiths, once proud kings of men, have already done so.

The Lord of the Rings
is so filled to the brim with an abundance of religious significance that it would be possible to write a whole book on the subject—as indeed I and others have done! Perhaps a few further examples, briefly listed, will whet the reader’s appetite. Tolkien confessed that his characterization of Galadriel was inspired by his love for the Blessed Virgin; lembas, the elvish way-bread that possesses such remarkable power, has been likened to the Blessed Sacrament, not least because
lembas
translates from the elvish as “life-bread” or “bread of life”; the parallels between Denethor and Theoden represent a parable of pagan despair versus Christian hope; and the list goes on and on. There is so much more.

If much has been written on the religious significance of
The Lord of the Rings
, less has been written on its political significance—and the little that has been written is often erroneous in its conclusions and ignorant of Tolkien’s intentions. There are exceptions, but alas, they are merely the exceptions that tend to prove the rule. Much more work is needed in this area, not least because Tolkien stated, implicitly at least, that the political significance of the work was second only to the religious in its importance.

I addressed the fundamental tenets of Tolkien’s political philosophy in the essay entitled “The Individual and Community in Tolkien’s Middle Earth”, which precedes the present essay. This philosophy itself has far-reaching consequences on the purely political level. Significantly, it led Tolkien to reach the same conclusions as had Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical
Rerum novarum
and as had G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in their advocacy of what became known as distributism. What Chesterton and Belloc called distributism is, to all intents and purposes, what the Catholic Church, in her
Catechism
, calls subsidiarity.
The Lord of the Rings
is, on the political level, a mythical exposition of these ideas of subsidiarity. The Shire is itself the model of a society in which subsidiarity is the established norm. It is a family-centered society rooted in human-scale communities living in harmony with the primary realities of nature. Hobbits shun the artificial accretion of unnecessary technology and resist the encroachment of the power of the machine. The Enemy, on the other hand, seeks domination through the power of technology and through the employment of the machine. Whereas hobbits, elves and men of good will have organically oriented minds and hearts, rooted in roots (tradition) and bearing fruit (wisdom), the evil forces have only “a mind of wheels” bent on the destruction of the natural order (civilization) and its replacement by the artificial (modernity).

The Ring itself has great political significance. It teaches us that the thing possessed possesses the possessor, or, as Christ put it, that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. This is a sobering lesson, rooted in perennial wisdom. It is a lesson that our own meretricious and crassly materialistic age is in need of being reminded.

Perhaps we can now understand why the liberal secularist intelligentsia despises Tolkien’s masterpiece.
The Lord of the Rings
is not merely a riposte to the agnosticism and hedonism of the proponents of modernism and modernity, it is an antidote to their poison. And, of course, as is proven by Tolkien’s immense popularity, most people still prefer good old-fashioned Christian morality to new-fangled ideas of moral relativism. Purity is still preferable to poison. And that’s a happy ending of which Tolkien himself would have approved.

35

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T
HE PHENOMENAL POPULARITY
of Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
continues to be greeted with anger and contempt by many self-styled literary “experts”. Rarely has a book caused such controversy, and rarely has the vitriol of the critics highlighted to such an extent the cultural schism between the cliquish literary illuminati and the views of the reading public.

It is perhaps noteworthy that most of the self-styled “experts” among the literati who have queued up to sneer contemptuously at
The Lord of the Rings
are outspoken champions of cultural deconstruction and moral relativism. Most would treat the claims of Christianity in general, and of the Catholic Church in particular, with the same dismissive disdain with which they have poured scorn upon Tolkien. Indeed, their antagonism could be linked to the fact that Tolkien’s myth is enriched throughout with inklings of the truths of the Catholic faith.

According to Tolkien’s own “scale of significance”, expressed candidly in a letter written shortly after
The Lord of the Rings
was published, his Catholic faith was the most important, or most “significant”, influence on the writing of the work. It is, therefore, not merely erroneous but patently perverse to see Tolkien’s epic as anything other than a specifically Christian myth. This being so, the present volume [Birzer’s
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth
] emerges as a valuable and timely reiteration of the profoundly Christian dimension in the work of the man who is possibly the most important writer of the twentieth century.

Professor Birzer grapples with the very concept of “myth” and proceeds to a discussion of Tolkien’s philosophy of myth, rooted as it is in the relationship between Creator and creature, and, in consequence, the relationship between Creation and subcreation. In his rigorously researched and richly written study, Professor Birzer helps us understand the theological basis of the mythological world of Middle Earth and enables us to see that Tolkien’s epic goes beyond mere “fantasy” to the deepest realms of metaphysics. Far from being an escapist fantasy,
The Lord of the Rings
will be revealed as a theological thriller.

Tolkien’s development of the philosophy of myth derives directly from his Christian faith. In fact, to employ a lisping pun, Tolkien is a misunderstood man precisely because he is a
myth
understood man. He understood the nature and meaning of myth in a manner that has not been grasped by his critics. It is this misapprehension on the part of his detractors that lies at the very root of their failure to appreciate his work. For most modern critics, a myth is merely another word for a lie or a falsehood, something that is intrinsically
not
true. For Tolkien, myth had virtually the opposite meaning. It was the only way that certain transcendent truths could be expressed in intelligible form. This paradoxical philosophy was destined to have a decisive and profound influence on C. S. Lewis, facilitating his conversion to Christianity. It is interesting—indeed, astonishing—to note that without J. R. R. Tolkien, there might not have been a C. S. Lewis, at least not the C. S. Lewis that has come to be known and loved throughout the world as the formidable Christian apologist and author of sublime Christian myths.

Integral to Tolkien’s philosophy of myth was the belief that creativity was a mark of God’s divine image in man. God, as Creator, poured forth the gift of creativity to men, the creatures created in His own image. Only God could create in the primary sense, that is, by bringing something into being out of nothing. Man, however, could subcreate by molding the material of Creation into works of beauty. Music, art and literature were all acts of subcreation expressive of the divine essence in man. In this way, men shared in the creative power of God. This sublime vision found (sub) creative expression in the opening pages of
The Silmarillion
, the enigmatic and unfinished work that forms the theological and philosophical foundation upon which, and the mythological framework within which,
The Lord of the Rings
is structured.

The Silmarillion
delved deep into the past of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s subcreated world, and the landscape of legends recounted in its pages formed the vast womb of myth from which
The Lord of the Rings
was born. Indeed, Tolkien’s magnum opus would not have been born at all if he had not first created, in
The Silmarillion
, the world, the womb, in which it was conceived.

The most important part of
The Silmarillion
is its account of the Creation of Middle Earth by the One. This Creation myth is perhaps the most significant, and the most beautiful, of all Tolkien’s work. It goes to the very roots of his creative vision and says much about Tolkien himself. Somewhere within the early pages of
The Silmarillion
is to be found both the man behind the myth and the myth behind the man.

The “myth” behind Tolkien was, of course, Catholic Christianity, the “true myth”, and it is scarcely surprising that Tolkien’s own version of the Creation in
The Silmarillion
bears a remarkable similarity to the Creation story in the book of Genesis. In the beginning was Eru, the One, who “made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made”. This, therefore, is the theological foundation upon which the whole edifice of Middle Earth is erected. Disharmony is brought into the cosmos when Melkor, one of the Holy Ones, or archangels, decides to defy the will of the Creator, mirroring the fall of Satan. This disharmony is the beginning of evil. Again, Tolkien’s myth follows the “true myth” of Christianity with allegorical precision.

Shortly after describing the rebellion of Melkor, Tolkien introduces Sauron, the Dark Lord in
The Lord of the Rings
. Sauron is described as a “spirit” and as the “greatest” of Melkor’s, alias Morgoth’s, servants: “But in after years he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the Void.”

Thus, the evil powers in
The Lord of the Rings
are specified as direct descendents of Tolkien’s Satan, rendering impossible, or at any rate implausible, anything but a Christian interpretation of the book. In the impenetrable blackness of the Dark Lord and his abysmal servants, the ring-wraiths, we feel the objective reality of evil. Sauron and his servants confront and affront us with the nauseous presence of the Real Absence of goodness. In his depiction of the potency of evil, Tolkien presents the reader with a metaphysical black hole far more unsettling than Milton’s proud vision of Satan as “darkness visible”.

Tolkien is, however, equally powerful in his depiction of goodness. In the unassuming humility of the hobbits, we see the exaltation of the humble. In their reluctant heroism, we see a courage ennobled by modesty. In the immortality of the elves, and the sadness and melancholic wisdom it evokes in them, we receive an inkling that man’s mortality is a gift of God, a gift that ends his exile in mortal life’s “vale of tears” and enables him, in death, to achieve a mystical union with the divine beyond the reach of time.

In Gandalf we see the archetypal prefiguration of a powerful prophet or patriarch, a seer who beholds a vision of the Kingdom beyond the understanding of men. At times he is almost Christlike. He lays down his life for his friends, and his mysterious “resurrection” results in his transfiguration. Before his self-sacrificial “death”, he is Gandalf the Grey; after his “resurrection” he reappears as Gandalf the White, armed with greater powers and deeper wisdom.

In the true, though exiled, kingship of Aragorn we see glimmers of the hope for a restoration of truly ordained, that is, Catholic, authority. The person of Aragorn represents the embodiment of the Arthurian and Jacobite yearning—the visionary desire for the “return of the king” after aeons of exile. The “sword that is broken”, the symbol of Aragorn’s kingship, is reforged at the anointed time—a potent reminder of Excalibur’s union with the Christendom it is ordained to serve. And, of course, in the desire for the return of the king, we have the desire of all Christians for the Second Coming of Christ, the true King and Lord of all.

Significantly, the role of men in
The Lord of the Rings
reflects their divine, though fallen, nature. They are to be found among the Enemy’s servants, though usually beguiled by deception into the ways of evil and always capable of repentance and, in consequence, redemption. Boromir, who represents man in the Fellowship of the Ring, succumbs to the temptation to use the Ring, that is, the forces of evil, in the naïve belief that it could be wielded as a powerful weapon against Sauron. He finally recognizes the error of seeking to use evil against evil. He dies heroically, laying down his life for his friends in a spirit of repentance.

Ultimately,
The Lord of the Rings
is a sublimely mystical Passion play. The carrying of the Ring—the emblem of sin—is the carrying of the Cross. The mythological Quest is a veritable via dolorosa. Catholic theology, explicitly present in
The Silmarillion
and implicitly present in
The Lord of the Rings
, is omnipresent in both, breathing life into the tales as invisibly, but as surely, as oxygen. Unfortunately, those who are blind to theology will continue to be blind to that which is most beautiful in
The Lord of the Rings
.