Literary Giants Literary Catholics (40 page)

Perhaps the bonds of affinity between Tolkien and Chesterton are displayed most explicitly in their shared respect for tradition. In 1909 Chesterton had defended traditionalism by labeling it the philosophy of the tree:

I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as when it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly by its roots the higher it rises with its branches. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species.

A keen sense of tradition was as important to Tolkien as it was to Chesterton, and the whole of
The Lord of the Rings
resonates with its presence. Yet it is interesting, and perhaps not completely coincidental, that the mythological figure that Tolkien uses to embody this principle of tradition is Treebeard, a treelike creature who was the oldest living being in the whole of Middle Earth. Treebeard appears to be Tolkien’s personification of Chesterton’s philosophy of the tree.

When Pippin and Merry had first seen Treebeard, they felt that the wisdom of the ages could be glimpsed in the depths of his eyes:

Those deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impressions of them.

   
“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

Of course, this traditionalist imagery is rooted in the Catholicism that Chesterton and Tolkien shared, serving as a timely reminder that the bonds of affinity between them subsist within a greater wellspring of inspiration from which both men drank thirstily. Like a host of other Christian writers before and since, Tolkien was concerned principally with what the critic Lin Carter described in her study of
The Lord of the Rings
as “the eternal verities of human nature”. What was important to all the writers of the Catholic literary revival was not the accidental trappings of everyday life, the “stuff” of soap operas, but the essential nature of everlasting life, not what human society was becoming but what humanity was being, not the peripheral but the perennial. This was the animus at the very core of the revival heralded by Newman, a revival that enshrined the belief that the highest function of art was the expression of the highest common factors of human life and not the lowest common denominators—life’s loves and not its lusts. It is by these standards that Tolkien’s work should be judged, and it is by these standards that he shines forth as one of the
illustrissimi
of the revival of which he was part.

39

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The Catholicism of
The Lord of the Rings

S
OME CHRISTIANS REMAIN SUSPICIOUS
of
The Lord of the Rings
. They see within its mythological setting hints of neopaganism, possibly even Satanism. Can anything containing wizards and elves, and sorcery and magic, be trusted? Certainly, in the wake of the worldwide success of the
Harry Potter
books, many Christians fear the effect that “fantasy” literature might be having on their children. Are these fears justified? Should Christian parents prohibit their children from reading these books? Emphatically, in the case of
The Lord of the Rings
at least, the answer to these questions is no. Far from being prohibited, Tolkien’s epic should be required reading in every Christian family. It should take its place beside the Narnian Chronicles of C. S. Lewis (Tolkien’s great friend) and the fairy stories of George Macdonald as an indispensable part of a Christian childhood.

It is intriguing that the same Christians who express their suspicion of Tolkien are quite happy for their children to be exposed to the witches and the magic in C. S. Lewis’ stories. Clearly, these naturally concerned parents are oblivious of the profound Christianity that threads its way through Tolkien’s myth. In truth, and “truth” is the operative word, the power of Christ speaks more potently and subtly in Tolkien’s Middle Earth than in Lewis’ Narnia.

Many devotees of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
have read it, often on numerous occasions, without gaining an inkling of its deeper meaning. Its spirituality, if any is detected, is seen as pagan, little more than a cocktail of new-age pantheism. It is clear, therefore, that Tolkien is widely misinterpreted and often misunderstood, a charge that can seldom be leveled at C. S. Lewis. Is this a weakness in Tolkien’s work? The question can be answered only by comparing Tolkien’s and Lewis’ respective approaches.

The most important difference in Tolkien’s and Lewis’ approaches lies in their attitude to allegory. Lewis’ work abounds with allegorical connections, whereas Tolkien disliked the unsubtle straitjacket that the use of allegory placed upon the weaving of a story. In his foreword to
The Lord of the Rings
, he said about allegory:

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.

Tolkien was well aware that the forsaking of allegory in the telling of his tale gave his readers a freedom that many would not merely use but abuse. Applicability implied the likelihood of its misapplication. It was a price he was prepared to pay. Above all, however, story and allegory had one thing in common. They both subsisted within higher reality with a higher purpose.

Allegory and story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human “literature”, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read “just as a story”; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start from opposite ends.

Regardless of whether they started from opposite ends, the works of Tolkien and Lewis converged, meeting somewhere in Truth. Both men believed that fairy stories and myths were not, as the “moderns” maintained, lies or falsehoods representing a reprehensible escape from reality. On the contrary, they were the best way of conveying truths that were otherwise inexpressible. They were also the best way of high-lighting the difference between facts and truth. Facts were physical, but truth was metaphysical. Facts were scientific, but truth was an art. Specifically, and properly understood, Truth was the Art that governed the cosmos, and the purpose of art, that is, subcreation, was to mirror Art, that is, the primary Creation of the Creator. Thus, in a sublime paradox, myth becomes the highest realism. This was encapsulated by Tolkien in his essay on fairy stories:

The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”. . . in the “eucatastrophe” we see a brief vision . . . a far-off gleam of
evangelium
in the real world.

In conclusion, Tolkien stressed that Christianity, the true myth, had reconciled all lesser myths to itself. The lesser myths, in the form of fairy story or romance, were “derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.” However inadequate in themselves, they still offered a glimpse of the greater truth from which they spring or into which they flow.

Where then is this brief vision of the greater truth, this “far-off gleam of
evangelium
”, to be found in Tolkien’s work? In his greatest works, those centered on the secondary world of Middle Earth, the careful avoidance of allegory makes the search for the sudden glimpse of reality a wonderful game of hide-and-seek. As Tolkien himself intended, and as millions of his readers continue to demonstrate, it is not necessary to play the game in order to enjoy the story. It is, however, necessary to play the game if one wishes to understand the story more fully and enjoy it at its deepest. One can scratch the surface or plumb the depths. On the surface, one is entertained and swept away in a beautifully dramatic narrative; beneath the surface, one is introduced to the profound Reality that makes the drama beautiful. The true adventure is not in the mastery of prose but in the mystery of praise.

The profoundly Christian nature and supernature of Tolkien’s work can be demonstrated by adopting a trifocal approach. First, by looking at Tolkien the man, we shall discover the soul of a Christian mystic; second, by studying Tolkien’s philosophy of myth, we shall come to understand the theological basis of his own mythological world; and third, by looking at the myth itself, as revealed in
The Silmarillion
and
The Lord of the Rings
, we shall see that Tolkien’s epic goes beyond mere “fantasy” to the deepest realms of metaphysics. Far from being only an escapist fantasy,
The Lord of the Rings
will be revealed as a theological thriller.

In order to get to grips with Tolkien the man—or with Tolkien as the man behind the myth of
The Lord of the Rings
—it is useful to start with how the man saw himself. Specifically, it is useful to see how he saw himself in relation to his work. According to Tolkien’s own “scale of significance”, his Catholic faith was the most important, or most “significant”, influence on the writing of
The Lord of the Rings
. 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, and considering how the very concept of “myth” is often misunderstood, we should proceed to a discussion of Tolkien’s philosophy of myth.

Tolkien 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 critics that lies at the very root of their failure to appreciate his work. For most modern critics, “myth” is merely another word for a lie or a falsehood, something which 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.

Tolkien believed that the story of Christ was simply a true myth, a myth that works in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened. Whereas pagan myths revealed fragments of eternal truth through the words of poets, the true myth of Christianity revealed the whole truth through the Word Himself. The poets of pagan antiquity told their story with words, but God, the omnipotent Poet, told the true story with facts—weaving His tale with the actions of real men in actual history.

This sublime vision found (sub) creative expression in the opening pages of
The Silmarillion
, in which the “true myth” is reflected through the medium of Tolkien’s wonderful imagination. In these pages Tolkien’s own version of the Creation 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”. God, the One, “spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music”. He then allows the Holy Ones, or archangels, to share his creative gifts, declaring to them their role in Creation: “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.” In this way, the archangels brought forth the Creation of God as a Symphony of Praise in His honor: “And a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depth and into the heights . . . and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.”

Disharmony is brought into the cosmic symphony of Creation when one of the archangels decides to play his own tune in defiance of the will of the Composer. Instead of being an instrument in the Great Music, the rebel archangel composes his own theme, bringing discord. This disharmony is the beginning of evil. Again, Tolkien’s myth follows the “true myth” of Christianity with allegorical precision. The rebel archangel is named Melkor, later known as Morgoth, and is obviously Middle Earth’s equivalent of Lucifer, also known as Satan. Melkor is described by Tolkien as “the greatest of the Ainur” as Lucifer was the greatest of the archangels. Like Lucifer, Melkor is the ultimate source of the sin of pride, intent on corrupting mankind for his own spiteful purposes. Melkor desired “to subdue to his will both Elves and Men”, envious of the gifts that God had promised them, “and he wished himself to have subjects and servants, and to be called Lord, and to be master over other wills”.

The allegory becomes even less mistakable when Tolkien describes the war between Melkor and Manwe, who is clearly cast in the role of the archangel Michael. “And there was strife between Melkor and the other Valar; and for that time Melkor withdrew and departed to other regions and did there what he would.”