in search of areté

Avallónnë. Fifth Age. – Stratford Caldecott, in his excellent work The Power of the Ring, explores “The Spiritual Vision Behind The Lord of the Rings.”

In his introduction, Caldecott explains not only Tolkien’s purposes for the book but also the Oxford professor’s feelings about the times in which he lived. It is to be remembered that Tolkien always denied his work was drawn from the events of the 20th century but was also quick to add that The Lord of the Rings had applicability to many times and settings. The times have not changed but only intensified in the thirty-plus years since Tolkien’s death, and what was applicable then is no less so now.

In the following quotations from Caldecott, all emphases are mine.

What the book celebrates – and mourns – is a world and a tradition that appears to be passing away in a great war, or series of wars. These wars are fought in a good cause, against an enemy that cannot be allowed to win. Yet the real danger is not that the free world might be defeated; it is that we might be corrupted, brutalized and degraded by the conflict itself, and in particular by the means employed to secure victory. . . .

“Our mistake in the great wars of our own time has been to accept the false idea that the end justifies the means, and that ‘if a thing can be done, it must be done’ (Letters, 186). For, as Tolkien wrote to his son in 1944, the Allies were attempting to defeat Sauron by using the Ring. The penalty would be to breed new Saurons, and to turn Men and Elves into Orcs – ‘Not that in real life things are as clear-cut as in a story, and we started with a great many Orcs on our side.’ (L, 66)

If Caldecott’s and Tolkien’s observations are important for the free countries of the world in which we now live, they are even more important for those of us who seek to reflect and represent the Kingdom of God to an unbelieving world. Even as the free peoples in Middle-earth were engaged in spiritual warfare against Evil, so Christians struggle against principalities and powers unseen but not unknown.

Orcs in the Pulpits and Pews

Our struggle is also to maintain holiness as we battle the Enemy. It is here that the statements above have application: we are prone to corruption, to justify unrighteous means, and do something simply because we can. The relentless attacks of the Enemy and the continual need to defend ourselves by putting on the armor of God can be wearying. The subtle, insidious temptation is to allow ourselves to be slowly and quietly diminished, robbed of joy and spiritual power, rather than edified and brought to maturity in Christ Jesus.

At the same time, a blindness to slight deviations from righteousness develops in full light of day, our sight dimmed by ignorance, introspection, isolation, or some other malady. Questionable practices, perhaps excused due to desperation or exasperation to evangelize the lost and edify the church, are allowed for the sake of achieving godly purposes.

Technology lures us in and shifts our focus from “what” and “whom” to “how” and “how much.” As we utilize media and sophisticated productions to reach the lost, we become almost addicted to and enslaved by it. The church’s version of “keeping up with the Joneses” – “keeping up with the Baptists”? “with the “Emergents”? “the Seeker friendlies”? – threatens us with shallowness. We have form but no substance.

The words of Faramir, the Dúnadan of Gondor, should cause all of us to examine our own means and methods in our ministries:

‘Yet now, if the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us, enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scarce claim the title High. We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts.’”

Even as the men of Gondor were gradually lured from their holiness and righteousness, so we are drawn away from our first Love. It is not a sudden, abrupt change of course but a slow, imperceptible drift: the current is always present and should never be far from our hearts and minds.

The Church cannot allow herself to be corrupted, or afford to adapt the ways of the world in ministry, or do something simply because we can without regard for the need or effectiveness. God has told us not only what to do, but also how to do it.

We ignore this and will suffer for it. For to do God’s work in our own way is to not do God’s work at all.

Avallónnë. Fifth Age. – In a chapter entitled “Myth and Sub-creation” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Bradley Birzer explores Tolkien’s beliefs regarding myths, both pagan and true. “Tolkien mythologized nearly everything in his life,” Birzer writes. In more familiar and (I believe) accurate terms, it might be said that Tolkien saw the spiritual dimension in every area, aspect, and act of his life.

Birzer continues:

For Tolkien, mystery surrounds us. But modernity has deformed our perception of this reality. His mythologizing of the world, Tolkien believed, increased our ability to see the beauty and sacramentality of creation. . . .

Indeed, for Tolkien, myths expressed far greater truths than did historical facts or events. Sanctified myths, inspired by grace, served as an anamnesis, or a way for a people to recall encounters with transcendence that had helped to order their souls and their society. Myth, inherited or created, could also offer a ’sudden glimpse of Truth,’ that is, a brief view of heaven. At the very least, sanctified myth revealed the life humans were meant to have prior to the Fall.

Two fundamental aspects of Tolkien’s mythology must be stated from the outset. First, as every reader of Tolkien has found – either to his delight or to his chagrin – Tolkien created a world vastly complex and nuanced. . . .

“Tolkien believed his legendarium to be a single entity revealed to him over time. To him, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings were a continuation of the same story, inseparable, and, when divided, incomprehensible.

The second aspect of Tolkien’s mythology that must be understood is his firm conviction that God authored the history of Middle-earth, in all its manifestations. Tolkien thought that he merely served as a scrivener of God’s myth. ‘I have long ceased to invent,’ Tolkien wrote in 1956. ‘I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. . . . The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), “that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named.”‘ . . .

“After all, both Tolkien and Lewis argued, God spoke through the minds of poets, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth,’ Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves. ‘One must be content to accept it in the same way, remember that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths, i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there.

Birzer argues that two essays by Tolkien – The Monsters and the Critics and On Fairy-Stories – reveal additional depth to Tolkien’s understanding of myth.

Tolkien’s examination of Beowulf, the subject of the first essay, has become a standard in the field of Beowulf criticism, and Anglo-Saxon scholars and critics typically either agree with it or abhor it. For Tolkien, who had committed to memory almost the entire poem, Beowulf represented one of the great moments in western history. . . .

“Beowulf, Tolkien had argued, is as important for the historian and the theologian as for the English teacher. Two things should immediately prove this, he thought. First, the story contains a dragon. Rarely in literature does one find them. Contrary to our popular memory of legends, no ‘wilderness of dragons’ abounded in medieval literature. Instead, when such a bestial worm does present itself, the critic should take its significance to the story and its symbolism seriously. Indeed, the appearance of a dragon signifies a number of things – most of them evil. A dragon personifies ‘malice, greed, destruction.’ Second, Tolkien noted that few authors would devote over 3,000 lines of high poetry to something ‘not worthy of serious attention.’ Instead, the ‘high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful.’

“Beowulf’s greatest strength, Tolkien believed, lay in the author’s understanding that the theme should be implicit rather than explicit.

For Tolkien, the Beowulf poet beautifully intertwined pagan virtues with Christian theology. . . . Most certainly a Christian, the author used the poem to demonstrate that not all pagan things should be dismissed by the new culture. Instead, the Christian should embrace and sanctify the most noble virtues to come out of the northern pagan mind: courage and raw will.

“Tolkien’s belief that the best of the pagan world should be sanctified reflects St. Augustine’s thinking. In his On Christian Duty, St. Augustine wrote, ‘[If philosophers] have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.’

Tolkien warned that fallen man can pervert fairy stories, fantasy, and myth, making them something for the promulgation of evil. Therefore, Tolkien concluded, one should leave fantasy to the mental imagination and to the written word. To take fantasy to the animated visual arts, such as with motion pictures or the theater, must result in either ’silliness or morbidity.’

“Indeed, as high art forms, fairy stories and fantasy offer much to human existence. First, fairy stories illuminate the vast inheritance our ancestors have bequeathed to us. Second, fairy stories give us a new sense of wonder about things we have taken for granted or which have become commonplace. . . . Fairy stories and fantasy allow one to see ‘things as we are (or were) meant to see them.’

Yet, because we are fallen, restless, and susceptible to pride, Tolkien argued, even the well-intentioned can pervert the high calling and gift of creativity. In such perversions, man turns art into power; adulterated by sin the prideful man uses his gifts not to exalt creation and the creator, but to serve himself. . . .

“With such religious implications and significance in its artistry, Tolkien concluded, the best fairy story and sub-creation provides the reader with what he labeled the euchatastrophe, the unexpected joy. . . . The ultimate fairy story, or true myth, then, is the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. . . . ‘The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact,’ C.S. Lewis argued along Tolkienian lines. ‘The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.’

“With the Incarnation of Christ, ‘art has been verified,’ Tolkien claimed. ‘God is the Lord, of angels, and of men – and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused’ with the arrival of God in Time, and man has been blessed beyond earthly comprehension.

The story, especially The Lord of the Rings, became much more than a myth for any one people or any one nation. It, instead, became a myth for the restoration of Christendom itself.”

Avallónnë. Fifth Age. – Professor Bradley Birzer explores Tolkien’s perspective on faerie (myth), truth, and man in his introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth.

To enter faerie – that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation – is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence. . . . To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J.R.R. Tolkien firmly believed . . .”

The English Roman Catholic G.K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that ‘he not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.’ Likewise, Tolkien shows in ‘Smith of Wootton Major’ that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to full become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.

“For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. . . .

“Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. . . .

“Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology.”

Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society . . .

“Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. ‘It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad,’ Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy.”

To the modernist, ‘myth,’ like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

“For religious fundamentalists, myths also represent lies. Myths, the argument runs, constitute dangerous rivals to Christian truth and may lead the unwary astray, even into the very grip of hell. . . . It is likely, the fundamentalist concludes, that all myth comes from the devil and is an attempt to distract us from the truth of Christ . . .”

For Tolkien, however, even pagan myths attempted to express God’s greater truths. True myth has the power to revive us, to serve as an anamnesis, or way of bringing to conscious experience ancient experiences with transcendence. But, Tolkien admitted, myth could be dangerous, or ‘perilous,’ as he usually stated it, if it remained pagan. Therefore, Tolkien thought, one must sanctify it, that is, make it Christian and put it in God’s service. . . . This motif of ’sanctifying the pagan’ has been repeated throughout history by Christians in a multitude of ways, and was instrumental in contributing to the wildly successful spread of the faith.”

It is both fitting and worthwhile to recall the comments of C.S. Lewis in his review of The Lord of the Rings at this point:

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity. The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. [Tolkien] applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it in any other way.” (quoted in Colin Duriez’s Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle-earth)

Avallónnë. Fifth Age. – One of the good things about owning and having read so many books (30+) by or about Tolkien and Middle-earth is having the immediate opportunity to re-read them from time to time. Upon doing so, I find that I have forgotten some things while other observations of the various authors, unimportant to me in the past, have now taken on a new perspective – or, rather, I have taken on a new, broader, and/or deeper perspective.

I recently picked up Bradley Birzer’s 2002 work, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth and began wandering through his insights into Eä and Arda. At the time of writing, Birzer was (among other positions) Professor of History at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Included in this post are comments from Joseph Pearce, author of Tolkien: Man and Myth, who wrote the Foreword to Birzer’s book:

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.”

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 sub-creation. . . . Tolkien’s epic goes beyond mere ‘fantasy’ to the deepest realms of metaphysics. Far from being an escapist fantasy, The Lord of the Rings is revealed as a theological thriller.

It is perhaps noteworthy that most of the self-styled ‘experts’ amongst the literati who have queued up to sneer contemptuously at The Lord of the Rings are outspoken champions of cultural deconstruction and moral relativism . . . For most modern critics a 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 . . .

“Integral to Tolkien’s philosophy of myth was the belief that creativity is a mark of God’s divine image in Man. . . . Only God can create in the primary sense, i.e., by bringing something into being out of nothing. Man, however, can sub-create by molding the material of Creation into works of beauty. Music, art, and literature are all acts of sub-creation expressive of the divine essence in man.

[T]he evil powers in The Lord of the Rings are specified as direct descendants 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 Ringwraiths, 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 that immortality 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. . . .

“In the true, though exiled, kingship of Aragorn we see glimmers of the hope for a restoration of truly ordained, i.e., 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 eons of exile. . . .

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.”

I would take issue with Pearce on at least one point, i.e., the role of Gandalf. Pearce’s description of the wizard as “Prophet and patriarch, a seer who beholds a vision of the Kingdom beyond the understanding of men” would seem to be more true of Elrond Peredhil. Gandalf is a more fitting picture of the role and activity of angels in the world or, perhaps better, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in believers as He encourages, strengthens, and empowers Christians in the battle against the Kingdom of Satan.