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.
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THE INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY IN TOLKIEN’S MIDDLE EARTH
TOLKIEN’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! Si
milarly, 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.
Perhaps we should clarify exactly what Tolkien meant by his not being a “democrat”. He is voicing his contempt for the macrodemocracies of modern secular states with their tendency to centralize power in huge “democratically elected” political mechanisms that are increasingly distant from, and deaf to, the needs and aspirations of ordinary people. It is clear, however, that Tolkien’s insistence on the “spiritual principles” of humility and equality illustrates his placing of the integrity of the individual and the family at the very heart and center of political life. It is clear, in fact, that his views are convergent with the distributism of the Chesterbelloc and with the creed of “small is beautiful” expounded by Schumacher, both of which are merely popular applications of the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity.
Tolkien’s insistence on the “spiritual principles” at the heart of all reality, including the sociopolitical and sociocultural, found expression in the way that he viewed Creation and creativity. His reasoning was as follows: since man is made in the image of God, and since we know that God is the Creator, man’s own creativity must be a gift of God reflecting His “imageness” in us. Since, however, only God can create in the true or absolute sense by making something from nothing, our creativity is only subcreation in the sense that we make things from other things that already exist. Thus the potter molds his earthenware from clay; the artist paints his picture using oils or watercolors to bring to physical fruition his imaginative perception of a landscape or a human face or a still life; the storyteller or mythmaker uses words or possibly music as the means to bring to physical fruition his imaginative perception of the things, or images, about which he writes, recites, sings or plays. In each case our creativity employs real things, Creation, to subcreate something original yet subsistent upon the Creation itself. Thus, in Tolkien’s view, there is a hierarchy of Creation. At the top is God, as Creator; then comes Creation, which is the direct fruit of God’s primal creativity; finally, there is subcreation, whereby man partakes of the image of the Creator through the gift of creativity.
The sociopolitical and sociocultural impact of such a belief in the hierarchy of Creation can be seen from Tolkien’s discussion of true and false perceptions of life in his essay “On Fairy Stories”:
Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he “welcomed” the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into “contact with real life”. He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression of “real life” in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more “real” than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!
Tolkien is saying, of course, that a horse, as a living work of Creation—that is, having been made by God directly—is more real, more alive, than a car which, as a work of subcreation made by man, is lower in the hierarchy of creative value. Yet he is actually saying more than that. The car, as a product of “mass-production robot factories”, is actually a machine made by a machine! The artificial in the service of the artificial. Worse, the human beings working in the mind-numbing robot factories are actually servicing the machines. The alive in the service of the dead. Reality sacrificed on the altar of virtual r
eality.
But Tolkien is saying even more than this. What does he mean by insinuating that centaurs and dragons are more “alive”, and therefore within the hierarchy of creative value more “real”, than cars? Well, for one thing, he is referring to the fact that centaurs and dragons are animate creatures, albeit animated only by the imagination! Yet I believe he is saying something even more potent and important. He is saying that there is even a hierarchy within the realm of subcreation. He is saying that subcreation in the service of beauty and truth is better than subcreation for purposes of power. Put simply, art is better than technology. But why is he saying this? To answer that particular question, we have to return to the hierarchy of created value. If God is at the top, His Creation next and subcreation at the bottom, does it not follow that subcreation, being a gift from God, should be at the service of its Giver, its Source? Since God is the Beautiful and the True, so much so that all beauty and all truth, properly understood, are a reflection of Him, isn’t subcreation in the service of beauty and truth better than subcreation in the service of mere utility? Isn’t the former, subcreation in the service of God, whereas the latter is subcreation in the service of man?
Here, perhaps, we should remind ourselves that art, within the context of this discussion, is meant in terms of the liberal arts. Theology is an art. She is queen of the arts as she is queen of the sciences. Philosophy is an art. History is an art. Literature is an art. Within this context, we can see that Tolkien is agreeing with Josef Pieper that leisure is indeed the basis of culture. If we do not have time to study, to enjoy and indeed to practice the arts, we will not be truly alive and therefore not fully real—in the sense of not being as real as we are meant to be, as real as God meant us to be. Heaven forbid that we should stand before the Judgment Seat and be told that we are only virtually real!
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