Lady Day & the One Ring

A nasty cold retired me from my day job and any productive blogging this past week, but it did give me ample time to resume my reading of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which I last read in 2003 while Peter Jackson's "adaptations" were in theaters. This rereading has yielded many interesting reflections lost on the thirteen year old version of myself, particularly the religious components. It would be a danger to read Lord of the Rings as a direct Christian allegory, for it is not, but it does have broad Catholic themes, a strict outlook of good and evil, and the construction of the world, through revisions, seems to mirror the composition of our world (angelic elves, demonic orcs, Sauron as Satan, men running from their fate while capable of good and evil). One minor detail which stunned me came in chapter IV of Return of the Ring, "The Field of Cormallen." You see, Tolkien writes this little passage:

'The fourteenth of the New year,' said Gandalf; 'of if you like, the eighth day of April in the Shire reckoning. But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King....'

The wizard, Gandalf, refers to the date of the destruction of the One Ring, the tool by which the invisible antagonist tempts men to turn against their innate knowledge of right and wrong and to do his bidding until their own countenances are vanished. The Ring, whether conceived as such or not, is a clear analogue for the "stain of Original Sin" (cf. Vatican I) that infects men who do not live in the life of grace. Tolkien picked for its destruction Lady Day, when after centuries of prophets and kings dragging their feet to do some, but never all of God's will, a poor Jewish maiden in Nazareth gave the angel Gabriel an unequivocal "Yes" and conceived the God-Man of the Holy Spirit. Unlike C.S. Lewis, Tolkien seems too restrained to make a perfect Christological equivalent in his classic work, yet the obedience of Mary and the sin-vanquishing presence of Christ are made present by Aragorn's acceptance of his own destiny, in contrast with his vacant ancestors, and Frodo's destruction of the Ring, albeit with the help of the creature Gollum (Frodo cannot be perfect like Christ, so evil must play a part in its own destruction).

There is also the curious dating of the same to April 8th in "Shire reckoning." With no proof from the author's own records and no specialized knowledge of Tolkien aside from having read a few books, I gander that he is testing competing views of man's happiness. The Shire, isolated from the troubles of Middle Earth and also its progress, is a place of natural contentment where people carry on their lives in a traditional manner (tradere, passing on what was received) and are fortified by their living within the confines of their realm. According to a footnote the Shire calendar has one thirty days, not thirty-one; for April 8th to coincide with March 25th the two would have to be thirteen days apart, the variance of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Apart from the blissfully ignorant Shire, Gondor is in the heart of Middle Earth, the capital of men and right next to the citadel of evil. Aggression has less to do with its decay than its absent kings and lost purpose, all of which are put right by Aragorn's ascent to the throne after Frodo's deed. Gondor becomes what it was always meant to be, like mankind in the Saints after the Incarnation. By the end of the story Gondor is fulfilled, but the bucolic Shire has not been saved from the ravages of reality by its remoteness.

As happy and preferable as hiding from the machines of our day may be, it will not save either our world, our Church, or our souls. We must controvert our day if we are to enter our own heavenly city and join the ranks of men who were changed after the Annunciation and were restored from ancestral guilt to ancestral innocence.

Francis the White

"So you have come, Gandalf," he said to me gravely; but in his eyes there seemed to be a white light, as if a cold laughter was in his heart.

"Yes, I have come," I said. "I have come for your aid, Saruman the White." And that title seemed to anger him.

"Have you indeed, Gandalf the Grey!" he scoffed.... "For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!"

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

"I liked white better," I said.

"White!" he sneered. "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken."

"In which case it is no longer white," said I. "And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."...

"I have not brought you hither to be instructed by you, but to give you a choice.... We must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.... We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order.... There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means."

"Saruman," I said, "I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant. I cannot think that you brought me so far only to weary my ears."

[From The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien]

Friday Miscellany

"I go to Rome to be crucified again."

Jones vs. Voris

In an hour-long interview with a YouTuber, Eugene Michael Jones repeats much of his anti-Voris rant verbally. (For those interested, I reviewed that book at length here and here.) The strangest new thing he says in this video is that it's much better to be an off-camera writer than an on-camera opinionater, in terms of avoiding excesses of vainglory. See around the 35-minute mark, where Jones opines that writing more readily lends itself to reflection than talking to a camera. My experience of reading many blogs—not to mention Jones's essays—argues otherwise.

Papal Intentions

Sometimes I wonder at what point it becomes questionably moral to pursue a plenary indulgence. As we all know, such an indulgence requires praying for the pope's monthly intentions. P. Francis's most recent prayer intention is that all countries would be successfully bullied into accepting refugees. In a month when we are encouraged to pray for the dead and win indulgences for their repose, it is most unfortunate that the pope has tried to guilt Catholics everywhere into asking God to fulfill his questionable vision of world politics.

Tolkien's Love Story

May 2017 will see the publication of Dr. Tolkien's story of Beren and Lúthien as a standalone tale, much as his son did with The Children of Hurin. I think that many of his stories work better separated from their original Silmarillion framework than as cogs in a larger machine, and I expect this will be one such example. Maybe I'm just looking forward to the version of the story where Sauron is a giant evil cat.

Descent into Hell

Mel Gibson has officially confirmed plans for a sequel to The Passion of the Christ, which, for all its flaws, remains my favorite religious movie. He hints at the inclusion of Jesus's descent into the Limbo of the Fathers as a kind of dramatic backdrop to what could otherwise be an action-light story. One hopes that Gibson will not present a Balthasarized version of the Descensus Christi ad Inferos, but only time will tell. I am also expecting good things from his new film Hacksaw Ridge.

The Ghost of Counter-Reformation Past

Speaking of the legacy of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a blogger at Bp. Barron's Word on Fire website has written a rather scathing criticism of the celebration of Reformation Day. There's no mention of the pope's imprudent gestures in this regard, but it's good that even clericalist-leaning apologists are willing to break ranks with the usual back-slapping now and then.

Tolkien Playing Hermes While Númenor Sinks

Hermes Trismegistus bestows his blessing upon thee!

It seems that the rather hysterical condemnation of Tolkien's fantasy world as implicitly, if not explicitly, Gnostic by a certain Fr. Ioannes Petrus is making the rounds again. (For His Traddiness's thoughts on the matter, see here and here.) The inimitable Mr. Joseph Pearce has stumbled across these talks and written some unnecessarily long essays in response at The Imaginative Conservative website (here and here). I do not know why he questions the consecration of Fr. Petrus, but I suppose Mr. Pearce is intent on discrediting the man before discrediting the man's argument.

Now, Mr. Grump is open to the argument that there is something in fantasy world-building that is at least formally Gnostic, but not that it is doctrinally so. There is nothing to suggest any hint of heresy in the works published by Tolkien. There might—might—be a hint of Manicheeism in his fantasized creation story (never published in his lifetime), where the dissonant music of the angelic Melkor is blended in with the holy harmony to make the physical world we know today. But no one can accuse Tolkien of any real dualism.

The photo above shows J.R.R. playing the part of Hermes in a school production of Aristophanes' The Peace. I wonder sometimes if he was simply so saddened by the state of the world and of the Church that he retreated into classical times, and then into a fictional history of his own making. The history invented in The Silmarillion is almost as dark and bleak as the history of the war-torn twentieth century, though, so I don't know how effective it could have been.

His thoughts on escapism:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? (from On Fairy-Stories)

Modern esotericism, supposedly founded in ancient times by Hermes Trismegistus, is a form of escapism. It ruins the valid practice of finding symbolic meaning in words, colors, beasts, cosmic phenomena, and stations of life, by squeezing false doctrines out of them. On the surface the esotericist will affirm the commonly accepted doctrines, then suggest that there's more going on beneath the surface, and finally admit that he's pushing the tired old heresies of dualism and reincarnation. Ho hum, the perennial heresy strikes again.

John Tolkien was no heretic, but he was a deeply unhappy trad by the end of his days. I do not fault him much for his fantasy-world obsession, even though I would quickly get bored doing the same thing, myself. The real world is more interesting than any world I could subcreate, and probably less depressing than Middle-Earth.

I wonder if he would have served the Catholic world better by spending his last years writing against the disintegration of the Church, rather than polishing The Silmarillion and passive aggressively saying all the Mass responses in Latin when the vernacular was becoming the norm. It is rumored that Tolkien spoke at a few early English traditionalist meetings, but I have yet to see any tangible evidence. Imagine a series of essays against the Novus Ordo by the author of The Lord of the Rings. What a great boon that could have been to our generation, and how much harder it would have been for secular schlockmeisters like Peter Jackson to scrape the religious barnacles from his work!

Another Thought on Tolkien

The Rad Trad earlier posted his utter disbelief at the sight of a FSSP priest attacking the literary output of one of the most prolific Catholics of our time. After listening to part of the second sermon (around the 32:00 mark) against the Oxonian professor the Rad Trad began to wonder if the priest has really considered the extent of what he says.

The priest condemns the climax of the story, when Frodo enters the chasm of Mount Doom, where the antagonist forged the Ring, to destroy it. The Ring eventually seduces Frodo, who puts it on, but by chance or fate the creature Gollum attacks Frodo to reacquire the Ring for himself. A fight ensues in which Gollum bites off Frodo's finger—Ring and all—and falls into the volcano, destroying the Ring. What is so troublesome about this? According to the sermonist, an evil creature did good and the Christ-like Frodo was seduced by evil! A perversion of doctrine! The Rad Trad says hogwash!

First of all Frodo is not the only Christ-like figure. Tolkien began drafting the Lord of the Rings as an adventure story, unwittingly installing a Catholic aesthetic and outlook within the plot and characters. During his many revisions Tolkien made the Catholic elements more profound. Lord of the Rings is not a parallel, epic re-telling of the Bible. It is an adventure story based on the epic style which integrates a linguistic experiment on the author's part. Three of the characters have Christ-like features—as do all the Saints—but none of them are meant to be Christ. Frodo's selflessness and willingness to suffer everyone else's burden, of which he owns no responsibility, reflects Jesus' acceptance of the Cross. Aragorn is the king of men who will redeem a people paying for the sins of a king of ages past, paralleling Our Lord and Adam. And lastly, Sam whose good, pure and incorruptible spirit sustains the journey. Tolkien, if anything, avoided making any character into a Jesus figure, which would be the height of literary trouble.

Another point is that while evil cannot do good, God can use or re-direct evil so as to accomplish something good. The Jews' rejection of Jesus and Pilate's politically motivated cowardice were clearly evil, rejecting the God-Man in favor of a revolutionary murderer. What greater sin could there be? And yet did not the Father and His Only Begotten Son know this would happen? And did Our Lord not proceed to Golgotha with His Cross to redeem us after this rejection? Similarly Gollum did not destroy the Ring per se. Both he and the Ring were consumed in their own greed and evil, which backfired on both of them. Providence within the story allowed good to come from choices made favoring evil. Yet, did not Frodo and Sam's journey to Mount Doom make the destruction of the Ring possible?

The Rad Trad is not a Tolkienophile, but he sees no reason why a good writer and devout Catholic's books should be questioned, particularly in the way that this priest and the Rorate Caeli bloggers question his work.

You Must Be Joking

"I will crush the Index!"

JRR Tolkien, the Roman Catholic layman whose day job as a linguistics lecturer at Oxford was overshadowed by his brilliant books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was not sufficiently Catholic in his writings according to a few absurd traditionalists (here and here). Tolkien—who shouted Et cum spiritu tuo after the local bishops conferences translated the Roman Mass into vernacular—is apparently analogous to those teachers of false doctrine against whom St. Paul warns us in his first epistle to St. Timothy. Does anyone think Tolkien proffered a real pagan alternative to Christianity? Does anyone think the Fantasy genre (and Tolkien ought not be confined to it) is real? If Paul read and quoted pagan writers in the Scripture he wrote why can we not read the fiction of an entirely orthodox Catholic?

The Rad Trad suspects the dangers of emotionalism and brashness forewarned in these lectures are actually the Catholic spirit and religious instinct, not the preferred manual-based formal theology. Honestly, if a 5th century believer read Return of the King and Ludwig Ott's manual on dogma which would he find more Catholic in its totality, not just in what it says its outlook and how it speaks?

As an aside I met Tolkien's daughter Priscilla once in Oxford. She was leaving the Sheldonian with a friend of mine one night during Trinity term after a performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. I greeted my friend, with no idea who the lady to his left was. He said, "Oh! [Rad Trad], this is Priscilla Tolkien!" We chatted for only a quick moment and my friend and I went on our way. My friend nearly died during the encounter. Why, you might ask? She is on the petite side and he could only think of hobbits....