Biblical and Theological Commentary on Tolkien's Letters, Part 7
Letters #267, #269, #291, #297, #306, #310, and #328
(avg. read time: 10–19 mins.)
Letter #267 (9-10 January 1965 to Michael Tolkien)
In this letter to Michael, Tolkien again appeals to the life of his mother as the source of his bond with the Catholic Church, and thus why it would pain him bitterly for any of his children to stray from the Church (note that Michael would continue to teach in Catholic schools into the 70s). The impact of his mother’s death has a new edge to it now that his daughter is older (35) than his mother ever was (34). He reiterates how he sees her as a martyr worn out with persecution well before her time. But here he also notes his feelings about Fr. Francis Morgan:
I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests ‘in the course of my peregrinations’; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the ‘liberal’ darkness of which I came, knowing more about ‘Bloody Mary’ than the Mother of Jesus – who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.
I have already noted that both sides of Tolkien’s family had been Protestants of some kind, but after seeing how they treated his mother upon her joining the Roman Catholic Church, and after experiencing the charity of Fr. Morgan, his will became set on sticking with the Church through thick and thin, even upon meeting a host of awful priests. Because for him, one Fr. Morgan showed him a light much greater than the darkness manifested in any of these priests.
Letter #269 (12 May 1965 to W. H. Auden)
The occasion for this short letter is that W. H. Auden had written Tolkien asking him if he thought that his views about the Orcs were heretical, since they seemed to be a completely evil and irredeemable race. Orthodox Christian ontology has held that existence is itself good, being created by God.1 In a previous unsent letter to Auden (#183 cited previously), Tolkien had affirmed that there is no such thing as absolute evil in his tale because there is no such thing period (since pure evil could not have the good of existence). Also in a previous letter (#153), he stated that he does not believe the Orcs to be irredeemably evil because they are not evil in origin. In any case, he does not consider himself qualified to appraise the quality of his notion of Orcs, whether it is heretical or not. But he asserts a sub-creator’s right in relating to the Primary World. He sees no obligation to conform his sub-creation to established Christian theology, though he aimed to be consonant with it. There is a strong emphasis on freedom here and the explorative character of sub-creational activity. Even as the sub-creator surely believes in the importance of reflecting and conveying their “primary” beliefs and thereby maintaining consonance with the Primary World, he/she understands that the Secondary World must have its own inner consistency of reality, therefore it need not conform to the Primary World per se.
Letter #291 (22 November 1966 to Walter Hooper)
Walter Hooper was a literary advisor of the C. S. Lewis estate and had begun working on collecting and preserving Lewis’s works after his death in 1963. This letter is a response to one of the fruits of that labor, as Hooper had sent Tolkien a copy of Of Other Worlds. Tolkien notes the great interest with which he read this volume, but his only comment on the work is that he noticed for the first time consciously, “how dualistic Lewis’ mind and imagination [were], though as a philosopher his reason entirely rejected this.” The most remarkable illustration of this is his notion of the Miserific Vision, which Tolkien criticizes as “rationally nonsense, not to say theologically blasphemous.” This notion is supposed to be the converse of the beatific vision, the perfection of union with God that gives humans immediate (rather than some form of mediate) knowledge of God, the result being both complete happiness (hence “beatific”) and complete holiness. The notion that there can be a converse to this is to say that what is unholy has a power that is equal and opposite to the Holy One, that there could be some perfect opposition to this state brought about by some perfectly opposed force, which is to say that there could be such a thing as absolute evil. As noted on multiple occasions already, orthodox Christian ontology rejects such an idea, for it cannot be squared with the Bible. Unfortunately, Lewis did not realize the implications of such an idea, appealing as it did to his intellectual (though not necessarily conscious) tendencies towards duality and dualism.
Letter #297 (drafts: August 1967 to “Mr Rang”)
Tolkien sent a shorter version of this letter to “Mr. Rang,” but he retained drafts of notes he made in response to investigations about the nomenclature of LOTR. On the one hand, he was pleased with the achievement of his goal of verisimilitude and of inspiring “literary belief” in the “historical” reality of the book, per his work “On Fairy-Stories.” On the other hand, he noted that such efforts of investigating the “sources” of his nomenclature are “valueless for the elucidation or interpretation of my fiction.” Indeed, there is a peculiar forcefulness to this statement, along with his perplexity about many such efforts, coming from a philologist. What is of interest to this commentary are his statement on one such attempted link and the comments he surrounds this statement with:
The use of éarendel in A-S [Anglo-Saxon] Christian symbolism as the herald of the rise of the true Sun in Christ is completely alien to my use. The Fall of Man is in the past and off stage; the Redemption of Man in the far future. We are in a time when the One God, Eru, is known to exist by the wise, but is not approachable save by or through the Valar, though He is still remembered in (unspoken) prayer by those of Númenórean descent.
There is a connection between the term here and the name of Eärendil, as noted in my Tolkien review, but the fact remains that the context and symbolism are different. There is inspiration, but one should not derive too much from it, as Tolkien did not. After all, as Tolkien says above, this imaginary time is nowhere near that of éarendel/John the Baptist but is located between the Fall and the Incarnation. He also reiterates a point he has made at multiple points about how God in this world is known through natural theology and communicated with through sparse worship. The One, in fact, remains active in the world, but in an “anonymous” fashion of providence, unlike in the context of revealed theology.
Letter #306 (sometime after August 25 1967 to Michael Tolkien)
One of the last letters we have of Tolkien to his second son once again addresses matters of the Church (it addresses other subjects as well, but they are not of relevance for this commentary). He wrote this letter almost two years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council and the reforms it instituted. Tolkien objected to the change in the liturgy of the Mass introduced by the Second Vatican Council, because of which the Mass would be conducted in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Simon Tolkien, his grandson, has remarked that Tolkien would attend Mass and loudly give the responses in Latin while everyone else was doing them in English. Such was Tolkien’s commitment to the tradition in which he had been raised.
Between this and other trends set off by the Second Vatican Council and otherwise, Tolkien remarks that such trends are serious trouble, “especially to those accustomed to find in it [the Church] a solace and a ‘pax’ in times of temporal trouble, and not just another arena of strife and change.” Traditions can ossify and outlive their purpose, to be sure. But the struggle has always been distinguishing those ossified and ossifying traditions from living and life-giving ones. The great traditions become what they are not simply because of their age, but because they have some link to a crucial element of history and have stood the tests of time and change in some way. And, of course, on a psychological level anyone can grasp the sort of effect these changes are having on Tolkien, when that which represented a key source of reliability, stability, and security (things we tend to associate with the state of “peace”) suddenly changes, it can become disorienting and off-putting. But, of course, such a thing is a normal occurrence in this world, as a Catholic professor had reminded Tolkien when he expressed how he thought his world was collapsing at 21 (he said to him “Back to normal”). Still, he insisted that, for all his frustrations with the Church, there was nowhere else to go.
While he expressed appreciation for ecumenical efforts in his day (“I find myself in sympathy with those developments that are strictly ‘ecumenical’, that is concerned with other groups or churches that call themselves (and often truly are) ‘Christian’”), he still did not agree with the restorationist tendency among Protestants:
The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St Paul's strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!) Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred.
Such an idea is, of course, the continuation of the Reformation tendency to go back to the source (ad fontes) of Scripture in an effort to “wipe the slate clean” and begin afresh where the Church had gone wrong in some given way. Naturally, such efforts had to be taken up again … and again … and again … and again and so on over the next centuries. But there is a difference between testing all things by the Scriptures and essentially wanting to start over as if the intervening history—and the countless, often unrecognized, ways in which it shapes—has not happened or has no relevance to our hermeneutical task. The Protestant ethos in the former sense is still necessary and will always be necessary, but I am inclined to agree with Tolkien about the latter issue.
Of course, the opposite tendency of obsessively “bringing things up to date” is not the solution either. But Tolkien wants to be careful to distinguish that tendency from the ecumenical efforts that it was (and still is) often confused with (if for no other reason than that widespread ecumenical efforts are of more recent vintage in the post-Reformation era). As noted before, he is in agreement with efforts to reunite and reconcile Christians across these lines. He still thinks there should be more acknowledgment and repentance of how the Protestants have mistreated the Catholics, especially in his context of Britain. Again, he remembers all too vividly the example of his mother, driven by the suffering of persecution for becoming a Catholic by her Protestant relatives to an early death. But in the end, Tolkien notes that this principle must rule the day, “But charity must cover a multitude of sins! There are dangers (of course), but a Church militant cannot afford to shut up all its soldiers in a fortress. It had as bad effects on the Maginot Line.” This principle comes from 1 Pet 4:8, and its context further suggests what is necessary for Christian unity in being hospitable to one another (4:9), serving one another with the gifts God has given each person (4:10), and glorifying God in all things by speaking as one who speaks the words of God and serving as one who serves with the strength God supplies (4:11). He then closes this portion of the letter with reflections on how he was raised in the faith by Fr. Morgan, including in making him and his brother Hilary serve the Mass each morning. But he also notes how friendships he made with other Christians influenced him, including Christopher Wiseman’s father Frederick, “one of the most delightful Christian men I have met,” of whom he says, “Fr Franics always referred to as The Pope of Wesley, because he was the President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference.”
Letter #310 (20 May 1969 to Camilla Unwin)
Camilla Unwin was the daughter of Rayner, Tolkien’s longtime reader for Allen & Unwin, and the occasion for this letter was that she was doing a school project addressing the question “What is the purpose of life?” Tolkien divides this question into two others: “How ought I to try and use the life-span allowed to me? OR: What purpose/design do living things serve by being alive?” As the answer to the first question is dependent on the second, he first addresses the second one.
Naturally, the scope of Tolkien’s second question extends to all living things, not only humans, and so he appeals to how patterns and organization are noted in nature. The way he proceeds from this observation is quoted here in full:
Human curiosity soon asks the question HOW: in what way did this come to be? And since recognizable ‘pattern’ suggests design, may proceed to WHY? But WHY in this sense, implying reasons and motives, can only refer to a MIND. Only a Mind can have purposes in any way or degree akin to human purposes. So at once any question: ‘Why did life, the community of living things, appear in the physical Universe?’ introduces the Question: Is there a God, a Creator-Designer, a Mind to which our minds are akin (being derived from it) so that It is intelligible to us in part. With that we come to religion and the moral ideas that proceed from it. Of those things I will only say that ‘morals’ have two sides, derived from the fact that we are individuals (as in some degree are all living things) but do not, cannot, live in isolation, and have a bond with all other things, ever closer up to the absolute bond with our own human kind.
So morals should be a guide to our human purposes, the conduct of our lives: (a) the ways in which our individual talents can be developed without waste or misuse; and (b) without injuring our kindred or interfering with their development. (Beyond this and higher lies self-sacrifice for love.)
We see here the influence of Catholic tradition, especially as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, on Tolkien’s way of thinking about the world. This is the teleological argument proper. While that title is often applied to arguments from design, which in turn depend on the complexity of a thing or of the universe in general, the teleological argument proper is focused on the question of purpose and how the fact that purpose guides life is an indication of the existence and action of God (at least, that’s the short version of the argument). Likewise, the question of the purpose of life inevitably raises the question of God. And if there is a God who is responsible for the “is” that we see around us and for the purpose that guides the world, the question is then raised about the “ought” of our own existence: How ought we to live in alignment with the design and purpose (i.e., will) of God for humans? That is, the question of morality is raised, for which Tolkien notes that it has individual and communal dimensions. And naturally, we can see again the influence of the moral vision of cruciform life as that which is beyond and higher than general morality.
Of course, if one asks the bigger “why” question of why God should include humans in general or any human in particular in his purpose, Tolkien simply admits “there is no answer, because that requires a complete knowledge of God, which is unattainable. If we ask why God included us in his Design, we can really say no more than because He Did.” This is a reminder again that God’s will is both the ground for and guide of our existence. We would not exist at all apart from the exercise of his will, nor can we be what we were created to be but by following the will of him in whose image we were created. Conversely, the question of the purpose of life is ultimately unanswerable if there is no personal God. As Tolkien says, speaking from the perspective of humans in this hypothetical reality, all that one could say in response to such a question is, “I am as I am. There is nothing you can do about it. You may go on trying to find out what I am, but you will never succeed. And why you want to know, I do not know.”
When Tolkien returns to the subject of the rest of the universe in relation to humans, he says that those who believe in a personal Creator do not worship the universe itself, but they do think that devoted study of the universe as the creation of the Creator can itself be a form of worship directed to the Creator. Indeed, contemplating the world influences our ideas about God and how to express them, as there is no expression about God in biblical or traditional theology (or otherwise) that does not depend on some connection to the world we know as a way to illuminate the one who is most mysterious. In light of all of these points, Tolkien ultimately concludes in a way that resonates with many confessions of the Church over the centuries (perhaps most famously, among Protestants, in the Westminster Confession):
So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour.
Indeed, if God made us to be image-bearers of himself, we cannot know ourselves or our purpose properly without knowing him. And to know God, as we see again and again throughout Scripture, is to be moved to worship God. Indeed, the image of being “made in God’s image” has its roots in the context of worship. No graven images of God and God’s creatures are to be objects of worship according to the Second Commandment, because the image-bearers of God are the people who participate in worship that is directed to the Creator alone. And even as our purpose in relation to creation is to live worshipful lives as proper image-bearers of him, representing his rule to the rest of creation, so our purpose in relation to God in worship is to sum up the worship of creation. As such Tolkien concludes this discussion with this, “And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in the Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. [sic. Dan 3 in the LXX, reflected in Catholic Bibles] PRAISE THE LORD … all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.”
Letter #328 (draft: Autumn 1971 to Carole Batten-Phelps)
Carole Batten-Phelps has given to Tolkien only his most recent example—if he could only imagine how many more there would be—of people expressing profound appreciation and love for what he has done in LOTR. This outpouring has led him to believe that his work has become a vessel of light that has proven redemptive in the deprived, dark world of modernity. Though he has described this effect of fairy-stories in his essay many years prior to this letter, he has only reluctantly, and with goading from others, thought of his own work in this way on occasion (note that he refers to another fan who inspired him to think of the effects of his work in this way in Letter # 87). What helped him “turn a corner” in this regard was a man who showed him pictures and asked if he had seen them prior to writing LOTR given the similarities. Tolkien said that he had not seen them before and the man—in Gandalfian fashion—asked him, “Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?”
He had since no longer been able to suppose otherwise, but the thought of providential use of him and his work as a divine instrument was not an instigation for pride. He is one learned in the stories of Scripture, the stories of the saints, and the stories from many other sources, which has led him to realize, “the imperfections of ‘chosen instruments’, and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.” As with the letter he received in 1944, his response is deferential and grateful that he has thus been used. It is perhaps another sense of the “sub” in “sub-creator” that one must remember one’s subordination to the Creator and that one is thus subject to the Creator’s providential use for creative purposes. He reflects this Primary World belief also in his Secondary World, particularly in that quintessential story of the relationship of creation and sub-creation in the Ainulindalë.2
Whatever beams of transcendent light there may be in his story, Tolkien attributes it to that transcendent source. It is a light that shines through him, not from him. At the same time, he notes that people such as the woman who wrote this letter would not be able to observe the sense of “sanity and sanctity” in it unless they also had it. Hence, there is a sense of God preparing at least some to receive the divine work through human sub-creations.
Augustine, Enchiridion 3–4 (11–15).
The Silmarillion, 17: “And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my desire. For he that attempteth shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” Ibid.: “Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added. And thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory.”