Biblical and Theological Commentary on Tolkien's Letters, Part 2
Letters #43–#45, and #49
(avg. read time: 13–26 mins.)
Letter #43 (6-8 March 1941 to Michael Tolkien)
Some of Tolkien’s most theologically and ethically insightful letters are to his son Michael. Letter #43 is one that is among the more often quoted of Tolkien’s letters, because it contains his counsel to his son on matters of marriage and relations between the sexes. As the foundational point, he begins with the fact that men and women live and relate in a fallen world and, “The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall.” As he says, the spirit of concupiscence (strong desire, especially sexual, that leads to sin) “has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell.” This is the frequent image by which Dame Folly is portrayed in the Book of Proverbs in contrast to Lady Wisdom. After all, a crucial component of wisdom is properly ordered, properly directed, and properly exercised desires, and so Wisdom is portrayed as a proper recipient of desire, rather than desire being denied altogether.
Such concerns are precisely what guide Tolkien’s comments here, as he says to Michael that he has no call to complete renunciation of such relations. But short of marriage, is friendship—by which he means something more than acquaintanceship—then possible? He says ideally it should be, but we live in a fallen and not an ideal world. In this fallen world, relations between men and women can be turned to sin as much by “generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones.” Attempts at such friendship tend to fail in the long run, especially in situations where both man and woman are single, because one will often fall in love with the other. In such situations, the friendship is then jeopardized, especially when the one who fell in love realizes that the other does not reciprocate. Of course, there are situations where this might be easier to deal with: “Later in life when sex cools down, it may be possible. It may happen between saints. To ordinary folk it can only rarely occur: two minds that have really a primarily mental and spiritual affinity may by accident reside in a male and a female body, and yet may desire and achieve a ‘friendship’ quite independent of sex. But no one can count on it.”
There are elements of nature and nurture in what Tolkien talks about here, as the problems he refers to in male and female friendships are not inevitable and there are ways in which the differences in how, e.g., Americans socialize now compared to how young British men and women socialized in Tolkien’s era affect the potentialities of such friendships. At the same time, the element of nature remains in the differences between men and women, in the biological imperative, and in other factors that bring men and women together, regardless of cultural frameworks. There is also an element in this in which Tolkien’s insistence that such friendship as he talks about may be possible between “saints” could have greater applicability than he realizes, as he uses “saints” in a more restricted sense than the Bible warrants. That is, the Christian context and shared Christian values can do more to make these friendships possible and guard against inclinations to give into temptation. But at the same time, the risks remain, and it is possible for familiarity to breed laxity and due awareness and caution must remain in such a context. The aforementioned difficulties can arise here as it can outside that context.
From the man’s perspective, such difficulties arise because what single men tend to desire from women—even in more innocent situations—is not merely the kind of friendship like they can find with other men. Rather, they seek love and a complementarity that a woman can give in a way that a man cannot. Such is what is illustrated in Gen 2:18–24 of the woman being made as an ezer kenegdo (a “helpmeet” or a “helping counterpart”) for the man. That is, men and women were made to complete each other and because from the union of man and woman comes the reproduction of children, this complementarity is typically sought in a relationship of sex or one that will lead to sex. Naturally, companionship is also sought in such a relationship of complementarity, but because of the entanglements of the possibility of sex and the aforementioned corruption of instincts related to the same in this fallen world, the desire for companionship too can become corrupted in these contexts and ultimately contribute to sexual sin. The Christian young man thus wants to know how to relate to the young woman for whom he may feel such desires, or at least for whom there is a distinct possibility he could develop such desires, without falling into the traps of sin.
As Tolkien mentions, there is the popular tradition—more popular in his day than ours, even if it is still present—associated with romance in chivalry (such that “chivalry” is often a term used for polite conduct, especially of a man towards a woman, even though the chevalier’s codes involved much more). Perhaps the most enduring feature of that tradition is in how men kneel before women when they propose marriage to them, communicating symbolically, even if not intentionally, the symbolism of fealty and allegiance sworn to a superior. The chivalric tradition is the product of the culture of Christendom, but not necessarily Christian ethics, and so Tolkien is quite ambivalent about it. What he says about it, both positively and negatively, deserves to be quoted in full:
It idealizes ‘love’ – and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service’, courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity – of the old-fashioned ‘his divinity’ = the woman he loves – the object or reason of noble conduct. This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion (as long ago it was, producing much of that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God’s way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion) it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman. Yet I still think it has dangers. It is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly ‘theocentric’. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. (One result is for observation of the actual to make the young man turn cynical.) To forget their desires, needs and temptations. It inculcates exaggerated notions of ‘true love’, as a fire from without, a permanent exaltation, unrelated to age, childbearing, and plain life, and unrelated to will and purpose. (One result of that is to make young folk look for a ‘love’ that will keep them always nice and warm in a cold world, without any effort of theirs; and the incurably romantic go on looking even in the squalor of divorce courts).
There is indeed a temptation to become so enraptured by the woman you are in love with as to fall for this borderline idolatry. But as love rejoices in truth, it is distinct from such overweening infatuation, for the woman is not something higher than the man, nor lower than him so as simply to be the object of desire, but a fellow human being, a companion in this fallen world, capable of the same saintliness and sinfulness as the man. Chivalry, as such, does not inculcate a properly ordered, directed, and exercised desire, for it is not properly theocentric. Without loving God properly, one cannot love others rightly, hence why loving God and loving neighbor are connected as the greatest commandments, and this applies also to love between a man and a woman.
Of course, Tolkien is not ignorant of the challenges for women, but here he knows such less on a personal level than on an observational one. And, indeed, his observations still resonate with what is often said today, almost eighty years later, about the proclivities of women and the temptations and weaknesses they face in the matter of relating to men. For them, sympathy and understanding, which can give them advantages in many ways in relating to others compared to men, can serve as their own means for sin to exploit. As such, they are less likely to be swept away by the pitfalls enshrined in chivalry, being, in Tolkien’s words, less romantic and more practical:
Don’t be misled by the fact that they are more ‘sentimental’ in words – freer with ‘darling’, and all that. They do not want a guiding star. They may idealize a plain young man into a hero; but they don’t really need any such glamour either to fall in love or to remain in it. If they have any delusion it is that they can ‘reform’ men. They will take a rotter open-eyed, and even when the delusion of reforming him fails, go on loving him.
In the cases of both men and women, Tolkien is largely working in stereotypical fashion, for it must be so, as one must either speak in generalities, spend endless time qualifying generalities, or simply respond to the less typical (but not unheard of) issues as they come up, rather than trying to be comprehensive in a letter. But these stereotypes exist for a reason: they resonate with general experience, much as proverbs that are not universally but generally true. Of course women can become overweeningly infatuated with a man and overlook his faults and flaws as a man can a woman, but the more typical failing for them is that they will realize the faults and flaws and think they can change the man. This tendency is the subject of such widespread jokes about how “I can change him” precisely because it is so common. But again, one sees how tendencies that make men and women complementary to one another are the same means that sin can exploit to sow chaos between men and women where there should be companionship and sexual discord where there should be sexual harmony. This is why there is much said about the pitfalls of sexual sin and sexual immorality in Scripture, as well as the proper function of sexuality. These things are as needful to hear today as they have always been, no matter how much things are thought to have changed in relations between men and women.
Indeed, one aspect of relationships that encapsulates these points is monogamy. Insofar as women are the sexual selectors determining what qualities of a mate are desirable, they are also more inclined to monogamy than men are, who have stronger sex drives. In Tolkien’s words, “Monogamy (although it has long been fundamental to our inherited ideas) is for us men a piece of ‘revealed’ ethic, according to faith and not to the flesh.” Scripture does make allowances for polygamy in the patriarchal era and ancient Israel, even as allowance is made for divorce for other reasons, but Jesus’s teaching on marriage in Matt 19:1–12 // Mark 10:1–12 makes clear that the purpose from the beginning was that one man and one woman should become one flesh, monogamy being based on the twoness of the sexes and the complementarity of the sexual (re)union. But in the fallen world, the creative purpose can no longer feel natural, hence why Tolkien says of men, “Each of us could healthily beget, in our 30 odd years of full manhood, a few hundred children, and enjoy the process. Brigham Young (I believe) was a healthy and happy man. It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds, and souls.” As Paul most thoroughly demonstrates in Rom 7 (and elsewhere), the most palpable effect of the Fall is this dissonance it creates within us apart from the grace of God. Sin can create the illusion of happiness, contentment, and fulfillment, indeed, of self-realization, as has been a popular goal of the supposed good life in Tolkien’s day as well as our own.
What Tolkien says in response to these facts of life in the fallen world is once again worth quoting in full:
However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (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. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that – even those brought up ‘in the Church’. Those outside seem seldom to have heard it. When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only —. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances).
We see here again the crucial lessons that Tolkien has learned of the cruciform life. It is often mistakenly thought on an implicit level (even if it may not be explicitly articulated) that love is the path of least resistance, that it should necessarily be an easy thing to love someone, that it is something you must feel, and if there are times when it seems difficult, that in itself is an indication that something has gone wrong. But love is an exercise of the will; this we see when we look to the One who became incarnate, was crucified, buried, raised, and exalted for us. And in this fallen world, it is backwards to think that love is the path of least resistance or that it is the easiest thing in the world to do. That is why when Jesus summarizes what it means to be his disciple, to show love as he has shown love, he marks the path of faithfulness as the one of self-denial, of taking up one’s cross, and in that way following he who was going to take up his cross for the sake of the world. Faithfulness in the fallen world requires struggle, for the world is not right and so much of it inclines us to infidelity, whether in terms of our faithfulness to God or our faithfulness to one another (and the world can often deceive us as to what is the path of least resistance anyway). Love is neither a force that simply operates from without upon oneself or a kind of inertia of unconscious/subconscious impulses with which one must move. Love is an exercise of the will; this is why love is a command made throughout Scripture, for it is precisely the exercise of the will that can be commanded.
One of the chief exercises of the will in love is that of commitment. This is what defines long-term relationships that truly live out the vow that is completed with “till death do us part,” not that of finding “the [idealized] one,” “the soul-mate,” or the best fit. Looking for such is again defining love by feeling, rather than by will. In fact, the decisions made to exercise love in commitment are those decisions that are most in our control to make. It is true that with technology being what it is, especially with the Internet, the pool of potential mates could be larger for any given individual today than in Tolkien’s time (even as that technology and the society it forms makes the modern dating scene even more of a hellscape). But his fundamental point about how little choosing we actually do in the whole process of forming these relationships remains resonant. He recognized that it is a matter of God’s providence that we are brought into contact with these people that we come to love. Any number of things could have happened, any number of decisions could have been made that would have prevented us from meeting them, but in the hands of God’s providence they worked together such that we meet these people.
Of course, Tolkien himself knows God’s providence in his own story. But he does not, simply for that reason, use his story as an example for his son to follow, for he also knows of the exercises of will made in that process. He does provide his own autobiographical comments on the relationship between him and Edith, but he tells his son, “My own history is so exceptional, so wrong and imprudent in nearly every point that it makes it difficult to counsel prudence. Yet hard cases make bad law; and exceptional cases are not always good guides for others. For what it is worth here is some autobiography – mainly on this occasion directed towards the points of age, and finance.” Indeed, as I mentioned in my review of the Tolkien biopic, the actual process by which John Ronald was reunited with Edith and they were engaged was messy and created further messes, for she had to break off an engagement she already had, she left an Anglican community with which she had had close ties, and her move to Roman Catholicism was by no means smooth, nor did Tolkien handle it in the best way for Edith. But the Tolkiens persevered through it all by their faithfulness to God and one another, exercising the will to love at countless points throughout the difficult journey.
And it is to the content of his faith that Tolkien ultimately points his son as the supreme guide in love, including for these questions of relations between man and woman that he has talked with his father about. Here he shows what it means to him to make love theocentric by looking to the Eucharist, the center of Catholic liturgy:
There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.
So it is by looking to the cross that one finds the substance of what Tolkien has been saying about the nature of love. When others participate in this gospel pattern, including by signifying such with partaking of the Eucharist, they too find that in this death to self and to the fallen world that there is resurrection life on the other side, where all that is sought in human relationships—love, faithfulness, and joy—is found embodied in the crucified, risen, and exalted Christ (Gal 2:19–20). Even the greatest of all human relationships in marriage can and will be dissolved by death, but that love shown forth in the Eucharist has already overcome death by God’s resurrecting power, for this is the love that death cannot hinder, for it was impossible for death to keep its hold on the Risen One (Acts 2:24).
Letter #44 (18 March 1941 to Michael Tolkien)
The next letter to Michael Tolkien is much shorter and it concerns Tolkien expressing to his son how he has more in common with his maternal ancestors, the Suffields, than with the Tolkiens from whom he derives his name. That sense of being more connected with that side of his family and with where they come from—Worcestershire and the general West Midlands—comes from his connection to his mother Mabel. Here and elsewhere, Tolkien expresses the profound influence she had on him as what he thought of as a martyr for Roman Catholicism. She had died at the age of 34 from diabetes, but the stressors of her life that made the condition have accelerated effects on her came from her family ostracizing her for becoming a Catholic (the Suffields were mostly Methodists and the Tolkiens were mostly Baptists). Thus, Tolkien described her disease as being “hastened by persecution of her faith.” From her, a woman Tolkien describes as being “a gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering,” he learned by example what a cruciform, faithful life looked like. And we have already seen at multiple points in his early letters how that vision shaped his beliefs and ethics.
Letter #45 (9 June 1941 to Michael Tolkien)
The last letter to Michael Tolkien that we will be covering in this part is Tolkien’s response to a letter in which his son informed him that he was an Officer Cadet at the Royal Military College in Sandhurst. Tolkien expresses how one war is enough for any man to go through, but now he is faced with the fact of living through a second World War, but now being unable (though not unwilling) to take part alongside his son who must endure the trials of war himself. But he encourages his son to take heart with him in both hope and faith: “The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh: it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued.”
The latter point is something that Tolkien had written about in his “On Fairy-Stories,” and it is something about which I discussed in my entry on that work. The notion illustrates the importance of eschatology to Tolkien’s theology, as well as what it signifies about God’s redeeming power beyond imagination. As for the former point, Tolkien may be deriving this from his own sense of profound connection that comes with fatherhood or he may be deriving it from analogy with the Trinity, where Father and Son do not have the biological connection, but they are eternally so related as Father and Son. He does not make such sources clear here, but the latter is certainly possible.
One final point worth noting from this letter is Tolkien’s lament of how Britain once again finds itself on the opposite side of a war with the Germanic people that Tolkien had developed much respect for in his studies of their myths and history, now corrupted by Hitler:
Anyway, I have in this war a burning private grudge – which would make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affect the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized….
As I have noted previously, this is a point at which Tolkien found God at work in preparation for the gospel, what one could call a point of continuity between nature and grace. The Beowulf-poet, and Tolkien after him, held deep admiration for this aspect of Norse culture that was carried on by the early Anglo-Saxons of the British Isles, where it was Christianized by people like the Beowulf-poet. But this Northern spirit of courage, perhaps their greatest contribution to Europeans at large as far as Tolkien was concerned, had now been corrupted at the direction of a demonic idiot. Tolkien himself had expounded on this subject in his famous essay on Beowulf and he would go on working to present it with utmost integrity in his own fiction (he was working on LOTR at the time he wrote this letter), and so he took Hitler’s corruption of this spirit to his own ends most personally.
Letter #49 (draft to C. S. Lewis [1943])
The last letter of concern for this part of the commentary is a draft of a letter Tolkien never sent to C. S. Lewis addressing his booklet “Christian Behaviour” that would eventually become part of Mere Christianity. His response is directed towards a suggestion that Tolkien found untenable; namely, that there should be two kinds of marriage: Christian marriages (which entail lifelong commitments) and State marriages (which have no such obligations). He interrogates this policy from multiple angles throughout the letter.
First, he notes Lewis’s argument against a lack of distinction in which he says, “I’d be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.” But as Tolkien notes, this is not a suitable analogy, because the ultimate reason for this anger is not simply that someone was trying to interfere with his habits (as indeed many Christians would certainly try on this front, particularly in this time). Rather, the anger would stem from injustice: “They would be injuring us by depriving us of our share in a universal human right, the temperate use of wine, against our will.” It would be an injustice because it would be based on a lie denying that people would not have a right to that which they do in fact have a right to.
By analogy, he cannot then base this policy on this argument when it comes to Christian marriage if Christian marriage does in fact reflect the truth about sexual behavior and how it should be embodied in monogamous, permanent, and rigidly faithful unions. As a result of the Fall, men’s sexual psychology creates dissonance with this vision, but Tolkien and Lewis both agree that it is the instinct that has gone wrong. If it were not so, “It would be an intolerable injustice to impose permanent monogamy even on Christians. If Christian marriage were in the last analysis ‘unnatural’ (of the same type as say the prohibition of flesh-meat in certain monastic rules) it could only be imposed on a special ‘chastity-order’ of the Church, not on the universal Church. No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians.” On this point, Tolkien insists that the question of justice and what can justly be expected of others cannot in the end be divorced from the question of truth, and it is precisely the foundation of truth about the Christian vision of marriage and human sexuality that Lewis would be sacrificing to enact this policy on this logic.
In light of this point, Tolkien says that “Toleration of divorce – if a Christian does tolerate it – is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury) – if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter merely of expedient policy.” In the parlance of ethical discussions, Tolkien is of the view that divorce, by its nature, cannot be right, but there may be cases in which it is necessary, as he thinks also may be the case with war. It is something that could be considered permissible because of the hardness of human hearts (as Jesus says in his teaching on marriage and divorce), but it is not right in the sense that it is obligatory by divine will (for it was not part of divine design for marriage) nor—as it is often treated—in the sense that it is perfectly permissible as something of neutral value. If it is necessary, it only happens because something has gone deeply wrong, not because of inconvenience or unhappiness or, to paraphrase a popular notion in law, there is simply “no fault” at all.
Tolkien himself notes that he once dissented in feeling from the teaching of the Church, but he did not expressly do so, for such would be a rebellion against the catholic and apostolic faith (what Tolkien describes as being “under saving obedience”). He, too, once thought that Christian marriage was a matter of special behavior of his “sect,” but he could not in fact continue to hold this opinion and be in agreement with the teaching of the Church. And he would have, like he thinks Lewis in danger of doing, been participating in the undermining of the Christian teaching if he had somehow advocated for this policy. He had seen this embodied in the last Christian marriage he had attended at this point, which followed this policy of being married twice, once before a priest and once before the state’s registrar, in the former case committing themselves to one set of formulas that enjoined fidelity and obedience, and in the latter committing themselves to another set of formulas that did not involve such vows. His description of the reasoning of this whole proceeding deserves to be quoted in full to close this part of the commentary:
In fact it was only not ridiculous on the assumption that the State was in fact saying by implication: I do not recognize the existence of your church; you may have taken certain vows in your meeting-place but they are just foolishness, private taboos, a burden you taken on yourself: a limited and impermanent contract is all that is really necessary for citizens. In other words this ‘sharp division’ is a piece of propaganda, a counter-homily delivered to young Christians fresh from the solemn words of the Christian minister.