Review of The Philosophy of Tolkien
(avg. read time: 6–12 mins.)
This Tolkien Tuesday features a review of another book on Tolkien and his Christian faith that I think is among the better ones. That book is:
Kreeft, Peter. The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005.
Like most books in this area, Fleming Rutledge’s being a notable exception, Kreeft’s book is a collection of thematic analyses with each chapter devoted to a different philosophical/theological theme. But among such thematic analyses, Kreeft’s is one of the best. He also has an advantage over some others who write such works in that he is a traditionalist Roman Catholic and thus has a particular affinity with Tolkien’s way of thinking. Furthermore, he is a philosopher who is able to tease out some of these ideas and their significance more clearly than some others.
He first establishes the relevance of this kind of analysis for literature for readers who are not accustomed to it. Perhaps the best part of this section is his discussion of how literature tests philosophies:
Literature not only incarnates a philosophy; it also tests it by verifying or falsifying it. One way literature tests philosophy is by putting different philosophies into the laboratory of life, incarnating them in different characters and then seeing what happens. Life does exactly the same thing. Literature also tests philosophy in a more fundamental way. It can be expressed by this rule: a philosophy that cannot be translated into a good story cannot be a good philosophy. (23)
In the former case, although it is not literature, this is something that Star Trek at its best has done remarkably well and it is one of the major reasons that some of the shows have had such staying power. And what makes this aspect of Star Trek work well is that the characters are not simply shifting ideas with flesh coverings that the writers assign different roles to with each new situation, but well imitate how philosophies are embodied in and enacted by real people, sometimes with unflappable consistency, sometimes with compromise. In good writing, the characters drive the response to the situations in the plot, rather than the needs of the plot or message dictating what characters would do in the given situation. The same applies to LOTR, and the interaction, clashing, and balancing of different philosophies from these different characters is part of what has given them such staying power with the audience well after they finish the book.
In the latter case, I think there is some need for qualification here, even if I am overall inclined to agree that good philosophy becomes incarnate in good stories because we are story-driven creatures. Let us take as examples one literary and one non-literary story: Virgil’s The Aeneid and Zhang Yimou’s film Hero (or Ying Xiong in the original Mandarin). Both are well-told stories. The former has endured through the ages as formative for Western culture. The latter is a visually stunning tale starring Jet Li (as well as Donnie Yen, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, and Chen Daoming) that is a fictionalized story set in the time of Qin Shi Huang during his conquest of China. But perhaps the most significant problem philosophically with both is that they both—the former intentionally and the latter, apparently, unintentionally—are functionally imperialist propaganda. The former presents a thoroughly realized eschatology in which the line of Augustus is divinely appointed to rule the world and the time of Augustus is the climax of history. The latter, while showing a story of how peace for the land is better than the satisfaction of vengeance, ultimately shows that such peace is achieved through imperial conquest (and that such peace was the ultimate vision of Qin Shi Huang). These are not fundamentally good philosophies, although various things about the stories resonate with people. Of course, people can recognize stories as being told well without accepting the philosophy that underpins the story, even as people do with LOTR.
Still, the point remains that literature does well to test philosophy in some sense, even in this fashion. After all, we can see how the philosophy responds to challenges implicit in the narrative that are in some way reflective of the world. If the philosophy survives those challenges, it then poses the question of how well it survives in the world based on the realism of the sub-creation (and here one can find assistance in Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation). One can thus also pay attention to how the story avoids certain challenges or ignores certain possibilities and what such things may convey about the strength of the philosophy it embodies. There just needs to be clarification from what Kreeft says here.
As for the engagement with various philosophical subjects in the book, there are several strengths to Kreeft’s analysis. I have previously recommended his section on providence in Tolkien’s work (54–61) and I will do so again. It is probably the best aspect of the book, as Kreeft explores how we see providence at work, only ever in hindsight and not foresight, as part of the tapestry of history, and how its presence in Tolkien’s work is true to life in ways that it is not in the works of some other popular Christian fiction writers (for which he lists as examples Frank Peretti and Tim LaHaye; 60).
He also provides a more balanced analysis of the roles of predestination and free will in Tolkien’s work than Rutledge’s heavy-handed treatment (as I noted, that is one of the key weaknesses of her work). As he says:
Both of these ingredients, free will and destiny, are always present in every successful story, every interesting story, every (and this is the point) story we find realistic, “true to life”. A story without predestination means a story without an author, and that is a story without any authority. But a story without free will, a story about machines or falling raindrops, is not a story either. Every story has to have in it free persons making free choices that they could have made differently—otherwise there is no drama. (63)
He also provides a helpful analysis of what it could mean to call Tolkien’s work “religious” or “Christian.” He helpfully uses a version of Aristotle’s four causes to illustrate the different ways this is possible. It can be religious/Christian in its material cause (subject matter), final cause (purpose), formal cause (structure), and/or efficient cause (origin; 66–70). I will not spoil the aspects of his analysis here, but I do commend it to the reader. This section is also good for consideration of what is meant by “Christian” art. I have often balked at the use of this category, as people are often too narrow or too broad in what it could mean. The use of the category raises the question of whether a Christian artist can produce non-Christian art, and what such a thing could mean, or if a Christian artist necessarily produces Christian art by virtue of the fact that it is the product of a Christian. I think the idea Kreeft supplies from Flannery O’ Connor helps to bring some measure of clarity: “the Christian novel not as a novel about Christianity, Christians, or a Christian world, but ‘one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by’” (65).
His philosophical exploration of beauty is worth pondering over for its exploration of the relationship between the beautiful and the good. In his words,
The contrast between the good and the beautiful is not in the nature of things. Only in a fallen world is beauty a temptation, or “vain” (see Prov 31:30); and that is only because God trains us by what Lewis calls the Principle of “First and Second Things” in the essay by that title.… Putting first things first is the key to the health of second things. Beauty is a “second thing”: it is very good, but not as good as moral goodness. And the worship of “art for art’s sake” will destroy not only true worship but also art. (150–151)
One ought also to consult his work on good and evil in Tolkien to see many of the same points we have noted previously in reviewing Tolkien’s work.
However, there are other times when he tries to press points or correlations too far for Tolkien’s mythology to accommodate. For example, in his comparison of the beliefs of supernaturalism and naturalism, he correlates the former with the start of Arda as flat and the latter with the reshaping of Arda into a sphere. As he says:
A flat world is a physical symbol for a supernaturalistic metaphysics. It points to a “beyond” beyond its edges, a “more”. But a round world is self-contained, and absolutely relative. In The Silmarillion the world is changed from flat to round as a divine punishment. This is far from fantastic; it is symbolically quite accurate. For, in fact, the divine punishment was that our worldview, rather than our world, was changed from supernaturalism to naturalism. (38)
On the one hand, this correlation is self-undermining, given how people seek to undermine the ridiculousness of belief in the supernatural (whatever form it takes) by correlating it to belief in a flat earth. Kreeft is not a flat-earther, so this just seems like a flight of fancy correlation that he did not think through. On the other hand, this correlation does not fit Tolkien’s story either. The changing of the fashion of the world functions as a punishment against Númenor, but it is more about ensuring the safety of Aman and Middle-earth (as well as the rest of Arda) by removing the temptation to invade the Undying Lands. A path is still left open to the Elves that leads beyond Arda, but others cannot find it. When Aman is removed, it is not as if naturalism sets in where there was once supernaturalism, but it is the case, as I noted from Tolkien previously, that the prevailing belief among the Free Peoples is something of a monotheism of natural theology. And even with the Valar present within Arda, the people never had direct experience with Eru Ilúvatar.
Furthermore, if this were correlated with some point of Tolkien’s, cosmology would not be such a bothersome thing for him. Yet that is exactly what Christopher Tolkien relates to us in Morgoth’s Ring: “It is at any rate clear, for he stated it unambiguously enough, that he had come to believe that the art of the ‘Sub-creator’ cannot, or should not attempt to, extend to the ‘mythical’ revelation of a conception of the shape of the Earth and the origin of the lights of heaven that runs counter to the known physical truths of his own days.”1 Tolkien never got around to reformulating such aspects of his mythology and so Christopher maintained what he had done with the refashioning of the world. For these multiple reasons, it is illegitimate to invest such significance in the shaping of the world as a way of conveying the philosophy of Tolkien. It can work as an allegory for one’s own thinking, but it does not do well to reflect Tolkien’s thinking.
Another case where Kreeft’s philosophical framing is not the most helpful is when he links Tolkien’s story to Platonic Ideas/Forms. This is part of his exposition of Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation, particularly in the fact that Tolkien described himself as having the sense of “discovering” his world and its creatures, rather than “inventing” them. Kreeft explains,
Take Hobbits. Why do they strike us as ‘real’? Where are they? In the Mind of God; and Tolkien knows the Hobbit corner of that Mind better than anyone else. Hobbits are not allegories of English farmers, any more than Elves are allegories of Finnish minstrels, or Orcs of Nazi soldiers. They are real because they resemble not physical things or someone’s opinions, but Platonic Ideas. (45)
Tolkien never gives a systematic outline of his metaphysics, although he does touch on the subject. But never does he strike one as a Platonist, unless one is dedicated to finding this in his work. In fact, as far as the reality of sub-creation is concerned and its ultimate reifying, Tolkien does not adopt any Platonic way to explain it. Rather, when he speaks of the “hallowing” of sub-creation in “On Fairy-Stories” and, to a lesser extent, in his letters, he has an eschatological vision that is out of keeping with Platonism. That is, he talks of such ideas being made real, embodied, tangible, like in the ending of his “Leaf by Niggle.” But this is against Platonism, wherein the ideal of any quality is never embodied, never the tangible version of the same. This “hallowing” that Tolkien speaks of would be taking the imagined thing in the wrong direction as far as a Platonist would be concerned.
And as with Rutledge’s book, there are times, though not frequently, where Kreeft commits some technical errors. First, he suggests that Merry’s horn (which he uses in the Shire) is a gift of Théoden, when it was actually a gift from Éowyn. Second, he makes a suggestion I have never seen before or since that “Tom Bombadil and Goldberry are quite possibly the Valar Aulë and Yavanna” (73). Kreeft never explains how he arrived at such an idea, and I cannot justify it from Tolkien’s works, particularly since we have no clue from Tolkien’s works that Aulë ever came to Middle-earth previously, except for war with Melkor, and that he and Yavanna could end up becoming so provincial after their secret arrival in Middle-earth as to only concern themselves with the Old Forest. Third, he mistakenly thought Frodo invoked the name of Galadriel rather than that of Eärendil when he used Galadriel’s phial (159), but one can see from the text that this is clearly not the case. Fourth, for some reason, he says Bilbo slayed Smaug (212), although it was Bard.
Overall, though, I think Kreeft’s book is a worthwhile addition to the libraries of Tolkien fans who wish to explore more about his worldview. Kreeft’s volume is an accessible introduction to many philosophical topics related to Tolkien’s work. It does well to whet one’s appetite for more of such exploration of Tolkien’s works. At least, it had that effect on me when I first read it many years ago.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, History of Middle-earth 10, ed. Christopher Tolkien (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 371. Also see 370–78.