My apologies for my absence from this blog for the last couple of days, but a variety of reasons mean that I have been unable to post as I would like. However, to keep you going, here is something I wrote a couple of years ago on a topic dear to me: JRR Tolkien. I hope you enjoy it.
Why has ‘The Lord of the Rings’ had such an impact on so many generations of readers, and now at least one generation of film goers. Although opinion polls should be lightly salted before consumption, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ has consistently come top in every poll I have seen asking the general reading public for its choice as to the book of the twentieth century. Why is this?
Of course, one answer, and by no means the least, is that it is a cracking good story set in the most intricately detailed other world that any author has ever created. But there have been many great stories, and almost innumerable invented worlds, so the question remains, what places this one apart?
For people to take a book into their heart I would suggest that it has to have what the Good Professor called ‘applicability’, that is, it must speak to the secret and not so secret yearnings, loves, fears, hopes and dreams of the reader. But given the huge variety of people who have read and loved ‘The Lord of the Rings’ over the years, in widely varying times and places, how could this one book be applicable to them all?
Well, I would like to argue that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally a defence of the values of civilisation. That civilisation is our own, founded in Classical times in the thought of Plato and Aristotle and the epics of Homer and Virgil and rejuvenated by the infusion of Judaeo-Christian ethics, theology and philosophy in the centuries following the life of Christ. The foundations of this civilisation however, have been eroded over the last few centuries, leaving a general sense of rootlessness and unease brooding over the West.
But what are the foundations of Western civilisation and how does Tolkien defend them? I would argue that there are three: the individual and moral, the social and political, and the religious and transcendent.
To deal with the moral and individual foundations first (the remaining two will have to wait for further posts). Going right back to Classical times there has been a conviction in Western thought that there is a natural moral law: that some actions are right and others are wrong and that these laws apply across times, cultures and peoples. Thus Cicero could say in De Republica:
And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times (De Republica. Book 3, Chapter 22).
Tolkien echoes this statement exactly in the words of Aragorn in ‘The Two Towers’ in answer to Eomer’s question:
‘The world is all grown strange…How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’
‘As he has ever judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’ ‘The Two Towers’ Book 3, Chapter 2.
The point here is that one is responsible for one’s actions, that men and women are moral agents with the power of free will which they are called upon to exercise and thus be held accountable for their actions. Of course, this is not to say that we are uninfluenced by outside factors. Tolkien dramatises this perfectly when Frodo is seated on Amon Hen, wearing the Ring, and the wills of Sauron and Gandalf are bent upon him.
The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ Book 2, Chapter10.
But in the end the choice is Frodo’s. Throughout ‘The Lord of the Rings’ characters are called upon to make decisions with profound consequences, even though these consequences may not be at all apparent when they make the decision. And here Tolkien is insistent on one very important principle: the ends do NOT justify the means. Throughout ‘The Lord of the Rings’ when a character decides to do what is immediately right and not sacrifice someone or something on the basis of a hoped for future good that action is proved right. For instance, Aragorn when faced (in the book) with the choice of following Frodo and trying to protect the Ring, or attempting to rescue two small Hobbits of no importance in the grand scheme of things from torture and death, opts for the latter. Any ‘rational’ cost/benefit analysis would say that this action was mad. The deaths of Merry and Pippin would be regrettable, but compared to the overwhelming importance of the destruction of the Ring they, sadly, count for nothing.
Such, all too often, is the analysis of politicians and business leaders of our own world. Yet in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Aragorn, by choosing to follow Merry and Pippin sets in train a path of events that leads eventually to the downfall of Sauron. Whereas if he had followed Frodo and Sam, even if the Ring had been destroyed, they would have found a Middle Earth devastated, with Minas Tirith sacked and destroyed and quite probably Rohan depopulated.
Contrast this with Saruman, the archetypal example of the politician of realpolitik.
‘A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all…This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. 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; all the things we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.’ ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ Book 2, Chapter 2.
A clearer statement of the belief that the ends do justify the means would be hard to find. Yet, by adopting this strategy Saruman, perhaps unwittingly at first, turns himself into the ape of the Enemy. For this is the mentality of the chess player with human lives: pawns are there to be sacrificed, never mind that these are individual human beings with lives and hopes and fears. But to do this means to disengage at a fundamental level from one’s own humanity, for it means denying equality of being to others on the grounds that they are in some way unimportant and inessential.
We can also see how easy it is to fall into this trap, for certainly, at least in the beginning, Saruman did genuinely desire these good ends: Knowledge, Rule, Order. But here we see the particular trap of the intellectual, who thinks himself wiser and cleverer than the ordinary run of men. The analysis of Aquinas as to the functioning of the Will is particularly illuminating as to how this can happen in one.
‘From the fact that God has understanding, it follows that He has a will’ (Aquinas Summa Contra Gentiles I.72).
This is the fundamental point in St Thomas’s understanding of the will and, as such, is rather different from the idea of the will now widespread. For St Thomas the will is an appetite for what is good. In principle one cannot will what one knows is bad because that would go against the nature of the will.
How then do we explain those, unfortunately innumerable, instances of men doing evil? This is because while the will wills the good it is up to the intellect to decide what it is that is good. Thus I am currently sitting here writing this essay because my intellect tells me that this is a good thing to do. But I am also aware that my understanding of all these issues is by no means complete. So my intellect could decide that a better thing to do right now would be to go to the library and read up some more references and try to fix the ideas more firmly in my mind. Then I would decide to stop writing and get on the tube. Or alternatively while my intellect might know that the best way to finish this is to get down to some work, my will might decide that it really does not want to think about this at the moment and would much rather happily waste some time surfing the internet. Then the will would have chosen not to apprehend the intellect’s judgement that it is best to finish this column at the moment but rather to apprehend the intellect’s judgement that a good way to waste a couple of hours is to go on line. Or if I was in a state of depression and the judgement of the intellect was clouded by that depression I might (wrongly I hope) judge that it is pointless me labouring at this column as I will never understand what on earth St Thomas is talking about and I might as well go and watch some television instead. Thus the action of the will takes the form of a complex feedback, its operation in human beings often clouded by the passions or choices to apprehend to a lesser good rather than a greater good.
Thus do good men (or Maia) turn bad. For in the end Saruman became convinced that only through his own acquirement of Power (and the Ring) could what he conceived of as good ends be brought about.
Nowadays, particularly in the Academy, there are many currents of thought suggesting that we each construct our own reality, and that the standards that particular people and societies, or particular sub-cultures, set are peculiar to themselves. No one can stand outside their own milieu and say that this is right and this is wrong for we are all bound absolutely by being embedded each in our own particular world.
Of course, the drawback with this is that we would then be forced to admit that in the particular sub-culture of Islamic terror it was the right and proper thing to crash jet planes laden with people into the Twin Towers. Or that in the sub-culture of Nazi anti-semitism the Final Solution was indeed the solution.
And such views are by no means limited to extreme political and religious organisations. Allow me to quote the sociobiologists Michael Ruse and EO Wilson:
‘Morality…is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends…In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.’ The Evolution of Ethics. In Religion and the Natural Sciences: The Range of Engagement. Edited by James Hutchingson. Page 310.
The only way out of this morass of moral relativism is to admit that the almost unanimous voice of our Tradition is in fact correct: that there is a natural moral law inscribed in the human heart. And this is, I would argue, the first of the three reasons that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is so applicable to us today, and why it has struck such a chord with so many people.
For, against these voices proclaiming that moral choice and free will are illusions of culture or genetics, the voice of Tolkien in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is clear. People, particularly the Little People, DO matter. The choices everyone makes are fundamental and matters of huge importance, both for themselves and the world around them, even though we may never be aware of all of the consequences of those actions. We are essentially free to make our decisions but we will be held accountable for those decisions, for they are measurable against an objective standard of behaviour engraved in the human heart from time immemorial.
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