God, as infinite and pure Being (ipsum esse subsistens), is Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and so everything that participates in His Being shares these traits, what are classically called the “transcendental properties of being.” Accordingly, evil, as the negation of being, tends to deny one or more of these properties. The three greatest “incarnations” of evil in Tolkien’s legendarium – Melkor/Morgoth, Sauron and Saruman – can be characterized by which of these properties each one focused on and attempted to corrupt.
Morgoth, the highest Valar and the equivalent in Elvish mythology to Satan, was the first creature to fall from grace and communion with God (Eru Ilúvatar) through his introduction of discord into the Music of the Ainur, the artistic pattern weaved by the angelic Ainur which Ilúvatar used as a kind of blueprint for Creation. In this way, like the later Children of Ilúvatar (Elves, Men, Hobbits, Dwarves), the nature of the Ainur was intrinsically subcreative and so their corruption was characterized by this faculty. This is why Tolkien said, “The Enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines”.[1] Because of Morgoth’s primordial fall and interference in the Music, the world “has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken.”[2]
As the greatest of the Ainur, Morgoth was supremely subcreative, and so his fall “was a sub-creative Fall”. The Elves (or Eldar, the eldest of the Children of Ilúvatar), who “represent, as it were, the artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men”,[3] were thus “peculiarly [Morgoth’s] enemies, and the special object of his desire and hate – and open to his deceits.”[4] Perverted through pride, Morgoth’s artistic nature became “possessive, clinging to the things made as ‘its own’, [so that] the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation.”[5] Beauty is a sign of the love of God in Creation, the radiance of His creativity and goodness shining in all things – and, for the corrupted artistic instinct of someone like Morgoth, the most contemptible sign of its “otherness,” of the independence of Creation from himself. For this reason, Morgoth despised beauty, and from his first disruption of the Music to his many years of ruination, chaos and death wreaked in the world, he sought to erase all beauty and, by doing so, subjugate all things to himself, particularly through the power “of magic and machines.”
Sauron, the chief lieutenant of Morgoth and one of the greatest of the Maiar, the second order of incarnate angels in Eä, shared many traits with his master, including his subcreative power and preoccupation with magic and machines to achieve his ends, but while Morgoth desired to dominate and possess Creation itself and so had a special enmity with the Elves, Sauron’s primary goal was the domination of free wills. He desired to become God not through creative possession but by stealing the rational souls given by God to men and enslaving them to himself, imagining that in this way he would gain an army of faithful servants like God’s angels and saints. The transcendental property of being most hated by Sauron therefore was the Good; by perverting free creatures into choosing what violated the natural law designed into their God-given natures, he knew that they would become his slaves, since “whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of sin.” (Jn 8:34 DRA)
Although Sauron had many conflicts with the Elves throughout history, most notably Celebrimbor, with whom he forged the Rings of Power (except for the three held by the Elf-lords), this was in a sense merely incidental; Sauron knew that the time of the Elves was waning and that they would eventually be replaced by Men. Accordingly, he used all his powers of deceit and seduction to corrupt the Númenóreans into devil-worship of Morgoth, and for the Men of the East, such as the Easterlings and Haradrim, he effectively took Morgoth’s place:
Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants… if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world… When he found how greatly his knowledge was admired by all other rational creatures and how easy it was to influence them, his pride became boundless. By the end of the Second Age he assumed the position of Morgoth’s representative. By the end of the Third Age (though actually much weaker than before) he claimed to be Morgoth returned.[6]
The principal instrument that Sauron used to coerce other minds and wills, and which became his sole source of permanence and power in Middle-earth, was the One Ring, a symbol of “the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies”. Sauron knew how to manipulate people: the Elves through their desire to restore the beauty of Creation marred by Morgoth which he perverted into “a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise”; the offer of reward to the Númenóreans (since “[r]eward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment!”), who, based on the human Fall, desired immortality, the escape from the curse of death which they blamed on God, and so Sauron “denies the existence of God, saying that the One is a mere invention of the jealous Valar of the West, the oracle of their own wishes. The chief of the gods is he that dwells in the Void, who will conquer in the end, and in the void make endless realms for his servants”; and finally on everyone through desire for the One Ring, for “so great was the Ring’s power of lust, that anyone who used it became mastered by it; it was beyond the strength of any will (even [Sauron’s] own) to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it. So he thought.”[7] Ultimately, the Ring was an attack of pure pride, and could be defeated only through “the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble.”[8]
Though arguably the least successful of the three most notable “incarnations” of evil in Middle-earth, Saruman was also one of the worst, precisely because his fall was a betrayal. In Tolkien’s legendarium, we never, or only for a very brief time, get to see Melkor or Sauron before they became corrupted into demons, but Saruman begins his story in Middle-earth as the head of the White Council, the chief of the Istari and a friend to Dwarves, Ents and the Men of Gondor, who give him Isengard as a gift. His version of evil was also perhaps the most insidious, as well as the most evident in modern times, focusing as it did on two evils which are ubiquitous today: industrial devastation and political propaganda. (A similar effect of being “tainted with mere politics” is also seen in the fall of Denethor.)[9]
Being “mannish” in character because of their peculiar mission, the Istari were more susceptible to the sins of Men and capable of corruption as were the first angels who joined in the fall of Melkor. “The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this evil Saruman succumbed. Gandalf did not.”[10] Saruman’s impatient desire “to force others to their own good ends” led him into the pattern of domination by power which characterized the prior falls of Morgoth and Sauron. He did so both by the magic of the Machine, using his unrivaled knowledge of the natural world to subvert it for his own ends, “bulldozing the real world” and effectively becoming Orkish in the process, and by “coercing other wills”[11] through lies and deceit.
Saruman’s greatest power was in words: “Saruman’s voice was not hypnotic but persuasive. Those who listened to him were not in danger of falling into a trance, but of agreeing with his arguments, while fully awake. It was always open to one to reject, by free will and reason, both his voice while speaking and its after-impressions. Saruman corrupted the reasoning powers.” Gríma Wormtongue was a human instrument of this 1984-eque mind manipulation, effectively leading Théoden into demonic possession, but Saruman also exhibited it personally when confronted by the heroes after the overthrow of Isengard, tricking them into despair and defeatism (for which he was imprisoned by Gandalf in Orthanc as a form of “excommunication”),[12] and in the Scouring of the Shire. This last act was an example of the “reform” which Tolkien called “Sarumanism,”[13] the kind of collectivist and socialist planning to which Tolkien was ardently averse and which combines mechanistic wonton destruction with the dehumanization and spiritual demoralization of men.[14]
From this it can be seen that the transcendental property of being denied by Saruman was Truth. He violated the truth of Creation through his mechanistic exploitation and confused truth and falsehood in his deceptive “policies” (a favourite word of Saruman’s).[15] He shared this with a final “incarnation” of evil in Middle-earth, one which thankfully never occurred but certainly could have: Gandalf. In his fall, Saruman sought to break the purity and clarity of white light into the rainbow of relativism, calling himself “Saruman of Many Colours”.[16] Similarly, Gandalf said, “the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.”[17] Tolkien elaborated further: “Thus while Sauron multiplied… evil, he left ‘good’ clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil.”[18]
The ultimate negation of truth would make good evil and evil good, with the ends justifying the means even more so than for Saruman in his pragmatism. But in the end, through his profound humility and self-sacrifice, Gandalf resisted the temptation and succeeded where Saruman failed in the mission of the Istari to lead the Free Peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron. He did so by understanding the wise proverb of Théoden: “oft evil will shall evil mar”,[19] knowing that, in the end, evil is self-destructive while only goodness leads to true happiness.
(Cover image source: “Mine or no One’s.” By Audrey Corman: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Category:Images_of_the_One_Ring#/media/File:Audrey_Corman_-_Mine_or_no_One's.jpg)
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[1] Tolkien, Letters, letter 131.
[2] Tolkien, Letters, letter 212.
[3] Tolkien, Letters, letter 181.
[4] Tolkien, Letters, p. 454.
[5] Tolkien, Letters, letter 131.
[6] Tolkien, Letters, letter 183; p. 454.
[7] Tolkien, Letters, letter 131.
[8] Tolkien, Letters, letter 181.
[9] Tolkien, Letters, letter 183.
[10] Tolkien, Letters, letter 181.
[11] Tolkien, Letters, letter 131.
[12] Tolkien, Letters, letter 210.
[13] Tolkien, Letters, letter 154.
[14] Tolkien, Letters, letter 181.
[15] e.g. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 259, 580.
[16] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 259.
[17] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 61.
[18] Tolkien, Letters, letter 246.
[19] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 595.