Tolkien and the Eucharist (1/2)
The One Great Thing to Love on Earth
(The following is the first half of my chapter from Missio Dei’s new book, The Eucharistic Revival Project, edited by Phillip Hadden and Jonathon Fessenden and published by En Route Books and Media - check out the links for more info)
J.R.R. Tolkien is one of the most beloved authors of all time. Famous for his works of fantasy literature, particularly The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has more recently entered the mainstream of popular culture due to the success of the film adaptations of his books by Peter Jackson. Although Tolkien died in 1973, his continued admiration by literary scholars and casual readers alike has also inspired writers such as Joseph Pearce, Peter Kreeft, and Bradley Birzer to investigate Tolkien’s personal life, the influences which inspired his writing and his relationships with other contemporary authors, such as C.S. Lewis. These investigations, however, are not only the result of professional or even literary interest, but are frequently motivated by another, more profound desire: to discover the source from which Tolkien drew out the spiritual meaning and insight underlying the whole of his fictional Middle-earth, what Fleming Rutledge has called a kind of “parallel narrative” being told simultaneous with the apparent story through its symbolism, subtle dialogue references, and character analogues.[1]
All of this has led the aforementioned writers and many others to realize, especially through the study of Tolkien’s private correspondence and nonfiction works, that he was a devout Catholic whose faith, rooted and nourished within the cultural soil and revelatory light of the Church, was the primary inspiration for his writings. On no other point is this connection more apparent than the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, for which Tolkien possessed a lifelong, passionate devotion. Most of all, he believed in the evangelical power of beauty, and it was with great beauty that he expressed his adoration of the Eucharist.
The seeds of Tolkien’s Catholic faith were planted by his mother, who, soon after her husband Arthur’s untimely death in South Africa and her return to England with her two sons, converted to Catholicism. Tolkien would always consider her to be a martyr for the Faith due to the loyalty to the Church which she displayed during his childhood while suffering and eventually dying from diabetes (largely untreatable at the time) and the abandonment of her anti-Catholic relatives, inspiring him for the rest of his life.[2] Tolkien and his brother Hilary were then raised by Fr. Francis Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory founded by St. John Henry Newman, and spent much of their time around the priests, with Tolkien later writing that he was “virtually a junior inmate” of the Oratory and that he and his brother served Mass with the fathers daily,[3] cultivating a love for the Eucharist diffused from his priest-guardian and the spirituality of the Oratory. He even expressed his enjoyment of High Mass to his future wife, Edith Bratt, whom he helped convert to the Faith prior to their marriage.[4]
After becoming an Oxford don and serving in the Great War, Tolkien passed on his inherited Catholic faith to his children, to whom he regularly instilled his devotion to and love of the Eucharist. Tolkien wrote to his son Michael that “I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning— –and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again,” yet even when he struggled with his faith as a young man, the Eucharist was the persistent force which called him home: “Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger.” For this reason, he counselled Michael to always cling to the Blessed Sacrament whenever he experienced similar difficulties in his spiritual life:
The only cure for sagging [or] fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect.[5]
He also gave similar advice to his son Christopher:
If you don’t do so already, make a habit of the ‘praises’. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate Pueri Dominum (of which I am specially fond), one of the Sunday psalms; and the Magnificat; also the Litany of Loretto (with the prayer Sub tuum praesidium). If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy. It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass.[6]
Tolkien once described to Christopher a vision he experienced while attending the Quarant’ Ore Forty Hours devotion before the Blessed Sacrament:
I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it…. And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized…. the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love)…. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic.[7]
Like many other saints in history, Tolkien’s vision was directly tied to the Eucharist, with the grace of God communicated through Tolkien’s faith and wisdom providing an insight into the nature of the love of God and of angels as the heavenly messengers of his love. Tolkien wrote that this vision “was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it”,[8] an epiphany of beauty experienced as a kind of reward for his lifelong love of the Eucharist. Even in the midst of personal struggles, the difficulties of his writing and his work as an Oxford professor, helping his wife with her health issues and seeing two of his sons go off to fight in the Second World War (though his eldest son, John, was ordained a Catholic priest just after the war in 1946), he remained a daily communicant,[9] serving at Mass as an adult[10] and never failing to boldly proclaim his Catholic faith even amidst anti-Catholic prejudice from some of his friends and coworkers, including C.S. Lewis.[11]
In another letter to Michael, giving advice on marriage and relationships, Tolkien composed one of the most profound and poetic testimonies to the Eucharist in history, employing the languages of epic literature and Catholic theology with which he was intimately versed-
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament…. 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.[12]
Later in Tolkien’s life, during the 1960s and just before his death in 1973, Tolkien was faced with the many changes occurring in the Church, particularly as a result of the Second Vatican Council and the Mass of St. Paul VI. Like many of his time, including Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Ratzinger, as well as those today, Tolkien struggled with the plethora of abuses that rabidly fungated in the new Mass, often in violation of Vatican II and of the Church’s two-thousand-year liturgical tradition. He wrote to Michael in 1968, “I know quite well that, to you as to me, the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap.” In the same letter he expressed his criticism of the trend in doctrinal and liturgical primitivism popular at the time, as well as the dangers of the Council’s emphases on aggiornamento and what he called “ecumenicalness” while stating his belief in the need for ecumenical charity and his admiration for many non-Catholic Christians.[13] This authentic ecumenism also inspired him to join “a combined Christian Council of all denominations” in Oxford and united to fifty other cities.[14]
Tolkien was especially critical of the arbitrary abandonment of Latin, the reduced use of genuflection, and other disciplinary changes in the new Mass, which he, like others, recognized as ultimately false, expressive of the so-called “Spirit of Vatican II” which Pope Benedict XVI has called “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.”[15] Nevertheless, as Tolkien explained, “I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.”[16] Exhibiting this virtue to a profound degree, like his mother, Tolkien never abandoned his faith, since, as he wrote, even with all the scandals and abuses in the Church, to deny the Eucharist would be to “call Our Lord a fraud to His face.”[17] Instead, as he once wrote in answer to Camilla, the young daughter of his publicist Rayner Unwin, “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.”[18] As a man educated in history and living in an England which had once been Catholic but had not been so for some four centuries, Tolkien recognized the Catholic Church, led by the Pope, as the greatest champion of the Eucharist, and he saw this fact as its clearest vindication:
But for me that Church of which the Pope is the acknowledged head on earth has as chief claim that it is the one that has (and still does) ever defended the Blessed Sacrament, and given it most honour, and put it (as Christ plainly intended) in the prime place. ‘Feed my sheep’ was His last charge to St Peter; and since His words are always first to be understood literally, I suppose them to refer primarily to the Bread of Life.[19]
In what some might see as a contradiction to his strong traditionalism and his rejection of many modern innovations in the Church, Tolkien also recommended to Michael that he go to Mass “in circumstances that affront [his] taste,” and when confronted with distraction, annoyance, lack of piety in the faithful or mediocrity in the priest, to “[g]o to Communion with them (and pray for them).”[20] In this way, he showed a profound charity which did not violate but rather expressed his integral faith and upholding of tradition.
[1] Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 2.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 340, 353. Kindle.
[3] Ibid., 394.
[4] Ibid., 7.
[5] Ibid., 338.
[6] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 66. Kindle.
[7] Ibid., 99.
[8] Ibid., 99.
[9] George W. Rutler, “To his dying day, Tolkien was a daily communicant,” Catholic Education Resource Center (19 May 2019), https://www.catholiceducation.org.
[10] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 115. Kindle.
[11] Ibid., 96.
[12] Ibid., 53-54.
[13] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 393-394. Kindle.
[14] Ibid., 72.
[15] Pope Benedict XVI, Vatican II: The Essential Texts (New York: Image, 2012), 4.
[16] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 393. Kindle.
[17] Ibid., 337.
[18] Ibid., 400.
[19] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 339. Kindle.
[20] Ibid., 339.