Tolkien on Evil (1/2)
"[E]vil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain"
Tolkien’s understanding of evil was profoundly Catholic. This is clear from the first story of his legendarium, the Ainulindalë in The Silmarillion. In the beginning, before anything else exists, there is only God, Eru Ilúvatar – there is no dualistic evil entity, no Manichean or Zoroastrian belief in evil as an independent substantial rival to the Good. And Creation itself, from the angelic Ainu to the Children of Ilúvatar and the whole material world, are all given being by God; they are therefore fundamentally and intrinsically good. From the fall of Melkor and his introduction of disorder into Eä, evil is only a negation, a privation and corruption of the good, hence it is often called “the Shadow” in The Lord of the Rings. Evil is real, certainly, but only in a derivative and comparative sense – it has no being of its own, as Tolkien wrote: “In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero.”[1]
Since God is I AM, perfect and infinite Being itself, nothing that exists and is given being by Him can be evil. Only the loss of being, when something either ceases to be or lacks the perfection which God intended for it, can be evil. This is the classic Augustinian and Thomistic understanding of evil which underlies Tolkien’s Catholic faith and is expressed in his imaginative storytelling. Tolkien knew that God permits evil in His Creation, including sinful acts and the death of irrational creatures, only so that greater good may come, as Haldir observed: “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”[2] Tolkien similarly wrote with poignant eloquence in his letters:
No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.[3]
He also understood that God creates persons, both angels and humans, with free will, without which true love would be impossible but which also allows for the possibility of sin and its effects, of using something contrary to its God-given nature and of loving a lower good above a higher, as he explained:
Free Will is derivative, and is only operative within provided circumstances; but in order that it may exist, it is necessary that the Author should guarantee it, whatever betides: sc. when it is ‘against His Will’, as we say, at any rate as it appears on a finite view. He does not stop or make ‘unreal’ sinful acts and their consequences.[4]
Extending from this, one of the central themes in Tolkien’s stories is the relation between freedom, power and grace. While recognizing the fact that “the word [freedom] has been so abused by propaganda that it has ceased to have any value for reason and become a mere emotional dose for generating heat”,[5] due to its use in politics and morality to mean the anarchical liberty to do whatever I want so long as no one else’s “freedom” is impinged, he also wrote, “in the view of this tale & mythology Power – when it dominates or seeks to dominate other wills and minds (except by the assent of their reason) – is evil”.[6] A predominant form of this, which he highlights both in his legendarium and other writings, is the nature of magic, machines and political coercion as “the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies”, one of the main symbols of which was the One Ring.[7]
A theme or question Tolkien explored in his stories related to this interplay of freedom, power and grace was the capacity of created free wills to resist evil, whether by their own strength or through grace. In his stories, which are set in a pre-Christian time but one still open to the actual grace of God, there are times where characters, and in this context he is specifically focusing on Frodo, are “placed in positions beyond [their] power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person.”
Tolkien’s intention with this, which he gives as a kind of commentary on St. Paul’s statement that “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able: but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it” (1 Cor 10:13 DRA) and the petition “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” from the Lord’s Prayer, is not that God will give people temptations beyond their possible ability to resist, but that we are totally dependent on His grace in order finally to overcome them, as he demonstrated with Frodo’s “failure” but the subsequent rewarding of his “sanctity (and humility and mercy)” by the Ring’s destruction, merited by the power of grace: “But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good’; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us.”[8]
Tolkien’s Catholic understanding of evil permeated all of his stories in Middle-earth, especially since “the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world.”[9] Contrary to certain critics, he did not portray the members of any “side” in his conflicts as perfectly good or utterly evil – the “black and white” lack of moral ambiguity they criticize exists not in people, who are just as imperfect in Middle-earth as in our primary world, but in reality itself, in the perfect goodness of God contrasted with the emptiness of evil. This is the truth that more “adult” stories tend to obscure but which Tolkien portrayed with refreshing clarity:
If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict… I have not made any of the peoples on the ‘right’ side, Hobbits, Rohirrim, Men of Dale or of Gondor, any better than men have been or are, or can be.[10]
Tolkien was not the naïve, childish figure many have portrayed him as. In fact, he was keenly aware not only of the great evils of his own time, experienced firsthand in WWI, then personally and through the service of his son Christopher in WWII, as well as the gradual degradation of social morality in the 20th century and the political climate to which he paid close attention, but also of the universal human capacity for sin derived from the Fall. He recognized that “wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good’, ‘second best’ – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.”[11] This is what Galadriel called “the long defeat”:[12] the proliferation and apparent victory of sin throughout history, yet it never blinded Tolkien to the presence of goodness in the world:
A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men – sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face – not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit – we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil.[13]
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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2012), letter 183. Kindle.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Mariner Books, 2004), 348. Kindle.
[3] Tolkien, Letters, letter 64.
[4] Tolkien, Letters, letter 153.
[5] Tolkien, Letters, letter 81.
[6] Tolkien, Letters, letter 181.
[7] Tolkien, Letters, letter 131.
[8] Tolkien, Letters, letter 191.
[9] Tolkien, Letters, letter 211.
[10] Tolkien, Letters, letter 183.
[11] Tolkien, Letters, letter 49.
[12] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 356.
[13] Tolkien, Letters, letter 69.
Thank you - am looking forward to seeing part 2.