Tolkien the Post-Christian

The world of The Lord of the Rings isn't some fantastical past - it's our own.

[Author’s note: I presented this paper at Oxonmoot, the annual gathering of the Tolkien Society, at St. Anne’s College in Oxford, 2 September 2023. This date also happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of Tolkien’s death on 2 September 1973. This paper is dedicated to his memory, in honor of the way his stories continue to enchant us.]

Commuting from my flat in Glasgow to the University where I study Tolkien and theology, I pass by no fewer than four church buildings. One of them has become a popular bar and concert venue. Another is now an upscale restaurant and theatre. A third has been converted into a block of flats. The final church houses a much-reduced congregation of the Church of Scotland. My walk to work captures, in miniature, the condition of post-Christian modernity. The social, psychological, and indeed physical architecture of Christianity can be found on every street corner, but fewer than fifty percent of English and Welsh identify as Christian (Roskams 2022).

Whether this is good or bad depends on whom you ask. It nevertheless points to a profound shift in the contemporary spiritual landscape. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in his magisterial book A Secular Age (2007), identifies World War I as a critical inflection point in declining religiosity in the West. Not coincidentally, it is also the critical inflection point in the creative life and career of J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s literary mythology develops and achieves mass popularity precisely during the period when religious affiliation begins to fall off dramatically.

There is a strand of Tolkien scholarship, exemplified by Joseph Pearce (1998), Bradley Birzer (2003), and Ralph Wood (2015) among others, which would claim that this is because Tolkien’s fiction mediates his Roman Catholic worldview to an irreligious world, reminding us of the “true faith” which we have forgotten. I have some issues with that. First, Tolkien explicitly denied that his was a Christian world, calling it rather a pre-Christian “monotheistic world of natural theology” (Letters #165, 220). Yes, he did famously write to Father Robert Murray that The Lord of the Rings was a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” but we tend to pay less attention to the second half of that quotation: “That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (Letters #142, 172).

The trouble is, a “monotheistic world of natural theology,” a world without “anything like ‘religion’ […] cults or practices” does not describe any known human epoch (cf. Morillo 2011). Well, except one: ours. I want to argue that Tolkien’s fiction, and most especially The Lord of the Rings, achieves its literary power not because it reminds readers of a premodern Christian past to which we must return in order to live rich and meaningful lives, but rather because it speaks directly to life in a post-Christian world: a world still deeply influenced by its religious roots but in which moral decisions are made without reference to theology and eschatological hope is not guaranteed, a world of thoroughly immanent enchantment that nevertheless gestures toward Something More.

To explore how The Lord of the Rings accomplishes this, I turn to Charles Taylor’s account of secularity, the social transformation “which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others” (3). First and foundationally, the premodern world is enchanted: it is charged with spirits, and the self who navigates that world is porous, vulnerable to influence by these spirits for good and for ill. The porous self is defined in the context of a communal and cosmic order of which it is one small interlocking part; it is thoroughly embedded in geography, ecology, and society. By way of contrast, the modern self is buffered: the bounded, rational individual, disenchanted and disembedded. This ideal self is also excarnated – that is to say, cut off from emotions, intuition, the body, and all the other pesky, “non-rational” elements of human experience.

The emergence of this buffered identity is bound up with a change in the felt nature of time and space as well. If the natural world is inspirited then it is much harder to justify expropriating and exploiting natural resources. Even that term, “natural resources,” heralds a radical shift in our attitude toward the natural world and the seasonal rhythms which govern it. In premodernity, these rhythms—the cycle of birth, growth, harvest, and death as well as the wheel of the Christian liturgical calendar—result in a sense of time that does not only move forward but which we might say spirals. In modernity, however, both time and space are now homogenous, resources to be deployed and exploited.

These paradigm shifts—disenchantment, disembedding, excarnation, the buffered self living in secular time—result in what Taylor calls the immanent frame, which “constitutes a ‘natural’ order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, and an ‘immanent’ world, over and against a possible ‘transcendent’ one” (Taylor 2007, 542). Secularity thus involves not only a decline in religious belief, but a shift from a “transcendence perspective” of existence to an “immanence perspective” in which human flourishing is the greatest good.

I will not claim that The Lord of the Rings is a completely modern, disenchanted novel – I don’t think the text stands up to such a reading! I do claim though that in the realm of ethics and decision-making, characters in The Lord of the Rings operate almost entirely within the immanent frame. Let us take the Last Debate as a paradigmatic example. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields has been won, and now the Captains of the West must decide their next move. Will they give in to the despair that claimed the life of Denethor? Will they strengthen the defense of Minas Tirith and wait there for Sauron’s next onslaught? Gandalf counsels neither, rather that they must ride in force against Sauron, not to defeat him on the battlefield, but to keep his Eye trained upon them and not upon the Ringbearers. As Gandalf says:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (LOTR 879)

Gandalf’s words capture the noble yet thoroughly this-worldly ethic of Middle-earth. Participants in the Last Debate evince a sense of duty, a calling to a higher purpose, hope – but hope for this world, not another. The War of the Ring is a desperate defense of goodness and truth, but it is not a holy war. Its participants do not choose with eternity in view, rather the lives and wellbeing of those who may come after them. Even characters with knowledge of Ilúvatar and the Valar—Gandalf most obviously, though also likely Aragorn based on his knowledge of the Downfall of Númenor—not even these characters factor God into their moral decision-making, not in public anyway (cf. Madsen 2011).

In the case of the Hobbits, through whose eyes we experience most of The Lord of the Rings, there is not even unspoken knowledge of Eru: choices are made, wholly and clearly, within the immanent frame. Sam’s intuition in the depths of Mordor that “the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (LOTR 922) might suggest to a Christian reader the God whose Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it (John 1:5). But it need not! Upon his sight of the Star, Sam does not pray but comes rather to rest in his relationship with Frodo, thoroughly immanent but no less significant on that account. Love is one of the values which drives Sam’s decision-making: love for Frodo, love for the Shire, a dogged hope. But there is no sense here or elsewhere that he loves as an act of religious devotion, nor because it participates in the Divine nature (cf. 1 John 4:7).

How ironic then that Sam, the most immanent character of all, shows us how The Lord of the Rings transgresses the immanent frame and reveals “light and high beauty” not so much outside the world as within it. Taylor writes, “in the enchanted world, the meaning exists already outside of us, prior to contact; it can take us over, we can fall into its field of force. It comes on us from the outside” (34). In disenchanted modernity, however, meaning must be actively sought out, must be made. This results for many people in what Taylor calls the malaise of immanence: a nagging sense that no answer is compete, the ground of our being could in fact slip away, a “fragility of meaning.” Many of us recover a sense of deeper significance in the natural world: “The sense here is that in closing ourselves to the enchanted world, we have been cut off from a great source of life and meaning, which is there for us in nature” (315-316).

In their journeys, Sam and the other Hobbits repeatedly encounter a world wilder and more wonderous than any they had imagined, one charged with a deep-down, holy Otherness that troubles the boundaries of the buffered identity and evokes awe in both the beautiful and terrible senses of that word. Nowhere is this truer than in Lothlórien. Here, as Tolkien told Milton Waldman in his famous 1951 letter, “I make the perilous and difficult attempt to catch at close quarters the air of timeless Elvish enchantment” (qtd. Hammond & Scull 2014, 735). Thus we might expect Lothlórien to be the place where the transcendent makes itself most keenly felt in the novel. Note however Tolkien’s aside in On Fairy-Stories that “it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he” (OFS 28). If we interchange fairies here with Tolkien’s Elves the point is even stronger: for the immortality of the Elves is immortality within the circles of the world, and they envy humans their ability to escape, you might say transcend it. Tolkien’s distinction here between natural and supernatural could be phrased as the distinction between immanence and transcendence. Elves are ultra-immanent, and their enchantment therefore is one which is to be found within immanence itself – yet not within the “immanent frame” of modernity.

Upon encountering Lothlórien, Sam does not say that he feels as if he is in heaven – it is not clear that Hobbits have any such notion. Instead he says this:

It’s sunlight and bright day, right enough […] I thought that Elves were all for moon and stars: but this is more Elvish than anything I ever heard tell of. I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning. (LOTR 351)

To be inside a song is to be en-chanted. I do not involve myself with the musicologists and attempt to define music, but speaking as a musician it seems clear that a song is intentional. Even if the intention is simply to provide a framework for improvisation and experimentation, there is a degree of intentionality involved. To feel oneself inside a song is to feel oneself inside a meaningful world, one which is imbued with intentionality, even if it is not clear who is doing the intending.

Sam develops this same insight with a different metaphor on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, as he and Frodo reflect upon the nature of Story and realize that they are, in fact, “inside” the story of Beren and Lúthien and the Silmaril: “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” (LOTR 712) Stories like songs are intentional: narrative only happens when a narrator puts experience in order and, in so doing, renders it meaningful. Fantasy theorist Laura Feldt writes:

The underlying world model used in most modern fantasy fiction encompasses an implicit cosmology and anthropology which is purposeful and teleological. The genre of fantasy fiction thus presents a world in which an invisible power reigns and operates from behind the scenes. (2016, 554)

In the case of the novel, that “invisible power” is the author. This accords with Tolkien’s theory of literary sub-creation. By creating a secondary world, the fantasist imitates the God who creates the Primary World: “We make still by the law in which we’re made” (OFS 65). Moreover, in the late philological essay “Fate and Free Will” Tolkien suggests a theological analogy between the human storyteller (or Elvish storyteller, as the case may be) and Eru as the Author of the history of Arda (186-187). It is not simply that the sub-creator makes a secondary world, but that this world is there for a reason. It is not an accident; it is going somewhere, even if that “somewhere” is simply the end of the tale.

One need not believe, as Tolkien did, that history actually is the work of a Primary Author, in order to experience Middle-earth as a meaningful cosmos. One need not believe God is singing Creation into being in order to be enchanted by the Music of the Ainur. Like Sam, our wonder is founded and grounded in immanence, in love for the natural as natural. Enchantment in Middle-earth is what the Jesuit writer William Dowie calls natural hierophany, a disclosure of the sacred which is bound up with, not separate from, the secular.

Taylor writes that art has become one of the ways in which disenchanted moderns can transgress the immanent frame and yearn toward deeper meaning for human life. Taylor writes that “one way in which this [yearning] has been met in our age is narrative, a more intense telling of our stories, as individuals and as societies. […] For narration is one way of gathering time. It shapes the flow of time, ‘de-homogenizes’ it, and marks out kairotic moments” (Taylor 2007, 714). Narrative art re-enchants the world – re-sings it, lends to it a sense of providential meaning, if only for as long as the tale lasts. Not for nothing does Tolkien write in On Fairy-Stories, “spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men” (OFS 48). Works of art have the power to move us, regardless of the philosophical or religious views of their makers. They cast their spells “without our having to identify their ontic commitments. And this is what offers a place to go for modern unbelief” (Taylor 2007, 400).

It is little wonder to me that Tolkien’s narrative enchantment remains so popular in a disenchanted age. It draws upon the symbolic repertoire of Western Christianity and Western pre-Christianity to speak to the post-Christian experience of a world without God. It does not do so as religious propaganda or crude allegory. Like the post-Christian world to which it addresses itself, its ethics and metaphysics anchor it but do not evangelize; its roots are deep but not determinative. It offers glimpses of richer meaning and deeper enchantment than modernity’s immanent frame is prepared to contain, but leaves the religious significance (or lack thereof) up to readers to interpret for themselves. It speaks—sings—enchants in a “subtler language” that does not compel primary belief but invites secondary belief.

Thus it seems to me appropriate to close with a song from the Lord of the Rings stage musical which I had the chance to see at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury the night before Oxonmoot:

Sit by the firelight’s glow
Tell us an old tale we know
Tell of adventures strange and rare
Never to change, ever to share
Stories we tell will cast their spell
Now and for always.

Fifty years to the day since his death, Tolkien continues to cast his spell. May his Great Tale never end.

…

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