Christianity and Tolkien

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Christianity and Tolkien

For what it’s worth, I’m an atheist, and an anti-theist. By this I mean that I not only disbelieve in any god, I also find many forms of theism morally objectionable. From the outset I want to say that this is not a post about religion per se, its merits or demerits. It is about the curious fact that as an atheist, and as an anti-theist, I still enjoy Tolkien’s books. On one level this isn’t really surprising at all: Tolkien’s books obviously appeal to a wide range of individuals of all types: his creations are diverse enough to accommodate many different world views.

Nevertheless, Tolkien was himself a Christian and his Catholicism was evidently a very central part of his self-identity. Along with the myriad other influences in his persona and especially professional life, Tolkien’s religion contributed to the form that his creation eventually took. There is one god, a set of demigods and a whole ambiguous theology that relates the destinies, fates and choices of these immortals to the more folkloric Elves and the hobbits.

There have been myriad books about Tolkien written from an explicitly Christian perspective. The most recent “The Christian World of the Hobbit”, by Devin Brown, continues this tradition. Of course most of the most well known and highly regarded critical work on Tolkien has taken place from a neutral perspective – Rosebury and Shippey come to mind. Nevertheless, there is a definite trend for academic and other works on Tolkien to approach his work from a perspective that already considers Christianity in some form to be true.

My questions are these: Do you think it is reasonable to approach an author, from an academic point of view, with a religious world view already in mind? Secondly, how do you think your faith or lack of it informs your reading of Tolkien? For example, are you more disposed to feel that Eucatastrophe should define Tolkien’s stories, and are wont to explain away its absence, as in The Children of Hurin?

The second part of my question concerns Christianity itself in Tolkien. How do you think that one can judge the effect of a certain worldview on a literary work? What counts as “Christian” and “not-Christian” in Tolkien? Do you think some Christians overemphasise the “Christian” themes in Tolkien’s work? To answer this question let’s take a look at what kinds of beliefs constitute Christianity:

Christians will probably believe one, some or all of these following propositions. Note, of course, that not all Christians will believe all of these propositions, so if you’re a Christian and you feel misrepresented, I’m telling you now that this list is neither exhaustive nor does it describe every individual who calls themselves a Christian.

1. There exists an eternal, all-powerfull, all-knowing creator God, who, though of one essence, exists in three distinct, but not separate, persons.

2. There exists a devil, Satan, and numerous other demonic beings as well as angels, archangels, etc.

3. The earth is not billions of years in age, but created by God six to ten thousand years ago.

4. There was an actual Adam and Eve in a literal Garden of Eden who sinned and brought upon the world the horrible suffering it contains

5. God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting all the evil that ever has or ever will occur.

6. A first – century Galilean Jew, Jesus, was born of a virgin as an incarnate God in the flesh and performed numerous miracles during his life.

7. This Jesus was crucified according to specific prophecies in the Old Testament as a divine sacrifice to atone for the past, present and future sins of the world.

8. Jesus was resurrected

9. There is life after death, and only people who have ace[ted a legitimate form of Christian belief will go to eternal bliss in heaven, while all others, with a few rare exceptions, will suffer an eternity of torment in hell.

For each of these points, it seems to me questionable that Tolkien depicted a universe in which they are true with any fidelity in his books. For example, it is indeed unclear that Eru is all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing. There is certainly a significant demonic figure, Morgoth, but he is unlike Satan in many ways - he is incarnated and actually acts out deeds in person in the world. Moreover, any sufficiently powerful and malevolent being in Tolkien’s universe (e.g. Sauron, or Galadrial had she given in to temptation) would appear to mortals as a kind of Satanic figure. The precise age of the world in Tolkien is not really known, and certainly seems to be more than six to ten thousand years.

Of course there are vague similarities; Morgoth does resemble Satan in some respects, and Eru does indeed conjure a sense of the biblical God. Nevertheless I contend that it is in the moral dimension where Tolkien, consciously or not, most drastically departs from Christian doctrine. Unlike the Christian God, Eru is not in fact a lawgiver, nor does he make covenants with particular peoples, or punish others when they fail. Certainly, there is the example of Numénor, which is the most biblical of Tolkien’s stories, but in general Tolkien’s characters never decide upon their moral actions with reference to notions of “judgement” or “righteousness”. That which is good is good for its own sake (a very humanistic point that is often overlooked in Tolkien, I think).

Nor, in Tolkien, is there any notion of “Sin”. As I understand it, sin describes not merely wrongdoing, but wrongdoing that is in some sense an affront to God’s character, and which requires atonement. The ultimate atonement, the death of Jesus, is said, therefore, to be necessary because all humanity sins and only sacrifice is righteous enough in God’s eyes to expunge it. In Middle-earth, ethical choices carry great weight and consequence, but they are not made in the face of divine commandments or threats of retribution. Likewise, a Jesus figure would seem out of place in Middle-earth (and indeed we see no equivalent) as the whole notion of “sin” is never broached. Evil, both natural and human, in Tolkien does not come about as a result of some direct analogue to the Fall – whereby humans were once morally perfect before they descended into darkness – but from the beginning the capacity for evil in the world was incarnate within it. Likewise, notions like shame and guilt are out of place in Middle-earth: certainly individuals are morally judged by their peers, but they are never taught to be shameful of their humanity, due to some kind of inherent sinful nature.
In short, it seems to me that a case can be made that the Christian part of Tolkien’s work has been radically overstated, if you actually take his work and compare it to commonly held Christian doctrines. In the moral dimension especially Tolkien seems to drift away from Christian concepts of righteousness and wrongdoing, which revolve around the notion of sin, a concept that never makes itself apparent in Tolkien’s writing.

One might say, but of course Tolkien’s work is not explicitly Christian. In what way, then, is it Christian at all? If it lacks the Christian outlook on moral truth (that moral goodness is that which is pleasing to and sanctioned by God, and badness is “sin”) then how is Christianity manifested? Perhaps through the vague notion of a benevolent God? This is indeed more Christian, than, say, Buddhist, but it could equally be pantheistic or even polytheistic. For example, when Gandalf says to Frodo that he was “meant” to find the ring, nothing in the text leads the reader it is a somewhat Christianlike god pulling all the strings behind the scenes – the suggestion is suitably vague.

Thoughts?