Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination and the Uses and Abuses of Tradition

Thomas W. Smith

I. Introduction

I’m supposed to say something about Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination. Well, I suppose that the first question is whether Tolkien’s Catholicism affects his writing; whether Tolkien has such a thing as a Catholic imagination.

At first glance it looks like the answer is no. After all, where is the religious sensibility in the book? There are no religious sanctions for behavior among the characters. There are no cultic practices, except for a brief moment of silence before meals in Gondor. The story happens before Christ’s birth, and has nothing to do with historical Christianity. None of Tolkien’s characters anticipate Christ explicitly. In fact, some Christian authors have gone out of their way to say that Tolkien is a pagan who is dangerous for Christians to read. No less an authority than Tom Shippey is confused on this point. He can’t quite figure out how Tolkien’s Catholicism influences his stories.1

However, in one of his letters, Tolkien says that his Catholicism is central to his fiction. He writes,

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revisions. 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.2

1 Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 175-181.2 Letters, page 172.

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So Tolkien insists that his Catholicism is central to his work. How are we supposed to approach the work in light of that fact? An allegorical interpretation of Tolkien’s Catholic imagination is ruled out because Tolkien has forbidden it.

In the Foreword to Lord of the Rings, he writes, …I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.3

So Tolkien’s imagination does not work by setting up a one to one relationship between his characters, events, or plot devices, on the one hand, and his Catholic beliefs on the other. Arwen isn’t Mary; Sauron isn’t Stalin or Hitler; Gondor is not western Europe, and so on.

Another approach is to recognize that Tolkien’s Catholicism influenced the ways he used symbolism and developed his themes, and go on to mine the books to find examples. Lembas, for example, could be said to be symbolic, and to point to the Eucharist. Several fine books have been written recently that take this approach.4 But I think that approach has its limits; I don’t think it goes far enough. I say this for two reasons.

First, this approach limits the applicability of Tolkien’s art. The authors of these books I mentioned recognize that there is Catholic symbolism and themes in Tolkien’s fiction. But if you listen again carefully to the famous passage where he tells us he dislikes allegory, you will notice that as Tolkien denies that his story is allegorical, he also emphasizes that it is applicable. Again, Tolkien says, “I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I

3 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), Foreword, p. 7.4 See, for example, Bradley Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth (ISI Books, 2003); Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle Earth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

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think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”5

So one of Tolkien’s big objections to allegory has to do with its limited capaciousness. Allegory is a problem for Tolkien precisely because it limits the scope of the reader’s imagination. It places restrictions on how to apply the stories to our own lives. The problem isn’t just that allegory gets boring once you get it; the problem isn’t just that reading a story in which you’ve seen through the allegory is as bad as sitting through a whole magic show in which you’ve seen through every trick. Tolkien’s point is that if the author uses allegory, he is limiting the reader’s freedom to allow the author’s vision to transform their own experience, whatever that experience is. Tolkien seems to be inviting us to think as broadly as we can about the applicability of his stories.

Tolkien says that the religious element is absorbed into this story. A work of art that absorbs a specific religious vision of the world is suffused with an artist’s vision in a way that’s not limited to symbols and themes. It is meant to impart an orientation towards life as a whole. It is meant to be applied to our experience to inform and illuminate that experience. In short, if we relegate the Catholic imagination to symbols and themes, we refuse its proper ambitions. In other words, if part of the point of the story is to impart a whole vision of life, reading that story puts a responsibility on us that goes beyond the discovery Catholic symbols and themes.

Sure; Catholics believe in the Eucharist and Mary and sacraments. But the underlying question is, “Why do we believe in those things in the first place?” Perhaps there’s something behind or underlying our belief in them. Perhaps we believe in those things because we see the world in a certain way. Our particular beliefs about these things point to deeper beliefs in the way reality is structured. That is, our particular beliefs about hierarchy or tradition or sacraments bespeak an entire orientation towards God, our

5 Tom Shippey reads the passage this way. See Author of the Century.

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life in the world and our destiny in the next. So one question we need to ask about the Catholic imagination is, “What is it about the way Catholics see God and creation that leads us to believe in realities like sacraments and tradition and priesthood?”

To understand this question is to recognize that belief is not merely a matter of holding certain propositions. More deeply, it is a way of seeing the world. A way of standing in and walking through the world. A way of allowing oneself to be transformed by that seeing and standing and action in the world. Let me quote from theologian Robert Barron:

Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian life flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christians see differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, their action, their whole way of being in the world have a distinctive accent and flavor. What unites figures as diverse as James Joyce, Caravaggio, John Milton, the architect of Chartres, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the later Bob Dylan is a particular and distinctive take on things, a style, a way, which flows finally from Jesus of Nazareth.6

So belief is not only a matter of assenting to the truth of particular doctrines. That is a dimension of religious belief, but not the only one, and probably not the most important one. In addition, we assent to those particular doctrines – our minds hold those particulars beliefs to be true – they make sense to us; they appeal to us – because we see things in a certain way. We believe in these realities because we believe something about reality.

This makes sense of the way Tolkien thinks of the relationship of his Catholicism to his fiction. Tolkien sees the world in a certain way. His vision is absorbed into his story. He refuses to place any particular religious practices or religious doctrines into his story because they would only dull the vision. The whole work is religious; not any particular part of it. That’s the point. Sure; one of the ways

6 Robert Barron, And Now I See…: A Theology of Transformation (NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 1.

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this vision manifests itself is in the themes and symbols of the story. But in addition, for Tolkien, the religious vision – the Catholic imagination – affects also his whole approach to art and life.

So when you ask, “What is the Catholic Imagination?” you are really asking, “How do Catholics artists see the world and how is that vision incarnate in their art?” Those are big questions. And let me risk an approach to them.

I’ll suggest that the Catholic imagination holds a conviction about mediation. That is, one of the things that defines a Catholic Imagination is a sense of mediation. And if you want to understand the way Tolkien’s Catholicism suffuses his writings, you have to understand the way mediation works in a Catholic cast of mind; the way mediation works in a Catholic vision of the world.

To see reality through the lens of mediation is first of all to assent to the notion that God is manifest everywhere and in everything. It is to believe that God’s creative activity is not something that happened a long long time ago and then stopped. It is to believe that creation is an ongoing relationship between God and the world, wherein the divine abundance at the heart of the Trinity sustains and is manifest in the order and beauty and goodness of the world around us. In every part of it. God is not separate. We live and breathe and die in God. He is present everywhere. So to look at the world through the lens of mediation entails believing that everything and everyone you encounter is a vehicle or a go-between for divine presence. Catholics find meaning literally in everything.

Christ is the ultimate mediator, of course, and in a sense nothing else compares with Him. But everything else can become an analogous mediator precisely because nothing in creation is separate from God, including the writer’s art. If everything and everyone bespeaks of God, then everything and everyone can become a road to God. Everything is a kind of sacrament of divine presence.

Perhaps other religious traditions that say things like this, so I’m not making a claim that only Catholics think this

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way. I’m not being triumphalist. I’m just reporting what I take to be the news about this way of seeing things.

The more I think about it, the more the concept of mediation is a kind of key that unlocks and unites the apparently weird and unrelated mysteries of Catholicism. We believe in sacraments because we believe in mediation. We believe in the sacramental character if nature because we believe it mediates God’s abundance and beauty and order. Catholics believe in the sacramental character of everyday life because we believe, for example, that making the sandwiches that form our children’s teeth and bones and flesh is a way of mediating God’s creative action. Catholics believe in the priesthood because they believe that hierarchies can mediate. Catholics address petitions to Mary and the saints because of a conviction about mediation. We believe in the apostolic succession because we believe that the human community can mediate. We think that history can mediate, because Christ the great mediator entered history. We believe in tradition because we believe that history can mediate. In other words, we think that the faithful who have gone before us, and who have lived and loved and suffered with and through our beliefs have something essential to tell us about how to conduct our lives. At its best, Catholics think that tradition can mediate divine life.

So to explore the question, “What is Tolkien’s Catholic Imagination?” is to explore mediation in Tolkien’s work. The only problem with this approach is that there’s just too much to talk about. All sorts of things mediate in Tolkien’s vision: nature, wisdom, stewardship, suffering, weakness, hierarchy, mercy, justice, death. So I’m going to have to focus on one theme: the way tradition mediates in Tolkien’s imagination. Let me do this in two ways. First, I’ll talk about the way Tolkien’s notion of tradition influenced the way he approached his art; I think it helped lead him to write the kind of stuff he wrote. Second, I’ll talk briefly about the treatment of the mediating power of tradition in his fiction. And here I want to say something about how tradition can go wrong.

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II. Tradition and Recovery

So let me begin with the question, “How did Tolkien’s notion of tradition affect his approach to his fiction?” And let me start by sketching the major events of Tolkien’s youth. Tolkien was born in South Africa, and his mother moved him away from there when he was about three. His father died when he was four in South Africa, and then his mother died when he was twelve. He was raised by a Catholic priest who was a friend of the family, and once he went to school he made some unusually close friendships with a group of five boys. This fellowship called itself the Tea Club and Barrowian Society, or TCBS for short. Each partner in the fellowship was a budding young artist, and they thought of their friendship as special. Part of their fellow-feeling stemmed from a sense that they had a special responsibility to put their mark on the world in a way that would remake it through their art. They felt bothered by their youthful notion that the country had lost its way somehow.7 It is also easy to see how Tolkien’s affection for his friends would be especially acute because his intimacy with them expresses the intimacy he lost with his parents. Tolkien fell in love with a young woman named Edith Bratt. But his guardian refused to allow them to see each other until they were of age. Then, World War I broke out. Tolkien enlisted and suffered through the Battle of the Somme for four months until he was shipped home with trench fever. By time he recovered, four of his five best friends were dead.

So until he was twenty years old, Tolkien led a life of unrelenting loss, and grief and suffering. As Tolkien’s biographer comments, Tolkien’s early experiences with mortality gave him “a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won forever.”8 It’s crucial to read Tolkien’s work in light of his personal experience of grief and loss. It makes the 7 John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).8 Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 39.

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extreme melancholy of his work all the more real, and touching.

But it’s also important to note that a large part of Tolkien’s personal grief had their origins in the history of his time. His best friends died in the trenches. And this means that his own grief should be seen in light of the fact that his entire culture was going through a process of grief and loss. Perhaps Tolkien’s personal experience gave him a unique window onto that shattering experience.

We know that those who lived through it experienced World War I as a kind of watershed moment. We confront two questions here. First, what is it about that war that shattered people’s worldview? Second, how was Tolkien’s art a response to this crisis? In other words, why did Tolkien begin to write fantasy in the wake of his shattering experiences of biography and history? Tom Shippey writes,

If one considers the whole history of Tolkien’s youth and middle age, from 1892 to 1954, a period marked not only by two world wars and the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, but also by – I give them more or less in chronological order – the routine bombardment of civilian populations, the use of famine as a political measure, the revival of judicial torture, the ‘liquidation’ of whole classes of political opponents, extermination camps, deliberate genocide and the continuing development of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ from chlorine gas to the hydrogen bomb, all of these absolutely unthinkable in the Victorian world of Tolkien’s childhood, then it would be a strange mind which did not reflect, as so many did, that something had gone wrong, something furthermore which could not be safely pushed off and blamed on other people.9

It may be that World War I began a process that we might call the unveiling of the modern age. It began a process of disenchantment with the modern age. How so? The modern project was begun to relieve our estate – to dignify our lives, to ease our suffering and liberate us from

9 Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth (NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003), 324-5.

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the hostile forces of nature. And the promise was that this could be accomplished through the harnessing and application of various kinds of power. Scientific power would make us healthier. Technological power would make our lives more convenient. Economic power would make us richer. Military power would make us more secure. Political and bureaucratic power would make our societies more rational and stable.

But in World War I the paradoxical fruits of this project started to be revealed. The powers that were supposed to dignify and liberate us became instead vehicles for senseless cruelty and suffering. A project that claimed it could improve on the stinginess and indifference of nature, ruined nature. A project that claimed it would create rational, stable, secure political organization, created instead states that were criminally stupid, murderous, insecure and unstable. In short, people began to suspect that the project that aimed to liberate us, enslaved us. In other words, many people experienced this senseless, violent mechanized war between modern nation states as the culmination of modernization. And if you find that a vision of life that promised to make your lives more human, actually makes your lives more inhuman, you will find that you are disenchanted with that project. You will become disillusioned, for you will see that project as an illusion.

This had massive political consequences. Our former colleague Vince Sherry argued in his recent book that the Great War caused a breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity – the cultural norms of public reason and civic rationality.10 In art, you see the lost generation exploring themes of shattering, of remaking, of disorientation, and loss of perspective. Philosophically, the point was to find the origins of the modern project and take it apart. Some argued that the problems of modernity can be explained by looking back to the very origins of western civilization, and consequently we needed to clear the ground for something fundamentally new and different.

10 Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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Heidegger called for a return to thinking so that we could uncover the will to power at the heart of western rationality from the beginning, and which is supposedly the origin of the modern problem. These movements are manifestations of the same impulse: to overturn the modern; to get behind it to discover the cause of what ails us; and so to construct a more hopeful, less power-hungry future. In short, the point in these cases is to reject what came before. That impulse to reject or at least comprehensively rethink the western tradition is understandable, given the disillusionment these people experienced at the time.

What did Tolkien do? Well, he wrote fantasy. How are we supposed to understand that response? One way of looking at Tolkien’s work is to say that fantasy is an escape. In this view, Tolkien’s response to the crisis of post-War Europe is sort of pathetic. In his fiction he’s running away the horrors of his own life and the events of the time.

But I think that’s not the best way of looking at fantasy. Tolkien, after all, was not the only one writing this stuff. In the twentieth century, modern views of life bore fruit in tyranny and violence, and this led to massive disillusionment with those notions. This point has led Tom Shippey to argue that “The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic.”11 Fantasy writers like Tolkien, Ursula LeGuin, William Golding, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut, or Bill Pullman understand their work as a kind of recovery from modern disillusionment and disenchantment. They felt the need to create an alternative reality precisely because the modern notion of reality wasn’t realistic enough. Often these authors are particularly concerned with exploring the nature and reality of evil. Several lived through various horrors of the twentieth century, and

11 J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), vii. As Bruno Bettelheim has pointed out, “Myths and fairy stories both answer the eternal questions: What is the world really like? How am I to live my life in it? How can I truly be myself?” The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (NY: Alfred Knopf, 1976), 45.

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were bone-deep convinced that they had come into contact with something irrevocably evil. They also… felt that the explanations for this which they were given by the official organs of their culture were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself.12

So the authors of fantasy became disillusioned with the conventionally respectable modern answers.  In sum they found the answers that their culture was giving to the most basic human questions were unrealistic because they couldn’t account for the reality of evil in the twentieth century.  They became disillusioned especially with the modern account of evil.  And it is a genuine human achievement to become disillusioned with illusion.

But these authors went beyond disillusionment.  They found that they needed to create an alternative reality in which questions could be asked with a fresh voice, and new answers to those questions could be explored.  They created fantasy in order to get a new purchase on reality. For Tolkien, a survivor of the Somme, the “realism” that the official organs of his culture promoted was revealed as at best unrealistic about the human condition and at worst disastrous.13 Tolkien insists that his fantasy stories are not about escape, but about recovery.14 Or, if you want, escape from a false view of human life and the world, to a more real view of human life and the world, which you get by creating alternative realities in which traditions and virtues can be rediscovered.

So there is a lot of fantasy that’s being written in response to the horrors of the twentieth century. Tolkien isn’t alone in this. Tolkien’s fantasy is unique, however: he calls his fantasy, history. It’s made-up history to be sure, but it’s still a form of history. His fiction is suffused with this sense that meaning in history can be found in the way 12 Shippey, Author of the Century, xxx. 13 For accounts of Tolkien’s experiences during World War I and its effect on his work, see John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).14 Of course, this is his argument in his “On Fairy-Stories.” See Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 109-161.

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tradition is handed down. One of the reasons the Lord of the Rings is so appealing – one of the ways it draws you in – is that it gives you a sense that, as big as the book is, it’s just a little window onto a whole world that is behind the story, hidden in old poems and lost tales that pop up from just below the surface. The story of the ring, it turns out, is part of a much larger and longer story, as Sam and Frodo realize as they go along. And if you get enchanted by the Lord of the Rings and read some of Tolkien’s earlier work like the Silmarillion or the Book of Lost Tales, you find that the central elements of these stories are about the way tradition is handed down, from the Valar to the elves, to the Numenoreans, to the race of ordinary men, which is basically what we are.

So Tolkien said that recovery is possible in part by rediscovering tradition through fantasy. In Tolkien’s art, recovery happens through an imaginative recreation of the past, in order to see the ways in which the past can be a help in shoring up the present to care for the future. I think Tolkien turned this way because his Catholic imagination led him to think about tradition in a mediating way. Tradition for him is something to be perpetually rediscovered and handed on. In the end, I think this is one reason why Tolkien has been so rejected by the literary establishment. His critics have not sufficiently disentangled themselves from their modern prejudices against tradition. They are too in love with the notion that recovery from the modern age is one with rejection of tradition.

So Tolkien employs tradition in service of recovery. Indeed, this explains not just his approach to art, but also his approach to scholarship. It explains his fascination with ancient and medieval languages, his approach to Beowulf, his convictions about the proper way to order the English curriculum at Oxford, in which he insisted that alongside the study of texts one had to study the history of languages as the primary cultural artifact. This was the way to genuinely respect the culture of the past. He thinks of the study of languages, of story-telling, of scholarship on medieval epics, as ways of recovering ancient virtues and

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insights, and bringing them up to date in service of renewal. It’s not simply recapitulating the old forms. If Tolkien’s tragic fiction tells us anything, it tells us that there is no going back to a golden age. That’s why the Scouring of the Shire is one of the most important parts of the Lord of the Rings. Rather, Tolkien is imaginatively imparting a vision of renewal through the creation of an alternative reality that functions to give us a new view of reality now that our old modern constructions of reality have been shattered. Fantasy is not a vacation from reality for Tolkien; it is an attempt at recovery that seeks a deeper encounter with reality.

In fact, for Tokien, part of the problem of the modern way of viewing life is that it rejects tradition. If that’s true, then one response to our disillusionment with the modern project is to reject its rejection of tradition. Tolkien is famous for his rejection of modernity’s treatment of nature. He hates machines and the way they destroy the environment. But I think what’s overlooked is his rejection of modernity’s treatment of tradition. He thinks that modernity’s rejection of tradition is part of its problem.

If that is right, any response to the modern project which rejects tradition is insufficiently critical of the very modern project that rejection intends to criticize. In other words, Tolkien’s Catholic imagination led him to try to recover from the disillusionment of the modern age by rejecting the modern age’s rejection of tradition. For Tolkien, part of the problem with the modern world was that it did not borrow enough from an older world. For Tolkien, the way through the crisis of the modern world was not to reject the past and break it apart to make something new. Indeed, for Tolkien, that response was insufficient precisely because it partook too much in the attitude of the modern project that gave birth to the crisis he lived through. That is, Tolkien’s stories operate in part by dramatizing the mediating power of tradition. Part of the point of the stories is to get behind the modern age’s rejection of tradition by dramatizing a world in which history and tradition matter a great deal. This allows us to

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see what it would mean to live with a sense that tradition mediates. I’ll talk more about this later.

Modernity is a very complex phenomenon with a lot of permutations. It’s like a diamond with many facets, and it appears differently depending on which way we are holding it and looking at it and in which kind of light. So we might look at the various ways modernity handles religion or science or art or beauty or philosophy. And we can engage in these in very different ways. But let me ask this rather flatfooted question: “How does modernity handle tradition?”

Let me begin with a suggestion. When people try to locate the origin of the modern age, some point to the Renaissance. Others point to the Reformation. These are obviously very different historical movements. So do they have anything in common that could identify them as movements that in their own ways pave the way for the modern? Well, one thing they both have in common is the rejection of the medieval, that is to say, the Catholic, view of tradition. Luther’s motto, “sola Scriptura,” for example, betokens an impatience with the long tradition of Scriptural commentary that had been developed in the Catholic church since the patristic period. Alternatively, the great humanists’ insistence that they wanted to make an end run around the medieval way of viewing the classical world signaled a similar impatience with tradition. The point here was to engage in a rebirth which was made possible because humanists could get back to the sources themselves. I am not making a moral judgment here. As I will argue later, mediation can go wrong, and perhaps these movements were a necessary outgrowth of and corrective to Catholicism. But, still, what does this observation suggest? That at the birth of the modern, you have an orientation towards tradition that is deepened and widened later on.

The modern cast of mind seems to reject the mediating character of tradition. For instance, the notion of progress and self that are hallmarks of the modern could come to mind when you think about modernity. Modernity is inseparable from the idea of a progress that permits us to permanently leave behind a past that has little to teach us.

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A progress that allows us the maximal freedom to reinvent ourselves and our culture in light of what reason allows. I teach classics, among other old things, and I’m consistently struck by the notion that what I do is obscurantist, impractical, and a throwback. In other words, the implicit claim is that the classical and medieval worlds have nothing to teach us, except perhaps to illustrate what we need to be rid of.

In this sense, modernity is a kind of cultural Marcionism that breaks with its own past in order liberate itself; that breaks with the past so that its future can be indeterminate and therefore free. You might recall that the ancient Marcionites rejected the Hebrew Bible to free themselves from the need to make it fit into a Christian worldview, or to make their Christian worldview fit with it. In doing do, they did not need to think about how to integrate the past into their present. There are huge advantages to this approach. The past is recalcitrant – it resists your desire to do what you want it to. The point is that it was easier for the Marcionites not to think of salvation in terms of salvation history – in terms of tradition.

III. Objections to Tradition

At this point, intelligent people should raise objections. How could a person in this day and age defend tradition as a vehicle for recovery? Doesn’t that make Tolkien a throwback? A tweedy, fuddy-duddy ivory towered Oxford idealist? And it could be even worse. Many in the literary establishment Tolkien have been accused of defending a hegemonic, imperialist western culture that arrogantly thinks it’s superior to everything else because of its tradition. Moreover, if he defends the western tradition, he must implicitly be defending all the practices we abhor from that tradition, which makes him sexist, racist, antidemocratic, and I won’t go on. In this objection, Tolkien is just another cultural imperialist. If these objections are

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justified, tradition doesn’t mediate anything but oppression. How does one meet these objections?

I think one begins by pointing out that these objections seem to rely on a modern conception of tradition. And if we buy into those conceptions, the debate is over before it’s begun. It’s important to note that from a Tolkienian perspective, the currently academically respectable deconstruction of the western tradition to discover its roots in will to power is not a rejection of modernity. Rather, it is an outgrowth of modernity. It is an expression of hypermodernity insofar as the point is to somehow get behind the hermeneutical veil of tradition to the real source of our trouble. It begins by rejecting tradition before the investigation has even begun. But on the surface, nothing is less modern than the prohibition of inquiry.

The modern view of tradition insists that tradition is to be rejected because we are superior to what came before us. We are superior to what came before insofar as we are the beneficiaries of progress. That is, the modern rejection of tradition assumes that our ancestors were barbarians in a way we are not. And so it becomes scandalous and rude to argue their case. To take up the case of our ancestors is to deny to ourselves our rightful place at the apex of history. It denies to us our own sense of superiority. And it does this in several senses because it also denies to us our precious sense of superiority that we enjoy when we condemn the various injustices of the past from our own enlightened perspective. Paradoxically, perhaps one of the reasons we feel more enlightened than our ancestors is that we think we know that the universe is a chaotic, meaningless place in which we cannot adjudicate questions of value they way our ancestors, in their innocence, thought they could.

But this way of viewing tradition is not the only way of thinking about tradition. First of all, tradition is not like an estate you can inherit without much thought or work. It’s not something that can be taken for granted. There is no tradition without the mediating work of the poet, scholar, and thinker, who tries to make sense of it. In fact, as T.S.

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Eliot wrote, the whole tradition changes once an artist has added to it. So tradition is something that needs to be worked for; to be grown into.

Moreover, we sometimes think that love of tradition makes you inevitably conservative and resigned. But that’s not necessarily the case. In fact it may be that the process of individualism, which often aims at making men more apt for obedience, requires cutting people off from their traditions. King Henry VIII, when he wanted to centralize his state, first did away with cult of the saints.15 The wisest, the best, the least conventional, the most passionate and radical characters in Lord of the Rings are the ones who are deeply in tune with their traditions, like Gandalf or Aragorn or Faramir.

But these aren’t my central responses to the objections about tradition. My central response to the charge that the mediation of tradition makes us culturally arrogant is to say that our own tradition isn’t really our own; our tradition is a gift. And if you believe in the mediating potential of tradition, you tend to accept the gift of tradition not with arrogance but with humility.

What do I mean by this? Rémi Brague says that what characterizes the western tradition above all is its Romanity. For Brague, western culture gets its unique dynamism from the fusion of two elements that are in tension: Judaism and Greek culture. But Brague also says there is a third term that’s indispensable for understanding western culture: the Roman. His point is not to remind us that Rome influenced us, too. For Brague, Romanity is not simply a cultural influence; it’s a way of looking at cultural influence. Specifically, it looks at these cultural movements as both foreign and superior. The Roman attitude towards tradition is to recognize that it didn’t invent anything, but bears within itself two elements that are foreign to itself. In other words, the best way to look at our western tradition is to recognize that it was never really our own; it always was a gift from the outside. There’s nothing to get superior about. According to Brague,

15 Duffy, Stripping the Altars.

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This is precisely the content of the Roman contribution: the structure of the transmission of a content not properly its own. The Romans have done little more than transmit, but that is far from nothing. They have brought nothing new in relation to those creative peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews. But they were the bearers of that innovation. What was ancient for them, they brought as something new.16

This cast of mind was open to receiving the fruits of those superior and foreign cultures that have been handed on through the centuries. To believe in the possibility that tradition can mediate is to be open to the possibility that you are inferior to those who came before; that you have something to learn from them. On this “Roman” model of receiving tradition, one is always foreign and inferior even to one’s own tradition. So the western tradition is never strictly one’s own; something to be possessed and celebrated as one’s own; something to be proud of and imposed on others. Rather, it is a spirit of openness to the new and the foreign, because one recognizes that one’s own tradition is foreign.

What I’m really saying in a high-faultin’ way is that tradition is a gift. What is a gift? How does one respond properly to a gift? A gift is always a surprise. A freely chosen affirmation that it is good you exist. It never limits you or tears you down. And, a real gift is something that allows you to transcend your narrow, individualistic self-concern. Receiving a genuine gift always brings you outside of yourself. When you accept a gift with genuine gratitude, it makes you less selfish, in a way. It’s a recognition that you need gifts to exist; that you’re not the center of the universe. It’s a reminder that we all need reciprocity for basic survival and for a good, human life as well. Moreover, it’s something you often feel like you have to grow into; to live up to. And, a gift given unselfishly is never something to be used to lord it over other people. There are abuses of gifts.

16 Rémi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002).

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Thinking about tradition as a gift breaks us out of our narrow preoccupation with ourselves and our own culture and our own time. It frees us from a solipsistic “presentism.” An openness to what we have received from the past probably makes us less selfish toward the future.

Looking at tradition as a gift from the outside also opens us to other cultures in a unique way. Recognizing that central elements of our tradition came from foreign traditions allows us to wonder what else the world has to offer. If we get into the habit of thinking of our cultural life partly as something we’ve received as a gift, that allows us to ask questions about different peoples and cultures – with a spirit of innocence and open wonder. That espouses a certain humility towards what one has received, that in turn allows one to be humble about what could be received by the other. Tradition in this betokens an openness toward what is other precisely because one’s own culture has been formed by what is other.

To have this view of tradition is to think of the culture you are presently living in as something which has been informed by what it has received; something nourished and cultured by a soil that is richer than any soil you could produce yourself. On this view, tradition is something to be worked for; to be grown into, and then passed on in a new form. One cannot therefore impose it on others as their superior; precisely because you tend to think of yourself as inferior to those who gave you the gift of your tradition. Cultural imperialism is a failure to love tradition, not its fruit.

Conclusion

This is not to say that objections to tradition are all wrong. Many people have bad experiences with their religious traditions. Maybe all cradle Catholics are in a sense recovering Catholics; recovering from attempts at mediation that went awry. If the greatness of the Catholic imagination stems in large part from its emphasis on mediation, its tragedies also come from that same source.

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Specifically, Catholicism goes wrong when the realities that are supposed to mediate divine presence, become an obstacle to divine presence. The mediating realities that Catholics love are like arteries – when they’re clear and they work they way they should, they bring us the stuff of life. But when they get stopped up, they kill us by attacking our heart. So the danger in a vision of life that believes in mediation is sclerosis.

Many Catholics have had experiences of priesthood that refuses to mediate and instead thinks it exists for its own sake. Clericalism is a refusal of priests to realize the mediating character of priesthood. Catholics have experiences of overly rigid hierarchies that block divine life. Catholics have experiences of overly rigid interpretations of tradition, wherein Catholicism itself becomes a kind of idol. Even a sacramental view of the world can become an obstacle in some cases for an experience of the immediacy of divine presence. So if traditions can mediate, they can also go wrong.

This is crucial to understand if you’re a Catholic. For if you don’t understand the lens you look at the world through, you don’t know what to do when your prescription changes and the lens starts to distort.

Tolkien dramatizes this in his fiction through his depictions of Denethor and Aragorn. Tolkien’s art very often works by setting up contrasts. Saruman – Gandalf. Faramir – Boromir. Denethor – Theoden. One contrast he sets up is between Denethor, steward of Gondor, and Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor. How do these different men understand tradition?

Aragorn understands that the Numenoreans – the men of Gondor – are inheritors of traditions that go back to the elves and then to the Valar, semi-divine beings made by God to govern creation. Aragorn has spent most of his life in the wilderness learning that tradition and protecting its vestiges in the hinterlands of the old empire of the Numenoreans. He is a steward in the precise sense – he cares for and protects all creatures, even the ones who don’t know about it, like the hobbits. And he does this in an

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expansive sense. His physical protection of the hobbits is of a piece with his love of tradition.

On the other hand, Denethor is a steward who is supposed to rule in the king’s place until the king returns. But Denethor thinks Aragorn is a barbarian; uncultured and from a lesser line. Denethor refuses to give up his throne to the rightful king; he wants to cling to the tradition he knows, rather than receive it as a gift – something not properly owned – and pass it on to someone else to take a new form. So he refuses to hand it on. In fact, he kills himself. And, he also tries to kill his son. Those who would reject the mediating power of tradition also implicitly kill their own offspring. If you kill your ancestors you wind up killing your descendents.

Tradition for Denethor is something to cling to; not to be received as a gift and then passed on as a gift. Something that makes him superior, rather than something that makes him a servant – to those who came before (his superiors) and to those who will come after. Tradition for Denethor has become sclerotic. A vehicle for self-aggrandizement, rather than service in humility.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings, a new age is ushered in. This age depends on heroes who are willing to allow the tradition they have inherited to take on new forms. The wise characters in the book know the past. They know the old dead languages. They know the old lore and epic stories. And this knowledge of the past is part of what allows them to care for the present and future. And this knowledge of their tradition doesn’t make them impractical or conservative or more prone to obey authority. It gives their imagination scope. It gives their practical deliberation wisdom. It gives them a long view of events, and a proper perspective on them. It gives them an independence and freedom that isn’t available to those who haven’t worked hard to know the things they know. By contrast, the fools in the book like Saruman and Sauron don’t care about the past. And that locks them into a selfish concern for their own power – for their own present. In a

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profound sense, acceptance of the mediation of tradition is acceptance of one’s own mortality.

The best characters in the book – the wisest ones like Galadriel and Gandalf and Aragorn – know that the destruction of the ring means that an old world is passing away and a new world is beginning. The question is whether the new world that is arising will be wise enough to tap into the wisdom of the past in order to create its new civilization. That’s the real struggle in the Lord of the Rings – between the modernizers like Saruman and Sauron with their machines and slaves and bureaucracies – and the traditionalist reformers like Gandalf and Aragorn.

In a sense, the happiest part of The Lord of the Rings is the part not written – the golden age of Aragorn. And I think that the best symbol of this golden age is the marriages that take place at the end of the third age – between Aragorn and Arwen, and Faramir and Eowyn. Those marriages are intermarriages between different traditions. The marriage between Aragorn and Arwen is between the old elvish tradition and the newer Numenorean tradition. The marriage between Faramir and Eowyn is a marriage of the old tradition of Numenor and the newer race of Rohan. In those families traditions will be received and given over to a new generation. The sense you get is that these marriage will bring forth something new and different, that will be in its own way important to pass on. One of the fun things to do when you finish reading Lord of the Rings is to imagine what it would look like to build a whole world anew with the resources that have been passed on. This is one of the ways Tolkien uses fantasy to get around our rejection of tradition – by dramatizing a world in which history and tradition matter a great deal, and can be used as resources for renewal. His art allows us to see what would open up to us if we lives with the sense that tradition mediates.

Tolkien’s work baptized my imagination; his art still affects the way I see things. In this sense, his art mediated divine presence in the world for me. It showed me a way of seeing human history that is not all tragic. It showed me

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that even when things look bleak, there are always resources for people creative enough and hopeful enough to do something fundamentally new and different. And at least some of those resources come from tradition, brought up to date and poured into new vessels through the work of a Catholic imagination.

_____________________________________________________________Thomas W. Smith, Ph.D. is Chair of the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions and Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He is author of Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle’s Dialectical Pedagogy (SUNY Press, 2000) and has published articles on ancient, medieval, and contemporary political philosophy in such journals as American Political Science Review, Polity, American Journal of Jurisprudence, Review of Politics, Journal of Politics, and Polis. He is the recipient of the Lindback

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Award for Teaching Excellence and several Pi Sigma Alpha Professor of the Year Awards. His “The Foolishness of the Wise: Tolkien on Tyranny” is forthcoming in Toivo Koivukoski and David Tabacheck (eds.), Tyranny: Ancient and Contemporary (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2005).

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