As I also stated there, it is my hope that the writings collected in this volume will support this. For some with knowledge of the Catholic faith – which in addition to a set of dogmas and religious rites entails a worldview encompassing inter alia a distinctive theology, metaphysics, cosmogony, and anthropology – many of the Catholic elements and themes highlighted and briefly explored here will have already been noted. But these will be opaque to many readers, and so I provide this concise guide for those readers who wish to know to what I believe Tolkien is apparently alluding or referring at various points that may otherwise only perplex or seem thoroughly abstruse.
AGES OF THE WORLD
Here: “we being in 1960 of the 7th Age …”
While many are familiar with the concept of named Ages of the World as found in classical mythology, e.g. the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc., it is far less well known that the Catholic Church has long espoused a system of numbered Ages of the World, extending through at least a Sixth Age. Throughout Tolkien’s life the Proclamation of the Birth of Christ, just before the start of the Christmas Vigil Mass, flatly stated that Christ was born “in the sixth age of the world”. The text of the proclamation comes from the Martyrologium Romanum (Roman Martyrology), the Roman Rite Catholic Church’s official list of martyrs and saints, with associated calendrical information. It reads in part (emphasis added):
… anno Imperii Octaviani Augusti quadragesimo secundo, toto Orbe in pace composito, sexta mundi ætate, Jesus Christus, æternus Deus æternique Patris Filius, mundum volens adventu suo piissimo consecrare, de Spiritu Sancto conceptus, novemque post conceptionem decursis mensibus, in Bethlehem Judæ nascitur ex Maria Virgine factus Homo. … in the forty-second year of the empire of Octavian Augustus, when the whole world was at peace, in the sixth age of the world, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by His most merciful coming, having been conceived of the Holy Ghost, and nine months having elapsed since His conception, is born in Bethlehem of Judea, having become Man of the Virgin Mary.
BODY AND SPIRIT
Here: “their being was incarnate and consisted naturally of the union of a fëa [‘spirit’] and a hröa [‘body’]”
Here: “‘persons’ – in whole being, fëa and hröa”
Here: “They say that the fëa or spirit ‘remembers’ its body (which it has inhabited in every part equally)”
Here: “though those fëar that obeyed their summons were safe from the Darkness, to be naked was against their nature.”
Here: “For the function of the body of one of the Incarnate is to house a fëa, the absence of which is unnatural to it; so that such a body is not ever in precisely the like case with a body that has never possessed a fëa: it has suffered loss. Moreover while the fëa was with it, the fëa inhabited it in every part or portion, less or greater, higher or lower.”
Since the Enlightenment, and particularly stemming from the hugely influential theory of mind-body dualism espoused by seventeenth-century century philosopher, mathematician, and scientist René Descartes, it has become commonplace, even among many Christians, to regard the human person as a spirit (soul) that inhabits and uses a body, which however is of no particular importance to the nature or integrity of the human person. In this view, a human person is in no essential way incomplete when a soul leaves their body; in fact, for many the departure of a soul is actually regarded as liberating, as it frees the human person from material needs and burdens.
Though most who have adopted this view (in considered fashion or not) will be unaware of it, this dualist anthropology is in fact a revival of the ancient Platonic/Gnostic/Manichaean belief in the superiority of the spiritual to the material; and in their extremes, the belief that the material world, including the body, is inherently evil, a trap for the human soul, whose primary goal is, or ought to be, to free itself from the body and the material world.
In Catholic anthropology, on the other hand, the nature of the human person, and the relation of body and spirit in the human person, is precisely that which Tolkien ascribes to Incarnates, here and elsewhere, repeatedly and forcefully. That is, it is the nature of incarnate persons, both Elves and Men, to be a unity of body and spirit, such that if either is lost or separated, the incarnate person is incomplete, and has suffered a grievous loss and disruption to its nature. Neither the body nor the material world are inherently inferior to spirit, or something that a spirit has a duty to seek to escape.
Here: “by the birth of Lúthien [Melian] became enmeshed in ‘incarnation’, unable to lay it aside while husband and child remained in Arda alive, and her powers of mind (especially foresight) became clouded by the body through which it must now always work.”
Here: “Pengolodh also cites the opinion that if a ‘spirit’ (that is, one of those not embodied by creation) uses a hröa for the furtherance of its personal purposes, or (still more) for the enjoyment of bodily faculties, it finds it increasingly difficult to operate without the hröa. The things that are most binding are those that in the Incarnate have to do with the life of the hröa itself, its sustenance and its propagation. Thus eating and drinking are binding, but not the delight in beauty of sound or form. Most binding is begetting or conceiving.”
In marked contrast with that of Incarnates, the situation with spirits like the Valar and Maiar that are not incarnate by nature, but instead fashion bodies for themselves in order to more easily interact with Incarnates and the material world, turns out in one important aspect to be Platonic, as shown by this passage in Plato’s Phaedo (Plato: Complete Works, Hackett, 1997, here):
“The soul of the true philosopher thinks that this deliverance [from the body and the senses] must not be opposed and so keeps away from pleasures and desires and pains as far as he can; he reflects that violent pleasure or pain or passion does not cause merely such evils as one might expect, such as one suffers when one has been sick or extravagant through desire, but the greatest and most extreme evil, though one does not reflect on this.
What is that, Socrates? asked Cebes.
That the soul of every man, when it feels violent pleasure or pain in connection with some object, inevitably believes at the same time that what causes such feelings must be very clear and very true, which it is not. Such objects are mostly visible, are they not?
Certainly.
And doesn’t such an experience tie the soul to the body most completely?
How so?
Because every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal … As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life …”
EXISTENCE, CONTINGENCY OF
Here: “He [Eru] is outside Eä but holds the whole of Eä in thought (by which it coheres).”
In Catholic metaphysics, the existence of the material universe and all that is in it, is contingent: both in the sense that it does not exist by necessity but rather by a gratuitous act of Divine creation, and in the sense that its continued existence, in all its parts down to the most minute particle, and at all moments, is due to God’s continuous (from a temporal view) willing of its existence. Its Catholic formulation (as so much else of Catholic metaphysics) is due to St. Thomas Aquinas, who greatly elaborated and expanded upon the contingency of existence.
Tolkien’s particular statement here, that the whole of material and temporal existence (Eä, “the World that Is”) “coheres” (< Latin co-haerere, literally ‘stick together’) in Eru’s thought, also clearly echoes Scripture, in particular Col. 1:17: “He [Christ] is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”. The ongoing contingency of existence is also reflected in Acts 17:28, where St. Paul, quoting (ultimately) Epimenides (who however had Zeus in mind), says to the gathered Athenians: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said”.
EVIL (AS LACK OF
PERFECTION)
Here: “√man ‘good’. This implies that a person/thing is (relatively or absolutely) ‘unmarred’: that is in Elvish thought unaffected by the disorders introduced into Arda by Morgoth: and therefore is true to its nature and function.”
Here: “‘Best’, but not perfectly: that is, not in any case exactly according to the conceived and unrealized pattern. But such ‘imperfection’ is not an evil, necessarily.”
Aquinas, like Augustine and Plato before him, held that evil has no independent existence. Certainly, rational beings can do evil things, but evil itself has no “being”. Rather, in much the same way that dark has no independent existence, but is rather merely a lack or absence of light, evil for Aquinas is likewise some deficiency or lack of the good in/for created things. In Thomistic terms, this is held to mean a lack in a thing’s perfection of form: that is, a failure or prevention of a thing to fully be or become that which by its nature it ought to be, in all its essentials. Hence it is in this sense evil if, say, a squirrel, which has the form (in Tolkien’s parlance, pattern) of a quadrupedal tree-dwelling rodent with a bushy tail that typically feeds on nuts and seeds, either lacks or is deprived of one or more limbs: it does not fully realize, or no longer fully realizes, its form. This of course does not mean that such a squirrel is itself evil, only that it has suffered an evil (in this Thomistic sense). Obviously, too, there are degrees of such evil: if, losing one or more limbs, a squirrel is no longer able to dwell in trees or even obtain food for itself, then it suffers more of an evil than if, say, it lacked/lost part of its tail.
Even so, the Elvish definition of good, and of impairments to the good, hinges on the degree to which a thing or being realizes, or fails or is impeded from realizing, its particular pattern; that is, on the degree to which a thing or being is “unmarred”. The unmarred state of Arda and its beings was perfectly “true to its nature and function”; but this perfection of all things was impaired by Morgoth, so that every thing in Arda has been subjected to an evil, and every being in Arda is in turn susceptible to an inclination to do evil.
EVOLUTION (THEISTIC)
Here: “This the Valar say is how the variety of Arda was indeed achieved: beginning with a few patterns, and varying these or blending pattern with pattern.”
Here: “For it is clear in such lore as we have received from the Valar that they set in motion the unfolding of different living patterns at many different points in the Ainulindalë, and therefore this was repeated in Eä. Within Eä we have then not one single Ermenië or Great Pattern, but a number of early or Major Patterns (Arkantiër).”
Here: “… these ‘major patterns’ (arkantiër) developing in Arda will diverge whether by the design of their beginners, or by the varieties caused by the stuff of Arda which they must use, into different but similar groups of descendants.”
A long-standing feature of what has come to be known as “young-Earth creationism” is the belief in “special creation”: that is, that the first living things in all their species were created, if not “at once”, nonetheless within a short period of time. This belief was (is) rooted in a literal interpretation of the creation account of Genesis, such that all varieties of life were created within a span of four days. Coupled with commitment to a theory of invariable, immutable forms (see HYLOMORPHISM below), there is no time or mechanism available for any sort of descent of species: all species must therefore have been directly created by God at the beginning of the world.
Tolkien’s theory of patterns (forms) here, on the other hand, allows both for beginnings at different times of various species, from a variety of patterns (though always subordinate to and ultimately derived from Eru’s own Great Pattern, and subject to the will of Eru), and even for their change, by blending or divergence, over time. (A time greatly lengthened by the alteration of the length of the Valian Year, though of course still nothing like geologic time.) It should be noted that this sort of theistic evolution is not the same as what is now commonly called “Intelligent Design”, one form at least of which has God repeatedly intervening in time to shape and guide the development of species. Rather, the ability of patterns to blend and diverge over time is in a sense “built into” them. (Note that the term evolve itself, in origin and in this context, indicates a “rolling out” of some inherent potentiality already possessed by a living being, or in Tolkien’s terminology, that “unfolds” over time.)
FALL OF MAN, THE
Here: “The Eldar thought that some disaster, perhaps even amounting to a ‘change of the world’ (sc. something that affected all its later history), had befallen Men which altered their nature, especially with regard to ‘death’ … Andreth believed that death (and especially the fear of it) had come upon Men as a punishment or result of some disaster – rebellion against Eru the Eldar guessed.”
In the Catholic view, the Fall of Man occurred when our “first parents”, who are called Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, transgressed against God’s command that they not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Having done so at the instigation of Satan in the form of a serpent, they separated themselves from God’s grace, and were expelled from the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden. And because they were the first parents of all mankind, the consequence of their sin, called “original sin”, was passed on to their children and so to all subsequent generations of the human race. It is for this reason that all of mankind is subject to toil, hardship, evil desires, and (at least bodily) death.
Here: “The Quendi never ‘fell’ as a race – not in the sense in which they and Men themselves believed that the Second Children had ‘fallen’. Being ‘tainted’ with the Marring (which affected all the ‘flesh of Arda’ from which their hröar were derived and were nourished), and having also come under the Shadow of Melkor before their Finding and rescue, they could individually do wrong. But they never (not even the wrong-doers) rejected Eru, nor worshipped either Melkor or Sauron as a god – neither individually or as a whole people. Their lives, therefore, came under no general curse or diminishment; and their primeval and natural life-span, as a race, by ‘doom’ co-extensive with the remainder of the Life of Arda, remained unchanged in all their varieties.”
Unlike Men, Elves did not fall corporately. They are thus in many ways a portrait of what Tolkien imagined unfallen Men could have been.
Here: “childbirth is not among the Eldar accompanied by pain”
Genesis 3:16 states that painful childbirth is one of the consequences of the Fall: “in pain you shall bring forth children”. The Eldar, being unfallen, do not experience pain in childbirth. Moreover, since the Catholic Church teaches that the Virgin Mary was, as Tolkien says “the only unfallen [purely human] person” (L:286 fn.), i.e., preserved from original sin by an act of Christ’s prevenient grace (the actual meaning of the Immaculate Conception), it likewise teaches that she did not experience pain during Jesus’ birth.
Here: “The Númenóreans, or Dúnedain, were still in our terms ‘fallen Men’; but they were descendants of ancestors who were in general wholly repentant, detesting all the corruptions of the ‘Shadow’; and they were specially graced. In general they had little inclination to, and a conscious detestation of lust, greed, hate and cruelty, and tyranny.”
Again, the early Númenóreans, though being fallen, by a special grace generally approach nearest to the unfallen Quendi, particularly in their right relations to God, to incarnate existence and self-mastery, to the natural world, and in their interests and arts.
HYLOMORPHISM
Here: “In the first shapings this primary substance or erma became varied and divided into many secondary materials or nassi, which have within themselves various patterns, whereby they differ one from another inwardly, and outwardly have different virtues and effects.”
The Aristotelean-Thomistic metaphysic of hylomorphism (from Greek ὕλη, hylē, ‘wood, matter’, and μορφή, morphē, ‘form’), holds that all material things (incl
uding human beings and all other things, living and unliving) are comprised of matter (ultimately derived from PRIME MATTER, q.v. below) and form, that is, a Divinely-willed organizing principle that shapes prime matter into the thing that it is. In a living being, its form is its spirit; in a human being (any Child of Eru) its form is its soul. In Tolkien’s terms, living beings comprise erma ‘prime substance’ and an ultimately Divinely-willed arkantië ‘great pattern’. A Tolkienian distinctive is that the arkantiër were developed in response to the Great Pattern, Erkantië, of Eru, and so represented a subcreative act; and yet were both permitted and willed by Eru. Another distinctive is that the nature of Incarnates consists of an unity of both body (in Tolkien’s terms a hröa) and, as its pattern, a soul (in Tolkien’s terms, a fëa).
INCORRUPTIBILITY OF SAINTS
Here: “Men report that the bodies of some of their Dead long maintain their coherence, and even sometimes endure in fair form as if they slept only. That this is true the Elves know by proof; but the purpose or reason is not to them clear. Men say that it is the bodies of the holy that sometimes remain long incorrupt: meaning those of whom the fëar were strong and yet were turned ever towards Eru in love and hope.”
The Catholic Church recognizes as incorruptible a body that, without having been embalmed or otherwise artificially preserved, nonetheless shows little or no sign of decomposition even long after death. Incorruptibility is most often associated with saints, and among the laity at least incorruptibility is considered evidence that the deceased is a saint, whether (yet) canonized or not. Some incorruptible bodies are further said to exude the ODOUR OF SANCTITY (q.v.).
The Nature of Middle-earth Page 34