Does The Lord of the Rings contain a Manichean view of evil? Some authors, including leading Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey,2 have suggested that it does, and some passages appear to confirm this suspicion. Sometimes those who bear the Ring appear to be struggling only with themselves when they are tempted to put it on, but at other times, they seem to be influenced by an external force, something like a principle of Evil. For example, when Gandalf asks Frodo for the Ring in order to check its identity, we are told that “either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it” (FR, p. 54). Is the Ring reluctant or is Frodo reluctant? Does the impulse come from within Frodo, or from an independent Evil principle? Could a Manichean point to the Ring as an example of a completely and utterly evil thing?
We must remember that the One Ring has the powers it possesses only because it was created by Sauron to aid in his quest for world domination. This means that the Ring is not an example of the Manichean idea of an independent evil force in the world, since it is animated by Sauron’s will and power. To paraphrase a saying made famous by the National Rifle Association: the Ring doesn’t corrupt people; Sauron’s power working through the Ring corrupts people.
In addition, the Ring is not an example of a completely evil thing. It is true that Elrond calls it “altogether evil” (FR, p. 300), but his reason for saying this is that nobody can use the Ring for good. The elements that compose the Ring are not themselves evil. There is no “evil metal,” not even in Tolkien’s world. If those very same particles of precious metal had been forged into a ring by someone else, then it would not have been the One Ring. The power of the Ring is the power of Sauron, which was infused into the Ring through some mysterious process that is unknown to us. As Gandalf says, if the Ruling Ring is destroyed, then Sauron “will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning, and all that was made or begun with that power will crumble, and he will be maimed for ever” (RK, p. 160).
But what about Sauron himself? Isn’t he an example of a completely evil being?
As Tolkien remarks in a letter, Sauron represents the most corrupt will possible (L, p. 243). But even a totally corrupt person is still a person, an existing creature with powers and capacities that are not evil in themselves. As Elrond says, “nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so” (FR, p. 300). In fact, Sauron is not himself the source of all evil, as Gandalf tells us: “Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary” (RK, p. 160).
So The Lord of the Rings is not based upon a Manichean view of the nature of evil. This is important because it seems impossible for something to be completely and utterly evil. Everything that exists has some good quality or other. Even things that seem to be evil in themselves are not completely evil. For example, nuclear weapons and land mines are useful only for destroying people and things, but even they have some good qualities. (They are composed of parts that are not in themselves bad things, for instance.)
But if the Manicheans are wrong about the nature of evil, then what is evil? If evil is not an independent force, what is it?
Evil Depends on Goodness
Another way to look at evil is to see it as essentially parasitical on goodness. On this view, goodness is necessary for evil, but evil is not necessary for goodness. Evil is like the darkness of a shadow: light is necessary for shadows to exist, but shadows are not necessary for light to exist. Goodness is primary and independent, whereas evil is secondary and dependent on goodness.
This view of evil is often called “Augustinian,” since it was held by St. Augustine (354–430 C.E.), one of the most famous and influential Christian thinkers of all time. St. Augustine writes:
Wherever you see measure, number, and order, you cannot hesitate to attribute all these to God, their Maker. When you remove measure, number, and order, nothing at all remains . . . Thus, if all good is completely removed, no vestige of reality persists; indeed, nothing remains. Every good is from God.3
Tolkien accepts this Augustinian view of evil. In a letter, he writes, “In my story I do not deal with Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero” (L, p. 243).
To see the Augustinian view of evil at work in The Lord of the Rings, remember that it includes the idea that evil is a lack of goodness, as darkness is a lack of light. And since goodness is primary and independent, it follows that the more evil something is, the more nearly it approaches nothingness. There are many illustrations of this in The Lord of the Rings.
The Ringwraiths, for example, ride real horses and wear real robes “to give shape to their nothingness when they have dealings with the living” (FR, p. 249). When the Lord of the Nazgûl attempts to enter the Gate of Minas Tirith, Gandalf says to him, “Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master” (RK, p. 100). When Frodo looks into Galadriel’s mirror and sees the Eye of Sauron, he sees that “the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing” (FR, p. 409). And Gandalf remarks that Saruman, after the fall of Isengard, has “withered altogether” as a result of his evil life, so that nothing more can be made of him (RK, p. 285).
Tolkien endorses the Augustinian view of evil in the dreary desolation of Mordor when Sam sees a white star twinkling overhead. Its beauty strikes Sam and he starts to regain hope: “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (RK, p. 211).
So St. Augustine and Tolkien agree that nothing is completely and utterly evil, because such a thing could not even exist, since existence itself is good. And they both believe that whereas goodness is primary and independent, evil is secondary and dependent on goodness. But if that is true, then where does evil come from? If the world was completely good at one point, then how could evil get started in the first place?
Where Does Evil Come From?
We have seen that nothing is completely and utterly evil. Along the way, we have noted that nothing is evil in itself, not even the One Ring of Power. So where does evil come from? St. Augustine and Tolkien both believe that ultimately all evil comes from the mind of some created person or other.
St. Augustine coined the phrase “inordinate desire” to describe the root of evil, which he identifies as the desire for something that violates the rightful order of things. (So “inordinate” means something like “out of order” or “disordered.”) Commenting on St. Paul’s statement that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10), St. Augustine says that “the love of money” must be understood as “any sort of love in which one has immoderate desire and wants more than is enough. This avarice is desire, and desire is a wicked will. Therefore, a wicked will is the cause of all evil.”4
St. Augustine’s idea, then, is that it is possible for evil to arise in a situation that involves only good things. The fall of Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve have a similar pattern, he thinks: in both cases, there were good creatures who wanted to have more than their fair share of the good things in the world. This desire is the source of all evil, and when we freely give into it, evil is born. St. Augustine writes:
Neither the goods desired by sinners, nor the free will itself . . . are evil in any way . . . evil is a turning away from immutable goods and a turning toward changeable goods. This turning away and turning toward result in the just punishment of unhappiness, because they are committed, not under compulsion, but voluntarily.5
In other words, evil comes from an exercise of free will.6 As he says in another place, “Whence comes this turning away, unless man, to whom God is the only Good, replaces God with himself to be his own good, as God is the Good to Himself?”7
Tolkien echoes this view in one of his letters. He says that the War of the Ring “is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour�
�� (L, p. 243). This view of the origin and source of evil is expressed in many places in The Lord of the Rings.
For instance, the pride and greatness of mortal men proves to be their weakness, since Sauron uses it to ensnare them by means of the Nine Rings. Sauron learned the art of ring-making by ensnaring the elven-smiths of Eregion through their “eagerness for knowledge” (FR, p. 272), which apparently blinded them. By contrast, Elrond tells Glóin that the Three Rings of the elves were not made by Sauron, nor did he ever touch them; those who made them desired only “understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained” (FR, p. 301). The difference between the three Rings of the elves and the One Ring of Power is clear: the Rings of the elves are not aimed at satisfying desires that are out of order, whereas the One Ring points its wearer toward the domination of everyone else. As Galadriel tells Frodo, to use the One Ring, he would need to train his will “to the domination of others” (FR, p. 411).
Tom Bombadil is not tempted at all by the Ring. He is perfectly content with his place in the world, and has no desire at all to get more than his fair share. In fact, he is so immune to the power of the Ring that he can see Frodo when he wears it: “Old Tom Bombadil’s not as blind as that yet. Take off your golden ring! Your hand’s more fair without it” (FR, p. 151).
Sam is also able to resist the temptation of the Ring because he knows that his humble garden is “all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command” (RK, p. 186). Unlike corporate executives who try to steal from their stockholders and avoid responsibility for the consequences, Sam is content to tend his garden. He resists the desire to occupy a place that is not his own, and thus allows the lure of the One Ring to pass him by. How many of us could resist this same temptation?
Boromir was unable to resist this lure. When Boromir proposes using the Ring in battle against Sauron, Elrond replies that it cannot be used for such a purpose. The Ring was made by Sauron, belongs to him, and is “altogether evil.”
Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart . . . as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. (FR, p. 300)
This was good advice, but when Boromir was alone with Frodo and the Ring, he was unable to heed it.
Saruman is also unable to resist the lure of the Ring. He tries to persuade Gandalf to join him and Sauron, arguing that Saruman and Gandalf would be able to bide their time, keep their agenda hidden, “deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose.”
Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means. (FR, p. 291)
Saruman is willing to justify the means in terms of the ends, hoping to impose his will on the world and everyone in it. Right after saying this, he asks Gandalf if he knows where the Ruling Ring is, and “a lust which he could not conceal shone suddenly in his eyes” (FR, p. 291). After Saruman’s fall, Gandalf explains that he would not be turned around because he “will not serve, only command” (TT, p. 209), calling to mind Milton’s famous interpretation of the reasoning of Satan: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.”8
By contrast, Gandalf has no such designs on world domination. He has no “wish for mastery” (TT, p. 210). To Denethor the Steward of Gondor, Gandalf says that he is given no realm to rule, but rather that he is a steward over “all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands” (RK, p. 16). There is a big difference between being a steward over something and an owner of it, of course. Gandalf recognizes this difference, and realizes that he is only a steward, not an owner. He refuses to “play God” by marshalling everything at his disposal in order to impose his preferences on the world. Whereas Denethor refers to himself as “Lord of Gondor,” Gandalf calls him “Steward of Gondor” instead (RK, p. 129). In the end, Denethor still rules his own end by killing himself, and thus reveals his false conception of the scope of his own authority.
In contrast to these evil desires for what is out of order, we find that the hobbits have something like a natural sense of their proper place. We have already seen this “plain hobbit-sense” (RK, p. 186) in Sam’s ability to resist the temptation of the One Ring. Recall also what Thorin Oakenshield says in The Hobbit as he lies on his deathbed and apologizes for speaking so harshly to Bilbo during the attempt to resolve the standoff between the dwarves and men over the treasure hoarded by Smaug the Dragon: “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song over hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world” (H, p. 290).
Of course, the hobbits are not immune to temptation. In fact, at the most crucial moment, Frodo gives in to temptation and claims the Ring for himself. As it happens, only the greed of Gollum saves Frodo from becoming another Gollum himself. Frodo was lucky. The destruction of Sauron thus resulted from the apparently coincidental collision of three evil impulses: Frodo’s desire to keep the Ring, Gollum’s desire to take it from Frodo, and Sauron’s single-minded focus on world domination, made possible by his confidence that nobody would ever try to destroy the Ring.
The clearest illustration of the nature of evil comes from Sauron himself. Gandalf says that Sauron calculates everything with reference to his desire for power (FR, p. 302). This focus on domination is so powerful that it even colors his fears about the One Ring, as Gandalf makes clear: “That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind” (TT, p. 104). Comparing Sauron to Satan, Tolkien holds that no rational being is totally evil.
In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. . . . Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants. (L, p. 243)
Thus, Sauron’s evil lies in his desire to usurp God, to assume a place in the world that is not rightly his. As St. Augustine would say, this kind of desire is the root of all the evil in the world.
Overcoming Evil
We have already seen that in order to make something evil, you must start out with something that is good. This is the pattern we see over and over again in Middle-earth. Treebeard the ent notes that trolls are “counterfeits” of ents, just as orcs were made “in mockery” of elves (TT, p. 91). Frodo makes a similar point about orcs (RK, p. 201), and Tolkien describes Isengard as “only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery” of the Dark Tower (TT, p. 175). In all of these cases, evil things turn out to be good things that have been twisted for evil ends.
It is not surprising to find that evil is also connected to the destruction of good things in The Lord of the Rings. For example, we are told that orcs invented many clever but horrible devices, especially machines for war (H, p. 62). Treebeard says similar things about Saruman, who “does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment,” and who created orcs capable of enduring sunlight (TT, p. 76). We are also told that orcs find special delight in going out of their way to destroy living things (TT, p. 11).
The destructive aspect of evil also extends into the realm of relationships. For instance, when they are looking for Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, Gandalf and Pippin find the porter slain along the road to the Closed Door. Gandalf calls this “Work of the Enemy” (RK, p. 127). And Haldir, the elf from Lothlórien, says that the power of the Dark Lord is most clearly seen in “the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him” (FR, p. 390).
In our world, we see these same evil themes at work. For example, on September 11th, 2001, terrorists used basically good things (box cutters and airplanes) to cause mass destruction, devastation, and death. In doing so, th
ey clearly manifested the essential evil impulse, the desire to impose one’s own preferences on the world. By deciding that many innocent people should die, they assumed a position and a prerogative that was not rightly theirs. Their choices reflect the kind of evil will that we would expect to find among Sauron and his minions.
Fortunately, if Tolkien is right about the nature of evil, then there is some good news. This follows from the fact that the Manicheans were wrong about the nature of evil: it is not an independent force in the world, equal to goodness and opposite to it. Instead, as St. Augustine realized, goodness is fundamental and independent, whereas evil is secondary and dependent. Whereas evil cannot exist without goodness, the converse is not true. This means that there always exists some possibility of eliminating evil from the world. Since evil must be produced out of pre-existing goodness, it follows that goodness is, so to speak, the “default mode” for the world. As long as people have choices, it is possible that they will choose well. So there is always some reason to hope that evil will be overcome.
In conclusion, we have learned that evil is a lack of goodness, that it stems from a desire to have more than one’s fair share, and that it is linked to fear and destruction. Knowing this, we are in a position to see more clearly the evil in ourselves and in other people. Do we wish to dominate other people and impose our wills upon the world? What is our proper place? What things do we find satisfying and frustrating? Do we enjoy the simple goods of the world, with a bit of “plain hobbitsense,” or are we bent on achieving some fantastic ideal under the name of “the good life”? Reflecting on these questions, together with Tolkien’s illuminating depiction of evil, can bring us closer to understanding and maybe even overcoming the evil in ourselves and in the world around us.9
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy Page 12