Related articles and links |  1 of 4

This is part three of a conversation between two authors whose books discuss the faith of J. R. R. Tolkien and the religious values underpinning The Lord of the Rings. Parts one and two appeared on our website earlier this week.

Bradley J. Birzer is assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he specializes in the history of the American West, and related topics. His book, J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth, was just published by ISI Books.

Mark Eddy Smith is a graphic designer at InterVarsity Press, which published his book, Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings, earlier this year. (purchase)

From: Brad Birzer
To: Mark Eddy Smith

Dear Mark,

Thanks for the great response. I agree with you completely regarding Faerie. We are inadequate to speak or write about it, as it's beyond us. In the modern world, Tolkien did get as close as anyone in describing it. I do, however, think we could go back to the saints and mystics of history and find many who also described it accurately.

Each of the New Testament writers had an intimate understanding of Faerie. As Tolkien wrote in his brilliant academic essay, "On Fairy-Stories," "The gospel contains a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance . …But this story has entered history and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of creation."

For Tolkien, as with all Christians, God's story ("God's spell") reaches its highest fulfillment with the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. As Tolkien concludes, "To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath."

This, I think, ties into your questions regarding grace/faith/works and Tolkien and Lewis. The Roman Catholic understanding of salvation is certainly complex. Though Catholic theology argues that one is saved only by grace (and sanctified by works, inspired/moved by grace), the question of how or why an individual originally accepts that God-given faith remains unanswered in any concrete way. While the purer Augustinians lean toward the predestinarian side and the purer Thomists toward the free-will side, orthodox Catholic theology embraces neither extreme. The answer of salvation, according to the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, resides somewhere in the unexplained middle:

That they who sin had been cut off from God, may be disposed through his quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace, so that, while God touches the heart of man through the illumination of the Holy Ghost, man himself neither does absolutely nothing while receiving that inspiration, since he can also reject it, nor yet is he able by his own free will and without the face of God to move himself to justice in his sight.

Tolkien wrestled with this great Catholic dilemma in the entirety of his adult life. In a letter to his son Christopher, he wrote that a soul has free will, but "God is (so to speak) also behind us, supporting [and] nourishing us." Specifically, Tolkien noted, God supports each of us individually through a guardian angel. "Faith is an act of will," Tolkien wrote to his son Michael, but quickly added that will is "inspired by love." Additionally, Tolkien wrote, "faith is not a single moment of final decision: it is a permanent indefinitely repeated act."

next page... |  1 of 4

December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46