Jung, Campbell, Tolkien, and the Christian Moral Vision
Loup des Abeilles
This essay appeared on an old hard drive. I wrote it some 20 years ago as I struggled to find my way back to Christian faith after having abandoned it. Perhaps you will find it meaningful. As I re-read it, I feel again the great passion and agony that animated me at that time.
I begin with two questions before me: “What was the nature of what spoke to me so deeply in Tolkien?” and “To what in me did it speak?” I hoped to begin an approach to these questions by getting some theoretical bearings from Jung’s Two Essays on Analytical Psychology and Campbell’s Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. In the end, I found the approaches of these works profoundly unsatisfying but very revealing. Over the past several years, during the course of my alienation from Orthodox Christianity, I found myself drawn again and again to various forms of animism and neo-paganism. What I thought I was seeking in them was a sense of the proper life of the world, which I felt was arrogated in classical Christian theism to God alone; this theology I felt as denying the life of the world, ultimately as denying my own life. I wanted to reclaim a sense of the reality of contingent things in the face of “the absolute,” and the life-sense of pagan religion, which saw the world as full of gods, the spirits of ancestors and the spirits of place, seemed to be a living example of such a sensibility. I wondered if it might be possible to wed Christianity with this pagan sensibility, to have a living God and a living world — a God whose absolute being did not crush or occlude the lives of finite beings and their significance, or deny the genuine freedom of the world in its creativity. But I think that in this desire, I tipped the scales against God, and reading Jung and Campbell has, negatively so to speak, helped me to redress that imbalance. Furthermore, returning to Tolkien, the childhood source (or so I imagined) of my sensitivity to a pagan sensibility, I have found that Tolkien is no pagan, or rather, that he shows perhaps why certain European peoples were so quick to receive Christianity as their own (Shippey 154). In fact, I begin to think that if there were elements of paganism which inclined towards the reception of Christianity, it was Tolkien in my own case who early planted the seeds of Christian faith through his superficially non-Christian mythology. Where I thought to explore the roots of paganism and discover the sources of its appeal, I have rediscovered instead why I have found in Christianity a truth that has spoken so deeply to my heart.
I will begin by offering the comments and criticisms which came to me as I read these works of Jung and Campbell. I am well aware that these comments are tentative and based on insufficient evidence. Nevertheless they serve to express something of my own inward conversation as I have struggled through the issues they raise.
I. Some comments on Jung’s Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Jung’s writing, at least in this relatively early work, is diffuse and difficult, and he frequently touches on central subjects by means of pathological case-studies which are of no direct interest to me (a great deal he has to say about transference seems of little theoretical relevance). For Jung, individuation is the process of “coming to selfhood” (171). The self is the totality of conscious and unconscious (“conscious and unconscious… complement one another to form a totality, which is the self… the self is a quantity that is superordinate to the conscious ego” [Jung 175]). He conceives of the archetypes essentially as the heritage of the evolution of the human being and of the human mind, and of libido as psychic energy, the source of which is the unconscious (Jung 165). Overall, I have the impression of the collective unconscious as a vast, impersonal, energy-filled realm up from which flow energy and motivation for life (I deliberately say “impersonal” rather than “transpersonal,” because I do not have any sense of a way in which the “transpersonal” might be “superpersonal” rather than “impersonal,” i.e., “subpersonal”). In a way this parallels the sense of the body: a collection of processes, evolved over the course of eons, which act as the substructure of consciousness.
But the crux of the matter is this: the unconscious, like the body itself, is amoral: it is raw material with which to construct a life. It is both good and evil. My body processes permit the storage of energy, but to what end? I eat, and I can use the resultant energy to comfort a child or to beat him. Likewise with the energies arising from the collective unconscious; likewise with the archetypes themselves. What is the criterion by which we judge? We can’t simply say that the criterion is the harmony of conscious and unconscious; one must have the upper hand; one must be the directing, ruling power; or rather, if the “self” is “superordinate to the conscious ego,” by what process, by what criterion, does it judge? And does anything judge it? The whole conception simply sidesteps the unavoidable question of ethics. If the “self” at which we are aiming is not the conscious ego, which can see and apply ethical criteria, but some “larger self” which includes the unconscious, then who or what in the end decides for good or evil? He says that “identity with the collective psyche always brings with it a feeling of universal validity” (Jung 149), which he criticizes strongly: in fact, he specifically criticizes the taking of the “conclusions of Jewish psychology as generally valid” (Jung 149). One wonders just exactly what “Jewish psychology” is. Does he mean, for example, the ethos of the Hebrew prophets, in which (as far as I can see) the genuine worth of the human person in his inward integrity, and a right to the respect of that integrity rooted in divine mercy and righteousness, is expressed for the first time in human history? Does he mean to challenge, to relativize these “conclusions of Jewish psychology”? By what authority does he do so — by tribal instinct? With what would he replace them? Presumably with the conclusions of an “Aryan” psychology? The whole thing, frankly, makes me shudder, and this passage remained in the book even after postwar revisions!
What about the self-evidence of moral norms, such as (for example) that torture and murder of innocents is reprehensible? Is that not a valid feeling of “universal validity,” a perception of universal moral truth akin to our perception of universal truths of mathematics? He suggests that this idea of “universal validity” crushes the individual, who must have freedom (Jung 150-151), and this immediately after the passage cited above which reproves the universalizing of the conclusions of “Jewish psychology.” What sort of freedom is he calling for, and freedom to do what? Is it not possible that freedom ultimately rests on genuinely universal truths, without which it is merely blind and destructive — in fact not free at all? He does not shy away from drawing wide-ranging conclusions and making perceptive comments about all sorts of social and religious phenomena far beyond the arena of pathology which in a sense is the book’s proper focus. However, it strikes me that his psychology, when it ventures out into those larger realms, is less psychology than philosophy; and it is not clear philosophy, but fragmentary and confused philosophy, which fails precisely because it takes on the task of philosophy while rejecting its tools. He refers on several occasions to the “impersonal religious problem” (Jung 180), and says that “the universal problem of evil and sin is another aspect of our impersonal relations with the world” (Jung 179). I do not understand what he might mean here by “impersonal.” In an instructive example, he describes a patient’s dream of black and white magicians, commenting that “the dream stresses the relativity of good and evil in a way that immediately calls to mind the Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang” (Jung 180). He then goes to say that “For a moral man, the ethical problem is a passionate question which has its roots in the deepest instinctual processes as well as in his most idealistic aspirations… the answer likewise springs from the depths of his nature” (Jung 181), and praises the “singularly apt, plastic configuration of thought [which] is the prerogative of that primitive, natural spirit which is alive in all of us and is only obscured by a one-sided, conscious development” (Jung 180-181). What do I take away from all this? The assertion that wisdom is found in the depths of the unconscious; that this wisdom is primitive and natural, in contrast to the wisdom of rational and moral reflection (“one-sided conscious development”); and that this wisdom is superior to the Judeo-Christian moral and metaphysical vision (“Jewish psychology”) in that it accepts the relativity of good and evil. The question arises again: granted that the collective unconscious is both good and evil — that is comprised of energies and structures which can turn in either direction — then how are we to know what we must do? Who is the agent directing these powers, to what end, for what reason? Are we really ready to admit the relativity of good and evil as a superior wisdom? Particularly, what does it mean that this was written in the milieu in which the Shoah came to pass? Shouldn’t that historical experience forever put an end to this titillating dalliance with the notion of the relativity of good and evil? It is quite possible that Jung’s psychology might shed light on the process which permitted the Shoah to occur; but that it should hedge on the issue of good and evil seems monstrous to me.
Part of the appeal of Tolkien’s world for me was precisely that it rendered good and evil in such plain and distinct forms. There are goblins and there are elves, and seeing their character so clearly renders them saturated with meaning. Even in the more nuanced parts of the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings which treat the corruption of the good so powerfully (for example, the effect that the Ring has on those who bear it), there is no sense of confusion: the good is being corrupted when the person bows to base desires and motivations, to the desire for a power and pleasure enjoyed to the exclusion of, rather than in communion with, others (this is evident in the very beginning of Ainulindalë, when Melkor becomes corrupted in seeking alone for the Flame Imperishable, although it is to be found only with Ilúvatar). When I remember the whole pathos of The Lord of the Rings, it is unthinkable to me that there should be any blurring there of the distinction between good and evil. Even Tom Bombadil, who most represents the primitive, elemental, natural spirit, is a servant of the good. For Jung, the archetypal world is one in which good and evil appear in greater relativism; for Tolkien, they appear in greater contrast. This perception of good and evil is very deeply based on “Jewish psychology,” it seems to me. And yet Tolkien is the modern mythographer par excellence. Perhaps his moral vision rules and gives form to the unconscious as it “creates an image that answers to the conscious situation…[with] an artistic vision” (Jung 181). And this might well be the source of his genius and his power. Traditional Christianity had become moribund, threatened by the theological ambivalence of scientific naturalism and historical criticism of sacred texts, creeds, and rites. But the needs those traditional forms had satisfied were still present, so Tolkien was able to use the images thrown up by the collective unconscious to re-invigorate the Judeo-Christian vision, to breathe new life into it: perhaps by re-binding its deepest intuitions and desires to perennial realities of the human soul. Perhaps it was from Tolkien that I learned first, and so deeply that I carry it ineradicably to this day, not call good evil, or evil good. His elaborate secondary world became the place where I could experience these realities, and so of course, as a child, I “wanted to go there” (a sentiment I have heard echoed by countless Tolkien devotees). In this sense, Jung is correct: the images of the collective unconscious are redolent of life, in a way in which the rational constructs of theology and philosophy are not. Or rather, they permit us to carry a life-sense which feels the genuine meaning of theology and philosophy. On the one hand, there is Tolkien, on the other hand, the Nazi occultists and sycophants of Aryan heathenism. How is the choice made as to which use the powers and structures of the unconscious will be put? Tolkien might thus represent a new baptism of the collective unconscious, and I am conscious as I write this that the power of this baptism comes not from within, but from above, as I am conscious in every moment of moral strength. And I am left with the same impression I have from the process view of creation: of God’s lure bringing order out of chaos — not annihilating the chaos, but enlightening it (as Lewis talked about animals being more themselves when domesticated, not less); in this case, the chaos not of the primeval world, but of the psyche.
Jung proposes the notion of the persona as a sort of “false individual,” an individual constructed out of impersonal elements (“the compromise role in which we parade before the community” [Jung 156]), and suggests a “true” individual underlying it, the revelation of which is our aim (Jung 175). But what is the nature of that “true self”? His ontology of the person here (inasmuch as I can discern one) seems to me to fall short of the whole philosophical tradition which arose on the basis of the Trinitarian and Christological controversies - in which, interestingly, the Greek term πρόσωπον was put aside in favor of ὑπόστασις, and in which the personal achieved decisive ascendancy over the essential (at least in the Trinitarian theology of the Christian east). In what I have read Jung has not clearly expressed his thoughts about the relation between the self and the collective unconscious, or expressed clearly what he thinks the self is.
He also sidesteps the question of the ontological status of the archetypes. Are they real, one wants to know? Jung talks about “cases where… a ‘saving’ thought, a vision, an ‘inner voice,’ [comes] with irresistible power of conviction” (161). Comes from where? From the unconscious. Is it so, then, that these voices and visions come invariably from within us, and not from beyond us (I am not comfortable with a facile conflation of the two)? It is hard to tell whether he is proposing the archetypes simply as a way of speaking about these realities that a “modern” man might accept and therefore be able to relate constructively to (Jung 97), or if he is suggesting that his view is in fact more advanced and scientific than that of the savages who did not regard gods and demons as mere “psychic projections” (Jung 92) (elsewhere he refers to the “error of judgment which leads [the primitive man] unthinkingly to assume that the spirits are realities of the external world” [Jung 184]). Often he vacillates between these two positions in the course of a single page. Postmodern that I am, I am not so sanguine about denying the objective, extrapsychic reality of angels and demons. Jung criticizes Freud and Adler for their reductionism, but doesn’t he fall into the same trap in his psychicalization of religious phenomena?
On the other hand, there are things which commend themselves to me. I am left with the sense of a tripartite world: just as in traditional shamanic cosmology, there is the underworld, the overworld, and middle-earth, so here we have the underworld of the unconscious, the overworld of the rational, moral ego, and the middle-earth of daily life, in which these disparate realities come into contact and conflict and seek some uneasy harmony. Likewise, life comes from below; just as psychic energy comes from the unconscious, the “lust” of life comes from below in an amoral rush. Crush it, and your life is drained of vitality; give it free reign, and your life crumbles into chaos. How should it be restrained? Can it be channeled, and yet its autonomy be respected? How does one seek it, to enliven one’s life; and how does one discover the principles according to which it must be mastered? How does one master it, and yet attend to it at the same time? But as far as I can see, there is no escaping the moral and rational discrimination of the conscious ego in this case. There is also a benefit, I think, in appreciating the depth of the evolutionary process from a psychic as well as a physical perspective; in other words, to acknowledge that just as our bodies have an eons-long evolutionary history, so do our souls, if you will, which are rooted in the psychic history of humanity. This is fully consonant with the process metaphysic which is my basic world-picture for now. But nevertheless, we are left with the same issue. Our bodies, with all their ambivalence, complexity, euphoria, reluctance, glory, recalcitrance, and infirmity, are the raw material from which to coax the joy of our life; and the same is true of the collective unconscious. To be respected as a product of the autonomy of the process of universal evolution, but not to be bowed down to — to be mastered in the name of a creativity which consciously strives to serve the good. In other words, I can take away the concept of the collective unconscious and the archetypes, while rejecting the psychologizing and ethical relativism which accompanies them in Jung’s exposition.
II. Some comments on Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology
Campbell, even more than Jung, deals harshly with the reductionism of Freud, going so far as to call psychoanalysis a “cult” (464) — albeit in a technical, and not a pejorative, sense. Yet ultimately, he also exhibits a species of reductionism; and although he tries to temper it with another, “transcendent” or “mystical” point of view, this latter appears plainly (to this student of religions at least) to be derived from the consensus of the philosophia perennis — i.e., ultimately a covert form of advaita vedanta, which is insensitive and antithetical to the personalist religious and mystical ethos and insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He approvingly quotes Sri Ramakrishna on the “ultimate unity of all religions” (Campbell 463) and then comments:
The names of Shiva, Allah, Buddha, and Christ lose their historical force and come together as adequate pointers of a way (mārga) that all must go who would transcend their time-bound, earth-bound faculties and limitations. (Campbell 484)
From the perspective of one who has very consciously placed a particular, and great, value on the figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the whole complex of moral and metaphysical doctrine associated with the community constellated under his formative influence, I cannot help but feel the total inadequacy of Campbell’s analysis. Can the names of all gods can really be thought to “come together” when one compares Christ with the deities of the sacrificial and cannibalistic rites Campbell discusses at length in part two? He makes a superficial attempt to do so: “Something of the sort can be felt in the Christian myth of the killed, buried, resurrected, and eaten Jesus, whose mystery is the ritual of the altar and communion rail” (Campbell 182). I have difficulty in expressing the extreme violence that such reductionism does to the Jewish background and Christian meaning of the Last Supper and its commemoration. While Campbell would have it that the historicity of myth and rite is a mere tool for socialization (462), this myth and this rite above all demonstrate that such an attempt to relativize history results in a grotesque and vacuous caricature. Christ’s mystery is not the “ritual of the altar and communion rail.” Where that ever became the case, it was a pagan declension from the primitive kerygma. Christ’s mystery is expressed by Jesus in what the majority of scholars regard as his ipsissima vox: his addressing God as Abba, with the tender intimacy of a child (Jeremias 9 ff). From this flows the central Christian ethos: “God is love… if we love one another, he himself dwells in us…” (I John 4:8, 12). Is this God, who establishes genuinely free persons in a communion of love with one another and with himself, to be equated with the dying and rising gods whom Campbell frankly avers to be mythical expressions of the human vision of the lives of plants (177)?
For this is his central, reductionist insight. Humans see that their nourishment implies the death of other beings; this gives rise to the myths of the early Neolithic planters (Campbell 177). Humans are pressed by the chaos and social strife of their growing settlements, and this gives rise to the myths of sacral kingship of the hieratic city states (Campbell 178). The specific forms that these myths take are the result of innate biological formations:
The science of comparative mythology is, then, a comparative study of upādhis: the deceptive attributes of being, through which the human mind, in the various eras and areas of its domain, has been united with the secret cause of tragic terror, and with the human sufferer (the self being stripped away) in tragic pity. (Campbell 55)
Whether these upādhis are inborn traits or primal experiences of all human beings, or specific historical and cultural artifacts, is ultimately of no consequence. They provide the palette, so to speak, for human expression in myth and rite of the mystery it perceives in cosmic life. So here, both the form and content of myth and rite are reduced to human perception of plants, animals, and society, expressed in the language put at our disposal by the vicissitudes of evolutionary biology, geography, and history.
Campbell does allow another opening, an escape route from this reductionism, and that is the way of mysticism or transcendence. But does his transcendence really transcend, or it does it not rather descend? The first hint is present already in the quotation above: “the self being stripped away…” In introducing a passage from the Christian mystic Gertrude of Helfta, he says: “In all mystical effort the great goal is the dissolution of the dewdrop of the self in the ocean of the All: the stripping of self and the beholding of the Face” (Campbell 82). But Christianity stands implacably opposed to this facile concept of dissolution; Christ says, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 25:15), and “I have come that they may have life, and may have it in all its fullness” (John 10:10). The goal of Christian life is not the dissolution of the self, but its discovery; not dissolution into the other, but communion with the other; not the oblivion of mystic transport, but love, and concretely expressed (i.e., incarnate) love at that. Where there is only one, there is no communion, and no love; hence the Christian insistence on the dogma of the Trinity, which portrays even the abyss of the primordial ground of the universe not as a solitary cause, but as an everlasting communion of love. If “the self” is stripped, there is no “Face” (ὑπόστασις), there is only a mask (πρόσωπον, persona). The portrayal of myth, rite, religion, history, culture, and even mysticism which Campbell gives is at root impersonal, while Christianity is at root personal, and incapable of being subsumed by his reduction.
And Campbell has an apparent conviction that the ultimate reality underlying the phenomenal world is indeed impersonal:
…this infantile notion… of a world governed rather by moral than by physical laws, kept under control by a super-ordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men’s thoughts in most parts of the world… to the very present. (Campbell 81)
Most charitably I would assess Campbell here as somewhat lacking in theological literacy. If he believes that all theists are “infantile,” he would have done well to learn that there are many with great philosophical acumen and human insight (perhaps he respects such Christian figures as Nicholas of Cusa, of whom he speaks approvingly (Campbell 51), because he reads them in accordance with his own impersonalist bent, or perhaps he seeks out Christian thinkers, and passages in their literature, who do not represent Christian personalism clearly). If he further believes that he is the first to encounter the apparent caesura between a genuinely personalist theism and scientific naturalism, or that his own efforts have exhausted all possibilities for bridging that gap, he is guilty of an unaccountable hubris (and would have done well to read Whitehead). And if he means to assert as an incontrovertible empirical fact that there is no personal God concerned for human weal, and that there is no moral reality independent of the exigencies of a dharma constructed by men to ensure social stability, then I would reply drily that more than his assertion is necessary to convince me!
I certainly accept, and find convincing, his exposition of the origin of the mythological and ritual cultures of the world, but I do not accept the truth of the universal world-view he claims to find in their roots (a world-view strangely consonant, by the way, with his own late-modern atheist proclivities). What I see are insights set in a perennial field of human pain and tragedy, giving rise to ritual paroxysms of ecstasy and murder. But what I also see is that in this ocean of blood and tears, another insight arose, basically incompatible with the first, in the nascent personalistic monotheism (henotheism, at first) of the Jews. And contemplating Campbell’s vivid picture of the heathen city-states which surrounded them, I am little surprised at the jealous boundaries the Jews sought to erect between themselves and their neighbors, nor at their claim to be the chosen bearers of a unique revelation.
“One of the chief problems,” he writes, “…is that of becoming reconciled… to the monstrosity of the just-so world,” i.e., the brutal fact of life’s foundation in killing (Campbell 181):
In the primitive ritual… sudden, monstrous death… becomes therewith a revelation of the inhumanity of the order of the universe… a god-willed monstrosity in being, and retaining its form of being only because a divinity… is actualizing itself in the entire display. (Campbell 181)
But is it possible to interpret this perceived brutal fact only as divinely-willed? On the contrary, Jewish myth and religious thought certainly perceived the brutal fact, but perceived it not as divinely-willed, but deriving from a primordial perversity of human freedom. He writes:
The sense of it all – or rather, nonsense of it all – is to be made evident forever in the festivals and monstrous customs of the community itself; but it is evident also – and forever – in every part and moment of the universe, for those who have been taught by way of the rites to see and to know the world as it truly is. (Campbell 183)
“As it truly is” – on the basis of Campbell’s own comments, many of which have been cited above, I have to believe that he concurs with this assessment – that what he is offering is an appreciation of the wisdom expressed in the most horrific rites of human history, which express an impersonal ethos with utmost brutality, of cannibalism and human sacrifice. And yet he fails to consider another wisdom – a wisdom which does not see implacable impersonal forces alone governing the course of cosmic and human life; a wisdom which does not accept the “nonsense of it all” or seek consolation in the extinction of the human person. Somehow, in the midst of all the same experiences of death, loss, and suffering, this other wisdom also came to be (and as the Hebrew scriptures bear abundant witness, the ancient Jews were not unacquainted with rites of human sacrifice). Is it not worthy of being heard? Should it be dismissed as a “more sensitive, humanized, and humanistic [response] of revulsion” in comparison with the vision of the world’s brute “nonsense” (Campbell 180)? I feel the poignance of the loss of this vision most strongly when he writes:
…when the will of the individual to his own immortality has been extinguished – as it is in rites such as these – through an effective realization of the immortality of being itself and of its play through all things, he is united with that being… in a stunning crisis of release from the psychology of guilt and mortality. (Campbell 180-181)
So, then, when I look in my son’s eyes, and contemplate with a father’s love the inevitability of his death, and the fragility of his life, I should be content to know the “immortality of being itself” – as if it would console me to see roses growing on his grave? What of his person, when that person is known in the communion of love as incommensurable with all things, as unique, irreplaceable, infinitely precious? Indeed, there must be some bliss in that “release from mortality and guilt” – a bliss purchased at the price of a vision of genuine human life. The author of the letter to the Hebrews writes: “Since the children share in flesh and blood, he too shared in them, so that by dying he might… liberate those who all their life had been in servitude through fear of death” (Hebrews 2:15). If we wish to take our own experiences as clues to the depths of things, why not take our love as such a clue, and not just the “brute facts”? Then perhaps we would hear the message that “we love because [God] loved us first” (I John 4:19) with what Tolkien calls the “sudden joyous ‘turn’” of a fairy-story, which “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (Tolkien 68).
Here, it seems to me, are the true vestigia Dei.
III. Some notes on Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories”
When I turned to Tolkien himself, I first re-read the opening portions of The Silmarillion, which portray the creation of the world, the nature of the semi-divine beings who shape and inhabit it, and the fall of the greatest of them, Melkor (Tolkien’s Satan). Tolkien has here linked a single creator-god, “Eru, the One, whom the Elves call Ilúvatar,” with the pantheon of the “Ainur,” very directly inspired by the Norse gods, although thoroughly revised to “bring them up to our own grade of assessment,” (qtd. in Burns 163) as Tolkien once commented. Primarily this meant concentrating their negative attributes in the single character of Melkor, and cleaning up the violence and sexuality which characterized many of the Norse gods; the Ainur are distinctly angelic deities. Marjorie Burns comments:
It is the Ainur whose music begins the world, but it is Ilúvatar who gives vision to their song, so that we seem to have two sets of divine rule, two coexisting versions of a godhead, both of which are needed to bring the world into being. (Burns 176)
I would go so far as to say that, since the Ainur represent obvious elemental characteristics of the world, and have particular affinities for its various processes and realities, what they represent is in fact the world’s autonomy vis-à-vis its creator-god; its realization of the beauty portrayed in the music which gave it birth is accomplished not by divine fiat, but by the struggles of the Ainur and of Elves, Men, and Dwarves. In other words, cosmogony is a matter of freedom, of dialogue between God and the world, and not a matter of the omnidetermination of divine providence. All of this seemed congenial to the theological outlook I had felt growing in myself during the course of my disillusionment with classical theism (the theism which brooks no rivals for God in the creation and providential guidance of the world, and is thus, among other things, incapable of a coherent theodicy).
But all this now seemed irrelevant to my task at hand, which was to begin to understand why Tolkien appealed to me, and what in me he was appealing to, and I had already begun to suspect strongly that the answer to these questions did not lie in the region of Tolkien’s hybrid monotheism. I had as a child no theological preoccupation with the autonomy of the created world. Something else drew me. Since reading Jung and Campbell had dissatisfied me, I thought I would turn to Tolkien himself, and ask him what he had intended to achieve in writing his stories.
In “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien does not speak of myth, but of the fairy-story. He is distinctly wary and critical of theoretical mythographers and anthropologists, people whom he says are “using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested” (Tolkien 18). His interest falls not on the history of fairy-tales, but on their present effects:
I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them… when we have done all that research – collection and comparison of the tales of many lands – can do; when we have explained many of the elements commonly found embedded in fairy-stories… as relics of ancient customs once practiced in daily life, or of beliefs once held as beliefs and not as ‘fancies’ – there remains still a point too often forgotten: that is the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are” (Tolkien 19, 31).
I concur that in my own questions, Tolkien’s considerations strike immediately closer to what feels like the heart of the matter than speculations about the origins of myth in the depths of the psyche or in humankind’s perception of various facets of cosmic life. I am interested in what they said to me, and what they showed me of myself as one whom they could address.
So Tolkien undertakes to speak not of myth, but of the fairy-story, and of the way in which “they were meant to be used.” What then is a fairy-story? Not a story about fairies, but a story about “Faërie,” which is
the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted. (Tolkien 9)
Faërie, then, is an objective reality, accessible to human beings when they are “enchanted.” Tolkien stresses the genuine reality of Faërie again and again; it is decisively not a dream: “the primal desire at the heart of Faërie [is] the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder” (14, emphasis mine).
Tolkien asserts that “The magic of Faërie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires” (13). We seek entrance into this realm because of the satisfaction of human desires there. And entrance is available to us through “enchantment,” which occurs through the use of fantasy and through the inherent powers of imagination and language.
The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval… how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. (Tolkien 21-22)
Fantasy is our approach to the enchantment which opens the gates of Faërie to us: “To the Elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires, and when it is successful of all forms of human art most nearly approaches” (Tolkien 53). Fantasy is rational; it is based “on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it” (Tolkien 55). It is the play of imagination in the act of sub-creation, the act of opening a “secondary world.” So paradoxically, it is through imagination that the objective reality of the enchanted realm is opened to human beings. This rings true to my childhood experience; I always “knew” that Tolkien’s secondary world was “real.” I felt this very keenly in reading (and now re-reading) his short tale The Smith of Wootton Major, concerning a young man granted a magical star on his brow which allowed him entrance to Faërie. I felt that Tolkien had given me such a star.
The result of a sojourn in Faërie in an enchanted state is Tolkien says, “the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires” (13). These desires he identifies as recovery, escape, and consolation. By recovery he means a renewed vision of things in their clarity, “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity – from possessiveness” (Tolkien 57).
Creative fantasy… may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you… It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron… (Tolkien 58-59)
And we ache with desire for this enchantment and these wonders:
But the land of Merlin and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable… I desired dragons with a profound desire. (Tolkien 41)
I desired them as well, because I desired that the things of my life be charged with a sense of wonder and beauty. Tolkien showed me these things through opening the gates of Faërie to me. What I lost by falling away from the fantasy of my childhood, I regained in another, supremely powerful fairy-story later in life.
Another of the primal purposes of the fairy-tale for Tolkien is escape. He feels constrained to defend the notion of escape against critics, primarily by pointing out the circumstances under which escape is a laudable and rational endeavor. Why, he asks,
should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. (Tolkien 60)
Tolkien’s own sense of the rationality of escape was based in his somewhat mild-mannered Luddism and rejection of the mechanization of rural English life which he witnessed during his own childhood; and on the crushing experience of the Great War, in which he lost almost all his boyhood friends, and during which he began the composition of his earliest tales. And of course, Tolkien was an escape for me as well: an escape from the responsibilities of childhood schoolwork, an escape from the family stresses of my divorced (but fortunately amiable) parents, an escape to a realm of sharp and evident meaning, of clear distinction between good and evil, and of clear purpose. Perhaps in Faërie there is also an escape from Jung’s persona and its conformity to social expectation. And perhaps in my perception of priestly vocation there was more than a hope that that life would permit me to dwell permanently in such a realm of freedom.
But the final and decisive purpose of the fairy-story is consolation, and here is where it provides what Jung and Campbell cannot provide me. Tolkien refers to what he calls eucatastrophe, the opposite of tragedy; the
sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale)… a sudden and miraculous grace …[in which] we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through. (68-70).
And that gleam came through for me in everything of Tolkien’s that I read, giving me an obscure vision of the then unknown joy which I was to meet later in the story of Jesus of Nazareth.
If “a gleam [comes] through,” the question remains as to where it is coming from. On the other side of the myth for Jung is the darkness and moral ambivalence of an impersonal collective unconscious. On the other side of the myth for Campbell is our acquiescence to the agony of cosmic life and our dissolution in the impersonal All. Neither of these could I fairly describe as a “gleam,” nor do I recognize in them the “gleam” with which Tolkien enchanted my childhood. Tolkien writes, “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.” (70-71). The underlying reality or truth revealed to me as a child in the joy of Tolkien’s fantasy was a glorious truth, not a terrible truth, the vivid presence of evil in his tales notwithstanding. To this day, as I reflect on it, in spite of my various dogmatic dissatisfactions with classical expressions of Christianity, I remain immovably convinced that the ultimate truth about the world and human life is indeed glorious, and not terrible – not a god-willed inhumanity and monstrosity, nor a realm beyond good and evil in the atavistic depths of the psyche. This, more than anything else, was what spoke to me in Tolkien’s miraculous modern manifestation of the power of the traditional fairy-tale, and I think he spoke to the noble pagan in me: he spoke to that hope of joy. The true fairy-story served for me as a little “evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world” (Tolkien 68). This little evangelium opened my heart to receive later the great Evangelium, which Tolkien says “has not abrogated legends, [but] hallowed them” (Tolkien 73). By attuning me to the desire for recovery, for escape, and for consolation, Tolkien prepared me to hear the Gospel, in which these themes receive their supreme expression – precisely because the Gospel is addressed to the person; offers a world in which the personal is ascendant over all the impersonal forces which crush it; and promises the ultimate consolation of triumph over death.
Works Cited
Burns, Marjorie. “Norse and Christian Gods: The Integrative Theology of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. Ed. Jane Chance. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 163-178.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Jeremias, Joachim. The Central Message of the New Testament. London: SCM Press Ltd, 1965.
Jung, C.G. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953.
Shippey, Tom. “Tolkien and the Appeal of the Pagan: Edda and Kalevala.” Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. Ed. Jane Chance. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 145-161.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” Tree and Leaf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965. 3-