'The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy'

[Child of the 7th Age]

I am stepping into this discussion as an outsider. As I read over a goodly chunk of the thread, several thoughts came to mind.

First, I think folk are trying to come up with a single, magic, controlling key to explain behavior, which simply does not exist.

Some sort of religious belief is the only thing that would compel everyone, without exception, to behave morally.

There are a thousand different reasons why a person might choose to follow a path which he or she deemed to be "moral." Religious belief is certainly one possible reason to compel a person in a moral direction but it is not the only one. There are people out there who do not hold any formal religious beliefs or even a belief in the existence of God but who feel compelled to act in a decent way towards their fellow human beings, who put themselves out again and again to help others. There are people who act morally because they are afraid of the consequences that might occur if they behave in a different fashion. Such individuals may be motivated by the law set down by the state or by religion itself -- the belief or fear that retribution could be forthcoming. And there are saints among us who can see beyond the mundane and truly glimpse a vision of a universe grounded in morality. That vision may be based on the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man, or some combination of both... But, whatever it is, they see and understand more than I could ever do.

My basic point is this. The world contains such amazing variation in people, cultures and belief structures, religious and otherwise, that one can't jam everything into a single explanation. The one thing I will say with certainty is that whatever Creator brought this universe into existence, he or she must have loved diversity and complexity. We were all given brains and each of us thinks a little differently. The Creator did not turn us out on a one-size-fits all model, and I would therefore argue that a one-size fits all approach to morality just doesn't work.

You run into similar problems when you get into discussions of religion and immoral behavior. You can judge a movement-- any -- movement on the basis of its beliefs or you can judge it on its results.

If you look at core beliefs in terms of morality, then you would not find a great deal to criticize harshly in the major relgions of the world. (Yes, I'm sure you could debate this or that, but we're talking real evil, and that's not there.) But if you were to look at actual behavior or results, then it is quite a different story.

But where does that evil come from? The movement itself or the individual souls of the people who make up that movement. And I would say it is the latter. Whatever institution you look at -- the home, the school, the government--you can find instances of the "dark side." A religious movement or organization is no exception. And it would be possible to make a list of individual and mass atrocities which grew out of institutions and beliefs that had nothing to do with religion. We can put the word "nationalism" at the top of that list and go on from there.

The interesting thing is to take a close look at Middle-earth itself and see if the basic idea holds -- that of religious belief compelling morality. And the answer there is absolutely no. Tolkien has depicted characters who are deeply moral, but who do not act out of a religious impulse.

Those who've read my posts from way back when know I love to look at Tolkien's Catholicism and see how it influenced his writing. But having said that, I would also argue this: Arda in the Third Age was a world in which religious belief per se was virtually absent. Eru is a very distant figure whom only a few folk know about, at least in any formal sense. Yes, there are the Elves... But how many were there? They kept to themselves and did not go around telling people about their stories. It took a little rotund hobbit named Bilbo Baggins to decide to translate the tales into Westron!

A few men like Faramir still preserved some of the religious customs of Numenor, but this was not the norm. Most of the Men of Middle-earth had no idea who Eru even was. As Tolkien states in his Letters:

There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World, and only directly accessible to the Valar or Rulers."

And hobbit culture is among the most "secular" that I have ever seen. If Frodo was extraordinary, it was because he seemed to instinctively grasp truths (which might be labelled 'spiritual') that had never actually been revealed to him. He was unusual in this regard. Yet, despite their total lack of formal beliefs, the hobbits as a whole were basically a moral people. (Alright, I know there were a few exceptions like the Sackville-Baggins family, but hobbit "sins" are really rather small!)

T.A. Shippey has some interesting things to say about all this---how Tolkien used LotR to study how Man clung to morality and stayed the course despite all the forces pushing him towards darkness and despair. And this was at a time when Man had not been given the slightest revelation of what lay beyond.

Tolkien did not feel that religious beliefs were the only reason to compel a person to act morally. His book carries a different message. Even in a world where Eru is a distant figure glimpsed only through an occasional providential act, Man is expected to act in a moral fashion and not to give in. There are no acceptable excuses for not doing so-- belief or no belief. Certainly, there are times when man will fail -- Frodo and the Ring is a case in point -- but, as Tolkien states in his Letters:

He [i.e. Frodo] was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do.

It would have been easy for Frodo to say "no" to the Ring quest at several points in the story, but he chose to go on. Tolkien doesn't say a lot about why Frodo and the other characters choose to follow such a moral road. But we do get glimpses -- things like friendship, a way of life in harmony with the earth, and the feeling that some things are simply worth fighting for. I can't help feeling that he was telling us that there is a still, small voice in each of our hearts that, despite the pull to evil, tells us the track we should be on, if only we would listen to it.

[ October 29, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]