Tolkien and Therese

5 minutes

I’ve read The Lord of the Rings ten times. Each time I’m struck by some new layer of meaning. Tolkien was a great scholar of languages, and it’s not surprising that an imagination so trained would produce something complex and multi-faceted. Yet LOTR is also a work of deep Christian mysticism. 

Some years ago, during a recent reading of the Trilogy, I came across a passage from the chapter “Many Meetings” in The Fellowship of the Ring. The setting is Rivendell, where Gandalf is looking in on Frodo just after his wounding on Weathertop and his flight the ford: 

Gandalf moved his chair to the bedside, and took a good look at Frodo. The colour had come back to his face, and his eyes were clear, and fully awake and aware. He was smiling, and there seemed to be little wrong with him. But to the wizard’s eye there was a faint change, just a hint as it were of transparency, about him, and especially about the left hand that lay outside the coverlet. 

‘Still that must be expected,’ said Gandalf to himself. ‘He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.’ [Emphasis mine.]

It’s the sort of passage that one’s own eyes glaze over on the first, second, third, and even fourth reading. A bit of descriptive filler before the next plot movement. I’d certainly never heard of anyone making anything of it. But when I really saw this passage, it struck me so forcefully that I wondered if I’d actually read these words before. For here was a glimpse into the hidden logic of nature, grace, sin, and sanctification that only a man of deep prayer could have written, and which only a little soul could have received. To me the passage spoke of the same truth that I’d been discovering in the writings of St. Therese of Lisieux.

I did not know St. Therese during my earlier readings of LOTR. There was a long gap between what, if memory serves, were my eighth and ninth readings. A rough patch in my life, a re-conversion, and a crisis of hope when I came to see I was powerless on my own to do the good that I willed, lay between those earlier readings and this one. Like Peter, or the young Frodo (who wished that Bilbo had simply stabbed the vile Gollum,) the younger me “girded himself and walked where he would.” He did, that is, until he put the Ring on his finger on Weathertop, and felt the sting of a cold blade. The soul is made of something, and when it is harmed, it is changed. 

For me, the path to sanctity could not be the steady, stepwise tramp up the ever-rising mountain. I would have to go under, or through. I found Therese in an hour when I needed her most, when I understood the desperate necessity of becoming a little child. Against the treachery in us and in the world only hobbits, not eagle-eyed wizards or warriors, can triumph. Such littleness of being was the one thing that might have saved Gollum, had he been able to accept it. It was the thing that allowed Frodo as far up Mt. Doom as he got, before his wounded nature cracked, and only the logic of Providence rescued him. 

But that littleness is also the destiny of every hero, even of the strong. Every would-be saint must learn before the end that he cannot carry the Ring that he must carry, nor deserve the Havens where alone his soul can rest. The deeply wounded sometimes learn it better – because they have no other choice. 

The wounded are little. Whether by design or by sin, their own faults or someone else’s, their legs are off at the knees. Down there, closer to the dirt, it becomes possible to learn that all of our virtues and merits are gifts. And if this is so, then it is better and more freeing to be dependent on the Light Itself, than on the dim light one can muster. Compared to God, all are equally undeserving, and so can, through abandonment, equally be blessed and glorified beyond merit.  As St. Therese put it:

In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is blemished in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own justice and to receive from your love the eternal possession of yourself. [Emphasis added]

That's why I was so struck by the effects of Frodo’s wound, and by the possibilities that followed it. Because of Weathertop, the old path, the path of strength – so often a path of pride – was unavailable to him. Even if it was possible before Weathertop, it was not after. But Gandalf perceives that this very thinness of Frodo’s soul, so concerning in-and-of-itself, now makes it a better prism for that rare kind of light which alone can defeat the darkness. 

This is not to say that every hero should fail as Frodo failed, or be little in exactly the same ways that he is little. Certainly, each soul is different, and some heroes and saints are meant to fly like eagles. Goodness loves variety, and a fellowship of heroes with differing strengths makes for a much richer world; a better story. Yet we are living in evil times, and the old path over the mountain is not so accessible anymore. The stench of Mordor, its cold blades, its black fingers, have reached so far and have touched so many, that the situation would be hopeless, were there not another way. A secret way.

“I will seek out,” she writes, “a means of getting to Heaven by a little way—very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection.”

This secret path, which St. Therese discovered, and the logic of which Tolkien independently touched upon, is uniquely suited to modern man. To be modern is to have the knees of history cut out from under you. To be floating free, unmoored from many of the external supports that were the product of generational virtue. It is, in some ways, to stand almost naked before the Eye of Sauron. I don’t know exactly what that description of rootlessness means for you. I know what it means for me. It is a very common experience, this spiritual isolation. We are all of us enduring the effects of a cold, antiseptic maelstrom that lays us bare, and threatens to either pare us down, or else, in a reaction of mere stubborn will against it, to harden our hearts so that we don’t become like Gollum too. 

Yet the Good Thief found sanctity in the midst of his self-inflicted wounds, and stole heaven the same day. He found the thing that made him equal to St. Therese, that mystical logic by which the same wage is paid to eleventh hour workers as those who’ve labored all day in the hot sun. It is the truth that what we are – the we that we try so hard to cling to, to refine, to purify – is but a thin film through which the greater light shines. Only in that light can that film become solid. Whatever solidity is already there, or seems to be, is on loan. Because Frodo’s soul has been wounded by a blade of Mordor, it is in grave danger. Yet because the wound pared down that which must be pared down, he is all the more able – and the more desperate – to magnify that Light that alone can save him.

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