Boethian Meditation the Third

So since he who has control over good things can do all things, whereas those who control evil things cannot do everything, it is clear that those who can do evil things are less powerful.

The professor whom I am assisting in the course on Boethius neatly divides Boethius’s “evil beings” into three categories.  Some men are evil through ignorance, because they simply do not know what the good is, or because they are deceived.  Some are evil through weakness of the will, because they know what is good but they desire evil more than the good.  But some are evil through malice, and they do what is evil because they know it is evil.  They take delight in the harm they cause.

In the case of Tolkien’s characters, at least the ones who are tempted by and succumb to the Ring, the first two categories seem to merge.  Through weakness of will Isildur keeps the Ring on account of its beauty, and he is thereby deceived into thinking it harmless.  Through ignorance, Bilbo and Frodo keep and use the Ring for many years, and it wears away the strength of their wills to the point that Bilbo barely gives it up, and Frodo cannot do so at all, even though at the last he knows with perfect clarity how evil it is.  Gollum desires the beauty of the Ring from the beginning, and murders for it; he is then deceived into thinking that, with the Ring’s help, he can learn great secrets under the mountains.  In all such cases, the action of the Ring depends on deception and the weakness of its wearer’s will, and its result is not to increase the wearer’s power, but to drain it away.

But what of the beings who are evil for evil’s own sake?  In what sense are they powerless?  Here I think my two previous meditations pertain the most.  For it is of these evil men, and only of these evil men, that Boethius asserts that they simply do not exist.  He qualifies this, of course, by saying that such men do not exist as men—they exist as something less, as corpses exist.  But do what sorts of powers pertain to a corpse?

… All power is to be reckoned among desirable things, and all desirable things are related to the good as to the high point of their nature.  But the capacity to wreak evil cannot be related to the good, and so is not something to be desired.  Yet all power is desirable, so it is clear that capacity for evil is not a power.

As it is with the Ring, so it is with Sauron and all evil beings.  They possess no powers except temptation and deception, acting like parasites on the ignorance and weakness of other beings.  In cases where these other beings resist temptation and deceit, they sometimes have the power to destroy.  But Sauron and all his ilk are wholly powerless to create: they can only destroy what has already been created.  They are powerful in the sense that leeches are powerful, deriving their capacity to cause harm only from the constitution of their victims, and not from any real power radiating from their own beings.

You see kings seated high on lofty thrones,
In gleaming purple bright, fenced by grim arms,
Speechless with rage, threats on their louring brows.
Draw back this veil of arrogant, empty show,
Then see close chains which bind the lords within.
Lust with its poisonous greed excites their hearts;
Wild anger whips up storm-waves in their minds;
Grief plagues these captives, slippery hope torments.
The king you see by many lords possessed,
His aims frustrated, by harsh masters pressed.

Or, as Boethius writes in the following chapter:

True voices and true shapes were lost;
Bereft of human norms,
Their minds alone endured unchanged
To mourn their monstrous forms.

(Consolation of Philosophy, V.2 & 3)

 

Boethian Meditation the Second

“But evil men, you will say, have power.”

My second meditation on Boethius begins with his own objection.  Having pressed his claim that evil men do not exist, Boethius comes to the sticking point:  if evil men don’t exist, why are they so powerful?  This is neither more nor less than the problem we have with Sauron and the Nazgul.  If Tolkien really embraces the Boethian/Augustinian view that evil is nothing, why is it that his evil creatures can cause so much harm?

“I would not deny this myself, but their power stems not from their strength but from their weakness.”

What weakness is this?

“If, as we concluded a little earlier, evil is nothing, it is obvious that wicked men have no power, because they can perform only evil deeds.”

This is hard to swallow.

The thing is that you can’t criticize Boethius for not knowing how much harm an evil person can do.  You can’t bring the Holocaust or World War II against him.  As Boethius pens the lines above, he is witnessing the final collapse of Roman civilization while pining in the prison whither he has been sent after betrayal and disgrace by his fellow senators.  The wicked men he mentions will eventually put him to death—an eventuality that he already suspects.  So there is no telling him that he does not know what he is talking about when it comes to the power wielded by evil men.

But power, Boethius suggests, is always a power for something.  Now, what if you set about to get something you want, but it turns out that every power you thought you had ends up hindering you in your quest?  Clearly these “powers” would not be real powers at all—they would be handicaps, because they would render you powerless to fulfill your desires.

It is precisely this that becomes the curse of the wicked.  For they too have desires (for happiness of course, like the rest of us), but they have chosen the ways of evil to bring them about.  And the problem with the ways of evil is that they take no account of the good.  But the good, as Boethius argues, is what all desire, and what is necessary for happiness.  Thus, having cultivated the wrong powers and become strong in the wrong paths, evil men are powerless to attain the good.

What is the weakness of Sauron?  It is the weakness that Boethius ascribes to the evil man.  “He is very wise,” Gandalf says of Sauron, “and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice.  But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts.”  In his weakness of mistaking power for the only desirable good, Sauron is blind to all other goods.  On this blindness depends the web and weft of the ensuing plot:  Sauron cannot think that someone would refuse power, and actively seek to destroy the One Ring.

 

Boethian Meditation the First

Until now, I had thought that Tolkien’s representation of evil followed either Augustine or the Angelic Doctor or both.  But teaching a bit of Boethius to my undergraduate students this week has opened up new worlds of possibility.  Boethius has much to say of evil, even though it be hard to be understood.  Moreover, it is material Tolkien would have known well, as Boethius’s works impinged like no others upon the medieval world of which Tolkien was a student.

What I am doing for the next couple weeks, therefore, is to take a break from dogging the Fellowship so literally, and instead to look at the theme of evil in Boethius.  This post is the first of four meditations on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.  In all these meditations I will try to uncover the hidden tracks of Boethius’s influence over Middle Earth, and with the aid of Lady Luck perhaps this will redeem said meditations from the tedium of the lecture hall.

Quoth Boethius:

“This claim of ours may perhaps sound surprising to some, that wicked men, who form the majority of mankind, do not exist, but that is the actuality.  I am not denying that evil men are evil, but I am claiming that in the pure and simple sense they do not exist.”*

There is a claim to wake one up in the morning, no?  But it fits hand-in-glove with the hints Tolkien has been dropping about the Nazgul.  I think Boethius puts the case more strongly than either Augustine or Aquinas.  He goes on to draw an analogy:

“You could say that a corpse is a dead man, but you could not call it a man pure and simple; in the same way, I grant that corrupt men are wicked, but I refuse to admit that they exist in an absolute sense.  Whatever maintains its due order and preserves its nature, exists; if it abandons its nature, it ceases also to exist, for its existence is bound up in its nature.”*

So corrupt men are like corpses.  The image resonates with the Barrow-Wights, with the army of undead cowards in the Paths of the Dead, and with the nature of the Nazgul as “less” than men.  How is it that these men lose their nature as Men?  Boethius tells us that the nature of Man is to seek the good.  The wicked fail to seek the good for whatever reason.  And that makes them corpse-like, for man is not man insofar as he lives but insofar as he lives well.

There is more where this comes from, and I will wrest a few more thoughts out of it before moving on.

 

 *Should you like to read this passage and the more that is where it comes from, as indeed you should, you will find it in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Book IV, at the end of chapter 2.  Should you have difficulty finding Boethius in the archives of your library, perhaps you might look for him under his full name, Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius.  There is a Tolkienesque ebullience to such a name, and it suggests that his mother most likely thought him important.

 

Evenstar

After the foregoing posts, I was going to leave the chapter of many meetings behind forever, and press ahead to the chapter of many speakings.  But after speaking of so many other meetings, could I pass over our first sight of Arwen Undómiel in silence?  It would falsify every effect that Tolkien says she is supposed to have on us, and would embarrass the praises of the Elven troubadours.  So here is my panegyric upon Arwen, and the last one I shall make on the present chapter.

Tolkien says almost nothing about her.  Tolkien, in fact, does not let us near her.  The two times that Frodo sees her, he notices her from practically the other end of the room, and he neither speaks to her nor hears her voice.  This continues to be the case even in The Return of the King, when Arwen is queened in Gondor.  The only time that Frodo (and therefore the reader) draws near to Arwen is when that doughty Hobbit takes his last farewell before returning to the Shire.  The first and only words we hear from Arwen’s lips are those in which she surrenders her passage over the Sea to Frodo, and gives him the white crystal to ward off evil.  Beyond this, if we desire any further acquaintance with her, we must look to “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” in the appendix.

Without that appendix, even the glorious wedding of Arwen to Aragorn comes as nothing more than a curious surprise to the reader.  The love of Arwen and Aragorn is a hidden thing in the Tale of the Ring—hidden as Arwen herself was hidden for many an age in Lothlórien, and as she still continues to be hidden in the sense of being kept more or less at a distance from the reader.  She is there and ever present in Aragorn’s thoughts, as the reader recognizes the second time through; but she is far removed, like the star after which she is named.

Like the star, Arwen’s colours are grey and silver.  She would be an excellent subject for black-and-white photography.  Her eyes are grey, her hair is dark, and her skin is flawless white.  When Frodo sees her first, she is clad in grey with silver lace in her hair; and when he sees her last, she is once again in the same colours.  There could be no greater contrast to the other women in the book.  Eowyn, Galadriel, even Goldberry have golden hair and flourish in rich earthy colours, especially of green.  The Evenstar’s colours are grey and silver because they are less terrestrial and more celestial.  The other heroines are of the day; she is of the twilight.  And Tolkien intends it to be so.

Perhaps another post would provide more space for speculations on why Tolkien removes this heroine so far from the reader, why she is presented as the woman who waits and glimmers—like the stars wait and glimmer in the sky—and not the woman who rides to war or weaves enchantments or holds her washing-day in the rain.

For the moment, however, I wish to conclude these reflections by referring this celestial heroine to another heroine whose name enters only briefly into the Tale of the Ring (and almost always in connection with Arwen).  From the beginning, Tolkien forges a link between Arwen and Lúthien Tinúviel.  Frodo knows right away that of Arwen “it was said that the likeness of Lúthien had come on earth again”; and before the end of Frodo’s first feast in her presence, we have already received the hint that she will share not only in the likeness of Lúthien but in her doom.  Frodo receives a visual clue (and a very rare one at that) near the end of the evening, when he sees Aragorn standing beside Arwen and speaking with her—Aragorn appearing no more in the guise of a Ranger but in Elven-mail, with a star on his breast.

This briefest glimpse of the twain together is the first time that Tolkien the narrator calls Aragorn directly by his proper name.  In place of the pejorative “Strider,” the true name of Aragorn becomes predominant from this point onward through the rest of the tale.  Arwen herself will vanish like a star in the daylight; but like a star, she will continue to exert subtle influences discernible to those who know to look for them.

 

To Take a Bow

Bowing!  Here is a practice that has fallen out of the modern fashion.  I remember noticing it at the beginning of The Hobbit, when Bilbo bows to no fewer than 13 dwarves who enter his hobbit hole, exchanging the lines “At your service” and “And at yours.”  Frodo repeats this ritual somewhat more clumsily in the feasting hall of Elrond, when he meets one of those very dwarves again—Gloin, come from Dain’s kingdom under the Mountain.  Frodo discovers this venerable dwarf sitting next to him at table, and immediately proceeds to scatter the cushions on his seat by rising and bowing.

Bowing, I have recently discovered, is by no means so easy at it looks.  There is a stiffness about the modern vertebrae (or, at least, about mine) that hampers the motion and besets the attempt with a very odd if not awkward unease.  Several times now I have attempted to bow at the appropriate times in various liturgical services among the Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox.  There is certainly good reason for bowing at such moments—honoring the name of God, or of any Person of the Trinity, with a bow is hardly an objectionable act.  And yet it comes unnaturally.  I was not bred to such things.  And if it proves so unmanageable in the presence of a god, I suspect I would not attempt it in the presence of a dwarf, however venerable.

This, in conclusion, is part of my reason for loving The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien is archaic and anachronistic even perhaps where he does not mean to be.  Whether or not bowing was still fashionable in the 50’s, it is one of those elements of foreign culture that appears so exotic and charming in the eyes of a barbarian raised in the late 90’s.  Archaism, anachronism, and all the charm of the foregoing are as much a function of the perceiver as they are of the perceived.  The Hobbits are lovable because they belong to an older culture than we.

 

The Mewlips

This poem from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil seems the right stuff for Hallowe’en.  May you all be kept from the Mewlips tonight.

The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool´s borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they´ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips – and the Mewlips feed.

 

Many Names

Suddenly Bilbo looked up. “Ah, there you are at last, Dúnadan!” he cried.
“Strider!” said Frodo. “You seem to have a lot of names.”
“Well, Strider is one that I haven’t heard before, anyway,” said Bilbo. “What do you call him that for?”

Why is it that things in Middle Earth have so many names? It’s as if Tolkien’s narrative landscape was tunneled through with linguistic rabbit holes, teeming with broods of playful and proliferating names. Black Riders, Ringwraiths, and Nazgul; Rivendell, the Last Homely House, Imladris; Strider, Aragorn, the Dúnadan—it seems as if being a person or place of importance in Middle Earth requires at least three different names, one of which must be in a foreign language if at all possible.

The meetings at Rivendell, and the tales told at the Council of Elrond in the chapter following, must have worked on Tolkien like so many excuses for enriching the treasure-trove of Middle-Earthling names. The character who was Tom Bombadil several chapters ago becomes Iarwain Ben-adar, Forn, and Orald during the Council of Elrond; and the sneaking culprit who bears so much of the blame for the Ring is revealed not only as Gollum but as Sméagol, who is to become Slinker and Stinker before his tale is done.

And this is not even counting the epithets. Frodo is dubbed both the Halfling and the Ring-Bearer, just as Elrond is the Half-Elven and Gandalf is the Grey. The Ring itself is variously the One Ring and Isildur’s Bane. Even Sauron, who does not seem to have another proper name—certainly not one as decorous and awe-inspiring as “Tom Riddle”—has an entourage of epithets that include “the Dark Lord,” “the Necromancer,” and “the Enemy.”

And so it seems that any being of any importance or lineage in Middle Earth bears many names, and indeed cannot avoid bearing them. Interestingly, the lone class of beings to largely escape these multiple namings is the Hobbits. They are named in our common modern way of First Name, Last Name, and that is very likely because they are neither important enough to have epithets (except in the case of a prodigy like the Old Took), nor adventurous enough to win other names. (Think of how many multiple namings arise from the same thing being named in multiple languages. That is a phenomenon that no respectable Hobbit would wander far enough to suffer.)

This fanciful proliferation of names, I believe, is ultimately not merely fanciful. If it does nothing else, it contributes its tuppence to the three-dimensional texture of Middle Earth as a world of intelligent beings. Things are named diversely because diverse languages name them, or because diverse qualities inhere in them. A name picks out what is most salient from someone’s particular angle of vision. Thus, Isildur’s Bane means nothing to Frodo until he hears the story of Isildur; but to the Heirs of Isildur, the epithet strikes closer to home than the mere noun “the Ring.” So it is with the Last Homely House and Imladris. The first conveys to us all the comfort of a chair by a fire; the last conveys all the magic and mystery of an unexplored fairy kingdom.

All this seems to be roughly what lies in the background of Bilbo and Frodo’s exchange on the names of Aragorn. It is tempting to think that Tolkien included the brief conversation just to make his linguistic point. For Aragorn explains to Bilbo that he is called Strider by a particular folk (the Bree-landers), much as he will explain to Boromir in the following chapter that travelers give the Rangers scornful names. The striding and wandering quality—“Longshanks” as Bill Ferny puts it—is what stands out about the Rangers to such a folk. But as Bilbo goes on to demonstrate in Elvish, the name of “the Dúnadan” when applied to Aragorn is fraught with import. It means “Man of the West, Numenorean,” and is not only what stands out to the Elves when they look at the weather-beaten Ranger, but is closer to the reality of who he is.

And so I say: let the names be fruitful and multiply, and replenish all of Middle Earth.

 

Many Meetings

Well, there are many of them, aren’t there?  First the missing Gandalf turns up abruptly by Frodo’s sick bed; then we meet Elrond and Arwen; then Gloin; then Bilbo; then Strider under a new name.  It is a chapter of discovering old friends and discovering new things about old friends.  It is a chapter that gives one the impression that something is afoot, and that the impending council is going to be an explosion of discoveries and strange tales.

All this takes place against the backdrop of my favourite place in all literature:  the Last Homely House east of the Sea.  I noticed during this re-reading how little Tolkien actually tells us about the appearance of this house.  Sometimes it seems more like a country manor with a garden, and sometimes more like a Gothic abbey or even an intricate medieval city.  Perhaps this ambiguity is intentional.  Tolkien indulges in very little description of Rivendell, but what he tells us is significant.  Rivendell retains the memory of good things from all the places of Middle Earth, and it reminds each person of what he loves best.  It is “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking.”  It has nooks and crannies and Elves of every stripe.  As Pseudo-Dionysius might have put it, Rivendell is variety in unity and unity in variety.

Along with the peaceful harmony of variety, Rivendell is a place of the peaceful harmony of different orders of beings.  By this I mean Elves (themselves possessing varying degrees of greatness), Men, Hobbits, and even Dwarves.  (Surprisingly, except for occasional references, the old feud between Dwarves and Elves seems to be dropped in the Last Homely House).  There is what might be called a “cordial consent of being to being”* throughout the house of Elrond.  For it is a House and not a Court; and Elrond is a host, and not a king.  The great of the world pass through such a place and rub shoulders with the comparatively insignificant, all with the greatest amiability and enjoyment.  The Elves themselves are sometimes “like kings, terrible and splendid,” while others are “merry as children”—and they coexist with perfect amicability.

There are few incidents in the Lord of the Rings that I love as much as Bilbo, the old Hobbit, requisitioning the appearance of Aragorn, the Heir of Isildur and rightful King of most of Middle Earth, to help him work out a rhyme in a little ditty he is composing for the amusement of the Elves.  And Aragorn comes, not because Bilbo is his equal, but because the two are friends, and greatness and smallness do not matter in a such place.  In much the same way, when Frodo is seated (to his dismay!) at the table of the great during Elrond’s feast, his feelings of smallness vanish as he enters into conversation and enjoyment with his neighbors.

What I am trying to gesture at with these ramblings is something I find foreign to our world and way of thinking.  For there is a hierarchy among the intelligent beings in Middle Earth—not merely a hierarchy of position and personal qualities, such as we find in our own world, but a radical hierarchy of essences and species and internal powers.  Our own modern-day quibbles over the equality of the sexes and the races vanishes like a star in the sun in the world of Middle Earth.  For in Middle Earth, the inequalities between Hobbits and Men and Elves are greater, involving the exercise of immaterial powers over persons of lesser degree—involving even the ability to inhabit a suprasensible world in addition to the sensible one.  Yet in houses like Rivendell, this radical hierarchy does not create envy or oppression among the ranks of beings, but rather concord and mutual respect.  There is dominion without domineering, giving-of-place without fawning, and above all, merriment and good humour in putting up with both one’s betters and inferiors.

After all, at the end of the day, the setting of Rivendell gives us the chance to enjoy what some never enjoy in our own world.  In how many places could such a diversity of ranks and privileges co-exist without perversion and abuse?  Rivendell satisfies our desire that Hobbits should be Hobbits and not Elves; that Elves should be immortal and not Men; that Men too should be what they are—some Kings, some innkeepers, and some children—and that all should enjoy the best that their order offers.

 

*A phrase of Jonathan Edwards’.  Sometimes a Protestant can sound just like a Thomist.

 

Brief Meditation on a Cryptic Remark by Gandalf

Directly following Gandalf’s explanation of the Seen and the Unseen worlds to Frodo, Tolkien records for us a prophetic and mystifying rumination on the part of Gandalf.  To Gandalf’s eyes, which see in both worlds as the Elves do, Frodo appears slightly transparent.  Importantly, the word is transparent and not faded.  Gandalf does not think that Frodo will come to evil.  But, he reasons, “He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.”

The image of a glass filled with light instantly recalls the Phial of Galadriel, which will come to Frodo’s aid so often through his later adventures.  The implication of Gandalf’s rumination is clear.  Frodo too has begun to live in the world of both the Seen and the Unseen, and to those like Gandalf who can see the Unseen, he is already being transformed into a vessel or medium of invisible virtues.  As the Phial of Galadriel brings light to dark places, Frodo himself will presumably come to exude (for lack of a better word) a “spiritual” light in the darkness.

Perhaps it would not be too much of a stretch to take a cue from the Catholics on this point.  If Frodo’s sufferings transform him into a phial of light to his world—a vehicle of divine grace, as it were—then this lowly Hobbit of the Shire is destined to become a Saint of Middle Earth.

 

Two Worlds: The Problem of Evil, continued

At last!  The hour has come for the answering of many questions, the probing of many mysteries left veiled and inscrutable.  For as Book II of The Fellowship of the Ring opens, Frodo is awakening in Rivendell to a new measure of life and health, as if he were coming to life again and being reborn to a higher order of knowledge and duty.  His convalescence takes place under the watchful eyes of Gandalf and Elrond, who are shortly to hold a council.  Many things hitherto unexplained are to be made plain, and the thoughts of many hearts are to be laid bare.

Within his first hour of waking in Rivendell, Frodo and the reader learn several things from Gandalf about the part Frodo has been playing in the cosmopolitan game against Mordor.  Foremost among the revelations is something that the reader already knew:  that the Ringwraiths inhabit a world different from the every-day mortal one, and that Frodo was teetering on the brink of this world until Elrond came to his rescue.  The surprising piece of news, however, is that Ringwraiths are not the only beings to inhabit this “otherworldly” parallel universe.

“Here in Rivendell,” Gandalf tells Frodo, “there live still some of [the Enemy’s] chief foes:  the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas.  They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.”

The Seen and the Unseen.  Are these, then, the proper names by which to call the Two Worlds?  It’s as if the first world were primarily material, subjected to the five senses, while the second was somehow beyond the material and subject to other modes of perception.  We are reminded of what Strider said before the attack on Weathertop:  “Senses, too, there are other than sight and smell.  We can feel their presence… they feel ours more keenly.”

Yet Gandalf and the Elves perceive the Ringwraiths very differently than Frodo does, even though at the last even Frodo entered the world of the Unseen.  Frodo, on the brink of the Ringwraiths’ world, experiences the wraiths as powerful substances.  Gandalf, however, continues to speak of the wraiths as if they were literally nothing.  “The black robes,” he says, “are real robes that they wear to give shape to their nothingness when they have dealings with the living.”  How can Frodo and Gandalf, both seeing the Unseen, see it so differently?

Here, I believe, is another clue to that tangle called “the Problem of Evil” in Middle Earth.  The clue is that we must cast this problem in terms of two different worlds and two different orders of being.  For the Unseen world comprises a higher order than the Seen, and beings who can operate in the Unseen world have, de facto, a sort of power over the Seen world as well.

Let us imagine that certain beings in the Unseen World have become corrupt and evil.  Relative to the uncorrupted beings—good Elves like Glorfindel, Half-Elves like Elrond, wizards like Gandalf—these evil beings seem to have lost something, to have degenerated to the level of shadows and nothingness.  That is why Gandalf can speak of the Wraiths as nothing, and why Glorfindel has no fear of them.  However, relative to the Seen world, these corrupted beings retain their powers.  In fact, their power over the Seen world may still be great, even though they themselves have degenerated as beings within the Unseen world.

That is why Frodo, encountering the Ringwraiths from the vantage point of the Seen, is so easily subject to their mastery; while Glorfindel, revealing himself to them in his otherworldly wrath by the Ford of Bruinen, wreaks fear and havoc on them.  We cannot compare a pea and an apple.  Glorfindel is by all rights the peer of the Ringwraiths in their own world.  Frodo is not.  By the wraiths’ degeneracy into evil, they have made themselves lesser than Glorfindel.  By their nature as great beings, they are still greater than Frodo.