The Red Book of Westmarch

There is a side of things Boethius does not talk about in the passages we have already seen.  He does not ask whether the good man who is destroyed or harmed by the wicked suffers real harm or destruction.  He talks about this elsewhere, however, and the answer is No.

It seems to me that Boethius must say this in order for the world to be set right.  If one is seriously to believe that the wicked have no power, while one nevertheless experiences the mundane fact that the wicked kill people every day, or forge malevolent rings, or construct unassailable fortresses from which to deploy vast armies of orcs, then one must save face somehow.  One must revert to saying that those who seem to have power over the body have no power over the soul.  And perhaps one will emphasize the fact that the wicked have only a transitory power even over the body, and that in the resurrection, the wicked will have power over nothing.

The resurrection is a controversial subject to broach in Middle Earth.  Elves have no need of it, and Men do not philosophize about it.  Death is a gift, a boon from Iluvatar, and appears not to need revoking.  I will let that sleeping dog lie.  But even without a resurrection in Middle Earth, it is fairly clear that death is not an evil.  In the unknown realm into which the dying go, the goodness of Iluvatar must still order all things.  And one suspects that in that realm, whether in or out of the world, wrongs will be set right.

Thus Boethius appeals to the afterlife:  no matter what goods may be destroyed in this world, our happiness consists in another, in becoming divine (as he puts it): in becoming “gods.”  This, too, is what the wicked lose.  Moreover, whatever wrongs we suffer in this life at the hands of wicked men or fickle Fortune, are actually goods sent by divine mercy to prepare us for the long-awaited happiness.

These are threads Tolkien does not weave into the trilogy.  The reward of good deeds in Middle Earth is the song that is sung of them afterwards, by whoever is left to sing.  The righting of wrongs in the afterlife is a hope which, if yearned for, is still unspoken.  And yet there is the hint eveywhere that death is not really to be feared, that (like Gandalf, perhaps) the righteous man is ultimately unslayable.  He may go to the halls of his fathers, he may go down into the earth or pass over the falls to the sea–but in the end he is accounted for, and preserved from the reach of those who can kill the soul.  In whatever place the dead wait, he too awaits the unbending of the world and the fate of the children of Iluvatar.

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)

“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.

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.

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.

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.