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.

 

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.

 

A Fading World

“The Flight to the Ford” is an extension of the problem of perception, as I hypothesized about in my previous post.  The chapter, in broad outline, is the account of Frodo’s world beginning to fade as the Morgul wound in his shoulder takes possession of him.  Yet the language in which I have just described Frodo’s experience is somewhat deceptive.  For, while Frodo perceives that his world is fading, his companions know that it is not the world but Frodo himself who is fading.

The language of fading is, of course, automatically privative.  Frodo is losing his being, not gaining it.  Yet as Frodo progressively fades, the Black Riders progressively gather reality.  Frodo dreams one night that he is walking in his own garden in the Shire, “but it seemed faint and dim, less clear than the tall black shadows that stood looking over the hedge.”  The very next day Frodo is exhausted by a hard climb through the hills, and as he throws himself to the ground, the trees and rocks about him (normally prime examples of substances) seem mere shadows.  That night he has another dream of winged shadows, this time not alleviated by any image of the real world.  By the last day of his flight, Frodo feels, while still awake, that a shadow has come between himself and his friends.  In short, the world of substances is vanishing for Frodo, and (as Gandalf will explain later), he is becoming like a wraith.

By the time Frodo encounters the Nine Ringwraiths by the Ford, his perception of them has altered entirely.  He no longer needs to wear the Ring in order to see them clearly.  To his waking (fading) eyes, they “appeared to have cast aside their hoods and black cloaks.”  Frodo sees kings wearing white and gray, clearly delineated warriors with helmets and Morgul weapons.  And even those weapons, one of which, in the form of a knife-blade, melted in the sun when Strider held it in his hands, now withstand the daylight to appear cold and hard.

What is most striking at this climax is not only the alteration in the Ringwraiths’ appearance, but in their hold on Frodo’s will.  In the attack on Weathertop, Frodo was able to resist the Ringwraiths to the point of striking at a Wraith’s feet and then freely pulling the Ring off his own finger.  Immediately following the fatal attack, however, Strider tells Sam bluntly that “they [the Riders] believe your master has a deadly wound that will subdue him to their will.”  And by the end of the chapter, the plot has proved Strider right.

Consider Frodo’s reaction to the final appearance of the Ringwraiths, while he is straddling one of the swiftest steeds in the world and Glorfindel is urging him to flee.  In the past, Frodo never had such powers of escape; but now, as the Ringwraiths are thundering up behind and he is realizing the full of his danger, we are astonished to learn that “a strange reluctance seized him,” and that “he knew in his heart that they were silently commanding him to wait.”  More astonishingly, Frodo obeys them.  Rather than flee, he draws his sword.  It is an action that can only be described as half-willful deception of himself, as if he could excuse his obedience to the Ringwraiths on the grounds of trying to resist them.  At the last moment, it is only the intervention of Glorfindel that sends his horse galloping off in the right direction.

After crossing the Ford, Frodo again feels himself “commanded urgently to halt.”  This time he cannot refuse.  Feebly he attempts to brandish his sword, but the upraised hand of a Wraith strikes him dumb and breaks his blade.  Frodo is reduced to the plaything of the evil powers, and once again, only the intervention of something external to himself—the flood at the command of Elrond—spares him from being wholly seized.

And it is at this nadir of Frodo’s weakness, when he is internally defeated even if externally saved, that Book I ends.