I am becoming more and more intrigued by Tolkien’s evil creatures, especially the more powerful ones like Balrogs, Ringwraiths, and fallen Valar (or Maiar or whatever Sauron is). Tolkien was an intelligent Catholic, and it would therefore be expected of him to assume an Augustinian/Thomistic view of evil across all worlds—a view in which evil is not a substance but a privation, not something that exists but something negated from existence.
This view, of course, leaves an elephant in the room when it comes to explaining why evil beings cause so much harm in the world. (How, we ask, could the atrocities at Auschwitz be said to derive from a “nonexistence”?) It also complicates a fictional world where evil beings can wield incredible powers that cause supernatural harm. So the question is, Does Tolkien really assume any such Augustinian account of evil while imagining the actual operations of Barrow-wights and Wraiths?
The encounter with Ringwraiths on Weathertop clears up none of these problems, but it does give us a glimpse into what might be called the “psychology of Ringwraithery.” I want to highlight two things about the operation of evil in this chapter. The first is about perception, and the second is about the will.
About perception, the easiest way of putting things is that the Ringwraiths don’t quite inhabit or perceive the waking world that we do. As Aragorn discourses at length:
They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us…. And at all times they smell the blood of living things, desiring and hating it. Senses, too, there are other than sight or smell. We can feel their presence—it troubled our hearts, as soon as we came here, and before we saw them; they feel ours more keenly.
In short, the Ringwraiths do not live in the world of substance, but of shadow. So far so good… it is a very Augustinian way of structuring their psychology.
But whence, then, come their powers? Or, rather, first of all, what exactly are their powers? I find that this question is not so easy to work out. The Wraiths live in a world of shadows, but apparently they are solid enough to wear cloaks, ride horses, and wield knives. They are also responsible for causing certain privations (as all respectable evil beings do), such as darkness and cold. But I find their most interesting power to be Temptation. Frodo knows he is in the presence of a wraith when he has an overwhelming desire to put on the Ring. And this is important, at least as far as Augustine is concerned. For Augustine thought that evil did not exist anywhere except in the Will; and even in the Will, evil was not a reality in itself. Evil consisted in the perversion of the Will when it turned away from the highest Good to seek something else.
The brilliance of the attack on Weathertop is that these themes of perception and will come together. By putting on the Ring, Frodo succumbs to an evil will. Simultaneously, the wearing of the Ring causes him to enter the world of the Ringwraiths and see as they see. The altering of his will alters his perception: evil beings appear to become more substantial, and what the other Hobbits perceive to be merely black shadows, Frodo now perceives as clearly-delineated kings with robes and helms and hands.
All this leads to the question: Does the “substantiality” of evil in Middle Earth in fact have to do more with the perspective that it is seen from? Do evil beings seem more powerful precisely in proportion as they have control over the perceiver’s will? And if a perceiver’s will is not corrupted—as in the example of Tom Bombadil—does evil in fact not seem to be substantial at all?
I have a suspicion here that I am equivocating the terms “substance” and “power”, and “evil” and “evil thing.” I shall have to turn to culling out a few more definitions from Augustine. But in the meantime I find the idea highly suggestive that, in the case of the unfallen Valar and certain uncorrupted characters like Bombadil, evil beings really appear to be nothing.
The Red Book of Westmarch 
It might help to clarify things if you remember that “entering their world” and “the realm of shadows” depends on the consciousness of the person. The ringwraiths inhabit the same reality, but their consciousness of it is different. It is not the realm around any creature that changes, but what that creature consciously perceives.
The enigmatic Bombadil, curiously enough, can never be tempted by the distortions of reality the ring works on others. As you point out.
I say it might help, not because I have the answer, but it seems it is an important consideration to keep in mind that our world is made out of our consciousness of whatever it is we live in. I saw you didn’t use the word and wondered if you might want to.
I think the harm of evil is a function of our consciousness or, rather, lack of consciousness of what is good. This is of course a matter of perception, but perception seems less inclusive a word than consciousness. Our will is bound up in the consciousness we inhabit; desire influences perception.
Dear Unk, have you been reading the phenomenologists?!
I didn’t realize that I was avoiding the word “consciousness” so unconscionably. But it may be a subconscious habit of mine. One of my medieval teachers said once that he didn’t know what consciousness was, that the medievals had no word for it, and he didn’t know how to say it in Latin. I believe I’ve tended to avoid the word ever since, not so much because I agree with him but because I’m now genuinely puzzled over what the word means and why it played no role in pre-modern psychology.
But all that aside, you make a good point. It is certainly not reality itself that changes, but the Ring-bearer’s consciousness (=total perception influenced by desire?) of reality. I like to use the language of reality changing because in a few chapters Gandalf will describe this phenomenon in terms of two “worlds”, one that regular folk inhabit and the other inhabited by Elves and Wraiths (i.e., a suprasensible world, or so it seems). But that is of course metaphorical, as you duly note.
Yet another extremely interesting and thought-provoking post. I appreciate the mention of Bombadil, as this interpretation would explain much about his character: his complete resistance to the Ring and the dangers implicit in hiding the Ring with him. Bravo. Whenever I do get back to my own read through, this is sure to change the way I see things.
By the way, Sauron is a fallen Maiar. Besides Morgoth/Melkor, there were no fallen Valar.
I think Augustine is reacting against the Manichean philosophy to which he adhered in his early life in his definitions of Good and Evil; he is concerned that we should know that there is no such thing as Evil substance, and that no being is essentially evil. Of course, this does not mean to Augustine that evil does not truly exist, he is just pointing out that the wrong is in the ordering of things, not in the substance of things. If I have the components of a completely functioning automobile spread out before me, and every part is made perfectly, but I assemble them wrongly, I will have an evil car, one that functions either inefficiently or not at all. The best example of this in Tolkien I think is in “The Music of the Ainur”, in which the creation of the World by Iluvatar is likened to a Great Chorus of Angelic beings, and Melkor refuses to follow His direction in the making of the Music, but weaves his own thought into it, in contradiction to Iluvatar’s Great Design. Note that, in Tolkien’s conception, everything that subsequently took place in the unfolding of Ea was contained in this music; the problem was not that Melkor had a horrid voice, but that he was singing the wrong notes, and that is the thing, in either a choir or a Creation in which everything is subtly but intricately interconnected, which one must not do if things are to work out right.
Maxim: I think we’re on the same page. If I could take the example of the car a bit further, I’d say that, insofar as the car actually functions like a car, it is a good car; but insofar as it fails to be a car, it is “evil.” Hence, evil is not a thing but a privation of a thing, a sort of “non-existence” of what should be there.
Ilverai: For some reason I didn’t see your comment until now. Thanks for the correction about Sauron… one person’s laziness needs another’s vigilance.
I think I would run the other way with that and say to the extent a car fails to function properly, it fails to be a car, but not all failure is to the extent of a complete failure to function. It’s like the distinction between Deadly Sin and lesser sins; the lesser are an obstruction and an offense to the dignity of the Human person, but not a complete obliteration of our Human character.
To say that Evil does not exist may be misleading; Evil does, in fact, have a positive existence in the form of Persons whose relation to God and the World is profoundly disordered. It’s important to know that Evil does not exist as some sort of Zoroastrian entity, but it may become just a kind of sophistry to tout the nonexistence of Evil in the face of the reality of Persons who have made the purpose of their Being opposition to God and his Creation. Evil may be just disorder, but disorder becomes “incarnate”, in a sense, in the person of Satan and his angels, and all who choose to follow them.
You’ve put your finger on the problem that bothers me with Ungoliant and the wolf (its name escapes me) that devours the Silmaril. In a strictly Augustinian view of evil, even these creatures must be good insofar as they exist. But Tolkien seems to treat them not as normal creatures but (as you say) as “incarnations” of evil and disorder in themselves. Their existing becomes an evil.
For the sake of philosophical sanity, I wonder if it is better to treat these characters more as personifications than real creatures? I don’t know that Tolkien himself intended them to be taken this way. But one wants to cling to one’s Augustine and Boethius. I have a difficult time understanding how a character could become a positive evil (strictly speaking), without its author holding an implicitly dualistic view of good and evil.
As Tolkien is writing a mythology, it does have more of a black-and-white aspect to it; the ethical situations are much simpler than they would be in real life. I don’t think we should regard the characters as personifications, which would seem to go against Tolkien’s specifically expressed immense distaste for allegory, just as mythic elements of a mythic creation. Nevertheless, I do not believe it to be impossible for there to be an absolutely Evil being, or even many beings absolutely evil. I think it is more of a Modern distortion to say that because everything that is partakes of the good of being there is no such thing as a really evil being. I don’t even think that was what Augustine meant; he was going after something entirely different. Maybe we should draw a distinction between something being Substantially evil, which is impossible, there being no Evil substance, and something being Absolutely evil, as having successfully banished every particle of the light of God from its being. There is no Dualism here; God is Good, and all that he has created is good. I think it is true to say that all evil is a matter of disorder, something that is lower taking the place of that which is higher, which does not, as I said before, mean that evil does not really exist. Tolkien portrays this very well; all the evils devised by Melkor are simply taken up and woven into the symphony, all evil is as a drop dissolved into the sea of God’s goodness, or as Lewis indicates, Heaven is infinite Largeness and Hell infinite Smallness, and for a butterfly in Heaven to swallow all the immense miseries of Hell would not even cause it to hiccup. To say because an evil being has potencies of body and mind it can therefore not be thought absolutely Evil is to my mind simply to make a category error; it’s apples and oranges, really. A being becomes evil by opposing its Will to the Will of God; there is no more profound dislocation possible than this, no further depth of evil to which it is possible to sink. Therefore, Evil is an activity of the Will; any potency a being in absolute opposition to God retains is an instrument in the service of evil, and therefore is itself evil. As it is said, the corruption of the best is the worst; the highest of all created being when fallen becomes Satan, the darkest and most corrupt. This would seem to be the very fountain of the spiritual understanding underlying Tolkien’s World. Being Orthodox, I have no need to cling to either Augustine or Boethius (my relief is immense!); for one thing, I’m not really an expert on Augustine, and everything I know about Boethius I got from reading Lewis’ “The Discarded Image”. I do know enough about Augustine to know that, in his immense Corpus, it is possible to find material to support a thesis, and in another part, material to contradict it; I think it is very helpful to always keep in mind who he is controverting against at any particular moment, so that one may correct for any characteristic overstatement, and to remember that he had his training as a Rhetorician, not as a Philosopher, and that his knowledge of Greek was minimal. Even so, I doubt Augustine really thought Satan was not absolutely Evil, though I will probably not be able to effectively argue the point with you, as you obviously know a lot more about Augustine than I. I would just add, beware philosophical sanity, if by that you mean utter systemic consistency. In the Orthodox Church, we say Theology is experiential, and are constantly chided by those of the West for our lack of theological system, but Faith based on experience will run with a particular concept only so far as it is true (that is, consistent with spiritual experience), whereas a Theology based on philosophic consistency is free to develop a concept all the way to manifest absurdity.
I think “Beware philosophical sanity” is worthy of being translated into Latin and engraved on a crest or coat of arms somewhere.
I’m neither Catholic nor Orthodox, but I will confess to a certain penchant for, if not systematization, then at least harmonizing faith with reason. Perhaps I side more with the Catholics in thinking of faith and reason as the twin edges of a sword. The upshot is that even a myth or fable or revelation of a god must square somehow with what we know of the essences of things, and vice versa.
If there’s a discrepancy, of course, one must question either one’s reason or one’s interpretation of the myth… and in this case, it’s the interpretation of the myth that I’m trying to work out. Tolkien’s are not the words of a god, but one would like to construe them in such a way as to make them morally and metaphysically possible.
(As you yourself seem to indicate, perhaps this is not so hard to do. I like your parallels between Tolkien & Lewis, and the utter disorder of evil, and all that. There does seem to be a degree of evil from which there is no turning back.)