J.R.R. Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, and his religion heavily
influenced his life and career. His mother Mabel was born an
Anglican, but after the death of Tolkien's father, converted
to Catholicism in 1900. Many of Tolkien's father's family were
Baptists, and strongly opposed to Catholicism. Mabel was cut
off from both families, who stopped providing the single mother
any kind of financial support. In 1902 she moved Tolkien and
his brother Hilary to Edgbaston outside Birmingham to be near
to the Birmingham Oratory and its associated St Philip's School.
The Oratory had been established in 1849 by Henry Newman, then
a recent convert himself. Newman was one of the leaders of what
became known as the Oxford Movement which attempted to reform
the Church of England by returning to many of the doctrinal
and liturgical practices which existed before the Reformation.
When the most radical proposals of the Oxford Movement were
rejected by the hierarchy of the Church of England, Newman and
many of other Anglicans converted to Catholicism. Those who
remained within the Church of England became known as Anglo-Catholics.
The Oxford Movement remained influential in twentieth- century
Oxford, and T.S. Eliot was a notable convert to Anglo-Catholicism
in 1927.
At the Oratory Mabel was befriended by Father Francis Xavier
Morgan, who would become Tolkien's guardian two years later
when she died of diabetes. Nine years afterwards Tolkien was
to write: 'My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is
not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great
gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who
killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping
the faith.' The quote indicates something of the connexion Tolkien
made between his mother's faith and his own. In some way, Tolkien's
deep devotion to Catholicism reflected his love for his mother.
Tolkien's Catholicism would again affect his life in 1908,
when he was sixteen years old. He met his future wife, Edith
Bratt, and by the summer of 1909 they were in love. Father Francis
forbade Tolkien from seeing her, ostensably because she was
a distraction from his efforts to gain acceptance to Oxford,
but perhaps also because she was an Anglican. Tolkien had to
wait until 1913 to contact her, when he reached the legal age
of majority -- twenty-one. They announced their engagement only
after Tolkien had convinced Edith to convert to Catholicism,
not an easy thing because she had been heavily and publicly
active in her local Anglican Church. Tolkien wrote: 'I do so
dearly believe that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear
must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly'.
When Edith converted, she was promptly cut off by his family.
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Tolkien's Catholicism also coloured his intellectual life and
may have influenced his famous dislike of 'modern' literature
from Spenser and Shakespeare onwards. These, of course, were
the first great authors after the Reformation, when England
abandoned the Catholic Church, and Tolkien may have felt that
these authors were impoverished or diminished, like the Church
of England, which he called 'a pathetic and shadowy medley of
half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs'. But the most
famous intellectual application of Tolkien's Catholicism is
to be found in his relationship with C.S. Lewis. Lewis became
Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen
College in 1926. Lewis had been brought up in Ulster in Northern
Ireland as a Protestant. In adolescence he had embraced agnosticism,
but was gradually leaning back towards religion when he met
Tolkien. The two spent a great deal of time discussing Christianity.
In an episode in 1931 which Tolkien wrote about in his poem
'Mythopoeia' -- and which Humphrey Carpenter later dramatised
in the chapter entitle 'Jack' of his biography of Tolkien --
Lewis was persuaded by Tolkien's arguments and became a Christian.
However, Tolkien's success would later turn to disappointment,
for Lewis became, not a Catholic, but an Anglican. Lewis went
on to become a public apologist of Christianity in print and
on radio. Tolkien would later write on this: '[Lewis] would
not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one:
at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also
take up again, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted
in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland
protestant'.
All this does not represent a direct influence of Tolkien's
Christianity on his writing. In fact, Tolkien recognised that
much of his early work was incompatible with Christianity, particularly
the material in The Silmarillion (The Lord of the
Rings he described as consciously planned with religious
compatibility in mind). At the time of his death, he was struggling
to re-write material from The Silmarillion to make it
compatible with Christian philosophy.
One way in which Christianity obviously influenced Tolkien's
writing is in his treatment of the centuries-old debate over
the nature of evil. The official Church position was formulated
in 410 AD by St Augustine in his De Civitate Dei (The
City of God). In Book XII, Augustine asks why the angels
who rebelled against God are miserable. He concludes that the
condition of blessedness comes from cleaving 'to Him who supremely
is', which amplifies one's own being. In turning away from God,
the angels therefore diminished their own existence. He then
turns to his classic treatment of the nature of evil:
If the further question be asked, 'What was the efficient
cause of their evil will?' there is none. For what is it which
makes the will bad, when it is the will itself which makes
the action bad? And consequently a bad will is the cause of
bad actions, but nothing is the cause of a bad will. For when
the will abandons what is above itself and turns to what is
lower, it becomes evil -- not because that is evil to which
it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked.
I know likewise that the will could not become evil, were
it unwilling to become so; and therefore its failings are
justly punished, being not necessary but voluntary. For its
defection is not to evil things, that is to say, not towards
things that are naturally and in themselves evil, but the
defection of the will is evil because it wills contrary to
the order of nature, abandoning that which has supreme being
for that which has less. For avarice is not a fault inherent
in gold, but in the man who inordinately loves gold to the
detriment of justice, which ought to be held in incomparably
higher regard than gold. Consequently he who inordinately
loves the good which any nature possesses, even though he
obtain it, himself becomes evil in the good, and wretched
because deprived of a greater good.
And thus we are driven to believe that the holy angels never
existed without a good will or the love of God. But the angels
who, though created good, are nevertheless evil now, became
so by their own evil will. And a will cannot be made evil
by a good nature, unless there is a voluntary defection from
good; for not good, but a defection from good, is the cause
of evil. These angels, therefore, either received less of
the grace of the divine love than those who persevered in
the same; or if both were created equally good, then, while
the one fell by their evil will, the others were more abundantly
assisted, and attained to that pitch of blessedness at which
they became certain they should never fall from it -- as we
have already shown in the preceding book. We must therefore
acknowledge, with the praise due to the Creator, that not
only men, but primarily and principally of angels it is true,
as it is written, 'It is good to draw near to God' (Ps. 73:28).
From: St Augustine, On the Two Cities: Selections from
the City of God, ed. F.W. Strothmann (New York: Fredegar
Ungar, 1957).
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