LOTR 79 - Forgotten Lost Causes

Or, Will There Be Summer Blackberries in both Scotland & the Shire?

All men, and all ethnicities, and every polis, fears death...Link

Scott, by contrast, “has been banished forever, as it must seem, to the purgatory of a cold, incurious respect, to the shadowland of literary history, in which his importance (the word itself is a sort of dead hand) is suffered rather than examined.” James Bowman, in his excellent Honor: A History (2006), credits Scott with doing more than any other figure to adapt the old notions of honor to the new historical circumstances of 19th-century Britain. Honor had until then referred to a man’s standing among his equals—his reputation, what he was known for doing or not doing—but the spirit of the age demanded that inward qualities be considered equally important, if indeed not more so. It was Scott’s achievement, says Bowman, to meld these two conceptions into what became the basis for the Christian Gentleman: a compromise between inward goodness and outward reputation, between Christian humility and worldly aggression. But formal deficiencies don’t begin to explain the oblivion into which he has fallen. Scott is quite as consistently readable as Dickens, and infinitely more sophisticated than the Brontë sisters. The reasons for Scott’s demise are cultural rather than aesthetic: He spoke in a moral language that is now, for the great majority of Anglophone readers, indecipherable. His fictional world was defined by honor, loyalty, and blood lineage. His heroes and heroines did not change the world by hard work and persistence; they satisfied the demands history and circumstance placed on them by becoming the people they were meant to be. So there is no hope of reviving Walter Scott. Which is precisely why he’s worth reading. Link

Old Mortalityperfectly exemplifies this "code"which Scott created, out of the thick and pregnant air of his own free spirit: Sir Henry Morton is a gentleman, but he cannot abide the cruelty of the reactionary party. Against his own will, he finds himself "leading" the Revolution, for the simple reason that he is not allowed, by the old regime, to be human or charitable, except on pain of death. It is, or becomes, under Morton's hands, not a Revolution at all. A Restoration of Order would be a better phrase for it. But the best way to say it, is that Morton desires and struggles for the predominance of a primal Innocence: Sir Henry Morton is the Order that remains. As such, Providentially, he is protected from all his enemies by the express guidance of God, his infra and extra-adversaries, both the fanatics and the butchers. He is also protected from his nearest competitor, a rival for Edith's hand in marriage. God Himself, in the form of Scott's authorial hand, intends for Sir Henry Morton to represent the continuing life of the nation of Scotland.

What does this have to do with LOTR?

You will recall, that we are at the end of the trilogy. There is the ending of One Age, and the beginning of the Next One. The ending, and the beginning, are the same. Thus, the "survivors" of the disastrous War of the Rings are the pillars and suns of the new Era- they would have to be.

Nature is profligate of seed, which is cheap. Most men fantasize about being the one-in-a-million survivor of an epic and God-awful war in which demigods, demons, & the elements themselves clash in a Ragnarok that surpasses even that recorded in the dim and bloody and adumbrated myths of deep space and time. But no seed is wasted, even if it appears to be so, in the dream which is History. Each happening serves the journey towards the whole, the General Resurrection. What is needed is a shift out of dead time, into Living Time. This is precisely what good creative fiction (like Scott and Tolkien) provide in an accessible form, without compromising the "higher up, and further in" (Lewis). They lead into "more".

I have discussed, before, the superficial reading of Tolkien as a hack, a black-and-white cardboard cutter-and-paster, who "projects" the Shadow out onto the modern world in a vain attempt to turn back Time. This is John Michael Greer's take, and Greer is the most legitimate and subtle of this school of thought. Yet even he admits that LOTR will be one of the few modern works, or ancient ones, read a thousand years from now. Why is he mistaken, albeit less so, and in more creative ways, than all the other detractors?

LOTR is certainly not a mere pastiche, or psychologist's playground for Tolkien's neuroses and projections. On the contrary, like Sir Walter Scott's novels, his work is the "music" of Old Europe which survives its demise in the modern revolutionary conflagrations. Europe will undergo death. It will survive in Tolkien and Scott. This is what they share in common.

Those who are fertilized by the "seed" present in either of these men's work, will themselves become the seed corn of the New Shire, like Galadriel's mallorn seeds and the dust that goes with it, to continue. This happens "by magic", or Providence, from a higher perspective. Neither Tolkien, nor Scott, were wrong to rely upon eucatastrophe as the deus ex machina, which rescues the heroes at the end. They are not saying that you can appoint yourself to survive the end of the world, in an easy and literal way. They are saying that a remnant will by God's grace, triumph, despite the "rolling up of the heavens, like a scroll".

Though the mountains be moved, Life will go on. The Present or "Eternal Now" is diametrically opposite what we call "the present or now", precisely because it is Life, Being, and God. There can be only one Life, one Being, and one God (the mystery of the Trinity).

A Prophecy of Doom is not what you think - it is the Gospel - God will go on...(Link)

There is reason to think that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will ride again, and soon. There is also reason to think that this is, in fact, no big deal. They have always visited Earth. What we call Reality is not Reality. And that is very good news indeed. As RJ Rushdoony once said (and he noted that natural disasters were happening with increasing frequency), it would be bad news indeed if they could do all this without invoking the intervention of the higher powers, and the judgement of God.

To quote an once and future friend, God's judgements are always God's redemption. The way to eternal Life always and only leads through the Gate of Horn, that of Death. It is not found in the Gate of Ivory, which are Illusions, Lies, and puerile fantasies of Immortality.

God cures our Binary "Fall" with the binary (but temporary) opposition of the Gospel. Set a thief, to catch a thief, and treat a poison, with another poison. It is temporary because it opposes us until it "destroys" us, and we at least relent, if not repent. We "re-think" our situation. Is it really true that Death is the worst of all events? It is not. That is universally acknowledged, yet rarely acted on.

Pippin, Merry, Frodo, & Sam are those who "know" this, and came through. In a sense, it doesn't matter who survives, and who doesn't. I hate to quote John Maynard Keynes, but in the long run, we are all dead. Keynes drew the wrong and worst lesson from this, but it is possible to use our Memento Mori, or the blessing of mortality (Tolkien), to see through History, events, happenings, and our assured demise, in one form or the other. Eventually, if you live long enough, you fail a saving throw on the dice. It doesn't matter. It isn't under your control. In fact, God may "change the scenery" on you in the middle of an Epoch or Age, and the mountains may be moved into the sea.

What is Death but a "change of scenery"?

This is the basis of all real cheerfulness. It is the secret of Merry Old England. Sir Henry Morton learns cheerfulness through his trials, but his great virtue is that he is capable of seeing that he must be willing to risk death, voluntarily, in order not to be a passive acquiescer to his own "doom". All God asks of us, is that we play our part with enthusiasm, or verve, or creativity. The plot is not up to us, nor the scenery. 99% of what happens around, and even inside of us, is the Tale, and not of our own Telling.

But that 1% reaction, which is under our control, is extremely important. It is the working edge of creativity and freedom, which is our cooperation with God. This is a great mystery, and the Secret Fire, the Holy Spirit of which Tolkien wrote. It is not true that man has no free will. Yet, it is certainly true that we do not have "free will" in the sense that most of us like to imagine it. The will is deeply in servitude, and necessarily so, to either God or not-God. Not-God is how we initially define "our self", like the rebellious teen versus his parent. Luther understood this existentially, although he got some details wrong, which require Nicholas Berdyaev's corrections to be perfected.

We are questioned by God, and we must respond, in the I-Thou dialogue. The response changes us, for good or temporary ill, for God is the All-Healer and the All-Resurrector. I do not deny that there are demigods - hypercosmic gods, encosmic gods, mesocosmic powers, and even the Fey Folk of legend. But there is one Lord, and that is why He is called The Lord. Likewise, there are many and infinite labyrinths, riddles, mazes, delusions, illusions, lies, etc. Some are better than others, and some only require baptism to take their place as permanent parts of our soul's scenery. Others have nothing to do with us, and we want nothing to do with them. Others require working upon.

After the purgation of the War of the Rings, there is no "shadow" left in the four who return to the Shire, except for the ring-bearers, & a greater mercy of healing is vouched for them in the lands of the West, beyond the sea.

True gratitude, cheerfulness, and joy are always possible. Christians want to take a stand against the World, without rejecting fully the Flesh and the Devil. God "commands" us to never be anxious (the Flesh), to be wise to the snares of the crafty One (the Devil), and only then will we be able, like Sir Henry Morton and the four champions of the Shire, to take our stand against the world with a slender hope of coming through. But that's just a bonus, the icing on the cake. He who is capable of such a stand, will come through though he "goes under".

And that is true gratitude for Life (the ennobled passions), cheerfulness (avoidance of the Devil), and joy (triumph over the chains of the crippled cosmos, the incompleted "World"). Those who have passed from Death to Life, are the New World, which is the prophesied blossoming of the Old.

Authorial clarification: Here, directly, is what I am saying. God has the “responsiveness, through-put, and agility” to tame Evil in His Creation. If Creation manifests the negative, God has the positive answer to it. Already. And it’s already here, if it’s “not” it means you just haven’t seen it. We have to change our point of view first, or “stand things on their head”. The Outside and the Inside change together. Start with yourself. See what happens.