Tolkien’s Traditionalism: Conveniently Forgotten?

JRRT was a traditionalist in both the religious/Catholic and political/sociological senses of the word, a fact that gets 'forgotten' by many of his admirers today.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Julian Kwasniewski

J.R.R. Tolkien poured his heart and deepest sense of what “right” reality meant into his subcreative work. His world of Middle Earth is based on monarchy, tradition, obscure and yet profoundly meaningful rituals involving sacred and elevated languages. It is peopled by kings and peasants, wizards and sorcerers. Its economy is distributist. The men of Middle Earth are handsome and strong, its women beautiful with a delicate fierceness.

“You probably wouldn’t have wanted to get on Tolkien’s bad side,” a friend of mine remarked. “He could have cussed you out in fifteen languages, twelve of which he made up himself!” Though Tolkien never had the reputation for curmudgeonly belligerence that Belloc and Chesterton were famous for, there was more of this in his character than is perhaps popularly imagined. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this beloved author’s death: He passed to the Lord on September 2nd, 1973. World famous for his fantasy epic The Lord of the RIngs and its precursor The Hobbit, Tolkien is especially beloved to Catholics for his deep practice of the Faith and the subtle ways it permeates his creative work. However, despite this popularity, much of his thought on the Church and its spirituality is little known—or at least not talked about.

Far more of an academic than figures like Belloc, Chesterton, or Evelyn Waugh, Tolkien was not an apologist like his friend C.S. Lewis. Consequently there is less material in which he explicitly speaks of the Church or his relationship with the Church during the last decade of his life. However, Tolkien was a traditionalist in many senses of the word, and, while not extensively vocal about the state of the Church following Vatican II, was certainly troubled by it. Several comments on liturgy and the theological atmosphere of the 1960s are extant in Tolkien’s letters. Tolkien combines humility with criticism. He acknowledges that the changes and infidelities of churchmen and current ideas could not be equated with the defection of the Church, but he saw that they could provide an excuse for “scandal” and unbelief. His ecclesiology is sound enough both to be disturbed and faithful.

Start With Humility: Snuffling Priests and Women in Trousers

Writing to his son Michael, Tolkien the elder said on the feast of all saints, 1963, that “in the last resort faith is an act of the will, inspired by love. Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons.” Tolkien writes that the “temptation to ‘unbelief’ (which really means rejection of Our Lord and His claims) is always there within us.” When this inner temptation grows, our readiness to be “‘scandalized’ by others” increases. “I have suffered grievously in my life,” he continues, “from stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests; but I now know enough about myself to be aware that I should not leave the Church… for any such reasons: I should leave because I did not believe, and should not believe any more, even if I had never met any one in orders who was not both wise and saintly.”^[1]

In another letter, he wrote how, “in the course of [his] peregrinations” he had met “snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priest” but that the goodness of his childhood guardian, Fr Francis Morgan, outweighed them all.^[2]

Tolkien was not a snob. He advises Michael to make frequent communions and to make it “in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children… open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them).”^[3] This does not mean, however, that Tolkien thought such sloppiness was acceptable.

This mature and thoughtful reflection is good evidence, I think, that Tolkien was not the sort of man to let himself be easily swayed by the bad behavior of churchmen. His comments on Vatican II and the state of the Church are similarly measured.

Vatican II and the New Mass

In letter 306^[4], Tolkien writes: “‘Trends’ in the Church are… serious, especially to those accustomed to find in it a solace and a ‘pax’ in times of temporal trouble, and not just another arena of strife and change.” Being born in the midst of Queen Victoria’s reign, both the temporal and spiritual senses of security he once enjoyed have “been progressively stripped away from” him. And that now the “Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap. There is nowhere else to go!” What to do, asks Tolkien? “I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.” Tolkien recognizes that there are many “various elements in the present situation” which are “confused, though in fact distinct” like modern youth which is partly inspired by good motives such as “anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness” and “is not necessarily allied to the drugs or cults of fainéance and filth”. Writing this in 1967 or ’68, the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council could hardly not be included in this description.

Tolkien saw (from the vantage of 1963) the reform of Pius X regarding regular communion and the age of first communions as “the greatest reform of our time” and “surpassing anything, however needed, that the Council will achieve.” Tolkien was deeply devoted to the Blessed Sacrament. “I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning—and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again.” He writes that the most striking thing about the Catholic Church is that it is the only one that has “ever defended the Blessed Sacrament, and given it most honour, and put it (as Christ plainly intended) in the prime place.”^[5] The disregard for Eucharistic reverence and a correct theology of sacrifice which followed on the heels of the Novus Ordo must have troubled him deeply.

The philologist served the Latin Mass well into his adulthood: “Fr Gervase Mathew is saying Mass at Blackfriars on Saturday at 8 a.m., and I shall serve him” he wrote in 1945^[6], and in 1963 of a Mass offered for C.S. Lewis: “I had a Mass said this morning, and was there, and served”.^[7] In Letter 54, he writes to Christopher that he regularly uses prayers such as the Gloria Patri, Laudate Dominum, and Sub tuum in Latin. “It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass.”^[8] The disregard for the Latin liturgical patrimony would unquestionably have been hard on someone so intimately familiar with the beauty and pietas of the Catholic rites.

Simon Tolkien reminisced in 2003 about his grandfather’s attachment to the Latin liturgy:

I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.^[9]

Tolkien also saw the destructive tendencies of liturgical antiquarianism. The lengthy letter 306^[10] also contains comments on what Tolkien (and many others) saw as the “protestantization” of the Catholic Church:

The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance.

With regard to organic development and development of doctrine, Tolkien reflects on the tree analogy, used by G.K. Chesterton and other authors to describe how growth and continuity are compatible. Tolkien’s church “was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set.” Tolkien acknowledges that in some way “there is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree.” Yet “for those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred.” In other words, once the Church has reached the “tree” stage, it cannot invoke the seed phase as an excuse for changes which are really in discontinuity with its growth: “The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree.” The guardians of the patrimony must be all the more careful, not less in their task:

Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils. The other motive (now so confused with the primitivist one, even in the mind of any one of the reformers): aggiornamento: bringing up to date: that has its own grave dangers, as has been apparent throughout history. With this ‘ecumenicalness’ has also become confused.

This does not mean that Tolkien had no heart for his fellow Christians: On the contrary, he welcomed efforts to heal breaches in unity, but found that the advances the Church was making to the modern world and other denominations was often ineffective:

I find myself in sympathy with those developments that are strictly ‘ecumenical’, that is concerned with other groups or churches that call themselves (and often truly are) ‘Christian’. We have prayed endlessly for Christian re-union, but it is difficult to see, if one reflects, how that could possibly begin to come about except as it has, with all its inevitable minor absurdities. An increase in ‘charity’ is an enormous gain. As Christians those faithful to the Vicar of Christ must put aside the resentments that as mere humans they feel – e.g. at the ‘cockiness’ of our new friends (esp. C[hurch] of E[ngland]). One is now often patted on the back, as a representative of a church that has seen the error of its ways, abandoned its arrogance and hauteur, and its separatism; but I have not yet met a ‘protestant’ who shows or expresses any realization of the reasons in this country for our attitude: ancient or modern: from torture and expropriation down to [anti-Catholic books] and all that. Has it ever been mentioned that R[oman] C[atholic]s still suffer from disabilities not even applicable to Jews? As a man whose childhood was darkened by persecution, I find this hard. But charity must cover a multitude of sins!^[11]

Another rare and pertinent passage can be found in the unpublished manuscript portions of Tolkien and the Silmarillion. This book is a memoir of Clyde Kilby’s close collaboration with Tolkien in the summer of 1966 with a view to organizing the many drafts of The Silmarillion. “The book offers an incredible insight into Tolkien the man and Tolkien the myth-maker,” Bradley Birzer wrote in 2015, noting that it “reveals much about Tolkien’s personality.” Much of Kilby’s book remained unpublished. Birzer, however, shared this passage from Kilby’s unpublished pages:

Worst of all briar patches was what he persistently regarded as the spiritual decay of our times and particularly of his own Roman Catholic church, of which he was a longtime and devout member. The Church, he said, ‘which once felt like a refuge now feels like a trap.’ He was appalled that even the sacred Eucharist might be attended by ‘dirty youths, women in trousers and often with their hair unkempt and uncovered’ and, what was worse, the grievous suffering given by ‘stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests.’ An anecdote I have heard involved his attendance at mass not long after Vatican II. An expert in Latin, he had reluctantly composed himself to its abolishment in favor of English. But when he arrived next time at services and seated himself in the middle of a bench, he began to notice other changes than the language, one a diminution of genuflection. His disappointment was such that he rose up and made his way awkwardly to the aisle and there made three very low bows, then stomped out of the church.^[12]

The Church Alone Will Preserve Civilization

Tolkien wrote in 1944 that “as in the former dark age, the Christian Church alone will carry over any considerable tradition (not unaltered, nor, it may be, undamaged) of a higher mental civilization, that is, if it is not driven down into new catacombs. Gloomy thoughts, about things one cannot really know anything [of]; the future is impenetrable especially to the wise for what is really important is always hid from contemporaries, and the seeds of what is to be are quietly germinating in the dark in some forgotten corner”.^[13] The theme of preserving the traditions in the midst of persecution was deeply ingrained in Tolkien’s heart. Gandalf speaks to this in Chapter 9 of The Return of the King:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

While an extended apologia about his concerns regarding the abandonment of Latin, traditional liturgical forms, or theological fashions may not have come down to us, it is important to recognize that Tolkien was uncomfortable with the “spirit of Vatican II.” This was not a fluke, but something that arose from his whole attitude towards tradition and fidelity to inherited costumes and culture. He had a profound sense of the unity of culture, language, history, and ritual. One of the reasons he created so many languages and myths which barely featured in his finished works was because the mythic and cultural background they created even when obliquely referenced gave a sense of “completeness” or depth to his worlds. Consequently, we should remember that discomfort with modernization in the Catholic Church and an affinity to Tolkien’s fictional portrayal of reality is not just a coincidence; it is meaningful and proper because the two went together in Tolkien himself. And if we simultaneously love Tolkien’s ethos and the changes hammered through after Vatican II, we need to realize that we must not really understand one or the other; they are incompatible.

That his trilogy was in anyway an allegory, or strictly paralleling Catholicism, Tolkien denied. In a letter to a Jesuit friend who was reading the manuscript before publication, Tolkien wrote:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.

While it is true that Tolkien wanted his sub-created world to feel somewhat pagan and not to seem like an allegory of Europe, it certainly was in some sense: the Norse and Anglo-Saxon inspiration is everywhere. His abhorrence of Christian allegory, famous in his disagreements with Lewis over Narnia, probably inclined him in the direction of implicit religion. Sometimes, however this was not so implicit; in the same letter, Tolkien admits to the truth of seeing Galadriel as a type or reference to the Virgin Mary.^[14] At the end of the day, however, Tolkien’s intensely conservative vision of the supernatural runs so deeply it doesn’t have to be illustrated by attention-getting ornaments that shout it out.

Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth is based on monarchy, tradition, obscure and yet profoundly meaningful rituals involving sacred and elevated languages. It is peopled by kings and peasants, wizards and sorcerers. Its economy is distributist. The men of Middle Earth are handsome and strong, its women beautiful with a delicate fierceness (don’t forget the sword-wielding Éowyn!). Tolkien poured his heart and deepest sense of what “right” reality meant into his subcreative work. The mind boggles if it tries to imagine what the Consilium would have thought of the religiosity of the Shire; that the Hobbit wisdom of Sam Gamgee would have had no time for the Novus Ordo seems evident. If Tolkien’s traditionalism is to be discovered in his trilogy and in his letters, let us take this anniversary as an opportunity to revisit them with that in mind: We can learn much from his well-plowed and cultivated fields about what is precious and must be preserved in our own.

Notes:

^[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 337-38.

^[2] Ibid., 354.

^[3] Ibid., 339.

^[4] Ibid., 391ff.

^[5] Ibid., 339-40.

^[6] Ibid., 115.

^[7] Ibid., 341.

^[8] Ibid., 66.

^[9] From an article first published by The Mail On Sunday 2003, reproduced on https://www.simontolkien.com/mygrandfather, accessed May 11, 2023.

^[10] The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 391ff.

^[11] Ibid., 394.

^[12] Quoted in https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/07/tolkien-the-man-and-tolkien-the-myth-maker.html, accessed May 11, 2023.

^[13] The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 91.

^[14] Ibid., 172.