Saruman and the Danger of Sympathy

This post comes from reading some of the material in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings concerning Tolkien's caution about some of Charles Williams's approach and learning about black magic, his caution about the situation that Carpenter describes thus:  "By the lat nineteen-twenties Williams was thoroughly acquainted with the terminology and practices of black magic."

I think that the main thing is "sympathy." In order to understand a thing enough to yourself formulate acts of predication (propositions/sentences) that accurately describe the thing, you have to enter into a certain sympathy with it and, in a certain way, participate in the logic of it. This is along the lines of Barfield's ideas on participation and the creation of meaning (I myself would say that "objective" description, "scientific" description without any participation, is simply impossible and would yield nothing but nonsense and jibberish, at least as far as the project of describing a thing either accurately or in any way that is helpful).

But, with black magic ... this is dangerous. And that is basically the danger that Tolkien points up with Saruman. Saruman the White originally started to study ring making in order to be able to combat Sauron. But he became seduced.

Another point is that sympathy not just "has to happen" for knowledge, s if their is an alternative ... it just happens. Knowledge doesn't happen without it. And while it may be ok to become knowledgeable on certain subjects, it pays to keep this fact in mind and monitor one's own thinking. To put it in terms of Harry Potter: studying the dark arts for defense is necessary, but part of what's necessary precisely for defending against falling prey to their seduction is being aware of the danger of overly sympathetic thinking (what Harry accuses Snape of in Snape's first talk as DADA teachers in book 6: talking about them in loving tones)..

One last thing I would add is along the lines of the "the higher the leap, the harder the ground" principle and also takes care of some crediting I really should do. In a 1988 article, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict) wrote about the need for sympathy in Biblical Studies, by which he meant sort of being willing to step into the world of the text and give it a benefit of the doubt as far as being coherent, rather than always looking for the inconsistencies that betray different hands. Doubtless, redaction occurs. But one should always be "on the side of" the text in looking at the canonical shape as having coherency as a whole.

This is actually the same line of thinking on "knowing" as I think is the original sense in the Hebrew Bible in places. The verb "to know" gets used as a circumlocution for sex (as in Gen 4:1) and what is behind that is that knowledge is not the removed, objective thing that scientism thinks it is; it's experiential and interactive. There is agreement among scholars (conservatives too, just not ultra-literalists, those I say have lost the battle for their minds to scientism without having any clue even that that was the matter of the battle to begin with) that the two "trees" in the Garden of Eden are a "mashal," a metaphor or a riddle. Once up on a time I wrote a course paper supporting the reading that the tree of knowledge was a circumlocution for sex and that the proscription was against enaging before told it was ok. I no longer hold that view of the original sense of that particular passage, although I do think that the "knowledge" and "uncovering the nakedness" (they were naked and not ashamed and then they were naked and ashamed), which is another circumlocution in the HB (huge list of incest relationships proscribed in Lev 18, all stated as "you shall not uncover the nakedness of ..."), do have a presence and a role as symbolizing how deep the impact was of the Fall, but I don't think that means that the act itself was sexual.

What I now think is that the riddle is meant to hide the answer. If you asked the human author, "so, if it's not a code for sex, then, for what thing is it a code/riddle/metaphor?" I think that they would answer "why in the world would you want to have that in your head?" In that way of thinking, having knowledge is have a concept inside, part of you, a form of the thing itself inside you. And we're talking about, in the world of this text, the singular event through which all evil was let into the world ... death, decay, malice, hate, murder, all of it. Why would you want to know that? To understand it even enough to "get" what it is means to have at least a little bit of sympathy. It means, sort of, to open the door of you mind and invite a form of it (a concept) in as a house guest.

So, in all of it: the higher the leap, the harder the ground. Knowledge is impossible without sympathy ... including knowledge of another person in relationship to them or understanding an ancient text or divine Revelation. But there is also the danger with knowledge of other things, which is just simply inherent in the situation when the other stuff exists if you're going to known anything about it enough to be careful of the fact that it's there. But Tolkien was probably right too that Williams got way to excited about knowing about that stuff and may not have given the gravity of the matter its full due.