Tolkien’s Silmarillion and My Doctoral Studies in Old Testament / Hebrew Bible

In preparing for the most recent meeting (February 2024) of the book club I organize (The Pittsburgh Inklings), in which we finished up discussing J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, this was a strand of thought that came to me but I did not find a place to work into discussion there (the rest of the conversation was along other lines and very, very rich and lively).

In his famous essay on Beowulf, Tolkien characterized the poet behind the work as an author standing on the verge between two worlds. The Beowulf poet is heir to legends of monsters and heroes that feel much closer for him than for us, he himself much closer to living memory of those who heard the legends from voices that believed they were real. But he is also himself part of the new Christian world, but he also can see something true shining through behind old myths and legends, maybe something that has since gotten it wrong, but did have some genuine truth of insight in it. In the Silmarillion it feels to me like there is the same juxtaposition between Valinor and Middle Earth. Obviously the analogy does not work (at least for a creedal Christian like Tolkien, and I hope myself) on the level of making the Valar to be actual pagan myth (Valinor is holier than Middle Earth, whereas a Christian would not believe the myths to be holier than the Gospel), but I think the elves really are in a liminal space like that , informed by something from behind (in Valinor) while standing looking forward (to Middle Earth). I don’t think Turgon was advised to leave Gondolin and go to the havens by the sea in order to actually return to Valinor right then. I think he was told to go there because it is on the verge, able to see and smell and hear the real sea that is the passageway to Valinor but still within Middle Earth. It is not an attempted replica of things from Valinor as he had in Gondolin, hermetically sealed in the midst of Middle Earth like the light of the trees trapped in the Silmarils in Middle Earth. The point was not to have a replica of the old place, but to have the living people who saw and lived in the old place (Valinor)  now living in the new place (Middle Earth), informing the way of life in the new place from the place on the shore to which they alone properly have a right, open to the real sea that is the path to the source that only they from Middle Earth have seen, but also open to the real touch of Middle Earth, sharing in its dangers and trials. The elves were meant to stand on the edge between Valinor as world behind, with which contact could no longer be made, and Middle Earth as the arriving world in which they must be in some ways representatives of the Valar.

I think that this was analogous to his own work for Tolkien. The qualities of the different parts were, for him, I think, somewhat the other way around because of the fact that the Christian world was the arriving world, and thus for him a more full and holy world, whereas Valinor is definitely the more holy place for the elves. But I think the relationship of standing on the edge and representing the old in the age of the new, representing a memory of the distinction of the old that lives on in some faint form in the new, is similar, meaning Tolkien representing the myth as something that at least glimpsed truth (however wrong actual pagan practices may have gotten it after that).

A similar position was the case in how I myself approached my chosen studies. I was a PhD candidate in the biblical studies “wing” of a theology department, with a focus in Old Testament. But really I studied it as Hebrew Bible . . . and there is a distinct difference in these two terms and approaches, even though the textual material is largely the same and the actual history recorded is exactly the same, and they are not distinguished to oppose them, but to better understand their relation and flow, to unite them in the appropriate way. “Old Testament” is a distinctly Christian approach in which the text is viewed as conveying a real history (whether the literary forms are themselves scientifically “factual,” they  have a valid historical referentiality to some material reality—whether it was six literal twenty-four-hour days on the scientific level, or instead that God caused the world to evolve over millennia and the six-day structure is meant to convey deeper religious facets, the material reality is that God is responsible for the physical, scientific being and order of the world) that culminates in the Incarnation, the entry of God, who is bigger than historical factuality, into that world of fact (as C. S. Lewis named his essay, “Myth Became Fact”).

 

The Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament

But the question for me is not here the material history referred to (although obviously that is of paramount importance for me on the larger life level as trying to be Christian), but rather the sense used to refer to it. The Christian “Old Testament” sense and the proto-Jewish “Hebrew Bible” sense are not univocally the same sense. The Christian OT follows the Greek Septuagint (LXX for short, referring to the tradition that the divine seal was shown in seventy translators arriving at the same translation independently) in arranging the texts in historical chronology because of that core interpretation of the history to which they refer, the actual  to as fulfilled in the Incarnation. When reference is made to the “literal sense” in the medieval schema of biblical interpretation called the quadriga, the fourfold sense of Scripture (the literal, the allegorical, the tropological/moral, the anagogical/eschatological; the temple as an example is that the literal sense is the real Jerusalem temple building, the allegorical is Christ’s body, the moral/tropological is the believers’ bodies as temples, and the eschatological/anagogical is the New Jerusalem descending in John’s Apocalypse with no temple in it because it is all the temple), this “literal” sense it not straight-forwardly identical to the what I call the “original sense” of the Hebrew Bible as presented in the canon of the TaNaK (the Torah, the Neviim, and the Ketuvim—the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings). Hence some of the books being in different places: in the Tanak, Ruth is in the Writings instead of in the Former Propehts, as are Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and 1–2 Chronicles.

 

The Hebrew Bible Sense of the TaNaK

Not wanting to spend too long on the Hebrew Bible reading (as this essay is meant to focus on the thing of standing on the border between a world behind and a world in font), it’s still a good idea to describe it briefly (or at least my conception of it as I studied the material formally) to better see how they are different readings (HB and OT). The Tanak organization in three sections, while historically sequential, is not so in that the material content is arranged in historical order, as it is in the LXX, but rather in that it follows the conception of the historical progression of the relation of Israel to the rest of the world: its own identity established in the relation between the creation of the cosmos and the creation of the people by the giving of the Law in the Exodus event (being freed from the rule by a world power) in the Torak; then it’s religious but also geo-political entity in relation to the “nations round about” in the Prophets, first as a group of tribes ruled by the judges and then as kingdom/s; and finally in relation to the larger world on cultural levels like wisdom literature, the Writings.

The most important thing is that this textual arrangement can be conceived as concentric circles: the people in themselves (including getting an “in themselves” at all by being freed from bondage to a super-power); then in relation to the nations round-about (immediate land-status vicinity); and finally the larger “world” in an age of empires (Hellenism in the Second Temple period). And this spatial understanding (as distinct from the pronounced historical-buildup reading of the LXX/OT) mirrors the most holy spatial ordering in the Tabernacle and then the Temple—in the holy sanctuaries. Within the Tabernacle/Temple, the center was the Holy of Holies, and then moving out, it is surrounded by the Holy Place. And then, outside the Tabernacle, another concentric circle radiated out, which was the camp/land of Israel. And beyond that, the final concentric circle, the “nations.”

 

Some Specific-Passage Examples of the Difference between HB and OT Reading.

A few examples here may help. In the HB sense, the Gen 1 creation narrative is not properly about creation ex nihilo. This is not to say that it believed in eternal matter, as did some Greek philosophers, but simply that the point was not the move from an ontological “nothing” (nihil) to “something,” but rather of the fact that, without God and the order he provides (e.g., the framework of realms created on days 1–3 and corresponding inhabitants/rulers on days 4–6), the world is meaningless, “formless and void” (the only place this pairing occurs out this is in Jeremiah 4:23, again for the land, particularly for the land under judgment), utter chaos. A professor I had for a class on the Primeval History (Gen 1–11), when working on my MA, had a good way to put it: if you asked the reader of the HB sense of Gen 1, “well, if your point is not that the matter came from nothing, then where did it come from?,” they would answer, “well, from God making it from nothing, of course, but that is not the point here.” But I would add the qualifier of if you could convey the question to them in the first place in a way they would get it. The reason I put “nothing” and “something” in quotes is that it is specific language that did not develop until a certain point in history, which was the Elean school of philosophy in Greece circa 500 BCE (the main one being Parmenides, but also Xeno and his famous paradoxes) , where it is specifically distinguishing “things that are” from “things that are not” (in Hebrew, we do indeed find a word for “there is/was not,” a negation of being, but it is usually deployed contextually, such as “there was no king in the land in those days”; to my knowledge, we don’t have a noun for “noting”). The first place we have it in the Judeo-Christian tradition is in 2 Macc 7, where the Jewish mother tells the seventh of her sons, about to be killed by the Greek authorities for not eating pork as a sign of obedience after his six older brothers have been killed for the same, that he should not worry, because if God can make things that are from things that are not, he can raise him and his brothers from the dead. (The relationship is complex: Judaism, which at this point does believe God created things that are from things that are not, is directly opposed the Elean philosophers, who used a position of saying that things that are cannot come from things that are not as a support for their most fundamental position that all change is an illusion; but Judaism and Elean philosophy did both oppose the idea of semi-divine kingship surrounding the likes of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and so, for the Jewish author, it was less a thing of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and more of “the enemy of my enemy is somebody at least whose language I can use against the enemy”). Simply put, at the time of the composition of Genesis, the ideas of ontological something versus ontological nothing were not around to be worked with, as Greek ontology was not around yet in a linguistic formulation.

A central point from a Christian reading of the Bible is the belief that divine inspiration begins with the HB (you cannot have the HB sense containing a belief in polytheism) and that the development from HB to OT reading must be congruent. It must be the case that, once that language does enter the scene, creation of “things that are” from “things that are not” must be a good translation of the HB order-vs-chaos reading (which I believe it is).

Likewise in Gen 1, we have “let us create man in our own image.” It’s tempting to say that, even in the HB sense, the plural means the Trinity, but this would violate a key tenet of Christian faith: The Incarnation was not solely for the sacrifice on the Cross; Christ also came to reveal the Trinity, a very important point, as the doctrine of the Trinity is unique to Christianity. Doubtless, the phrasing is borrowed from a linguistic source that is polytheistic, but the sense in the HB has to be monotheistic. Maybe it means the heavenly court of God and the angels, or maybe more fundamentally simply that, since all things have their source of meaning in God, he must somehow (mysteriously for now in the HB), be the source of the relationality of male and female. (Likewise, the word for “God” here has plurality in it: Elohim is taking the base word for God, El, and adding first the feminine plural ending –oth, and then when adding the masculine plural ending –im, the th reduces to simply an h—but all the verbs except the “let us create man in our own image” are masculine singular; Gen 1 is even linguistically monotheistic) . In the end, the hard lines are that (1) it must be monotheistic but (2) it must not be yet Trinitarian (if the Trinity is already being referenced here, then Christ is not the unique revelation of it).

Sticking in Genesis, we have the “sons of God” in 6:1–4. Following the linguistic data from other usages of “sons of . . .” both in the surrounding culture and literatures and the HB, it means members of a class, here probably originally from a context of lower gods in an echelon. But that is not what it means here—or is it? Not to sound too much like a sophist, but that depends on what you mean by “mean.” (I’m not here going into the Sethite interpretation that reads the Sons of God as the men from the line of Seth and the daughters of men as the women of the line of Cain seducing them away from true worship of the LORD . . . I side with this interpretation that is a combination of the pantheon and royal readings). If you mean that the text speaks of lower gods in an echelon actually existing and actually copulating with human women, then no, the text does not intend such a material referent. But is that the only manner in which it can refer to something historical? I would argue that it is not, and that it could rather be rhetoric or polemic against practices among surrounding peoples who thought they had such men of divine descent as the children of the unions in Gen 6:1–4 were portrayed to be: violent men of renown, “men of the name” (as one professor put it, the Osama bin Ladens of their day). The rhetorical message would be something like, “no matter what the people’s around you tell you about how their gods have given them mighty leaders, don’t go after them (that always leads to trouble—it was what caused the flood); you have only one god, the LORD,” without really asking about the question of whether those gods “exist” versus “don’t exist” because those categories are not around yet, or at least in the same clarity as they are in, say, the later parts of the book of Isaiah. What were real in a way with that kind of clarity for the implied audience of this rhetoric were the powerful cult-of-personality leaders, usually warriors, among those peoples, and whom those people probably did at least serve with a blind devotion of seeing them as semi-divine.

So, what kind of a real-world referent could that be against which such a rhetoric is employed? I mean, the women do get pregnant and there are no men running around claiming to be their husbands/men in the regular human way that would get them pregnant, and no reports of human-level-only rape mentioned? Well (and this was the basic thesis of a post-script for an MA paper in the MA class on the Primeval History, which I then submitted as a writing sample for the application for the PhD program into which I was accepted), in an interview with Bill Moyer, the famous literature/religion scholar Joseph Campbell (famous for his Hero with a Thousand Faces and for George Lucas being very in awe of him) was speaking of rites of passage into adulthood and admitted the evidence for specific rites is scant in ancient texts. But he pointed to an example we currently have, which is the aborigines in Australia: when a boy is getting unruly in puberty, some evening the men will come into the tent naked and with bird down glued to their body in places with bits of their own blood, swinging the bullroarers, which are the voices of the bird spirits, and at this point, for this thing, the men are the bird spirits, acting in a way similar to the Catholic teaching that bishops and priests act in persona Christi when administering sacraments,  and they take the boy out into the woods and do some physical marking, maybe some subincision, maybe knock out a tooth, and whereas he has left with a boy’s body, be returns with the body of a man, and the responsibilities of behaving like a man.

It is the acting in persona of the bird spirits that is of interest here. It is not hard to imagine, if the sons of god in Gen 6:1–4 are conceived of as lower gods in a pantheon, that there would be cults and priests of these gods, and that there may be a practice of taking a girl who is physically able to conceive, taking her while she is ovulating, to a sacred grove at night to be gotten pregnant by a priest of the god who is thought to be acting in persona of the god, and then for the child to be treated as semi-divine and raised to be a maniacal tyrant. I am not claiming to have evidence of this happening; I am only saying that it is a situation possible in those cultures that would have the pregnancy as scientifically possible by our standards now and also orthodox according to Christian metaphysics if we can conceive of the biblical text as making a polemic against such a practice and saying, “here’s what they say of their leaders; do not follow them; it will only lead to evil and punishment,” without also saying “and it’s ontologically/metaphysically impossible” because those categories are not on the scene yet in the language borrowed from surrounding culture and literature for the text to be asking or answering that question yet.

But then our question becomes: how does this HB sense relate to the OT sense and its orientation toward the Incarnation? The issue in this HB sense is much the same as it is in the whole Pentateuch: the LORD is your god, and one of the key facets of this is that there is to be no mixing of the divine and the human, whether by saying that human warriors or kings can be quasi-divine or in stories of lower gods procreating with human women, and so you do not follow those people in serving those men . . . the divine and the human do not mix in that way. Even as far as cultic matters within the camp, the reason you do not touch corpses or menstrual blood is that these are more immediate contact with  death and life, which are properly the domain of the LORD: that which is too holy for you makes you impure for regular contact with the LORD and others in the Tabernacle.(Likewise, many of the foods prohibited in the dietary laws are bottom-feeders and refuse-feeders, which is a place of death; although there is at least one instance where a dietary restriction is about a dead animal but because of life—Lev 17 says you shall not eat meat with the life blood still in it, for the blood contains the soul . . . and only God is allowed to touch as intimately as eating). Of course, you can’t avoid these things, especially women with menstrual blood, and while you can avoid eating the unclean animals, if you never touch a corpse, let’s just say that, at the very least, you wind up with a lot of flies and maggots in your homes, and so you have to go through cultic action to restore cultic purity. The point of the sacrifices for cultic purity was not sinfulness, but a practice to keep ever before the eyes of the people that there is a huge gulf between who God is by nature and who we are by nature, and there is to be no mixing outside of the ways God prescribes. Moses can go up the mountain, and really must, because God told him to; but God also told him to put a barrier up lest the people break through and touch the mountain while he is on it and die.

So, how does the Incarnation relate? The Hypostatic Union in the Incarnation in the person of Christ is the only real mixing of the divine and the human (and so mysterious that it took 450 years for the Church to pin down adequate language for even what we can understand about it in the Christological formula of the Council of Chalcedon). Any others along the way who have claimed to mixed with the divine are either liars or unholy people who defile those who follow them. Maybe they mix with actual demons, or maybe they just pollute minds with the idea they have mixed with the divine; either way, the only thing reached by that path is violence and punishment.

Our next example is one where one might say, “but here you’re saying specifically that an erroneous translation is involved,” but in this case, one must look at ideas of inspiration and where all it occurs. In the Hebrew Isa 7:14, there is no need to assume the miracle of a virgin birth. The Hebrew alma can mean “young woman” without meaning virginity, and as far as I know, there is no marking that means the perfect tense here must be taken as the prophetic perfect, with a sense of future rather than past (if there are such markings and I have yet to encounter linguistic source-work on such, that would obviously change my thinking here). The idea of a virgin comes in when the LXX uses the Greek parthenos, which does mean specifically a virgin, to translate the Hebrew alma. In the Hebrew text, there is no need to go to the level of a virgin birth for the passage to be about divine intervention: Ahaz is afraid to ask for a sign of help even though Isaiah is telling him to have the faith to ask, and so Isaiah says, fine, God will give you a sign on his own: see this pregnant young woman here? By the time that kid can tell right from wrong after he’s born, God will have wiped out the two kings oppressing you.

So is the Christian use of the LXX invalid? Not even by rabbinic standards. The classic rabbis will string together passages that have no historical relation to each other, and so no necessary continuity of usage of terms and authors, stringing them together based in a common term in order to apply other elements in the passages to each other, and their justification is that the Holy One Blessed Be He gave both and could have hidden this connection for unfolding development. (Such esoteric readings get even more “disconnected” than this, from our scientific point of view: gematria is a Jewish number system that assigns a numerical value to each letter and uses the system to see connections invisible on the surface, such as, to take the most popular example, especially due to Darren Arnofsky’s film Pi, if you take the numerical value for the word for “father” and add it to the numerical value for the word for “mother,” you get the numerical value for the word “child” . . . to them this is no coincidence; the Holy One Blessed Be He hid it there intentionally for later finding). Both  the HB and LXX/Christian readings have a child involved in the bringing of salvation (for the Hebrew mindset, the delivery of the oracle by the prophet is itself part of the fulfillment); for the Christian reading, Christ is literally “God with us” (the second person of the Trinity in the Incarnation), which is the meaning of the name of the child in Isaiah, Immanuel (im is the preposition “with,” and Hebrew suffixes person-number-gender formatives, such that im-manu- means “with us” [-u is the actual third-person plural, and –ma- is a connector that gets added] and El is God, and it is a pronomial, meaning an implied “is” such that “with us God” means “with us [is] God” or “God is with us”).

One important thing to keep in mind for this study of the HB/OT  is that, in Christian theology, divine inspiration applies to the HB sense, what I have called “the original sense,” and so there is even more a need to see consistency, not that they are the same, but that the OT sense fulfills the HB sense in a unique way, in a Chrisitological way (and I mean here specifically the OT fulfilling the HB, not yet Christ fulfilling the HB/OT; the distinction of the OT sense, the quadriga’s “literal sense,” is its orientation toward the Incarnation as fulfillment).

 

Returning to Tolkien

To come back around to Tolkien, I would ask the question of what I might mean in my own formulation I have used often that the Silmarillion is the OT of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings is his NT. I have meant a number of things by that (but never an allegory, even when Tolkien uses biblical models for some parts of his narrative [like the scene at the west door of Moria in LotR being modeled on Numbers 20, just as he uses pagan myths as models for other aspects]). This time around, I mean something new: I mean an Old Testament reading as distinct from a Hebrew Bible reading. The material that makes up the Silmarillion was done over decades and decades of his life, and reworked many times, including major structuring elements. But the end of that arc of his own crafting and then Christopher Tolkien’s final shaping for publication in 1977 happened after the Lord of the Rings was written. I don’t think we can say that we can have no idea of a Silmarillion that is not oriented to the LotR, but I also don’t think that we can have no idea of an original Hebrew Bible sense that is not yet the Christian Old Testament reading of the same texts but that is necessarily congruous with that reading of the same texts. And as for myself and what I can understand of an original Hebrew sense through historical-critical study and of a Jewish sense from reading rabbinic material etc., I am still a Christian and will never really be able to approach the text without that Christian OT reading in mind, even if it doesn’t eclipse the HB sense. And I wonder whether, even with his great long history of composition of the Legendarium, Tolkien (either one of them) was ever able to think of the Silmarillion material without some mind to its unfolding in the LotR after that that work had been written. In the 1951 letter by Tolkien that Christopher used as the preface to the second edition of the Silmarillion, Tolkien wrote that the Hobbit, which was independently conceived and originally questionable concerning whether it belonged in the same Middle Earth as the earlier legend material, “proved to be the discovery of the completion of the whole.” More at length, he writes: “As the high Legends of the beginning are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view—and the last tale blends them” (the “last tale” being the LotR; while it was not officially published until 1954–1955, after the letter, he had a first chapter and title in 1938, resumed work on it in 1944 after having abandoned it for a bit, showed a full draft to the publisher in 1947, and had substantial revisions done by 1949, two years before the letter). I have written in others place about the Incarnational quality (capital I for the Christian doctrine) of Tolkien’s work, such as the warm and comfortable “hole in the ground” that begins The Hobbit being possible from a man whose personal experience of “hole in the ground” was the “no man’s land” trenches of World War I only through a deep belief that, in the Incarnation, God came down into all of the flesh, all sensory experience [in Greek, soma or “body” is a more holistic concept of embodiment, whereas, as I understand it, sarx or “flesh” is the lived sensate experience in the body, what I sometimes call the “squishiness”], even that horror-scape experience, and redeemed it), and here we have a further application of the same Incarnational principle to the whole canon of the Legendarium: the high mythic spirit of the Silmarillion meets the human humility of The Hobbit in the fullness of an “incarnation” (lowercase because it is subcreation and not creation, but still a mirror of that central event for Christianity) in the Lord of the Rings. But for here, what I want to ponder is that the biblical mode might also be found in a Silmarillion whose origins, like the Hebrew Bible, can be seen, but a Silmarillion that cannot be thought of (by us, or Christopher, or Tolkien himself) without seeing it in relation to The Hobbit and the LotR in the same way we as Christians (we, Christopher, and Tolkien himself) see the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament in relation to the New Testament.

This has all been, again, part of what I refer to as Tolkien writing in the “biblical mode”: not doing allegories of the Bible, but rather his writing over the course of his life and the relationships between these major installments having the same type of relations between them and some of the same shapes within them. My most central focus for that reading has long been a concept of typological fulfillment (which is particularly Christian in the “fulfillment” part, although a Jewish Hebrew Bible reading also sees typology, but in the form of Moses being the model and the presentations of prophets after him being echoes [e.g., Elijah’s forty-days trip to Horeb], in view of the statement in Deut 18: 15–19 that the LORD will raise up a prophet like Moses), in which the Tuor–Indril pairing and the Aragorn–Arwen pairing fulfill the original Beren–Luthien  pairing Tolkien himself stated as the “kernel” of the Legendarium.

 

The Road That Goes Ever On: a “Like Happens to Like” Development.

But there are also other ways that the this “mode” plays out, here in particular with the relations of the “world behind the text” (the Hebrew Bible for a Christian encounter of the whole Bible, Valinor for the elves, the legends of recent memory for the Beowulf poet, the world of myth for Tolkien), the “world of the text” (the Old Testament for a Christian encounter of the whole Bible, the shore of the sea for the elves, his own time for the Beowulf poet, and his own subcreation of Arda for Tolkien) and the “world in front of the text (the New Testament for a Christian encounter of the whole Bible, the life of mixing with the second children for the elves, the dawning Christian age for the Beowulf poet, his own world of lived faith, both individual and communal/institutional, for Tolkien). (I borrow the conceptual rubric of the worlds behind, of, and in front of text, which is summarized succinctly by the National Catholic Education Commission at https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/foundations/the-three-worlds-of-the-text/, but formulated more in depth by particular scholars in biblical studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

Concerning this “world in front of the text,” the realm of Christian thought that, for Tolkien, the myths feed into and, for us, the Bible begins, in an essay I have long been working on that focuses on this “biblical mode” in Tolkien, I have a section called “Like Happens to Like” that is basically about tenets of medieval theology that appear in Tolkien’s work not because he was trying to allegorize or somehow instantiate theological content in a way that could be clearly interpreted, but simply because (1) he “had it on the brain” (Christopher, in his own preface to the Silmarillion, mentions that his father was more into philosophy and theology by the time he wrote the Lord of the Rings), and (2) his thinking in the biblical mode leads his work in the same pathway as there is for the Bible: Scripture feeds into theology. My contention is not that you can jump straight from the fictional work into theology or that that is the primary meaning of the work, but that an author whose work bears such affinity with the forms in the Christian Bible (as I said, in my larger [hopefully to be written in full sometime] essay, the focus is on the element of typological fulfillment, although in the present essay it is on the relationship between the world behind the text and the world in front of the text) is highly likely to be akin to the development of the Bible into theology in the manner of literary elements that, while they have their own distinct literary meanings in their own story, can also be seen as analogous to major theological movements in the history of Christian theology, especially if the author has actively studied the theology.

Much of my thinking on that “like happens to like” focuses on the medieval theological maxim that “grace builds on nature.” The grace–nature relationship was paramount for medieval theology; the great doctor of the Church revered by all branches in at least Western Christianity, St Augustine, is known in the Catholic tradition of Tolkien as the “Doctor of Grace” (the doctors are usually given such titles: Aquinas is the Angelic Doctor and the Common Doctor; Bonaventure is the Seraphic Doctor, Scotus is the Subtle Doctor).

For this idea of grace building on nature, there were two directions in which it could be gotten wrong. The first is the Pelagian or semi-Pelagian reading that says that nature is pretty much all right on its own but just not the whole thing, and so grace just builds on top of it without really impacting it in itself. The second way, and the one of particular interest here, is what I call the “deconstructionist” way: nature is so broken and fallen that the only way grace can build on it is to deconstruct it and build something new from the pieces that might not look a whole lot like the original nature except maybe a few trace elements here and there. The eventual formulation to safeguard against these two extremes, to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis, is that grace heals, perfects, and elevates nature (fixes a distinct break that is definitely there; helps it fulfill its own aim that is intrinsic to it in its unbroken state but which it cannot reach on its own even in an unbroken state; and gives it a new aim above its own intrinsic aim it had on its own).

For here, the main idea is avoiding the deconstructionist error, grace not obliterating nature. I think the old legends and myths, the world behind Tolkien’s text, are the nature that Tolkien wants to see healed, perfected, and elevated, but not obliterated and deconstructed. As I have said, obviously Valinor is more holy than Middle Earth in a way that the myths cannot be holier than the Christian Gospel, but I think the structure of a world-behind not being obliterated by a world-in-front-of (leaving, effectively, nothing of the world-behind in the world-of-the-text) does cross-over in a meaningful way, and in the setting of Tolkien relating to real-world mythologies, it is also that thing of grace not obliterating nature, just as for me, a (quadriga) literal-sense Christian Old Testament reading should not obliterate an original-sense Hebrew Bible reading, but rather have an organic unity with it.

Of course, as stated above, for Scripture, this is also based in the doctrine that that original Hebrew Bible, as a world-behind for the Old Testament, is itself inspired, in a way that is not true for the myths to which Tolkien looked back, whereas it is true for the Christian Gospel to which he looked forward, the world of his faith into which he walked daily like that road that goes ever on for Bilbo and Frodo.  Perhaps that is why I feel such attraction Tolkien, like a walking companion on one of his and Lewis’s summer tours. They spent a career looking back to the myths and legends and forward to their faith, and I spent a decade of graduate school for theology and biblical studies trying to get a good sense of the relation between the Hebrew Bible behind and the Christian Bible ahead, like the Beowulf poet looking back to the legends to which he was closer than are we and forward to the  dawning Christian era of his culture.