Introduction
These thoughts go way back for me, particularly
those on lembas. I have had this theory at least as far back as the time when
the first trilogy of movies of Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings was coming out, at which time I was just starting and then
doing my MA in theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, because I can
remember talking about it to a good friend there who, while not officially
disagreeing, did say that he thought that it’s a difficult theory to prove
because of the fine distinction and nuance involved.
That fine distinction and nuance is
that I think that lembas bread is not an allegory of the Eucharist, as it is
often taken to be in Catholic circles, but rather symbolic of “sacramentality
as such,” a physical thing that can give more than physical material or
physical sustenance.
I’ll not be giving the whole of my
thoughts on lembas until the end, after I have gone into the fuller system of
this line of thought for literature as Tolkien practiced it, but for here, to sort
of whet the appetite and provide a little bit more solid substance at the
outset to keep the reader interested and confident that what will follow has
some substance to it, I’ll unpack this idea about lembas a very brief bit by
contrasting it with one of the “extra scenes” from the extended version of the
Fellowship of the Ring film, the first of the original Jackson film trilogy.
I call this scene the “farting
Pippin doll” scene because, in it, we find that Merry and Pippin, who are
always far too excited about food, have gone and eaten way too much of the
lembas they have been given and that is being packed into the boats and are
consequently experiencing some intestinal discomfort.
The point of lembas in the books,
however, is not the mere material quantity of fillingness. The point there is
the aid in action: the wording at one point is something to the effect of that
it gives the ability to master sinew, muscle, and bone, which I take to be
basically the ability to master your physical being to do what you need to do in
spite of psychological factors that work against doing so, like fear. In short,
it aids in the virtues of fortitude and courage, rather then sustaining the
physical body in the way that normal food does. This is pretty much the
definition of a sacrament in Catholic theology, a physical thing (such as bread
and wine and the words of institution or naturally occurring water, some action
of washing, and the Trinitarian formula) that provides something beyond the
physical as an aid to right action or living (in sacramental theology, this is
always divine grace).
(Don’t ask me what “sacrament” is
or what the nature or role of the sacraments are in Protestant theology because
I was never able to figure that one out while a Protestant, which is part of
why I became Catholic—in truth, it always seemed to me that the denominations I
was in had a strong attachment to the words “sacrament” and “church
authority” because to jettison them would seem too strong a break with
Christian tradition between the time of Christ and the Reformation [which includes
the period of the formation of the New Testament canon] and they did have some
utility in managing congregations, but that the words had no real clear
conceptual content in Protestant theology.)
(I think the extended scene from
the film completely misses the point of lembas, but I also know that it is a
decidedly fine point and that one cannot expect a film maker to get everything
right, but I do think it was good sense on Jackson’s part not to put the scene
in the theatrical version.)
The thing that makes the nuance so
tricky with lembas in LotR is that it is precisely through the tropes of an
actual sacrament, the Eucharist, that the image of the bread is open to
symbolizing sacramentality as such.
So, hopefully having set that up,
I’ll introduce the fuller exposition of this post by saying that what has
prompted me to write this post (other than that I want to get theories like
this that I have had for years out into actual structured and organized and
explicated form) is that, in doing a lot of thinking on the issue of Tolkien as
literature and the group literary project of the Inklings for the book club
that I am in, I have realized that the theory on lembas fits into a larger
theory on what Tolkien is doing versus strict and simple allegory.
As I said, before giving any more
details on lembas (which will be done as a closer), I wish to get the basic
larger literary system detailed. I’ll just note here as one further provision
of a possible application to the actual material, that it works, I think, for
other instances of biblical and/or ecclesial matters. One key example is the
fact that, while elements of the striking of the rock at Meribah in Numbers 21
are directly lifted and inserted into the account of the fellowship coming up
to and entering at the back/west door of Moria and the trek through Moria and
Gandalf’s fall on the other side, I do not think that this makes Gandalf an
allegory of Moses, but rather that certain elements of prophetic identity as
such (specifically the prophet’s frustration with the people whom they lead and
how this frustration leads them into falls) are among the elements that make up
Gandalf as a character. As with what I said about lembas though, what makes the
situation hard to discern is that it is precisely the tropes of the Moses story
by which this is done.
One last thing to mention in
introduction is that philosophy is key to the Tolkien system.
I think that, owing to his Catholic
background and familiarity with the tradition of Western philosophy from even
an undergraduate education in a classical school like Oxford, he was doing it,
even if only unconsciously, even back in the earliest writings of Middle Earth,
those done around the end of World War I, even before he began to focus on it
consciously around the time he wrote The
Lord of the Rings (at least according to his son Christopher in the foreword
to the Silmarillion). The important
philosophical tenet here is the Aristotelian concept of abstraction, on which I
will give some more in the next section, the main section of this post.
Tolkien versus Allegory
So, the core debate here is between
Tolkien and “allegory.” Stating the project thus assumes a tension in which
Tolkien disliked or had a beef with allegory. As I have mentioned in other
posts, Tolkien actually made use of allegory himself in a limited way,
particularly, and admittedly (meaning admitted by Tolkien in a letter), in the
instance of Tom Bombadil, who is an allegory of pre-fallen nature (see some
aside comments in my post on the film Arrival for further). Allegory (like
drama, as I have said in another post) becomes problematic when it is taken to
be the core literary project and the epitome or highest form of “sub-creation”
rather than one possible element to use among others in building or augmenting
the main narrative.
I have tried to think through my
method carefully here, and I believe that doing the visual first is best, with
minimal explication beforehand. One thing that is, however, important to make
sure of going into the visual is that a reader remembers the core tenet of
Tolkien and Lewis’s thought on myth, one that they inherited from Owen
Barfield, which is that myth contains truth that transcends or is beyond mere
material, historical factuality. Beyond this, two further things are important.
The first is that the ultimate Truth is God, even above (or really as the
source of, but distinct from) the supra-factual truth in myths, and the second
is that there is one place where mythical truth and historical fact coincided,
and that is the Incarnation, life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension of the
second person of the Trinity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.
So, the visual here will outline
four things:
1.
Simple allegory using pagan mythologies
2.
Simple allegory using the Christian Bible and the life
of the Church
3.
Tolkien using pagan mythologies
4.
Tolkien using the Christian Bible and the life of the
Church.
Allegory with pagan
Ultimate Truth (God)
----> mythic truth
----> mythological instantiation of mythic truth
(individual gods and events in actual mythologies)
-----> character/event on the current author’s page as direct allegory
of the mythological instantiation
(thorough one-to-one correspondence, only difference is
past “fiction” versus present coded fiction)
Allegory with Christian Bible/Church
Ultimate Truth (God)
----> mythic truth
----> Historical biblical/Church events/persons/institutions as factual
instantiation of mythic truth
----> character/event on current author’s page as direct allegory of
the biblical/Church instantiations
(thorough one-to-one correlation, only difference is
historical versus coded fiction)
Tolkien with Pagan
Ultimate Truth (God)
----> mythic truth
----> mythological instantiation (individual gods and events in actual
mythologies)
----> philosophical abstraction discovering mythic truth in the
mythological instantiation
(although this can be unconscious)
----> tropes of mythology events used to graft mythic truth concepts into
a new unique character, to include them among other possible in the aggregate
whole
Tolkien with Christian Bible/Church
Ultimate Truth (God)
----> mythic truth
----> Historical biblical/Church events/persons/institutions as factual
instantiation of mythic truth
----> philosophical abstraction discovering mythic truth in the
biblical/Church instantiation
(although this can be unconscious)
----> tropes of historical biblical characters/events etc used to
graft mythic truths concepts into a new unique character, to include them among
other possible in the aggregate whole
First, in explicating this visual
some, I have to give credit where credit may be due. Sometime during my years
at Franciscan University, the very beautiful and brilliant young Polish
professor in the English department whom I never quite had enough of a clue to
meet and get to know (it was a bit of a jumbled few years for me) had a sort of
literature weekend on campus, not really a conference, just different talks and
events going on around campus over the weekend. One of them was a debate
between Joseph Pearce and Russel somebody or other about the LotR movies.
During that debate they got onto
the topic of allegory and Tolkien’s response to it. I don’t remember them using
the specific elements I have used above, and I do think they stuck mostly to
the details of biblical elements (characters, events, etc) and the same
elements in Tolkien’s text without going into anything about the concepts of
mythic truth, philosophical abstraction, or tropes (and these also seem to
connect for me with a lot I have studied outside of Tolkien and Lewis, and so
it seems more likely that I would alight on them on my own and not from hearing
this debate) … BUT I do distinctly remember Pearce holding up his arm at an
angle at one point and pointing with the finger of the other hand down from one
spot to another in a succession from wrist to shoulder and saying something or
other about a descending ladder of sorts on which allegory more properly may be
seen as a descending set of rungs or hoops from the biblical to its allegorical
instantiations. That’s about the clearest I can remember anything from it, but
I may have gotten the whole visual descending in progressive steps from that
(although, I do have to add that it is much like the visual structure that I
have used in my expositions of chiasm and that originally, when forming the
present post, I had just everything in a line with the hyphen-arrows between
and then thought “that’s just not visually easy to follow the flow of because
it’s all sort of crammed in,” so I also did somewhat happen on this visual
schema on my own; I just want to give credit if it is in any way due, and it’s
an opportunity to drop in the name of somebody else who has done work on this
type of material, Joseph Pearce).
Exposition of the Visual
So, as I said, the philosophical
abstraction is a key element in the Tolkien approach. Concrete instances are
particular; abstractions are universal. The adjective “abstract” is actually
directly taken from the verb “abstract,” rather than being a “different sense.”
Something is “pulled out” by the intellect (I think it is the “agent intellect”
that Thomas Aquinas says does this, but I am not extremely well versed in this
area of Thomas’s application of Aristotelian “abstraction” … but I do know, or
at least think I know, that this is the difference between Aristotelian
epistemology and Platonic, that, for Aristotle, the universal form is always
present only in the particular instance of it and has to be abstracted by the
intellect, whereas Platonism says that the form is somehow, if I understand it
rightly, accessible to the mind, the nous,
apart from the particular instance, available from the “world of the forms”).
That something is what I am going to call the abstract form: the form of a
savior versus this particular savior.
Without this philosophical
abstraction, there is only the particular, say, Christ the savior. In this way
of thinking, really, “sub-creation” can only ever be allegory, which is not
really a creation. If the abstraction in a Tolkien model, after being abstracted,
is incarnated in a new narrative, then this is a true act of sub-creation. But allegorization
is not this. It may be used in limited cases such as Bombadil, but I think that
what Tolkien would say is that, at the very least, it is never the actual
narrative movement (the plot) that is allegorized from the model if the story
is to be truly narrative art, true sub-creation (see the final part of this
post on narrative).
And abstraction allows the author
to pick apart the tropes, figuring our which are accidental and which
essential, and choose which to employ to appeal to the core idea.
(Aside: a sort of the same thing
happens with a popular form in our times, which is the psychologization of
biblical stories, and in my opinion, way off base and not of much use at all as
art … we have no access to the drama or psychology of the characters in the
biblical texts along anywhere near current psychological/drama lines because
they did not have those lines as constructs in their formation of the texts, as
the modern lines of drama and psychology have been greatly impacted since
Shakespeare … in short such endeavors don’t really bring out anything or have
anything concrete in the text with which to connect.)
Some may think it right to deny any
art other than allegory, but in this case, we should jettison Tolkien himself
and his theory of “sub-creation” itself altogether, rather than pressgang him
onto the Procrustean bed and either stretch him or cut off his feet or head to
make him fit just so we can say “we have one of the really popular ones on our
side.”
To get back to staying on target, there
is a second thing that is importantly distinctive to Tolkien’s method, and this
is the issue of “tropes.” These are the dressing of the character/event: a
staff, a stone to which one was supposed to speak but that one actually strikes
with the staff, a golden land and forfeiting entry into it, bread, some type of
sustaining, and so on. In allegory, the reference is always to the thing as a
whole and the tropes cannot be separated out from each other and used
individually. The best example (before I get back to lembas bread) might be Lothlorien
as the golden land and Gandalf’s forfeiting entry by falling when he strikes
the rock bridge , which he must do (I argue) in payment for having struck the
stone door out of anger when he was supposed to speak to it 40 miles ago (the
40 miles of Moria representing the 40 years in the wilderness) and to provide
his friends entry into the golden land. All of that fits very well with the
model of Nunbers 21, but not all of the tropes are there and the core identity
of Israel’s promised land is not there in Lothlorien: for Israel, Canaan was
the final place, the final goal, but Lothlorien is only a stopping over place,
a place of temporary respite in the quest toward Mount Doom
And it should be noted
too that the LotR instance ADDS something not there in there in the Numbers 21
model: that the prophet ensures his followers entry precisely by his demise
outside the land; Moses’s punishment was nothing other than punishment and his
identification with the first generation, which must die outside the land because
they failed to trust God’s promise of protection and successful entry when the
twelve spies returned from scouting the land for 40 days in Numbers 13—it did
not aid the second generation in entering the land.
The real content that Tolkien takes
from Numbers 21 and grafts into Gandalf in Moses is, rather, that a leader,
especially one with prophetic qualities (sent by the Valar like prophets were
sent by God … and according to Deuteronomy 34:10, Moses was the greatest
prophet ever), bears the consequences of how well he or she leads those in
their charge, and when they perform poorly out of frustration and give in to
anger and don’t follow directions well, it costs.
The thing that makes it difficult
to sort out whether allegory or Tolkien’s method is being done with biblical/Church
history material is that it's easier to see with the mythology because nobody
believes these days that the mythologies had any historical fact base
whatsoever, whereas the Christian tradition does teach that there is
a historical base in the Bible: that some original couple actually did
something that gave evil a foothold in the world, that somebody named Moses did
exist and liberated a people in some way or another from Egypt and had a unique
revelation-from-transcendent-God experience on a mountain that provided a
content that has been passed down in real ways (whether that be the oral Torah
and written Torah in Judaism or Tradition and Scripture in Christianity), that
Jesus of Nazareth did historically perform miracles and that he could do so
because he was the Second Person of the Trinity in the Incarnation. AND this
teaching of historicity in the Bible comes under fire and this situation yields
individual believers who are very preoccupied with the historicity question at
the same time as being heavily under the influence of materialist
thinking and who, thus, cannot process connecting anything "mythic"
with the Bible and, so, wind up able to process only allegory and wind up
trying to read Tolkien as allegory.
I should note: This happens with
text adaptations of classics. I have heard people be critical of, for instance,
Pirates of the Caribbean as not "having a text behind it." Personally
I think that there are other things that such critics don't like about it but
don't like admitting it because it makes them sound Fundamentalist, so they
latch onto an "intellectual" sounding argument like "doesn't
have a text behind it" to say it's of lesser artistic value ... and so,
the word "text" becomes this sort of magical incantation to justify
other things. The thing here is not my exasperation with such thinking, but to
see that this follows the same pattern as thinking that allegories of the
biblical/ecclesial story are better sub-creation than something like Tolkien's
work (although this often takes the form of trying to force Tolkien into
allegorical models): directly instantiating a historical literary "text
behind it" (Austen, Kipling, Steinbeck, Les Mis, take your pick from a
million) is viewed as higher art than a new sub-creation out of the various elements
abstracted and distilled from a variety of texts and traditions by way of their
tropes (melding romance and horror and throwing in a bit of flavoring speech
from the book of Job in Pirates of the Caribbean).
Back to
Lembas
So, now I come back to my long-standing theory on lembas
bread, hopefully having done the necessary support work with the larger theory
of Tolkien’s art versus allegory (and using the instance of Numbers 21 as a
model for the Moria sequence to flesh out the larger theory). To recall, my
theory is that lembas is not an allegory for the Eucharist, but rather a symbol
of “sacramentality as such,” a “magical” (in the fictional world) physical
element that gives a person an aid beyond the mere physical, that aids virtue
(I think that “magic” itself is symbolic of the grace class of things: the good
magic of the elves and Gandalf et al being symbolic of grace, and the evil
magic of Sauron and Saruman being something of the same class that works in the
opposite direction).
Here is the key thing for saying that it is not an allegory
of the Eucharist: not all of the tropes are there. Just as the “final goal”
element is not there for Lothlorien, lembas has no element of sacrifice, nor of
giving of person. Those things would be necessary as parts of the whole for
lembas to be an allegory of the Eucharist because allegory only ever builds a
relation between the wholes and all the parts have to be there to have the
whole. Rather the tropes that are there (bread and supra-physical
sustenance/aid) point to the fact that, because they are drawn from a
particular sacrament (really THE sacrament), they point to the concept of
sacrementality itself (of grace, keeping in mind that I have discussed in
another post how Tolkien handles grace as well by the use of courtly love
according to medieval models), and having that concept requires the process of
philosophical abstraction (whether conscious or unconscious).
(Aside: I don’t know if you even COULD do an allegory of the
Eucharist; it would be different than doing an allegory of Christ’s life and
death, as Lewis did with Aslan; it would involve consuming the person, which
could be done only by cannibalism; and indeed, that is the mystery of the
Eucharist, that we consume the person without it being cannibalistic because it
is an unbloody and mystical participation in the sacrifice of Calvary; the way
that the aberration of cannibalism arises is that: by nature, rituals in pagan
culture attempt instantiate a mythic truth, but THIS particular mythic truth
can have only one instantiation of ANY kind without becoming the horror of
cannibalism, and that is the Eucharist itself).
The Issue
of Narrative
This is a bit of a difficult issue to speak of adequately,
but here goes. I would argue that only really narratives, meaning plots (“plot”
is the original meaning of “muthos”
in Aristotle’s Poetics), can be fully
allegorical. Elements like lembas can be fully allegorical only if they
participate in a narrative movement that has one-to-one correspondence with the
model … if they are going to be allegories of the things, they have to do the actions
that the things did in the model story. I think this is why Tolkien, while
maybe not specifying concretely that narrative art (the creation of a
narrative) is the only true sub-creation, pretty much uses them synonymously.
And, in answer to the objection that this would remove
painting or other visual art forms from the realm of sub-creation, while it is
a bit more speculative and imprecise, I would offer the comments of my friend
who originally noted the difficulty of demonstrating my “lembas is symbolic
only of sacramentality as such” theory. He is a visual artist whom I have
mentioned in another post, and he once described to me the concept of
narrativity in drawing and painting, meaning that such visual depictions can be
done in such a way as to lead the eye of the viewer through a distinct movement
from one element to another … a sort of narrative flow in the construction of
the depiction.
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