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Tolkien's Strange Christianity



jpospich1
Lindon

Aug 9 2025, 7:08pm


Views: 17297
Tolkien's Strange Christianity
NOTE: This is yet another essay in the tiresome genre of "what Tolkien really believed". But it's one, I hope, that will prove a little more useful to the general reader than most. Be aware that I am still developing my thought on this subject and that some of following conclusions must remain, for the time being, tentative.

As Verlyn Flieger long ago discovered, it is helpful to approach Tolkien through one of his associates and admitted influences: fellow "Inkling" Owen Barfield. Barfield, it is well known, was a follower of Rudolf Steiner, the German occult philosopher, and I think it must be admitted that both Barfield and Steiner, whilst incorporating aspects of Christianity in their thought, could be called Christian only in a very special, esoteric sense.

Barfield viewed the Christian myth as, above all, symbolically true, in the sense that it reflected the evolution of human consciousness which he believed, with Steiner, is a mode of divine consciousness. The broad outlines of the evolutionary process Barfield described belong to the familiar Romantic picture. In the beginning man is a part of Nature - which is divine - and one with it. Gradually however, a separation occurs, and this primordial unity is broken. The awakening of man as a being apparently separate from Nature and God is the birth of self-consciousness. According to Barfield, this long evolutionary process terminated around the time of the birth of Jesus; indeed, this is how Barfield interprets the Christian "incarnation". Coincident with the life and teachings of Jesus, the opposite movement then commenced: the crest of the Spirit - now fully 'internalized' within man - began to emanate outward, clothing nature in its own character and hue. The prospect of a total transformation of the natural world by the work of the human mind and hand became conceivable. This is the basis of the Romantic creed of rebirth (and it is also how Barfield interprets the nature of the Christian "universal resurrection."). It is not simply that man can remake nature through his own material labor and effort, although that is certainly possible to a degree. Rather, man can transform nature and himself from the inside-out by means of the transformation of the human imagination by Art. After all, of what is nature composed but the substance of the divine imagination? And what is the human imagination but a mode of the divine? Human beings, like all of nature, are projections of the divine self. The separate self - the self-conscious self - is ultimately an illusion, and at this point of the evolutionary process, an outmoded one in its current state. Redeeming this separate self - 'dying' to it, as it were - and re-establishing a unity with the divinity on a higher level is the primary task of the current stage of world evolution and the sole means of deliverance. According to many Romantic artists, this rebirth or Resurrection - of the individual and mankind as a whole - can only occur through Art. Indeed, the artist is destined to play the pivotal role in bringing about the next stage of humanity's evolution. In so doing the artist will be raised to the level of the creator-God and through his artistic activity effect a universal Apocalypse. The redemption of the self coincides with the redemption of the world.

Now, what does all this have to do with Tolkien? I believe that Tolkien broadly subscribed to the vaguely Christianized Romantic worldview held by Barfield and others and roughly outlined above. Moreover, I believe his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings was an attempt to overcome the separate self and establish identity with the divine being along the lines of much Romantic art. That is, The Lord of The Rings is essentially a religious exercise, and perhaps even a kind of ritual activity designed to effect a world transformation. To see how this may be, we will now examine his little-known poem "Mythopoeia," and then his well-known essay "On Fairy-Stories".

TOLKIEN'S BARFIELDIAN VISION IN 'MYTHOPOEIA'

Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact.

As Barfield has explained in his books, the greatest danger of the current stage of evolution is "idolatry," which is the perception of the world and the things within it as objects wholly external to the human mind. This is the great illusion that must be overcome in our age. Here Tolkien seems to agree, describing the world as a "creative act" which man originally participated in. Man must remember his "lordship", and recover his creative powers, not "worship the great Artefact" in a spirit of idolatry.

Man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Refract light is a familiar Romantic metaphor since Newton's Opticks of the nature of Creation. The imagination of man is a prism through which passes the pure white light of God, which is then refracted, imbuing the world with "many hues" that combine to form "living shapes that move from mind to mind". Ordinary perception is the result of a creative act, and the external, phenomenal world, as with Blake and other Romantics, is essentially mental in its nature.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which were made

As manifestations of the divine, we have formed this world through a "creative act," filling it with "elves and goblins" and "gods", however unconsciously at first. Moreover, this was our "right" as we are essentially divine beings. We still possess this ability of world-creation, but in our fallen state have nearly forgotten it.

Now Tolkien turns to a triumphant vision of "victory" over our fallen human condition. This victory, he suggests, will be accomplished by the Artist, specifically by the "legend makers" who resist the abyss of modern "progress".

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

Through their Art, the modern myth-maker will inspire men with visions of paradise.

Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have turned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

In the last stanza of the poem, Tolkien describes his vision of paradise. It is, strangely enough, a vision of Earth "as it is," not abolished or wholly transformed, but redeemed. Evil, he says, will no longer exist, as it stems from fallen consciousness. In this Earthly paradise the Artist will reign supreme, and his creations will become realities continually made anew.

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True
Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see
that all is as it is, and yet made free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden nor gardener, children nor their toys.
Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God's picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in malicious choice,
and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.

TOLKIEN'S REDEEMING JOY

"Mythopoeia" was first composed in 1931. The essay "On Fairy-stories" was initially delivered as a lecture in 1938, then published in an expanded form some years later.

At the end of a later version of the essay, we find Tolkien discussing a curious emotion or affect which he claims the best "fairy-stories" elicit and which he calls "Joy". This "Joy," he writes, is a result of the sudden "turn" in a fairy-story in which the forces of Good, by "a sudden and miraculous grace, never counted on to recur", overtake the forces of Evil, and begin to triumph over it. This is none other than the joy of the "happy ending", so common to the classical fairy tale. It denies, Tolkien writes, "(in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat," and gives a "fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief." When the "turn" in a fairy-tale occurs, "we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story and lets a gleam come through."

What is this "Joy" that Tolkien speaks of? It is, I believe, divine joy. It is the joy of discovering our true identity. We are not merely our separate selves or egos; we are the manifestations of God, and this world and all things within it are but a figment of God's imagination as made manifest through the human mind. All suffering, all pain and unhappiness and longing must fade away in the face of this highest, living truth. For as a result of accepting it we must also accept that it is impossible for Evil to ultimately triumph over Good. All must - and will - be redeemed.

The "turn" in a great fairy-story, Tolkien asserts, produces in us the same "quality of Joy" as would the realization that our own reality was nothing but a fairy-story with a necessarily happy ending. In fact, this is precisely how Tolkien characterizes the Christian myth: it is a fairy-story that is true in THIS reality. "Art has been verified," he writes. "Legend and History have met and fused." This understanding of Christianity, I would argue, is essentially identical with Barfield's Romantic, esoteric version As Barfield has written in his 1965 essay "Philology and the Incarnation":

"Well, as I say, the supposition is an impossible one, but it is possible — I know because it happened in my own case — for a man to have been brought up in the belief, and to have taken it for granted, that the account given in the gospels of the birth and the resurrection of Christ is a noble fairy story with no more claim to historical accuracy than any other myth - and it is possible for such a man, after studying in depth the history of the growth of language, to look again at the New Testament and the literature and tradition that has grown up around it, and to accept - if you like, to be obliged to accept - the record as an historical fact, not because of the authority of the Church nor by any process of ratiocination such as C.S. Lewis has recorded in his own case, but rather because it fitted so inevitably with the other facts as he had already found them. Rather because he felt, in the utmost humility, that if he had never heard of it through the Scriptures, he would have been obliged to try his best to invent something like it as an hypothesis to save the appearances."

In other words, Barfield was led by his tracing of the history of the "evolution to consciousness" to conclude that the Christian myth was true - not only in a certain "allegorical and symbolical" sense (Tolkien's words), but also historically - in the sense that it marked a definite "turn" in the evolution of consciousness from inward to outward, as evinced by the figure and life of Christ. ("Spirit, then, or God - sooner or later I think we must make the equation - progressively incarnates itself in the phenomenal world, then narrows itself into human consciousness, and at the point of the Incarnation begins a movement back upward toward Spirit again, having assumed, or subdued, all things to itself.") Again, my contention here is that Tolkien's understanding of the Christian "Incarnation" and "Resurrection" has far more in common with that of Barfield - and Romanticism in general - than to any orthodox understanding. Nothing that Tolkien says in "On Fairy-Stories," at least, seems to contradict this.

One conclusion we can draw from Tolkien's essential identification of "Christian joy" with the seemingly secular "joy" elicited by the best fairy-stories is that the latter must be considered, in some fundamental sense, religious. In other words, when Tolkien crafted his fairy-story to elicit the same kind of "joy" produced by the realization that the Christian myth is true, he was engaged in an essentially religious task. In fact, we must wonder if, like other Romantic artists, he ultimately considered his artistic efforts - and their products - the highest religious activity possible at this stage of the evolution of consciousness. For to effect the redemption of self and world ("The Resurrection"), the Romantic Artist must overcome modern man's exclusive identification with his ego-self. He must induce a gnosis - a deep and reverberating realization - of the essential identity of the seemingly individual self with the higher, cosmic Self or Spirit, which is ultimately God. For Tolkien, apparently, this gnosis or realization can be effected by means of the "Joy" elicited by the fairy-story at its finest. This "Joy," he writes, is a "piercing glimpse of... heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story and lets a gleam come through." It is a Joy so powerful and glorious that it can overcome our exclusive attachment to our lower selves, and deliver us from Evil. Insofar as the Romantic Artist can elicit this Joy in us, he can help liberate mankind, and insofar as he helps liberate mankind, he serves as a divine instrument of God, and indeed helps brings about the "Eucastrophe" - the "turn" leading to the happy ending - symbolized in the Christian myth.

That Tolkien believes the artist of "Fantasy," as he defines it, is a divine instrument is made clear by his statement at the end of his essay. There he writes that the "Christian" artist may "actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation." An earlier draft of this essay contained a more revealing version of this line: "For all we know, indeed we may fairly guess, in Fantasy we may actually be assisting in the evolution of Creation" (my italics). Needless to say, it is difficult to imagine an Orthodox Christian making such an assertion. Only when placed in the perspective of the "evolution of consciousness" as expounded by Romantic artists and interpreters such as Barfield does the true meaning of such an assertion become clear.

SYMBOLISM IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS

We may now put forth some tentative suggestions regarding the symbolism of Tolkien's great myth The Lord of the Rings.

1. The One Ring. The Ring seems to symbolize the very consciousness of "idolatry" - i.e. the consciousness of fallen man - described by Barfield. It is the fallow egoism so pervasive in the modern world. Such consciousness lacks any felt internal identity with its source, and indeed viciously denies such a connection in its quest to dominate and control. This separate self - once the goal of the evolution of consciousness - is now the source of evil insofar as it fails to transcend itself and re-impregnate the world with meaning and significance. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the Ring grants its wearer invisibility, just as fallen consciousness renders ones spiritual connection to the world invisible. The Ring bestows upon its wearer great power, but this power is a wholly worldly one, for to stand separate from the world permits one to possess and control the things within it like never before. Yet the Ring also exercises a baleful influence upon its wearers, enslaving them to Evil.

2. The Phial of Galadriel - In this Phial is captured a remnant of the original light of creation. Frodo uses it several times to drive back the darkness and advance in his quest. In terms of Barfield's "evolution of consciousness," we can view the light of Galadriel's phial as the divine light of imagination put in service of redemption. This light is the awareness of man's essential identity with divinity. It is this awareness or gnosis which can drive back the evil brought about by fallen consciousness.

3. Hobbits, Elves and Men. The notion of the Ring as fallen consciousness helps explain why the burden of carrying it falls exclusively to Frodo. For Frodo - and Hobbits in general - seem to represent modern man. That is why elves and heroic men are present in the story, but cannot undergo the pivotal struggle which is reserved for Frodo alone. Elves, ents, wizards and heroic men are like ancestral memories within Frodo (Tolkien was apparently a reader of Jung), present and participating in the conflict but unable to take his place in the central role, which was occurring in HIS time, not theirs. In this sense the quest can be viewed as ultimately internal, rather than external.

4. The destruction of the Ring. Frodo, famously, is unable to dispose of the Ring by dint of his own efforts. In the crucial moment he holds back, and refuses to cast into it the fire. At this point there occurs an act of "a sudden and miraculous grace, never counted on to recur," as described by Tolkien in "On Fairy-stories". Gollum, the mirror-image of Frodo as fallen man, rips the Ring from Frodo's hand and falls with it into the pit of fire, accidently destroying himself as well as the Ring. The Artist-Author, as a manifestation of God, intercedes in the story as Providence intercedes in reality. Just as Frodo requires divine intervention in order to succeed on his quest, so too does modern man. It seems likely that Tolkien viewed his work as exactly that - divine intervention in history.


Voronwë_the_Faithful
Doriath

Aug 10 2025, 2:09pm


Views: 17231
Excellent
I quite enjoyed reading that, and your view of Tolkien's is not inconsistent with my own, though I tend to approach from different angles.
'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'

The Hall of Fire


Silvered-glass
Nargothrond

Aug 12 2025, 5:51am


Views: 17188
The Flame Imperishable, etc.
Thank you jpospich1 for your interesting and thought-provoking post that had much new material to me. In particular, I had paid very little attention to the miscellaneous Inklings.

So Barfield was apparently a heretic or even not really a Christian at all, which raises uncomfortable questions about Tolkien as a supposed Christian author...

Barfield even might have been influenced by Tolkien's private thoughts rather than the other way around.

From the Wikipedia page on Anthroposophy:
Quote
The Catholic Church did in 1919 issue an edict classifying Anthroposophy as "a neognostic heresy"
This connects to some things I had been thinking about Tolkien's worldbuilding...


The Flame Imperishable and the Two Trees

The Book of Lost Tales describes the early Arda illuminated by a strange liquid light that moves about with apparent free will and in later sections appears to have emotions and possibly even thought processes of some sort. I think this liquid light can with good reason be interpreted as fragments of the Flame Imperishable. In any case, the Valar are unhappy with the light moving where it wills and proceed to gather and trap the light, first in the Two Lamps, then the Two Trees.

In a major difference to the later depictions that portray the Two Trees as nothing but good and wonderful and make no mention of what makes them shine, the original Lost Tales description of the Two Trees has a darker undertone that can be detected by an attentive reader.

As originally described, the Two Trees are powered by an amount of liquid light circulating in a closed loop, from which some liquid light is occasionally removed to create permanent magic items by the Valar and the Elves. As the Elves are said to have preferred to work with the light of Telperion, this neatly explains why Telperion in a later description was said to be dimmer than Laurelin and why Sun the ended up much brighter than the Moon. This line of thought can be further extended into issues of male/female dualism, which is an important concept in occultism. Tolkien also appears to have been aware of the yin/yang division as he wrote The Book of Lost Tales.

I think the Two Trees - where the light moves from the roots to the trunk and then to the branches and rains down from the flowers, only to be used to water the roots again - are probably supposed to embody some form of a reincarnation cycle. Notably, the Two Trees do not bear fruit until their deaths and would never have borne fruit if not for Morgoth.

If you really think about it, the Two Trees as originally described are things of horror that keep living spirits trapped in an eternal cycle with only an illusion of growth that amounts to nothing as the light in the trees very slowly diminishes from being used to create objects and also implicitly from being unhappy. The small amount of remaining liquid light that powers the Sun can shine brighter than the entire Laurelin, and I think that is because the light is happy to be free from the tree. The light conceivably becoming unhappy again when the Valar constrain the movements of the Sun is another thing entirely...

I also suspect the destruction of the Two Trees made the Awakening of Men possible. Humans would have tiny sparks of Flame Imperishable in them: men from Laurelin, women from Telperion. (This is not a Christian idea, by the way.) Some individuals, especially those not human, might not have sparks at all, and that could be the reason most of the Shire is so predictable to Frodo. In one of his letters Tolkien mentions that most hobbits do not have some "spark" which he doesn't describe in the letter, and I think this spark might have been a share of the Flame Imperishable, required to be a real individual rather than an automaton obeying social conventions.

In the real life there are occultists thinking themselves wise and special and claiming that at least 99% of all humans currently alive (or possibly all humans outside of their particular cult) are soulless automatons and therefore can be freely harmed and exploited without bringing about bad karma, so this is getting into a really dark and evil territory that is not Christian at all...


Colors and Light

In Tolkien's Mythopoeia we see a chain of influence through Steiner from Goethe who came up with his own alternative to the excessively prosaic normal science called Goethean science. Notably, Goethe was interested in optics and opposed to Newton's theories.

It sounds very plausible that Tolkien was influenced by (or even believed in) Goethe's dualistic color theory which has darkness as its own positive thing. In particular, Gandalf's words about breaking light would be in line with Goathe's philosophy of science as well as Goethe's ideas, which have white light as an indivisible thing and the dualistic counterpart to darkness, combining with it to create all the visible colors, while Saruman instead takes the (correct) Newtonian approach in which the white light is a mixture, so that breaking apart the mixture to bring out the separate colors is entirely compatible with the path of wisdom.


noWizardme
Gondolin


Aug 16 2025, 6:26pm


Views: 16389
Welcome to the Reading Room!
(An old, tradition -- and a fine one I think ought to be kept alive -- is to reply to what appears to be someone's first post on this board with that sentiment!)

Thanks for posting this - I enjoyed this piece about Barfield. Given the amount of time Barfield, Tolkien and the others spent in the pubs of Oxford discussing their ideas, it seems perfectly reasonable that some of Barfield ended up in the 'soup' or stockpot of Tolkien's imagination for writing LOTR.

Or should it be lasagne, not soup.....?
...Or is that Garfield, not Barfield?

Anyway...

I wasn't sure how seriously to take your claim that this was 'yet another essay in the tiresome genre of "what Tolkien really believed".'


It is, it's true a genre in which one faan can rarely persuade another. For myself, I note that Tolkien said:

Quote
'As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none

LOTR 2e Foreword
And so the "what Tolkien really believed" genre inevitably brings up the question of whether what we're really talking about is what the essayist would like Tolkien to mean, or assumes he means, and isn't really about what Tolkien really means at all.

This I realise makes me the aggrieved girlfriend in the 'distracted boyfriennd' meme. So be it. Smile

~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.

(This post was edited by noWizardme on Aug 16 2025, 6:30pm)


DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond

Aug 17 2025, 3:32am


Views: 16195
Tolkien As God of Ea
Quote
In so doing the artist will be raised to the level of the creator-God and through his artistic activity effect a universal Apocalypse.
I choose to interpret the above as either Tolkien as god as designer and creator of Eru, which he was, and so forth down to everything Middle-earth...

...or if seen through the lens of this Tolkien quote...

Quote
As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none.
...I'll interpret it as a viewpoint on what he observed of belief in all his experience during his life to that point, then extrapolated to fiction.

First, I like the books and the legendarium. But I think the gods Tolkien created were mean, cruel, petty, torturous and capricious to intentionally leave their creations to not just one but several possible "universal Apocalypses." Their squabbles taken to immense scales are no better than rowdy patrons at a bar brawl. Using Palpatine's words, everything that has transpired has done so according to Eru's, and therefor Tolkien's, design. I like the stories. Any good story has conflict and challenge in some way. Maybe they were necessary to the story. But I have no like or respect for the gods of Ea who Tolkien created. If belief made reality, the people of Middle-earth are better off to forget them and let them evaporate away. And invite the elves to remain, of course.

So how much was observation and invention and how much came from "Tolkien's Strange Christianity?"


noWizardme
Gondolin


Aug 17 2025, 1:35pm


Views: 16077
Or maybe Author, and not god
Authors would be very bad gods: as you say DHG, one of the important things authors do is give their characters a hard time... until the end of the story.
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.


Silvered-glass
Nargothrond

Aug 23 2025, 5:04pm


Views: 13217
Interpreting the Two Trees
(This post is only marginally on-topic, but I decided to post anyway for potential curiosity's sake.)

Now someone might have been wondering how I was going to reconcile metaphysically unpleasant ideas like the above one about the Two Trees with the sequel outline project I've mentioned earlier on this board. My solution is taking advantage of Tolkien's "Myths Transformed" phase, in which the Sun predates the Valar, the world was always round, and the old versions of the stories are inaccurate myths and going for science fantasy.

For the Two Trees I'm going with the route that the Two Trees were two great antennas that received scalar power from redundant arrays of space-based solar panels and the Darkening of Valinor was really about a massive Valinor-wide blackout while the Valar were taken completely by surprise and had next to no emergency power reserves available.

I suppose this kind of thing is a lot too science fiction for many people's liking, but it avoids the thorny religious and metaphysical issues that I really want to avoid because there is just no good way of dealing with them that I can see.

(The naive idea of just having two bright, shining trees that glow because "it's magic" is also bad in my opinion because that way are many questions that become inordinately difficult to deal with in the context of coherent fantasy world-building like the world-building in The Lord of the Rings.)


DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond

Aug 23 2025, 7:16pm


Views: 13173
Well Done
It tickles my sense of irreverence.

As they say, "sacred cows make great hamburger."


jpospich1
Lindon

Aug 26 2025, 3:59am


Views: 12517
The 'Joy' of C.S. Lewis
Tolkien was not the only Inkling who placed special importance upon something called "joy". "Joy" (with a capital 'J') was a preoccupation of C.S. Lewis as well. In his memoir Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis speaks of the experience of Joy as something of central importance to his spiritual life. He defines this Joy as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." He writes:

"I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is."

Just as Tolkien described joy "as poignant as grief" which arrives through an act of "grace" and possesses "a peculiar quality," so Lewis describes it in similar terms.

For Lewis this Joy is the ultimate desire of our earthly life, but it is, paradoxically, itself a desire:

"But then what I had felt... had also been desire, and only a possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing."

Only gradually does Lewis begin to understand the true nature of this Joy:

"We mortals, seen as the sciences see us and as we commonly see one another, are mere 'appearances'. But appearances of the Absolute. In so far as we really are at all (which isn’t saying much) we have, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality. And that is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for that unity which we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenal beings called 'we'. Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were, a dream."

This, of course, is the familiar Romantic notion of the phenomenal ego as a manifestation of the universal divine mind which alone is truly real. Cut off from the totality of Being by our individual selfhood, our only hope is to bridge the gap that separates us from the divine source. According to the esoteric philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (of which, as already mentioned, Owen Barfield was a follower), the bridging of this gap is the very purpose and operation of human as well as natural evolution (for they are one and the same).

Lewis ends his book by describing his current beliefs on the nature of Joy. Joy, he has come to understand, is merely a signpost pointing to the ultimate destination to which we are all journeying:

"When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, 'Look!' The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. 'We would be at Jerusalem.'"

An orthodox Christian may interpret Lewis's use of "Jerusalem" here as a reference to the heavenly state experienced after death by the true believer, or perhaps as the universal resurrection at the end of time. One who believes in the esoteric Christianity of Barfield and Steiner, on the other hand, may interpret the same symbol as referring to the end-point of cosmic evolution, in which God and man are at last reunited.

In fact, just as we did in the case of Tolkien, we may find a little more clarity regarding C.S. Lewis' notion of Joy by consulting Barfield himself. Barfield, it turns out, explicitly mentions Lewis's Joy in one of his essays. He writes:

"The longing for a 'paradisal' reunion with the Absolute, or with the spirit informing the life of both man and nature, is [C.S. Lewis] contends, native to the human spirit and is one that embodies itself in symbols at all levels (including of course the sexual one). It is a crucial element in man's faculty of imagination, and it is by its nature unattainable - except at the price of a pantheistic surrender of the very existence of the individual spirit....

"The solution of the irreconcilable antagonism implicit in this longing, without which we are less than men, but which we can satisfy only by ceasing to be men - or (to put it another way) the right way to 'handle' a desire by its nature unattainable - lies (so Lewis gradually discovered for himself) in taking a further step. The further step consists in discovering for oneself that the very presence of the desire is its own fulfillment; that 'what we really wanted' all the time was, not any one of the many successive objects to which the desires deludes us by appearing to point, but the desire itself, or an essential *quality* in it. Symbols are symbols of each other, as well as of that which both symbols embody; and the longing for reunion with nature, though it is archetypal to most other longings, is itself only a kind of symbol for the ultimate archetype, which is precisely that quality. It is only when we experience that indefinable quality, as and for itself, that we experience what Lewis called 'joy'."

In my first post, I suggested that Tolkien's "joy" was a sudden awareness of the soul's true identity with its divine source, i.e. God or the Absolute. The "peculiar quality" which Tolkien, Lewis and Barfield all ascribe to this experience could be interpreted, it seems, precisely as this awareness, which must be considered as suprarational, even as a kind of gnosis. And yet I wonder if any more clarity or confirmation can be ascertained in connection to the nature of this "quality" as it was understood by the Inklings.

In the same essay, Barfield goes on to describe another way of dealing with the "irreconcilable antagonism" of the human condition:

"It consists in placing the two opposites [e.g. of nature and man] side by side, treating them as contradictories, and contemplating the result with ironical detachment. It would probably be going too far to say that this other way 'originated' with T. S. Eliot, though it was certainly popularized or disseminated by his style in poetry and was formulated in his critical theory of the 'dissociation of sensibility.'"

Now C.S. Lewis, it is now well known, disliked T.S. Eliot's poetry with some intensity. T.S. Eliot, in turn, seems to have considered Lewis a romantic, one whose romanticism was naturally opposed to Eliot's classicism. What I would like to suggest is that this very disagreement lay at the heart of the opposition between C.S. Lewis (and the Inklings) and T.S. Eliot. What we are dealing with in this case, that is, are two incompatible forms of mysticism. One kind stresses divine immanence and tends to view the world as a manifestation and evolution of God. The other emphasizes the unreality of the world, the transcendence of the divine reality and the need to escape from existence to the higher world. The Inklings, it appears, were beholden to the first kind of mysticism, Eliot to the second; hence the antipathy.

It remains to interrogate further the nature of these two mysticisms as they manifested in the Inklings and particularly in Tolkien.


Meneldor
Doriath


Aug 27 2025, 3:53pm


Views: 10929
As
Spock said in Amok Time, "After a time, you may find that 'having' is not so pleasing a thing after all as 'wanting'. It is not logical, but it is often true."


They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep. -Psalm 107


jpospich1
Lindon

Sep 9 2025, 2:16am


Views: 9657
Two Schools of Neoplatonism
Leszek Kolakowksi, the Polish philosopher, speaks of two forms of mystical monism:

“On the one hand is the eternal temptation to regard the whole manifold universe as an illusion and a mere semblance of being, while the only reality is the unity of the Absolute. Alternatively, the world must be regarded as God in a state of evolution, from which it follows that God is not fully actual, nor is he the Absolute, but that he merely becomes so at the end of the history of creation and by virtue of that history. Pantheists often waver between these opposing views, which represent the dilemma of all monistic thought. The first alternative leads to the contemplative morality of self-annihilation; the second to religious Prometheanism, animated by the hope of achieving deification by one’s own efforts.”

We have, then, two opposed views. One declares the world and self as pernicious illusions which should be quit as soon as possible. The other declares the world and self as forms of an evolving deity that may be helped along by human effort. Eliot, it seemed, subscribed to the former view, Tolkien and the Inklings to the latter view.

Eliot's method in poetry as described by Barfield consisted in contemplating "the irreconciable opposition between man at one with nature and man cut off from nature". In his poetry, these two opposites were placed "side by side," treated as "contradictories," and the result contemplated with "ironical detachment."

The goal of this procedure, it appears, was to attain an insight into the unreality of both, and thus of the unreality of human existence itself. If the two poles of our existence were totally contradictory, their product can be nothing more than a zero. In reaching this understanding, we overcome the illusion of the universe and rejoin the unity of the Absolute.

Whereas Eliot's intellectual ascent may be related to the Neoplatonic mystical philosophy of Plotinus, Tolkien and the Inkling's sympathies lie more with the theurgic school of Iamblichus and Proclus. For Plotinus, the highest part of the human soul did not descend to the hall of mirrors that is existence; deliverence therefore consisted in coming to realize our essential identity with this higher self. For Iamblichus and Proclus, on the other hand, the human soul was wholly descended, making a program of intellectual ascent impossible. Instead, the soul must be transformed into a purified vessel of the Gods, at which point it may assist them in the act of cosmic creation and evolution.

As Esotericist Manly P. Hall has written:

"[The Neoplatonists] came to two conclusions, one essentially Egyptian and the other essentially Greek. These two conclusions were, first, that man by the supreme exercise of his own wisdom, could jump into the unknown as a possible action of self-extermination. The individual could destroy his individual existence... Essentially, there is a possibility that these Neoplatonists contemplate that the final act of wisdom is to cast oneself into the Infinite."

This is Plotinian way of ascent and that of T.S. Eliot. The other path, Hall continues, is a "little less extreme."

"In these writings we find there is the recongition that Total Being or Totality Itself being in Itself as the only Infinite and the only completeness that is conceivable, that Totality can possess the individual even though the individual can never possess Totality.

"Therefore, the Ultimate State is the condition of absolute accepting or absolute receptivity to Being. Receptivity to Being presupposes the complete extension of not being with the Self. ... So the mystical school assumes that the individual who has outgrown the mind and cast it aside as he cast the body aside is then capable of the Total Experience of Being. Neoplatonism does not assume that this Total Experience of Being is going to be bestowed upon individiduals in daily living, it assumes that this Total Experience is going to be bestowed at the end of the entire process of growth."

In order to cultivate a condition of "absolute accepting or absolute receptivity to Being," we must "awaken the One within ourselves," in the words of Proclus.

As scholar Van Tu writes: "Like all Neoplatonists before him, Proclus admits that no knowledge achievable through the intellect may be obtained about the One, as no cognitive faculty is equipped for such a task. What all beings do have, and what may thus be an apprehensible object of knowledge, is an internal striving after the One."

As Proclus writes: "What else is the One in ourselves except the operation and energy of this striving (huius operatio et adiectio)? It is therefore this interior understanding of unity, which is a projection and, as it were, an expression of the One in ourselves (prouolen entem eius quod in nobis unius et uelut expressionem), that we call “the One”.

Van Tu: "Since the reflection of this internal striving and unity is the only resource available to the human mind in its attempt to apprehend the One, Proclus consistently emphasizes the need to 'awaken the One in us' and insists that 'it is by the One that we know the One'".

Now we may understand better what Barfield meant by that "indefinable quality" in the "longing for a 'paradisal' reunion with the Absolute", which the Inklings called "Joy". This "indefinable quality," this "Joy", is nothing other than the image of Absolute within us, which is, furthermore, what we must unite with in order to achieve liberation, and perhaps, deification as we assist in the evolution of God.

At this point, it may be useful to re-examine the symbolism of The Lord of the Rings.


squire
Gondolin


Sep 9 2025, 2:35am


Views: 9657
With a humble spirit ...
... I don't think I understand any of the discourse in this post.

For all that I've read about and thought about Tolkien's metaphysics of his imaginary Middle-earth, I don't have a clue how the quotes and paraphrases of this deep and well-cited post will make it "useful to to re-examine the symbolism of The Lord of the Rings."

Can you make it simpler and clearer? Sorry to have to ask, but I got nothing from this.

squire online:
Unfortunately my longtime internet service provider abandoned its hosting operations last year. I no longer have any online materials to share with the TORn community.

= Forum has no new posts. Forum needs no new posts.


DGHCaretaker
Nargothrond

Sep 9 2025, 4:06am


Views: 9643
Philosophical Meaning
If you read it closely, you'll discover the meaning is simply that blue is their favorite color.