Hobbits and Freedom
One of the books I read while on retreat was The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot
But I’m not blogging about politics or economics, except incidentally. I blog about freedom, free will, etc. One chapter of the book is dedicated to those topics, the chapter entitled “The Free Peoples and the Master of Middle-Earth.” Much of the chapter is right on target, and the rest is frustratingly close to being right. It’s kept from being completely right by our old friend, freedom as absolute self-determination.
The authors rightly note that the novels are full of the idea of “a purposeful order behind events” (p. 98), referencing as an example the scene where Gandalf tells Frodo, “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you were also meant to have it.” They note, again rightly, that providence does not destroy freedom but guarantees it (p. 99, where they attribute this belief to JRRT as well, though they give no reference to where he said so).
But they are still confused on how it all works. Consider this:
Part of that truth is this: evil cannot be ruled out for any world in which God chooses to make creatures who are genuinely free to reject him, the source of all being and goodness. Even God accepts a trade-off. Indeed, without the contrast between good and evil choices, and between greater and lesser goods, our freedom would be insignificant. Presumably God deems a world with free, sinful creatures greater than one populated only by atoms, animals, and automata (p. 88).
God does indeed have to accept trade-offs, shocking though that may seem. Trade-offs are inescapable when working with finite things. The problem here is that Providence and freedom don’t have to involve a trade-off. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, genuine freedom does not have to entail the possibility of sin and the rejection of God.2 The sad thing is, most of the rest of the chapter (I’ll get to exceptions in a minute) would stand up just fine without this mistaken idea of freedom. JRRT did present a wonderful picture of characters making meaningful choices for good and for bad, and of the way those choices got made. The authors rightly point out how firmly The Lord of the Rings stands in stark contrast to the determinism promoted by the materialist and positivist philosophers of his day (Russell, Skinner, et al.)
The even sadder point is that the authors reference the right answer without understanding it. On p. 98, they note that St. Thomas says that God has given “even to creatures the dignity of causality” (ST I.22.3). Their mistake is to assume that this causality is primary causality, a mistake that St. Thomas does not make. They continue:
The mind, searching for simple images, is quick to imagine that the only choices are theological determinism–in which God predetermines everything and so makes no room for freedom–or “open theism”, in which God allows freedom and must therefore simply let us make our choices, which he learns about after the fact.
The traditional view of providence, however, is subtler, God creates and oversees the world, but he is also intimately involved in it. He can act directly in the world–to turn water into wine or raise Jesus from the dead–or he can work through so-called secondary causes, whether they be inanimate objects or our own actions. Through his providential care, he can even take our evil choices–as Joseph told his brothers who had sold him into slavery–and turn them to good.
This is tantalizingly close to the right answer. What stops them from getting there? The false idea that God’s predetermination leaves no room for freedom, which depends on the idea that “freedom” is absolute self-determination, which stems from our friend William of Ockham and which leads to the sort of fragmentation in society that the authors deplore elsewhere.
I leave you to ponder the next-to-last paragraph of the entire book (p. 189):
The quest for freedom, like the quest to destroy the ring [sic], traverses the edge of a knife, even as shouts of “freedom” proliferate on all sides. In 1944, at the height of World War II, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher, then serving in the Transvaal in South Africe. He described a conversation he had had with C.S. Lewis, Lewis’ brother, and Charles Williams, which turn “on the difficulties of discovering what common factors if any existed in the notions associated with freedom, as used at present.” Tolkien concluded that “I don’t believe there are any, for the word has been so abused by propaganda that it has ceased to have any value for reason and has become a mere emotional dose for generating heat.” Tolkien and his great story of the free peoples of the West should summon us to recover the meaning and purpose of freedom.
OK, a couple more notes on the book itself. It’s engagingly written and worth the time to read if you’re interested in such things, but it has a couple of glaring mistakes. One is a botched quotation (unless JRRT changed something early on) where “Bree” is substituted for “Bywater,” and the other is that JRRT was not fond of Charles Williams, who really could not reasonably be described as a friend and who is very unlikely to have been much of an influence.
Nevertheless, it was still worth the time to read, and I learned things about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from reading it.
- I was tempted to entitle this post “NeoCon Hobbits and Freedom,” only I was afraid that would attract too many people who wanted to argue about NeoCons.↩
- Brief summary: Jesus is fully human and fully free, yet He couldn’t sin. The Blessed in Heaven are free but cannot sin. God is pre-eminently free and cannot sin. Common theological opinion holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary was perfectly free and yet could not sin. Look through the blog archives if you want to know more.↩
Cogitans Clare 