“These are a Few of our Favorite Rings”

For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?  But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:24-25)

Hope, according to St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, is like Faith.  It is a bridge between what we want and what we have.  It is a grace given to bridge the gap between this life and eternal life, for we do not “hope for what we already have”.  And, as Paul points out elsewhere, out of Faith, Hope and Love, only Love will endure in heaven, for when we see Our Lord “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12), we will no longer need Faith to believe in Him or Hope to long for Him.

In other words, this life is lived amidst uncertainty.  It is what Eric Voegelin (quoting Plato) calls “the metaxy”.  Voegelin takes this word from The Symposium, where Socrates relates Diotima’s myth (or fairy story) about Love - in which Love is presented as a character, a person.  Love is an itinerant beggar, seeking God but always in danger of being snuffed out.  Love is half human, half divine.  Love lives in the “metaxy”, the in-between place where the Beloved is glimpsed and desired, but not attained.  Love in Diotima’s “fairy story” is a passionate but homeless scamp, like the Apostles, as described by St. Paul …

We are fools for Christ … To this very hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. (1 Cor. 4:10-11)

But such a life is a life of romance!  It’s the stuff of fairy tales and adventure stories.  G. K. Chesterton defines Romance as “the mood in literature that combines to the keenest extent the idea of danger and the idea of hope.”  Danger because what is hoped for may be lost; hope because what is hoped for is not yet found.  Or as J. R. R. Tolkien says in his essay “On Fairy Stories” …

It [The Eucatastrophe or the “Happy Ending”] does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far, it is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

This is an apt description of his own eucatastrophic tales, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, books which blossom with the Romance of Faith and Fairy Stories.  But more than that, these books show the perennial human temptation to step out of the metaxy, our desire to find a preemptive solution to the threat of “dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure”, our insistence upon building a home for homeless Love in this world, even though we men are “homesick in our homes and homeless under the sun” as Chesterton says.  We can only attain release from the metaxy in this life through power or by means of various drugs and drug-like things - or so we think.

And the great symbol of this power or drug or this alluring temptation to take control of our fate and abolish the uncertainty of Faith and Hope in this life is the Ring. 

In Tolkien’s epic, the Ring is the answer to the dyscatastrophe or defeat that seems certain to overtake us - and that does indeed always overtake each of us in death.  Tolkien said that history was “a long defeat” which contains “some samples or glimpses of final victory” - and this is true of personal history as well as the history of man.  Death - the immediate and personal “dyscatastrophe” that is bound to conquer in the end (at least in this world) - is the central theme not only of The Lord of the Rings, but of The Hobbit (in which the most important act of heroism on Bilbo’s part is the renunciation of the Arkenstone - giving up and not clutching the great treasure, which is sacrificed for the good of others; i.e., Bilbo could be said by Our Lord to be “losing his life for My sake”).  And also death is one of the major themes of the huge backstory of Tolkien’s legendarium, which is incompletely told in The Silmarillion.  The Numenoreans, for instance, go bad because they hope to cheat death - and this desire to cheat death and to attain a this-earthly immortality leads them into a kind of satanism - the effects of which linger even thousands of years later in The Lord of the Rings.

And it is striking that throughout The Lord of the Rings, the desire to use the Ring - the temptation to take a shortcut in the face of seemingly insurmountable evil - is always perfectly understandable and reasonable as far as “this world” goes.  The great political leaders of the epic, Boromir and Denethor, perceive the Ring as the key to political victory - and simply as the only means to avoid death and ensure survival!  But “You are a stumbling block to Me. For you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” (Mat. 16:23)  Or, as Gandalf would say …

Nonetheless I do not trust you … And now hearing you speak I trust you less, no more than Boromir. Nay, stay your wrath! I do not trust myself in this, and I refused this thing, even as a freely given gift. You are strong and can still in some matters govern yourself, Denethor; yet if you had received this thing, it would have overthrown you.

But how many “Rings” do we ourselves cherish?  How many shortcuts out of uncertainty do we ourselves take?  What are our own “drugs of choice” that allay our own anxieties and fears, temporarily abolishing (we think) the need for Faith and Hope?  How often do we clutch at “the things of men” and do not keep “in mind the things of God”?

The great act of Bilbo in The Hobbit is renouncing his personal treasure.  The great act of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings is his (ongoing and imperfect attempt at) renouncing his “precious”, the Ring, the tool that gives power, control, victory and that cheats death itself - while enslaving everyone who wears it.  For the immortality conveyed by the Ring is a “this-worldly” immortality, a living hell as a kind of zombie or ghost, which is the fate of the Nazgul. 

Devotion to the Ring - to the allures of “this world” only - is what St. Paul calls sarx, which means “flesh” or “immediate worldly ends”.  Paul tells us that Christ crucified is a “stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23), and indeed the suffering “fools for Christ” that he calls himself and his fellow Apostles seem foolish indeed by worldly standards. 

Indeed, instead of being, “beaten with rods ... stoned ... shipwrecked … in danger from rivers and from bandits … in danger in the city and in the country, in danger on the sea and among false brothers, in labor and toil and often without sleep, in hunger and thirst and often without food, in cold and exposure,” (see 2 Cor. 11) Paul could have taken up the Ring and had a nice house in the suburbs with a swimming pool and a two-car garage, with a team of employees working for Tarsus Tents Incorporated.  Instead, he renounced the treasures of this world for the treasures of the Kingdom Beyond - even though his only recompense (in “this world”) was Faith and Hope - the uncertain props that make all of life a fairy tale, that make all of life a Romance, that make all of life an act of Love that looks beyond even the “long defeat” that seems to end in death.