The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of The Rings, and: Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work (review)

Is The Lord of the Rings a Christian work? Patrick Curry's answer— "yes, but not only that"¹—is probably the best and most succinct response; but the issues implied by the question and Curry's answer are by no means uncomplicated. The 29 essays gathered in these two volumes demonstrate the validity of both sides of Curry's summary: the contributors to The Ring and the Cross explore various dimensions of "the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien's Christianity, even his Roman Catholicism, on his writing" (17), while the essays in Light Beyond All Shadow expand the inquiry to investigate more broadly "how Tolkien's writing opens up the nature of religious experience and the spiritual" beyond the strictly Catholic or Christian to include transcendental values at the most general level (vii). Regarding the first volume, The Ring and the Cross, the fact that Tolkien was a Christian "and indeed a Roman Catholic" (Letters, 255) is undeniable—primary evidence is abundant in his essays and letters; this evidence has been much discussed in recent decades, and much of it is rehearsed over again in this volume. What is deniable, and what some scholars have attempted—without much success—is the degree to which this fact constrained what Tolkien wrote or determined how his works should be read. The vast secondary literature that has grown up around Tolkien's imaginative writing explores virtually every doctrinal, ontological, theological, and soteriological topic extending from this fact, and in light of the tangle through which one now must make one's way, it can be stated in truth that The Ring and The Cross assists substantially in cutting a swath. A similar metaphor, that of mapping spiritual territory, governs Light Beyond All Shadow.

The question that hovers over both volumes is just how to measure the influence of Tolkien's religious views and commitments on the products of his creativity and his readers' response to them. Must we regard The Lord of the Rings, the Middle-earth legendarium, or the Tolkienian oeuvre as a whole as exclusively Christian? To that question one may join Curry and many contributors to these two books in saying, "no," perhaps adding "not necessarily." This question might have been posed just as easily as, "is The Lord of The Rings a pagan work," to which Curry's answer mentioned above would apply just as well. There are essays in these two collections by noted Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, by writers claiming positions sympathetic to atheism, paganism, and by writers trying valiantly to preserve neutrality by positioning themselves (with or without the label) as "agnostic" on the foundational issues. With only a slight modifications either question—"Is it Christian?" and "Is it pagan?"—might be answered justifiably: "Yes—but it is more than that." The power and the brilliance of Tolkien's judicious combination of constituent elements in constructing his work are evident in the breadth of positions exemplified in these two books and in scores of publications preceding them. Both of these questions are posed honestly by the contributors to these two essay collections; they are answered with satisfactory evidence backing up either approach. But, for some, therein lies the problem.

In a word, the decisive, underlying issue is that of specificity. In his essay in The Ring and The Cross, Stephen Morillo asks, "why should Christianity have a special claim on ideas common to so many religions," and "where . . . are the specifically Christian features" (emphases mine) in The Lord of the Rings, beyond what he calls "the commons of spirituality"? Are the broader spiritual—arguably, "pagan"—implications of the book necessarily incompatible with the more explicitly Christian doctrinal and theological...