Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics--Essays in Honor of David Lyle Jeffrey

Chapter 7: “A Brother Helped by a Brother”: Friendship and the City in the Fiction of the Inklings

     “A Brother Helped by a Brother” Friendship and the City in the Fiction of the Inklings Dominic Manganiello “A brother helped by a brother is like a strong city” (Prov. 18:19 RSV). I take my cue from this striking passage in the Book of Proverbs in order to examine how the notion of a polity built on the foundation of friendship, first advanced by Aristotle, is translated and expanded in a biblical context to include not only the relation between fellow citizens but also between brothers in the faith.Among the memorable representations of this trope in literature, two examples that come from the pen of the Inklings stand out in my view. In what follows, I focus on Frodo’s dealings with Sam and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the exchanges between Lester, Betty, and Evelyn in All Hallows’ Eve. In their respective novels J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams challenge a modern, Nietzschean politics of friendship, based on solitude and noncommunion, by showing how their characters strive to maintain the bonds of a fellowship at once human and mystical. 190 “A Brother Helped by a Brother” 191 I A Modern Tale of Two Cities In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien sets opposing models of human motivation —the individualistic and communitarian—in sharp relief. The first impulse is clearly exemplified in Sauron’s “lust for domination,”1 which is the only measure in “the scales of his malice,” as Gandalf reports at the Council of Elrond.2 The Ring the Dark Lord forges to enslave the world’s inhabitants represents, in Tolkien’s words,“the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force.”3 Tolkien uses this Nietzschean catchphrase to highlight the point that“power”is indeed“an ominous and sinister word” in his story, often signaling the misuse of authority.4 The German philosopher had radically countervalued Augustine’s libido dominandi as the good exercised by the creative individual—the Übermensch of the future—when he called on kindred spirits to carry out his selfappointed mission of inscribing “new values on old tables.”5 Despite the appeal to human company,“nausea at mankind,”best captured in the Sartrean dictum l’enfer c’est les autres’, fuels the iconoclastic vision of the superman .6 Although Nietzsche extolled“the friend in whom the world stands complete,a vessel of the good,”the one in whom others should“love the Superman as [their] principle,”he critiqued the gospel injunction to love one’s neighbor because pity formed the foundation of what he called Christian “slave morality.”7 In his view sympathy for the weak constituted a disease of the will that hindered the development of the strong and the dominant. He advised these superior types: “Flee into your solitude! You have lived too near the small and pitiable men!”8 Contempt for the lowly prompted a higher form of friendship that is the preserve, Derrida wryly observes, of those who “share what cannot be shared: solitude.”9 Against this philosophy of the ego in isolation, Tolkien presents an alternative vision of persons in relation inspired by Christian writers such as Saint Ambrose, who believed that “Friendship is the guardian of pity and the teacher of equality,so as to make the superior equal to the inferior, and the inferior to the superior.”10 The “free peoples” of Middle-earth accordingly form a fellowship to counter an evil plan that would bind them all in tyranny. These like-minded companions inject into the narrative what Tolkien describes as“the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil).”11 Frodo’s task is therefore not political in the strict sense of preserving a particular polity but consists in cultivating the “humane.”12 Tolkien depicts the many faces of the humane on a broad canvas that features a host of sundry folk from nearly every race, language, and tribe. These marvelous creatures—men, wizards, elves, dwarves, and hobbits— reflect the diversity found in the “society of aliens” who journey toward Saint Augustine’s City of God. In stark contrast to Nietzsche’s amoral superman who seeks friends to help him attain self-sufficiency, the members of the Fellowship of the Ring rely on each other to grow in virtue in...