Tolkien’s Consolations for Beleaguered Times
If you follow the journals that chronicle higher education, then you know that the daily headlines could depress a hyena. Colleges are not for-profit businesses and most cannot rely on massive endowments. They need revenue in the form of tuition to operate. And as enrollments continue to drop at small colleges across the country, administrators scramble to allure prospective students. Pressure mounts to offer “innovative” new programs that will yield a lucrative return on students’ considerable financial investment.
This pressure has been unkind to many traditional liberal arts programs. Despondent eulogies and anxious projections abound. By the time I was applying for teaching positions a decade ago, it was becoming common to hear that colleges were cutting humanities departments like dead weight from a sinking ship.
These reports did not come out of the blue. I remembered my days as an English major and philosophy minor in the early 2000s when I was bombarded by the rarely well-intended question, “What are you going to do with that?” This pragmatic, preprofessional disposition toward higher education has simmered in America for a very long time. But now it seems to have risen to a boil and it threatens to cook the life out of disciplines that cannot guarantee high starting salaries and signing bonuses.
David Brooks makes a persuasive case that our national disinterest in the humanities has created a culture that is morally inarticulate, narcissistic, and mean. A person who learns to translate Augustine’s Confessions from Latin or read novels like Brideshead Revisited may have acquired more patience, discipline, and empathy as well as the good fortune to encounter the wisdom of the ages. But those are hard chips to cash in a contract negotiation. Liberal arts ideals like the pursuit of truth and the development of character sound increasingly highfalutin.
I’d like to say, “it’s always darkest before the dawn,” and point to signs of life in collegiate America. But with birthrates, teenage literacy, and public opinion about the value of a college degree all in decline, combined with our country’s rapid secularization, there is not much reason to hope small college administrators will revive the humanities programs they cut. In my grimmer moods, I tend to think more of the late John McCain’s quip, “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”
“All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”
I was talking about all this with a friend not long ago, and I said I could not imagine wanting to be anything other than a theologian, only I would not mind doing it a few decades ago, before we had to worry about when the ax might fall or had to cajole students to come back to what is left of our corner. But then I thought of The Lord of the Rings and Gandalf’s counsel to Frodo just as Frodo realizes that the Ring has become deadly to keep because the “shadow on the border of old stories” has returned. “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo says. “So do I,” Gandalf replies, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”
The best stories and noblest heroes usually face the most hopeless odds. So the stage is set for the humanities and for those of us who love them to fight the good fight. This is the time given to us. And those ideals about truth and character are not highfalutin. They are essential to a truly happy life filled with meaning and purpose.
But it may be that to fight for the humanities, at least for their seat in American higher education, is to fight for a lost cause, or a “long defeat,” to draw again from The Lord of the Rings. “Long defeat” doesn’t sound hopeful or uplifting, but it is a phrase Galadriel offers for consolation to the grieving and exhausted fellowship. They have come to her homeland of Lothlórien to rest and recover, having passed through a great peril that took the life of their friend and leader Gandalf. But they still have so far to go and the forces arrayed against them threaten to crush what hope they have left. Galadriel gives them gifts and counsel and then assures them that she stands with them because she has for ages “fought the long defeat.”
It is enigmatic consolation. Galadriel does not lack hope, but she seems to concede that their righteous struggle never ends and it often comes with failure and sorrow. The late Paul Farmer applied “the long defeat” to his work treating the sick in the poorest of the poor places of the world. Farmer tells his biographer Tracy Kidder, “I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat and I’m not going to stop because I keep losing. . . . I actually think sometimes we may win.” But, he continues, “I don’t care if we lose. I’m gonna try to do the right thing.” The “long defeat” meant for Farmer joy in solidarity with others and also joy in the noble fight itself as its own reward.
Tolkien argues that the essence of “fairy stories” is “a sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur,” a victory from the jaws of a seemingly certain defeat. “Eucatastrophe,” he calls it, and it is not an “escapist” or “fugitive” fantasy that denies the reality of “sorrow and failure.” In fact, he insists that the reality of profound sorrow and failure is necessary for the eucatastrophe’s “joy of deliverance.” What eucatastrophe denies, Tolkien writes, “in the face of much evidence,” is “universal final defeat.” It is a true “evangelium . . . a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” It is the deep resonance all such stories have with the Christian story of God’s work to redeem us from the powerful forces of sin and death.
Because we live in the light of this ultimate eucatastrophe, all our efforts to understand what it means to be a human being, Tolkien suggests, are “hallowed.” The infinitely rich and luminous Word of Life has come to us and made himself known as truly God and truly human. And so each discipline in the humanities has a part to play to refract that light, like radiant beams through stained glass.
To teach and to study the humanities is therefore to participate in a joy that no one can snuff out, even if departments close and positions are cut. These departments, after all, have never held exclusive rights. And if the humanities point us to the true, good, and beautiful, they are worth our time and attention regardless of the institutional support they receive.
My home parish, for instance, runs a rigorous yearlong adult class on the foundations of Catholicism, and it is routinely packed with people of all ages who are hungry to read often difficult books and to engage the wisdom of the ages with a reverential scrutiny. Likewise, the success of online journals like this one and the like are encouraging signs that the torch for serious study, not only in theology, but across the humanities disciplines, will continue to pass from generation to generation.
As for lost causes, I agree with T. S. Eliot that we fight for them “because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” But we also know that victory is not ultimately up to us. We can hope for the humanities because at their best they give us a glimpse into a victory that the true Human has already won.