Providence and Meaning, Part 3
Rethinking Divine Providence Through J. R. R. Tolkien
About the author: Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, Illinois. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).
This article is part of a series exploring a constructive theology of divine providence. To follow the arc of the project, you can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, the Interlude here, Part 3 here, and the Epilogue here.
Perhaps the most enduring work of fiction from the 20th Century is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Since the outset of the 21st Century, the trilogy has only grown in popularity—thanks to Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movies and, now, Amazon’s prequel series The Rings of Power. While not the first of English-language fantasy stories, it remains a category-creator, making the fantasy genre what it is today. Tolkien’s world-building storytelling inspired the likes of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise, and George R. R. Martin’s The Game of Thrones universe—never mind the legions of other stories that have not translated to billions of dollars for film and TV studios.
What set Tolkien apart from his predecessors was his deeply theological rationale of the “secondary world,” as he referred to his mythos. When people generally think of “fantasy,” notions of magic and strange, mythical creatures tend to arise; for Tolkien, however, the point of the secondary world of fantasy is less the magical and more the imaginative process of turning our normativities upside down to better understand our primary world beyond itself.1 Notably, the work is imitative, or what Tolkien called a “derivative mode” that takes its cue from the Maker—as the “image and likeness of a Maker,” the maker of a secondary world acts out of the human right, sometimes poorly reflecting primary reality.2 But at best, for Tolkien, the secondary world molds the primary world3 in such a way as to reflect the theological character of the primary world, especially the “evangelium” that brings “final defeat” to the real “sorrow and failure” that is the “dyscatastrophe” of our world.4 The story can only give a “glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world,”5 but it is a glimpse of the world in its fuller state before God in Christ, beyond “mere fact.” In other words, for Tolkien, the grand, fantastical storytelling process, at best, was an effort to draw out the narrative theological character of the world in which we live.
Unsurprisingly, Tolkien’s grand narratives of “Arda,” as he called his secondary Earth, are full of provocative theological claims, not least for our reflections on divine providence. And at no point does Tolkien labor meticulously to narrate the mechanics of his understanding of providence more than in his creation myth in The Silmarillion. To set the scene, though, it will be instructive to turn first to two scenes in his The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien’s chief angelic emissary to Middle Earth, Gandalf, alludes to faithful human action amid the mystery of providence.
In the first scene, Gandalf returns to the Shire after a nine-year absence, during which he seeks information about the Ring of Power entrusted to Frodo’s care. To both of their dismay, Gandalf had learned that the Ring was the one ruling ring that belonged to the great enemy Sauron and that Sauron himself had returned after a long exile. He had secretly grown his forces of conquest while releasing his chief servants in search of the Ring.
In this setting, Frodo laments that such evil days would be his and that the deadly Ring had found its way to him. With a line made famous by Peter Jackson’s blockbuster films,6 Gandalf replies, “So do I . . . and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”7 Gandalf’s emphasis here is on creaturely action, but we see hints of his broader wisdom. Lament amid tragedy and struggle is honest and fair. As we see in Part 2, contra his friends, Job did not misstep in lamenting his situation. Unlike in Jackson’s rendering, in the book, Gandalf more clearly shares Frodo’s lament, for Gandalf, too, wishes such evil times were not upon them (“So do I”). In Gandalf’s wisdom, though, he knows they must press through the lament and consider their response. Theologically, we would refer to faithful response. That is, not just any response will do. The nature of faithful response, for Gandalf and us, contains the glimmer of wisdom that not everything that happens is God’s purpose.8 As I will introduce below, more artistically, not everything belongs to God’s music.
Much later, in The Return of the King, Gandalf finds himself in the ancient Middle Earth city of Minas Tirith. The alliance of free peoples has successfully withstood the onslaught of Sauron. Still, Gandalf knows well that the victory merely delayed their ultimate defeat against the more abundant forces awaiting a follow-up attack. Gandalf cautions, “Hardly has our strength sufficed to beat off the first great assault. The next will be greater. . . . Victory cannot be achieved by arms.”9 He points those who labor for freedom from tyranny to a higher, self-sacrificial calling for the good of those still to come: “But we must at all costs keep [Sauron’s] Eye from his true peril. We cannot achieve victory by arms, but by arms we can give the Ring-bearer his only chance, frail though it be. . . . We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves.”10
On the surface, Gandalf follows the Thomistic virtue of courage in contrast to Aristotle’s version. Whereas Aristotle argued that courage entails the ability to recognize a lost cause and to live to fight another day, Aquinas takes from Christ the recognition that hope springs from the courage to give oneself to certain loss for the sake of another. Perhaps the image of a single parent is appropriate here, enduring painstaking and exhausting labor at a personal loss—sometimes even emotional anguish—so that their children might thrive. For Aquinas, as for the devout Catholic Tolkien, at stake is something greater than mere observed “fact.” The calculus of wisdom recognizes the life-giving reality of love that also holds onto hope through faith in something other than the mechanical workings of the world. In Gandalf, we have an image of that wisdom, who can look beyond short-sighted victory and beyond the outworking of forces and immediate circumstances that would lead to justified despair.11
But what is Gandalf looking toward? Is it fair for me to read theological musings into a story that makes no explicit reference to God?12 Tolkien’s larger mythology indicates that it is fair. After all, while the peoples of Middle Earth refer to Gandalf as a “wizard,” Tolkien’s larger mythos refers to him as a Maia, a second-level angelic being who existed with Ilúvatar (God) before the creation of Arda (Earth). As a Maia, Gandalf is known as a quiet being who especially seeks wisdom over craft. His propensity to seek the wisdom of Ilúvatar leads to his being sent to Middle Earth to aid the peoples of Middle Earth in their resistance to Sauron. And while Gandalf is mighty in battle, his mission is ultimately not to take up the power of arms but rather to stir love and faithfulness in people who, on their own, would never be able to overcome the demonic forces that lie behind Arda’s manifold tyrannies.13
And with the revelation of Gandalf as a Maia, we can turn to the theological heart of his reflections and address our lingering questions about divine providence. “In the beginning,” as our Genesis narrative begins, “God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Tolkien imaginatively elaborates in his Ainulindalë, the opening section of the posthumously published The Silmarillion.14 In this creation account, Tolkien reflects upon creation as the music of Ilúvatar. Herein, Ilúvatar is the conductor, while the musical performers are the Ainur, an angelic host that consists of greater and lesser beings, some of whom would later be called the Valar and Maiar, respectively. All lived initially in direct communion with Ilúvatar, reflecting an aspect of Ilúvatar’s person. Significantly, for our purposes, Gandalf is one of these angelic beings.
The account of making the music itself may be the most interesting in Tolkien’s corpus, and it is certainly the most loaded for his world-building. As the “endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony” arose, “the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.”15 The Ainur would later learn that the sudden filling of the Void was the content of Creation itself.
As with any tale, though, turmoil soon entered. The greatest of the Ainur, Melkor, grew discontent in playing the music of another. He sought his own musical “theme” that “increase[d] the power and glory of the part assigned to himself,” and with Melkor’s self-aggrandizement entered the first “discord” in the cosmic music.16 Perhaps the most interesting part of this tale is the narrative manner in which he progresses to his preferred divine response, particularly as the latter relates to Creation, for Tolkien narrates three cycles of Melkor’s musical discord. In this first cycle, Ilúvatar sits fast and oversees a sort of yin-yang clash where the two themes wage war on one another: “about [Ilúvatar’s] throne there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war one upon another in an endless wrath that would not be assuaged.”17 Interestingly, Ilúvatar then smiles as if to dismiss the war of wills as the primary mode of divine intervention. Then, Ilúvatar begins a new theme, but again, Melkor rises to the occasion, having recruited fellow Ainur to his theme. The discord and subsequent clash are even greater.
Despair abounded among the faithful Ainur, who ceased to make music. It would seem that the will of Melkor has emerged victorious, to the glory of Melkor. Indeed, the success of this Melkorian music relied upon “drown[ing] the other music by the violence of its voice.”18 The strength of Melkor depended upon an overpowering might—like Sauron’s war for conquest much later in The Lord of the Rings; not coincidentally, Melkor’s music was purely imperial in its force. The Maia, who became Gandalf, was there to witness the entire Melkorian ordeal. As with the free peoples’ resistance of Sauron, the head-on musical fight against tyranny was noble and even necessary. In both circumstances, Tolkien demonstrates that despair is the end of the path. But why? Tolkien’s message seems to be that the might of power that produces violence is someone else’s game, not God’s. To resist is a necessary evil, not an ultimate solution.19
Tolkien’s message is not to resist the resistance against evil. Rather, his message is to pay attention to and to participate in a higher resistance that undermines violence. The music of the Ainur contains the clash, but the clash does not contain the ultimate movement of God. Herein lies the beauty of Tolkien’s account: after the second rise of Melkor’s musical theme—a theme with a “unity of its own”—Ilúvatar initiates a third divine theme. This final theme was “deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.”20 Notably, this final theme took Melkor’s theme into itself, bringing about great sorrow. But in doing so, Ilúvatar’s third theme “wove into its own solemn pattern” Melkor’s “most triumphant notes.”21 That is, Melkor’s theme became the occasion of its own defeat, bringing sorrow into Ilúvatar’s music but ultimately undoing itself amid the beauty of self-sacrifice in Ilúvatar’s music. The higher power turns out to be counter-intuitive: the power of self-sacrificial love brings the eschatological defeat of violence.
We see the lesson of the music of the Ainur works itself out in the climax of The Lord of the Rings. Where sorrow and loss are real, the willingness to follow Gandalf’s counsel draws Sauron’s might forth from his stronghold of Mordor. Sauron sees the ripe opportunity for victory, drawing out his forces to crush resistance once and for all. But in doing so, he opens the fields of his stronghold to the most unlikely bearers of hope—the diminutive hobbits Frodo and Sam. They are now free to pass through Mordor to the fires from which the Ring had been forged. Yet the work is not finished, for Frodo and Sam themselves fail. Not even their courage is enough. In the final moments, Frodo falls into the lust for power and decides to keep the ring. In his power-lust, he loses the Ring to the even more pitiful Gollum. Despite the sacrifice of many, the lust for power appears to have won, but that is when the transcendent delivers upon Ilúvatar’s promise that Melkor’s “most triumphant notes” would be their own undoing. While celebrating, in fine anti-climactic irony, Gollum stumbles and falls to his doom, carrying the Ring with him into the fires from which it was forged. The resistance mattered, but the victory did not belong to the resistance. Rather, it belonged to the transcendent movement.
Understandably, Peter Jackson changed the climactic moment in his epic adaptation. Jackson had Frodo arise and wrestle with Gollum. For Tolkien, though, only the anti-climactic would do because Tolkien’s vision of divine providence posited divine movement as completely distinct from the struggle. Of course, the battle mattered and was even vital—without the struggle, there would not have been a force of free peoples to prey upon Sauron’s pride, and there would not have been a pair of hobbits to take the Ring to Mordor. Participation is vital. But hope no longer lies in the resistance, any more than it lies in the systems of power in the world. Hope lies in the movement of Godself, often opaque to our minds. Further, hope rests within the ability of our faith, however weak, to cling to the signs of divine providence in history and to trust that the invisible movement is still happening. Faith trusts that God is providentially at work, even when violence seems to win. Faith trusts in the character of a God who revealed Godself in Christ, showing all that God’s love would take the fullness of violence upon Godself in the person of Jesus. Personal faith sometimes has to rely upon the faith of another, especially when circumstance feels bleak. Frodo relied upon Sam in just this way. But hope itself lies in the God who providentially rises above a clash of might and enters into the most triumphant moments of discord in the clash. It listens for God’s music outside the structures that move history’s march.
In Part One of this series, we attuned ourselves to dismantle our false presumption of divine providence joined with the violence of might. That something happens to my advantage—personally or structurally—does not mean that it belongs to God’s music. A sure sign to aid in our self-critique is the presence of violence. Does my success coincide with the violence that pushes others to the margins? If so, we are not likely looking in the direction of divine providence. Of course, providence remains active, however opaquely, but it is not synonymous with the outworkings of our violent social structures.
Similarly, in Part Two and the Interlude, we sought to reattune ourselves regarding suffering, which is neither necessarily a sign of God’s judgment nor pleasure. Suffering is a fact of the violence that characterizes Creation in its state of discord. Yet the all-loving God over-accepts circumstances and providentially works anyway.
Now, here, we add the final piece. God’s over-acceptance hears the discordant music, works within its discordance by taking its violence into Godself, and over-powers the discordance by allowing its greatest triumphs to become its own downfall. On the grander social level, history is littered with the downfall of empires from the self-inflicted wombs of its own hubris. In response to Habakkuk, God points to this dynamic as the place to see God’s providential judgment upon oppressors. On a more personal note, though, providence's slow pace and opacity might be harder to accept. Economically, the poor get poorer while the rich get richer. Any gain in battles against injustice only seems to become losses amid the responses from those who feel they are losing power. In democracies, communities face an increasingly uphill fight to ensure the health and prosperity of their people, regardless of who ends up in power. Families continue to crumble amid the stresses of life. Churches too often accept social structures and boundaries and, therein, fail to consider the people on the margins. When they do care, churches often lack the resources to help. Where is providence?
Somehow, providence remains active in the least expected places. I mentioned some of these in earlier parts, including the old mentor who reaches out to help the one who kept her woe silent, the money and/or food that show up from unexpected directions in times of need, and the rallying of communities around the people facing tragedies. There is a sorrowful beauty in these responses. Nonetheless, in them, we hear God’s music. To them, we could add the joy one finds in relationships when nothing else seems to be going their way or the strength one finds in loving an enemy and forgiving the afflictions that seem most unforgivable. In these microcosms, we see the power of divine providence at work to overcome violence, not to call what is evil “good,” but rather to rejoice in the hope of something better. Divine providence offers a glimpse of something better and gives the strength to endure with beauty and joy in the unexpected. The pain and the suffering are real, but “[a]ll we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”22 Therein, we have a glimmer of hope that providence is real, for the glimmer is less visual and more audible: we hear the music of the Ainur.
Tolkien writes, “I propose . . . to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of ‘unreality’ (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact’, in short of the fantastic. I am thus not only aware but glad of the etymological and semantic connections of fantasy with fantastic[.] . . . Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness” (J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien [HarperCollins, 2006], 139).
Tolkien, “Fairy-Stories,” 144–5.
Tolkien, “Fairy-Stories,” 147.
Tolkien, “Fairy-Stories,” 153; cf. 153–7.
Tolkien, “Fairy-Stories,” 153.
Albeit, relocated: Jackson moves the conversation and famous line later, to the Mines of Moria as the Fellowship seeks passage east through the Misty Mountains. Additionally, in the movie, nothing remotely approaching nine years has passed between Bilbo’s leaving the Ring to Frodo and the conversation.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 50.
For Gandalf, “God” bears the name “Eru Ilúvatar.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 888.
Tolkien, Return of the King, 890–1.
The Steward of Gondor, Denethor, himself had already fallen to despair at the might of Sauron. Denethor perceived that there was no pathway to victory through fighting. Interestly, Gandalf neither disagrees with Denethor’s assessment nor faults him for despair under the circumstances. In fact, Gandalf reaffirms the futility in itself of their war—even another victory on the battlefield would only delay the inevitable: “This war then is without final hope, as Denethor perceived. Victory cannot be achieved by arms, whether you sit here to endure siege after siege, or march out to be overwhelmed beyond the River. You have only a choice of evils; and prudence would counsel you to strengthen such strong places as you have, and there await the onset; for so shall the time before your end be made a little longer.” However, for Gandalf, there is another kind of victory—another kind of victory that may well cost them their lives and kingdoms. The greater task that Gandalf recognizes is a Thomistic courageous participation in a transcendent victory in which they would give up their own well-being and even lives to make space for the transcendent to enter into the violent system unlooked for. Gandalf himself does not know that this greater victory would happen, for it is not guaranteed by the outworking of the processes of the status quo in power. In assessing Gandalf’s counsel, Aragorn rightly recognizes the paradox in which “hope and despair are akin,” for the hope in Gandalf’s counsel does not set them up for majestic or imperial ambitions (Tolkien, Return of the King, 888.) Earlier, Gandalf referred to this hope as a “fool’s hope” (Tolkien, Return of the King, 824). I might add that it is hope from the margins, not looking to the structural mechanisms of power dynamics or enclosures.
Arguably, implicit references to God are abundantly sprinkled throughout The Lord of the Rings, not least by Gandalf when he refers to the “Secret Fire” whom he serves and his being sent back after his death following his battle with the Balrog.
It is a consistent theme in Tolkien’s corpus for him to decry victory through arms. Despite the valor in resisting evil, created beings ultimately only ever—at best—delay defeat through the taking up of arms. Victory only ever comes from the outside, an image of deliverance that does not belong to the structures and logic that drives creation in its exile/fallen state.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
Tolkien, Silmarillion, 3.
Tolkien, Silmarillion, 4.
Tolkien, Silmarillion, 4.
Tolkien, Silmarillion, 5.
Gandalf calls both options—direct resistance and failure directly to resist—as “a choice of evils.” It seems that the evil in resistance is the need to operate in a broken system wherein resisting violence entails responding violently. Yet failure to respond to violence such that violence is left unchecked is itself evil (Tolkien, Return of the King, 888). For Gandalf, the response of hope remains intermixed with sorrow because of the persistence of violence. What makes his path better, though, is that it bears the violence in oneself in order to participate in the making of something better—something non-violent—for others. This response is the cruciform response that recognizes victory over violence only ever comes in the ironic undermining of violence in self-sacrifice.
Tolkien, Silmarillion, 4.
Tolkien, Silmarillion, 5.
Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, 50.
Absolutely stunning piece!
A verbal feast… the music of illuvatar