Wisdom from Weakness

“Frodo, I Think You Do Very Unwisely in This… I Do Not Think You Should Go With This Creature. It is Wicked.” Frodo and the Wisdom of Unwisdom.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 902-907

When I first sought for a title for this blog and all that I am trying to achieve in reading and rereading The Lord of the Rings at this point in my life I decided to call it Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings because that is what I was looking for. And when I first began to write it twelve years ago I never thought that one day I would be writing about unwisdom and that I would be doing so approvingly. You, my dear readers, must judge if I am right to do so and whether you think that Frodo is right to do as he chooses to do here or whether, with Sam, you will sigh audibly when Frodo declares to Faramir that he will take Sméagol under his protection and that he will go with him to Mordor.

“Frodo, I think that you do very unwisely in this,” said Faramir. “I do not think you should go with this creature. It is wicked.”

“No, not altogether wicked,” said Frodo.

“Not wholly, perhaps,” said Faramir, “but malice eats it like a canker, and the evil is growing. He will lead you to no good.”

And Faramir is right. Gollum has told him that he intends to lead Frodo and Sam into Mordor by way of the pass of Cirith Ungol, or cleft of the spider, and that there is “no other way”. And we know that in that place Gollum will betray Frodo and hand him over to Shelob, deadliest of the children of Ungoliant, a malicious and monstrous spirit in spider form who, long ago, had aided Morgoth in the destruction of the trees of light and in the theft of the silmarils of Fëanor.

Gollum will lead Frodo to no good because he intends to regain the Ring from him and he will not rest until he has done so. We know that and Frodo knows it too. He does not know exactly how Gollum will seek to do him harm but he knows that he intends to do so.

So Denethor is right to call this a fool’s hope when he learns of what his son has done in setting Frodo free and not bringing the Ring to Minas Tirith. Faramir’s action is an act of foolishness and so is Frodo’s. It is utter foolishness to go to Mordor carrying the Ring of Power into the very heart of the Enemy’s power. It is foolishness to entrust the task to a “witless halfling”. And before we leap to Frodo’s defence here and speak of his wisdom we might recall that when Frodo asked Gandalf why he had been chosen for this task and not another, Gandalf replied to him:

“You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”

Faramir tells Frodo that he does not think that Gandalf, the wise one, would have made the choice that Frodo makes. But even Gandalf has never entered Mordor but only Sauron’s lesser fortress of Dol Guldur. There is no guide that Frodo could possibly choose to take him into Mordor than Gollum and Gollum will only take him there because of his desire for the Ring and it is almost certain that Gollum will betray him.

If wisdom means making the best choice among all available options then surely we must say here that no such choice exists. Faramir cannot think of one and neither could the Council in Rivendell. Frodo must give himself up to a wisdom that is so unwise that maybe the Wise would be incapable of doing it. Maybe this is why all the other members of the Fellowship are given other work to do, absolutely necessary work without which Frodo could never accomplish his mission.

Gandalf did come closest to the unwisdom that Frodo now chooses back in the study at Bag End when he spoke about Gollum.

“My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end…”

Gandalf, more than anyone else in the whole story, knows that there is a Power at work in the story that does not work primarily through the wisdom of making the right choice among available options but a wisdom of such things as Pity. Frodo will make his choice through this wisdom. It will almost cost him his life. It will certainly cost him the possibility of a happy retirement in the Shire among those who love him. But it is through this unwise choice that Middle-earth will be saved.

“The Eye: That Horrible Growing Sense of a Hostile Will That Strove With Great Power to Pierce All Shadows of Cloud, and Earth and Flesh and to See You.” The Wisdom and Power of Sauron and The Frailty of Frodo.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 822-826

When I chose to give my blog the title, Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings, it was not immediately clear to me that I would need to reflect on different and even competing kinds of wisdom and that not all of these would be life giving. St Paul understood this sense of competing wisdoms that I was slower to grasp when he wrote to the Corinthian church, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength”. In such a world of competing wisdoms one form might indeed appear to be foolishness to the other.

As Frodo begins to draw nearer to Mordor, having crossed the Dead Marshes with the aid of Gollum, he becomes increasingly aware of a malignant power that he understands as an Eye.

“With every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked.”

Frodo called this sense of malignant power, “the Eye”, and with this we are given a sense of his inner life at this stage of his story. Of course, he first heard that name for the power from Galadriel when he offered the Ring to her in Lothlórien. And both of them shared the same experience; that of striving against a power that wanted to break into their minds and to see them.

This desire to “see” is far more than a mere exercise in surveillance. It is not Frodo and Galadriel’s shopping habits that Sauron wishes to see, or their political opinions. Sauron wants to have their innermost essence, their very reality, laid bare before him. “He gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”

That word, gropes, denotes the lust that lies at the heart of Sauron’s wisdom and a pornographic stripping away of every barrier that lies between his gaze and the object of his desire. Frodo feels this too. “The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a horrible will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the walls were become that still warded it off.”

Sauron wants to “see” and to control. It is this desire that drove his ambition to create the Ring during the Second Age. The Ring is a technology of control. The ability to control not only the actions of others but their very wills and first of all it seeks to know that will. Even from an acquaintance with the Ring that has been very brief Frodo begins to understand this. He shows this understanding to Galadriel when he says to her: “I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?” The very asking of the question displays within Frodo a desire to see as Sauron desires it.

Galadriel understands this too and understands that with this desire must come the power to dominate others and it is this power that Sauron has trained through many ages and it is this that makes him different from his fellow Maia, Gandalf. Sauron and Gandalf belong to the same order of heavenly being created by Ilúvatar and with the same essential powers but Sauron has dedicated his power towards one purpose and that is domination.

And this brings us back to that quotation from St Paul with which I began this reflection. Paul distinguishes human and divine wisdom and power. For us wisdom tends to be related to power, to our desire to achieve mastery over all things, to eliminate risk and uncertainty as far as is possible, essentially to make of the cosmos a machine that is entirely predictable and entirely under our control. I say our but as Gandalf pointed out to Saruman who shares this desire, ultimately only one will can achieve this power and until that moment comes we all live in a reality which is an endless struggle to be that totally knowing,dominating and controlling will. Gandalf, and I would add, St Paul as well, understand a very different kind of wisdom that does not want to dominate in this sense but wishes to see in order to delight in the one that is seen. And in order to achieve this kind of seeing there has first to be a casting away of the desire and the means to achieve domination and this is what Frodo is doing. He is trying to cast away the Ring in such a way that no-one will ever be able to use it again.

The Divine Foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom.

“I Will Take The Ring, Though I Do Not Know The Way.”

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 260-264

How much we would like to view the hero as someone in an exalted state. The eyes should gaze intently to a distant point, towards the hero’s glorious destiny. The hero will stand alone and the admiring gaze of all will look up into those eyes for how could anyone look down at the hero. And the hero should be beautiful. How could it be otherwise? For the hero is the projection of our longings for ourselves, the exalted self that we long to be or, perhaps, to be with.

Older and wiser heads may smile at such longing with a degree of indulgence, remembering that I used the words, high, lonely and destiny quite recently in this blog reflecting as we did so on the close kinship between Saruman the White and Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew. Am I suggesting that neither Saruman nor Uncle Andrew have never outgrown this rather adolescent longing? I rather think that I am. There is no blame attached to an adolescent being an adolescent but the world is blighted by adolescents who never grow up.

And when we compare these characters to the one who speaks the words of the title of this blog post so quietly and so reluctantly we know that we are talking about something quite different to the self admiration of these outgrown children. For Frodo shares little in common with Saruman. This is not to say that Frodo is completely free of the desire for exaltation. When he sat with Gandalf in his study at Bag End Frodo had felt “a great desire to follow Bilbo” flame up in his heart; a desire “so strong that it overcame his fear”. Perhaps at this point of the story the influence of Narya, the ring that Gandalf bears, is able to warm his heart, though even Gandalf is surprised. It is at that moment when he declares that “hobbits really are amazing creatures”. So there is a place and a time for exaltation but as the story reaches the place in which the decision has to be made concerning the Ring all exaltation, all warmth has gone. Frodo has met the implacable hatred of the Morgul Lord, has felt his blade pierce his flesh, the tiny splinter travel towards his heart. Now as he sits among the Council and listens to the debate about what should be done to the Ring he feels “a dead darkness in his heart”.

The debate continues. Boromir argues that the Ring should be used against Sauron, Elrond says that this is impossible; Glóin asks about the three Elven Rings and Elrond declares that they must remain hidden; Erestor of the Grey Havens speaks of the folly of trying to make the journey to Mordor and Gandalf answers that it is this folly that Sauron is incapable of grasping; and at the last it is Bilbo who asks what messenger should take the Ring to the fire.

No-one answers him. Either because they still feel that it is folly to take the road to Mordor or because they know that for them to carry the Ring is impossible all remain silent. And at the very last it is Frodo’s voice, this time struggling against an overwhelming desire to rest, that speaks “as if some other will was using his small voice”.

“I will take the Ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”

After this everything is all quite simple. So it is once the great choices are made. All falls into place around them and the people who make them. Even Sam does not argue against the choice only that Frodo should not go alone. But the choice and the manner of its expression is the most moving moment of the whole story. It is the moral heart of the story. It is made, not at the conclusion of some process of selection with all the qualities of each candidate having undergone careful assessment but simply because one person has been called, has been chosen. And the choosing is like “the pronouncement of some doom”.

Are life’s truly great choices always like this? Do they always feel unavoidable, even inevitable, and yet they still have to be made? And do they always feel like pronouncements of doom? A last judgment against which no argument can be found? Such choices are practically inexpressible. Elrond rightly places Frodo amongst his mighty ancestors even as the heroes gathered in Rivendell had to remain silent as a hobbit stood to speak but even his words feel small against the magnitude of the choice.

Gandalf Shows Us that the Greatest Wisdom is Learned Through Weakness and Suffering.

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The Fords at Osgiliath are taken and its defenders, commanded by Faramir, are in full retreat back across the Pelennor Fields to Minas Tirith. Meanwhile Denethor awaits the end in his tower.

Pippin fears that the Dark Lord himself has come but Denethor replies with a bitter laugh:

“Nay, not yet Master Peregrin! He will not come save only to triumph over me when all is won. He uses others as his weapons. So do all great lords, if they are wise, Master Halfling. Or why should I sit here in my tower and think, and watch, and wait, spending even my sons?”

In recent weeks on this blog we have seen that Denethor is not the self-indulgent coward that Jackson portrays him to be in his films. He lives and eats austerely and even sleeps in his armour so that his body should not “grow soft and timid.” It is so important that we should take note of the way in which Tolkien describes him here so that we understand the full tragedy of his story. Denethor’s journey to despair is the fruit of his greatness not his weakness. To understand it in this way will teach us a profoundly wise self-awareness if we will allow it. There is a time in the first half of life in which we believe that we must eliminate our weakness and develop our strength. If we do that then we will achieve great things as Denethor does but there will come a time when we must learn to see that our strength has the capacity to bring us to disaster while our weaknesses, those qualities that we have pushed into the shadow that follows us, will teach us wisdom if we will allow them. In a powerful passage in his second letter to the Corinthians the mighty Paul speaks of an affliction that brings him low, that he prays will be taken away from him. Eventually God tells him that his power is made perfect in weakness. In many ways The Lord of the Rings is a story that displays that reality. It is not Denethor’s greatness that will bring down Sauron but Frodo’s weakness and Gandalf’s fool’s hope!

Gandalf recognises this. At one point Denethor taunts him with his weakness when Gandalf reveals that the captain of the armies of Mordor is none other the Witch King of Angmar, the Lord of the Nazgûl. “Then, Mithrandir, you have a foe to match you… For myself, I have long known who is the chief captain of the hosts of the Dark Tower. Is that all that you have returned to say? Or can it be that you have withdrawn because you are overmatched?”

Pippin is horrified! Denethor is accusing Gandalf of cowardice, of running away. How will Gandalf react? Will he strike out in anger? But Gandalf is no young hothead but has become one who has nothing left to defend. He has learned the wisdom of weakness choosing the life of a wandering pilgrim, sometimes driven from the doors of those from whom he seeks shelter, habitually bearing insults such as the one that Denethor hurls against him. He has learned a patient long-suffering and a deep pity for the suffering of others. And he knows that among all the foes that he has faced, greater even than the Balrog of Moria, the greatest is Sauron’s chief captain. It may be that when they meet he will be defeated but for Gandalf that matters far less than the future of Middle-earth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it to fellow members of the resistance to Hitler, whether they emerged from the struggle as heroes mattered very little. What mattered was whether the coming generation would be able to live. That too is the wisdom of one who had learned through suffering and weakness.