Gandalf and the Rebel

Gandalf and the Rebel

I used part of a recent vacation to read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings again. It is the perfect novel, whether you like adventure, landscapes, towering characters, an exaltation of common virtues, or ‘a pleasant mixture of them all’, they are to be found there. I have lost count of how many times I have read the book.

In between reading LOTR, and as an exercise in contrary thought, I finished reading Albert Camus’, The Rebel, a book length essay that I began some time ago. I am a Christian , and Camus, the dead french philosopher, critic, novelist and playwright, was an atheist, but he can, shed a clear, uncompromising light on the human condition. (His book, The Fall, is the best description of the complete sinfulness, of even good men, that I have ever read.)

Anyway, The Rebel, is his attempt to lay out how a society which has rejected Christian hope and God’s Grace can grapple with the demands of justice, the reality of death, the whole human problem, and not descend into mass murder and repression. He freely admits, writing in 1950, that nihilistic, God-rejecting societies such as Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany had done just that. (His answers are not encouraging.)

Camus rejects Grace, Christianity, and God because for him, any aknowledgement of God’s role in human life makes God guilty of injustice. But, to be consistent, he also recogniuzes no chance of salvation from death. His vision of the Rebel is one who insists on justice and rejects death, all the time knowing he will lose in the end:

“In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.”

“The novel is born at the same time as the spirit of rebellion and expresses on the aesthetic plane the same ambition.”

“The art of the novel can reconstruct creation itself….choosing the creature in prefernce to his creator…it is allied to the beauty of the world or of its inhabitanrts against the powers of death and oblivion.”

In essence, Camus could never write a work like The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien described his fantasy tales as being stories where characters receive help by Grace through mythological means. His characters encounter implacable, inescapable evil that does real harm, but the they can, if they chose to, rely on the presence of such help. In fact, they are judged in the story according to their reliance on or conversely, mistrust of the overarching plan behind their created world. Tolkien’s story also climaxes with a eucatastrophe, a change in plot direction which moves from disaster to rescue, death to life, defeat to victory. Tolkien elsewhere took pains to point out that the Christion story climaxes in the eucatastrophe of the resurrection. Tolkien would readily agree with Camus that the writer of tales acts as a subcreator, but he saw this as a proper and orthodox expression of what God made us to be.

Camus would say that we best write by telling stories that highlight a hopeless yet brave struggle against injustice and our own death, emphasizing the creative power in rejecting these facts in our hearts. We remain subject to both tradgedies, but emphatically refuse to agree with them. In fact, his ideal hero would make certain that he dies himself if it became necessary to kill another in the name of Justice.

This is so close, but at the brink, so divergent friom the Christian story. Injustice and death are real for the Christian, and both must certainly be rejected. But the Christian rejects them because Truth has come, and died in our place, satisfying the claims of and defeating the power of death and Justice. Grace has appeared and can be trusted to prevail, and God can be glorified in all His ways, as the eucatastrophe of the Resurrection and the Final Judgement will confirm. Gandalf, Frodo and all the rest in Tolkien’s story will heroically lay down life and continually risk all to resist both death and evil, but do so with confidence in Grace, and become an agents of that Grace.

Camus scoffed at such literature, which was for him, the literature of aquiesence, submitting to the grace and power of an unjust God.

But which is true to the universe we know? Camus’ universe is finally an unlivable one, with a bare chance that the heroic acts of the Rebel could mitigate for a brief time the ravages of death and injustice. The universe of Tolkien, and the Christian revelation, sees hope that abounds, and beyond all earthly darkness, the stars God made.

Pastor Harley Wheeler