In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets were paved with white marble; and the Folk of the Mountain laboured in it, and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone. (1)
On May 14th, 1854, Bishop Ullathorne called on the [Curé d’Ars] and asked him to pray for England. The bishop of Birmingham relates that the man of God said with an accent of extraordinary conviction: ‘Monseigneur, I believe that the Church in England will be restored to its splendour.’ (2)
From about the 1800s to the end of the 1950s was a period of restoration. One aspect of this was the revival of interest in the Middle Ages, not merely as a period of darkness, horror, and Catholicism, but as intriguing, romantic, and profound. Sir Walter Scott published his great medieval historical novel, Ivanhoe, in 1819. The first of the ‘Tracts’ published by Newman and his fellow Tractarians, to recover in some measure medieval theology for Anglicanism, appear in 1833. Augustus Welby Pugin published his manifesto of neo-Gothic architecture, Contrasts, in 1836, part of a movement which transformed Gothic architecture from being just a matter of pointed windows, into a whole attitude toward decorative symbolism and the liturgy, based on painstaking historical research. The Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848; Morris and Company was established in 1861; they and others filled new and old Gothic churches alike with gorgeous, elaborate, and appropriate art and furnishings.
It is easy today to look at Victorian medievalism as something of an affectation, and certainly there is a world of difference between genuine medieval art and the Victorian stuff, which has been deeply unfashionable for most of the time since the 1960s. One must remember that, on the one hand, at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was breath-taking ignorance of the Middle Ages, as well as prejudice against it, which the pro-medievalists had to address (3). On the other hand, we actually don’t notice, because we take for granted a great deal of their work which involved, for example, the stripping away of 17th and 18th century false ceilings, box pews, and galleries from medieval ecclesiastical buildings, turning them back from preaching-boxes into churches where liturgy could be celebrated (4). The scale of physical restoration of the old, and the building of the new, is simply staggering.
As I have presented it, this was not primarily a project of Catholics, who lacked the resources to build on the scale of the Anglicans. Nevertheless it had a huge impact on the Catholic community, who found many of the most effective and longstanding arguments levelled against them in popular culture suddenly lose their force: essentially, the arguments based on the idea that the Catholic Church represented medieval ignorance, darkness, and horror. Waves of Anglicans, early examples including both Pugin and Newman, followed their researches by converting.
Catholics found themselves playing a new game with Anglicanism, the game of who can most convincingly portray themselves as the continuation of England’s ancient Christian faith. This was a game in which Catholics had a decided advantage. It is perfectly obvious that the Latin liturgy, the Sacraments, and devotion to Our Lady were central to medieval spirituality, and for all the efforts of High Church Anglicans, these were always going to be associated with the Catholic Church. The efforts of Sir Walter Scott and Alfred Lord Tennyson in literature, and Pusey and Keble in theology, to promote the romantic glamour of the past while sneering at those aspects of it which looked distinctively Catholic, was never going to be terribly convincing.
The Catholic Church in England embarked, therefore, on a massive programme of restoration: the restoration of the ancient glory of the Church in this country. The heights of the medieval Church might seem unattainable, but some things could be saved, some new things could built in the ancient spirit, and some measure of the ancient glory could be passed on to future generations: ‘after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone.’
So in Oxford, once a great Catholic university filled with every kind of religious order, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was possible for the Benedictines, Dominicans, and Franciscans to return. Around the country impressive cathedrals and monasteries were built: in Buckfast, the monks themselves raised a stunning new church, literally on the foundations of a 12th century monastic church, which had been destroyed in the Reformation. The ancient landscape of holy places, too, was painstakingly restored, at first with pitifully modest shrines, but with increasing confidence and splendour as time went on: Walsingham, Holywell, Glastonbury, Willesden, Caversham – the list goes on. The new shrine image at Willesden is made from a wooden beam which had been part of the ancient shrine visited by St Thomas More; the new church at Caversham has in its foundation stones taken from a medieval bridge chapel, mistakenly believed at the time to have been the shrine visited by Queen Catherine of Aragon. The new shrine at Walsingham was installed in a medieval pilgrim’s wayside chapel at the start of the final, holy mile, to England’s Nazareth, which had found its way back into Catholic hands. At the same time, newer orders like the Jesuits and the places made holy by the witness of Catholics during the penal times, were not forgotten.
I don’t think I need to labour the parallel with the world of the Lord of the Rings. The melancholy of past glory is everywhere present in Middle Earth, but it is not the melancholy of despair. It might not be possible to turn the clock back, but it is possible to restore the King, to save the still-free lands, to defeat the enemy in his current incarnation, and to make some measure of repair and renewal – morally, spiritually, and physically – first of Gondor, and then of the Shire. And this indeed is the Christian vocation: the restoration of God’s image in man, with respectful gratitude to our predecessors in the Faith, and in unity of spirit with them.
It remains only to note how the English Catholic programme of restoration suddenly came to a halt in the 1960s, ushering in a period of extraordinary hatred of the past, and a kind of spiritual and physical vandalism. Visitors to Oxford may like to purchase a copy of the history of the Church of St Aloysius (5), which recounts how the Jesuits of this period gave away or destroyed irreplaceable vestments, irreparably damaged the High Altar, and took much of what had been a magnificent collection of relics for disposal in the crematorium. That was as nothing, however, to the damage inflicted directly on souls, by the ridiculing of the immemorial teachings of the Church. We might be reminded of the words of Saruman, near the end of The Return of the King: ‘I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives’ (6).
Like many of his generation, Tolkien, having played a not insignificant part in the ongoing and very successful restoration of the Catholic Church in England, found himself betrayed by those placed in positions of authority in that Church. He is said to have made loud responses in Latin at the English Mass, which first appeared in 1965 (7). It can give us little satisfaction to note that the new programme, an attempt to make the Church relevant to a modern world in which medievalism seemed to be losing its allure, coincided with the most disastrous period of apostacy and lapsation, of priests and religious abandoning their vocations, and the closure of churches and communities, which is possible to imagine outside of a period of severe persecution.
Tolkien’s own literary achievement, which in its own way ‘preserves the memory and the glory of the years that were gone’, has on the contrary proved an extraordinary success. May it continue the work of making imaginative room in its readers for the restoration which we need today even more than at the time it was composed.
Towards the end of The Lord of Rings, Merry contemplates the corpse of Saruman and hopes it marks the ‘very last end of the War.’
‘I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘And that’ll take a lot of time and work.’
Footnotes
(1) The Return of the King (Folio Society edition), p260.
(2) The Cure of Ars (St. Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney, 1786-1859) Dom Ernest Graf (Monk of Buckfast)
(3) See Inventing the Middle Ages Norman Cantor (1991)
(4) See Unlocking the Church William Whyte 2017
(5) St. Aloysius’ Parish, Oxford: The Third English Oratory – A Brief History and Guide, 1793-1993 by Fr Jerome Bertram Cong. Orat. (1994); the booklet is on sale in the church.
(6) p315
(7) His grandson Simon Tolkien wrote in The Mail on Sunday in 2003: ‘I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.’ Available online at simontolkien.com/mygrandfather