Tolkien was always very outspoken about his religion, proudly stressing his belonging to the Roman-Catholic rite. The importance of faith in his life and its effects on his writing has been explored, more so than in the writer’s biography by Humphrey Carpenter (2002), by Joseph Pearce in Tolkien, Man and Myth (1998)1. Further insight into how much it influenced certain aspects of his life can be gotten from Tolkien’s Letters (2006).
For Tolkien, his religion also had a special emotional significance, which few people were capable of understanding. His faith was the only immaterial heritage that his mother Mabel left him2. Born to a family of Anglicans, Methodists in particular, Mabel Tolkien became all the more attracted to the Roman-Catholic Church after her husband’s death, converting in 1900 and bringing with her also her sons, who at that time were 8 and 6 years old. Ronald received his First Communion three years later. The Tolkien boys too were originally baptized in the Anglican Church, and in his adult years, Ronald regarded his second name, John, to be his Christian name, preferring to be addressed with this among his colleagues, though his parents never thought about this implication on the occasion of his baptism (Tolkien, 2006, p. 397-8).
Mabel’s conversion met with strong disapproval on the sides of both her and her husband’s families, resulting in the removal of most of their financial support, which only led to her adhering to her new faith all the more in search for solace. This she found in the priests from the community of Birmingham Oratory, particularly in Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who helped her rearrange their living conditions and also substituted the role of father to her sons, often even taking them for holidays to the seaside. They received their Catholic education in the strict environment of the Oratory, where, as Tolkien recounted in a letter (ibid. p. 395), they virtually became the junior inmates, usually serving at the Mass before going to school. And since the Oratory priests were all learned men, they provided the boys with a wide range of knowledge, mainly on religious philosophies and classical languages.3
Unfortunately, the idyll did not last long. Early in 1904, Mabel was diagnosed with diabetes, of which she died just about a half a year later. Tolkien ascribed the rapid deterioration of her health to her being worn out by poverty and persecution, which he believed were the result of the considerable repulsion by her family on account of her conversion. Thus, in his opinion, she was a martyr who spent herself in her effort to hand the faith on to her boys (ibid. p. 354). Ever since then, she embodied for him the ideal of religious devotion; he often presented her as a model to his own children and was much grieved when, even under the image of her sacrifice, their faith faltered (ibid.). After her death, Tolkien, following the example of his patron St John the Evangelist4, adopted St Mary, the mother of Jesus, as his spiritual mother, holding her in special devotion.
However, as Pearce (1998, p. 23) remarks, it should not be assumed that he clung to religion blindly, without any critical evaluation, out of loyalty to his mother or his Oratorian upbringing. Indeed, he had to test it against various theories he came across in the university environment, which by its nature should be areligious.5 But in spite of the fact that even Tolkien had his darker periods when he almost completely ceased to practise his religion (e.g. during his first term at Oxford, later in Leeds or while living at 22 Northmoor Road6), Catholicism remained his spiritual harbour to the end of his days, because, for him, it “was not an opinion to which one subscribed but a reality to which one submitted.” (ibid.)
But though the seed of faith was planted by his mother, it would have never got rooted so firmly without the care of Fr. Morgan, into whose guardianship Mabel entrusted her sons ere she died. Metaphorically speaking, Fr. Morgan held over them both of his hands: one the soft hand of protection and financial support, for which Tolkien always felt immensely indebted to him, but the other one strictly overseeing his education and moral development. He was the one who ensured that Tolkien remained at King Edward’s by paying a portion of his tuition fees with his own money when he was under no obligation to do so, and from whom Tolkien learnt charity and forgiveness (Tolkien, 2006, p. 395, 354) and, as Pearce (1998, p. 31) adds, also the Christian understanding of honour, obedience, faithfulness and other virtues. Later, in his writings, he liked to juxtapose these with their perception based on the Nordic mythologies, an interest in which he started to develop at about the same time as he and his brother were moved by Fr. Morgan from their aunt’s house, where they were unhappy, to new lodgings at Duchess Road.
Religion and Fr. Morgan had also a crucial impact on Tolkien’s marriage. At Duchess Road, the sixteen-year-old Ronald met Edith Bratt, a fellow orphan two years his senior, and in the next two years, their friendship turned into a romantic relationship. Because of his two newly founded loves, to Nordic literature and languages and to Edith, his school performance slightly slackened, to Fr. Morgan’s great disappointment. While he did not mind the former of Ronald’s loves, he ordered the boy to end the romance and when, in spite of his warning, they continued it, he had the girl removed to another accommodation and strictly forbid Ronald to see or write to her until his 21st birthday. Out of reverence and indebtedness, though unwillingly, Tolkien submitted to the three-years-long ban.
When this was over and the lovers finally successfully reconciled and Edith agreed to marry him, Tolkien’s next biggest concern was her conversion to Roman Catholicism because, for him, it was absolutely unthinkable not to have a proper wedding in this rite. This proved to be the first major source of quarrel in their life together, as Edith used to be a very active member of the Church of England and appreciated in their local community (besides, her relatives would react just as Mabel Tolkien’s did), and it remained the main source of their disagreement for most of her life, despite her initial after-conversion excitement. Carpenter (2002, p. 98) mentioned that it was because she developed considerable dislike to some of their practices, such as confession-making, which Pearce criticizes him for (1998, p. 46), saying it might not have been as bad as Carpenter described it. But they both agree that, while the shallowness of her faith might have partially been the result of the not-enthusiastic-enough teaching of the priest who prepared her for the conversion, to which Tolkien ascribed it, he too was not very helpful to her in this matter, being unable to communicate to her the nature of his emotional attachment to religion, which she did not understand, nor reason it out using the mythology-based arguments he later presented to C. S. Lewis.7
What he did not achieve with his wife, he did, at least partially, with his colleague and friend, the above-mentioned Lewis. It were the philosophical debates with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that led the born-Protestant to resume the practice of religion and basically created one of the greatest Christian apologists of his age. Partially, because, to Tolkien’s disappointment, Lewis did not turn to Roman Catholicism but remained an Anglican. Most of their disagreement, as far as religion was concerned, resulted henceforth. Their opinions differed mostly on the matter of marriage—while Lewis advocated the dual system of civil and church marriage, Tolkien accepted only the church one as true and sinless—and that was also one of the reasons for their later estrangement. Tolkien reproached Lewis not only for not informing him or any other of their Inkling friends about his wedding, nor inviting them to it, but mainly for marrying a divorcee with a child. His view on the sanctity of marriage Tolkien explained also in several letters to his sons, Michael and Christopher.8 Pearce (1998, p. 47) observes that, in this, he was echoing the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. Nonetheless, the teaching fell somewhat short of the intended effect in the case of his youngest and favourite son Christopher, who divorced and remarried, causing his father considerable sorrow.
Tolkien always cared much about the religious up-bringing of his children, even though in one of his letters he expressed guilt that he might not have done enough (Tolkien, 2006, p. 340). He used to take them to church regularly and, as they grew up, discussed with them and advised them in many matters of faith, just like Father Morgan did to him, often via letters when they flew out of the family nest. From the perspective of the devout Catholic that he was, his efforts were more than rewarded when his eldest son John became a priest.
Apropos priests, from childhood Tolkien had many good friends, and later also fans among them, with whom he maintained a lively correspondence. And he seemed to be much interested in the religious views of most, if not all, people with whom he became more than just an acquaintance, especially those who made an occasional appearance at the Inklings’ meetings, such as Charles Williams or Roy Campbell, both of whom also had a certain impact on his relationship with Lewis. While Tolkien thought Williams, also Anglican, had a regressive effect on his friend, he was highly amused by Lewis’s misgivings about the latter one, a Christian convert.9
As for the practice of religion, Tolkien was very traditional and orthodox, presumably due to the fact that he was raised in the Oratory. As Carpenter (2002, p. 174) commented, he set himself a very rigorous, almost ascetic way of life. For example, he never went for the Communion unless he went to confession first. For him, the Sacrament was the “one thing to love on Earth […] the true way of all loves” (Tolkien, 2006, p. 53) and main source of spiritual consolation, seconded by prayer, which he deemed the most powerful tool in the fight against evil. Doubtlessly, his faith was also the major factor that helped him survive the horrors of the trenches of World War I in his youth, as well as any other misfortunes in life, which he viewed as a journey of defeat, the aim of which was to earn the right to enter the joy of heaven after death. However, neither did Tolkien view the Church as an institution as perfect. He was aware that it consisted of fallible humans, whom or whose decisions he may not always like, such as many of those installed by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. While he approved of the increase of ecumenical efforts, he contested its decision to exchange the traditional liturgical language, Latin, for vernacular languages. As a result, to the end of his life, he kept on responding during the Mass in Latin while everybody around him was using English.10 Nonetheless, he accepted all the changes as opportunities to exercise the virtue of loyalty to the church which he still felt to be his “home”. At least Italy, the hearth of Christendom, which he visited in his retirement, felt like home to him (Carpenter, 2002, p. 296).
Towards the end of his life, Tolkien became still more and more concerned with the metaphysical and theological implications of his fantasy world. Trying to figure them all out only caused further distractions and delay in his completing The Silmarillion. But his faith did not influence just his story-making, it also shaped his academic interests. As Pearce (1998, p. 17) notes, “the realization that Christianity may not have been the faith of his father but was the faith of his father’s fathers,” incited his love for Medievalism. As a university teacher, he studied many medieval texts, with special focus on those from the earliest-recorded English literature, with religious context—from the famous ones like Chaucer’s, Arthurian legends or Beowulf, to the lesser-known such as Ancrene Wisse, The Life and Passion of St Juliene, or Pearl—which he either translated or lectured on. He also collaborated on a new translation of the Jerusalem Bible, particularly working on the Book of Jonah. Even modern literary works he read with interest in their philosophy, religion, and morals (Tolkien, 2006, p. 378, 34).
So it is in place to ask with C. A. Coloumbe, as reported in Pearce (1998, p. 20), what would have become of Tolkien, had he not been raised in the Birmingham Oratory, but was put into a Protestant boarding school as his relatives intended after his mother’s death.11 The world might have never seen any of his fictional or scholarly works, or they might certainly have been much different without the strong religious undertones that they have now.
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1Since Carpenter’s Biography was originally published in 1977 and is the only authorized biography of Tolkien, as it was developed in collaboration with him, Pearce was building on it.
2 Not taking into account the modest capital he used to receive from a business she invested in, faith was the only heritage at all Ronald was left with after his mother’s death, as his unempathetic aunt burned all Mabel’s letters and papers (Carpenter, 2002, p. 52).
3 This does not mean that his Kind Edward’s school education was insufficient in this way. On the contrary, since he developed a close friendship with the headmaster’s son Christopher Wiseman and his family, hence also the headmaster, this allowed him to take some extra classes that he taught. Tolkien remembered the headmaster as “one of the most delightful Christian men” (Tolkien, 2006, p. 395).
4 See Tolkien, 2006, p. 397.
5 Being brought up in the Oratory, there is a possibility that Tolkien might have been acquainted with the nine lectures of its founder John Henry Newman, which answer Protestant arguments against Catholicism, thus providing him with „a basic kit“ for the defence of his religion. Also, it is the Oratory where he might have become acquainted with the theology of Thomas Aquinas even before Pope Pius X insisted in his encyclical Motu Proprio from 29 June 1914 that Aquinas’s Summa Theologica be used as a textbook of theology in all institutions providing cleric degrees, because Newman’s theology on natural and revealed religion bears much resemblance to Aquinas’s teaching on this matter—at least on the first sight. I have not had the time to look deeper into Newman’s theology to compare it with Aquinas’s, but this discovery creates a new research field in Tolkien studies since Tolkien’s opinion on the matter of pagans’ knowledge of God is similar (see his theory on the nature of myths). So far, I believed it derived from Aquinas, but this provides a serious ground for the assumption that it might have actually be derived from Newman.
6 See Carpenter, 2002, p. 85, and Tolkien, 2006, p. 340.
7 See Carpenter, 2002, p. 97, 209.
8 See Tolkien, 2006, letter 43.
9 See Tolkien, 2006, letters 83 and 276.
10 http://www.simontolkien.com/mygrandfather.html
11 See Carpenter, 2002, p. 51.
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Works cited
Carpenter, H., J.R.R Tolkien: A Biography, 2002, London: HarperCollins, 2002. 384 pp. ISBN 978-0-261-10245-3
Carpenter, H., The Inklings, 2006, London: HarperCollins, 1978. 287 pp. ISBN 978-0-00-774869-3
Pearce, J., Tolkien: Man and Myth, 1998, London: HarperCollins, 1998. 424 pp. ISBN 0-00-274018-4
Tolkien, J.R.R.; Carpenter, H. (ed.), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2006, London: HarperCollins, 1981. 502 pp. ISBN 978-0-261-10265-1
http://www.simontolkien.com/mygrandfather.html
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