Frodo's faith

Christian Century, Sept 6, 2003 by Ralph C. Wood

Gandalf answers with a speech that lies at the moral and religious center of the entire epic:

"What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature [Frodo declares] when he had a chance!"

"Pity? [Gandalf replies] It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that [Bilbo] took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."

"I am sorry," said Frodo. "But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum."

"You have not seen him," Gandalf broke in.

"No, and I don't want to," said Frodo. "... Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death."

   "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And
   some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not he
   too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise
   cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured
   before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is hound up with
   the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to
   play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the
   pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many--yours not least."

"The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many" is the only declaration to be repeated in all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. It is the leitmotiv of Tolkien's epic, it animating theme, its Christian epicenter as well as its cir cumference. Gandalf's prophecy is true in the literal sense, for the same vile Gollum whom Bilbo had spared long ago finally, enables the Ring's destruction.

The wizard's saying is also true in the spiritual sense Gandalf lays out a decidedly nonpagan notion of mercy. A a creature fo more sinning than sinned against, Gollum deserves his misery. He has committed Cain's sin in acquiring the Ring, slaving his cousin and friend. Yet while the Ring extended Gollum's lite by five centuries and enabled him endlessly to relish raw fish, it has also made him utterly wretched. Evil is its own worst torment--as Gandalf urges Frodo to notice: "You have not seen him."

Be exceedingly chary, Gandalf warns Frodo, about judging others and sentencing them to death. Though Gandalf speaks here of literal death, there are other kinds of death--scorn, contempt, dismissal--that such judgment could render. Frodo is in danger, Gandalf sees, of committing the subtlest and deadliest of all sins--self-righteousness.

Neither hobbits nor humans, Tolkien suggests, can live by the bread of merit alone. Gollum is not to be executed, though he may well deserve death, precisely because he is a fellow sinner, a fallen creature of feeble frame, a comrade in the stuff of dust. Gandalf admits that there is not much hope for Gollum's return to the creaturely circle, but neither is there much hope for many others, perhaps not even for most. To deny them such hope, Gandalf concludes, is to deny it also to oneself.

GANDALFS DISCOURSE On pity also marks the huge distance between Tolkien's book and the heroic world that is its inspiration. Among most ancient and pagan cultures--Iike their modern counterparts--pity is not a virtue. The Greeks, for example, extend pity only to the pathetic, the helpless, those who are able to do little or nothing for themselves. When Aristotle savs that the function off tragic drama is to arouse fear and pity, he refers to the fate of a character such as Oedipus. We are to fear that Oedipus's fate might somehow be ours, and we are to pity him for the ineluctable circumstances of his life, his unjust fate. But pity is never to be given to the unjust or the undeserving, for such mercy would deny them the justice that they surely merit. Mercy of this kind--the kind that is so central to biblical faith--would indeed be a vice.