J.R.R. Tolkien as Model Christian Artist: Questions for Artists and Bayou Hobbits in South Louisiana
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This paper originally appeared as the second part of a panel presentation with Dr. Hannah Woldum Ragusa, entitled “Can Art Be Christian and Still Be Art? Jacques Maritain and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lessons for South Louisiana,” at the 2025 Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts & Culture Festival.
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“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work;" wrote J.R.R. Tolkien, “unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision...For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”[1] This quote from Tolkien in Letter 142 is justly well known. Indeed, so evident was the influence of faith to Tolkien that when writing to his American publishers, he declared that “the only criticism [of Lord of the Rings] that annoyed me was one that it ‘contained no religion.’” However, the quotation is also puzzling since Tolkien consciously left out anything like ‘religious cult’ or ‘worship’ in his Lord of the Rings, save for a hymn to Elbereth in Rivendell (oft repeated by Frodo) and the ‘Numenorian Grace’ by Faramir. Nevertheless, it is clear from his letters that Tolkien considered his novel as a fundamentally Christian and especially Catholic work.[2]
First, I will briefly review some of the hallmarks of Tolkien’s own life and faith and then I will turn to how he understood his own art in itself and “as of course a fundamentally...Catholic work.” In this second section I will also briefly note some connections between Tolkien’s own account of his artistic process and Jacques Maritain’s thought and writings—writings which Tolkien was indeed aware of. Fascinatingly, Tolkien’s own writing process, his preference for myth over strict allegory, and his account of ‘sub-creation’ have certain resonances with Maritain’s own work discussed in a previous article by Dr. H. Ragusa. Ultimately, I will argue that Tolkien’s faith influenced his writings through his vision of reality without thereby compromising the artistic integrity of the work or forcing it to be ‘about’ some specific didactic issue. To use the Maritain-Mauriac view, Tolkien’s faith was influential through “purifying the source.” I will close with some possible implications for how Tolkien’s own life and art may be important to others, especially Louisiana writers and we Bayou Hobbits who seek both to carry on and to enliven a literary culture informed by the Christian faith in Louisiana.
Tolkien’s Catholic Faith
Often the mental image that people have of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is that of an Oxford Professor and Inkling, a born Catholic, sitting easily in a study or with C.S. Lewis at the Eagle and Child. However, it is important to remember that Tolkien was a convert. He entered the Church at Christmas in 1903 just before his 12th birthday,[3] some three and half years after his mother herself had entered the Church from Anglicanism. Becoming and staying Catholic was a conscious choice for Tolkien and one that came with certain hardships as well. For instance, Oxford had only recently, and by act of Parliament, begun to permit some Catholic students and professors in 1871.[4] Being Catholic also entailed hardship for his family, since Tolkien’s grandparents on both sides were Protestant and cut off his mother after her conversion. This exacerbated the somewhat tenuous situation that the family was already in—since Tolkien’s father had died untimely when the young John Ronald was 4.[5] Indeed, for the rest of his life and though he loved his extended family, Tolkien held that their actions had contributed to the early death of his mother, Mabel, who worked mightily to support her sons.[6] For the rest of his life he regarded her as a martyr for the faith.[7]
After the death of his mother, John Ronald’s and his younger brother’s formation were overseen by the Birmingham Oratorians who had been founded by Cardinal John Henry Newman. In fact, many of them had known the good Cardinal, especially Tolkien’s guardian Fr. Francis Morgan. Though Tolkien’s continuing education and formation were entrusted to Fr. Morgan, the death of his mother too should remind us that Tolkien’s faith was no inevitability. Indeed, as Holly Ordway notes, C.S. Lewis reacted to many of the same experiences in youth (namely, the loss of one’s mother and the horrors of the front in WWI) by turning to atheism.[8] Tolkien by contrast embraced his faith all the more and learned to forgive his extended family.
Tolkien’s faith was greatly influenced by the intellectual life of the Oratorians. But it was also his trust in Providence and love for the Eucharist that were the two main hallmarks of Tolkien’s faith. Tolkien had a tremendous trust in the fundamental goodness of being and providence—that in the end, all evil things would be but an “instrument” for and “tributary”[9] to still more wonderful manifestations of the Transcendent Good. Evil is always a warping of what is a fundamentally holy and good reality. Our own powers may be insufficient to finally overcome evil, but being—at its ground—is always good. It was this recognition that helped him get through the trenches of WWI and impelled him to first write (in those same trenches) some of the first parts of his legendarium, the Silmarillion.
The second bedrock of Tolkien’s faith was the Eucharist, a special love of the Mass (as the re-presentation of Christ’s one eternal sacrifice), and adoration. As he writes in his marriage advice to his son Michael, after critiquing old traditional chivalric romance for being insufficiently theocentric, “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament....There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves up on the earth.”[10] While this may seem like standard advice to Catholics today, we must not overlook it. Tolkien viewed Pius X’s (at the time controversial) reforms encouraging frequent reception of the Eucharist as perhaps “the greatest reform of our time.”[11] In Tolkien’s day, it was standard for people to say “I heard Mass” and not “I went to the holy sacrifice of the Mass” because reception of the Eucharist was infrequent. When his own sons went off to war, Tolkien encouraged them to make a good confession and receive the Eucharist whenever they were able. Again, for most Catholics this may not appear as unusual advice. However, what is unique is that in his letters Tolkien encouraged his youngest son Christopher, when he could not get to Mass, to pray the Roman Canon (i.e., the Eucharistic prayer of the Mass with Jesus’s words from the Last Supper).[12] That Tolkien did this himself and encouraged his sons to memorize and pray through part of the Mass when they could not attend a liturgy speaks volumes of his personal piety. Finally, Tolkien was also a devotee of Adoration. While praying in adoration in 1944, he even seems to have had something of a vision of his guardian angel as an expression of God’s love for him and for each human being. Also, as a final vignette for how much the Eucharist meant to Tolkien, it should be noted that in 1934, in full academic regalia, he carried the baldachin canopy over the Eucharist in a procession at Oxford—the first such procession in several hundred years and since the Reformation.[13] When Tolkien’s friend did something similar in Edinburgh, Scotland a few months later,[14] he and the rest of the procession were met with spit and stones. Police had to use batons to control the anti-Catholic crowd. While the Oxford procession was more peaceful, it was no less a public profession of Christ and his words at the Last Supper: “This is my body given up for you.”[15]
Tolkien on Writing and Catholic Art
As noted very briefly above, Tolkien’s writing was not unrelated to his spirituality and life. He started composing his legendarium in the trenches of WWI. Understanding reality through writing, or through ‘sub-creation’ as he called it, rather than through pure abstract intellectual reflection, was a common part of his life. Indeed, myth and fairy-story hold a great deal of power for conveying reality “by the ancient device of exemplifying [the true and the good] in unfamiliar embodiments, that may tend to ‘bring them home.’”[16] The same point is made by Aragorn, who responds to Eomer’s question “The world is all grown strange...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” “As he has ever judged...Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”[17] Myth and fairy story are a better vehicle for artistic truth than allegory for Tolkien. Indeed, the better the story, the easier it will be to see many allegories in it because it will more truly reflect reality. Moreover, story was also intensely related to Tolkien’s prayer life. He often received stories or parts of stories in answer to prayers.[18] This is perhaps most clear in his Leaf by Niggle, which occurred to him in a dream as a whole when he was stressed about the Lord of the Rings. But it is also true of certain sticky parts of The Lord of the Rings.[19] Given Tolkien’s deep reflection on the topic, I will turn now to his understanding of story—especially fairy story—and his own method of writing. Indeed, his love for ‘fairy story’ is tied up both with his rejection of allegory and his understanding of ‘sub-creation.’ From there I will point out the ways that Tolkien views his work as ‘fundamentally a Catholic work.’
Tolkien’s own writing style was somewhat haphazard and uneven. While C.S. Lewis seems to have had a regular habit of writing, Tolkien often struggled to juggle writing with all his many other responsibilities. Often he would get stuck at points only to receive a certain inspiration to continue and a sudden breakthrough, along with much encouragement from Lewis. Moreover, he did not plan his work beyond brief sketches and was at times surprised in his own writing. New and unplanned characters would appear in his stories—such as both Strider and Faramir and even the Black Riders—only to be revealed in their fullness later. His story often followed from the choices of the characters, which he almost had to observe.[20] “The truth comes out then [once I get going writing], only imperfectly glimpsed in the preliminary sketch,” declares Tolkien.[21] Indeed, the climactic struggle between Frodo and Gollum and the providential deliverance of Frodo in the Mount Doom chapter, for instance, could not properly be sketched ahead of time (try as Tolkien might to draft an end to shoot for). It could only be written in the moment when the characters arrived since each choice by the characters fundamentally changed the ending.[22]
Especially important for Tolkien’s own writing and self-understanding was his firm rejection of allegory. Tolkien’s thoroughgoing rejection of allegory was not about mere taste or idiosyncratic quirk. It was a principled position. When questioned about what the allegorical meaning of his novels were, he wrote back, “I have no didactive purpose, and no allegorical intent. (I do not like allegory (properly so called: most readers appear to confuse it with significance or applicability).”[23] And again “[The Lord of the Rings] is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political.”[24] The story has no further external end or didactic purpose beyond itself. It is properly “use-less” because it is not “for” something else in the way an allegory is. To put it in philosophical terms, true art for Tolkien is an end in itself and not for a further “use.”[25] Fairy story is no mere instrumental good. Its purpose is the intrinsic truth embodied in that story. “Myth and fairy-story must, as all art,” Tolkien notes, “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.”[26] “The writer’s job...” is “to have as one object the elucidation of truth...in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments, that may tend to ‘bring them home.’”[27] For this reason, notes Tolkien, “that there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability.”[28] A story that deals with the real and true, even if in the Golden Wood of Elfland, will always have application to our lives and be revelatory. Tolkien rejects allegory because he does not want to subvert his story to anything beyond itself as a true ‘sub-creation.’
Tolkien’s understanding of ‘sub-creation’ is central to his understanding of art, connecting both to truth and the way that humans authors and artists image God, the Creator par excellence. Art, and specifically sub-creation, is purely a spiritual activity for Tolkien. He states this plainly, “art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire...seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfaction of plain ordinary biological life, with which in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it.”[29] Art as sub-creation does not have a material or biological use, but comes from a love of the real ‘primary world.’ The temptation, continues Tolkien, is that we may become possessive, clinging to our art or ‘secondary world’ as if it were our own and in an idolatrous way such that “the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation.”[30] Rather than loving the primary world and the Creator and reflecting the true and good anew in an exciting new story of unfamiliar environments, such an idolatrous sub-creator rebels against the laws of the Creator, re-fashioning reality as he wishes things to be.
As proper sub-creation, writing myth or literature is fundamentally revelatory of being and truth. “The Lord of the Rings,” notes Tolkien “is a ‘fairy-story’, but one written...for adults. Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth’, different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism’, and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief.”[31] The height of this reflection of ‘truth’ is what Tolkien calls the “eucatastrophe.” At its most trite, the eucatastrophe is the happy ending. At its pinnacle, it is the sudden beyond-hoped for happy ending and rescue, that at times can produce “joy that brings tears.” Tolkien describes the eucatastrophe as “a sudden glimpse of the Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint has suddenly snapped back. It perceives—if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second[ary] plane...—that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.”[32] The eucatastrophe is the first promise of redemption in Genesis after the Original Sin; it is the Resurrection in the Gospels; it is the shout “the Eagles are coming” when all hope has finally had been lost and the mountain is consumed in molten rock. In this way, notes Tolkien in his famous lecture “On Fairy-Stories:” The Gospel “has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them.”[33]
Tolkien as Christian Artist
Tolkien’s own experience of certain truths only being known through writing which were imperfectly intuited through preliminary sketch, of his understanding of art as “sub-creation” reflecting and expressing the truth, and of art as not being “about” or subordinate to any further didactic message or effect bears a certain likeness to the thought of Jacques Maritain on art and poetic or creative intuition.[34] Tolkien does not explicitly reference Maritain as an influence on his understanding of art and creativity (unlike Flannery O’Connor, for instance), but Tolkien was reading Maritain while composing the Lord of the Rings, and Christopher Tolkien confirmed that his father was familiar with Maritain’s work.[35] Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism was originally published in 1920 and Tolkien had works by Maritain on philosophy in his personal library. Moreover, we know he was reading Maritain no later than September 1944—which is after finishing a first draft of Two Towers, before starting The Return of the King, and right before Leaf by Niggle. (For more, see Oronzo Cilli, Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist, 2nd ed., (Edinburgh, Luna Press Publishing, 2023), 194-195. Cilli dates the notes that Tolkien wrote in his copy of Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy to Sept. 11 & 12, 1944. In Introduction to Philosophy (originally published in 1942), Maritain references both Aquinas’s distinction between prudence and art as different intellectual virtues as well as his own larger discussion of this distinction in Art and Scholasticism (1920).)
Yet, what is it that makes Tolkien’s novels “of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” as he puts it? When a priest friend wrote to Tolkien saying that “the book left him with a strong sense of ‘a positive compatibility with the order of Grace,’”[36] Tolkien heartily agreed. The Lord of the Rings, he notes, was not Catholic consciously at its composition. It has no major aim of allegorizing the Faith, but the revisions were consciously done in accord with what Tolkien holds to be true about reality. “For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbols.” Tolkien continues, “However, that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little; and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it.”[37] Tolkien makes many such statements about the Christianity of his novels. His faith did not change or distort the story in itself (i.e., in the moment of writing or composing). Just as Christianity does not change into theology the science of the scientist or the philosophy of the philosopher, so too Tolkien’s works are not changed into flat allegorical repetitions of the Gospel. No, the faith changed him. It purified and elevated his understanding and receptivity to the Truth; it changed him in the moment of discovering the meaning of being, of discovering forgiveness and mercy, of suffering, death, and the enduring providence of God.[38] The faith purified and changed Tolkien, the artist and sub-creative source, and in doing so purified and elevated the whole Lord of the Rings. The Christian themes are not confined to one character or another or to specific events. Such a tactic would make ‘Christian literature’ one more sub-class among many within a larger artistic category. It would be nothing less than limiting the transforming power of grace and the Gospel. Rather, the faith is present in everything “as elements in solution,” totally transforming the narrative and making it “of course a fundamentally...Catholic work.” Indeed, as one letter to Tolkien noted, “faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source,” like light from a lamp not directly seen. One does not directly behold the source of this light in the Lord of the Rings, but by its light one sees everything else.[39] Ultimately, Tolkien’s story is one of grace and providence and whether we will love God to the end or love something else. At its heart, the central conflict of the Lord of the Rings is no ego-drama, of great heroes who conquer through sheer force of will. Rather, in the final throw, the conflict is a theo-drama, for “there is more than one power at work” in the world.[40] It is this central conflict in Lord of the Rings and all the many characters great and small wrapped up in it that has continued to captivate audiences ever since it was first published.[41]
Conclusion
So what can we take from Tolkien’s example as Christian artist? Certainly, Tolkien’s writing was greatly influenced by his technical skill with languages. But, the Lord of the Rings has continued to captivate readers—whether it be Led Zepplin, Stephen Colbert, Peter Jackson, venture capitalists, vice-presidents, or even some of us Bayou Hobbits—not merely because of Tolkien’s technical and artistic skill, impressive though it was. Rather, the books have an enduring, subtle expression of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful that does not deny that evil exists nor reduce the encounter with evil to flat allegory. They seem at every moment disposed to the order of grace. From the way Tolkien describes the land, the forest, the city, the hard-won mercy of Bilbo and Frodo that rules the fates of many even when all hope seems lost, everything has a ring of truth which makes them so compelling. Moreover, Tolkien’s secret was graced active receptivity, even in the midst of hardship, poverty, and suffering. We too in Louisiana, who love our mossy trees, our bayous, and have a land that is no less magical than Tolkien’s can be attentive to and transformed by the same grace, the same shining forth of being and providence, and the same love that moves all the stars whether here or in Middle Earth so that our art too may ever increasingly be a “tributary” to God’s glory and an “instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”[42]
Christopher Ragusa, Ph.D., is a Professor of Theology at Franciscan University in Baton Rouge, LA.
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition, eds. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), 257. Letter 142. Indeed, so evident was the influence of faith to Tolkien that when writing to his American publishers, he declared that “the only criticism [of Lord of the Rings] that annoyed me was one that it ‘contained no religion.’” Letter, pg. 319. Future citations of The Letters will follow this pattern and simply note the letter and the page number for the quotation.
[2] See also Letters 213, 269, and 328. Holly Ordway also has an excellent book on this topic, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Elk Grove Village: Word on Fire Academic, 2023). See especially pages 259-266. Ordway also opens her work by noting the importance of Tolkien’s Letter 142.
[3] Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 33.
[4] In 1926, Parliament officially passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act which removed the last of the penal laws against Catholics—such as processions being illegal. Tolkien himself references the Catholic persecution he felt in both childhood and adulthood in Letter 306, pg. 554.
[5] Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), 24, 31-32.
[6] Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 55, 60.
[7] Tolkien, Letter 38a, pg. 61, Letter 44, pg. 75, and Letter 267, pg. 494. Carpenter implies that Tolkien connected his mother with the faith as a way of dealing with her death from diabetes. See Carpenter, Biography, 39, 133. Carpenter somewhat skeptically writes of Tolkien that his mother “died (he believed) for her Catholicism” because of her family’s cruelty and neglect. See a similar passage on pg. 130. By contrast, Ordway argues that given current research it is entirely reasonable for Tolkien to conclude that Mabel’s adult diabetes was triggered by her stress and suffering from caring for her children when her family rejected her because of her Catholic faith. Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 54-56.
[8] Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 56-57. Death remains an important theme for Tolkien’s work throughout his life. See for instance, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Film Portrait, directed by Derek Bailey (1996; Oxford: Landseer) [1:04:26-1:05:45, 1:06:27-1:06:55]. See also Letters 131 (especially pages 204-5), 186 (page 353), and 203 (pages 377-378).
[9] Indeed, these are the worlds of God in the Silmarillion. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group, 2001), 6.
[10] Tolkien, Letter 43, pg. 74.
[11] Tolkien, Letter 250, pg. 476. For more on this see Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 109-112, 316. See the footnote on 109 as well for the subsequent historical point.
[12] Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 141-143. Tolkien, Letter 54, pg. 95.
[13] Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 194-5.
[14] Ibid., 276.
[15] Tolkien’s love of the Eucharist also influenced certain aspects of the Lord of the Rings, even if unintentionally in the first writing. For instance, the lembas bread that Galadriel gives to the Fellowship in Lothlorien is a kind of eucharistic antetype. Tolkien notes in the Silmarillion that Melian (a maia, angel in Tolkien’s cosmology) first teaches the Elves, especially Galadriel, how to make this bread as it was made in Valinor. It is literally the bread of angels (panis angelicus), a traditional title of the Eucharist, given to the Elves. Moreover, at times the bread is called “Elven waybread” that strengthens one for the journey, recalling viaticum as the Eucharist given to the dying to prepare them for meeting God. Indeed, via means “way.” In contrast with the Fellowship, Gollum is unable to eat the lembas because he is in such a state of vice and corruption. “The wafer” tastes only of “dust and ashes” to him. Gollum’s response itself recalls St. Paul’s advice regarding “eating and drinking judgment upon oneself” through unworthy reception of the eucharistic species (1 Cor. 11: 23-34). Lastly, Tolkien notes that the Elven waybread is physically no different than normal bread made by humanity. “No analysis in any laboratory would discover chemical properties of lembas that made it superior to other cakes of wheat-meal.” Letter 210, pg. 394. All the observable accidents are unchanged. Instead, a deeper power is at work in a way that recalls the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation. See also Letter 213, pg. 411.
[16] Tolkien, Letter 153, pg. 289. The link between myth and truth is also at the heart of Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia, which recounts the central theme of his conversation with Lewis that sparked Lewis’s own conversion: Christianity is the true myth, the myth that became history.
[17] J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 33.
[18] Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Wheaton, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976), 53. See also, Tolkien’s experience of grasping an insight into the Gospel that is best captured in story and could not be reproduced by argument. Tolkien, Letter 89, pg. 143.
[19] Tolkien, Letter 98, pgs. 164-165.
[20] Letter 131, pg. 204. Tolkien reports that he always had sense of recording what was there and not of inventing the story. His literary device of “translating” and “editing the Red Book” (Lord of the Rings) is a reflection of this. See also Letter 153, pg. 284 where Tolkien describes the experience of writings as having things revealed through him rather than by him.
[21] Tolkien, Letter 91, pg. 147. The view that truth at times is only apprehended in creating art where it is only partially intuited prior to the making is very much like Maritain’s understanding of creative intuition. Moreover, this letter is sent to Christopher Tolkien in November of 1944, after when it is known that Tolkien had been reading Maritain. See footnote 36 for more.
[22] Tolkien, Letter 191, pg. 362. See also Letter 236, pg. 461 and Letter 246, pgs. 460-466 for Frodo as an instrument of and trusting in providence. The central theme of death for humanity is another important example of the way that for Tolkien the intuited truth was fully grasped only through the writing and re-reading. See Letter 208, pgs. 385-386. Yet, he is careful to note that even this theme is not a “purpose” or “message” but a truth intrinsic to and embodied in the story.
[23] Tolkien, Letter 215, pg. 423.
[24] Tolkien, Letter 165, pg. 319. Emphasis in the original.
[25] A helpful example of “an end in itself” might be the Mass, which was so important to Tolkien. The mass certainly embodies truth, beauty, and goodness and is the re-presentation of Jesus’s one, eternal sacrifice on the Cross. However, Mass is not “for” some further purpose or “use.” It is “use-less.” The goal of worship is nothing other than being in communion with God and loving Him in that very moment. It is not subordinated to some further purpose (i.e., as an instrumental good). The goal of the Mass is being united to the Trinity by offering ourselves together with Christ’s self-offering to the Father. By loving what the Mass is and participating in it, we can understand the truth of it, receive grace, and be transformed. However, if we only seek the Mass for some further “use” or only for gain, we will miss both what it truly is and not fully participate in it (not fully receive its effects). Art, worship, and philosophy/contemplation all have this wonderful ‘use-less’ (non-utilitarian) quality. Here Joseph Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998) is particularly instructive. Sport also provides an additional example of an activity that is “an end in itself” like art, having both an intrinsic meaning and cultivating certain virtues in us. Indeed, those players who subvert sport to further ends (honor, fame, money, etc.) are “bad” teammates and play the sport poorly given its intrinsic meaning (even if they win). See more in my “Practice Makes Perfect: How Sport Teaches Life” in Joie de Vivre (Fall 2024): 3-5. https://www.jdvjournal.com/archive/practice-makes-perfect-how-sport-teaches-life
[26] Tolkien, Letters 131 and 203.
[27] Tolkien, Letter 153, pg. 289.
[28] Tolkien, Letter 203, pg 377-8. He continues, “There is I suppose applicability in my story to present times. But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power or Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!”
[29] Tolkien, Letters 131, pg 204-5.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Tolkien, Letter 181, pg 338. See as well Letter 153, pg. 289.
[32] Tolkien, Letter 89, pg 142.
[33] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Story” in Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Books, 1975), 72.
[34] See Hannah Woldum Ragusa, “Creative Intuition, Virtue, and the Possibility of Christian Art,” Joie de Vivre (28 July 2025). For a more direct comparison with Tolkien, see also Jonathan McIntosh, The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (Kettering, Ohio: Angelico Press, 2017), 33-34.
[35] Jonathan McIntosh, “Tolkien and Jacques Maritain on Art,” The Flame Imperishable (blog), June 25, 2025. McIntosh also confirmed in a personal email that Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien estate affirmed that Tolkien was familiar with Maritain’s writings.
[36] Tolkien, Letter 142, pg. 257.
[37] Tolkien, Letter 142, pg. 257-8.
[38] Tolkien, Letters 131 and 203. The distinction between “moment of proof” and “moment of discovery” that I reference here is Msgr. Wippel’s language and is in keeping with Jacques Maritain’s own position distinguishing “the nature of philosophy” and the graced (or ungraced) “state of the person” who is doing philosophy. For a detailed account of the debates on Christian philosophy and how grace changes the Christian, see Hannah Woldum Ragusa’s “Norris Clarke on Receptivity as a Positive Perfection of Being,” forthcoming in Whose Thomism? Which Tradition?, American Maritain Association, 2025, especially pgs. 3-8. Especially important in these debates are Maritain’s An Essay on Christian Philosophy trans. Edward Flannery (New York, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1955) and John F. Wippel’s “The Possibility of a Christian Philosophy: A Thomistic Perspective” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 1, no. 3 (1984): 272-290.
[39] Tolkien, Letter 328, pg. 579.Tolkien was very grateful for several such comments: that the Lord of the Rings contained “a sanity and sanctity...which is a power in itself” and another that praised Tolkien’s writings for creating a world where “faith seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp” illuminating everything else. Tolkien rightly responds that “if sanctity inhabits [an author’s] work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him but through him.”
[40] J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 61.
[41] Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 6.