Rite and Reason: Two famous books that focus on human nature and salvation, The Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Flies, reach very different conclusions, writes Brian Maye.
Two very famous English novels were published 50 years ago this year, both with the word "Lord" in their titles. Both were deeply religious works but the beliefs they contain about human nature and salvation could not have been more different.
Why the respective authors, J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and William Golding (Lord of the Flies), possessed their very differing religious outlooks would be an interesting question to ponder but that is not the purpose of this article. Instead, it will look at how the two novels reached their contrasting conclusions, one optimistic, the other very pessimistic.
The horrors of the second World War had a profound affect on Golding. He said that anyone who lived through those years and who could not see that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey" was at best naïve and at worst wrong in the head. The source of this deep-seated evil he believed to be original sin.
His novel tells the story of a group of English schoolboys stranded on a tropical island while being evacuated during a war. There are no adults with them and the boys attempt to set up a civilisation on the island similar to the one they had been used to at home. But their efforts end in disaster, murder, anarchy, fire and terror.
What caused this societal breakdown in Lord of the Flies? Golding gave his own explanation at a lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1962 (afterwards published as Fable in a collection of essays entitled The Hot Gates).
He describes the breakdown of the civilisation on the island as resulting from nothing more complex than the inherent evil of man. "So the boys try to construct a civilisation on the island; but it breaks down in blood and terror because the boys are suffering from the terrible disease of being human."
For Golding, the structure of a society is not responsible for the evil that erupts, or at least it is responsible only in so far as the society reflects the nature of fallen man. The shape of the society the boys create is "conditioned by their diseased, their fallen nature".
In the same lecture, he went on to say: "If disaster came it was to arise, simply and solely, out of the nature of the brute Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous." Even the title of Golding's novel is a translation from the Hebrew ba'alzebub ("lord of the flies"), the name of a Philistine god, which in late Latin, Beelzebub, means "the Devil".
Tolkien lived through two world wars (serving in the first of them) but his masterpiece fantasy, while very much concerned with the power of evil, put forward the belief that good would win out in the end. He was a lifelong devout Catholic who called The Lord of the Rings "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work". In addition, he insisted that the fact that he was "a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic" was the "really significant" element in his work.
"Above all shadows rides the sun," proclaims Samwise Gamgee in the perilous gloom on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, showing his faith and hope in a power beyond the reach of the Shadow. In this way, Tolkien shows that the hopeful hobbit, like the hope-filled Christian, does not despair, even in the midst of the greatest evil.
The most obvious parallel between the myth of The Lord of the Rings and Christian belief is in the nature of the quest, which constitutes the central purpose of Tolkien's story. The journey of Frodo and Sam into the very heart of Mordor in order to destroy, or unmake, the ring in the fires of Mount Doom is representative of the Christian carrying the cross of sin, the original sin inherited at birth.
Tolkien makes the over-riding Christian dimension of The Lord of the Rings even more unmistakable in that the climactic attempt to destroy the ring, and in consequence the Dark Lord who forged it, occurs on March 25th.
The Anglo-Saxon scholar and Tolkien expert, Tom Shippey, says in his book The Road to Middle Earth that in "Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, March 25th is the date of the Crucifixion".
It is also the feast of the Annunciation, the moment in history when God became incarnate as man.
The meaning of the date for the Catholic Tolkien was that it signified the way in which God had "unmade" the Fall which, like the ring, had brought humanity under the power of "the Shadow". If the ring the hero wants unmade at the culmination of Tolkien's quest is the "one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them", the Fall was the "one sin to rule them all and in the darkness bind them". On March 25th, the one sin, like the one ring, had been unmade, destroying the power of the Dark Lord.
Brian Maye is a writer and historian