LotR as a "Fundamentally Catholic and Religious Work"    

Believe It... or Don't


Tim LaHaye was recently on Good Morning America being interviewed about the first book of "The Jesus Chronicles," which are planned as a series of four books, each based on one of the Gospels. The first in the series is based on the Gospel of John. (I experienced an immediate Catholic disconnect here - John's is the last-written Gospel, why start with it?*) LaHaye said that one thing he'd discovered while writing the book was the wealth of traditional stories Catholics have about John; he specifically mentioned the one about John being boiled in oil but not dying. This is a good example of Catholic tradition as distinct from Tradition. Official Catholic belief does not include John being boiled in oil (or the other attempts to martyr him, which also failed - according to tradition). It's not Catholic teaching that when St. Paul's head was cut off, it bounced three times and each place it hit on the ground immediately sprouted flowers - but I have a friend named Paul who thinks that's a really neat story. Does he think it happened? ...W-e-l-l, he'd like to, but... Does its being historically accurate or not make any difference in how my friend lives his life? No, but he still thinks it's a really neat story, because it speaks to what he feels about his patron saint's holiness.  

If Tim LaHaye has just encountered these stories now, he's missed out on an entire form of traditional (as opposed to Traditional) Catholic writing called hagiography. You can find it in just about any book of "lives of the saints" published before 1950 or so. You can tell it's hagiography when the saint can do no wrong (any statements the historically-true saint actually made about being sinful are covered by the explanation that the saint was just so holy that any tiny fault seemed horribly sinful to such a pure conscience), and when there are these stories.
Saint Christopher in better days (artwork by Albrecht Durer)
No one's publishing hagiography these days. The pendulum swing is on the side of research into historical truth (which, truth be told - pun intended - has come up with some really neat stories, too, all the better for being real). This trend has also cost some saints their feast days, most notably St. Christopher. It's not that St. Christopher didn't exist historically, but that we don't know if St. Christopher existed historically. Back when he got his feast day, that wasn't of primary importance. Oddly enough, one reason February 14 is no longer the feast of St. Valentine on the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar isn't that we're not sure if there was a holy man named Valentine, but that there seem to have been three of them: and their stories have gotten so woven together that we don't really know which parts belong to which man. There are so many canonized saints that there aren't enough feast days to go around, so it does seem to make sense to hand them out to people we can definitely attach some history to.

From my understanding, the main reason the pendulum had to swing was that some people were starting to think that whether or not a story was historically accurate made a difference, something that wouldn't have entered the minds of the original writers of hagiography. My personal hope is that before too long we'll reach a point where we can call a story a story, or a legend a legend, and have that classification not take away from what the story is saying: that is, the point the original storyteller was trying to make, the truth that's deeper than the facts. We might never know which Valentine secretly paid the dowries of poor young women so they could get married, but his story said enough about love and generosity that its effect has gone far beyond Christians. The most important thing about St. Christopher may have been his name, which means "Christ bearer," and those who've been given his name over the years (including one of JRRT's sons) can be reminded by his story that bearing Christ to others isn't always a light task, even if the legend that tells us that might not be historically true. (The legend is that Christopher was an exceptionally large man, and as a service  would carry travelers across a river that had no bridge. One day he was carrying a small child across and the child began to get heavier and heavier until Christopher could barely move. He realized the child was Christ and that he had experienced a bit of the burden of sin that Christ carried for us.)

Another "believe it or don't" saint who carries a meaningful name is Veronica, who legend tells us got past the Roman soldiers to use her veil to wipe the blood and sweat from the face of Jesus on his way to Calvary - a veil that ever after carried a miraculously made image of Jesus' face. The name the legend gives her means "true image," and if such a women did exist historically I doubt if that's the name her parents gave her. But for generations of Catholic girls and women who've received that name, her legend's a reminder of our call to serve others and to show the true image of Christ to the world.    

Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings was being published just about the same time that hagiography was going out of style. Perhaps there's a part of the human psyche that needs something beyond historical facts; Tolkien certainly thought so.


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*The professor who introduced me to the concept of strong and weak group societies would say that it's because John's is the most weak-group-friendly of the Gospels. Evangelical Christianity as we know it today has its roots in weak-group America. Billy Graham has suggested that people wanting to learn more about Jesus begin by reading the Gospel of John. John's Gospel is so dense in both theology and language that it's not the first reading assignment I'd suggest to a non-Christian who wanted to learn more about Jesus. But I come from the strange mix of being American and Catholic; I psychologically and intellectually understand the weak-group POV, but at my emotional core I'm strong group. Reverend Graham, on the other hand, is weak group in both his culture and his expression of faith; he probably understands more than I do what will resonate with the "normal" non-Christian American. (My suggestion, by the way, would be Mark - for the earliest and most basic telling of the story, stripped down to what the evangelist considered absolutely essential.)

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