Theological Reticence and Moral Radiance: Notes on Tolkien, Levinas, and Inuit Cosmology

I WANT TO CONSIDER, IN A ROUQH AND PRELIMINARY WAY, the resemblances of three moral landscapes. is an imaginary landscape: Tolkien's Middle-earth in the Third Age, with its pockets of civilization in a vast depopulated wilderness. is a depopulated European landscape, as mediated through one philosopher's mind: the postwar moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, developed as the remnant of European Jewry struggled to reconstitute its culture. is a northern landscape: the high arctic of the Inuit and their kindred peoples, with its exacting and isolating climate. Scholars who work intensively and methodically on Tolkien or Levinas or circumpolar anthropology may find such comparisons useless or superficial. But lived experience has a way of making connections across the boundaries of academic and religious taxonomy. It is associative; it knits together the personal discoveries that have commanded our attention, whether or not they have commanded anyone else's. What might be mere free-association for a casual reader--not that anyone can read Levinas casually--forms a coherent and purposeful pattern for a reader who listens at a certain frequency. My friend the late Anne Tracy once wrote, One may count upon it, that two instruments, each tuned to one true tone, must then sing in tune with one another. These three instruments, singing together, form a compelling chord in my own mind that I hope to make audible to others. Consider the following passages. The first is from The Lord of the Rings, as Frodo and Sam journey through Mordor hungry and afraid, and one night as Frodo sleeps Sam sees a sight that reorients and revives him: Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. (VI.2.922) The second passage is from the memoir Moonlight at Midday by naturalist Sally Carrighar. The book records her life in a Bering Sea village in the 1950s, where she went to study marine mammals and became part of the human community as well. Dwight Milligrook, a man pulled in two directions by the competing claims of traditional subsistence hunting and the new money economy, said to her: When you work for wages, your thoughts turn towards yourself. You look down when you walk. You no longer love simple things like little animals and the sky and beautiful country. You are self-centered and feel sober and thin. If you are locked up in jail, you do not feel like yourself, and having to work for somebody else is only like being locked up with a longer string. (188) The third passage, from Levinas's Totality and Infinity, probably reflects the philosopher's experience of five years in a German prison camp in the Second World War: The whole acuity of suffering lies in the impossibility of fleeing it [...]. In suffering [the will] turns despairingly into total submission to the will of the Other. In suffering the will is defeated by sickness. [...] But we still witness this turning of the I into a thing; we are at the same time a thing and at a distance from our reification [...]. In suffering the free being ceases to be free, but, while non-free, is yet free. It remains at a distance from this pain by its very consciousness, and consequently can become a heroic will. This situation where the consciousness deprived of all freedom of movement maintains a minimal distance from the present, this ultimate passivity which nonetheless desperately turns into action and into hope, is patience--the passivity of undergoing, and yet mastery itself. …

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