The Naming and Narrative of Treebeard and Yahweh

In a well-known passage, Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin the Entish philosophy of naming:

For I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.’ A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

In other words, the name of a thing is its narrative: things are identified by their temporal eventfulness. According to Robert Jenson (Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God), what is true of Treebeard is likewise true of the God of the Old and New Testaments.

God… is uniquely described by the narrative of the Exodus-event, and the one so described has a personal proper name, JHWH. The description and the name in their interplay determine Israel’s relationship to her God. Asked who God is, Israel’s answer is, “Whoever rescued us from Egypt.” Asked about her access to this God, Israel’s answer is, “We are permitted to call on him by name”… In [the Decalogue], the name and the narrative description are side by side, to make one identification: “I am JHWH your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.”…

To the question “Who is God?” the New Testament has one new descriptively identifying answer: “Whoever raised Jesus from the dead.” Identification by the Resurrection neither replaces nor is simply added to identification by the Exodus; the new identifying description verifies its paradigmatic predecessor…. Thus the phrase “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is simultaneously a very compressed telling of the total narrative by which Scripture identifies God and a personal name for the God so specified; in it, name and narrative description only appear together, as at the beginning of the Ten Commandments, but are identical.

In Treebeard’s terms, accordingly, Yahweh’s name is a “real name” first, because it “tells you the story of the thing” it names, and secondly, because like any other living thing, it is “growing all the time.”

Salt Lake City vs. Treebeard’s Eyes: Tolkien and Descartes on Tradition

J.R.R. Tolkien and René Descartes give us two powerful, yet as one might expect, contradictory images of tradition and its relevance for human wisdom. In his Discourse on Method, a work that could justly be characterized as the intellectual charter of the modern era, Descartes contrasts those human enterprises which have the benefit of the planning and oversight of a single, “master craftsman,” with those comparatively haphazard achievements which are the result of many different planners over the course of a long period of time. As Descartes writes,

it occurred to me to consider that there is often not so much perfection in works composed of many pieces and made by the hands of various master craftsmen as there is in those works on which but a single individual has worked. Thus one sees that buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usually more attractive and better ordered than those which many architects have tried to patch up by using old walls that had been built for other purposes. Thus those ancient cities that were once mere villages and in the course of time have become large towns are usually so poorly laid out, compared to those well-ordered places that an engineer traces out on a vacant plain as it suits his fancy… (Discourse on Method, AT 11)

In short: Paris vs. Salt Lake City.

What Descartes is contrasting in his image of these two different kinds of city (the centrally planned vs. the non-planned), of course, are two different and (for him) conflicting ways of looking at the world, one that is rooted (if not “cemented”) in custom, authority, received wisdom, in a word, tradition, and another that is critical, analytical, methodological, inquisitive, exploratory, enlightened, self-conscious, independent, autonomous, in a word, rational.

In opposition to this characterization of the alleged haphazardness and, to that extent, irrationality of “tradition” is Tolkien’s image of Treebeard’s eyes, something I’ve commented on before in connection with the historical character of theology in comparison with philosophy. As Pippen reflects on Treebeard’s eyes in The Two Towers,

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground – asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

Joseph Pearce has suggested that in this extended description of Treebeard’s eyes Tolkien is showing his agreement with Chesterton’s account of “traditionalism,” or what Chesterton described as the “philosophy of the Tree.” As G.K. wrote in one article,

I mean that a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable. The innermost rings of the tree are still the same as when it was a sapling; they have ceased to be seen, but they have not ceased to be\central. When the tree grows a branch at the top, it does not break away from the roots at the bottom; on the contrary, it needs to hold more strongly by its roots the higher it rises with its branches. That is the true image of the vigorous and healthy progress of a man, a city, or a whole species. (Church Socialist Quarterly, January 1909, as quoted in Pearce, ed., Tolkien: A Celebration)

To bring the contradiction between Tolkien and Descartes to as sharp a point as possible, we might say that they both see tradition in semi-arborial terms: what Descartes sees as a bewildering, unintelligible, even idiotic network of subterranean (and hence sub-rational) influences and commitments, Tolkien sees as (potentially) a life-giving root system, reaching across time and space to provide society with much needed nourishment, strength, and stability.

Saruman’s mimetic desire

Saruman the Gollum, part 2

For all his sophistication, a further indication of the corruption of Saruman’s mind and soul is the self-incriminating hypocrisy of his description of Gandalf as “wandering about the lands, and concerning himself in every business, whether it belongs to him or not,” for as Treebeard tells Merry and Pippen, “minding the affairs of Men and Elves” was precisely what the wizards were sent to Middle-earth to do, a task to which Gandalf remained faithful but which Saruman abandoned, instead “tak[ing] up with foul folk, with the Orcs,” creatures with whom he certainly ought to have had no “business.” Treebeard outlines the diminishment of Saruman in these further, incriminating words:

“There was a time when he was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything. And he got more and more like that; his face, as I remember it – I have not seen it for many a day – became like windows in a stone wall: windows with shutters inside.”

Saruman began as a “wizard,” which is to say, one of the “Wise,” but in his play to become a “Power,” we see him having to stoop to the level of a disgraceful liar. Saruman has become a Gollum.

Other comparisons between Saruman and Gollum might be made. I have already mentioned Saruman’s “scoffing” reference to Gandalf “the Grey,” and when Gandalf mentions Radagast, Saruman “no longer concealed his scorn”: ” ‘Radagast the Brown!’ laughed Saruman… ‘Radagast the Bird-tamer! Radagast the Simple! Radagast the Fool!'” This pointless, unprovoked, and out-of-all-proportion litany of insults is telling. On the one hand, through the powerful and learned Saruman’s derision of the wandering, poverty- and nature-loving Franciscan, Radagast, Tolkien might be seen unmasking the feigned, pragmatic, “beyond-good-and-evil” indifference of the technocratic, industrialist will-to-dominate, as something much more abject, namely a subliminal envy and resentment in the face of an aesthetically arresting and morally indicting created goodness. Like Milton’s Satan when confronted by the hierarchically subordinate yet unfallen cherub, Zephon (Paradise Lost, bk. 4), Saruman’s posture of superiority is really a front for a secretly and perhaps only half-consciously realized moral–and to that extent, metaphysical–inferiority.

Theology and Treebeard’s Eyes

David Burrell (“Creation and ‘Actualism’: The Dialectical Dimension of Philosophical Philosophy”) makes a passing comment about how “theology operates far more historically than many philosophers are accustomed to proceed.” Having read a bit of contemporary analytic philosophy of late, this statement rings profoundly true for me. It reminds me, moreover, of Pippen’s reflections on the fathomless depths of Treebeard’s eyes in The Two Towers, an image Joseph Pearce (Tolkien: A Celebration) has interpreted in terms of G.K. Chesterton’s defense of traditionalism as the “philosophy of the tree.” As Pippen describes Treebeard’s eyes,

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground – asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

I think that’s fantastic as a description, not only of the simultaneous stability and dynamism of tradition, but also–and to go back to Burrell’s comment–of the historical-rootedness of theology vis-a-vis the rootlessness of much contemporary philosophy: “filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present… considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”