A Hero of a Hobbit

with a hat-tip from Stanley Hauerwas

Writing Updates: The Hedgehog Review published a piece I wrote called “The Evangelical Question in the History of American Religion”. I was trying to figure out why the “ex-vangelicals” behave so much like the “evangelicals”. Here’s a quote:

As Peter Berger writes, “A sky empty of angels becomes open to the intervention of the astronomer and, eventually, of the astronaut.”21 We are in a moment when sexuality, gender, and race have become the astronauts of the modern religious sphere. They are the medium we have created whereby we might encounter the divine, but they are far removed indeed from the angels of the past.

It is still paywalled, but I’m told it will be free for a short period of time soon. I will drop you a note when that happens!

I also have a piece on divine judgment in the summer print issue of Christianity Today. It was a difficult piece to write- I tried to retrieve a theology of divine judgment for the everyday Christian. Alas, I think I failed more than I succeeded, but let me know what you think.

“Constancy is the form of a whole human life.” Stanley Hauerwas

I want to reflect a bit on how Sam became a hero.

This is interesting to me because Sam is not heroic. He becomes a hero in spite of himself. This is not me saying that “heroes are not born, they are made”. It is rather saying that Sam is a little goofy and impish. He doesn’t possess great physical strength or intellect. He is not overly serious- in fact he is often making jokes. He is hungry nearly all the time. It wouldn’t even be accurate to say he is “ordinary”; he tends, rather, toward the childlike, the impish, the clown. In fact, he possesses all of the characteristics of a fool- silly, clumsy, simple, joking at grave occasions, talking about his stomach when danger is at hand- except he is not a fool. So what is the difference here between a simple Hobbit and a fool?

Let’s begin to map the difference with one story about how Sam behaves on a treacherous ridge on the way to Mordor.

On the outer ridge of Emyn Muil, Sam and Frodo are stuck on the side of a ledge. They need to scramble down a gully in order to traverse the ravine.

Frodo pauses halfway down and says, to Sam: ‘Look! We must have come down a long way, or else the cliff has sunk. It’s much lower here than it was, and it looks easier too.”

Sam complains about how steep the climb is, and then remarks “those as can’t fly can jump!” When he’s told that it would be quite a jump (or fall), he announces his dislike of heights with “looking’s better than climbing!”

Do you see that Sam has a jocular, cheerful air about him? He is prone to downplay the seriousness of a situation by making a joke or a casual remark. This makes him an impish figure- not a child, exactly, but also not a person with an overly serious nature. There is no gravitas with Sam.

But the setup of Sam’s personality serves, I think, to reinforce Sam’s character. When Sam and Frodo see the sloping rock face, Sam gloomily announces that he is going first; “it’s only sense: put the one lowest as is most likely to slip. I don’t want to come down atop of you and knock you off- no sense in killing two with one fall” (592).

This is how Sam works; he has a frank evaluation of the situation at hand, and he faces it with a bit of humor and the gumption to do what is needed. He is right, of course- if one is likely to fall, it is better for him to fall alone than to take another man with him. He has rightly evaluated both his clumsiness and the risks at hand. But his clumsiness and impishness— weaknesses, perhaps, of his nature- are not met with corresponding weaknesses of character. A lesser imp would be fearful and shy from danger. Sam is likely fearful, but he does what needs to be done.

So what makes Sam a hero and not a fool?

I’d like to suggest to you that the difference between a Hobbit and a fool is constancy. Constancy is not heroism, but it is what makes heroism possible.

In a short essay on the overlooked “British” virtue of constancy, Stanley Hauerwas writes that constancy is “the virtue necessary to sustain the integrity of the self”.⁠¹  The integrity of the self is the ability of an individual to be who they are, regardless of how their life circumstances change.

Now, “constancy” by this definition should not be confused with authenticity. This may be the most important thing I say to you today, and coincidentally something I did not intend to say.

Insofar as theological language is always spoken within a particular culture, the “integrity of the self” may seem to mean something different in 2022 than it did when Stanley Hauerwas wrote this letter to his godson in 2012. Constancy, or the integrity of the self, does not mean “being true to yourself.” It is quite common to hear people talk about the need to be “true to oneself”. What they mean is that they desire to live lives that correspond with “who they are”. How one gets to the core of “who they are” usually remains unspecified. It seems to involve finding a a) set of desires, b) particular lifestyle (job, hobbies, home environment) or c) aesthetic that “feels like me”. It is a sense of “fit”, an “aha”, that identifies this correspondence between a person and their “authentic self”. A person then makes choices that reinforce that correspondence. Being “true to oneself” requires that one identifies which narrative one is true to. There is no “authenticity” or integrity without a prior story, the story that an individual must find themselves in- even as the story is that there is no story but the story that they chose when they had no story (as the great Stanley Hauerwas says).

Many Christians have sought to remind us that no one “chooses their story”. I’ll confess this critique of the ability to “choose our story” provokes a bit of a yawn from me. The choice, after all, is not between “choosing” and being “given” a story. It’s not that simple. It is not simply that we cannot “choose” our story and it is given to us. It is that we are a storied people who are rejecting our situatedness in a story. We think we can choose, and the fact that we think we can choose already situates us in a particular late-modern context. We have a story, even as we think we are “choosing” our story. So it is not simply that “you cannot choose your identity” as much as “the fact that you think you are choosing your identity demonstrates that you have in fact been given to it by the particular situatedness of late-modern-capitalism-technocracy whatever it is.”

No one is choosing, even if they think they are choosing. The idea that sexuality or gender identity or political agency or activism or the overthrow of systems or reinstatement of new orders- the idea that these things would grant a different story is a story. As Stanley Hauerwas famously put it, “the story of modernity is that you should have no story except the story you have chosen when you had no story.” But even the idea that we are “choosing” this story belies the fact that the story of wherever-we-are-living has been chosen for us.

[If I read one more instagram post about Empire, I will owe someone 4000 words- first on how this is a very old idea in theological studies, second on how “empire” is not compatible with America, third on the weirdness of allowing for certain kinds of religious nationalism (America= Babylon) but not others (America= Israel), fourth on how theology has utterly failed our imaginations by allowing us to become captive to political language and metaphors. Have you, too, discovered mainline theology of the 1990’s and allowed it to grant you your story? ]

Where was I.

Yes, Do you see? You think you don’t have a story but you are already inhabiting one and it is a particularly bad one. The story that you have no story is a bad story because it is stories, in fact, that allow simple little Hobbits to become heroes.

In a perfectly improbable essay, Stanley Hauerwas uses the rabbits of Watership Down to articulate how it is that Christians can shape a “churchly identity”. This “churchly identity” is a form of the backward looking dimension of constancy. According to Hauerwas, people cannot even know who they are without a story. They are given these stories about their history as a means of granting them an identity, a sense of who they are and who they must be.

Hauerwas uses the rabbits of Watership Down to illustrate this story, but it could just as well be illustrated by Lord of the Rings. The rabbits of Watership Down become a people “as they acquire a history through the adventures they share”. In his words,

“Adventure requires courage to keep us faithful to the struggle, since by its very nature adventure means the future is always in doubt. And just to the extent that the future is in doubt, hope is required, as there can be no adventure if we despair of our goal. Such hope does not necessarily take the form of excessive confidence; rather, it involves the simple willingness to take the next step.”⁠²

Storied identities necessarily include adventure because they are made up of a willingness to live in the future with what one has been given in the past. Some of the rabbits in Watership Down had no story. In one particular den, the leader “allowed each rabbit to do as he pleased. The story that formed them was that they were no longer dependent on tradition. They assumed the way to stop history from becoming their fate, as it had for Sandelford, was to have no history at all.”

But in assuming that they could choose their own story, they in fact were living out an ill-fated, anemic story. The rabbits under this warren did badly. Remember Hauerwas’ words-  the story of these rabbits was that they had no story except the story they chose when they had no story. But the idea that they could choose their own story is, as I’ve said, itself a story. This idea, for Hauerwas, is the ultimate coercion of liberal societies. That “we achieve the goal of making freedom the fate of each individual… creates the peculiar form of self-deception at the heart of the modern project.”

The self-deception is that no one is coerced to choose the story that they may indeed choose their own story. But we are all coerced to believe this. We are coerced to believe this in order that we may participate in economic systems that are said to perpetuate the possibility that each individual may “choose their own story” and self-actualize in their own chosen way. If you do not believe me, simply observe the looks you receive if you suggest to someone that perhaps it is not a social good “to work for societies where everyone has the economic power to be whatever they want.”³ In liberal societies, self-actualization trumps duty every time. (This is not about abortion, but it is not not about abortion).

Sam’s heroism is exhibited most clearly in duty. This is because he knows the story he has been cast in. Because he knows the story, he can take off on an adventure and become the kind of person who keeps his promises. He could not keep his promises at all if he did not know that a) promise keeping was good and b) what kind of duty his story demanded of him and c) what kind of future his promise-keeping, or promise-breaking, might reveal. Just as with Watership Down, “Good and just societies require a narrative, therefore, that helps them know the truth about existence and fight the constant temptation to self deception”.⁴

What is it that allows Sam, a silly little Hobbit, to become a hero, and what is it that prevents our modern equivalents from doing the same?

I think it is that Sam himself was embedded in a story. Now, I don’t mean a “tale”, in that Sam was a character in a novel (though Tolkien himself plays with this idea, as I will mention later). I mean that Sam knew who he was. He was a Hobbit, from the Shire- one of the later inhabitants of the land that was previously inhabited by Elves. The world of the Shire before the Hobbits saw grave wars, wars that were being reignited by Sauran in Mordor.⁠⁵

Sam accompanies Frodo because he has said he would. It really is as simple as that. The following exchange, from the first volume, sums it up perfectly.

“It would be the death of you to come with me, Sam," said Frodo, "and I could not have borne that."

"Not as certain as being left behind," said Sam.

"But I am going to Mordor."

"I know that well enough, Mr. Frodo. Of course you are. And I'm coming with you.”

Sam becomes a hero by doing the next thing, in his own way. But how does he know what to do next? Quite honestly, he doesn’t. He simply does what needs to be done. His heroism is the result of a lifetime of living according to a particular pattern. This pattern was keeping his promises. He has bound himself to Frodo, and this allows him to behave in some rather heroic ways.

I fear that in our current time, men of clownish instinct like Sam become fools and not heroes. Hauerwas, I suspect, would diagnose the problem in this way: “the modern presumption is that one never should be held responsible for commitments that we have not freely chosen, even if we thought at the time we were freely choosing.”⁠⁶ Sam certainly did not know the danger ahead. Anyone would understand if he turned back- indeed Frodo encourages him to. But he has made a promise and his constancy encourages him to keep on the way.

Tolkien and Hauerwas share a belief about what it is that makes a hero. It is not dynamic personalities or training or a sense of destiny; it is being cast into a story as a person who knows he has been granted a story. Sam puts it this way:

“We shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually — their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on — and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same — like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?”

So there we have it. It is a story that makes a hero of a Hobbit- heroes who just went on, come what may.

1. Hauerwas attributes this observation to Alasdair MacIntyre. This quotation is from the essay on “Constancy” in The Character of Virtue.

2. Hauerwas, “Story Formed Community”, 172 in The Hauerwas Reader.

3. Hauerwas, again- in “Killing Compassion”.

4. Hauerwas in “Story Formed Community.”

5. I am doing this from memory and I am certain some of you gentlemen who have read the Simillarion are dying to correct me- please do.

6. “Killing Compassion”, in Dispatches from the Front 166-167.