Gollum and the Hedgehog
Christian Sin-Talk
I’ve written a piece entitled “The Evangelical Question in the History of American Religion”. It is published over at the Hedgehog Review; if you are a subscriber, your copy should be in your mailbox soon. I’m told I’ll have a link to share by July 1- if you read it, do let me know what you think. I have made some broad statements, but I figure if Alan Jacobs can attribute social media’s ills to “demons”, certainly I can be afforded a bit of generalization.
Faramir laughed softly. “Fish! He said. “It is a less perilous hunger. Or maybe not: Fish from the pool of Henneth Annun may cost him all he has to give”.
In relation to God there is no middle term between love and hate- Karl Barth.
Four years ago the New York Times published an op-ed that I think about at least once a week. Entitled “Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin”, it articulated a view I have found to be somewhat common.[1] The idea was that the Christian concept of sin is not only outdated but dangerous. “Sin”, for the author, has clear connotations: “Sin. That tiny word still makes me cringe with residual fear. Fear of being judged unworthy. Fear of the eternal torture of hell. Fear of my father’s belt.”
Notice a few things with me in this sentence. First, the language of sin carries for the author a relationship to fear. This is because sin brought with it either immediate negative consequences (judgment, shame, and corporal punishment) or the threat of future negative consequences (eternal torture and hell). Sin for the author is an exclusively negative reality. She writes, “God was a megaphone bleating in my head: “You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad!”” No wonder she has no use for sin!
Notice, second, that “sin” has a loose relationship to the author’s own actions. She is afraid of punishment and judgment, but she lacks a sense that an ex post facto evaluation of her actions as wrong might be appropriate. The fear associated with sin may also be the fear of a disproportionate evaluation, of an unclear distribution of negative goods. Faced with the condition of her humanity, the only evaluation possible, it seems to her, would be a positive one.
ear of arbitrary punishment plus lessened personal agency and lessened guilt would, indeed, seem quite a poor doctrine of sin. The author has replaced any understanding of sin with a marvelously improbable formulation of her own: “To me, the greatest sin of all is failing to be an engaged citizen of the world, so the lessons are about being open to others rather than closed off.
She goes on to describe the liturgy that is forming her young children in this way:
“We started taking our kids to marches when the younger one, Davia, was an infant perched on our shoulders and 3-year-old Tessa danced between the lines of protesters as if it were a block party. We’ve marched for racial justice and for women’s rights. Our church is the street, our congregation our fellow crusaders. We teach our children to respect the earth by reducing, reusing and recycling.”
Recycling, that great salvation! The great metaphor of our age for things done to be good that in fact do no good. (There is an entire essay waiting to be written on Recycling and the moral imagination in the modern world.)
The author then notes how her own children have taken up the message and become miniature ministers of her chosen gospel: “Their activism has even inspired others. In 2016, Tessa choreographed 20 grade-schoolers in a “Kids for Hillary” pantsuit flash mob in Berkeley which was featured by local media outlets as well as Fast Company and even Courrier Japon.”
That aged poorly. But I digress.
The above op-ed is a pitch perfect articulation of the current vocabulary around the Christian doctrine of sin. It reveals both what ordinary people often think sin means and how they evaluate its utility. They are wrong on both accounts. But reframing or reintroducing the language of sin is no simple task, and indeed there are yet another set of pitfalls to avoid when we attempt to do so.
To make sin “relevant” is often to bastardize the doctrine, to thin it out to terms like “solidarity” or “responsibility” that have cultural cache but less theological resonance. David Brooks has spoken often of the need to reclaim an understanding of sin, but he does so largely through the lens of character and civic accountability.[2] The problem here is that the doctrine of sin is not primarily a shared set of moral norms. Now it may result in such a set, but to define it entirely in that direction moves its doctrinal location from theology to ethics and erases the locus of the doctrine from the God-world relation, to the execution of human activities.
There is also some attempt also to reclaim sin-talk to speak about racism; but racism and sin are not collapsible. There is the sin of racism and “racism as sin”; they are not identical and must be analytically separated. Racism is indeed a sin, but what often happens is Christian theological terms are borrowed to speak about racism (solidarity, social sin, accountability) without the referent (God) functioning nearly at all. When Christian concepts are borrowed in this way, they yield a grammar that results in feelings of moral superiority but lacks any possible spiritual value. One may feel justified in calling racism a “sin” and may gain a feeling of moral satisfaction; but such feelings were never the desired end of Christian sin-talk. If Christian sin-talk yields ends unconcerned with reconciliation with God, it is no longer Christian.
What is needed, instead, is an adequate description of both the condition that all humans find themselves in, and the relation that this condition places each creature in before God.
This could, and perhaps should, be a much longer essay. Instead, I’ll give you a quick picture of the Christian doctrine of sin, through one of its best expositors-- Gollum, from Lord of the Rings.
Gollum is a creature of the deep—(remember that the Hebrew sh’eol, often used to speak of one’s separation from God literally means “depths”-- see Ps. 139, among others).
Gollum comes from a “clever handed and quiet-footed little people”; a family of high repute. Hobbits and Smeagol share an origin story as distant relatives; they know the same riddle and can understand each other’s language, though Gollum now often speaks in an impish, babbling mumble.
Gollum was “The most inquisitive and curious-minded of his family” (cf Isaiah 14:12-15).
His people loved the water, swimming and boating and fishing- but he loved the deeps most of all, the muddy surfaces that lay, still, beneath the water. “He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward.” His interest is less genealogy and more the depths, even, perhaps, the abyss.
He is a slippery slimy creature- amphibious, often found either by the water or diving in and out of it. He is also a hunter; though his appetites have been distorted-- he eats raw fish, he refuses the staple cracker that the Hobbits rely on, preferring instead to go hungry.
Gollum enters our story because he was the original possessor of the Ring. The ring was discovered by Deagol, Smeagol’s brother. Simply because he wants it, Smeagol steals the ring and then must kill his brother to hide the thieving: ‘No one ever found out what had become of Déagol; he was murdered far from home, and his body was cunningly hidden”. This combination of thievery, murder, and duplicity becomes Gollum’s calling card.
From the very first, the ring is not good for Gollum. It makes him invisible to his family, and he also keeps the Ring invisible to others; “he used it to find out secrets, and he put his knowledge to crooked and malicious uses. He became sharp-eyed and keen-eared for all that was hurtful. The ring had given him power according to his stature. It is not to be wondered at that he became very unpopular and was shunned (when visible) by all his relations.”
“Power according to his stature”- what an Augustinian turn! Indeed, Augustine would remind us that power rightly used orients the creature toward God. Wrongly used it creates a creature whose power cannot achieve the ends for which it is intended. Indeed Gollum’s “stature” is often described as stooped, hobbling, bent-over, groveling. The only power he has is reflected by this stature. His is increasingly a power to harm.
We see already one feature of Christian sin-talk in Gollum’s character- he has lost touch with the good. His desires have turned away from loving the Good, preferring instead inferior things like the depths to the surface, hunger to inferior food, the dark to the Sun. Tolkien feeds us this bit of sin-talk directly:
“One day it was very hot, and as [Gollum] was bending over a pool, he felt a burning on the back of his head) and a dazzling light from the water pained his wet eyes. He wondered at it, for he had almost forgotten about the Sun. Then for the last time he looked up and shook his fist at her.”
We have here the progression of Gollum’s character finely displayed. What began as a weakness in Gollum’s desire- Smeagol stole the ring “because I wants it” became a wholesale distortion of the creature. According to Augustine, after the fall, we no longer desire the good- there is a possible disorientation of will and desire.
We can see the deformation of Gollum’s character throughout these two volumes as his will is twisted entirely by the misuse of desire. Gollum, having gained the ring, has lost his name, his brother, his family, and the right use of his desire. The thing he wanted he got, and in turn this desire made him persistently susceptible to further corruption of desire. The more he got the thing he wanted, the most he lost everything that was worth having- family, love, and the ability to rightly order desire. Recycling, sin is not.
That sin deforms the creature completely and entirely is precisely Augustine’s view of sin. For Augustine and those who follow him in the Western theological tradition, sin has two forms; original, and “actual” (though this latter is called by various names).
All creatures by virtue of Adam’s fall bear the effects of original sin. This means that they do not do the good by nature, and only by grace. Here is one of the only places I borrow a Latinism in my teaching to lay people; all creatures are non posse non peccare- not able not to sin; only a few in this life- certainly Christ, and according to some Christian traditions also the saints are posse non-peccare- able not to sin. In the life to come, we will be non posse peccare- not able to sin.
(Do you see the subtle difference between the last two forms- “able not to sin”, and “not able to sin”? This question gets particularly juicy when applied to Christology- can you anticipate how?)
So Gollum is able to sin, and then quickly as he takes ownership of the Ring and his character is formed he is made captive to the Ring. He becomes not able not to sin- he is enslaved. Just as with sin; there is no “small bit” of sin. As our epigraph from Karl Barth noted, “In relation to God there is no middle term between love and hate.”
So sin is not only doing bad things; or being ignorant of good things; it is all of this even while remaining a creature. Sin does not utterly destroy the creature, rendering her something else (this is often misunderstood); rather sin deforms and dissociates the creature from the possibility of her living as she ought to be. Gollum becomes a shadow creature, formed by his desires, with deformed appetites and habits and even speech:
“Even Gollum was not wholly ruined. He had proved tougher than even one of the Wise would have guessed -as a hobbit might. There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as through a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things…But that, of course, would only make the evil part of him angrier in the end - unless it could be conquered. Unless it could be cured.’”
Sin doesn’t entirely ruin us- much of the secular literature on the need to “reclaim sin” and resist shame or reject it entirely misses this. But it distorts our desire and our will and makes us merely a shadow-creature, a distortion of what we might be. Gandalf puts it this way, in a conversation with Frodo:
‘What do you mean?’ said Frodo. ‘Surely the Ring was his precious and the only thing he cared for? But if he hated it, why didn’t he get rid of it, or go away and leave it?’
‘You ought to begin to understand, Frodo, after all you have heard,’ said Gandalf. ‘He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter.
Toward the end of the Two Towers, Gollum reappears. Sam and Frodo must follow him to Mordor, because they do not know the way. The creature “is somehow bound up with my errand” and is serving as Frodo’s guide. But he becomes increasingly erratic and dangerous, and they see in his stammering, his proclivity to hunt, and his yielding to hunger the degradation of his character. The Ring that he desired in his choosing of it is now leading him to his death, through the errand that threatens Sam and Frodo too. (This, also, is Augustine!- in that any freedom is directed only toward the Good, and freedom to choose other than the good s actually bondage).
There are several chief metaphors for sin in the theological literature. I have introduced the Augustinian one, which emphasizes a volitional choosing against the good that deforms the creature such that they can no longer choose the good. This view of sin locates it within the doctrine of creation. It identifies sin as the reality that orients the creature such as they are; it becomes a corollary doctrine of both creation and theological anthropology (indeed it is often housed between the two in written systematic theologies). It is the puzzle piece that connects creation and redemption; in many such views, it is sin that demands the work of redemption. (This is somewhat of a caricature, but a true generalization nonetheless). Sin here, however it is variously described, describes the creature’s orientation toward God and the self, and demands a reorientation of the creature through the work of redemption.
There are other chief metaphors for sin, and there is one in particular that I see cropping up in Tolkien’s Gollum. This is the sin of sloth, as Karl Barth depicts it. If Augustine’s view, taken up by Niebhur especially in the mid-century allows for sin as pride or active disobedience, giving it the chance as Barth writes to take “that Luciferian turn”; sin also manifests as sloth, as passivity, as implacable despair.
It is a failure to grasp the promise, a preoccupation with the self, a flaccid self-absorption that prevents the creature from seeing beyond its miserable abode.
Gollum looks down. He speaks in infantile riddles. He uses poor grammar. His initial willfull choosing poorly has become a wholesale destruction of his character, turning him into a shadow-creature.
Beyond sin as “self-estrangement” or social corruption alone, sin in this third migration is the means whereby the individual rejects God’s promise.
“So sin is, at most, a deep delusion we have about ourselves: that we are and can be outside relation to Jesus Christ. Yet, in another way, sin clearly obtains. People do have this delusion. And it has terrible consequences. Not only does it render them incapable of knowing God. It sets them on a kind of slippery slide toward nothingness.” (Kelsey, 177).
“Nothingness” is a critical category for Barth, who draws on Augustine throughout his work on sin and evil to grant this term an ontological and Christological meaning. For the sin of sloth, “nothingness” is the final state of the creature he rejects Christ’s “yes” to his sin. Barth says that the man who rejects Christ and chooses sin “wants to be left alone by God”. “He turns his back on God, rolling himself into a ball like a hedgehog with prickly spikes” (this is a clear reference, by my reading to Augustine’s in curvatus in se as the state of the creature “curved in on himself” in rejection of God). This turning away is not indifference but hate. It is based in “overweening pride”, a desire to be God for himself, a perverse love of God that is manifested in a desire to usurp and control God, “that man should sit unhindered on his throne”.
“The slothful man, who is of course identical with the proud, begins where the other leaves off, ie by saying in his heart ‘There is no God.”” More than mistreatment of one’s neighbor or rejection of the commands, sin for Barth takes this form of denial of Christ’s Lordship. It leads only to death.
To reclaim sin-talk culturally would require speaking about the way creatures are deformed through their love of what is other than God. More than a shared cultural vocabulary for what is “wrong with us”, sin-talk must retain a grasping after the God whose coming in Christ reveals sin for what it is. Sin talk stripped of its referent to God is no longer Christian. It becomes mere platitudes, attendance at protests and recycling campaigns. Apart from Christ, nothing can be seen for what it is.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/well/family/raising-children-without-the-concept-of-sin.html
[2] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/june/david-brooks-we-need-to-start-talking-about-sin-and-righteo.html
[3] The four states, articulated by Augustine, are:
Non posse non peccare- not able not to sin
Posse non peccare – able not to sin
Posse peccare- able to sin
Non posse peccare- not able to sin