As promised, here is the rest of my essay for Convivium. Enjoy!
I have always loved trees. Growing up in central Illinois, the once Great Plains, trees were not in abundance. I grew up in a relatively small town, though I never saw it as one for there were towns far smaller not ten minutes away. Still, because it was not a large town, we often had to drive out of it to get certain things. Also, my parents were not huge on flying, so we often drove wherever we went on vacation. What this meant for the child me was long trips in the car with mostly great open spaces to look at. I would see fields of corn and later soy fly past. But there were two different kinds of tree encounters that shaped my imagination. The first was the lone, often gnarled tree. It nearly always stood in the front yard of a house or farm near the road. The gnarled variety would conjure up images of witches and ghosts. The living variety, especially when the farm was farther away, conjured up images of Bilbo's part tree under which he delivered his farewell speech.
The second kind had a larger impact on my imagination. They were small copses, usually on what I would have called first mountains, when I was very young, and then hills as I understood that land could rise higher than I ever knew. They were always off in the distance, inaccessible; and therefore ripe for my young imagination. I peopled those copses with fairies and elves. I imagined great deeds, and small gnomes could be found within, if only I could get inside them.
As I grew older, and as I read more Lewis and Tolkien who supplanted the children's versions of the Greek myths I had read in grade school, trees and forests took on new meaning. Somewhere along the line I learned that creation was a book to be read. In Catholic circles we often hear about the two books of revelation: There is the book of general revelation (the cosmos) and the book of special revelation (the Bible). What we perhaps hear less of is that both books are meant to be read and interpreted and in similar ways. What I mean is this, if Scripture has a literal, allegorical, anagogical, and tropological meaning, so too does the cosmos. Augustine understood this.
In his Confessions, he writes, "Heaven and earth and all things in them, behold! everywhere they say to me that I should love you."1 While Augustine does not lay out the fourfold method of interpretation of creation, he understands that created reality calls out to us to recognize the Lord who made it. Augustine recognizes that even when he loves something particular, a particular sound or person or place by loving the particular, he loves God. Later in the same book of the Confessions, Augustine begins an ascent, seeking God:
I asked the earth, and it said, "I am not he!" And all things in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and among the living animals the things that creep, and they answered, "We are not your God! Seek higher than us!" I asked the winds that blow: and all the air with the dwellers therein [to whom I shall return], said, "Anaximenes was wrong. I am not God!" I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars: "We are not the God whom you seek," said they. To all the things that stand around the doors of my flesh I said, "Tell me of my God! Although you are not he, tell me something of him!" With a mighty voice they cried out, "He made us!" My questions was the gaze I turned on them, the answer was their beauty.2
Creation, the Book of General Revelation, by its beauty is able to tell Augustine that they have been made by God. This is the essence of a sacramental or participatory ontology. Creation participates in God and thus discloses truth to us about him, if only we have the eyes to see it. Pope Francis writes, "The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dew drop, in a poor person's face."3
In his essay, On Fairy-stories, Tolkien discourses on the nature of fairy-tales or fantasy. His goal, in many ways, is to be an apologist for a genre of story that had been, in his own day, relegated like outdated furniture to the nursery. At one point in the essay, Tolkien tells us what fairy-stories do what their telos is. He describes three aspects of this end, recovery, escape, and consolation. All three are vastly interesting, but it is the first I want to focus on here. So what does Tolkien mean by "recovery"?
"Recovery," Tolkien writes, "(which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining––regaining a clear view. I do not say 'seeing things as they are' and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them' –– as things apart from ourselves."4 While in this essay, Tolkien was unwilling to say that this recovery was a recovery of a true sight, I do think that is what he meant. Fantasy, and really all fiction or even all human art broadly defined, defamiliarizes5 the common for us. Trees, for instance, in Tolkien's writings undergo various strangifications. In the story that accompanied this essay, "Leaf by Niggle", a tree becomes a work of art which is later returned to the artist in reality (in an anteroom of heaven it would seem). In The Lord of the Rings we get various levels of defamiliarization. Ents are the most extreme, a people who are not trees but yet somehow are more like trees than even trees are. But then Tolkien also gives us Old Man Willow––a vindictive tree who attempts to kill Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin in the Old Forest––and the huorns a mix of truly entreed Ents and entish trees. There, according Tolkien, is satisfied his desires for Macbeth's Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane Castle. Tolkien longed for it to truly be the trees come alive, so he gives it to us in the siege of Orthanc and the defense of Helm's Deep (C. S. Lewis gives us something similar in Prince Caspian). The point here is that trees have been rendered strange before our eyes. Now these majestic creatures we have become accustomed to seeing as unmoving, have been allowed to move. And yet they retain their immobility by staying the course, by maintaining their ideals and identities.
We need this. Secular society (whether one wants to blame the Enlightenment or Medieval sources of our modern woes) has taught us to see in only one particular way. Fantasy helps clean away the smudges of modernity on our windows and so see things more clearly, more deeply, more truly. And Tolkien reminds us that we need this in order not only to see trees for what they really are in themselves, as they exist in the mind of God, but in order to remind us that we do not own them. Niggle's tree is returned to him in reality and it causes Niggle to exclaim, "'It's a gift!' […] He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally."6 Both Niggle's art, that is his talent, and the tree (both as painted and as given here in reality) are gifts. He received them from God. This is true not only of our own creativity, but of reality itself. It is a gift! But we need help seeing that.
In an early draft of his essay, On Fairy-stories, Tolkien considered discoursing on the existence of fairies or elves. He writes:
"Leaving aside the Question of the Real (objective) existence of Fairies, I will tell you what I think about that. If Fairies really exist––independent of Men––then very few of our "Fairy-stories" have any relation to them: as little, or less than our ghost-stories have to the real events that befall human personality (or form) after death. If Fairies exist they are bound by the Moral Law as is all the created Universe; but their duties and functions are not ours. They are not spirits of the dead, nor a branch of the human race, nor devils in fair shapes whose chief object is our deception and ruin. These are either human ideas out of which the Elf-idea has been separated, or, if Elves really exist mere human hypotheses (or confusions). They are a quite separate creation living in another mode. […] For lack of a better word they may be called spirits, daemons: inherent powers of the created world, deriving more directly and "earlier" (in terrestrial history) from the creating will of God, but nonetheless created, subject to Moral Law, capable of good and evil, and possibly (in this fallen world) sometimes evil. […] Thus a tree-fairy (or a dryad) is, or was, a minor spirit in the process of creation who aided as 'agent' in the making effective of the divine Tree-idea or some part of it, or of even of some one particular example: some tree. He is therefore now bound by use and love to Trees (or a tree), immortal while the world (and trees) last – never to escape, until the End"7
I quote this in full both because it is beautiful––and why should I mar Tolkien's words with my own––and because it illustrates something essential I have been trying to say in this essay: When we look at a tree we are not seeing just a tree.
A tree may give us a hint of the guiding spirit who moves and guides it, or maybe we see something of that Tree-idea that exists in the mind of God. Perhaps we will see the Tree of Life, or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Perhaps we will see the Tree on which Christ was hanged, which became for us the Tree of Life. Perhaps we will see all of these things or none of them. Perhaps we will be moved quite simply by the way Peter Wohlleben has come to see trees in their society. What we ought never to see is simply a large piece of wood and leaves meant only for our use with no end, no telos or skopos (to borrow language from John Cassian) of its own. That must be cleared away. Fairy-stories are one way to help us do that, though Tolkien would remind us that humility works too.
In Laudato Si' Pope Francis writes, "As Christians, we are also called 'to accept the world as a sacrament of communion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbors on a global scale. It is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God's creation, in the least speck of dust on our planet.'"8 He goes on to say that, "If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs."9 This gets at the heart of my love for trees. They are sources of awe and wonder, as is all of creation. This is one of many reasons why Pope Francis calls on us to care for our common home. But we need help to unlearn the cold, brutal vision of reality that has been passed onto us and reclaim those aspects of our past that sees the cosmos as "charged with the grandeur of God."10
I love trees. I always have and I always will. They have been a source of enchantment for me my entire life. I have been trained to see in them Elfland, the Tree of Life, Christ's Cross, and more. I hope that by talking to you about Ents and other trees, I have helped to awaken your senses to a sacramental ontology whereby you see trees, root and twig, as more than what everyday life may have led you to believe them to be. If I have focused my attention on Tolkien and Wohlleben and not other authors who might have proved equally helpful, I hope that you will understand. These authors are simply those who came to me first in defense of the trees. While for now my roots are not so deep as I hope they will be, I will have to wonder more than a tree is wont to do, and continue to contemplate them and what they might mean. I pray my branches will bear the fruit of these contemplations.
1 Conf. 10.8
2 Conf. 10.9.
3 6.233.
4 OFS, 67.
5 This term I have borrowed from literary theorist Viktor Shkolvsky who used it primarily of Tolstoy.
6 LBN, 113.
7 OFS, 254-255.
8 Praef. 9. Global Responsibility and Ecological Sustainability closing Remarks, Halki Summit I, Istanbul (20 June 2012).
9 Praef 15.
10 Hopkins, "God's Grandeur."