Moral Muddles and Misses

I. Don't Mess with Infection
 
I'm relieved to report that yesterday the hospital finally got HouseMate's infection turned around––after 48 hours of intravenous antibiotics. 
Lesson: Tea-tree oil is all very fine, but penicillin it is not.

I took HM the copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (the first of the three LOTR books) that I'd finished. HM's at the U, a world-class hospital––even the food is good, she says. 
Their excellence doesn't extend to all areas... The hospital's coffee shop is an Espresso Bar, correctly spelled, but check out the last line of the sign in the elevator:

That wouldn't be enough to make me doubt the excellent medical care, but it did give me pause.
I wonder too about The Meditation Room. Why "The"? That makes it seem like it's missing a trademark symbol:The Meditation Room™.

II. In our beginning is our end.

HM called me last night and said a visitor had seen the book by her bed and commented that LOTR is perfect for a long hospital stay:
"On one page, a character turns his head to the right, and five pages later he looks the other way" [almost always a he].

Yes, and how many ways can you describe a landscape?
Turns out, a lot.

I skim and I skip huge chunks.
I only like the psychologically complex parts, so I'm following the journey of Frodo & Gollum, about the addictive and attractive qualities of Power.

One of Tolkien's themes that I hadn't noticed when I was fifteen is,
the end does not justify the means. The way you start out, the way you go along the way create the end.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and this is very Catholic (not only, of course). The Catechism of the Catholic Church spells it out:

“One may not do evil so that good may result from it".*

All very well and good, but people whose moral ducks are in a row don't make interesting (or realistic?) fictional characters. 

The Orcs are boring because they are purely evil.
Characters like Aragorn and Gandalf are fine figures but are two-dimensional, since they are purely good.
In fact, they avoid the moral crux of the story by refusing to take it  on! It's poor Frodo who carries the deadly attractive Ring of Power.
And . . . SPOILER ALERT



  . . . he fails! Which is a brilliant choice: in the end, it is the morally messed up Gollum who is the (unknowing) instrument of redemption.

I suppose we could read Gollum as Judas, the betrayer who plays a pivotal role in salvation, though Frodo is not the Savior.
Frodo is us, trying and failing, and trying again. 
And failing again... 
By his Good intentions toward a Good end, he creates the conditions necessary for salvation, even if in the end the Conditions get on top of him.

The way the world is, you don't always have the luxury of moral purity. That's what makes Dietrich Bonhoeffer's moral dilemma so interesting:
Should he, a Christian minister who believed it was evil to kill, kill Hitler?

He decided yes, he should.
His reasoning, I think, was that doing evil (killing) can never be Good, but it may be necessary (in this fallen world) to do evil to stop a greater evil. And he failed too, but left us this interesting, complex example...


Most of us aren't forced to wrestle with, or choose not to wrestle with, the Ring of Power of our times on a large scale. But we still have to address the question, either consciously or not, in how we live:
"What then must I do?"
 
My favorite lines in LOTR come in the very beginning, when Frodo and Gandalf are discussing the necessity of setting your intention. 

Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil.

_____________________

* It's like Tolkein is spinning into story the catechism article "The Morality of Human Acts". This section spells out the three factors of morality: the object, the intention, and the circumstances:

1760 A morally good act requires the goodness of its object, of its end, and of its circumstances together.

"An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention" (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Dec. praec. 6).