Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

‘Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!’ he said. ‘How you have increased my sorrow, you two strange wanderers from a far country, bearing the peril of Men! But you are less judges of Men than I of Halflings. We are truth-speakers, we men of Gondor. We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt. Not if I found it on the highway would I take it I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them.
‘But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee.’

RJ took my aside on Asatru more seriously than I expected. At the time, I thought it was just another tiny Internet sect, but now I’ve done a real search and discovered that Asatru is everywhere:

• Asatru.org
• Asatru 101 from the website I linked in the original post
• Asatru Beginner’s Course
• The Asatru Alliance
• The Asatru Folk Assembly
• The Irminsul Ættir
• Asatru Etc., a personal page that also links the Belief System Selector
• A Yahoo group for Asatru education
• Asatru contrasted with other Neo-Pagan religions
• Northvegr: The Northern Way, which hosts that anti-slavery page to which many of the others link

(I took the religion selector and found it highly accurate, or at least highly transparent. Asatru wasn’t in my result list, though I suppose it’s covered by Neo-Pagan at #19 - rather low, considering my belief in honor, but the quiz was not subtle enough to pick up on that pagan virtue. Twenty questions only get you so far.)

I mentioned Asatru in relation to The Lord of the Rings purely for its moral content. Neo-paganism doesn’t interest (or disturb) me because, in my opinion and experience, modern people are incapable of belief in past gods. Dead religions cannot be revived, no matter how moral or attractive they might be. It takes a certain mindset to believe in the hosts of Valhalla or Olympus, and that mindset, like Tolkien’s elves, has passed out of the world (or at least the West) and is no more.

So, back to honor. I said,

Honor means, among other things, doing good not because it is good but because you are good. It is an entirely irreligious motive.

RJ replied,

That true honor is “irreligious” in the sense of “not motivated by an external religious code of behaviour”, I would agree with. And I would even agree that honor, like every virtue, must spring from the heart of the individual rather than being an act of outward conformity.

By irreligious I meant what irreligious actually means, neglectful of religion; indicating lack of religion. By religion I mean the service and worship of God or the supernatural, and not any peculiarly Christian definition under which other religions are religions but Christianity is not. Religion is a synonym of faith for my purposes.

The concept of personal honor is irreligious because it rests in the person and not in the deity. A Christian who is honest because of his faith is therefore not honest because of his honor. You cannot have both motives - or rather, you can, but most religions frown upon the latter and their adherents battle the sort of pride that inspires pagan honor. RJ knows this, as is clear later on:

As a result, the genuine child of God is motivated not by external strictures or threats but by an internal reality — his new God-given nature. He serves God and does God’s will not out of craven fear or selfish ambition, but out of gratitude and a sincere desire to be like his heavenly Father.

On the other hand, the genuine man of honor (as opposed to the man of faith) does good, and perhaps even serves God, not out of gratitude or love for the deity but out of his own personal integrity, his honor. This is a difficult distinction to make within a Christian context because the possession of good motives apart from Christ may not even be considered possible (due to the fallen nature of man or original sin). It’s easier to see the distinction in Judaism, where there is a question about the status of a person who obeys certain laws not because God gave them but because he, philosophically, believes that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, etc. (If I recall correctly, it’s not enough to obey because you believe it’s right; you’re supposed to do it because God said so. The point, anyway, is that there is a distinction here.)

I think most monotheistic religions come down against honor in this sense, despite a history of toleration, in practice, even for extreme manifestations of personal honor. Consider, for example, the toleration of family honor killings in Islamic countries, though in most, if not all, cases they violate Islamic law. Practices like duelling that once highlighted the conflict between honor and Christianity are long-dead in the West. Perhaps that is a victory for Christ, and perhaps it is a victory for Time. Rare now is the person who can look back and feel the sentiments of another age, even partially and syncretistically.

We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt.

Tolkien shows us the mores of Asatru without the gods. If Boromir believes in Asatru’s notion of honor, Faramir does him one better - he achieves it. The Valar are far off in The Lord of the Rings, and if anyone is doing good for Elbereth’s sake, they do not say so. Faramir speaks the language of honor, not the language of religion, and I for one will take him at his word.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 11th, 2003 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.