I Found Us, Splintered

Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

I have to confess, I was a sucker for the film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. At the time, I was taken by the action, the adventure and the army of elves. Now, looking back, I found that the enduring interest in that series lay in the exploration of Gollum.

Of the many facets of Gollum’s character, two stuck out as being of theological significance for me. The first, was the idea of incurvatus in se, Augustine’s way of explaining how sin causes us to curving in upon oneself. In sin, a person’s horizons turn inwards upon oneself, in order that a person might aggrandise itself at the expense of others, but wind up becoming less than human. We see this in Smeagol’s desire for the ring for himself at the beginning of the third movie, a move that would lead to him being reduced to a murderer, outcast and a thinned and greyed out version of himself.

Along with this first transition, a second aspect of theological significance was the splintering of Smeagol’s personality, shifting from an “I” to a “we” as he became the more familiar Gollum. In Gollum I saw a dramatisation of a maxim by Origen: where there is sin, there is multiplicity. Paradoxically, the more Smeagol turned towards himself as an autonomous individual, the less unified he became. The French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, has provided us with a fascinating overview of the patristic link between sin and multiplicity in his Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. This was a point that was taken up in a presentation on migrant identity, which I gave in Depaul University back in 2014.

We can be forgiven for thinking that the issue of multiplicity focuses on the splintering of one’s own identity. However, what is interesting about Origen’s identification of sin with multiplicity is that, as sin was a pervasive condition, so too was multiplicity. As a result, it would be artificial multiplicity in relation to ourselves and not talk about how multiplicity also affects our relations with others.

Take for instance, a chapter in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape counseled his nephew Wormwood on how to deal with a human’s relationship with his Mother. Screwtape suggested that one demonic technique is exploiting the divide between the one’s actions on the one hand and another’s perception of that person’s intentions or character on the other.

In chapter 3, Lewis writes of a demon’s necessity to generate such a multiplicity that the actions of a person with whom one relates to accumulate to create an “imaginary person” that becomes less and less like the real one. The demon’s victory comes when the real person becomes replaced by the imagined counterpart, such that a person could, to use an example provided by Screwtape himself, “turn at a moment’s notice from an impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s soul to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm”.

This much more subtle form of multiplicity operating within human relations, so Lewis reminds us, are what the demons use to ensure that such relations remain anything but harmonious.

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