Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XIX

SHADOW

1916: T

HE

S

OMME

It was not the front, but the journey to the front that was the worst. ‘There was some shit in people’s pants, I tell you.’¹ Two years into the war, Otto Dix had seen it all. In 1914, he had unhesitatingly signed up to the field artillery. Back then, people had assumed that victory would be swift in coming. Germany was the greatest military power in Europe. In the decades following the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Prussia had emerged to become the core of an immense German Empire. Its king now ruled as Otto the Great had once done – as a Caesar, a Kaiser. Naturally, such greatness had prompted envy. Russia, on the empire’s eastern border, and France, brooding to the west, had sought to crush Germany in a vice. The British, fearful for their rule of the waves, had joined with the French. For a few heady weeks, as the German army had swept first through neutral Belgium and then into northern France, it had seemed that Paris was bound to fall. But the French had rallied. The capital had remained tantalisingly out of reach. A great gash of trenches had come to score the Western Front. Neither side could force a decisive breakthrough. Now, though, on the slopes above the river Somme, the British and the French armies were making a concentrated effort to smash a hole through the labyrinth of German defences. All summer the battle had been raging. Dix, approaching the Somme, had been deafened by artillery fire of a volume he had never imagined possible, and seen the western horizon lit as though by lightning. Everywhere was ruin: mud, and blasted trees, and rubble. In his dreams Dix was always crawling through shattered houses, and doorways that barely permitted him to pass. Once he had arrived at his post, though, his fear left him. Stationed with a heavy machine-gun battery, he felt mingled excitement and calm. He even found time to paint.

Back in Dresden, the famously beautiful city in Saxony where he had been an art student, Dix had experimented with a range of styles. Only twenty-three when war broke out, and from an impoverished background, the sense of urgency he felt as a painter was that of a man determined to make a name for himself. Amid the mud and the slaughter of the Somme, he was witness to scenes that no previous generation of artist could possibly have imagined. By night, as Dix huddled beside a carbide lamp with his oils or his pens, flares over no man’s land would light up corpses grotesquely twisted on barbed wire. Then, every morning, dawn would illumine a cratered landscape of death. On 1 July, the opening day of the battle, almost twenty thousand British soldiers had been mown down as they sought in vain to take the enemy trenches, and another forty thousand left wounded. A fortnight later, every yard of the German lines had been battered by 660 pounds of shell. New ways of killing were forever being developed. On 15 September, monstrous machines called ‘tanks’ by their British inventors grumbled and ground their way across the battlefield for the first time. By the end of the month, flying machines were regularly dropping bombs on the trenches below. Only in late November did the fighting finally grind to a halt. Casualties numbered a million. To Dix, hunkered behind his machine gun, it seemed that the whole world was transformed. ‘Humanity,’ he wrote, ‘changes in demonic fashion.’²

There were plenty, though, who thought themselves on the side of the angels. Back in Saxony, a year before the outbreak of war, a great monument had been dedicated to commemorate the centenary of a particularly bloody victory over Napoleon. Centrepiece of the memorial was a colossal statue of Saint Michael, winged and armed with a fiery sword. That Germany’s struggle against her foes mirrored the cosmic war of angel against demon was a conviction that reached all the way to the top. The Kaiser, as the war dragged on and on, and a naval blockade of Germany began to bite, grew ever more convinced that the British were in league with the Devil. Patriotic Britons, for their part, had been saying much the same about Germany since the start of the war. Bishops joined with newspaper editors in hammering the message home. The Germans had succumbed to ‘a brutal and ruthless military paganism’,³ of the kind from which, more than a millennium earlier, Boniface had laboured to redeem them. They had returned to the worship of Woden. In Germany – so The Times announced – ‘Christianity is beginning to be regarded as a worn-out creed’.⁴

Yet it was easier, perhaps, for armchair warriors to believe this than for soldiers on the front. Behind the British lines at the Somme, in the small town of Albert, there stood a basilica topped by a golden statue of the Virgin and Child. A year previously, the spire had been hit by a shell. The statue had been left hanging precariously, as though by a miracle. Rumours began to spread in both the German and the British trenches that whichever side brought it down was destined to lose the war. Yet many, when they looked up at the Virgin, were inspired to dwell not on the calculus of victory and defeat, but on the suffering of both sides. ‘The figure once stood triumphant on the cathedral tower,’ wrote one British soldier; ‘now it is bowed as by the last extremity of grief.’⁵ The Virgin, after all, had known what it was to mourn a son. Unsurprisingly, amid the misery and the suffering that had become the common experience across the whole of Europe, the image of Christ tortured to death on a cross took on for many a new potency. Both sides, predictably, sought to turn this to their own advantage. In Germany, pastors compared the blockade enforced by the Royal Navy to the nails with which Christ had been fixed to the cross; in Britain, stories of German soldiers crucifying a Canadian prisoner had long been a staple of propaganda. Even so, in the trenches themselves, where soldiers – if they did not find themselves trapped on barbed wire, or riddled by machine-gun fire, or disembowelled by an exploding shell – would live day after day in the valley of the shadow of death, the crucifixion had a more haunting resonance. Christ was their fellow-sufferer. On the battlefield of the Somme, soldiers would note in wonder the survival amid all the devastation of wayside crucifixes, chipped and riddled with bullets though they were. Even Protestants, even atheists were capable of being moved. Christ was imagined sharing in a jest passed along the trenches, standing beside soldiers in their pain and weakness. ‘We have no doubts, we know that You are here.’⁶

Otto Dix, in his dug-out, had Christ’s sufferings much on his mind. Raised a Lutheran, he had brought a Bible with him to France. In the course of his service on the front, he had seen enough artillery attacks to recognise in their aftermath a kind of Golgotha. With his artist’s eye, he could glimpse in the spectacle of a soldier impaled on a shard of metal something of the crucifixion. Yet Dix, to a degree that would have confirmed British propagandists in all their darkest suspicions of the German character, refused to see Christ’s suffering as having served any purpose. To imagine that it might have done so was to cling to the values of a slave. ‘To be crucified, to experience the deepest abyss of life’: this was its own reward. Dix, volunteering in 1914, had done so out of a desire to know the ultimate extremes of life and death: to feel what it was to stick a bayonet in an enemy’s guts and to twist it around; to have a comrade suddenly fall, a bullet square between his eyes; ‘the hunger, the fleas, the mud’.⁷ Only in the intoxication of such experiences could a man be more than a man: an Übermensch. To be free was to be great; and to be great was to be terrible. It was not the Bible that had brought Dix to this conviction. In his determination to spurn the mindset of a slave, to revel in all the qualities that made for a master, there was a conscious repudiation of Christian morality, with its concern for the weak, and the poor, and the oppressed. A trench in the midst of the most terrible battlescape in history seemed to Dix a fitting vantage point from which to observe what was, so he had come to believe, the collapse of a 1900-year-old order. Alongside his Bible, he had a second book. So stirred was he by its philosophy that in 1912, while still an art student in Dresden, he had made a life-size plaster bust of its author. Not just his first sculpture, it had also been his first work to be bought by a gallery. Discerning critics, inspecting the bust’s drooping moustache, its thrusting neck, its stare shadowed by bristling eyebrows, had proclaimed it the very image of Friedrich Nietzsche.

‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’⁸ To read these words beside the Somme, amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, and littered with the mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche had written them back in 1882: the parable of a madman who one bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the market-place, where no one among his listeners would believe his news that God had bled to death beneath their knives. Little in Nietzsche’s upbringing seemed to have prefigured such blasphemy. The son of a Lutheran pastor, and named after Friedrich Wilhelm IV, his background had been one of pious provincialism. Precocious and brilliant, he had obtained a professorship when he was only twenty-four; but then, only a decade later, had resigned it to become a shabbily genteel vagrant. Finally, seeming to confirm the sense of a squandered career, he had suffered a terrible mental breakdown. For the last eleven years of his life, he had been confined to a succession of clinics. Few, when he finally died in 1900, had read the books that, in an escalating frenzy of production, he had written before his collapse into madness. Posthumously, though, his fame had grown with startling rapidity. By 1914, when Dix marched to war with his writings in his knapsack, Nietzsche’s name had emerged to become one of the most controversial in Europe. Condemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both.

Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’⁹ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’¹⁰ Enthusiasts for the Enlightenment, self-proclaimed rationalists who imagined that men and women possessed inherent rights, Nietzsche regarded with contempt. It was not from reason that their doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith that they believed themselves – in their conceit – to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead – but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. For centuries, perhaps, it would linger. Christianity had reigned for two millennia. It could not easily be banished. Its myths would long endure. They were certainly no less mythical for casting themselves as secular. ‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’:¹¹ these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith. ‘To devise something which could even approach the seductive, intoxicating, anaesthetising, and corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross”, that horrific paradox of the “crucified God”, that mystery of an inconceivably ultimate, most extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion undertaken for the salvation of mankind?’¹² Like Paul, Nietzsche knew it to be a scandal. Unlike Paul, he found it repellent. The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them – the strong and the healthy, the beautiful and the brave, the powerful and the self-assured – that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth. ‘Helping and caring for others, being of use to others, constantly excites a sense of power.’¹³ Charity, in Christendom, had become a means to dominate. Yet Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Its ideals of compassion and equality before God were bred not of love, but of hatred: a hatred of the deepest and most sublime order, one that had transformed the very character of morality, a hatred the like of which had never before been seen on earth. This was the revolution that Paul – ‘that hate-obsessed false-coiner’¹⁴ – had set in motion. The weak had conquered the strong; the slaves had vanquished their masters.

‘Ruined by cunning, secret, invisible, anaemic vampires! Not conquered – only sucked dry! . . . Covert revengefulness, petty envy become master!’¹⁵ Nietzsche, when he mourned antiquity’s beasts of prey, did so with the passion of a scholar who had devoted his life to the study of their civilisation. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. So dismissive was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. Much as Sade had done, Nietzsche valued the ancients for the pleasure they had taken in inflicting suffering; for knowing that punishment might be festive; for demonstrating that, ‘in the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty, before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now’.¹⁶ That Nietzsche himself was a short-sighted invalid prone to violent migraines had done nothing to inhibit his admiration for the aristocracies of antiquity, and their heedlessness towards the sick and the weak. A society focused on the feeble was a society enfeebled itself. This it was that had rendered Christians such malevolent blood-suckers. If it was the taming of the Romans that Nietzsche chiefly rued, then he regretted as well how they had battened onto other nations. Nietzsche himself, whose contempt for the Germans was exceeded only by his disdain for the English, had so little time for nationalism that he had renounced his Prussian citizenship when he was only twenty-four, and died stateless; and yet, for all that, he had always lamented the fate of his forebears. Once, before the coming of Boniface, the forests had sheltered Saxons who, in their ferocity and their hunger for everything that was richest and most intense in life, had been predators no less glorious than lions: ‘blond beasts’. But then the missionaries had arrived. The blond beast had been tempted into a monastery. ‘There he now lay, sick, wretched, malevolent toward himself; filled with hatred of the vital drives, filled with suspicion towards all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian”.’¹⁷ Dix, enduring the extremes of the Western Front, did not have to be a worshipper of Woden to feel that he was free at last.

‘Even war,’ he recorded in his notebook, ‘must be regarded as a natural occurrence.’¹⁸ That it was an abyss, across which, like a rope, a man might be suspended, fastened between beast and Übermensch: here was a philosophy that Dix felt no cause to abandon at the Somme. Yet it could seem a bleak one, for all that. Soldiers in the trenches rarely cared to imagine with Nietzsche that there might be no truth, no value, no meaning in itself – and that only by acknowledging this would a man cease to be a slave. The unprecedented scale of the violence that had bled Europe white did not shock most of its peoples into atheism. On the contrary: it served to confirm them in their faith. How otherwise to make sense of all the horror? As so often before, when Christians had found themselves enmired in misery and slaughter, the veil that lay between earth and heaven could appear to many hauntingly thin. As the war ground on, and 1916 turned to 1917, so the end times seemed to be drawing near. In Portugal, in the village of Fatima, the Virgin made repeated appearances, until at last, before huge crowds, the sun danced, as though in fulfilment of the prophecy recorded in Revelation that a great and wondrous sign would appear in heaven: ‘a woman clothed with the sun’.¹⁹ In Palestine, the British won a crushing victory at Armageddon, and took Jerusalem from the Turks. In London, the Foreign Secretary issued a declaration supporting the establishment in the Holy Land of a Jewish homeland – a development that many Christians believed was bound to herald the return of Christ.

Yet he did not come back. Nor did the world end. In 1918, when the German high command launched a massive attempt to smash their opponents once and for all, the operation they had codenamed Michael, in honour of the archangel, peaked, and broke, and ebbed. Eight months later, the war was over. Germany sued for terms. The Kaiser abdicated. A squalid peace was brought to a shattered continent. Otto Dix returned from the front. In Dresden, he painted maimed officers, and malnourished infants, and haggard prostitutes. He saw beggars everywhere. On street corners there were gangs of agitators. Some were communists. Some were nationalists. Some wandered barefoot, prophesying the end of the world and calling for man to be born again. Dix ignored them all. Asked to join a political party, he would answer that he would rather go to a brothel. He continued to read Nietzsche. ‘After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection, with new questions.’²⁰

Meanwhile, in basements stale with beer and sweat, men with strident voices were talking about Jews.

The Triumph of the Will

Difficult lodgers were the bane of any landlady’s life. Times in Berlin were hard, and Elisabeth Salm, as a widow, needed to make money somehow – but there were limits. The young man had always been trouble. First he had begun sharing his room with his girlfriend, a former prostitute called Erna Jaenichen – not the kind of woman that any respectable widow would want in her flat. Then groups of men had begun arriving, banging on Frau Salm’s door, pushing past her, and loudly talking politics all night. Finally, on 14 January 1930, her patience snapped. She ordered Jaenichen out of her flat. Jaenichen refused to leave. Frau Salm went to the police. They told her to sort the matter out herself. By now desperate, she headed to a local pub, where she knew the friends of her late husband would be. Sure enough, there they all were, cloistered in a back room. They heard her out, but refused to help. Why should they? There was bad blood between them. Frau Salm’s husband had been a man of deeply held beliefs, but his widow, rather than give him the funeral that he would have wanted, and which his friends had offered to provide, had turned instead to the local pastor for help. Now, standing in the Baer Tavern, she was surrounded by reminders of the sacrilege she had committed. Emblems stitched into flags the colour of blood. Well-thumbed sacred texts. Icons on the walls. The shrine in the corner, complete with flowers and a picture of Lenin.

The Bolsheviks had come a long way since their visit to the museum of natural history in London. The party that back in 1905 had seen fewer than forty delegates attend its congress now ruled a vast and ancient empire. So huge was Russia that it accounted for almost a quarter of the world’s Christians. Scorning the pretensions of Rome, its monarchy had claimed a line of descent from Byzantium, and the title of ‘Orthodox’ for its church. Revolution, though, had come to the self-proclaimed Third Rome. In 1917, the Russian monarchy had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, had seized power. Marx’s chosen people, the industrial proletariat, had been brought to the promised land: a communist Russia. Those unworthy to live in such a paradise – be they members of the royal family or peasants with a couple of cows – had been slated for elimination. So too had the Church. Even though Lenin himself had havered, fretting that it might prove counter-productive to offend believers, the demands of revolutionary logic had proven remorseless. ‘In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith.’²¹ The clergy had to go. In 1918, their churches had been nationalised. Bishops had been variously shot, crucified upside down, or imprisoned. Then, in 1926, the conversion of a particularly venerable monastery into a labour camp had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone. Still the process of weaning the masses off their opium had appeared to many communists to be grinding far too slow. Accordingly, in 1929, responsibility for religious affairs had been given to an organisation that did precisely what it said on the tin: the League of Militant Atheists. Their stated goal it was to eliminate religion once and for all. Five years, they trusted, would prove sufficient for the task. Organising themselves into missions, they set to work. Entire trains were commandeered. In the remote reaches of Siberia, where Christianity had only patchily spread, shamans were thrown out of planes and told to fly. There was no redoubt of superstition so distant that its shrines could not be demolished, its leaders liquidated, its darkness banished upon the light of reason. Religion – that farrago of unsubstantiated assertions, far-fetched prophecies and nonsensical wishful thinking – was destined to disappear. That, as Marx had demonstrated, was scientific fact.

Many beyond the borders of the Soviet Union – as the Russian empire had come to be known – agreed. It was why, that January afternoon in Berlin, Frau Salm found her husband’s comrades deaf to her appeals. Yet their very indignation pointed to an irony that Nietzsche had noted decades before. To insist that a church funeral might be a kind of blasphemy was less a repudiation of Christianity than an inadvertent acknowledgement of kinship with it. Increasingly, by 1930, there were Christians willing to contemplate a disorienting possibility: that the Bolsheviks, adherents of a cause as universal in its claims as it was uncompromising in its principles, might in fact be the shock-troops of an ‘anti-church’.²² Like Gregory VII, they had trampled the pretensions of an emperor into winter snow; like Innocent III, they had combated the forces of reaction with fire and inquisition; like Luther, they had jeered at the excrescences of priestly superstition; like Winstanley, they had proclaimed the earth a common treasury, and prescribed ferocious penalties for any objectors. For a thousand years, it had been the distinct ambition of Latin Christendom to see the entire world born anew: to baptise it in the waters of reformatio. Repeatedly, this ambition had brought revolution to Europe; and repeatedly, to lands shaped by very different habits of thought, it had brought ruin. Lenin, armed with the teachings of a German economist, had been no less the bane of Russian Orthodoxy than Cortés had been of the Aztec gods. That the once-Christian tradition of missionary zeal might now be sending the advance of Christianity itself into reverse was a possibility too cruel for most Christians to contemplate – and yet the shrewdest of them understood it very well. The godlessness of the Soviet Union was less a repudiation of the Church than a dark and deadly parody of it. ‘Bolshevik atheism is the expression of a new religious faith.’ ²³

The dream of a new order planted on the ruins of the old; of a reign of the saints that would last for a thousand years; of a day of judgement, when the unjust would be sorted from the just, and condemned to a lake of fire: this, from the earliest days of the Church, had always haunted the imaginings of the faithful. Christian authorities, nervous of where such yearnings might lead, had consistently sought to police them; but still, blurring and bonding with one another, the constituent elements of the longed-for apocalypse had never ceased to take on fresh lineaments. But now, across Germany, they were metastasising. Not all the paramilitaries in Berlin were communist. Street rivalries were ferocious. Frau Salm, making one last desperate appeal, had only to mention her lodger’s name for everyone in the back room of the pub abruptly to sit up. At once, the mood was transformed. Some of the men rose to their feet. Heading out of the pub, they went with Frau Salm back to her apartment. A few days previously, a communist daily had printed an unapologetic slogan. That night, standing in the kitchen of Frau Salm’s flat, waiting for her to ring the cowbell with which she habitually announced visitors, three paramilitaries readied themselves to answer the paper’s battle-cry: ‘Wherever you find them, beat up the Fascists!’²⁴

The name derived from the palmy days of ancient Rome. The fasces, a bundle of scourging rods, had served the guards appointed to elected magistrates as emblems of their authority. Not every magistrate in Roman history, though, had necessarily been elected. Times of crisis had demanded exceptional measures. Julius Caesar, following his defeat of Pompey, had been appointed dictator: an office that had permitted him to take sole control of the state. Each of his guards had carried on their shoulders, bundled up with the scourging rods, an axe. Nietzsche, predicting that a great convulsion was approaching, a repudiation of the pusillanimous Christian doctrines of equality and compassion, had foretold as well that those who led the revolution would ‘become devisers of emblems and phantoms in their enmity’.²⁵ Time had proven him right. The fasces had become the badge of a brilliantly successful movement. By 1930, Italy was ruled – as it had been two millennia previously – by a dictator. Benito Mussolini, an erstwhile socialist whose reading of Nietzsche had led him, by the end of the Great War, to dream of forming a new breed of man, an elite worthy of a fascist state, cast himself both as Caesar and as the face of a gleaming future. From the fusion of ancient and modern, melded by the white-hot genius of his leadership, there was to emerge a new Italy. Whether greeting the massed ranks of his followers with a Roman salute or piloting an aircraft, Mussolini posed in ways that consciously sought to erase the entire span of Christian history. Although, in a country as profoundly Catholic as Italy, he had little choice but to cede a measure of autonomy to the Church, his ultimate aim was to subordinate it utterly, to render it the handmaid of the fascist state. Mussolini’s more strident followers exulted nakedly in this goal. ‘Yes indeed, we are totalitarians! We want to be from morning to evening, without distracting thoughts.’²⁶

In Berlin too there were such men. The stormtroopers of a movement that believed simultaneously in racism and in the subordination of all personal interests to a common good, they called themselves Nationalsozialisten: ‘National Socialists’. Their opponents, in mockery of their pretensions, called them Nazis. But this only betrayed fear. The National Socialists courted the hatred of their foes. An enemy’s loathing was something to be welcomed. It was the anvil on which a new Germany was to be forged. ‘It is not compassion but courage and toughness that save life, because war is life’s eternal disposition.’²⁷ As in Italy, so in Germany, fascism worked to combine the glamour and the violence of antiquity with that of the modern world. There was no place in this vision of the future for the mewling feebleness of Christianity. The blond beast was to be liberated from his monastery. A new age had dawned. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis, was not, as Mussolini could claim to be, an intellectual; but he did not need to be. Over the course of a life that had embraced living in a dosshouse, injury at the Somme, and imprisonment for an attempted putsch, he had come to feel himself summoned by a mysterious providence to transform the world. Patchily read in philosophy and science he might be, but of one thing he was viscerally certain: destiny was written in a people’s blood. There was no universal morality. A Russian was not a German. Every nation was different, and a people that refused to listen to the dictates of its soul was a people doomed to extinction. ‘All who are not of good race in this world,’ Hitler warned, ‘are chaff.’²⁸

Once, in the happy days of their infancy, the German people had been at one with the forests in which they lived. They had existed as a tree might: not just as the sum of its branches, its twigs and its leaves, but as a living, organic whole. But then the soil from which the Nordic race were sprung had been polluted. Their sap had been poisoned. Their limbs had been cut back. Only surgery could save them now. Hitler’s policies, although rooted in a sense of race as something primordially ancient, were rooted as well in the clinical formulations of evolutionary theory. The measures that would restore purity to the German people were prescribed equally by ancient chronicles and by Darwinist textbooks. To eliminate those who stood in the way of fulfilling such a programme was not a crime, but a responsibility. ‘Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community.’ Hitler did not hesitate to draw the logical conclusion. ‘What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.’²⁹ Man was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put this into practice was not cruelty. It was simply the way of the world.

Horst Wessel, the young man who for three months had been living with Frau Salm as her lodger, had not merely been convinced by this manifesto – he had been electrified by it. The son of a pastor, he had become at an early age ‘an enthusiastic disciple of Adolf Hitler’.³⁰ Energies that he might otherwise have devoted to the Church he had consecrated to National Socialism. In 1929 alone, he had preached at almost sixty meetings. Much as his father might once have done, taking hymns to the streets, he had assembled a company of musicians and paraded with them through communist strongholds. One of the songs he had written for the band, his most famous, imagined martyred comrades marching by the side of the living. No wonder, then, that Frau Salm’s mention of his name should have made her listeners sit up straight. Wessel was a man that any self-respecting band of communists might be interested in cornering. This was why, on the evening of 14 January, three of them were standing outside his door, waiting for Frau Salm to ring her cowbell. Their intentions would later be a matter of disagreement. Perhaps, as they claimed, they had only ever planned to give him a beating. Perhaps the gunshot to his face had been an accident. Whatever the truth, Wessel was left critically injured. Taken to hospital, he died five weeks later. Complicating the matter yet further was the identity of the murderer: a man who had once been Erna Jaenichen’s pimp. The more the police investigated the case, the more confused the details became. Only one thing about the whole squalid business was certain: Wessel’s funeral was that of a street-fighter killed in a brawl.

Except that this was not at all how Wessel’s superior in Berlin saw it. Joseph Goebbels, like Hitler, had been raised a Catholic. Contemptuous though he might be of Christianity, he was alert not only to the hold that it still had over the imaginations of many Germans, but to how this might be turned to the advantage of his own movement. A propagandist of genius, Goebbels knew a martyr when he saw one. Speaking at Wessel’s funeral, he proclaimed – with a stagey catch in his throat – that the dead man would come again. A shudder ran through the crowd. ‘As if God,’ one of the mourners later recalled, ‘had made a decision and sent His holy breath upon the open grave and the flags, blessing the dead man and all who belong to him.’³¹ One month later, Goebbels explicitly compared Wessel to Christ. Over the years that followed, as the National Socialists progressed from fighting in the streets to bringing the entire country under their rule, the murdered Sturmführer continued to serve them as the embodiment of a saint: the leader of the martyred dead. Most Church leaders – conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky – opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle-hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.³²

Yet Christians, if they thought this would curry favour with the Nazi leadership, let alone influence it, were deluding themselves. To parody Christianity was not to show it respect, but to cannibalise it. Out in the woods, eager young National Socialists would burn copies of the Bible on great fires, and then – ‘to prove how we despise all the cults of the world except the ideology of Hitler’³³ – sing the Horst Wessel Lied. On the Rhine, in the amphitheatres of what had once been Roman cities, girls might gather by night to celebrate Wessel’s birthday with dances and prayers to his spirit, ‘to make them good bearers of children’.³⁴ Not just a saint, the son of a pastor had become a god.

Boniface, travelling across the Rhine twelve hundred years before, had witnessed very similar things. Dismay at the spectacle of pagan practices in a supposedly Christian land had led him to devote much of his life to combating them. Now, though, his heirs faced an even more grievous threat. Missionaries to Germany in the eighth century had been able to count on the support of the Frankish monarchy in their labours. No such backing was forthcoming from the Nazis. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed his movement to be Christian, had come to regard Christianity with active hostility. Its morality, its concern for the weak, he had always viewed as cowardly and shameful. Now that he was in power, he recognised in the claim of the Church to a sphere distinct from the state – that venerable inheritance from the Gregorian revolution – a direct challenge to the totalitarian mission of National Socialism. Although, like Mussolini, Hitler was willing to tread carefully at first – and even, in 1933, to sign a concordat with the papacy – he had no intention of holding to it for long. Christian morality had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their day. The new order, if it were to endure for a millennium, would require a new order of man. It would require Übermenschen.

By 1937, then, Hitler had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. The objections of church leaders to the state’s ongoing sterilisation of idiots and cripples infuriated him. His own preference – one that he fully intended to act upon in the event of war – was for euthanasia to be applied in a comprehensive manner. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most advanced scientific thinking, was something that the German people needed urgently to be brought to accept. Clearly, there was no prospect of them fulfilling their racial destiny while they were still cancerous with compassion. Among the Schutzstaffel, the elite paramilitary organisation that served as the most efficient instrument of Hitler’s will, the destruction of Christianity came to be regarded as a particular vocation. Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, plotted a fifty-year programme that he trusted would see the religion utterly erased. Otherwise, Christianity might once again prove the bane of the blond beast. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. ‘Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.’³⁵ The strong, as science had conclusively demonstrated, had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

Yet if Christianity – as Hitler had come to believe – was ‘the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity’,³⁶ then it was not enough merely to eradicate it. A religion so pernicious that it had succeeded both in destroying the Roman Empire and in spawning Bolshevism could hardly have emerged from nowhere. What source of infection could possibly have bred such a plague? Clearly, there was no more pressing question for a National Socialist to answer. Whatever the bacillus, it needed to be identified fast, and – if the future of the German people were to be set on stable foundations, enduring enough to last for a thousand years – destroyed.

As Goebbels, in reflective mood, would put it: ‘One must not be sentimental in such matters.’³⁷

In the Darkness Bind Them

For over four years, Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany. In all that time, Oxford had barely been touched by bombers. Even so, there could be no relaxing. This was why, on the evening of 17 January 1944, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon reported to the Area Headquarters in the north of the city. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had been serving as an air-raid warden since 1941. His duties were not particularly onerous. That night, he sat up late chatting with a fellow warden. Cecil Roth, like Tolkien, was a don at the university, a Jewish historian who had written – among many other books – a biography of Menasseh ben Israel. The two men got on well, and only after midnight did they finally retire to their quarters. Roth, knowing that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and observing that he had no watch, insisted on lending him his own, so that his companion would not miss early-morning mass. Then, just before seven, he knocked on Tolkien’s door, to check that he was up. Tolkien, already awake, had been lying in bed, wondering whether he had time to get to church. ‘But the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his sombre glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it.’ As a light in a dark place, when all other lights had gone out, Roth’s kindness struck Tolkien. So moved was he that he discerned in it something of Eden. ‘It seemed,’ he wrote that same day, ‘like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world.’³⁸

Tolkien did not mean this as a figure of speech. Every story, he believed, was ultimately about the fall. No less than Augustine had done, he interpreted all of history as the record of human iniquity. The world, which in the Anglo-Saxon writings he so loved had been named ‘Middle-earth’, was still what had it ever been: the great battlefield between good and evil. In 1937, two years before the outbreak of war, Tolkien had embarked on a work of fiction which sought to hold up a mirror to this abiding Christian theme. The Lord of the Rings was deeply embedded in the culture to which he had devoted an entire lifetime of scholarship: that of early medieval Christendom. To be sure, the Middle-earth of his imaginings was not one that Bede or Boniface would have recognised. The familiar contours of history and geography were missing; so too was Christianity; so too was God. There were men; but there were other races too. Elves and dwarves, wizards and walking trees: all filled the pages of Tolkien’s novel. There were also halflings named hobbits, and if these – with their large hairy feet and their comical names – seemed sprung from some nursery tale, then that was indeed how they had originated. Tolkien, though, could not rest content with writing a children’s book. His ambitions were too epic in scale. ‘The City will be hemmed in,’ Augustine had written, ‘hard pressed, shut up, in the straits of tribulation, yet it will not abandon its warfare.’³⁹ This vision, of the struggle to defy evil, and of the costs that it imposed, was one that kings and saints had held to, back in the early years of Christendom; and Tolkien was much moved by it. Marshalling their languages, drawing on their literatures, merging episodes from their histories so that, together, they came to take on something of the contours of a dream, he aimed to write a fantasy that would also – in a sense acceptable to God – be true. His hope for The Lord of the Rings was that others, when they came to read it, would find truth in it too.

Naturally, as a Catholic, Tolkien believed that the whole of history bore witness to Christ. He felt no call to apologise, then, for cloaking such self-knowledge as he had, and such criticisms of life as he knew them, ‘under mythical and legendary dress’.⁴⁰ His fiction, nevertheless, was not shaped exclusively by ancient song. Tolkien knew what it was to stare into the heart of his own century’s darkness. As a young man, he had faced Otto Dix and Adolf Hitler across the mud of the Somme. In 1944, memories of the carnage still haunted him. ‘Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!”’⁴¹ This terrifying vision, of corpses drowned in the mire of a battlefield, and left to float for all eternity, fused the terrors of a mechanised age with medieval visions of the damned. Tolkien, when he wrote of demons riding great featherless birds, or marshalling lethal engines of war, did so as a man who had witnessed dog-fights in the skies above the trenches and tanks churning across no man’s land. Sauron, the Dark Lord whose ambitions threatened all Middle-earth with darkness, ruled in the land of Mordor: at once both a vision of hell such as Gregory the Great might have recognised, and an immense military-industrial complex, black with furnaces, munitions factories and slag-heaps. Unfailingly, throughout The Lord of the Rings, it was the blasted desecration of tree and flower that had run like a scar across France and Belgium during the Great War that featured as the marker of his rule.

Now, as Tolkien pressed on with his novel, there were fresh miseries, fresh horrors that had put the world in their shadow. That history bore witness to a war between light and darkness, aeons old, and demanding from those on the side of good an unstinting watchfulness against evil, was a conviction that Tolkien shared with the Nazis. Admittedly, when articulating the mission of National Socialism, its leaders tended not to frame it in such terms. They preferred the language of Darwinism. ‘A cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.’⁴² So Hitler had defined National Socialism, a year before invading Poland and engulfing Europe in a second terrible civil war. The victories won by his war-machine, even as they demonstrated the fitness of his people to rank as a master-race, had provided him with something even more precious: the opportunity to preserve them from a uniquely besetting peril. Scientists, when they defined racial hierarchies for National Socialism, hesitated to define the Jews as a race at all. They were a ‘counter-race’: a virus, a bacillus. It was no more a crime to eradicate them than it was for doctors to combat an epidemic of typhus. On 9 November 1938, when the great synagogue in Cologne that had been funded by the Oppenheims was destroyed, it was only one of an immense number of Jewish properties similarly put to the torch across Germany. It was not enough, though, merely to burn the lairs of vermin. Vermin themselves had to be destroyed. That they might wear the form of men, women and children did not render their elimination any the less pressing a duty. Only people infected by the baneful humanism of Christianity – a cult, it went without saying, ‘invented by Jews and disseminated by Jews’⁴³ – could possibly think otherwise. Yet Hitler, even as he cast his campaign against them as a matter of public health, would often assimilate it to another narrative: a profoundly Christian one. To be saved, the world had to be cleansed. A people threatened by perdition required redemption. Those on the side of the angels needed to be preserved from the pestiferous agents of hell. ‘Two worlds face one another – the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god.’⁴⁴

Conquest had enabled the tendrils of Hitler’s hatred to reach far beyond the limits of Germany. Even before the war they had snaked and slithered their way into Tolkien’s book-lined study. In 1938, a German editor wishing to publish him had written to ask if he were of Jewish origin. ‘I regret,’ Tolkien had replied, ‘that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’⁴⁵ That the Nazis’ racism lacked any scientific basis he took for granted; but his truest objection to it was as a Christian. Of course, steeped in the literature of the Middle Ages as he was, he knew full well the role played by his own Church in the stereotyping and persecution of the Jews. In his imaginings, however, he saw them not as the hook-nosed vampires of medieval calumny, but rather as ‘a holy race of valiant men, the people of Israel the lawful children of God’.⁴⁶ These lines, from an Anglo-Saxon poem on the crossing of the Red Sea, were precious to Tolkien, for he had translated them himself. There was in them the same sense of identification with Exodus as had inspired Bede. Moses, in the poem, was represented as a mighty king, ‘a prince of men with a marching company’.⁴⁷ Tolkien, writing The Lord of the Rings even as the Nazis were expanding their empire from the Atlantic to Russia, drew freely on such poetry for his own epic. Central to the plot was the return of a king: an heir to a long-abandoned throne named Aragorn. If the armies of Mordor were satanic like those of Pharaoh, then Aragorn – emerging from exile to deliver his people from slavery – had more than a touch of Moses. As in Bede’s monastery, so in Tolkien’s study: a hero might be imagined as simultaneously Christian and Jewish.

This was no isolated, donnish eccentricity. Across Europe, the readiness of Christians to identify themselves with the Jews had become the measure of their response to the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history. Tolkien – ever the devout Catholic – was doing nothing that popes had not also done. In September 1938, the ailing Pius XI had declared himself spiritually a Jew. One year later, with Poland defeated and subjected by German forces to an unspeakably brutal occupation, his successor had issued his first public letter to the faithful. Pius XII, lamenting the ploughing of blood-drenched furrows with swords, pointedly cited Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek.’ Always, from the earliest days of the Church, this was a phrase that had particularly served to distinguish Christianismos from Ioudaismos: Christianity from Judaism. Between Christians, who celebrated the Church as the mother of all nations, and Jews, appalled at any prospect of having their distinctiveness melt away into the great mass of humanity, the dividing line had long been stark. But that was not how it seemed to the Nazis. When Pius XII quoted Genesis to rebuke those who would forget that humanity had a common origin, and that all the peoples of the world had a duty of charity to one another, the response from Nazi theorists was vituperative. To them, it appeared self-evident that universal morality was a fraud perpetrated by Jews. ‘Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews and Negroes, just like Germans or Romans, are descended from Adam and Eve, simply because a Jewish myth says so?’ Not merely pernicious, the doctrine that all were one in Christ ranked as an outrage against the fundamentals of science. For centuries, the Nordic race had been infected by it. The consequence was a mutilation of what should properly have been left whole: a circumcision of the mind. ‘It is the Jew Paul who must be considered as the father of all this, as he, in a very significant way, established the principles of the destruction of a worldview based on blood.’

Christians, confronted by a regime committed to the repudiation of the most fundamental tenets of their faith – the oneness of the human race, the obligation of care for the weak and the suffering – had a choice to make. Did the Church, as a pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer had put it as early as 1933, have ‘an unconditional obligation towards the victims of any social order, even where those victims do not belong to the Christian community’⁴⁸ – or did it not? Bonhoeffer’s own answer to that question would see him conspire against Hitler’s life, and end up being hanged in a concentration camp. There were many other Christians too who passed the test. Some spoke out publicly. Others, more clandestinely, did what they could to shelter their Jewish neighbours, in cellars and attics, in the full awareness that to do so was to risk their own lives. Church leaders, torn between speaking with the voice of prophecy against crimes almost beyond their comprehension and a dread that to do so might risk the very future of Christianity, walked an impossible tightrope. ‘They deplore the fact that the Pope does not speak,’ Pius had lamented privately in December 1942. ‘But the Pope cannot speak. If he spoke, things would be worse.’⁴⁹ Perhaps, as his critics would later charge, he should have spoken anyway. But Pius understood the limits of his power. By pushing things too far he might risk such measures as he was able to take. Jews themselves understood this well enough. In the pope’s summer residence, five hundred were given shelter. In Hungary, priests frantically issued baptismal certificates, knowing that they might be shot for doing so. In Romania, papal diplomats pressed the government not to deport their country’s Jews – and the trains were duly halted by ‘bad weather’. Among the SS, the pope was derided as a rabbi.

Yet there were many Christians too, seduced by evil, who entered into the realm of shadow. The Nazis, when they portrayed Jews as a pestilence, simultaneously backward and over-educated, verminous and smoothly plausible, were not, of course, weaving their propaganda out of nothing. The myths that they drew upon were Christian myths. Biologists who deployed the rational formulations of science to identify Jews as a virus were drawing as well upon stereotypes that reached back ultimately to the gospels. ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’⁵⁰ That the Jews had willingly accepted responsibility for the death of Christ was a doctrine that repeatedly, over the course of Christian history, had seen them condemned as agents of the Devil. Eight hundred years after a pope had first condemned as a libel the claim that they were in the habit of mixing the blood of Christian children into their ritual bread, there were still bishops in Poland who hesitated to dismiss it. In Slovakia, where Jews were first expelled from the capital, and then deported from the country altogether, the puppet regime established by the Germans was headed by a priest. Elsewhere too, from France to the Balkans, and in the very Vatican itself, Catholics were often induced by their hatred of communism to view the Nazis as the lesser of two evils. Even a bishop might on occasion be brought to speak about the campaign of eradication against the Jews with a worm tongue. In Croatia, when the archbishop of Zagreb wrote to the Interior Minister to protest against their deportation, he freely acknowledged the existence of a ‘Jewish question’, and that the Jews themselves were indeed – albeit in some unspecified manner – guilty of ‘crimes’.⁵¹ More than thirty thousand would end up murdered: three-quarters of Croatia’s entire Jewish population.

Yet nowhere was shadow more menacingly enthroned than in Germany. It was there – unsurprisingly – that churches lay most ruinously under the thraldom of an adversary pledged to their utter corruption. It was not only medieval Christendom that provided grist to the mill of the Nazi campaign against the Jews. So too did the Reformation. Luther’s contempt for Judaism as a creed defined by hypocrisy and legalism had many heirs still. These, dazzled by the swagger of National Socialism, might well find their own faith pallid by comparison. The parade grounds, ablaze with flags and eagles, seemed to offer a sense of communion with the numinous that their own dusty pews could no longer provide. Perhaps, as Hitler himself believed, Jesus had not been a Jew at all, but of Nordic stock, blond and blue-eyed. This thesis had opened up for many Protestants in Germany a tantalising prospect: that it might be possible to forge a new and National Socialist form of Christianity. In 1939, in the Wartburg, where Luther had completed his great translation of the New Testament, distinguished scholars had met to revive the heresy of Marcion. The keynote speaker had pledged them to a second Reformation. Protestants had been urged to cleanse Christianity of every last taint of the Jew. Back then, with the world on the brink of war, it had seemed clear which way the wind was blowing. The victory of National Socialism was at hand. The rewards would be rich for those that aided it. Christians could bide their time, keeping their thoughts in their hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose. Such, at any rate, was the thinking. A church of blood – racist and wraith-like – would be one that Hitler would indeed have cause to spare from destruction. A Christianity fallen under the mastery of National Socialism would provide him with a servant both potent and terrible. Those who belonged to it would be able to draw up plans for the liquidation of millions, and attend to the scheduling of cattle-trucks, and toast the success of their efforts even as the smell of burning corpses drifted in through the windows, and know that they were serving the purposes of Christ.

‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.’⁵² Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. Even committed Nietzscheans might flinch before their discovery of what this meant in practice. Otto Dix, far from admiring the Nazis for turning the world on its head, was revolted by them. They in turn dismissed him as a degenerate. Sacked from his teaching post in Dresden, forbidden to exhibit his paintings, he had turned to the Bible as his surest source of inspiration. In 1939, he had painted the destruction of Sodom. Fire was shown consuming a city that was unmistakably Dresden. The image had proven prophetic. As the tide of war turned against Germany, so British and American planes had begun to visit ruin on the country’s cities. In July 1943, in an operation codenamed Gomorrah, a great sea of fire had engulfed much of Hamburg. Back in Britain, a bishop named George Bell – a close friend of Bonhoeffer’s – spoke out in public protest. ‘If it is permissible to drive inhabitants to desire peace by making them suffer, why not admit pillage, burning, torture, murder, violation?’⁵³ The objection was brushed aside. There was no place, the bishop was sternly informed, in a war against an enemy as terrible as Hitler, for humanitarian or sentimental scruples. In February 1945, it was the turn of Dresden to burn. The most beautiful city in Germany was reduced to ashes. So too was much else. By the time the country was at last brought to unconditional surrender in May 1945, most of it lay in ruins. The liberation of the Nazis’ death camps, and the dawning realisation of just how genocidal Hitler’s ambitions had been, ensured that few in Britain felt many qualms. Good had triumphed over evil. The end had justified the means.

Yet to some, the victory felt almost like a defeat. In 1948, three years after the death of Hitler, Tolkien finally completed The Lord of the Rings. Its climax told of the overthrow of Sauron. Over the course of the novel, he and his servants had been searching for a terrible weapon, a ring of deadly power, that would have enabled him, had he only been able to find it, to rule all of Middle-earth. Naturally, Sauron’s dread had been that his enemies – whom he knew had found it – would turn it against him. But they did not. Instead, they destroyed the ring. True strength manifested itself not in the exercise of power, but in the willingness to give it up. So Tolkien, as a Christian, believed. It was why, in the last year of the war against Hitler, he had lamented it as an ultimately evil job. ‘For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons.’⁵⁴ Tolkien, although he gruffly dismissed any notion that he might have modelled The Lord of the Rings on the events of his own century, certainly viewed them through the prism of his own creation. The world of the concentration camp and the atom bomb was etched with the patterns of a more distant age: one when the wings of angels had beaten close over battlefields, and miracles been manifest on Middle-earth. There were few moments in the novel when its profoundly Christian character were rendered overt; but when they came, they were made to count. The fall of Mordor, so Tolkien specified, occurred on 25 March: the very date on which, since at least the third century, Christ was believed to have become incarnate in the womb of Mary, and then to have been crucified.

The first instalment of The Lord of the Rings was published, after a lengthy edit, in 1954. Most reviews, when not bewildered, were contemptuous. The book’s roots in a distant past; its insistence that good and evil actually existed; its relish for the supernatural: all were liable to strike sophisticated intellectuals as infantile. ‘This is not a work,’ one of them sniffed, ‘which many adults will read through more than once.’⁵⁵ But he was wrong. The popularity of the book grew and grew. Within only a few years, it had established itself as a publishing phenomenon. No other novel written over the course of the war remotely began to compare with its sales. Such success was very sweet to Tolkien. His purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings had not been a merely pecuniary one. His ambition had been one that Irenaeus, and Origen, and Bede had shared: to communicate to those who might not appreciate them the beauties of the Christian religion, and its truth. The popularity of his novel suggested to him that he had succeeded. The Lord of the Rings would end up the most widely read work of fiction of the twentieth century, and Tolkien its most widely read Christian author.

Yet this, while it might testify to Christianity’s abiding hold on the imagination, testified to something else as well. The Lord of the Rings – as many of its critics complained – was a story with a happy ending. Sauron was vanquished, the powers of Mordor overthrown. But the victory of good did not come without cost. Loss accompanied it, and diminishment, and the passing of what had once been beautiful and strong. The kingdoms of men endured – but not those of the other races of Middle-earth. ‘Together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.’⁵⁶ This sentiment, expressed by an Elvish queen, was one that Tolkien felt shadowed by himself. ‘I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat” – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpse of final victory.’ The success of The Lord of the Rings – while it bore witness, Tolkien hoped, to the ‘final victory’ of Christianity – bore witness as well to its fading. The novel offered Tolkien’s religion to its readers obliquely; and, had it not done so, it would never have enjoyed such unprecedented success. The world was changing. A belief in evil as Tolkien believed in it, and as Christians for so long had done, as a literal, satanic force, was weakening. Few doubted, in the wake of the first half of the twentieth century, that hell existed – but it had become difficult to imagine it as anything other than a muddy cesspool, surrounded by barbed wire, and with crematoria silhouetted against a wintry sky, built by men from the very heartlands of what had once been Christendom.