Theology and writing have a sometimes fraught interaction. Art has an apparent opposition to theology, if we consider how awful preachiness can get, how making a story into a tract makes it a very bad story. At the same time, we should remember that, as Chesterton put it in the last chapter of Heretics, “The fiercest dogmatists can make the best artists.” People with something to say make great art; people who merely say something with art (usually) make bad art (see: the ideological half of Hollywood). All this theory, however, can be abstruse and confusing, even useless; what we need to understand is application. To that end, let’s look at three different views of dominion, as represented by Whitman, Stapledon, and a trio of greats- Lewis, Tolkien, and Holy Scripture- respectively.

Walt Whitman

To be frank, I loathe reading Whitman and did so only because college made me. Why I loathe Whitman (and why I’ve read only portions even of Song of Myself, the poem I’ll be quoting here to adduce his view of dominion) should become clear as we consider what that view of dominion was.

First, though, let’s established what ‘dominion’ even is. For that purpose, I turn to Genesis 1:28, the verse which names the doctrine: “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” Dominion, in this light, is the doctrine of man’s relationship with nature, with material creation besides himself (although it is intimately connected with man’s relation to his own body, as is evident in the various authors).

Whitman’s view of man’s relation to nature is an old and storied one. Whitman was, whether formally or otherwise, a pantheist. As he states, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, /And what I assume you shall assume, /For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” and “I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, /And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own….” His view of nature is full of love, but it is self love; he sings of himself, and in order to sing of himself he declares the lovability of all things, for they are all him. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,” he states, and he lauds the integral continuity of all things.¹

For Whitman, there is no distinction between man and nature, between self and not-self, except as an artifact of thought. He is unconcerned with the death of logic this brings; as he famously proclaimed, “Do I contradict myself? /Very well then I contradict myself, /(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Indeed, he contained all the men of the earth, so that all were his brothers and sisters not in the Christian senses (1 Cor. 8:11) but as a death of identity.

This is a profoundly narcissistic view of nature, a mystic self-apotheosis. Whitman says not as the Christian, ‘Behold the glory of what is without me,’ but ‘I am everything; behold the glory of this myself.’ So is the nature of pantheism. It says either ‘I am everything,’ or ‘I am nothing, and all things being nothing, I am everything.’ The pantheist cannot with consistency love another; he must love himself, even distribute in others (the reverse, to love others in himself, is not available to the sinner, who hates himself only as much as he loves himself).

Nature, to Whitman, is a part of himself and lovable thereas. Technology, science, primitivism, all these are but parts of myself, the divine deus sive natura (to quote Spinoza). The result is, instead of a program of progress or of civilization, an erotic self-fascination, a fervid passion of adulation, a religious paean. Such is Song of Myself and also, I think, I Sing of a Body Electric. Whitman’s doctrine of dominion is a fever and a delirium.

Stapledon

Last and First Men is the only book of Olaf Stapledon’s which I’ve read, and I admittedly didn’t make it through the last bit. The 20+ sex reproductive cycle of the ‘men’ I stopped reading at was among the points which drove me away. Before that point, however, I read enough to get a clear idea of Stapledon’s view of nature- a view which, frankly, he shares with Saruman.

Stapledon speaks of a future of technology (and regression and destruction). Men build towers to the sky, from which they commute in personal airplanes; men develop psychic abilities by integrating a Martian hivemind into their make-up; men manipulate their ‘germ’- equivalent to how modern fiction uses the genome- to remake themselves. Two notable examples of this self-sculpting come to mind. First, we have the race which remade themselves on a fundamental level in order to survive migration to new planets. Second, we have the ‘men’ (only vaguely related to mankind, if at all- I forget) who by breeding and germ manipulation grow vast brain-towers, ‘men’ whose entire body is the head, whose skulls are tall structures of stone and steel, who have no limbs or motion save to think. This race then proceeds to tyrannize over their creators, resulting in a war to extinction and the rise (if I remember rightly) of a new race.

In sum, Stapledon’s view of nature is of a constant process of evolution in which man is no more than nature, in which there is no ‘God’ so far as matters (except as an element of culture, in a sense reminiscent of William James or Rousseau), in which all alterations and doing of technology are to be judged only by the desirability of their effect. His idea of dominion is to control, to alter, to remake, to rule with utter sovereignty. Nature is to be exploited through technology, even the nature of man himself; let all the trees of Fangorn burn in order that the superior race, Uruk or man or wizard, may rule.

Tolkien, Lewis, and More

Tolkien’s view of technology is a matter of some reputation. Generally, people are under the impression that he was, if not a primitivist or an Amish Catholic (how incongruous those terms are!), at least generally opposed to the development of technology. His elves are called, with a jocularity that does not obviate the meaning intended, ‘hippies.’ The truth is otherwise, as it often is when a modern tries to see modernity in Tolkien’s perspective rather than through it.²

Let’s consider the three groups in The Lord of the Rings who can be justly said to represent the height of a proper relationship with nature, as Tolkien conceives of it: hobbits, ents, and (at the pinnacle) elves, particularly Elrond, Galadriel, and their peoples. The hobbits are an agrarian folk. They do not seem much enamored with ‘technology’ except as it has been used for centuries by their ancestors, but neither do they regard ‘nature’ as something to be reverential towards, as environmentalists nowadays and nature-worshippers back in the day would have it. The hobbits grow food on their farms, and they leaves woods in the Shire, and they dig holes in the ground to live in. They represent the English common sense position.

The ents, of the three, are the closest to being anti-technology. Certainly they appear to have no particular ‘technology’ even at a second glance. Yet this impression is deceiving, if we remember that technology and science aren’t just steel and gears and smoke and white lab-coats and calculations. ‘Technology’ is the reworking of nature to a particular end, man (or ent) re-ordering the material in order to bring about a result. ‘Science’, etymologically and wholistically, is ‘knowledge,’ the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of understanding of the world. For technology, then, we have Treebeard’s home as evidence; this is a place the ent has shaped for himself or which has been shaped by his residence to him, and in it we find the drink which makes Pippin and Merry veritably gargantuan (nearly the size of short humans!), another bit of ‘technology.’ For ‘Science,’ meanwhile, what is the long list which Treebeard recites, the list of all living things, but a record of observation and science?

The elves, finally, are the most prominent example people point to in analyzing Tolkien’s understanding of dominion. The elves are far from primitivists, living off the land with minimal alteration to it. The elves build great structures- the flets of Lothlorien, the Last Homely Home of Rivendell, the great works of the Noldor: Nargothrond and Gondolin, the halls of Thranduil beneath the earth, even Doriath. In fact, in the definition given above, the highest expression of elvish power qualifies as ‘technology.’ The magic of the elves is in the greatness of their ‘art,’ the excellence of their craft. What they do is not ‘magic’ in the sense of the supernatural; it is instead a perfection of ordering the natural to their purpose that men, through ignorance, perceive as impossible.³

So the view of technology and nature which Tolkien presents is this: to use, to elevate, and never to exploit. Exploitation is to regard nature as a means to power, as Saruman does. To rule without regard for beauty, without regard for the purpose of each part of the world- the ground to grow, the food to be eaten, the mountains to soar, the rain to cleanse, the flowers to be beautiful-, to exercise control without love for what is ruled, that is the ‘technology’ which Tolkien deplores. The man who would cut down trees in order to build a cubicle is a man misguided at best, evil at worst, and certainly foolish. He who breaks white in order to surpass it has forgotten the excellence of white, and so all those colors, which might have been beautiful, are merely a sign of rottenness in the soul, as Gandalf hints to Saruman.

A similar view of dominion is implicit in Narnia and The Hideous Strength,⁴ both by C.S. Lewis. The Talking Beasts of Narnia are not like our animals, but it is by fulfilling of purpose and by attendance to righteousness that they have the ‘science’ of speech- as too many discover in the Last Battle, in losing their speech. The efforts of Filiostrato, Straik, Frost, and Withers to remake nature, to reshape the nature of man as Stapledon’s men did are in vain not because they lack a technical capacity (though certainly the Head of the Institute seems more demon than man) but because by subsuming man into nature, by seeking to rule nature for themselves instead of for their Creator, they have lost all right of nature, all sight of it. So nature is the means of their destruction.

The view of dominion these two men espouse, in its essence at least, is the view which Scripture declares to us. Man is given dominion of nature, to rule it, but he is not given sovereignty. He remains a steward of God’s earth (1 Cor. 4:1-2), even if when the Son comes to inspect His demesne, the steward hides. Denethor held Gondor in preparation for Aragorn, and man holds dominion in preparation for Christ. In that dominion, man is to care for nature in all its purpose and its beauty. He is to elevate it, to work the elvish craft of technology, to bring forth its purpose and turn it to higher purposes of His glory, but he is never to regard it as a mere means of power. Always nature is a sacred trust, a responsibility. Whether like a hobbit, in steady fulfilment of vocation and life, like an ent, in caring for a corner of the world which many forget (remember, the ents were tree-shepherds, not mere hermits), like an elf, working from nature wonders which echo nature’s glory back and carry all the glory upwards to God, man is to work dominion with fear and trembling (Ps. 2:11), with righteousness enacted (Ps. 112:1), with joy everlasting (1 Chr. 16:33).

Conclusion

All these four wrote with impressive skill. I may loathe Whitman, but I can acknowledge his technical capacity. Stapledon I admire, even as I balk at his morals, his mechanistic materialism.⁵ Lewis and Tolkien are among the greatest artists of history. Yet all four of them incarnated in their work deep theological implications. They poured forth art which was built around declaring something, and it is the more beautiful for that declaration. From their example we should take the lesson. The doctrine of dominion is seen in Lewis and Tolkien properly, but it is not seen as a didactic statement, an abstraction, a command. No, it is lived out, breathed through the work, a worldview seen rather than described. Let this be an example- and please, leave Whitman off the college courses.⁶

God bless.

---

Footnotes

1. I acknowledge that I do not thoroughly prove my interpretation of Whitman here, only exemplify points that cohere to it without necessitating. I hope to exhibit, more than prove. My view of Whitman was formed several years ago while reading (as mentioned) for college, and I don’t remember the exact sections which led me to my conclusion, except that having reached said conclusion, his work became much easier comprehensible, including his near-erotic fascination with nature and others and (in one case) corpses. ↩︎
2. The difference between seeing an author as agreeing with you and seeing what the author thinks about your opinion. ↩︎
3. Clark’s Third Rule, eh? ↩︎
4. I cannot recommend That Hideous Strength too strongly; it is a book second only to The Lord of the Rings in the annals of fiction (alongside a few peers). Read it (after the two books which precede it in the series, or you’ll be confused- Perelandra is particularly essential). ↩︎
5. The whole ‘nudist into adultery into apparently some sort of virile virtue’ thing fairly early in the book was… something. Artistically well done, too- Stapledon understood certain parts of how humans, their mythology, and their archetypes work when he wrote that. ↩︎
6. Except as an example of philosophical and theological perversion, not to mention the disturbingly erotic tendencies of the mystic and pantheistic. ↩︎