Gifts Not Possessions, Love Not Selflessness
In The Silmarillion, readers encounter Melkor, the satanic arch-fiend of J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythological world. Indeed, the more familiar Sauron of Lord of the Rings is but an underling of Melkor. Melkor is a being determined to make his own mark, apart from the will of the creator. He wants to control others, to have subjects and servants. Melkor constantly tries to thwart the creative work of others as they form the material world. He strives to make something that is his own. Ironically, all he can do is destroy and pervert the work of others; he can create nothing new. Melkor wants what others have, and he would rather destroy the creations of others rather than not have them for himself.
The desire for possession typifies Melkor – possession of others’ wills, of others’ abilities, and of others’ creations. Yet whatever he possesses, he ruins. Melkor is the epitome of selfishness. The opposite of selfishness, however, is not selflessness. Both of these concepts center on self. Tolkien’s close friend, C. S. Lewis, suggested that valorizing the negative virtue of “selflessness” was one of the devil’s great linguistic victories. One gives up what one perceives to be one’s own. And we all know people—and I have certainly been one of those people—who use their “self-sacrifice” precisely to gain power over others or to vaunt themselves morally.
The opposite of selfishness is love. Love actively looks to the well-being of others. Love seeks to fulfill the self by looking outside of it. To be sure, to acquire the ability to love we must be able to give up those things we are attached to—whether they be wealth, time, or an exaggerated sense of our own importance. But they should be given up not so that we can be “selfless,” but because we love the one for whom the sacrifice is made.
This brings us back to the theme of possession. We are tempted towards the self-centered “virtue” of selflessness because we have a misunderstanding of our existence. We view what we give up as truly ours to give up. Whatever it is—whether tangible objects like wealth or intangible things like attention or a sense of honor among our peers—we view it as ours, something to which we have a right and ownership. And like Melkor, the more tightly we grip it, the more likely we are to pervert or misuse it. But from a Christian view of reality, all things are gifts. In 1 Cor 4:7, St. Paul asks the Corinthians: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” Anything we “possess” is nothing more or less than a gift from God (see James 1:5, 17). Once we teach ourselves to look on the world and all that is in it as God’s gift, as expressions of God’s love for us, perhaps we can free ourselves from the obsession with possession that hinders our ability to love.
What is the meaning of “self-sacrifice,” if nothing is really our own to begin with? In stark contrast to Melkor, we can become a little more like Tolkien’s Hobbits, who love to receive gifts, but who can give them to others just as freely as they receive.
