There is something that reading Augustine, Sayers, and the description of Numenor share that remains hard to articulate. The impression, after working through all three, is not simply that they are making the same argument but that they are making it defined by absence, by what is deliberately withheld, and by the theological weight that absence is made to carry.
Augustine's privation theory in Book 12 of the City of God shows that evil has no positive ontological status but is a deficiency, a falling away from being rather than a rival force. This is illustrated most precisely in Chapter 7, where seeking the cause of evil will is compared to trying to see darkness or hear silence. Darkness is known by the eye only where it ceases to see, and one does not encounter it as a thing but notices it through the failure of the faculty that requires light. Evil is structured identically: not something encountered but something registered through the absence of what ought to be present.
Sayers’ Hamlet analogy in Chapter VII of The Mind of the Maker explains something Augustine leaves underdeveloped; namely why passive privation becomes active depravity. When Shakespeare writes Hamlet, everything outside the poem acquires retroactively the character of exclusion, and the category of the wrong word does not exist before the right word is chosen. Not-Being, once a conscious will make it a centre of opposition, draws its power from the Being it negates, which is shown most clearly when Garrick rewrote Hamlet with good intentions and commercial success, producing a worse corruption than a malicious alteration would have, since the stronger the will behind a distortion the more power it draws back into contact with the original.
What both texts leave unresolved is whether the agent is culpable if the defection of will was constituted rather than caused. Augustine's two-men thought experiment argues that only the will itself can explain why one falls and the other does not, but a will whose defection has no efficient cause is also a will whose defection has no prior condition, and Sayers's Hamlet analogy sidesteps rather than answers this, since poems do not have free will and misquoters are not fallen creatures in the theological sense.
Ultimately, Tolkien combines both the doctrine and the tension in the Meneltarma. The sacred mountain is defined by absences so systematic they read as some form of theological argument: no building, no altar, no tool, no weapon, no word except the king's at three prescribed occasions. The silence on the summit, so profound that a stranger ignorant of all Numenorean history would not have dared to speak aloud, renders Augustine's darkness analogy in spatial form, where the sacred is felt through the complete withdrawal of everything that would ordinarily mark a place as significant. Sauron's temple introduces not a different religion but the wrong relationship to the same reality, what Augustine in Chapter 8 describes as inordinate love, and the will that places itself at the centre of worship rather than its object is precisely the Anti-Hamlet figure Sayers identifies, constituting itself through active opposition.
Although Sayers argues that the act of recovery is structurally identical to the Incarnation, taking catastrophic material and transmuting it through creative interpretation into a new form of good, and Christopher Tolkien's work assembling fragments into continuity is this act at the philological level. Of all the great heirlooms of Numenor, only the Ring of Barahir survives, passed through the Lords of Andunie to Elendil and eventually to Aragorn. The fall is not undone, but something carried through the catastrophe and arrives in the Third Age still recognisable as what it was, just as the record itself exists against the avoidance of most survivors who refused to study Numenor because it bred only useless regret.
- RS
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