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Quote:
Stanley, J.R.R. Tolkien himself struggled with this question. Early in his writing career, he treated Goblins (later called Orcs) as though they were purely evil; they had no more choice than cardboard cutouts. By the end, however, the picture had changed radically. The Orcs were under the enslaving domination of a great evil: the Dark Lord, Sauron. They were not necessarily evil, they were only slaves to evil.
Peter Jackson made his film Orcs ugly (top photo) in order to represent the degraded state of their souls. In fairness, once the Ring was destroyed, they would have been freed from Sauron’s controlling curses. At this point, Jackson should have shown them transformed from foul to fair the way King Theoden of Rohan was transformed when Gandalf the White freed him from the controlling curse of another dark sorcerer: Saruman. The bottom photo is what this Orc actually looked like once he was released from all those fell enchantments. Same dreamy eyes.
The stark difference in the Tolkienverse between Good and Evil, while it seems rather dated today, served Tolkien’s purposes of presenting a morality tale in the same black and white terms used in the Bible. And there the matter might have rested if readers hadn’t began to query Tolkien regarding the place of Orcs in the religious narrative of Christianity.
Were Orcs sentient creatures with free will? Could they go to heaven, even theoretically? The answers had to be yes; even angels have free will, although their decisions to be good (or evil) were made long ago and will stand for all eternity.
Tolkien belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, and “catholic” means “universal.” Jesus, the Church taught, came to redeem the sins of all, not just the cute and lovable people. That redemption had to be available even to the Orcs, although of course Tolkien did not rewrite the Lord of the Rings to follow his own evolving spiritual awareness. The trilogy had long since been completed by the time he worked through these issues.
Christ’s Church was, Tolkien believed, a “big tent” with room for the entire world to take shelter. He could not in good conscience believe that Orcs were denied the possibility of salvation.
Technically, then, Orcs are not necessarily all bad; they must possess some redeemable qualities. They did, however, labour under the severe disadvantage of being under curses and enchantments binding their wills to servitude to Sauron.
Once the One Ring was unmade in the Cracks of Doom, Sauron vanished from an active role in Middle-earth, reduced to an incorporeal shadow that could no longer wake a sleeping cat, let alone regain power and have another go at world domination.
With Sauron’s power broken, we may be sure that the Orcs were forced for the first time in their lives to stand on their own two feet and begin dealing with life’s uncertainties. At this point, their redeemable qualities would begin to manifest themselves.
The remarkable Helen Keller was blind and deaf, but learned to function despite her handicaps. Orcs began life as slaves to evil, but after the fall of Sauron, they would have begun gaining emotions and senses they didn’t even know they had.
We didn’t see these qualities manifesting in Lord of the Rings because the Orcs had not yet been released from their spiritual bondage to the Dark Lord. Once freed, however, the ones who survived would have gone through remarkable changes.
The Orcs, the reader would have realised, had never been truly evil in themselves; they only appeared so because they were utterly overshadowed and overborne by the will of the Dark Lord. Once he was destroyed, the invisible chains surely fell from them and they were free to make their own decisions. At this point, they were no worse than ordinary Men, and perhaps in some ways better.
All this begs a final question: can Orcs go to heaven?
The answer, as Tolkien eventually realised, has to be “yes.” But with Sauron dominating their minds, how could this be? For me, the answer lies not with Tolkien but with one of his friends and colleagues, C.S. Lewis.
In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis explained how a man who appears damned might still go to heaven. God, Lewis said, understands that - for example - a certain man has a bad digestion that makes him angry, surly, and rude; God understands, and makes allowances.
Man sees only appearances, but God sees the entire picture; thus judgment should be reserved to Him. A man with a digestive disorder will be judged, Lewis decided, in such a way that his chances of going to heaven will be no worse than those of a person who was a born saint and never had to work at it.
God judges the man not for his actions, but for what those actions would have been had he been freed from the torment caused by his inflamed gut. Because God sees far more deeply than we do, we are told not to judge others.
Even Hitler, Lewis said, might be in heaven today. Hitler, he suggested, appears to have been born twisted, to a cruel father, then given absolute power. And we know what absolute power does, don’t we?
God might well perceive that for the severely soul-damaged Hitler to order the deaths of 10,000 might leave less of a mark upon his soul than if you or I were to kick a dog. God doesn’t see the actions, he sees the stain they leave upon the soul.
Certainly if Hitler could (possibly) be in heaven, then Orcs could (possibly) be there as well.
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Answer to Were there any Orcs with redeemable qualities, or were they all evil? Did any fight against Sauron? by John Young https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any...et_type=answer |
04-08-2022, 07:20 PM
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