A 14-year-old asks if wearing the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings could be a mortal sin. Jimmy Akin explains how Catholic teaching on temptation, free will, and culpability applies—even in Middle-earth.
Transcript:
Cy: Nicholas says, Hi! I’m a mega fan of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. I am 14, and I have a weird question for you. First, in the Lord of the Rings, how culpable are people for mortal sin when they wear the One Ring? I would just like to say, 14 years old, using the word culpable. Good job, Nicholas. I am asking because it is possible to ignore the temptation of the ring.
Jimmy: My. Oh, so let’s do that. Then we’ll do his second question. Gotcha. Okay, so I have to start by saying that I have never read in their entirety the Lord of the Rings books. I have seen the movies. I’ve seen all the movies, and not just the Peter Jackson ones. I’ve seen the Nelvana, Ralph Bakshi productions, too, from back in the 70s, one of which only ended up on TV and was never theatrically released. So I’m familiar with the basic plots. But Tolkien may have stuff in the books that provides more detail about how the Ring works than what I’m aware of. So I don’t know, Cy. You may know more about that than me. You may have read the books in their entirety.
Cy: I did, yeah.
Jimmy: Okay, so you may be able to add some color to this. But assuming that it is possible to ignore the temptation that the One Ring provides, which it would seem to be given that Tom Bombadil is totally unfazed by the One Ring, he’s playing with it at the beginning of the first of the Lord of the Rings books, which I understand why they dropped that sequence from the movies, because the movies open with a very effective portrayal of how dangerous the ring is. And it would totally undercut that to have Tom Bombadil spinning it around his finger and not caring. So I think that was actually a good cut for the movies.
But the mere fact that it’s possible to ignore the temptation does not mean that a person is not going to have. Is not. Is not going to be committing mortal sin. The person may or may not commit mortal sin. The Church’s understanding is that in order for mortal sin to occur, three conditions must be met together. One of them is there has to be grave matter. And we’ll just specify that that’s the case in whatever mortal sin the ring is tempting someone to do.
The second is you have to have full knowledge of the moral character of the act. And that may or may not be present, depending on the extent to which the ring is impacting your perception of what’s going on. So it could be that the ring is depriving you of adequate knowledge of what you’re doing and what it really consists of.
And then the third condition is that there must be deliberate consent, meaning this is a free choice that the person is making. But it’s not deliberate consent if the person is under some kind of psychological compulsion. And the Ring would seem to provide, since it tends to corrupt folks in some cases in radical ways like Gollum, it would seem that there is a strong psychological compulsion there such that even Frodo succumbs to it by the end of the story.
And it’s only because of divine providence that the Ring ends up being destroyed. Because Frodo was not going to destroy it there at the end and he knew what the stakes were. He knew the Shire and other places would just be ravaged by Sauron if he didn’t destroy the Ring. And so that would seem to indicate that the Ring, at least in some circumstances, has tremendous psychological compulsion power.
So even if it’s possible for some unusually strong individuals like Tom Bombadil to ignore it, and even if a normal person could ignore it in some circumstances, like let’s say when you’re far from Mount Doom, your culpability will be diminished by the Ring’s noetic effects, which are its effects on your beliefs and, you know, what you perceive yourself to be doing.
And it will also be. Your culpability will also be mitigated by the degree of compulsion the Ring has over you in that moment. So on two grounds. Both by interfering with your knowledge of what you’re doing and by interfering with the normal exercise of your will to make deliberative choices, you could end up not being responsible in a mortal sin way for what you’re doing.
So it might end up being a venial sin or even not a sin at all if your knowledge or culpability were fundamentally removed from you. If your knowledge or your volition, your use of the will was fundamentally removed.
On the other hand, this is. It’s not guaranteed that you might not commit a mortal sin. You might still have enough control and knowledge to be mortally culpable for what you did. And even if you’re not, you may have made a free choice to wear the ring knowing what the consequences of that would be.
Like Bilbo, you know, Bilbo originally started wearing the ring not knowing what it would do. But by the time in The Hobbit, but by the time of The Lord of the Rings, he had learned the corrupting effect of the Ring. And there’s even a moment in the Peter Jackson movies where he’s, you know, given the ring to Frodo, but he just doesn’t want to let it go.
And he becomes. He starts. He even looks monstrous as he lunges for the ring at one point because he wants to wear it because it’s addictive. Well, okay, someone who engages when they are in control of themselves, who, let’s say, gets drunk or high knowing that that’s going to lead them to do immoral things is responsible for the path that they set themselves on.
So if, you know, let’s say someone goes out to a bar and starts drinking like crazy knowing they’re going to drive home in an unsafe state, they assume responsibility for driving home in an unsafe state. And that can be mortally sinful. Same thing if they know they’re going to get high, let’s say they’re smoking weed and they know they’re going to get high, and then they’re going to drive to the store to get snacks because they’re going to have the munchies. Well, they’re responsible for the dangerous condition they’re going to be driving in.
And so in the same way, one could have the ring and not be wearing it, but be tempted to wear it in a state where you still have control of yourself and you know, your addiction is not so far gone that you have no control over this. And if you then, while you have control of yourself, choose to wear the ring knowing what it’s going to lead to, then you have assumed the moral responsibility for what it will lead to.
And you could mortally sin by wearing the ring, by choosing to wear the ring once you know what the consequences of that act are going to be and you just want to do it anyway.
Cy: All right, Nicholas, there’s question number one for you. Nicholas’s second question…