What was wrong with Lord Denethor? Denethor, the Stewart of Gondor, was sure he knew the future. He had one of those ancient seeing stones, Palantír. He looked into it regularly and was convinced that the battle against evil was lost. He saw too much to doubt it.
“Why do the fools fly? Better to die sooner than late, for die we must.”
When Gandalf told him to fight Mordor, he got enraged,
“Do you think the eyes of the White Tower are blind? I have seen more than you know.”
He thought he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what the future held. This “knowledge” drove him insane. The illusion of absolute knowledge is the best recipe for insanity. As Chesterton puts it, the mind of an insane person always “moves in a perfect but narrow circle.” The function of the Palantír was to draw the person into that narrow circle and lock him in it.
“If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.” G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Denethor believed that Palantir was broadening his horizons but in reality, it was narrowing his field of vision. It showed only the things that aligned with the will of the one who ruled over the seeing stones. Slowly, Denethor’s “small circle of thought” became so small that he started suffocating in it.
Gandalf came to Gondor as a gust of fresh air and said, “Fight.” You don’t know the future beyond a shadow of a doubt. No one does.
“Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”
Who knows what the next day will bring? You never know what forces are at work in this particular circumstance of your life. All you need to do is to recognize the necessity and take the next step.
“There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil.”
What do we know about the future? Nothing. To recognize it is wisdom. This realization helped Chuck, Tom Hanks’s hero in Cast Away, to remain sane on his uninhabited island for four years. After being rescued, he told his friend what helped him to go on day after day without any hope of getting out of this prison. He said,
“I just continued living, breathing, until one day, everything changed. The tide gave me a chance… So I know what I will do now. I will continue to live because tomorrow will be a new day, and who knows what it will bring?”
Day after day, he continued living not knowing… until one day, the tide brought him a piece of plastic that he turned into a sail. Now he could get over the huge surf waves.
That’s exactly what Gandalf said to Aragorn, Gimly, and Legolas when they met him in the woods after his unexpected resurrection,
“I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.”
We never know what the tide will bring today. That’s why we continue living and breathing. It is not folly, as Denethor thought. It is wisdom. We don’t see the end. That’s why we are waiting for the turn of the tide.
