Found an old post of mine on the 'Is Eru God?' thread, which is a quote from an essay by Verly Flieger:
here. The most interesting point she makes is the following:
Quote:
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The supreme godhead, Eru/Iluvatar, who both proposes the theme and conducts the Music, is neither the Judaic God of Hosts who alternately punishes and rewards his people, nor the traditional Christian God of love and forgiveness. Rather, he is a curiously remote and for the most part inactive figure, uninvolved, with the exception of one cataclysmic moment, in the world he has conceived.
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Inactive & uninvolved about sums him up. Of course, my earlier point about his existing in order to stop the Legendarium being dualistic must be qualified. There are, of course, two kinds of dualism. Middle-eastern dualism posits a conflict between equal forces of good & evil - ie it is 'moral' dualism. North Western cultures produced a dualism which was about the conflict of order & chaos (whether Odin against Loki or Apollo against Dionysus). Tolkien seems to have used Norse myth as a basis & set up an Odin/Loki conflict, but set it out in a 'Zoroastrian' form. Yet Eru himself remains aloof from the conflict. Its as though he creates the world (monotheism) but then steps back & plays no part in events, so that effectively the tale plays out along dualistic lines. Hence, in effect it is a dualistic mythology. What is needed to prevent it being that is for Eru to play a much greater part, be an involved presence, but this is something Tolkien never does.
EDIT I think the one statement in the work that confirms this 'dualism' is Galadriel's claim that she & Celeborn have spent three ages 'Fighting the Long Defeat'. Existence is an eternal battle between good & evil.