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Originally Posted by davem
I think those last three words sum up the difference perfectly - in Judeo-Christian myth the Fall is a tragedy because it didn't have to happen. Tolkien clearly implies that if a Fall was not necessarily 'inevitable' (though I wonder from his words whether he didn't actually consider it was inevitable) it was certainly very likely. God creates a world which He considers 'Good', Eru creates a world which is already flawed in such a way that a Fall is 'an accident waiting to happen'. Eru chose to allow Melkor's dissonance to be included in the creation. Why? To give Melkor the chance to repent when he saw his 'dissonance' made real? Fine, but real people area going to suffer as a resullt of that act of compassion.
Or was it all about 'free will' - too easy. If I leave a group of of children alone in a room where I have placed a load of sharp knives in full view because they have 'free will' as far as what they do with those knives, am I thereby absolved of any responsibility as to what they do? Would I be justified in punishing those children if they stabbed each other?
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Congratulations, you just brought up one of the biggest debates in Christianity today. If Tolkien thought the Fall of Man was inevitable, I can bring to mind several Theologians who would disagree. This debate has been going around for a long time, even from the Middle Ages when the Calvinists showed up. Yes, God declares the world good, but that doesn't mean it was supposed to stay that way. Initially, Ea was good, too, until Melkor started messing things up. Many think the Fall of Man was a plan of God's all along- certainly he knew it was going to happen before the world was created (that's what Omniscient means...) but He created it anyway, and then allowed it to occur.
In the Garden of Eden, God set up a failure- the Tree- allowed Satan in to tempt Adam and Eve, and then He wasn't there at the crucial moment. Many Theologians look at this and say it was inevitable. Given Tolkien's pessimisstic view of God, it's possible that he belonged to this school of thought. Therefore, perhaps he wasn't trying to insert Catholicism into the story, but trying to make it look more positive and optimistic, as was the status quo of that time. Looking like a Calvinist (which is a sect of Protestantism) would not be acceptable to an Orthodox Catholic.
So, if we can't trust his statements, and the text is vague, and there's no hard evidence about his mindset, what are we left with? Our own interpretations? Eru help us....
EDIT: My pastor made my point about the fall of Man for me this morning. "We tend to view the fall like this: God created a perfect world, and declared it good. Then Adam and Eve come along and screw it all up and 'Ooops!' God is caught off guard. He says, 'Oh no! Whatdo I do? Anyone have any ideas?' Jesus stands up in the back and says, 'It's ok, Dad, I have a plan.' It seems silly, but that's how we really think of it. God had a perfect plan A, we screwed it up, and He had to come up with a Plan B. The truth is more likely to be that God planned in the Fall, that in fact it was part of his Perfect Plan A to reveal His love through our reconciliation to Him. The Fall of Man was supposed to happen."
This is not a widely accepted thought, especially not in Catholicism. If this is the idea that Tolkien had, in some form, he may have tried later to bring it back to the more accepted "We screwed up God's Plan, now we have to pay for it." Galileo, when he suggested the world was round, was nearly excommunicated untill he recanted his idea. Tolkien may have felt the same pressure to conform to the Catholic Church, not by inserting Christianity, but by fixing the view of it, even openly admitting that his version didn't coincide with the truth, even if that thruth may have been wrong.