Sauron vs. Your Mama - A Discussion of Power in Middle-earth

[davem]

Of course, Melkor may well have thought that what he was doing was 'right', that he was actually improving the Music (& later, by extension, the world). Whatever, he wasn't actually stopped by Eru - he waas even told directly by Eru that what he was doing would redound to his, Eru's, own glory - 'What you're doing will make me even more glorious!' - which could be taken as encouragement from a certain perspective.

In the end one cannot, as supreme creator, give one's Children free will & then object to the way they use it. If Eru had wanted his Children to only to do what he told them he could have made them robots. Once he creates beings with free will he gives them the ability to go against him. Melkor may simply have been doing his best. Even his desire to reduce the creation to 'chaos' may have been down to his belief that Chaos was a superior form to order. The fact is we don't have Morgoth's side of the story, & don't know his real motivation- we have his enemies' interpretation of his motives. He may well have honestly believed that his vision was superior. One would have to be able to prove that Eru's (& by extension the Valar's) vision was 'superior' in some objective sense. 'Eru was the supreme being & therefore must be right' is simply a 'Might=right' argument.

I'm not sure that Eru's behaviour, let alone his motives, are unquestionably 'right'. There's no mention of 'love' being one of Eru's motives for doing anything. His motive seems, in fact, his own glory - He doesn't, I note, condemn Melkor's dissonances because they will lead to suffering - he says, in effect 'Go ahead - what you're doing is only going to make me look even better than I do right now!'

This is the essential problem for me - either you have one supreme being who runs things Himself, or you have a pantheon of gods who argue & fight among themselves, in a conflict of order vs chaos. When Eru intervenes the Valar become robots who simply obey orders, or are sidelined.

And in the end, for me, Tolkien 's greatest works are the ones where Eru & the Valar are very much in the background & can be safely ignored - TH, LotR, CoH.