The sinking of Numenor - a lesson to whom?

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

Since Men and the Elves are referred to as the "Children of God," I sometimes (rather puckishly) think of the results of Eru's intervention as being an act rather like the old saying, "I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it." Perhaps that's the way Tolkien viewed God, but I tend to think not; having myself been raised in pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, it never fails to amaze me that he would write, "Nothing was evil in its beginnings; not even Sauron was so." It certainly wasn't what I was taught as a child, and yet, he held this view even before I was born.

I will perhaps be guilty of sending us off on a tangent here, but the quoted comments struck my interest, and I feel somewhat obliged to point out certain facts regarding said Catholic doctrine.

Firstly, the idea that nothing was evil in the beginning, that "not even Sauron was so," is a very Catholic sounding phrase to my mind. Lucifer, after all, doesn't mean "blasted evil person" but "light-bearer," and the idea of Lucifer's fall to becoming Satan was perhaps better known pre-Council than post, since more emphasis was given to the Devil than since, but it is most definitely good, old-fashioned Catholic thought to say that Lucifer was a good angel of God once.

Indeed, this harkens back very much to Augustinian thought. Augustine, in trying to account for the existence of evil in the world, comes up continually against the apparent contradiction that God, as a perfectly good being, wouldn't create evil... but He created the Devil, right? One of Augustine's answers to this question (he grappled with it long and had a few) was that God created everything Good, and things are evil only insofar as they have lost aspects of the Goodness proper to them.

In a sense, one can see this reflected in Melkor, who is, I am very willing to claim, no more evil in the beginning than Tolkien claimed of Sauron. Specifically, it seems demonstrable that as Melkor becomes more evil he loses parts of his original goodness and powers, eventually becoming completely unable to subcreate anything, but only to destroy, because creative power is a Good, and he has lost that as he has stripped himself more and more of his original goodness.

Anyway, without getting into more philosophy than my tired, addled brain can handle at this late hour, I'll basically just say that it seems very Catholic to me indeed that Tolkien should say such things of Sauron. Of course, this is not to say that such an understanding need be the household expression of faith (and no offence intended on that score to Ibri one way or another), but rather that Tolkien, given that he was raised, post-orphaning, by a Catholic priest, and was an academic with probably more than a passing knowledge of the classics (including Augustine and other church writers), would most definitely have had an understanding of evil that could accommodate a statement such as "even Sauron was not so in the beginning"--whether or not that was the understanding of the masses prior to the council, it is certainly in accord with centuries of philosophical Catholic thought.

Hmm... just ignore me if I've steamrolled too far into digression.