Fantasy Morality

[tumhalad2]

Originally Posted by Mnemosyne

Then I don't understand why you're suggesting that Tolkien's delving into the problem of bad stuff happening to good people, for no reason perceptible to those people, is somehow inconsistent with a (supposedly) Judeo-Christian-style god like Iluvatar, when we have a primary-world Scripture dealing with that exact problem.

The book of Job does not satisfy the Problem of Evil either; no biblical text does, and the ancients weren't really trying to respond to that problem anyway. They did want to find some ways to justify, or account for, suffering. Tolkien does the same; I'm not saying that Tolkien is being inconsistent, but that Eru, like the Judeo-Christian god, seems to act in certain ways that exacerbate the problem of evil and bring it to the forefront. Why suffering should exist in a world governed by an omnibenevolent god is not something that Job accounts for; indeed the very reason it does not is because it makes god into a kind of prideful Morgoth figure, or at leat a powerful but indifferent bureaucrat. The conception of God as omni- this and omni- that is one tradition (and certainly the mainstream one), but why that tradition should be true, and why, say, the God of Job should be false is beyond me.

If we do characterise Eru in terms of the God of Job, then the Problem of Evil does go away (we are no longer obliged to ascribe god maximally fantastic characteristics), but I see little evidence to suggest to me that Tolkien conceived of Eru in this way.