Melkor; Evil by Will or Evil by Nature?

[Kalessin]

Harad [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

I think yin and yang dominate Tolkien's works just as the dominate the Christian world (albeit unknowingly to most Christians).

I'm not sure about either point. If by yin and yang you mean an equilibrium arising from oppositional forces, and/or that everything exists must have an opposite (male/female, dark/light etc.), I'd have to say that this is not articulated in Tolkien's narrative or his contextual writing. Given his careful consideration of morality and the nature of myth, it seems unbelievable that he would not mention this conception or offer more obvious pointers.

Your second point is equally problematic. It's a bit like saying Jesus or a Judeo-Christian God dominate the Buddhist world, albeit unknowingly to Buddhists. If you have a faith that excludes other belief systems, then of course you can argue that other beliefs are merely modes of interpretation or awareness. For example, a Christian could easily argue that as God created everything, and gave mankind free will, all human beings live and act by the grace of God and in his image etc. A Buddhist might argue that God is merely the understandable personification of the self as divine, or at a most abstract level (infinite, and outside of existence) a mythologised aspiration to liberation or nirvana.

Most faiths could claim that all the others are unknowing vessels of their particular worldview. However, I don't like these arguments, and really they don't help in a down-to-earth analysis of Tolkien. Whilst you see things in Tolkien or Christianity that to you resonate elements of Chinese mysticism, others will see an absolute affirmation of their "born-again" Christianity, atheists or secular humanists will see something else, and so on. I'm not convinced anyone can 'prove' that they are right and everyone else is wrong, outside the walls of faith.

Eru created the potential for evil in Melkor so that all the testing that must go on in the Human/Elf/Dwarf/Hobbit/Orc/ experience would lead to the betterment of one's existence/soul/race etc.

Again, this is just NOT articulated anywhere. In my earlier post, I quoted Tolkien's exact words - "(Melkor is) the Beginner of Evil; his was a sub-creative Fall". That is about as explicit and straightforward as you can get. As far as Tolkien is concerned (and he wrote the darn book [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] ), Melkor's acts stem from Melkor, not Eru, and are not part of some divine Darwinian testing.

As I keep saying, we are overlaying and extrapolating on this with ideas that are interesting but cannot be authoritative. The Christian model - and its unresolved contradiction of omnipotence and free will - provide us with, I believe, the closest approximation to Tolkien's conception, but no more than that ... a vehicle for appreciation, if you will. The Silmarillion was neither allegory not evangelism. But from an academic standpoint, Tolkien's own culture and beliefs (and his contextual writings) are reasonably the most pertinent framework.

Why do we feel such a need to complete the parts of the puzzle that Tolkien left incomplete? Perhaps it is the joy of his (or any) great work that through reading, we enter it as it enters us, and experience an unchallenged personal sense of identification and understanding.
I'm not sure. But as I said, he was a writer - and absolutely not a philosopher [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] Watch out, or I'll have to unleash more Spinoza upon the boards [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img]

Peace

[ May 17, 2002: Message edited by: Kalessin ]