Eru letting Melkor go..

[Bill Ferny]

Mandos, I get the funny feeling we are just going around in circles here. You may be singularly impressed with the yin/yang cosmology, and far be it from me to persuade your personal beliefs otherwise. But the yin/yang is not the metaphysic at work in Tolkien, especially when he consciously revised his cosmology according to his Christian faith. That is the reason why I’m pressing the point here.

Simply put, light is not a necessary condition for darkness, nor is darkness a necessary condition for light. The darkness of the room is completely irrelevant in regard to a light bulb’s ability to create light. It is illogical to posit that light and darkness both exist necessarily. When I turn on the light in my study, the darkness goes away! That indicates to me that darkness does not exist necessarily. It also indicates to me that darkness is not a positive thing, but simply an absence of light.

The same thing holds for good and evil. Evil is simply an absence of good. Something is evil in as much as it is, to one degree or another, not what it ought to be. That presupposes that that something has a nature, which in and of itself is good, and it is evil to the degree that it fails to actualize it’s nature. Thus all evils are corruption of things made good. Good things are more in being, because their natures are more actualized, and evil things are less in being because their natures are less actualized. This is the metaphysic accepted by Tolkien’s religious faith, Catholicism, and I think you would be hard pressed to demonstrate to me, from direct narrative or latter speculations, that he had any other metaphysic in mind when he conceived the creation and fall of Arda.

Physics has nothing to do with it, and even if it did, as Salocin points out:

On the Quantum physics bit (which happens to be one of my other passions), not all particles have a corresponding anti-particle. Lets look at photons for a moment (since every on seems to love the light analigies). It does not have an anti-particle equivalent. Neither do any elementary Bosons with the ecception of the W+ and W- vector Bosons. Also, Neutrons do not have non-Anti-Matter opposites as do the electron and the proton (positron and negatron respectively). Also, even looking at the things that are complete opposites, for some as yet unexplainable reason, there is more matter in the Universe than anti-Matter, so they are not equal.

Wow, now I know how it feels for a person who has never read Tolkien to read some of the threads on this forum! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

Melkor is evil, not by design, not because he has to be in order for there to be good, but because he wills not to be what Eru created him to be. It is a free act of will on his part. If it is necessary in any way for Melkor to be evil according Eru’s design, then Melkor would essentially be devoid of freewill.

[ January 11, 2003: Message edited by: Bill Ferny ]