Davem,
There is much that I could respond to in your post. But most of that will have to wait for later as I am racing out the door. However, there was one comment you made that I could not resist responding to:
Quote:
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Is Illuvatar using such terrible suffering to 'force' Frodo to grow, & is that necessary - the only way that we can grow spiritually?
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There are two ways of viewing this problem. The first, and more legitimate way, is to consider the entire question of Illuvatar's role within the context of Middle-earth as Tolkien has depicted it for us. The second would be to answer your question in the context of how I actually feel about the whole role of suffering and the divine. Now, most of us are probably loathe to admit it, but I suspect that our answer even on the first score is going to be influenced by how we feel about this issue on a personal level.
First, regarding Middle-earth, I would say that Tolkien has depicted Eru in such a way that it is not possible for him to have used suffering to force Frodo to grow spiritually. The God of Middle-earth is far too distant a figure to take this kind of active role; he did not intervene in the personal lives of individual folk. Time and again, in the Letters and elsewhere, Tolkien emphasizes how distant from the world Eru is. Other than the Elves, few folk even know of His existence or the story of the music of creation. Eru is not shown interfering in the affairs of Arda as the Valar did.
Yes, there are a few exceptions in the Legendarium.....the cataclysmic destruction of Numenor and reshaping of the world, Manwe taking counsel with Eru when the decision is made to return Beren to Middle-earth. And there is the much quoted phrase in LotR where Gandalf says of Frodo that "you have been chosen". We are not told who did the choosing but most of us (including me) jump to the conclusion that it was Eru. The other obvious possibilities would be the element of providence in the final disposal of the Ring and the scene where Gandalf is taken to Eru after the destruction of his body and is then sent back to Arda again. Even the latter is not obvious from the book itself, but Tolkien has addressed this point in his letters.
If, out of the whole Legendarium, we can scrape up so few instances of 'interference', why would Eru suddenly fix his attention on one small hobbit with the explicit purpose of having him achieve spiritual growth through suffering? Yes, it is possible that, seeing the general problem with the Ring, he would have chosen Bilbo and Frodo as the best agents to bring about its destruction. But the motivation for that would be the all-encompassing problem of Sauron, not to lay down a path of suffering that Frodo must follow to achieve some spiritual goal.
Also let's not forget Bilbo. Gandalf in UT says clearly that he too was chosen. Yet he did not suffer in the same way as Frodo, and one senses that, although he grew and matured, he did not attain the level of insight that Frodo did. But this fact stemmed as much from personality differences as the varying degree of suffering to which the two hobbits were exposed.
It's a trickier thing when you begin discussing this question in terms of our own world. I'm sure you can get many answers, but my personal response would be no. Suffering is just too hideous for that. Most of us, at some point in our lives, experience some kind of personal cataclysm that forces us to stretch ourselves. Either we learn to surmount it, or we cave in and spiritually die. That's just the way life is, whether we like it or not. But let's not romanticize suffering. I worked for ten years with the parents of babies who died from crib death. For every parent I worked with who gained spiritual growth and insight, there were others who totally fell apart, destroying not just their own life but the lives of their surviving innocent children.
As the Bible aptly puts it, the rain fall on the just and the unjust. There are people who manage to surmount the suffering they are given and turn it into something positive, but too often the effect is exactly the opposite.
To me the miracle is this: that even in the worst circumstances, such as those which Frodo faced, some stubborn people (or hobbits) don't cave in but struggle on. Frodo did grow spiritually in some sense and, whatever else may be said about his transformation, he had enough inside himself to get the Ring to Mount Doom despite the suffering that he faced. Realistically, that is the most that anyone could have expected.
Nor is suffering the only way to grow. The best example of this in LotR is Sam. Sam's growth in LotR came not from suffering but from service. Fortunately, for most of us our own path will be closer to that of Sam than Frodo. Very few of us will be asked to give our all as Frodo did, but we will have a chance to live from day to day and do what we can to make things better for those around us. Tolkien himself says that Sam is the more typical hobbit of the two. There is a certain basic goodness in the Shire that stems not from suffering but those day-to-day good things. And the author makes it clear that, without the goodness of the Shire behind them, the hobbits could not have gone on in their quest. So there is more than one source of spiritual growth or strength, and the gentle goodness of daily life, as exhibited in the Shire, is surely one aspect of that.