[Rimbaud]

I'm glad nobody was offended by my poorly explained posts of yesterday. My original intent was merely to question Eru as 'seeing' the future; surely, if he was omnitemporal he would be there, instantaneously aware. 'Seeing' for me suggests some time-lag between event and perception.

I did touch upon a secondary point, which thanks to the more concise and structured replies of you all, I feel able to elaborate upon, yet more succintly, if that is not oxymoronic.

In particular, thank you to Heren Istarion who gave me a nice metaphor to work with. My secondary point, or certainly what it has metamorphosised into, is to study that rope that HI describes so ably.

I agree with the clarifications of Selmo's point. Tolkien understood and wanted the deity within ME to be extra-time. (This was one of the bases for my quibble with omnitemporality, but I see now that it depends on your perspective). So, as the deity watches the ants navigate the juice and sugar of life, he see all points of the 'journey' at once. Tolkien (and I would presume, most if not all of the posters on this thread) would see the deity as Good, and therefore Creation as Good - and that Time, if there is such a thing, will culminate in an Ultimate Good. However, if that deity is present at all points of the rope of time then the final picture is not the end of the rope but the rope as a whole. I mean to say, that there is no culmination if the deity is present at every point in that (however artificial) Time-span. There is simply the Whole, the Now, which encompasses every nanometre of the rope. So, (and here comes the rhetoric) if the Ultimate Good is not the End of the rope, but the Whole, evil events and actions do not constitute merely a necessary part of the Journey to the Ultimate Good - but are a part of the Ultimate Good itself. Thus, the Ultimate Good is not, well...Ultimately Good.

I think this is what I had intended to say yesterday; I confused myself when, in my mind I saw the deity and the Universe as one and the same.