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Old 04-16-2004, 01:16 PM   #7
littlemanpoet
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The Edge of Faerie
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littlemanpoet is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.littlemanpoet is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Tolkien Accounting versus Living

davem: Maybe that's putting too bald a face on it, but I found your comment interesting:

Quote:
I still don't think the 'wrongness' is accounted for.
Precisely. You are saying what the book said: accounting cannot arrive at an answer, because you're still trying to add things up, and they will not. Your example of Jung and transcendence is an example of numinous experience.

Quote:
And if that wrongness continues, that's unjust, & we are back at the question of why Eru, or God, allows that injustice. Is bringing right out of wrong, good out of evil, sufficient justification for allowing the 'evil' to go on existing?
This is just another version of asking "why". I think "why" is unanswerable. One has to let go of "why" and move through the suffering to the numinous, that completes the suffering with joy.

It is also telling that, from the Christian tradition again, Christ still bears the scars of his suffering, even in his "perfect", resurrected body, and will forever, according to the texts. So perfection no longer equals "without blemish", but seems to equal "completed and restored to wholeness, even with the signs of suffering still there". Apparently, if one accepts the Christian point of view on this, every scar we bear after our how-ever-many-years of life, may still be visible, whether emotional, psychological, spiritual, physical, or whatever, but will be made part of the perfection of the resurrected body. Sorry if this was offensive to those of you who do not hold to this particular faith; it's the way I think and view the world, and you know, I'm rather glad of it right now.

Completeness seems like the only possible conclusion to suffering, and it seems to be what Tolkien is suggesting not only for Frodo, but for Sam and the rest of the Fellowship as well.
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