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Anyone wants to place a bet how many pages this thread can carry on? Mine gamble would be somewhat around 11 (when folks on canonicity thread get wind (as I see you already started to) of what's going on.
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Oh Eru, nooooooooooooooo!
It seems to me that, in responding to this question, we have three broad options:
- We can interpret Eru as God in our own world, which (as Lalaith notes in post # 15) raises age old questions to which there is and can be no definitive answer, such as why God allows suffering in the world.
- We can try to look at in it Tolkien’s terms and answer on the basis of our understanding of his concept of God (as davem suggested in post #8).
- Or we can discuss how we react as readers to Eru based on what we know about Him in the text (the key aspects of which are outlined by Estelyn in post #9).
Personally, I prefer the last option as Eru is a fictional character and should, to my mind, be discussed as such (although our reactions as readers will, I suppose, be influenced to a degree by our own personal beliefs). On basis of the quotes given by
Estelyn and
Legolas and the definition which
Estelyn and
Bęthberry give of “sadism”, I would conclude that Eru is most definately not a sadist. But, in giving His Children free will, He has to accept (as indeed he does) the consequences, ie that they have the potential to rebel and give rise to evil, the inevitable consequence of which is suffering on the part of individuals. To have it any other way would be to deny them free will, and what would be the point of that?
The question remains, however, why certain individuals are “selected” for suffering. Gandalf says, for example, that Bilbo was “meant” to find the Ring. The almost inevitable consequence of this is that he or (more likely) Frodo will be charged with the task of destroying it, if it is to be destroyed. This issue was, as
davem indicates, explored in great depth in the
Nebulous "It" and Absolutes thread. My own view is that, while Eru refrains from simply just stepping in whenever He wants (which would deny His Children their free will), He allows himself to do so when evil would otherwise prevail (or, to use
H-I’s analogy, when the mess in the bedroom serves to undermine the structural order of the house
). But He never does so directly, but rather through His Children (such as Frodo), who still have a choice whether to go through with what He requires of them. Frodo could have turned back at any point, although that in itself raises an interesting question of what Eru would then have done to prevent Sauron’s total victory. Why Frodo? I think that it was because he was best suited to the task at hand. If he couldn’t have done it, then no one could have.
One further question arises in my mind, however. Are there such things as “natural” disasters in Arda (volcanoes, earthquakes and the like) or are all such phenomena the consequence of evil (in which case they will ultimately be the consequence of free will)? Such things cause suffering too, but if they are not the consequence of evil, then why does Eru allow them to exist within Arda? Did He give “nature” free will too?