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Originally Posted by davem
The difference is that, at best, Eru is Tolkien's take on God. Eru can't be the same as God, because he has no power to act beyond Tolkien's intention. Tolkien could have Eru do whatever he wanted Him to. To say that God=Eru is mistaking the map for the territory.
Also, is that the only one to one correspondence you see in the book? Do you see Frodo, or Aragorn as Christ? I think Eru=God is at the most extreme end of allegorical interpretation of the Legendarium. Tolkien's mind (anymore than any created being's) could not encompass the fullness & complexity of God - he would have to be greater than God in order to do that. He could only possibly know as much of God as God chose to reveal to him & 'you can't get a quart into a pint pot', as my old gaffer used to say  |
Okay, let's imagine this differently, then. Supposing that I was an artist, and I wanted to draw a picture of God caring for a repentant sinner. The sinner is not an allegory of any person or experience I personally know, or even that I don't know, just a sinner. His features might be based off of people I know, and his expression might be borrowed from somewhere. Same thing with the image of God.
Once I am done, I have a picture of God caring for a repentant sinner. It is not an allegory, nor is it a true story or a representation of one. It is, for all intents and purposes, a story.
So, I ask you then, is the God in my picture different than the God in Heaven? Yes, I agree that he is insofar as he is a painted object in my painting and the creator of all things in Heaven. However, within the confines of the painting, within the image, is there any reason to say that it is NOT as much God to the painted man as God Himself is to me?
What you seem to be saying, Master Davem, is that it is not possible for Man to write about God. I would put forward that this is a false premise. Man has been writing about God for thousands of years. He's the main character in the Bible.
And if God can be written about in a non-fiction work, even though none of the writers or the others characters can really, or did really, understand Him, then why is it so impossible for him to be written into a fictional work as well?
You base your premise that one CANNOT say that Eru is God because no one can know God completely. Well, as far as that goes, you can't know me completely. You can't know Mister Underhill completely. You can't even know Lalwende completely. It is a fact of human nature that we can NEVER know someone completely, entirely, totally.
Does that stop us from writing about them? No. Look at the abundance of biographies and, more pertinent to the discussion, historical novels, many of which were written by people who weren't even born at the time they occured. But they include real people, and they are, within the book, intended to be everything to the other characters (real or fictional) what they were to the people of their own time and period.
If it is possible then to write a fictional novel about fictional characters that incorporates real people into a story, with those real people being everything to the fictional characters that they were to their own contemporaries, then why is it so impossible to wriate a fictional epic about fictional characters that incorporates God into a story, with God being everything to that fictional world that he is to ours?