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Originally Posted by lmp
Therefore, Eru cannot have been anything but entirely good from the beginning, and the text never shows any alteration from this. Melkor's discord was from his own imaginings and do not derive from Ilúvatar, as stated in the text.
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Tolkien differs in his opinion:
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no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me
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and
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thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory
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These lines demonstrate that both Melkor's discordant theme and even his thoughts are a product of Eru. So from the very beginning, when the Valar were created, Eru made them with evil inbuilt. And as Eru says, evil is a part of the essence of existence in this cosmology; it is 'tributary' to glory, i.e. it must bow down to it, but it is an essential part of it.
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this condition Iluvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs
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Not only did Melkor, his thought and his discordant music have their source in Eru, but because Melkor decided to enter the physical world, his power was inherently and eternally bound to the circles of the world (which possibly explains why the Void was such a good prison for him - he would be separated from his power out there, it remained down in Arda - fantastic concept). The Valar are the life of Arda, and Arda is their life - so not only are Varda and Orome and Yavanna etc a part of Arda, but so too is Melkor, irrevocably.
And Eru allowed this to happen, but as is said above, "no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me". That is one of the essential mysteries of Eru, why he makes Melkor the way he does, and allows Melkor the freedom to be part of this creation; who knows why evil is part of Eru's plan, but it is.
It's all there in the books.
Problems only arise when we try to get our heads around the nature of what we read in Tolkien's stories. It doesn't matter if we apply our religion or non-religion to it, if we apply our sense of human rights, or our sense of animal rights, or lefts or ups or downs. The only way to comprehend why things happen is to look at the books and what they give us. And if you look at the books, then evil is part of Eru's plan. It has its origins in him. It's something I find hard to accept but there it is. And why? Well...I suppose Tolkien gives us the best explanation possible. Eru describes the world he has created as:
It is. It is what? Is just is.