Is Eru God?

[Lalwendë]

If Eru is God, then he is Tolkien's God, and he seems to ahve had a very tortured and idiosyncratic relationship with God. Firstly, Tolkien obviously endured immense mental suffering during WWI seeing his friends (and other men) slaughtered ostensibly for no good reason. Looking at the quotes davem has already posted, this is clear. Secondly, Tolkien undoubtedly had more than spiritual reasons for being a Catholic; it was his mother's religion and was important to him for this reason. It could have been said to have been his own 'precious', as it linked him to a loved parent.

So it appears Tolkien had a God he loved, and a God with motives he struggled to fully understand (of course none of us can ever truly know of any other person's relationship with God so we can only take evidence from what is written). This latter God appeared to demand blood sacrifice, like Odin (I think it was Fea who first mentioned this), and was not forgiving, not gentle. This God only seemed to offer a living Hell. I don't think it's coincidence that Tolkien stopped going to church during the 20s. He clearly had a difficult relationship with God and came to understand Him as a God who demanded not just worship but full on blood sacrifice.

Look at what happens in his work. This is a God who is not worshipped, whose only relationship with his people is to demand their lives every now and then (Numenor, Frodo) for the greater good. What Frodo goes through is very much like what the young conscript goes through. He is sent off to fight, to complete a suicide mission; he does not fully comprehend what will happen to him and only at Mount Doom does he realise what fate has in store for him. Against the odds he survives but only just, as what he ends up with is pure torment and Hell. He gets no reward. For all we know, his going off to the Undying Lands may as well be like taking his own life. We know he is mortal and going there is unlikely to change this; at best he might get a little comfort before he dies, but no reward of returning to his former life, no reward of going to 'Heaven'. What hapens to Frodo is horrible.

Yet what happens is compatible with the God that Tolkien knew, as he was inscrutable, sometimes incredibly cruel, but could somehow not be rejected. The other noticeable thing about this God is that he leaves the people to sort out just about all their problems and there is little intervention. For all the god it does the people, they might as well not have Eru. It demonstrates Tolkien's very difficult relationship with God. Where others who had been through what he went through entirely rejected God, he held onto his belief, seemingly only just, but at the expense of knowing a good God.

Looking at it from personal experience, my father rejected God after trauma, and says he would like to believe in God but cannot. I on the other hand believe in a God (though what I call it I don't know, although I know it is not trinitarian) but I cannot see the point in a veangeful or cruel God as I believe "Hell is other people". Anyone who has been through Hell may come out of it the other side with an idiosyncratic view of God, and this is what happened to Tolkien. Looked at this way, one of the major themes of his work may be the struggle to deal with a veangeful God who you cannot let go of.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalwende

Looked at this way, one of the major themes of his work may be the struggle to deal with a veangeful God who you cannot let go of.

I think it is the psychological 'tension' Tolkien felt between the reality he had known - losing his parents, his closest friends & having seen man's inhumanity to man on a scale never before experienced (which must have tempted him to question the existence of a caring God) - & his inability to reject God because of his mother's 'martyrdom' for her faith, which may actually have enabled him to produce his Legendarium, to spend most of his life producing it. That inner conflict had to be dealt with. God stands back & allows waste & suffering on a collossal scale - why doesn't he intervene & stop it???

Yet his own mother gave her life for that very God. To reject God would be to reject his own mother - or at least to declare that she was wrong & her death unnecessary (she quite possibly wouldn't have died if she had not become Catholic & brought her family's rejection & withdrawal of financial support on herself & her children).

I don't think that Tolkien's God was simply a 'vengeful' Deity who demanded human blood, & was glorified by that, but I do think he had that aspect to Him. Of course, Tolkien had to find some reason, or justification, for his mother's God having such a 'dark' side.

[littlemanpoet]

Regardless of how much can be garnered from Tolkien's Legendarium, Letters, and authorized Biography, attempting to psychologize the nature of his beliefs runs the inevitable risk of saying more about oneself than one says about Tolkien. Very astute points have been made, but I still find the commentary of Lalwendë and davem, for example, more revelatory about their own beliefs than those of Tolkien. Lalwendë, your own comments are very well qualified by a host of "seems" and "appears", as well as the admittance that I refer to above. Nevertheless, we cannot help but be inaccurate in our attempted portrayal of Tolkien's beliefs, at least from a psychological frame of reference. I imagine that a theological frame of reference may serve a little better, but I don't think very many people would be satisifed with that, in so much as it would either require a Roman Catholic (or at least Christian) context, or a non-RCC context that would be by turns just as innaccurate as a psychological.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Out of curiousity, I went to the source -- the Oxford English Dictionary -- to find if "eru" is a 'real' word. It is not, but eruv is. It's Hebrew and means:

Any of various symbolic arrangements which extend the private domain of Jewish households into public areas, thereby permitting activities in them that are normally forbidden in public on the Sabbath; spec. an urban area within which such an arrangement obtains, and which is symbolically enclosed by a wire boundary.

So an eruv (or the variant erub) is a public, social space that has been symbolically 'made' or converted into a private, religious space...soooooooo interesting. Is it too much of a stretch to see Eru as Tolkien's own extension into the public domain of his own "private domain"...? Given that the man was fond of, in his own words, "low philologic jokes" is it possible to see him using the narratives of Middle-Earth as "symbolic arrangements which extend the private domain of [Tolkien's] household into public areas, thereby permitting activities in them that are normally forbidden in public"????

(For what it's worth, the closest words I could find in the Latin family are eructate: "to vomit forth" and erudite: "learned, scholarly"; in Old English there's -ere: the masculine suffix (-es/-as) that "signifies a person or agent" and maybe ǽr-: a prefix meaning "early, former, preceding, ancient")

[Child of the 7th Age]

Oh, dear, I read these posts and tried to crawl in bed and sleep, but I felt compelled to get up and answer.....

This is a large part of why I do consider Eru to be both YHWH and the Trinitarian God-- the expectations and values placed on men are similar. Men are percieved as being "in control of their own destiny", having free will and making their own choices, their actions having true consequences. However, they cannot (by deciding and acting ) ultimately change the will and plans of Eru, any more than Melkor could. This has a similar feel to both the Christian Trinitarian God, and the Jewish YHWH. But it is quite different from many other religious concepts of God. I think that percieved personality is a large part of this whole consideration.

Helen

My thoughts are much closer to yours than they are to the depiction of Eru that Davem and Lalwende have put forward. I see Tolkien's Eru as distant and removed. But with all due respect, I do not see the demand for and glorification of human blood being one essential aspect of Eru in the Legendarium, which Davem's post states. Most of what is evil we bring on our own heads without help from the outside. I also have a problem with the portrayal of Frodo as an example of God's demanding and unreasonable nature:

Look at what happens in his work. This is a God who is not worshipped, whose only relationship with his people is to demand their lives every now and then (Numenor, Frodo) for the greater good. What Frodo goes through is very much like what the young conscript goes through. He is sent off to fight, to complete a suicide mission; he does not fully comprehend what will happen to him and only at Mount Doom does he realise what fate has in store for him. Against the odds he survives but only just, as what he ends up with is pure torment and Hell. He gets no reward. For all we know, his going off to the Undying Lands may as well be like taking his own life. We know he is mortal and going there is unlikely to change this; at best he might get a little comfort before he dies, but no reward of returning to his former life, no reward of going to 'Heaven'. What hapens to Frodo is horrible.

What happens to Frodo is sad, terribly sad, but it is not "horrible". Frodo was told, even from the beginning, that he could lose his life if he took on the task laid before him. Yet it was made equally evident that not taking on that task could result in the destruction of everything he knew and loved in the Shire. The full realization of what that meant came only slowly, but it was certainly not hidden from him.

Secondly, Frodo was given a choice. No God bludgeoned him over the head or put a knife to his throat. Sometimes, doing what is right is darned hard but you know in your heart what you have to do. Frodo was a decent person/Hobbit and he came to understand that. That he was injured horribly was true, and the general populace in the Shire did not recognize the sacrifice he made. Yet he was not without hope or friends. The support of Sam as well as the author's suggestion that the latter eventually sailed to the West, Arwen's attempt to give Frodo her seat on the vessel, Gandalf's gentle words of inquiry and how he made certain that Bilbo came with Frodo---to me this is not a scene of "horror" but of caring. I do not expect Eru to come flying down from the heavens to offer comfort and hope. Eru built these instincts into us, and it is our responsibility to respond with compassion. Frodo's friends clearly did this.

To assume that Frodo found no hope or relief in the West is to put words in the author's mouth that simply are not there. Nowhere in the Letters does Tolkien say Frodo would not find healing. He merely states that, like much in life, we simply do not know. But we have been told how much Frodo loved Elves and how the light in his eye came to gleem like a reflection of the splintered Silmarils caught in Galadriel's phial. If there is any mortal spirit who would be able to be healed across the Sea in Elvenhome, surely that would be Frodo.

I still think what we are dealing with here is not a difference in Eru but a difference in perspective. Somewhere in the Letters (I am too sleepy to dredge it up right now), Tolkien stated that one of the main reasons he wrote LotR and Silm was to see how men dealt with loss and hardship in an age when they had so little guidance: why and how they followed the path of "right" before they had been given any intimation of God's goodness and nature through revelation, and, in Tolkien's eyes, specifically through the incarnation. The author's eye then was not fixed on God or Eru, per se, but in looking at the response of men to the moral demands of the world. This is similar to Helen's statement above. Eru figures into this equation but only in a distant way, because that is the way the world worked in the pre-covenent period. If Eru is distant, it is because we are talking about the world before Abraham.

There is a second way that perspective comes into play here: that of our own personal perspective in reading the book. Littlemanpoet alluded to this in his post. If I had to use one word and only one word to describe the Legendarium, I would call it "bittersweet". The flashes of tragedy and horror are there, but so too is the steady undercurrent of hope. To view LotR largely from the negative side while failing to see the hope and light just won't work. And when we reduce Frodo's experience to "horror" or emphasize the "dark side" of Eru, we run the risk of erasing the clear line that exists between Sauron and the forces of light. I can't believe Tolkien would have wanted that.

There were clearly moments in life when the author was weighed down with despair. And yet there were other instances when we get a completely different picture. How else can you interpret the conversation between Andreth and Finrod? Tolkien felt so compelled to introduce the possibility of Eru entering into Arda that he even broke his own rule about "Christianity" not being part of the sub-created world. That conversation has always been magical to me: the tortured feelings of both parties, yet interspersed with the possibility of distant renewal. This interchange surely depicts a god of hope rather than anger or even distance.

_________________________

P.S. Can't help but add this, also in response to Lalwende . While no ritual is prescribed for the worship of Eru, Tolkien clearly states that those who follow Eru will combat the evils of the Shadow. I read this as essentially a moral directive: those who honor Eru will conduct themselves in such a way that their behavior will help to overthrow the evil posed by Morgoth and Sauron. To me, this moral imperative is far more significant than any ritual could possibly be.

[davem]

I can see & accept Child's points - but only if LotR is read in the light of the Legendarium (my usual way, admittedly). But in a recent conversation it was suggested that LotR is Tolkien's 'secular' novel. If we read LotR on its own, we don't get any sense of God being an active participant in the action. Gandalf is not 'an incarnate angel' to us, but a Wizard. Frodo's going into the West may (as Tolkien suggested in one of his letters) be read as an 'allegory' of death.

Remove his 'Christian' Eru from LotR & what do we get? Frodo sacrifices himself for others & dies. A 'reward' of some kind may be his, or it may not. Thus, it is the great 20th century novel to my mind & Tolkien is, in Shippey's phrase the 'Author of the Century' - he laid out our situation as human beings in a world where there is no hard evidence of an all powerful, loving God, where events like Gollum's fall may be seen as divine intervention or simple accident.

If Eru 'demands' Frodo's sacrifice He may be a Deity with both Light & Dark aspects, but nonetheless, He is a Deity the actually exists. What is the alternative? No Eru at all (which may be the case if we only read LotR) or an Eru who, in Gilson's words 'Canst only be glorified by man's own suffering & the supreme pain.' If Eru offers 'hope' to his Children it is hope which may only be found 'beyond the circles of the World', not within it. Hope, if it exists, exists with Eru, outside the World, yet LotR takes place within the World.

In short, if we include Eru in our understanding of LotR, make Him a player, we have to accept that he is 'inscrutable' (Gilson again), that he will allow suffering, if not actually require it, & that any 'reward' He gives to those who suffer for His (& other's) sake, is not recieved in this life. Neither does he deign to reveal even enough of himself to offer the smallest degree of reassurance to those who suffer for him that they suffer for a purpose. Eru kills the corrupted Numenoreans, but allows Sauron, their corrupter, to continue his existence in the world. The direct result of this is that Frodo will have to sacrifice himself to bring about his end.

If Eru 'chose' Frodo as Ringbearer, He also chose his ultimate fate. Eru's decision, way back before time, to allow Morgoth the freedom to alter the Music & then to enter into Arda, required Frodo's suffering. Frodo is destroyed because of Eru's choice - in other words, Frodo has to put right what Eru permitted.

[Lalwendë]

Presumptions and assumptions, that's all any of us really have to go on for what Tolkien truly felt about God. Applying theology isn't any different to applying psychology to his beliefs, how they were formed and how they developed; all we have to go on for evidence is the wealth of words written by and about Tolkien and none of us could hope to come close to understanding what he truly believed as the 'truth' of any person's relationship with God is utterly intangible.

Accepting that Tolkien's God is much more difficult and inscrutable than the kindly notions of God that many of us have come to know is not wrong. People of his generation were more likely to take the view that God could (and would) be cruel; my own Catholic grandmother used to tell me that God would smite me down and His way was His will. And you only have to look at a book of good, stirring Methodist hymns to see this view of God. Sacrifice and martyrdom has been, and is, a way of glorifying God.

Child expresses her belief in 'hope' through her post, and I too believe in 'hope', and through this I cling to the possibility that Frodo could have been healed too. But what the text lacks is any evidence that there truly is hope for Frodo. The great and the good contrive to obtain him a place in the ship to the West and judging by the evidence we have that Elves have powers of healing (e.g. Elrond healing Frodo's wounds at Rivendell) we might guess that he will at least receive some succour in the West. That gives us hope. But the cold hard fact is that the only thing that would truly heal Frodo is to turn back the clock and have none of this ever happen. When Frodo says "there is no real going back", then this is the truth; he will never return to his former state.

Frodo was indeed told that his task was dangerous, and he was given a choice, but do we know whether he fully comprehended that choice? I would say not, as it was not until Mount Doom that the awful truth dawned. Looking at this from real life, the servicemen who took part in experiments at Porton Down, and those who were involved in the atom bomb tests would have been told that their participation held risks, and though there may or may not have been choice involved, they would also have seen participation as their duty ("for the sake of my children and their children"). They would also end up hurt and would not be the same again, and though we can give them our compassion, it still does not undo the act or shut the Pandora's Box which was opened.

LotR, taken alone, has a very stark but modern ending. There is only a hope of succour, there are no promises and there is definitely no going back. I don't think it's only because the story is over that many people weep at the end of the book. Take LotR alone, without Eru, and the novel tells us that only the great efforts of human life can overcome evil, our hope lies with each other. Divinty is present, in the form of Light, but we do not know of Eru. Good and evil, Light and Dark are there but they are delineated through the actions of those who are 'good' or 'evil', not through reference to Eru.

But then take LotR in conjunction with the Silmarillion, and it becomes clear that there is a God in this world we are reading about, and it then becomes clear that this God is somewhat inscrutable, allowing suffering and we begin to ask why? Tolkien's answer as to why is that Eru just is, and it is his will. The Long Defeat is endless until Eru decides to bring about the End of Arda, as these people will continue to struggle and suffer against the evil which Eru allowed to enter into their world.

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by davem

Frodo is destroyed because of Eru's choice - in other words, Frodo has to put right what Eru permitted.

And if Eru had not permitted it, none of the inhabitants of Arda would have been free agents. So we are left condemning Eru either for permitting free will, or allowing evil. We can't have it both ways. This has turned into a revisitation of another thread's discussion about a year or so ago. Remember it?