Relative Powers

[drigel]

So are Eucatastrophes merely subjective? Tolkien says the greatest Eucatastrophe was the Resurrection of Jesus. So, would you say the Eucatastrophic experience is merely how we feel about an event rather than the event itself being, by its nature, Eucatastrophic?

Its all relative - varying degrees. The Resurrection is the ultimate, for Christians anyways, but for a Hindu... eh - not so exciting. I do commend you for the use of the word eucatastrophic, hussah!

There are other experiences for me that have occured in a space and a time that is of a more immediate nature to my personal reality, therefore I can only say for myself that it is a subjective internal process. Or lets say 2 people get in to a car accident, and both have near death experiences. They might not relate to it in the same way. One might say "I was so lucky", and thats it. The other would say "I was granted grace for some reason. I have been on the wrong path, now I am set on the right path", etc. For a society - the group as a body would have to have something in common for the group as a body to experience eucatastrophe - a common faith, a common enemy that has been overcome, a UFO landing in London, etc.

There are ideals revolving around the works that dont ever change, but ideals mean nothing without the individual. The primary world "as it should have been" for me would only apply to Valinor. In the sub-creation of ME, you would have to force justice onto a world where the genie is already out of the bottle, as it were.

I guess the point I was driving at was that it's not my nature to expect the external world to fit itself in my consciousness, regardless of my state of grace. I feel that I would be delusional or hallucinating otherwise. IMO, there were many acts of self-sacrifice in the 1st (or any) age that went unrewarded, ignored, that had no positive results for the individual. Those acts were just as significant and important (if only for the self-sacrificer's grace, or spiritual state) as the ones that had results, and were recorded in song. Conversely, how many goodly creatures died in the War of Wrath, when Beleriand was broken? Yet this is an event that I would say would be considered Eucatastrophic, at least to the players in the drama.

If you experienced a feeling of Eucatastrophe at a particular event, & I didn't wouldn't that mean I'd missed something - ie that I wasn't responding to an objective occurrence which I should respond to in a similar way?

Or, on the other hand, if you, along with a group of others, watched me commit an act of sacrifice, and didnt get rewarded for the act, would you think I was a loser? I wouldn't, no matter how many people thought I was.