Tolkien & killling?

[Bill Ferny]

Bill Ferny seems to be the gent who could best answer it, as the expert on things religious. Do the Orcs have free will or not?

No, I’m not the person to ask [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]. (For Lush: I DUNNO! [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]) There are far better Tolkienologists on this forum, and a search of “free will” and “inherent evil” will give you some better info. I do know this, however: Tolkien abandoned his notion that orcs were corrupted elves. This entails quite a bit of speculation as to if orcs had free will or if they were intrinsically evil.

This is a drastic step away from the "Is it not only a dream? Is it not all relative?" philosophy that some might use to explain ethics. In the Christian stance, good was good and then part of it became bad; not that good and bad are two different things existing independently. That is dualism, and something that I tend to believe didn't exist in ME.

Go Daughter! Go Daughter! It’s your birthday! It’s your birthday! (Ok, ok, but my eight year old son loves to say that.)

Anyway, this is the most important element for any understanding of Christian morality. Hats off to Daughter [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. Another way to put it is: in as much as something exists, it is good. That which exists to the highest degree is the highest good. This notion was so thoroughly indoctrinated into to Tolkien, that he naturally included it in his mythology.

Unfortunately, this notion is not too well liked by modernists because it applies a hierarchy of being, not only to the objective world, but also to the subjective world of ideas. For many people any hierarchy is a despotism. Well, I can handle it, because I definitely know I’m not God… others don’t feel that way. (No, that’s not a jab at Psych or Lit professors… well, maybe it is. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] )

aragornreborn… in response to your response to my response (huh?)… grrrr, in response to your May 7, 9:58am post. First of all, I do not question an objective reality beyond the sensing, knowing person. Believe me, I’m as far from a relativist as one can get. What I was attempting to briefly describe in a short space was that human knowledge is a collective affair.

Take, for example, Saint Thomas Aquinas. As much as I would like to say that Saint Thomas Aquinas is the height of all metaphysical and theological knowledge, I can not. He, like all other philosophers and theologians, is simply a single step in our collective knowledge (albeit a pretty massive step!). There are inconsistencies and holes in Saint Thomas’ metaphysics that has been filled by people such Heideger, Fichte and Lonergan. There is a lack of understanding in Saint Thomas' doctrinal theology that has been illuminated by modern biblical exegesis and patristics, and people like Adrian Nichols and Rodger Charles. There are holes in Saint Thomas’ moral theology that has been filled by people such as Josef Pieper and Romanus Cessario.

We continue along a linear path, ever deepening our knowledge of the diverse arts. Our knowledge of the objective world is constantly expanding (sometimes shrinking), and this is especially true of the human person and God. The use of the word “comprehending” in reference to our knowledge of God is inaccurate. There is no way to comprehend God, because He is, by His nature as infinite, incomprehensible. One can not know all there is to know about God. In fact, the more you know about God, the more you realize how little you know about God. However, one can apprehend God: know that He is, know those philosophical principles (which by their very definition are incomprehensible) and revealed truths (which by their own admission can only be understood in community) about Him, and all that that entails. Apprehending God is no easy task, taking into consideration the long history of doctrinal development.

The greatest contribution to Thomistic realism (and by consequence, modern Catholic moral theology) were the philosophies of Heideger, Fichte and Schelling. The human person, with his immaterial rational soul, is not comprehensible, but the Dasein, the person, was, like God, an ever knowable object (though certainly not infinite, but still not within the realm of utter knowability). Created reality, with its inter-connectedness through time and space, a fifth and sixth dimension if you will, was also an ever knowable object. Thus, all our knowledge about God, His creation and ourselves, is ever expandable, ever growing, always adventure.

Does this negate everything we know right now? Of course, not. We can apprehend enough of all things in order to make right judgements. Those hierarchies do exist, and always have. However, it does entail a great responsibility on the human race to ever delve the realms of our whole lives, to give fair hearing to those who disagree with the way we look at the world (including those who are just plain wrong, like Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Voltaire, Camus, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Schopenhaur, Gibbon, Whitehead… ok, so I’m a little opinionated… because even those clods had moments of insight), and to attempt to discover objective truth as a community. There’s no excuse not to act on what we know; there’s no excuse to ignore what we know; but we must always have the humility to admit there’s always something we do not know.

Well, it’s a school night… Maybe I’ll try to make this a bit more Tolkien relevant latter.