Of the Goodness of Tolkien’s Eru

April has been a quiet month at A Phuulish Fellow. I have had an exceptionally good reading month, and a decently productive writing month – for original fiction, anyway – but not much has caught my eye that suggested a blog article. It has been vaguely frustrating, to be honest. Damn it, I need more Tolkienian controversies to blow up – I can’t just wait until the next season of Rings of Power for some material to work with.

Well, as luck would have it, a Discord contact has pointed me at the direction of a certain article about the Goodness of Tolkien’s Eru – or the lack thereof:

https://lalaithmesp.blogspot.com/p/is-eru-good-god-epithets-and-actions-of.html

Oh yes. There is material here.

Now, first off, I think the essay is somewhat at fault for not properly defining what Good is, within the context of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. We actually run into a variation of the old Euthyphro Dilemma from Plato here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma, whereby we are unsure whether something is Good because Eru wills it, or Eru wills it because it is Good. My own instinct is that the second horn of the dilemma is the more satisfactory, as it stops the Goodness of Tolkien’s Eru becoming a mere tautology – though your mileage may vary. For its part, the article essentially tries to judge Eru through the lens of human moral understanding, which strikes me as mistake. Even if one disagrees with the standard approaches to Theodicy, it is at least worthwhile to consider them. The Book of Job and Boethius were exploring these matters centuries ago.

(That said, I do think there is a decent argument to be made that Tolkien’s Eru is primarily concerned with the Beauty of Creation, and less with conventional notions of Goodness. Tolkien would insist that Beauty and Goodness are really the same, of course, but the Eru of the Ainulindalë does very much come across as an artist. Aesthetic Theodicy, perhaps, though it is worth noting that the Ainulindalë is the product of the Elves writing down what they had heard from the Ainur… and the artistically-driven Elves might be putting their own subjective understandings into this metaphysical soup).

The essay then goes on to list three charges against Eru – oddly enough, none of them involving Túrin Turambar. Odd because if there was ever a Tolkien story that sought to wrestle with Theodicy, it is The Children of Húrin.

The first charge is that Eru allows Melkor to mar Creation, and abuse Eru’s own Children. The essay rejects the famous Shall Prove But Mine Instrument justification:

Iluvátar’s notorious statement, popularly known as the But-mine-instrument-Clause, has indeed met much criticism because it is belittling, if not outright justifying evil. Manwë would one day interpret the Clause like this: „Even as Eru spoke to us shall beauty not before conceived be brought into Eä, and evil yet be good to have been.“ One should not think that such a word was possible in a world like Eä. Just try to be more specific about „evil“ and tell for yourself whether it does not ring tremendously false to your ears: „9/11 will be good to have been.“ – „Auschwitz will be good to have been.“ – „Stalinism will be good to have been.“ No, it is absolutely impossible to say something so naive and get away with it, even if you are a Vala. Manwë deservedly gets rebuked by Mandos: „And yet remain evil.“ Well said, Mandos! Now, if only Eru was that wise…

In response to which, one might invoke one of the most famous speeches in science-fiction television. Tom Baker’s Doctor musing on exterminating the Daleks in the old Doctor Who serial, Genesis of the Daleks (1975):

Now, in fairness, Tolkien’s Eru does have the right to intervene in this way. It is, after all, His Creation, and He could no doubt remove Melkor from existence as easily as He created him. But to intervene would involve a violation of Free Will – not just Melkor’s, but those of all Arda’s creatures – and undermine the innate dignity that springs from Free Will.

Moreover, as the Doctor notes, “some things might be better because of the Daleks.” Some things might be better because terrible things have happened – because, as The Book of Job (and then later Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy) points out, we mere mortals have no point of comparison. We cannot see the entire picture – the future if 9/11 had never happened, to take the essay’s example – whereas Eru can see. He can see an Arda without Melkor’s tampering, and an Arda with Melkor’s tampering. And this is where the Shall Prove But Mine Instrument comes into its own. Melkor (as Mandos points out) is Evil because of his actions and choices… but that falls on him. Wider Creation itself, so far as Eru is concerned, is a better place, at least artistically.

In that respect, there is a reason Tolkien went with the concept of a Symphony of Creation, rather than the essay’s analogy of building a house and allowing someone to deliberately introduce faults. The Great Symphony arises organically, and incorporates notes (even from Melkor) in pursuit of Beauty. Eru is not designing a building to fill with little automatons.

The second charge against Eru is the Problem of the Orcs. Now, it must be admitted that the redeemability of the Orcs is a question that fundamentally breaks Tolkien’s internal metaphysics. Story wars with philosophy.

But the essay very much blames Eru for this predicament:

The issue has once been addressed like this: „Would Eru provide feär for such creatures? For the Eagles etc. perhaps. But not for Orcs.“ That spawned the hypothesis that Orcs were irrational animals, driven only by the dispersed spirit of their masters (Morgoth or Sauron). But this assumption is clearly in conflict with numerous evidence for Orcs behaving as if indeed they had a soul, arguing rationally (to their profit), acting consciously in the absence of any puppeteering masters and, if they could, even against them. But if Orcs have a soul, who gives it to them? It is the uncontested belief by all the Wise that „the new feä … come[s] direct from Eru and from beyond Eä.“ Which can only mean this: Eru equips evil Orcs with evil feär!

There is an easy out here: we simply do not know enough about the metaphysical situation of the Orcs. It is one of the mysteries of Middle-earth, a Gordian Knot that Tolkien himself could not untangle. All we have are his various competing ideas and theories. The essay plays fast and loose with that, treating shaky authorial uncertainty as solid ground.

But to meet the essay on its own turf – Eru does not equip the Orcs with evil feär, because feär are not innately evil. Orcs are evil because they act evilly, and make evil choices, and while one might question how much Free Will the average Orc has in practice, one cannot blame their evil inclinations on something beyond the world. Their evil inclinations are very much of this world.

The third and final charge against Eru involves the destruction of Númenor, and more specifically, the deaths of innocents arising from that.

For to Iluvátar, granting help means inflicting genocides. Not as if he, supreme and almighty god, did not have more subtle means! We should assume be might just halt Ar-Pharazôn’s heart – and while we are at that, those of his senior officers, too – and with all their tyrants dropping dead on the afterdeck, the survivors would fall onto their knees, praise God for delivering them from Evil, and rejoicingly return to freedom. Oh no, not that! Iluvátar resorts to divine displays of the most coercing kind: „And all the fleets of the Númenóreans were drawn down into the abyss, and they were drowned and swallowed up for ever.

Giving the King a convenient heart-attack would not fix Númenor. The islanders have become utterly obsessed with their Fear of Death, and Sauron is sitting back home, smugly anticipating what he will do next. Númenor has not merely stopped acknowledging Eru, it has literally become the home of Devil-worshippers, and practitioners of human sacrifice. Can the essay-writer not see that this is a recipe for continued repeats of Pharazôn’s misadventures, until Something Must Be Done? The Númenoreans were also given the island under the clear condition that they must not sail West to Aman – one would imagine that removal of said island actually makes sense, given what these people have just done.

Now, there is a decent argument that Eru’s actions here took the lives of innocents – Tar-Miriel, for example, assuming she was not the Partner in Crime from Tolkien’s alternative version of her story. But I think one needs to take a step back, and consider the oddity of the Akallabêth, as it applies to Tolkien’s invented world. This is a story where the underlying ethics are different from normal, and not merely because Tolkien wanted to write a Deluge story.

The Akallabêth is is easily the most Old Testament-flavoured story Tolkien ever wrote. And the thing about the Old Testament God is that He does not play by a modern mindset. He sets down His rules, and expects those rules to be followed. Breaking those rules has consequences.

As such, the survivors of the Downfall would not curse Eru for destroying their home. Rather, the Old Testament view would be along the lines of “we sacrificed innocents to a false god, and invaded Aman in violation of the Ban. He let some of us live. Truly, He is merciful.”

(There is a New Testament element to the story too, in the form of Amandil. Putting the principle of Forgiveness above adherence to Rules. It earns Elendil that fortunate wind).

Can we convict Eru of being a Bad God here? Certainly, if we apply moral standards external to the spirit of the story. The Akallabêth is an in-universe Mythic Lesson, as expressed through an in-universe narrator with a worldview utterly alien to that of the twenty-first century West. Bringing in anachronistic considerations does not strike me as a useful approach to analysing the story. Can we fit this eccentricity within the spirit of the wider legendarium? That in itself replicates the matter of the Old Testament versus the New Testament, though one can construct artificial work-arounds – the possibility that the Downfall was merely a volcanic eruption, and that the episode was mythologised by in-universe people after the fact. But really, one ought not to see Tolkien’s legendarium as completely consistent with itself, and that extends to his treatment of Eru.

**

So is Tolkien’s Eru then a ‘Good or Bad God’? Frankly, I do not think the text invites us to ask that question. The character is a hands-off deity, and with only some notable exceptions, stays out of the narrative. To charge Him, as the linked essay does, with responsibility for Melkor or the Orcs or the Downfall is really to neglect the underlying spirit of Tolkien’s stories. Fun as it might be to criticise the Valar’s missteps, judging Eru is rather something beyond the reader’s pay-grade in any serious serious sense, as we are not given enough evidence, nor does Tolkien ever mean for us to make such a judgement.

• April 28, 2024
• Philosophy, Reading, Tolkien essays, Youtube
• 2 Comments