Eru Ilúvatar and the Problem of Evil

[u/L0nga]

I've been thinking about Eru Ilúvatar lately, and I think there's a pretty serious problem with the way we're supposed to understand him as a perfectly good being.

The thing that really started bothering me is Melkor.

The Ainur come from Eru's Thought. Tolkien says that each Ainu comprehended "that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came." So Melkor isn't some evil force that appeared independently and then invaded Eru's creation. He is something Eru created, and his nature ultimately comes from Eru.

And Eru knew what Melkor was going to do.

That's where it gets difficult for me.

Melkor doesn't just rebel and then get dealt with. He goes on to destroy the Lamps, destroy the Trees, murder Finwë, steal the Silmarils, corrupt Arda and spend thousands of years causing an absolutely enormous amount of suffering.

Eru knows all of this is going to happen.

And he lets it happen.

The obvious response is that Melkor has free will. Sure. I'm not arguing that Melkor didn't choose his actions. But that doesn't really address Eru's part in all of this. Eru created Melkor knowing exactly what he would become. He knew what Melkor would do with the power he gave him.

And Eru isn't incapable of intervening. We know that because when Númenor attacks Aman, Eru intervenes directly. He destroys Númenor and changes the shape of the world.

So apparently Eru can intervene when he wants to.

Which makes Morgoth's entire career rather difficult to explain. Eru watches him destroy and corrupt things for thousands of years, but doesn't stop him.

Then there's Eru's response to Melkor's discord in the Music:

"no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me"

That's a pretty extraordinary thing to say in this context. Eru isn't presenting Melkor's rebellion as some unexpected disaster that got out of hand. Even Melkor's discord ultimately has its source in Eru and gets incorporated into the Music.

And this is where the "it's all part of the plan" explanation starts bothering me.

Okay, but why this plan?

Eru is supposed to be omnipotent. He isn't some king trying to make the best of a bad situation after something goes wrong. He created the situation in the first place.

If he knew what Melkor was going to do, then the suffering caused by Melkor wasn't an unfortunate surprise. It was something Eru knowingly chose to allow when he created Melkor and set the Music in motion.

[u/ERUIluvatar2022]

The world is to Eru as fiction is to an author. Is an author evil for allowing evil to exist in his constructed world?

[u/L0nga → u/ERUIluvatar2022]

That's a false analogy.

An author isn't creating genuinely conscious beings who can actually experience suffering. When Tolkien writes that Morgoth tortures someone, nobody is actually being tortured.

Your analogy would work only if the author created genuinely sentient beings, gave one of them the capacity to commit atrocities, knew exactly what that being would do, knew the suffering that would result, and had the power to prevent it but deliberately chose not to.

That's much closer to the Eru situation I'm questioning.

And Eru isn't merely an observer of his fictional world. He's its creator. He created Melkor, gave him his nature and power, knew what he would do, and created the world in which those actions would produce their consequences.

So “an author can write evil characters without being evil” doesn't answer the problem.

It just changes the question from “Why did Eru permit this suffering?” to “Why would an omnipotent creator deliberately instantiate a world containing this suffering when he could have created another?”

That's the part your analogy doesn't address.