God can write straight with crooked lines.

[Limnor]

Philo, your love of Tolkien's writing is evident. Writers such as Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Clancy (just kidding, kind of) have offered the world a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and try to connect with or understand the divine.

Your two LONG posts have much that I actually agree with as it 'feels right' to me. When I have more time I will try to make some comments on what you've written as you have spent some time putting your thoughts together. As it is, my mind is starting to shut down for the day.

Happy New Year!

Regards,
MG

LOTR feels deeply meaningful, to me and many other people. But we don’t treat LOTR as something to pray about in order to determine its truth. So what, exactly, does “feels right” establish, and what does it not?

[Gadianton]

I also enjoyed Philo's explanation of LOTR. The main thing it makes me think about is the fantasy genre. How does fantasy frame an explanation for the world vs. sci fi and other fiction? God seems not to be allowed, just magic. The problem with magic is that it's a wildcard; can do anything. So you've got to invent rules for the magic, but then it's not really magic, so what is it? It's not science. It's not God or straightforward morality.

[Limnor]

I’m enjoying Philo’s posts as well. I think the story of Boromir and Faramir play out what Philo is describing.

Boromir and Faramir are brothers, sons of the Steward of Gondor, who rules in the absence of the King. Boromir is tempted to seize the Ring of Power and use it to force the right outcome; he believes power can bring about goodness. Faramir also has the chance to take the Ring, but refuses because he recognizes that goodness can be destroyed through coercion. Boromir does have a moment of redemption, but Tolkien is careful about what that redemption means and doesn’t use it to justify Boromir’s actions.

I think Tolkien avoids the claim that evil is necessary for good—“let us do evil that good may come” as described in Paul’s letter to the Romans—or that suffering somehow improves the whole. He doesn’t play the “crooked lines” game at all.

[Philo Sofee]

The Legendarium is the vast group of myths, histories, languages, and philosophical reflections created by J. R. R. Tolkien to give depth and reality to Middle-earth. It is not like a single story is involved. It's more like an entire mythic world like a secondary reality with its own creation account, ancient wars, fading ages, genealogies, poems, and invented languages.

The Legendarium explores how creation, freedom, pride, sacrifice, decline, and hope unfold across time. Events are shaped not only by heroes and villains, but by music, memory, and moral choice. Power is dangerous when seized, healing is often quiet and costly, and the greatest victories are frequently acts of endurance rather than conquest. And it is more to the small and unimportant who effect greater change than the mighty and heroic.

Tolkien's books like The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are expressions of this larger mythic framework, each telling only part of a much older and deeper story. JRR's son Christopher gave us the Unfinished Tales as well as the 12 volume History of Middle Earth which so many are just not aware of in any kind of detail, since the movies only focus on a small part of the 3rd Age of Middle Earth, while the entirety is in 4 Ages. The Legendarium treats history as layered and fragmentary, full of lost songs, half-remembered truths, and competing perspectives, much like real ancient myth.

In short, the Legendarium is a mythology of meaning: a world built to feel older than the stories told within it, where light diminishes, memory matters, and hope survives not because evil is absent, but because goodness refuses to vanish.

Just to add (and I'm going by memory here, so I apologize if I am mixing Tolkien's Legendarium with something else), there's also an underlying theme of the cyclical nature of all things. Power (the rise and fall), the repeated patterns within the overarching myth-cycle, the impermanence of creation and the inevitability of destruction (for example, Two Lamps). Even the cyclical nature of collective and individual memory (gaining knowledge, and the slow loss of it).

If Tolkien had no ethics, and had decided to go the route of pretending to be a prophet, the religious tradition would have had an internal consistency, and richness that would have rivaled most modern and ancient religions. His only failing was in the creation of the orcs as being seen by all races as irredeemable, and worthy of only death. To me, that seems to be the most problematic glaring hole in the overall morality of the word he created.

Excellent points Dr. Steuss... So... here is how I would approach it, based on Tolkien's evolving thinking through time. He never did stop developing, changing, learning, and improving the world he created, which, betimes caused extra interesting contradictions to pop up which he would then address. His was never a completed project, but an adventure into the further unknown. He constantly revised the languages (which really ARE fun by the way!), the history, the chronology, and attempts to keep it real as a legendary world.

You put your finger on the issue that Tolkien's world shows the rise and fall of powers, how patterns repeat across ages, knowledge lost, and the general impermanence of things. Some destruction was followed with a partial renewal. Yet some things were entirely lost never to be brought back, like the two trees of light, the great Numenor, the fading the elves, etc. So, yeah, cycles exist, but so does forward moving. His repetition of patterns is not entirely like the Eastern or classic myth systems. Some things really are lost forever in Tolkien's world. The Silmarils are never recovered for instance. Many of the rings are destroyed, some of the Palantiri are destroyed and never rebuilt or used. So there is no eternal cycle that resets, but rather there is irreversible history where we can hear echoes, but there is no loop, as like Nietzsche's eternal return loop. So how does this effect Tolkien's ethics?

You are entirely correct to bring up the orcs, a subject Tolkien also thought through for decades since it bothered him greatly. Tolkien could have created a religion-like system with internal consistency. But the reason he didn’t is not lack of ambition, but it speaks more to ethical restraint. He refused prophetic authority, doctrinal finality, and moral closure. For him, he didn’t want people to obey Middle-earth. He wanted them to think inside it.

What I see in the various discussions of his Legendarium therefore is his ideas survive skeptical scrutiny since he remained open ended ethically. And yes, this disturbs some organized religions pretty badly! A fake prophet would have closed questions. Tolkien appears to me to have kept them open on purpose. And I don't see that as a failure on his part or laziness either. It's more in line, interestingly enough, with moral discipline. This brings us to the orcs. They aren't a hole in the system so much as an unresolved wound. And I don't see your point as naïve at all either. Tolkien himself struggled with this. I suggest, based on what we have of Tolkien's expositions that the Orcs were not morally unredeemable in principle. And, his struggling apparently prevented him from finding closure with this issue. Their existence is not a sweet spot in his ethics. His struggle can really be seen in his draft letter to Peter Hastings, a Catholic who was the manager of the Newman Bookshop in Oxford who had asked him if he had over-stepped his ethical and moral bounds in his sub-creation. (In "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien," 2nd revised and enlarged edition, (2023): pp. 281-291)

Later in life he resisted that Orcs were soulless and purely evil by nature which deserved death simply by existing. He worried deeply that this would violate his belief that evil cannot create life, and imply God created beings beyond redemption, which in turn, in men's minds would justify extermination as being acceptable and morally clean. His troubled soul never did fully solve all that. But that is part of his point as well. They are ethically troubling by design. As we look over the Orcs in the story they appear to be the visible cost of domination. They are the end-state of total corruption (interesting to compare with Gollum, no?!). Orcs were robbed of culture, of mercy and even choice actually. They are not evil choices made freely, they are victims of Morgoth's violence, twisted beyond repair. But Tolkien doesn't then let us off the hook easily here. All this doesn't make their deaths morally easy by any means. It makes it tragic. I don't see Tolkien's own struggle to come to grips with this as lazy so much as morally honest about the cost of evil. Some harms, once done, cannot be undone, and that disturbs us, exactly as it should! And this doesn't collapse Tolkien's ethics I don't think, because nowhere in the Legendarium does Tolkien celebrate the killing of Orcs as a moral good. It is regrettable and tragic within the story’s constraints. He doesn't ever frame it anywhere as righteous joy. And here we get an incredible instructive contrast to mull over.

Some theology systems declare entire groups morally worthless, which in their turns justifies in their minds violence as obedience, in order to erase the moral discomfort. Yet Tolkien does not shy away from keeping that discomfort alive and seen, and felt. Tolkien's world is scarred, not with holes in the plot, but with a reality of consequences of choices made, ethics twisted, and lives changed. Orcs actually, come to think of it (!), support Tolkien's moral seriousness. If it was shallow, Orcs would be easy to destroy and be seen as a cleansing. No questions would linger. We wouldn't have to deal with this nasty business. Yet, readers keep asking about them, and very properly so. Tolkien himself kept revising their origin since he never fully resolved their problem. I would propose this is a sign of ethical depth, not failure. He increasingly rejected the idea of irredeemable beings, but never found a clean narrative solution. That lingering discomfort feels intentional to me appearing, on deep thought, as a refusal to make domination’s victims morally easy. This, to me, shows too much ethics for easy answers. Tolkien didn’t close every moral loop because closing them would have meant lying about the cost of evil. And that’s exactly why his work keeps generating serious thought rather than collapsing into doctrine.

[Gadianton]

But we don’t treat LOTR as something to pray about in order to determine its truth. So what, exactly, does “feels right” establish, and what does it not?

If I read a book on gravity, I might find it exciting and enlightening, experience "a-ha!" moments and perhaps tears if my curiosity is really getting satisfied. I'll call this a first order confirmation by the Holy Ghost. A non-believer might say the "feels right" feeling comes from the wisdom of the words on the page as the words are comprehended. Second order confirmation comes when the Holy Ghost triggers a powerful emotional response to the words being read, independent of comprehension, which assures us that the words are authorized by God and factual. It's literally a magic 8-ball confirming "yes" or "no" with no other information.

I might begin to read a book on gravity, and in theory, the Holy Ghost might grant the second order confirmation, even though it's totally over my head. I might file that book away for a later time, knowing it's true, and that down the road I'll gain a lot from it. But what if I begin to read a book on evolution? In theory, the Holy Ghost will darken my mind, in a second order answer, and cause a stupor of thought. This is the 8-ball "no".

Mormons by default always mean the second order confirmation when they speak of determining truth, it's just how Mormon culture has evolved, but the first sense gets played all the time as needed. For instance, ask a missionary if the Koran is true. Better, ask Dan Peterson. He can't really say the HG darkened his mind and told him it was false, but he can't say it's true in the same as the Book of Mormon is true either or even the Bible. My world religion teacher did that at BYU and threw the class into a tailspin. Aha! A first order confirmation is possible. The general wisdom of the book can definitely be experienced through the power of the Holy Ghost. Even the book on evolution could be dealt with in theory, as I read the book, there are certain truths therein that might initially bring excitement to my mind, but, Satan tells 99 truths to tell one lie, and so the Holy Ghost might step in to bring the second order stupor or thought even though the words are quite coherent and even beautiful in their way. Nip it in the bud.

Perhaps MG's Sorites Paradox comes into play here. Just like we don't know how many hairs make a beard, we don't know how many little truths equate to Truth, and so the first order confirmation happens with fluidity, as hairs are encountered, while the second order holds the divine fuzzy logic that yields the binary "yes" or "no" 8-ball answer to say if it's really a beard or not without needing to focus on each hair.

I think the unique part to Mormonism is the second-order 8-ball T or F confirmation.

[Philo Sofee]

Philo, your love of Tolkien's writing is evident. Writers such as Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Clancy (just kidding, kind of) have offered the world a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and try to connect with or understand the divine.

Your two LONG posts have much that I actually agree with as it 'feels right' to me. When I have more time I will try to make some comments on what you've written as you have spent some time putting your thoughts together. As it is, my mind is starting to shut down for the day.

Happy New Year!

Regards,
MG

Happy New Year MG. Yeah, lets all enjoy the new day and year! We can have many discussions this year on all sorts of fun topics. Tolkien has completely over taken me finally, and I wouldn't have it any other way. There is depth profound here I have not seen in years!

[Limnor]

If I read a book on gravity, I might find it exciting and enlightening, experience "a-ha!" moments and perhaps tears if my curiosity is really getting satisfied. I'll call this a first order confirmation by the Holy Ghost. A non-believer might say the "feels right" feeling comes from the wisdom of the words on the page as the words are comprehended. Second order confirmation comes when the Holy Ghost triggers a powerful emotional response to the words being read, independent of comprehension, which assures us that the words are authorized by God and factual. It's literally a magic 8-ball confirming "yes" or "no" with no other information.

I really appreciate this explanation, Gad. The distinction of a first-order “feels right” response helps explain something I didn’t understand before about Mormon thought.

The “magic 8-ball” is interesting—you’ve talked about the “grammar” before, and how authority might fit into personal revelation. Does this explanation fit into the idea that confirmation isn’t about evidence but more about authorization to believe something is true or false independent of understanding or external evidence?

Even outside of LDS thought, your explanation can help make sense of why wisdom and beauty can be acknowledged in many texts while not necessarily be considered as capital-T Truth. It “feels” right can apply across a broad spectrum of things, but it holds a special place for Joseph and the Book of Mormon that I don’t get. I don’t get that type of feeling about the Book of Mormon at all—there is way too much senselessness and arbitrariness to the death of Laban, as one example.

But what you’ve said can explain why the Mormon model is resistant to external evaluation. If second-order confirmation overrides evidence to the contrary, disagreement can be attributed to a failed reception on the “other’s” part.

Not playing the “score points” game here, honestly seeking to understand, so thank you. You’ve patiently described the epistemology clearly over the past couple of months, and made the internal coherence to a believer easier to see while also pointing out its limitations.

[Limnor]

Philo said: The Ainulindalë (The Song of Creation) does not say: “God allows evil in order to bring about greater good.” That’s the utilitarian reading and Tolkien refuses it. Instead, it says: “God allows freedom, and freedom can wound reality yet reality is not abandoned.”

That’s a very different claim. The perspective Tolkien develops here is that evil is not instrumental. Suffering is not justified. Victims are not collateral. God is not optimizing pain. We discover that meaning is preserved without explaining suffering. That’s why Melkor is later judged not for causing the discord per se, but for persisting in domination for refusing harmony, and continually refusing humility.

You ask us to assume a loving Creator who desires the greatest good. Tolkien answers: The “greatest good” is not maximal pleasure (read "joy").
It is freedom held open for all to be who and what they are. It is about relationship rather than control, or determining who gets to sing and who doesn't, or who gets to stay, and who is to be banished into outer darkness for disagreement described as wickedness as sons of perdition. It is working with faithfulness rather than correctness, as well as with meaning rather than explanation.

This.

Do you see Tolkien as drawing from an established theological view?

[Gadianton]

The “magic 8-ball” is interesting—you’ve talked about the “grammar” before, and how authority might fit into personal revelation. Does this explanation fit into the idea that confirmation isn’t about evidence but more about authorization to believe something is true or false independent of understanding or external evidence?

I think so absolutely. I can give my opinion that Jesus will return in 2029 in church and some feathers will be ruffled others won't. I could possibly get in trouble. But if I bear testimony that the Holy Ghost has confirmed to me that Jesus will return in 2029; I'm in big trouble.

but it holds a special place for Joseph and the Book of Mormon that I don’t get. I don’t get that type of feeling about the Book of Mormon at all—there is way too much senselessness and arbitrariness to the death of Laban, as one example.

You don't "get that good feeling", but that's first order confirmation (in my experimental model here). Missionaries don't care about that. Even if you feel bad all the way through, the HG can zap you with the knowledge that it is True if you pray and ask about it. I had a roommate at the y who had gotten confirmation about the girl he was to marry, and he said he wasn't attracted to her (rated her a 4), and was really in love with another girl who he'd dated of-and-on for years. I know another situation where two guys were after the same girl, the one guy who ended up with her was in love with her, but while knowing this, the second guy who lost out asked the first guy if he'd received "confirmation" that she was the one. Do you see how important it is to decouple first order feelings from this second order feeling, the second order manifestation-type feeling being a direct knowledge transfer from the HG? You can feel totally right about something but the Lord may know something you don't.

I think this "second order" confirmation has evolved in Mormon culture. What are the influences? Possibly spiritualism. The 8-ball. The Liahona, which way do I go? Possible 19th century philosophy of science, Baconian induction. At what point is a scientific theory true? What makes a beard? This second problem is quite relevant to Mormonism uniquely. Christians accept the Bible as the complete word of God. Somehow, it establishes its own authority. Christians don't need to come to "know" that the Bible is true. Because Mormonism had to add to the Bible, this is the way to get it on the same level. It's crazy, but having been there many times as a missionary, if you were to ask a Christian to pray about the Bible in order to know that it's true, they'll be totally confused -- "I already know it's true because it's the freaking Bible!". But if you ask them to pray about the Book of Mormon to know if it's true, it makes a degree of intuitive sense. Sure, God could tell us if something is true, why not? But in general praying and getting answers like this is like a tool every Christian recognizes from their own garage, but as one they never really had a need for.

[Morley]

The testimony is really the only argument that Mormons have left. They have no rational, historical, scientific, or theological arguments that stand up to any degree of scrutiny--so it's all on reliant on the knowledge that is the gift of the Holy Ghost. "It's true because my testimony tells me that it's true, nothing else really matters." When pressed on this, it's followed with "I've had experiences that showed me the truth. You need to understand that these are experiences are too sacred to discuss, so I can't talk about them."

In this regard, the Mormon testimony is the ultimate straightener of crooked lines. In the Mormon mind, no other religion, no devotee of any other faith, neither does nor even can have this experience regarding their own beliefs. An Evangelical or Muslim might believe, but their beliefs cannot hold a candle to the level of absolute belief that's the testimony that's given to Mormons. Note how MG retreats to what he sees as a this bedrock of belief--a knowledge that is only given to him and his fellow religionists. Other believers in a 'creator God' may have some hint of it, but nothing like the truths that are known by those who are LDS.