Confluences

"Sin, violence, cruelty, egoism, and despair are the discords that disrupt the surface, but always as privation, a failure of love; they are no part of being's deep music, but only shrill alarms and barren phrasings, apostasies from music altogether. Evil, for all its ineradicable ubiquity, is always originally an absence, a shadow, a false reply, and all violence falls within the interval of a harmony not taken up, within which the true form of being is forgotten, misconstrued, distorted, and belied. This is not to imagine being as a music without disonnances, but as one without ultimate discords for the soul that turns its motion toward God's all-embracing eternal order of love, seeking to recover the theme of this love and articulate it anew forever."

-David Bently Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. (207-8)

I'm halfway through The Lord of The Rings trilogy now. Perhaps I should have simply declared a Tolkien week; but I'll do what I can to keep the discussion of hobbits to a minimum from this point on.

When I read the passage quoted above, I thought immediately of the creation myth Tolkien devised from The Silmarillion. The creator, Iluvatar, begins with a song and asks his angels to sing with him. One angel, Melkor, tries to create his own theme, and, for a time, seems to succeed. But then the creator introduces yet another theme:

"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Iluvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.

[...]

"Then Iluvatar spoke, and he said, 'Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Iluvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of themes more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'"

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. 2nd edition. ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. (16-17)

The key observation is that evil and violence are not strictly necessary in either telling, nor can they overcome the original and fundamental theme from which they are derived and which they can only corrupt.