Gift of Death and Númenor

JRR Tolkien on the Decline & Destruction of Western Civilization
First Timers | 25 July 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBP1mQF8voA

6:26 That's kind of where Tolkien's theology has faults.

In real life he was a Catholic, and knew that death was a punishment. True: punishments can involve blessings, indirectly, but they are not in and of themselves directly blessings only or primarily.

Claudia Manfredini

@Laurelin70

Tolkien theology IN UNIVERSE has no fault. Actually, about death, sin and the passing nature of the world is more advanced than the (classic) Catholic theology, since it's more easily integrated with our scientific knowledge of the world.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@Laurelin70 The problem with that is, Tolkien didn't conceive of Arda as a separate universe or "world of Narnia" ... in the world of Narnia men can already be mortal when arriving the forbidden fruit can turn Jadis immortal (except for killing), because it's another universe.

For Tolkien, the world is the same so all of the same theology applies, even if centuries or millennia before Abraham, not all of it is revealed yet.

As to "our scientific knowledge of the world" that's obviously the source of more than one Inkling error on theology. Knowledge falsely so called.

However, Lewis in The Problem of Pain is worse, since making the fall collective removes individual and therefore all responsibility for it, which makes that version a kind of Supralapsarian Calvinism.

I'm very sad a "Catholic" priest in Paris expressed himself in 2021 or so as sharing that view. Lewis had the excuse of not having the Church and the Council of Trent, with Catechisms. As well as indignated.

[he wondered what Numenor had become in Faramir's time]

8:13 In Faramir's time, Numenor had sunk below the waves c. 3000 years earlier.

As another name for it since then is "Atalante" I think you can guess what Tolkien is alluding to.