FREEDOM IS AN IRKSOME BURDEN:
Mythology and what it means to be human (Thomas M. Doran, 4/22/26, The Dispatch)
The best modern mythology that seeks answers to what it means to be human includes epic mythology that depicts big events and often reduces those events to a page or so of text; heroic mythology by depicting what humans should and should not do; and granular mythology, where one may feel that the myth describes the real world, or an actual era of human history.
At the epic mythology level, we have Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which describes the creation of the world and all its creatures, high and low; the rebellion of many of the elves and their age-long war with the rebel angel, Morgoth; and the collaboration of many men in the elves’ disordered enterprise. Tolkien’s myths depict in a profound manner the Creator’s gift of freedom and corresponding consequences, a moral momentum that corresponds to physical momentum in the created universe, where objects in the physical world—apart from the object(s) imparting the initial momentum—are also radically displaced.
So too, the moral momentum of the elves’ disordered use of the gift of freedom produces dire consequences for many elves and men who associate with the rebels. Not only that, the moral momentum of the elves’ original rebellion against their angelic benefactors cascades into more abuses of freedom, including “kin-slaying,” when the rebel elves steal their brethren’s ships to travel to Middle-earth. In the Creator’s lexicon, the radical gift of freedom cannot be true freedom unless consequences somehow correspond to the majesty of the gift itself.
The “problem” of Free Will is that opponents abhor the responsibility it imposes: