The Moment Walter White Became the Dark Lord
What Tolkien and Breaking Bad tell us about Falling from Grace
The Book of Lost Tales is a fascinating read. All of the themes and most of the motifs that would come to compose The Silmarillion are already there, but organized in a completely different — and, in many ways, more pagan-like — book.
Both are obsessed with crystals. And yes, I know that’s Sauron, not Morgoth. It just looks cooler that way
While The Silmarillion's Melkor is an enemy of the Valar from the beginning, Tales's Melko (not a typo, he did not have the R back then) is more Loki than Lucifer. Chaotic, certainly, but not evil at first. While the Valar were shaping Aman, Melko was busy building his own land at the north. And when the Valar decided to build the Two Lamps, they asked Melko for permission to put them at the extremes of the world, implying that they recognized, to some extent, his right over those domains.
The destruction of the Lamps, like their creation, also appears in a different light. If in The Silmarillion the Lamps are beautiful works, in Tales they are much more questionable: the text explicitly calls attention to how the light, spread throughout the world before, becomes a monopoly of the Valar by being closed up inside the Lamps. Their destruction in Tales, therefore, does not come across as much worse than, say, Loki stealing the apples of immortality. You could even play devil's advocate and argue it was an act of (misguided) rebellion against the Valar, who were increasingly trying to control things which should be kept free.
(Like they will futurely do with the elves. The Book of Lost Tales raises the question of whether taking the elves to Valinor was an improper interference by the Valar on Ilúvatar's plan.)
Ironically, the fact that Melko is less evil from the start makes his fall easier to comprehend. One point stays the same in both earlier and later tale: it was after the destruction of the Trees and the loot of the Noldor jewels that Melko(r) became the Enemy, the Dark Lord, the Black Foe of the World — Morgoth. If there was a chance of redemption, he abandoned it by darkening Valinor.
But the path to that moment is different. In Tales, all shit hits the fan at the same time: Melko betrays the Valar, destroys the Trees, steals the gnomic jewels, and murders the Firstborn of Ilúvatar in the span of one day. No surprise the guy changes. Anyone who commits so many crimes in such a short time will get to the other side different enough to justify a new title.
In The Silmarillion, however, Melkor is evil from the beginning. So what makes the Darkening of Valinor particularly horrendous? He betrays the Valar, who had offered him a second chance; but the reader, at least, knew already he was a lier. He kills the Trees, but is that worse than this version of the destruction of the Lamps? He murders Finwë and many others; a dark deed, but not an original one, since by then he had already kidnapped and tortured the elves to create the first orcs.
What changed? Why now is it adequate to call him by a new name? Why, it is suggested, he could redeem himself before, but not after?
Understanding the nature of the fall may help us understand the nature, and perhaps the impossibility, of redemption. And maybe with this we might try to answer a bigger question: the problem of Hell.
To answer that, let us move away from the Undying Lands and closer to Albuquerque, New Mexico, 308 Negra Arroyo Lane.
This is the moment Walter White became Heisenberg
The phrase is infamous among the Breaking Bad fanbase. Fans would say it, at first unironically, trying to plot the point of no return: which of the many evil acts Walter White commits throughout the series was the one to definitely turn the shy high school teacher into the ruthless druglord? Which was the straw that broke the camel's back that is Walt's morality?
It quickly became a meme, for a simple reason: these “points of no return” happen again, and again, and again. You could argue Walt crosses it in the second episode, when he kills Krazy-8. Or perhaps it was when he watched Jane Margolis overdose; or when he ordered the murder of Gale; or when he killed Mike; or when he poisoned Brock. You could even argue it was at the very last episode, when he admits that he liked his drug trade because it made him feel alive, thus accepting the monster he had become.
Walter White crossed dozens of points of no return; which, of course, means none of them were really unreturnable from. There is little doubt that, at the end of Breaking Bad, he is beyond repentance. But it seems impossible to say precisely when that happened. The difference between Walter White and Heisenberg is not the difference between an alive camel and a camel crushed under piles of straw. It is the difference between Theseus's ship when he departs and Theseus's ship when he returns.
The difference, therefore, is not in Walt's actions, but in Walt himself. On the last season Walt, in an attempt to keep Jesse in the meth business, says:
If you believe there is a Hell, I don't know if you're into that, but we're... we're already pretty much going there, right? But I'm not gonna lie down until I get there.
Breaking Bad, S5 E7: “Say My Name”
What distinguishes Walt from Heisenberg is not that one has poisoned a kid and the other hasn't. It is that one is (presumably) capable of asking for forgiveness, while the other considers his crimes so essential to his own identity that he cannot even conceive letting them go.
Let us go back to Melkor. He was evil before the Darkening of Valinor, and became worse after it. However, the difference between him before and after — that is, between Melkor and Morgoth — is that one could repent and seek his true place in the Music, and the other cannot. Not because he has lost the ability, but because he has lost the will.
Is Hell eternal?
This may shed some light on the Problem of Hell. The classic problem of evil says that, given that evil exists in the world, God cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. The problem of Hell is similar: if God is (omni)merciful, how can Hell be eternal? How can a finite being like a human, acting inside time, commit such a horrendous act that not even infinite benevolence can forgive?
We would like, perhaps, if God were to offer Heaven even to those who did not repent. That, however, is a contradiction. Forgiveness is not an external entity God gives to humans. What God offers — the only thing there is to be offered — is Himself. And God is not only good, but the Good.
Think of a child who has just taken a school test. When she compares her answer to the teacher’s feedback, she knows what she got right; and, more importantly for us, what she got wrong. The same way, we humans only know our moral faults when we compare them with the Good. Admitting one’s faults, however, is a painful process, as anyone who has felt regret can attest.
To be close to Heaven is to know God, and knowing God is knowing one's own shortcomings. As C. S. Lewis wrote:
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.
Mere Christianity, “The Perfect Penitent”
The theologians can decide if there are crimes so terrible God cannot forgive them. But let us assume there are not, that divine forgiveness is always greater than human offense. Even then there are those who will not be forgiven. Not because the forgiveness is not offered, but because, on the path of committing their crimes, they became the kind of person who will not ask for it.