You are certainly entitled to you own opinion. You are not, however, entitled to you own facts.
In Judaism and Christianity, angels are indeed the messengers are
God. The Greek ἄγγελος translates the Hebrew
mal’akh ( מַלְאָךְ ), “messenger”, cognate with the Arabic
malak (ملاك). But in Judeo-Christianity, angels, like
men, are possessed of free will. Their fall, if I understand the theology correctly (the point is not one upon which I have spent much energy), is their refusal to
serve. This refusal is the result of
pride, which results in a “hatred of God [which] comes from pride. It is contrary to love of God, whose goodness it denies, and whom it presumes to curse as
the one who forbids sin and inflicts punishments.” (catechism of the Catholic Church ¶ 2540).
As you note, this is represented in
Melkor, who in the
Ainulindalë raised a cacophony discordant with the themes proposed by
Eru to the
Ainur.
As for
prophets, I am unfamiliar with angelic “prophets” in any of the three Abrahamic religions. The Christian and (I think) Jewish view of an angel (in the sense of a spiritual being normally without corporeal form) proclaiming a truth to some man or group of men and women would be the same as a human in the service of a king delivering a message from the king to others in his service: that they should do such-and-such, or that they were astray in this or that activity, or that the king proclaims some act or event he has prepared now or for the immediate future. Sometimes we see them performing things we humans cannot do: in Christianity there is the story of an angel awakening Peter in prison the night before his scheduled execution: his chains fall off him, the angel leads him quietly past the sleeping guards, the doors of the prison opening of their own accord, until Peter finds himself standing alone at night in a silent street outside the prison. To find a parallel in
Tolkien, you would have to turn to the story of
Beren held chained and captive in Tol Sirion by
Sauron: When
Lúthien and
Huan the Hound of
Valinor defeated Sauron, she “stood upon the bridge and declared her power: and the spell was loosed that bound stone to stone, and the gates were thrown down, and the
walls opened, and the pits laid bare; and many thralls and captives came forth in wonder and dismay”. (
Silmarillion, “Of Beren and Lúthien”)
As for
Gandalf, you are somewhat astray. Tolkien told Michael Straight, editor of
New Republic (
Letter 181),
[Gandalf's] function as a “wizard” is an angelos or messenger from the
Valar or Rulers: to assist the rational
creatures of
Middle-earth to resist Sauron, a power too great for them unaided. … [The wizards] were … involved in the peril of the incarnate: the possibility of “fall”, of sin… The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this
evil Saruman succumbed. …
Predestination is a subject of considerable controversy in Christianity. It is a tenet eventually rejected by the Fathers of the Church: without
free will, Man is no longer a morally responsible. For the most part, Christians held this position until the Protestant Reformation, when John Calvin resuscitated the idea that some people were created to enjoy salvation, while others were created to be damned, and that this was the Will of God which no one could set aside. (Calvin’s position is called “double predestination”.)
The problem with predestination is that we human beings exist as creatures passing through time. While all of us instinctively understand the concept of time, none of us, not even our best physicists and philosophers, know or understand what it is or how it works at what we might call a “mechanical level”. (Time might be “quantized”, that is, broken into tiny discrete pieces like sand falling through an hourglass. If it is, the tiniest unit of time could be what physicists call
Plank time, about half a second divided into parts numbering 10 to the 44th power (10 followed by 44 zeros), an incredibly small number.) Our whole existence is in time, and we know nothing else. God, however, is
outside time; and I believe (though you may correct me) that this is a belief held in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Tolkien’s world, Eru is also outside time, though he interacts with the Ainur in what sounds like a time structure.
Buy a Being outside Time can see all things in Time all at once, like a man who has a familiar book in front of him (I have
Lord of the Rings open in my lap) who can see and inspect at his leisure what is in both the beginning and the end of the story. When in the chapter “The Stairs of
Cirith Ungol”
Sam recalls the tale of Beren and Lúthien, how the Silmaril they took became the star
Eärendil, and that the light
Frodo’s
Phial of Galadriel is the same light, he exclaim, “Don’t the
great tales never end?” And Tolkien’s deliberate use of a double negative, something Sam would be prone to saying by accident, tells us,
The Great Tale never ends. Then he effuses,
Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even
Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like
tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks he's the hero or the villain? Gollum! Would you like to be the hero – now where's he got to again?
Now to Gollum, Frodo, and Sam, passing through time in Tolkien’s
subcreation (his own word for it), Gollum’s fate is not sealed. He still has free will.
We know that he will shortly fall from Grace to Evil, but
we are outside the book, and outside its subcreated stream of time.
(Now if someone reading this is an atheist, bear with me for a moment, and consider the puzzle.) To us, the perfect foreknowledge of
events of a Being outside Time appears identical to predestination; but we are conflating our sense of passing time with foreknowledge. If you allow for a moment that there is such a Being outside Time, and that this Being created all that is and endowed each creature with Free Will (and again I tip my hat to you atheists and agnostics passing through this thread who are familiar with the philosophical postulates of the Problem of Evil and the Problem of Free Will), then why does it boggle the imagination that this being would allow each character in creation to exercise its free will? The Problem of Evil (“Why would a good god allow evil to exist?”) only becomes irreparable if this life is all there is; Judaism teaches that this is not so (though not all its sects and branches concur), and Christianity echoes this teaching with a shout.
Tolkien touches on predestination. I have already cited Gandalf’s speech to Frodo, “you were
meant to have
the Ring,” as one example, but there is another. When the Fellowship of the Ring is about to break at Parth Galen, just before
Boromir tries to seize the Ring,
Aragorn and the rest of the Company of the Ring are debating what course to take by the waterside. When they deduce that Frodo will attempt to go East without them,
Pippin exclaims, “Stop him! Don’t let him go!”, to which Aragorn replies,
I wonder? … He is the Bearer, and the fate of the Burden is on him. I do not think that it is our part to drive him one way or the other. Nor do I think that we should succeed, if we tried. There are other powers at work far stronger.
Aragorn is stating clearly his belief that there is a Being driving the outcome of the Quest, though neither he nor even Gandalf knows or can know what will be.
