Hard on the heels of The
Battle for Middle-earth comes The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St
Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faerie (2017), by Jonathan S. McIntosh, Fellow
of Humanities at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. As I have hardly
scratched the Fleming Rutledge volume, it will be some time before I can give
this book my full attention, but I can list a few clues as to why I ordered it.
“J. R. R. Tolkien was a profoundly metaphysical thinker,
and one of the most formative influences on his imagination, according to this
new study of his works, was the great thirteenth-century theologian, St. Thomas
Aquinas. Structured around Tolkien’s Middle-earth creation myth, the Ainulindale, The
Flame Imperishable follows the thought of Aquinas as a guide in laying
bare the deeper foundations of many of the more familiar themes from
Tolkien’s legendarium, including such notions as sub-creation, free
will, evil, and eucatastrophe. More than merely using Aquinas to illuminate
Tolkien, however, this study concludes that, through its appropriation of many
of the philosophical and theological insights of Aquinas, what Tolkien’s
literary opus achieves is an important and unique landmark in the history of
Thomism itself, offering an imaginative and powerful contemporary retrieval,
interpretation, and application of Thomistic metaphysics for the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.” – Amazon.
"There have been many good books on Tolkien. There
have even been several very good books on the philosophy of Tolkien. This book,
however, is something else, something more, delving deeper. To borrow a phrase
from C. S. Lewis, it goes further up and further in. Within these densely
packed and brilliant pages, we journey to the core of Tolkien's Thomistic heart
and mind. Reading this book engenders an unshakable conviction that one can no
more separate Tolkien from Thomas than one can Dante from Thomas. Without
Aquinas, there would have been no Divine Comedy. Without Aquinas,
there would have been no Middle-earth. In short, and in sum, this book is
absolutely essential reading to anyone who takes Tolkien seriously enough to
want to understand him more deeply."
--JOSEPH PEARCE, author of Tolkien: Man & Myth and Bilbo's
Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning of The Hobbit
Not to mention that St. Thomas Aquinas is my own patron saint;
pairing him with J. R. R. Tolkien is just too irresistible.
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