The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie

by Jonathan S. McIntosh

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.

"McIntosh's comprehension of Tolkien's Legendarium is masterly; his appropriation of Aquinas is superb; his knowledge of the most important works in recent theology is staggering. A first-rate work of scholarship on a rarely explored aspect of Tolkien's work--the metaphysics of Faërie."
--RALPH C. WOOD, author of The Gospel According to Tolkien

"The Flame Imperishable is a most valuable addition to Tolkien scholarship. Jonathan McIntosh explores Tolkien's implicit metaphysics of Middle-earth in the light of Thomism with skill and restraint, developing productive lines of argument. His focus on the creation story within the larger Silmarillion, combined with his attention to Tolkien's views on creation and sub-creation, allows him to develop a careful and insightful analysis that will greatly enrich our understanding of Tolkien's work."
--HOLLY ORDWAY, author of Tolkien's Modern Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (forthcoming from Kent State University Press)

"While many scholars have explored Tolkien's literary and philological influences, his philosophical and theological sources have attracted far less scrutiny--apart from general religious motives and themes. Jonathan S. McIntosh shines a brilliant light into this lacuna, revealing Tolkien's debts to St. Thomas Aquinas, and along the way situating Tolkien among the line of theological philosophers extending from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and on into Tolkien's own day. The Flame Imperishable is surely the most thorough study to date of Tolkien's most cosmological works, and especially of his creation myth, the Ainulindalë. In a tour de force for religious and non-religious readers alike, McIntosh illuminates Tolkien's own metaphysical thought and how it pervades the entire fictive world of his legendarium."
--JASON FISHER, editor of Tolkien and the Study of His Critical Essays

"Breathtakingly original, this book deserves to be a landmark. McIntosh makes a compelling case for the cosmological depth of Tolkien's world, arguing not only that it is a world founded on St. Thomas Aquinas, but that it is also a significant contribution to metaphysics in its own right. With a boldness supported closely by a wealth of reasoned argument, McIntosh highlights the singularity and magnitude of Tolkien's achievement both as an artist and as a speculative thinker."
--MARK SEBANC​, co-author of the Legacy of the Stone Harp series

"In this scholarly study of the philosophical basis of Tolkien's Middle-earth, Jonathan McIntosh demonstrates that metaphysics can be exciting. Far from detracting from the beauty and originality of Tolkien's writing, approaching it through the thought of Thomas Aquinas serves to all the more fully reveal its power over the reader. We know that, however deeply we engage with these stories, there is always more to discover. This is a trustworthy guide to the radiant sense of being in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, which truly illuminates the realism of Tolkien's project."
--ALISON MILBANK, author of Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians

"In this exciting and lucidly written study, Jonathan McIntosh flings open a door that has remained all but sealed, bringing together the doctor of creation, Thomas Aquinas, with the artist of creation, J. R. R. Tolkien. In uncovering the influence of Aquinas on Tolkien's mythmaking, McIntosh lights up Tolkien's major themes--including the relationship between creation and sub-creation, the independence and 'otherness' of created reality, and the unity of world myth and fairy tale. Most importantly, he helps us recover the vision of a world made meaningful and whole by its Creator."
--CRAIG BERNTHAL, author of Tolkien's Sacramental Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth

"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 somethi...

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Christianity, Nonfiction, Religion, Christian, Literature

306 pages, Paperback

First published December 26, 2017

About the author

Dr. Jonathan McIntosh is a Fellow of Humanities at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. He is a member of the College’s graduate ​faculty, and teaches the College’s junior-year political and economic philosophy course, as well as electives in philosophical theology, natural law ethics, medieval thought, and Tolkien.

Dr. McIntosh joined the College faculty in 2007 after pursuing his M.A. (2004) and doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Dallas (2009). He received his B.S. in Philosophy from University of Idaho in May 2001.

He is the author of The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (Angelico Press, 2017) and several academic articles on the philosophical theology of St. Anselm of Canterbury. His personal blog can be found at https://jonathansmcintosh.wordpress.com. Dr. McIntosh and wife Annie (B.A., 2000) live in Moscow with their four daughters.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. McIntosh brings his scholarly insight of the theology and metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to bear on the creation myth of J.R.R. Tolkien. The result is an increased understanding and appreciation of both. I found myself reading The Flame Imperishable with Aquinas's Summa Theologica and Tolkien's Silmarillion near at hand. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Tolkien's "hierarchy of evil", the light it sheds on Sauron's Ring and the dangers of modern technology. A fascinating read!

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best pieces of literary analysis I’ve ever read. I now understand my simultaneous attraction to the Silmarillion and Aquinas: “They’re the same picture.”

[Jeremy]

This is a revision of McIntosh's dissertation at the University of Dallas. I heard McIntosh give a related lecture in Moscow, ID, in Summer 2011 (Wordsmithy). Positive review here. WORLD review here.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fascinating.
1. I have not read a book this philosophical in a while, so I had to re-exercise that muscle.
2. So much food for thought on being, evil, etc. that I didn’t expect and I’m so glad to have read it!

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting and detailed book: a journey through Thomas and Tolkien showing how Tolkien assumes the Thomist perspective. If you love metaphysics, theology and Tolkien then this is the book.

[Simon Esmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like reading the Vulgate armed only with highschool Latin I made it through this doctoral thesis. There were many bright moments of illumination and encouragement in the trudge of reading a book meant for much smarter people than me. I did really enjoy it.

[Dan Lawler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Touting Thomas with Tolkien

Thomas Aquinas, with a big assist from Aristotle, created a comprehensive philosophical system that answered many of the big questions about life and the universe at large through reason alone, without resort to the revelation of Scripture. As observed by Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson in The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Aquinas "asked the professors of philosophy never to prove a philosophical truth by resorting to the words of God, as philosophy is not based on Revelation, but on reason, and if you try to base it on authority, you destroy it." Aquinas had assumed the philosophers would conclude from the observation of nature and application of human reason that the universe was made by a personal, creator God, and this was the foundation of his philosophical system. But it did not take long for philosophers, freed from the word of God by Aquinas himself, to conclude that there was no God, and thus began the decline of Thomas’s Scholasticism and rise of Modernism which, taken to its logical conclusion, gave us today’s Postmodernism.

There remain today some die-hard Thomists, including author Jonathan McIntosh, but they recognize that Aquinas’s view of the world “has become largely lost and to a large extent even unintelligible to the modern world.” (p. 263.) McIntosh thinks it just needs to be repackaged to make it more appealing to modern audiences; and what is more appealing than J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings legendarium? So, according to McIntosh, in Tolkien’s great myth, “we have the hidden truths of St. Thomas.” (p. 265.)

The trick for McIntosh is to convince people that what they find appealing in Tolkien’s fantasy is an embedded Thomist philosophy, so if they like the fantasy, they’ll just love the philosophy behind it. But the trick does not come off well.

First, McIntosh acknowledges that nowhere in all of Tolkien’s writings, including his hundreds of letters, does he mention Thomas Aquinas even once. This is all the more remarkable given the 5000+ page Complete History of Middle Earth that Christopher Tolkien compiled from his father’s background material and initial drafts of The Silmarillion and LOTR. If Tolkien had intended the legendarium to be a subliminal endorsement of Thomism, there should have been some evidence of that in Tolkien’s extensive preparatory materials for the books. McIntosh supposes that because Tolkien was a well-educated Catholic who had inherited a set of Aquinas’s works from his godfather, he must have at least been influenced by Aquinas. But even if that were true, it is still a gigantic leap from there to the conclusion that the legendarium is loaded with hidden truths from St. Thomas, and that it is those truths that make Tolkien’s works so appealing.

Second, Tolkien "scholars" freely read into his works all kinds of different philosophies. Verlyn Flieger claims that Tolkien was so enamored with Owen Barfield’s Anthroposophy and his theory on the evolution of consciousness, that he made it the primary motif of the Silmarillion and LOTR. She finds so many of Barfield’s hidden truths in Tolkien’s writings that “one might almost think Tolkien had kept [Barfield’s] Poetic Diction open before him as he worked.” See, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World by Flieger. Absent authorial intent, it is a simple matter to make the author’s myths and metaphors mean anything you want.

Third, as most every Tolkien fan knows, the strong appeal of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is just not there in the Silmarillion, and McIntosh finds all of his Thomistic truths in the Silmarillion, not the trilogy. So even if Thomism is hidden in the Silmarillion, that does not account for the thing that people really love about the trilogy.

Finally, the main theme of the book is that “where St. Thomas translated the biblical mythos into the logos of Aristotle, what Tolkien represents in part is an effort to retransplant the Thomistic logos back into the original, mythic soil from which it first took root.” (p. 264) In other words, where Thomas took what McIntosh considers to be a creation myth from the Bible (mythos) and restated it in rationalistic, humanistic terms borrowed largely from Greek philosopy (logos), Tolkien supposedly took Thomas’s rationalistic statements of philosophic truth and formed his fantasy writing around them. Note that in this process Scripture disappears altogether and we are left with Tolkien’s myth and Thomas’s rationalism. But we know from Tolkien himself that this is not what he intended, and Thomas’s synthesis of Greek philosophy is not what makes Lord of the Rings so attractive.

A big difference between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings is that the former is a Tragedy (well-described by Galadriel in her statement “together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat”), whereas LOTR was the opposite of Tragedy and Tolkien called that Eucatastrophe in his essay On Fairy Stories, describing it as:

“the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and insofar as evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

To Tolkien, eucatastrophe was not merely a literary device for use in the secondary, imaginative world of fairy tales, but pointed to the Great Eucatastrophe in the real Primary World:

“The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality.’ There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”

In our nihilistic meaningless postmodern age, life is Tragedy or, at best, Irony: the universe endowed mankind with inherent desires for ultimate truth, beauty, goodness and joy, but provides none of these things and offers instead only universal final defeat. The appeal of LOTR is its Eucatastrophe, and because the fairy tale bears the “inner consistency of reality” it also holds out the promise that there is a Great Eucatastrophe in the real world, and Tolkien was convinced this was so.

It is not the fusion of fairy tale and Greek philosophy that makes LOTR appealing. It is the fusion of fairy tale and the historical Great Eucatastrophe that is its real cause for joy. Said Tolkien:

“It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be ‘primarily’ true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the ‘turn’ in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was mostly well-written, and I think the argument was persuasive and worth exploring, but I really cannot stand Christian metaphysics. I think the worst part was when Aquinas talked about how hierarchy is necessary because otherwise the rich and powerful wouldn't be able to emulate God's generosity to inferior beings.

I have no words...

[Boze Herrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book stands at the intersection of several of my enthusiasms: fantasy literature, the Inklings, the theology of St. Thomas, people who spell “faerie” weird. The title alone feels like a personal marketing pitch. The author acknowledges that there’s little direct evidence of Tolkien engaging with the beloved Doctor, apart from a four-volume Latin edition of the Summa in which he underlined select passages on virtue. But McIntosh uses the more mythology-heavy sections of the Silmarillion to demonstrate that Tolkien’s metaphysics are fully consistent with the intricately structured and creation-loving worldview St. Thomas lays out in the Summa. “What undergirds Tolkien’s view of the ‘common being’ (ens commune) of things,” he writes, “giving them their uncommon depth and reality, is a broadly Thomistic appreciation of the infinite profundity of the One who is self-subsisting being itself.” One imagines Flannery reading these words and sighing in approval.

[Othy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Flame Imperishable" is, perhaps, the best book I've read about Tolkien. Scholarship on Tolkien's work is rather uneven, and much of the literature scratches the surface and reiterates wonder without delving into (and with) it. McIntosh, however, accomplishes to much in just 260 pages, founding Tolkien firmly in his Catholic (and Thomistic) culture while also showing how he plays with, furthers, and re-mythologizes it. McIntosh counters many arguments suggesting pagan, Manichean, and Gnostic foundations and shows Tolkien's work to be Christian through and through. I've never read such a perceptive and enjoyable book on Middle-Earth, and I would suggest it to anyone who is interested in how Tolkien's work lives and breathes as beautiful works of fiction.

[Giovanni Costabile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Undoubtedly one of the best books about Tolkien out there, and finally one whose author is able to consistently disprove many misconceptions about Tolkien which, although in good faith, even the best scholars have had concerning Tolkien's views on religion. Now there can possibly be no doubt that Tolkien actually was a creative Thomistic theologian, and a fantastic approach to theology, which by no means devalues theology itself, but instead re-asserts it, is the undisputable basis of his invention and writing.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

In letter 142 Tolkien says that "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" and that "the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." Nothing could make how literally Tolkien meant 'fundamentally' as clear as Jonathan S. McIntosh's excellent study,The Flame Imperishable.

This book needs to be read twice. In fact it deserves to be read twice.

[Kyleigh Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Flame Imperishable has changed the way I read Tolkien and deepened my understanding of Aquinas by explaining how Tolkien "re-mythologizes" the theology through his stories: abstract theological concepts now have names, faces, and plot lines.

I confess I used to be one who thought Iluvatar was standoffish and absent from anything beyond the Ainulindale, that Tolkien's deity resembled the deistic "Watchmaker" more than the biblical God. McIntosh demonstrates how an underlying Thomistic worldview and Tolkien's use of the flame imperishable make Eru, though still distant, an involved figure.

Parts of the book were still pretty dense (it is a dissertation, after all), but it really shone in the chapters on Eru and Melkor, with lots along the way about the Valar, music and vision, and the ainur. McIntosh does show areas that Tolkien diverges from Thomas's theology, but I would have liked some interaction with areas people have suggested are Thomistic but McIntosh doesn't (nothing comes to mind, but it was overall so positive that I'm curious if there's another side).

I would like to revisit this book again in a few years, after a few more readings of Tolkien's legendarium, and after reading Morgoth's Ring. In the meantime, I've got plenty to keep ruminating on, especially with regard to sub-creation, hierarchy of evil, and artificial intelligence (my current research paper).

[Steve DePangher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought Provoking: Setting Tolkien in the Context of Aquinas

McIntosh has a wonderful ability to take what are, to me, difficult-to-understand positions in metaphysics, and make them understandable. For the reader who struggles with the metaphysics, but nonetheless is a fan of Tolkien, there is a kind of oscillation in the text between medieval scholasticism (often nicely brought with current authorities) and Tolkien's fiction that makes the whole more manageable. I found the abundant footnotes very helpful and wish that they had somehow been more integrated into the text. My favorite section of the book was the last one, devoted to analysis of Tolkien's thoughts on evil, especially as seen in his treatment of Melkor/Morgoth.

[Paul Hess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book. The final chapter on the metaphysics of Melkor is worth the price of the book. It’s a very dense book, best suited for those with a solid background in both theology and Tolkien’s legendarium. The book has a lot of quality, thought-provoking insights into the theology and philosophy undergirding Tolkien’s works.

[Luke Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in preparation for a talk, very dense and heavy going but also very good. Chapters one and five were particularly good but the one on music, vision and aesthetics pretty much lost me off. Likely more me than the book.

[Leaflet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an easy read, but well worth the time and effort.

[Lee Kersting · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging read for those (like me) not versed in philosophy.

[Bobby Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my most challenging read of the year so far, but I found it to be very powerful, and gave me more of an appreciation for aesthetics, the created order, and Thomist philosophy.

[Clare Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomist theology is not my thing but this book is well researched and argued, so agree or disagree this is a model for Tolkien scholarship.