Book review by John Wm. Houghton of The Flame Imperishable (2017) by Jonathan S. McIntos

Houghton, John Wm.

English

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Journal of Tolkien Research
Volume 5 | Issue 1 Article 3
2018
The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and
the Metaphysics of Faërie (2017) by Jonathan S.
McIntosh
John Wm. Houghton
The Hill School, numenor@aya.yale.edu
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Recommended Citation
Houghton, John Wm. (2018) "The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (2017) by Jonathan S.
McIntosh," Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 5 : Iss. 1 , Article 3.
Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol5/iss1/3
The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie, by 
Jonathan S. McIntosh. Kettering, Ohio: Angelico Press, 2017. xvi, 289 pp. $19.95 
(trade paperback). ISBN 9781621383154. [Also available in ebook format.]  
 
This is a remarkably good book, one that will instantly become required reading. 
McIntosh is, to begin with, not only an insightful student of Thomas Aquinas but 
also a limpid expositor of the Angelic Doctor’s thought (qualities not always 
found in the same person). At the same time, he knows intimately the Tolkien 
texts with which he is dealing (chiefly the “Ainulindalë,” “Athrabeth Finrod ar 
Andreth,” Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and “On Fairy-stories,” though he ranges 
widely through the legendarium) and has an impressive command of philosophy 
in general, as well as of the secondary literature on both Thomas and Tolkien, 
adeptly citing Kant, Heidegger and Maritain alongside Shippey and Flieger (full 
disclosure: the present reviewer is also cited). 
The monograph, a revision of the author’s 2009 dissertation for the University 
of Dallas directed by Phillip Roseman, comprises an Introduction, five chapters, 
and a brief “Final Theme.” A portion of the third chapter, McIntosh notes, was 
previously published in Music in Middle-earth, edited by Heidi Steimel and 
Friedhelm Schneidewind (Zollikofen: Walking Tree, 2010); it appeared under the 
title “Ainulindalë: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of the Music,” pp. 
53-74. 
The Introduction (1-28) establishes, cogently, the grounds for considering 
Tolkien as a metaphysician and as a Thomist, and sets out the plan for the rest of 
the book. 
Aquinas’s Summa Theologica begins, not with his influential arguments for 
the existence of God (the “Five Ways”), but rather with an analysis of the 
concepts of theology and revelation, building the logical foundation on which a 
discussion of the existence of God can take place. In a somewhat similar fashion, 
McIntosh discusses the role of faith and reason for each of his authors at the 
beginning of his first chapter, “The Metaphysics of Eru” (29-72), before turning, 
again following Thomas’s road map, to discussions of the existence of God, 
God’s nature in general, God’s presence in the world, Tolkien’s idea of 
eucatastrophe, and the specific issue of God’s nature as the holy Trinity.  
To examine just one aspect of this rewardingly dense discussion, consider the 
fourth section of the chapter, “Eru: Plotinian One or Thomistic Esse?” (50-55). 
On the one hand, partly because sections of a translation of  / commentary on the 
Neoplatonist Enneads of Plotinus circulated in the Muslim world under the 
entirely misleading title The Theology of Aristotle, Aquinas’s new Aristotelian 
philosophy and theology, transmitted in part by writers like al-Ghazali and Moses 
Maimonides, placed great emphasis (whether positive or negative) on the idea of 
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God as the transcendent One. On the other, Tolkien’s identification of the creator 
as Eru, immediately glossed as “the One,” has given rise to much discussion 
about the degree to which he means to follow Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. The 
difficulty for medieval thinkers in the Abrahamic traditions was that a 
Neoplatonic God was, so to speak, too transcendent, so disconnected from the 
creation as to defy accommodation to their scriptural narratives (in particular, the 
pagan Neoplatonists held that the One “creates” only in the sense that by thinking 
on Itself it emanates being). Thomas held that God does not transcend being, but 
rather is Being, self-subsistent being-itself. God is that whose essence is to exist, 
and precisely in this God transcends the creation, every part of which necessarily 
derives its existence from God. Tolkien, McIntosh argues, represents exactly this 
system with his references to the Flame Imperishable, depicted in Ainulindalë as 
the power “to bring into Being” (Silmarillion 16) which is with Eru alone and 
which Eru sends to burn at the heart of the world when he says, “Eä,” “let it be.” 
Tolkien’s comments on the “Athrabeth,” McIntosh shows, underline the point. As 
to why Tolkien would picture the creative power of Being under the image of fire, 
McIntosh points to various biblical instances, such as the pillar of fire in Exodus 
and the appearance of the Spirit in Pentecostal tongues of flame in Acts: 
particularly likely to have influenced Tolkien, however, McIntosh suggests, is the 
initial theophany to Moses at Mount Sinai, where God declares his name to be “I 
AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14, the key text for seeing God as absolute Being), 
speaking out of a bush which is burning and yet never consumed.  
In the second chapter, “The Metaphysics of the Ainur” (73-118), McIntosh 
might be expected to take up the topic of angelology, but he in fact postpones that 
discussion largely for chapter four, considering instead the threefold issue of 
divine knowledge, will, and power. Again, to single out one point as an example 
of the whole: If God’s self-knowledge does not simply result in the emanation of 
the world, as the Neoplatonists would have said, does God have ideas about what 
the world should be, “exemplars” that God follows in the act of creation? And if 
so, how can having a multitude of ideas be consonant with God’s transcendent 
simplicity? Thomas’s answer is that in knowing himself, God also knows all the 
ways in which God could be known by creatures, and thus also knows what sorts 
of creatures would do the knowing, and, further, knows himself as creator. Thus, 
as Maimonides had pointed out, God knows the world through his planning of it, 
not through observation; but, in contrast to a builder or an artist who works 
according to a design, whether expressed or internalized, God’s plan for creation 
is simply knowledge of himself. The Ainur, McIntosh demonstrates, well reflect 
this Thomistic model of creaturely knowing and being known: themselves the 
“offspring of [Eru’s] thought,” they at first “comprehended only that part of the 
mind of Ilúvatar from which he came” (Silmarillion 15); and when they first see 
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the Children of Ilúvatar “they saw the mind of Ilúvatar reflected anew, and 
learned yet a little more of his wisdom” (Silmarillion 18). 
Chapter three, “The Metaphysics of the Music and the Vision” (119-156), 
begins with a survey of ideas about music and creation in the antique world down 
through Boethius, then presents an “account of Thomas’s views on music, beauty, 
and the realism of created being” (137)—the last point being (to paraphrase 
Thomas, Summa Theologica, Ia.18.4 ad 3) that the actual existence of a creature 
realizes its nature even more truly than the otherwise more noble idea of the 
creature in the mind of God. In contrast to the subjectivism inherent in Kant’s 
proffer of a “disinterested” aesthetic sense, Thomas’s understanding of beauty has 
an irreducible objective component. McIntosh then analyzes both the Music of the 
Ainur and their Vision of Eä, giving (it seems to me) more attention to the vision 
than have other commentators. In particular, he points out that it is the Vision, 
rather than the Music, which evokes in the Ainur a Thomistic and Tolkienian 
desire that what they have designed should have real being (145-149). In a fifth 
section, the chapter returns to the question of eucatastrophe, already touched on 
in the discussion of Eru in chapter one, observing that Tolkien’s remarks (in “On 
Fairy-stories”) about the Incarnation are precisely a claim that in that one case 
God has in fact done for human story-telling what Eru does for the Music of the 
Valar, that is, raised it to the level of primary reality (154-155). 
With the fourth chapter (157-202), McIntosh focuses more specifically on 
“The Metaphysics of the Valar.” The opening chapters of Genesis famously omit 
any reference to the creation of the angels, leaving Jewish and Christian thinkers 
to speculate as to the history and function of these spiritual powers. Both 
traditions had been willing to read “Let us make man in our own image” (Genesis 
1:26) as spoken to angelic assistants; however, given the Neoplatonists’ doctrine 
of the Demiurge and emphasis on the transcendent One, both Jews and Christians 
came to stress the absolutely singular nature of God as Creator. Aquinas 
eventually concludes that angels can at most be makers, instruments for shaping 
what God creates, and Tolkien’s Valar accord with this principle. In depicting 
them as “fictional embodiments of [his] theory of subcreation” (185), however, 
Tolkien gives their making far wider scope than Aquinas would have allowed 
(thus giving them some formal similarities to the Demiurge).  
The chapter does contain one of the very few inconsistencies in the book. 
While discussing the physical embodiments of the Valar (which, he points out, 
reflect a Cartesian sense of mind-body dualism, unlike the Thomistic, 
hylomorphic picture of fëa and hröa in elves and men), McIntosh says that it is a 
“necessity” that the Valar “assume physical bodies” (192), though the following 
discussion makes it clear that, though they are bound to the world, bodies are not 
a necessity: the Valar generally put them on or off like clothing, Melkor being the 
notable exception. 
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In the last major part of his discussion (Chapter Five, “The Metaphysics of 
Melkor,” 203-260), McIntosh turns to ponerology, surveying the considerable 
literature on Tolkien’s understanding of evil. In particular, he argues that Tolkien 
can be best understood as holding a Thomistic position which sees evil 
specifically in light of the doctrine of creation, emphasizing that the privation of 
evil is precisely a privation of created being, a creature’s “failure to achieve its 
goodness” (216). This Thomistic understanding would thus be distinguished both 
from the dualist conception for which Tom Shippey has influentially argued and 
from what Neal Keesee and I have claimed is a Boethian interpretation (211). In a 
very effective analysis, McIntosh devotes the bulk of the chapter to examination 
of a “hierarchy of evil” in Tolkien’s thought: evil in connection with “creation, 
sub-creation, preservation, domination, and annihilation” (217). 
In his final theme, “Of Metaphysics and Myth” (261-266), McIntosh, having 
considered so many ways in which Thomas can cast new light on Tolkien, asks 
whether Tolkien can add anything to our understanding of Aquinas, whether he 
“might  . . . help us to recover the kind of metaphysical insight possessed by St. 
Thomas” (263). Citing a comment I once made about the theological task of 
“remythologizing,” McIntosh concludes that  
 
Tolkien offers an implicit validation of Thomas’s project by 
translating the creation metaphysics of Christian philosophy 
back into the mythic mode . . . what Tolkien gives us is not one 
more dialectical treatise arguing that faith and philosophy have 
met and mythos and logos have kissed, but a radically fresh 
vision of the world, in which we might see and experience how 
these things are so. (265, emphasis in the original) 
 
McIntosh himself has, I think, provided a “radically fresh vision” of Tolkien’s 
creation myth and its philosophical background: the book is lively, challenging 
and important, deserving of the highest commendation.  
 
John Wm. Houghton 
The Hill School  
Pottstown, Pennsylvania 
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The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (2017) by Jonathan S. McIntosh

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The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of Faërie (2017) by Jonathan S. McIntosh

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