http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/867803737

The flame imperishable : Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the metaphysics of Faërie

The argument of this dissertation is that J. R. R. Token was a metaphysical thinker, that questions concerning the nature of both created and uncreated being significantly inspired and shaped his fiction, and that one of the formative influences on Tolkien's metaphysical imagination was his great Catholic forbear, the thirteenth-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. In this dissertation, accordingly, I undertake a philosophical investigation of Tolkien's creation-story recounting the origins of the world of Middle-earth, the Ainulindale, in which he lays the metaphysical and theological foundation for many of the more recognizable themes from his mythology, including sub-creation, free will, evil, and eucatastrophe. Each of the following five chapters focuses on a different element or elements from Tolkien's creation-myth, analyzing these in light of some of the central philosophical questions considered by St. Thomas Aquinas, especially in his Summa Theologiae. My conclusion is that, in its appropriation of many of the philosophical insights of St. Thomas, what Tolkien's literary opus accomplishes in part is an important and unique landmark in the history of Thomism, offering a creative and powerful contemporary retrieval, interpretation, and application of Thomistic metaphysics for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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