Chapter V develops the analyses of Chapters III and IV through a close reading of one of the most problematic passages of The Lord of the Rings, namely the fall of Gandalf in Moria and his following return. With the help of Tolkien’s own (elusive) exegesis of the passage, the chapter reveals that this narrative event embodies two key meta-literary motives recurrent in his mythology. First is sub-creative submission, featuring the sub-creator’s humble decision to hand over their sub-creations to the supreme “Writer of the Story” (the Godhead Eru) and affirm their “naked hope” in Him. This is followed by the direct, miraculous intervention of Eru, which interferes with the ontology of sub-creations, disrupting “the Rules” of their secondary world; in this particular, Eru’s intrusion transcends the intentions of Gandalf and his divine authorities – the Valar, the archetypical secondary sub-creators – and results in the enhancement of their plans, and their eventual integration within a higher creative project.

This chapter offers a critical appraisal of two dominant approaches to pluralism, conflict, and difference in contemporary political theology, both of which draw on the thought of Augustine. Postliberal Augustinianism, represented by the “Radical Orthodoxy” of John Milbank, develops a highly sophisticated account of the metaphysics of human sociality, grounded in a creative reading of Trinitarian theology which construes political community in terms of harmonious difference. Augustinian civic liberalism, represented by Charles Mathewes and Eric Gregory, draws on Augustine’s understanding of love and difference in order to propose an ethics and ascetics of liberal citizenship. Both, however, thematize political community and difference in essentially oppositional terms, privileging one or the other, and reading conflict in decidedly negative terms. The limits of these political theological strategies reveal a need to reconceptualize the nature of political community and the place of conflict therein.

In Chapter 1, I explain how the book can be read and used in a nonlinear fashion, providing affordances for further exploration, comparable to the way the book approaches the creation and experience of works of art. The chapter proceeds to present a detailed advance organizer in the form of a point-by-point overview of the main messages and ideas of this book, providing a framework for the way the book can be read and used.

This chapter looks at the assumption that there is a relationship in world politics between international organization and peaceful change. That premise is the working hypothesis behind many of the chapters in this book, and it provides the justification for the scholarly search for empirical patterns between IOs and change. When international relations is assumed to be comprised of a mechanical ontology (causal mechanisms that lead from initial conditions to predictable effects), then it makes sense to employ a scientific methodology indebted to Isaac Newton. But the shifty concepts of world politics, such as conflict, peace, change, and stability, are not well-suited to machine-like regularity. Concepts such as change are subjective or ambiguous and hence make for poor variables. The chapter examines the gap between methodology and ontology that emerges in the effort to find causal mechanisms that link the practice of international organization to the outcomes of peaceful change.

Dietterlin’s Architectura experienced perhaps its richest reception and afterlife among architectural sculptors in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. The façades of the Cathedral of Cuzco, Cuzco’s Jesuit Compañía church, and the monastery of the church of San Francisco in Lima all adapted motifs from Dietterlin’s Architectura to compare European and Indigenous Peruvian ideas about the stability of matter. Constructed in the wake of catastrophic earthquakes in the 1650s by Andean and other Indigenous sculptors, the façades reinterpret the structural, anatomical and material conceits of Dietterlin’s treatise to overturn its vision of architectural matter and especially stone as a materially unstable entity. Instead, they used the imagery of Dietterlin’s Architectura to promote an alternative ontology that underscored the transience of forms and structures while affirming the fixity of matter such as stone. Even as architectural images like those of the Architectura spurred artistic and natural philosophical discourses on a global scale, Peruvian artists adapted Dietterlin’s ideas to accommodate their own ontologies and philosophies of nature.

Suggestions of a processual orientation in Collingwood’s thought can be found in certain places in his corpus, but Collingwood is not generally known as a process philosopher. This is likely because the Libellus de Generatione, in which he develops a process-oriented ontology, has long been unavailable and thought lost. While a copy was found and is housed in the Bodleian Library, it was only made publicly available in 2019. This chapter explicates the process ontology developed in the Libellus and contextualizes it in relation to Collingwood’s wider corpus and to early twentieth-century process philosophy. Drawing on Sandra Rosenthal, I argue that Collingwood’s understanding of process is closer to Bergson’s than Whitehead’s, especially in ways that allow for genuine novelty and creation, and in its implications for the metaphysics of time. I then discuss implications of this process ontology for the view of Collingwood as an idealist and for other areas of his philosophy. Finally, I consider whether attributing a processual ontology to Collingwood is in tension with his own view of “metaphysics without ontology.”

This chapter endeavors to explain Heidegger’s intertwined thinking about death and “the nothing” and explore the ontological significance of this connection. As we have seen, “death” (Tod) is Heidegger’s name for a stark and desolate phenomenon in which Dasein (that is, our world-disclosive “being-here”) encounters its own end, the end “most proper” to the distinctive kind of entity that Dasein is. Being and Time’s phenomenology of death is primarily concerned to understand Dasein’s death ontologically. Heidegger is asking what the phenomenon of our own individual deaths reveals to us all about the nature of our common human being, that is, our Dasein (and what that discloses, in turn, about the nature of being in general). Understood ontologically, “death” designates Dasein’s encounter with the end of its own world-disclosure, the end of that particular way of becoming intelligible in time that uniquely “distinguishes” Dasein from all other kinds of entities (BT 32/SZ 12).

In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange yet once common hermeneutic strategy, namely, reading Heidegger backward by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger’s own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this chapter critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion I reach is that White’s creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger’s early work, yet it remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Most importantly, I shall suggest, White helps us sharpen and extend our understanding of the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger’s philosophy.

This chapter begins by tracing the consequences of the subsuming in modernity of mythos under the auspices of logos, namely the reduction of God to the status of the ‘biggest’ of all beings. The consequences of this for mythopoiesis are many, but chief among them is the foreclosure of the further distancing of plainly theological (that is, mythopoieic) discourse from the realm of the reasonable. By re-examining the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, however, the chapter concludes by pointing towards a way of understanding not only the work of theologians and people of faith as pointing towards the divine, but that all of our mythopoiesis is, in some sense, a making towards God.