Religious and Devotional John Wm. Houghton (bio) Three of this year’s essays deal with Tolkien as a Catholic writer. The first in this Catholic trio, Claudio A. Testi’s “Tolkien’s Work: Is It Christian or Pagan? A Proposal for a ‘Synthetic’ Approach” (Tolkien Studies 10: 1–47), should be required reading, if only for the dispassionate way its first section demolishes the extreme Christian and pagan positions without the first hint of a “plague on both your houses” attitude. With unrelenting logic—section 5 extends to two levels of numbered subdivisions—the essay makes a cogent case for a synthesis ultimately rooted in Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between nature and grace. To hold that Tolkien creates a world “intentionally containing explicit and exclusive Christian elements” (1), Testi argues, presents five problems (I reproduce Testi’s numbering scheme): 2.1, it violates “Tolkien’s razor,” his observation that the Arthurian cycle fails because it “explicitly contains the Christian religion” (2, citing Letters 144) and other congruent statements. [End Page 267] 2.2, “It mistakes applicability for allegory and theorizes hidden meanings” (3), again violating Tolkien’s expressed opinions. 2.3, “It mistakes source for representation” (3)—for example, noting correctly that some aspects of the Virgin Mary go into Tolkien’s conception of Galadriel, it incorrectly concludes that the latter represents the former, though in fact there are compelling reasons for saying that she does not. 2.4, “It derives a total identity from a partial similarity” (4), reading, for example, the Ainulindalë as if it had no parallels outside the Hebrew Bible and differed in no significant respects from the Priestly Creation account in Genesis. 2.5, “It diminishes the vastness of Tolkien’s conception” (5)—other elements of Tolkien’s interest and experience besides his religious commitments contribute to the soup of his story (his love for the northern legends, for instance). To use his religious connections as the sole, or even the principal, lens through which to interpret his books is to ignore or devalue the contributions of all of the other sources. The arguments against the “Tolkien’s work is pagan” position, Testi observes, are “almost symmetrical” to those against the Christian reading: 3.1, “It diminishes the relevance of the texts that show the fundamental relation between Tolkien’s works and Christianity” (6), such as the epilogue to “On Fairy-stories.” 3.2, “It considers some elements of Tolkien’s works as incompatible with Christian Revelation, when in fact they are not” (6). 3.3, “It derives irreconcilable contradictions between Tolkien’s and [the] Christian world from what are only partial differences” (7)—Elvish reincarnation in the fictional world, for instance, does not make the fiction irreconcilable with the real world, as Elves are, after all, fictional. 3.4, “It confuses historical Paganism with ‘Tolkienian’ Paganism” (8). Testi offers as one of several differences the claim that Tolkien’s pagans do not practice human sacrifice, though, as he notes later (22), this is strictly true only of Middle-earth: the Akallabeth depicts Sauron as sacrificing the Faithful in the Temple of Melkor on Númenor. 3.5, “It diminishes the vastness of Tolkien’s conception” (8). Testi begins the constructive portion of the essay by making a pair of distinctions: between internal and external views of the mythos, on the one hand, and between the plane of Nature and the plane of [End Page 268] Grace, on the other. In this second distinction, rooted in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the plane of Nature deals with the “inherent capabilities” of “rational beings”; the plane of Grace deals with elements of “Judeo-Christian Revelation which would be impossible to obtain fully by means of mere natural abilities” (9). Tolkien’s world, then, is one that, internally, operates on the plane of Nature, where the “knowledge, choices, and actions of his characters result only from their inherent natural abilities, with no specific reference to any form of supernatural Faith or Biblical Revelation. In this sense, we must say that we are in the presence of a world that is devoid of Christian contents” (10, emphasis in original). Externally, however, the world is in harmony with the...