Allegory specter? It doesn't look that way to me at all. Allegory is one-to-one correspondence of character to character, and I don't see that in the author's introduction to the book. The review, maybe, but not the author's introduction.
I agree that the genuflection thing in the review (Aragorn at Boromir's death ) is a bit of a stretch, but I can see how many Catholics would immmediately associate the two.
Regarding the "Christian Humanism" thing, this definition from the introduction clarifies the author's use of the phrase for me:
Quote:
In his thinking about truth, reason, science, art, and myth, and in his hope for a renewal
of Christendom and an end to the ideologically inspired terror of the twentieth century,
Tolkien fits in nicely with a group of twentieth-century scholars and artists which we
might collectively label as “The Christian humanists.”22 The Christian humanist asks two
fundamental questions: (1) what is the role of the human person within God’s creation?
and (2) how does man order himself within God’s creation? Christian, or theocentric,
humanism, as opposed to anthropocentric, secular, Renaissance, or Enlightenment
humanism, argues that one cannot understand man’s position in the world until one first
acknowledges that man is created in the image of God and lives under the natural law
as well as the divine law.
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In terms of water, air, fire, etc, remember that Tolkien is a Catholic who stated very clearly that the Gospel is the one and only completely true myth. For Tolkien, all the worthwhile myths before and since, point forward and backward to the Gospel, to the incarnation, crucifiction, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. He hated allegory, but he certainly had no problem using Myth to point to transcendant truth-- and, he stated that the culmination of that transcendant truth lay in the Gospel, which he called "the one true Myth."
For a mystical Catholic such as Tolkien, fire naturally comes to represent the Holy Spirit, and all references to fire will be examined in that light-- is this a foreshadowing of the Holy Spirit? Likewise, water. I certainly agree that all myths regarding water were not written by Christians. However, if a mystically-oriented Christian takes Tolkien's mindset that all myths point toward the Gospel, then that Christian will consider many, many myths about water, and wonder "Is this a foreshadowing of The Holy Spirit?" If all truths point to the supreme Truth, and that Truth is the gospel, then a Christian would expect many, many truths to foreshadow it. And that was Tolkien's point of view, as I understand it, from reading "On Fairy Stories", and from what I have gathered in his letters, and from an article detailing parts of his conversation with C. S. Lewis.
I'm seriously considering ordering the book; after reading the introduction (Thanks Pat!) it seems quite worthwhile to me.