Kingdom. Frodo and Sam are first in the reign of Iluvatar because they are willing to be last and least among those who 'move the wheels of the world'". Wood notes, too, that the elves' lembas waybread is "reminiscent of the eucharistic wafer: its airy lightness gives strength in direct disproportion to its weight". Pat Pinsent, in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, states that "his own devout adherence to Catholicism is in fact reflected throughout his writing, to the extent that ... his faith was the driving force behind his literary endeavors". The Episcopal priest and theologian Fleming Rutledge, in her 2004 book The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings, writes that Tolkien had constructed his book both as an exciting surface narrative, and as a deep theological narrative. She cites his statement that "I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories)." In her view, Tolkien very rarely allows the hints and suggestions of divine intervention to break the surface, but that the cumulative effect of his "veiled substructure" can have a powerful effect on the reader. She writes that Tolkien was providing "a rare glimpse of what human freedom within God's Divine Plan really means." She notes that while Tolkien had said The Lord of the Rings was fundamentally religious, Middle-earth appears "a curiously nonreligious world". Her view is that this was entirely deliberate, as Tolkien wanted to avoid any hint of pantheism, worship of the natural world; and while Arda is, as Tolkien wrote, "my own mother-earth", the action is set long before the Christian era; she points out that he wrote in a letter that Concealed Christianity: myth, not allegory The scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien's fantasy "has no explicit Christianity", unlike the medieval Arthurian legends "with their miracles, pious hermits, heavy-handed symbolism, and allegorical preachiness". Tolkien's Middle-earth, "greatly to his credit", avoided preachiness and allegory. On the subject of making Christianity explicit in fantasy, he wrote: Flieger comments that the word "fatal" is to be taken literally: an explicit Christian message "would have killed the work", draining the life from the secondary world, and that Tolkien had indeed written in a letter: Christ Christ figures The philosopher Peter Kreeft, like Tolkien a Roman Catholic, observes that there is no one complete, concrete, visible Christ figure in The Lord of the Rings comparable to Aslan