In the Introduction to Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real, Alison Milbank examines a chapter in G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy titled “The Ethics of Elfland.” Chesterton observed, Milbank claims, that the materialist science of his day implied “a purpose and causality that does not belong” in a strictly materialist framework, but which seemed to be inherently religious. “Even the phrase ‘natural selection’ is unfortunate in implying a mechanism and even a telos: a sort of natural theology. And a natural religion is what Chesterton himself draws out of his study of the fairy-tale. First, he derives a narrative ontology, whereby life itself has the character of a fairy-tale, in the sense that it has an entelechy: he feels himself to be part of a story. This comes through a sense of self-consciousness, or rather a sense of consciousness of being part of a world. It sounds obvious but logically to have this awareness is already to impart meaning to experience. To see the world is to wonder at it: the wonder is therefore not some sentimental patronage but a kind of shock. Secondly, such an awareness of the thisness of the world calls out gratitude; for admiration, as Chesterton points out, has included within it an element of praise. So from existence as a surprise Chesterton derives its creator, as the one whom he desires to thank. Even the repetitions in nature speak to him not of tiredness and clockwork but ‘a theatrical encore’: ‘There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently’. Thirdly, he goes on to argue that the proper form of thanks is some form of humility or restraint. He cites the fairy-tale prohibition against Cinderella staying at the ball after midnight as evidence that the happiness of existence rests on an incomprehensible condition, from which he derives a sense of the fallenness of the world, and that what exists has something of the quality of goods saved from a wreck.

“Chesterton’s ‘natural religion’ is pretty complete but quite unlike the natural theology of the eighteenth-century deists, in which God was in a sort of continuum with the created order, but at the same time oddly absent. God is not here a deus absconditus at the end of a chain of being, but revealed and active in every phenomenon and experience. Moreover, it is the cultural production, the fairy-tale, mediated by ‘the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition’ — his nurse — that shows him how to interpret the natural world. Indeed, the chapter tends to privilege mediatory figures in the fairy-tale itself, such as the fairy-godmother or the witch aiding the hero to destroy the ogre’s castle. In Chesterton’s view, everything is waving madly at us to indicate its divine origin and its storied character. Mediation is therefore not a distantiation from God but an enabling of this realization of divine purpose.

“And it is from this recognition that the theology of the art of invention of stories, fantastic or otherwise, is derived. To tell a story, whether one’s own or a traditional tale, is to mediate the world in its intentionality and narrative character. It is therefore no surprise that our own age has such trouble with plotmaking in novels, resorting either to historical pastiche, novels based on real events, or postmodern bricolage. For to tell a story is to affirm that there is meaning to life, and that experience is shaped and has an entelechy.

“This also has implications for all sorts of mediations. In our amoral market economy, economic transactions have taken on the fatalism of nineteenth-century science, with a similarly unacknowledged ‘magic’ quality to the distribution and sale of commodities. Similarly, our political system has trouble in relating central and local powers and has downplayed the roles of trades union and local education authority alike. The Church of England is itself denigrating the role of the local parish in favour of ‘fresh expressions’ of Church, which seek to address people in their specific age-group, consumer choices or networks, rather than as members together of a local (and international) society.

“Chesterton’s ‘Ethics of Elfand’ by contrast embraces the localism of the Edwardian and Georgian fairy in its specificity, but renders it universal: that is, we are all storied beings but our narratives are refracted and specific. Fairyland is everywhere about us, but we can never possess it. The ‘incomprehensible condition’ limits us to one woman, one place and one nation, but our allegiance is to the world. Without that specific and local sense of sacrality, however, the universal cannot be understood, just as we need a concept of a tree in order to appreciate the sycamore in our back-garden.”

— from Alison Milbank, Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (T & T Clark, 2009)

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