“Having been raised in northern Scotland under the intellectually doctrinaire rigors of Scottish Presbyterianism, as a student in the early 1840s at King’s College, Aberdeen, [George MacDonald] was restless and searching for a more satisfying orientation to life. His discovery of the German romantic writers, such as Novalis and Hoffmann, revolutionized his thinking, for they illustrated for him the indispensable role which the imagination must play in developing a truly viable Christian faith.

“Most of MacDonald’s fantasies are fine examples of the fairy tale genre. As a child he loved the rich tradition of Scotch and Irish — Celtic and Gaelic — fairy tales, and his genius lies in his ability to create the unique atmosphere and tone that produces the singular effects of that literary type. Fairy tales convey their meanings in a unique manner. They speak to the reader’s inner life, posing images and events that appeal to the subconscious and therefore address a person’s unique inner struggles and concerns.

“They have a very important function in the life of children, helping them to come into a healthy relationship to the mysteries of life, achieving effects quite beyond the ability of realistic stories. Bruno Bettelheim explains:

Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature, direct the child to discover his identity and calling, and they also suggest that experiences are needed to develop his character further. Fairy tales intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity — but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity.

“What is true for the child is no less true for an adult when the tales are focused upon adult concerns and needs. They help a person feel the true nature of one’s soul before God, the nature of a right relationship with him, and the satisfying excitement of a proper response to his expectations. MacDonald understood this. He was keenly aware that certain childlike dimensions are necessary components to a healthy spiritual life. He often refers to Christ’s statements in this regard. He remarked: ‘For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, of fifty, or seventy-five.’

“Bettelheim explains further:

In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalized and become comprehensible as represented by the figures of the story and its events. . . . Fairy stories do not pretend to describe the world as it is, nor do they advise what one ought to do. . . . The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in his life. The content of the chosen tale usually has nothing to do with the patient’s external life, but much to do with his inner problems, which seem incomprehensible and hence unsolvable.

“This is precisely the way McDonald’s tales function.

“For the adult reader of these tales, the intellect and the imagination work in tandem. In ‘The Fantastic Imagination,’ MacDonald expresses it well: ‘What we mean to insist upon is, that in finding out the works of God, the Intellect must labor, workman-like, under the direction of the architect, Imagination.’ When a reader’s intellect is working subservient to the imagination, the full person is involved. MacDonald’s thought continues:

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect.

“The author whose mind is infused with the Spirit of God captures truths that ‘dazzle gradually’ through the story he is inspired to tell. For, being fallen as we are, the naked truth is ‘too bright for our infirm delight.’ The genius of the fairy tale is to present the reader with those moments of insight uniquely adapted to that reader’s needs, and that unfold their insights by degrees as a person contemplates them.

“When in the beginning of Lilith Vane the protagonist encounters the Raven, he asks where he is, and the Raven explains that he has come through a door. When Vane protests he is unaware of any door, he is told he has just come through a door ‘out’ — that is, out of the physical world intellectually perceived — and finds himself ‘in’ — that is, the world spiritually perceived by the heart. The Raven continues: ‘ . . . the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in.’

“We confront a profound paradox. The doors ‘out’ leave behind, not the physical world per se, but its appearances, that which the careless viewer mistakes for its realities. The doors ‘in’ lead one to glimpses of higher reality, truths ‘too bright for our infirm delight.’ Such momentary perceptions — instances in which one loses a sense of self — come most often by indirection, and are perceived by the heart. They are mythic; they offer ‘a real though unfocussed gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.’ They exist quite beyond the reach of intellectual analysis and

That frost of fact by which our wisdom gives
Correctly stated death to all that lives.

“The worlds which an expert fantasist creates are conducive to such moments. MacDonald is such a genius.”

— from Rolland Hein, Doors In: The Fairy Tale World of George MacDonald (Cascade Books, 2018)

Related reading and listening

  1. “You love the man at once” — Marianne Wright on the generosity and geniality of George MacDonald
  2. We wonder as they wander — Daniel Gabelman on the spiritual geography of George MacDonald’s fairyland
  3. Foolishness, gravity, and the Church — In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
  4. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt —
    FROM VOL. 148
    Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
  5. “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
  6. The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales — Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
  7. Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
  8. Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 minutes)
  9. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
  10. “A state of divine carelessness” —
    FROM VOL. 121
    Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 minutes)
  11. Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  12. The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
  13. In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
  14. Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
  15. A George MacDonald symposium — Excerpts from four interviews talking about the work of George MacDonald: Michael Di Fuccia, Marianne Wright, David Fagerberg, and Daniel Gabelman. (28 minutes)
  16. George MacDonald on the imagination — Readings from two essays by George MacDonald about how the human imagination is “made in the image” of God’s imagination. (20 minutes)
  17. Ruinous reductions and brash bowdlerizations — Ken Myers reads an article by Vigen Guroian, “The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, at al. against the Frauds, Experts, and Revisionists.” In the article, Guroian critiques the common practice of retelling traditional stories in ways that eliminate the meaning of the originals. (31 minutes)
  18. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
  19. The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
  20. From myth to sacramentality — Craig Bernthal: Tolkien asserts that reading fairy stories is a way to ‘recover’ the world”
  21. Faith born of wonder — Theologian Andrew Davison echoes a theme in the work of G. K. Chesterton, describing the work of apologetics as awakening a sense of wonder in the reality of Creation as a beautiful gift. (23 minutes)
  22. Christina Rossetti and George MacDonald revisited — Alan Jacobs talks about the theme of renunciation in Christina Rossetti’s poems, and Stephen Prickett looks at aspects of nineteenth-century Romanticism from which George MacDonald’s work emerges. (33 minutes)
  23. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 148 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, Willem Vanderburg, Jeffrey Bilbro, Emma Mason, Alison Milbank, and Timothy Larsen
  24. How myth speaks to deep desires in the human heart — Rolland Hein explains that George MacDonald is a writer of myth functioning rightly, and that such myth affects people a-rationally, stirring something in them much deeper than intellect or emotion alone. (15 minutes)
  25. Thomas Howard on Charles Williams — From a 1995 interview, literary scholar Thomas Howard describes the texture and depth of the “metaphysical thrillers” of Charles Williams. (16 minutes)
  26. Virtue and myth in Middle-earth — Ralph C. Wood and Bradley Birzer discuss Christian wisdom, virtues, and the strength of myth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s created world of Middle-earth. (33 minutes)
  27. Man, myth, and Middle-earth — Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce discuss the “author of the century,” J. R. R. Tolkien, and assert the power of myth to convey deep truth. (26 minutes)
  28. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff
  29. On children’s literature and gardening — Vigen Guroian discusses profound fairy tales and the pleasures of gardening. (20 minutes)
  30. Alison Milbank: Imaginative Apologetics beyond C. S. Lewis — Alison Milbank offers an approach to defending the Christian faith that restores the imagination as a faculty inseparable from reason. (61 minutes)
  31. Further up and further in: understanding Narnia — Joseph Pearce explains how fairy stories can open our eyes to the depths of reality if we read them with the virtue of humility. (15 minutes)
  32. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
  33. Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians — Alison Milbank discusses how both Chesterton and Tolkien restore reason to fantasy and help us to see things as we were meant to see them. (20 minutes)
  34. Fairy tales and what’s really real — Anna Maria Mendell describes how fairy stories can use the device of magic to call attention to the real nature of things. (13 minutes)
  35. Mary Midgley, R.I.P. — Philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018) was a tireless critic of the reductionist, atomistic claims of modern science. (16 minutes)
  36. Gisela Kreglinger: Victorian Wisdom for Contemporary Plights — Gisela Kreglinger considers how George MacDonald’s perspective on gender roles might guide us through some of the questions, problems, and concerns we face today. (68 minutes)
  37. Vigen Guroian: “Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues through Fairy Tales” — Vigen Guroian contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation. (48 minutes)
  38. The risk of stories — George Steiner on the necessity of vulnerable imaginations
  39. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 121 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel Gabelman, Curtis White, Michael Hanby, Alan Jacobs, James K. A. Smith, Bruce Herman, and Walter Hansen
  40. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  41. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  42. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 103 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, David Thomson, Adam McHugh, Glenn C. Arbery, Eric Miller, and Eric Metaxas
  43. Alan Jacobs on The Narnian — Alan Jacobs discusses C. S. Lewis’s view of the imagination and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination. (53 minutes)
  44. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 76 — FEATURED GUESTS: D. H. Williams, Catherine Edwards Sanders, Ted Prescott, Martin X. Moleski, Stephen Prickett, and Barrett Fisher
  45. The arts and public funding — Ken Myers answers a letter from a high school student asking about whether Christians should support the idea of federal funding for the arts.
  46. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
  47. The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis — Interviews about Lewis with Clyde Kilby, Michael Aeschliman, James Como, Bruce L. Edwards, Thomas Howard, and Gilbert Meilaender. Plus a reading by Alan Jacobs. (73 minutes)
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