(stories, c. 1871)
Perhaps no other author regularly managed to evoke as much childlike wonder in their writing as George MacDonald did. Throughout his more than fifty published volumes he continually emphasized the reality of the spiritual world and the importance of our relationship with it—and ultimately with God. Few have written stories with the kind of playful seriousness we find in his best work, especially in his fairy tales.
These stories include The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and Curdie (1883), and At the Back of the North Wind (1871), as well as various shorter tales such as “The Golden Key,” “The Light Princess,” and “The Wise Woman.” As is appropriate for children’s stories, they are simply told, but they are also so vividly imagined and highly inventive that they appeal to the child in all of us. Each of his fairy tales features elements that are strange and haunting, as well as moments where the numinous reality of another realm breaks through. In The Princess and the Goblin, for example, the princess finds her way to a tower, where a wise old woman sits spinning as she oversees a mysterious burning fire of red and white roses. Later in the story the princess is only able to find her way through a dark and forbidding mine by keeping one hand on the thread that the old woman has spun. In the story the thread is real but it is also metaphorical and spiritual, for the princess cannot see the thread, only feel it—and dares not let go or she will be lost in the dark. It is perhaps a perfect illustration of the nature of faith.
We should, however, be careful about working too hard at any exact interpretation of these stories. MacDonald himself resisted giving any explanations, and when asked what one of them meant, he tersely replied, “So long as I think my dog can bark, I will not sit up and bark for him.”1 He left the stories to speak for themselves. And they do not speak to us as allegories or intellectual puzzles aimed at the mind but rather as mythic tales aimed at the heart. They are meant to show us truths that do not easily reduce to rational explanations and provoke a more intuitive response from the reader. There are layers of meanings at work here, all of them valid: physical, spiritual, mythical, and psychological. Each of these layers interpenetrate and illuminate each other, which is why these stories are not so much meant to illustrate theological truths as to help us find our way into a different way of experiencing these truths.
MacDonald projected his own inner life into his stories to make them feel universal, a reflection of our own personal stories. His words arouse our dormant longings for truth and goodness as we journey with his young protagonists on their paths through danger and discovery and miracle. Alongside these young heroes and heroines we meet supernatural beings and find familiarity and friendship with these residents of a realm beyond our own. MacDonald’s tales are not unlike dreams, mixing all their disparate elements together into something that creates an impression and a feeling rather than simply communicating an idea.
There are three common elements to most of these fairy tales: first, the existence of a wise, loving guide who gently helps the young protagonist along the journey, as the wise old woman does in The Princess and the Goblin. This is MacDonald’s reminder that we do not walk the spiritual path alone, but God reveals himself in various and sundry ways along our journey.
Second, MacDonald shows how his heroes and heroines come to see death in a different way—not as a fearsome enemy but as a friend who ushers us through the doorway into eternity. At the Back of the North Wind revolves around the relationship of a young boy, Diamond, with death itself, personified as the North Wind. One need not fear death, the story reminds us, but one can embrace it when its proper time comes.
Third, MacDonald illustrates that the purpose of our lives is to undergo a transformation—to be changed from what we are into what God intends us to be. God wants to impart his “divine life” into our souls, a process that is critical for discovering who we really are. And the new self each of us becomes in the process is a more childlike self, for it is only the child whose trusting heart is open enough to see things as they really are. The path to transformation, MacDonald shows us, will not always be an easy one. Images such as the aforementioned “fire of roses” remind us that the cleansing fire of purgation is one of the painful steps along the path. We must be purified to be prepared for the presence of the holy in our lives.
George MacDonald was born in Scotland in 1824 and grew up around the beauties of the Scottish Highlands and the preachments of a stern Calvinism. Throughout his life he would look to nature for spiritual sustenance and do battle with the image of God imparted to him by his childhood religion. After earning a master’s degree in the sciences, he attended seminary to prepare for ministry and then was called to a church in Arundel. But his career in the pulpit was brief due to what the elders of the congregation considered to be his unorthodox views.
MacDonald had little patience for theological abstractions and viewed the truth as relational rather than judicial, pointing to the central importance of a personal experience of God’s love. “To know a primrose,” he wrote, “is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work.”2 His congregation could not accept the conclusions he had reached regarding the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, which he did not think squared with God’s character. MacDonald believed that Christ came to save us from sin, not from the punishment for sin, and therefore saw the work of Jesus as not a matter of appeasing the wrath of God but of dealing with the disease of sin itself. Other major points of contention were his rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell and his unapologetic embrace of universalism, the conviction that the love of God would, in the end, mean forgiveness for everyone.
When MacDonald’s two-year pastorate ended in conflict and it became clear that it would not be easy to find another church to pastor, he fell back on what had, up to that time, been only a pastime—writing. If he could not preach in a pulpit, he would preach through his books.
His first major book, an adult fantasy novel called Phantastes, was published to little notice in 1858, and he also wrote some children’s stories, which were better received. But none of this work brought in very much money, and his financial condition became desperate. One of his friends, a publisher, suggested that the only way to make money as a writer was to write realistic novels, so MacDonald decided this could be an effective way of communicating the ideas about the character of God that were so important to him. In 1863 he published his first such novel, David Elginbrod, which was an immediate success. Throughout the rest of his life he churned out a steady flow of these novels that dealt with the spiritual awakenings of his various characters. They became popular enough to provide him a good income, and allowed him to indulge himself with an occasional fantasy story (which sold poorly in comparison) for the sheer joy of it. He continued to write and publish at a steady pace until health issues made it impossible. He had a stroke in 1900 that robbed him of speech, and he died five years later after a slow decline in health.
MacDonald’s novels were a laboratory in which his theological ideas could be explored and demonstrated to “work” in real life. He never saw them primarily as entertainment but as a way of communicating his vision of the immensity of God’s love. Rarely has a novelist so unapologetically envisioned himself as a teacher, which points toward what is both the strength and weakness of the novels themselves—MacDonald tended to preach a little too much. The novels are full of digressions and digressions from digressions, bulking up their page count but detracting from the unfolding of the story. However, sometimes these digressions are actually the most interesting and enlightening parts of the book, and a chance for MacDonald to offer practical pastoral wisdom and spiritual insight to his congregation of readers.
One of MacDonald’s biggest fans was C. S. Lewis, who said that he didn’t think he had ever written a book in which he did not quote from MacDonald. In fact, Lewis gathered up some of his favorite MacDonald quotes and published them as George MacDonald: An Anthology. But it was not only the insights he gleaned from the great Scottish writer that attracted Lewis; it was also the deep spirituality of the man himself that radiated from the writing. “I dare not say he is never in error,” Lewis wrote in the introduction to the Anthology, “but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ himself.”3
Throughout his literary output, George MacDonald excelled at two things. First, he offered gem-like nuggets of practical wisdom about how to live in the light of God’s love and grace. Each of his books has moments where a little unexpected truth flickers into focus as we read, and by its light we see our lives a little differently. Second, he regularly manages to evoke a sense of wonder in the reader, reminding us that there is more to the world than meets the eye. MacDonald shows us a world where the boundary between the seen and the unseen is very thin indeed. Across that boundary God reaches with his relentless and untamable love, and for a moment we are all children once again, in awe of our heavenly Father.