Who Was George MacDonald, And Why Is He So Important In Understanding Lewis And The Great Divorce?
Some quotations:
TO MR. N. FRIDAMA, who seems to have asked Lewis about the steps in his conversion to Christianity:
15 February 1946
I was baptised in the Church of Ireland (same as Anglican). My parents were not notably pious but went regularly to church and took me. My mother died when I was a child.
My Christian faith was first undermined by the attitude taken towards Pagan religion in the notes of modern editors of Latin and Greek poets at school. They always assumed that the ancient religion was pure error: hence, in my mind, the obvious question ‘Why shouldn’t ours be equally false?’ A theosophical Matron at one school helped to break up my early beliefs, and after that a ‘Rationalist’ tutor to whom I went finished the job. I abandoned all belief in Christianity at about the age of 14, though I pretended to believe for fear of my elders. I thus went thro’ the ceremony of Confirmation in total hypocrisy. My beliefs continued to be agnostic, with fluctuation towards pantheism and various other sub-Christian beliefs, till I was about 29.I was brought back (a.) By Philosophy. I still think [Bishop George] Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God is unanswerable. (b.) By increasing knowledge of medieval literature. It became harder and harder to think that all those great poets and philosophers were wrong. (c.) By the strong influence of 2 writers, the Presbyterian George MacDonald and the Roman Catholic, G.K. Chesterton. (d.) By argument with an Anthroposophist [Owen Barfield]. He failed to convert me to his own views (a kind of Gnosticism) but his attack on my own presuppositions smashed the ordinary pseudo-‘scientific’ world-picture forever.
Letter to Arthur Greeves: from Great Bookham, Surrey, 7 March 1916
I have had a great literary experience this week…the book, to get to the point, is George Macdonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard…Have you read it?…At any rate, whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once…Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along the little stream of the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree…and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter, which is rather conventional faery tale style, and after it you won’t be able to stop until you finish. There are one or two poems in the tale…which, with one or two exception are shockingly bad, so don’t TRY to appreciate them…All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed.” (Surprised by Joy, 201-202).
“Turning to the bookstall, I picked out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names Saxon and sweet as a nut—‘Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new book. The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new” (170-171)
“I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me…took longer.” (172)
PREFACE TO LEWIS’S ANTHOLOGY OF MACDONALD’S WORKS
All that I know of George Macdonald I have learned either from his own books or from the biography (George Macdonald and his Wife) which his son, Dr. Greville Macdonald, published in 1924; nor have I ever, but once, talked of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. Macdonald.
We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing that we can know about George Macdonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.
His father appears to have been a remarkable man—a man hard and tender and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity ‘He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.’ The theological maxim is rooted in the experiences of the author’s childhood. This is what may be called the ‘anti-Freudian predicament’ in operation. George Macdonald’s family (though hardly his father) were of course [extreme] Calvinists.[Yet] it is he himself, in the very midst of his intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is revolting.
All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn. All that is best in his novels carries us back to that ‘kaleyard’ world of granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery, the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how much real charity and spiritual wisdom can co-exist with the profession of a theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly terrible old woman who had burnt his uncle’s fiddle as a Satanic snare, might well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called ‘a mere sadist’. Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer and again in What’s Mine’s Mine, we are compelled to look deeper—to see, inside the repellent crust something that we can whole-heartedly pity and even, with reservations, respect. In this way Macdonald illustrates, not the doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.
He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King’s College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been identified. I mention the fact because itmade a lifelong impression on Macdonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the ‘great house in the North’ was the scene of some ]important crisis or development in his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of German Romanticism. In 1850 he received what is technically known as a ‘C.all’ to become the Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel.
In making these extracts I have been concerned with Macdonald not as a writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly Macdonald has no place in its first rank—perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid… What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopœic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man… A myth is a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters.Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, ‘done the trick’. After that you can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of communication are words, it is desirable that they should be well chosen: just as it is desirable that a letter which brings you important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the waste paper basket as soon as you have mastered its contents, and the words of the story are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the ‘theme’ or ‘content’ is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes—they are not much more than a telephone. …Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius—a Kafka or a Novalis—who can make such a story. Macdonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. [This Art]… is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry—or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and ‘possessed joys not promised to our birth’. It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are re-opened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.It was in this mythopœic art that Macdonald excelled…The great works are Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and Lilith. From them, just because they are supremely good in their own kind, there is little to be extracted. The meaning, the suggestion, the radiance, is incarnate in the whole story: it is only by chance that you find any detachable merits. The novels, on the other hand, have yielded me a rich crop. This does not mean that they are good novels. Necessity made Macdonald a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good. …One rare, and all but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The ‘good’ characters are always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are stagey.
Most of my extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help—sometimes indispensable help towards the very acceptance of the Christian faith. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; 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. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. The title ‘Inexorable Love’ which I have given to several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability—but never the inexorability of anything less than love—runs through it all like a refrain; ‘escape is hopeless’—‘agree quickly with your adversary’——‘compulsion waits behind’—‘the uttermost farthing will be exacted’. Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so. Macdonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) ‘He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy’. He hopes, indeed, that all men will be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none better) that even Omnipotence cannot save the unconverted. He never trifles with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but also as astringent as the Imitation.
So at least I have found him. In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation… It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought—almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions—the Everyman edition of Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from [21]the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was.I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the process was complete—by which, of course, I mean ‘when it had really begun’—I found that I was still with Macdonald and that he had accompanied me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was now telling me was the very same that he had told me from the beginning.
There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through. The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my ’teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was Goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception is all the other way round—in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from ‘the land of righteousness’, never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire—the thing (in Sappho’s phrase) ‘more gold than gold’.
CLASS SUMMARY 1-11-23
SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 8
Filled with doubts from his encounter with the hard-bitten ghost, Lewis wonders whether the whole journey is a cruel joke, that he and the others have been brought to this country only to be taunted, as in Tantalus and Cowper’s poem, as well as a verse from Revelation. “Terror whispered, ‘This is no place for you’”—Lewis contemplated with horror not only what the rain could to do him but even a flying insect, let alone one of the lions he had seen prowling. He tries to hide in a grove of trees, all the while thinking, “If only I could find a trace of evidence that it was really possible for a Ghost to stay-that the choice were not only a cruel comedy-I would not go back.” He sees another Ghost—a well-dressed woman who had been clad in finery hobbling (on her high heels?) and trying to hide near the same trees. A Bright Spirit is following her and she pleads for the Spirit to leave her alone and to have some decency. The Spirit says she is going in the wrong direction, and he offers to support her on the journey towards the mountains, practically carrying her if need be. She is horrified by the prospect and says he doesn’t understand at all—that she could not possibly go with him where people like him are dressed in bright light, saying, “How can I go out like this among a lot of people with real solid bodies? It’s far worse than going out with nothing on would have been on earth. Have everyone staring through me… They’ll see me! I’d rather die.”The Bright Spirit points out that she has died already, and the Ghost wails “I wish I’d never been born—what are we born for?” The Spirit says “For infinite happiness—you can step out into it at any moment. Don’t you remember on earth that there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it, if you will drink the cup to the bottom, you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds. Come and try.” Almost, I thought the Ghost had obeyed. Certainly it had moved: but suddenly it cried out: “No, I can’t. I tell you I can’t. For a moment, while you were talking, I almost thought . . . but when it comes to the point. . . . You’ve no right to ask me to do a thing like that. It’s disgusting. I should never forgive myself if I did. Never, never. And it’s not fair. They ought to have warned us. I’d never have come. And now-please, please go away!” “Friend,” said the Spirit. “Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?”
“I’ve alreadv given you my answer,” said the Ghost, coldly but still tearful. “Then only one expedient remains,” said the Spirit, and to my great surprise he set a horn to his lips and blew.” At the sound, hooves could be heard in the distance, and suddenly they could see a great herd of beautiful unicorns heading straight at them. I heard the Ghost scream, and I think it made a bolt away from the bushes . . . perhaps towards the Spirit, but I don’t know.. My own nerve failed and I fled.”
EXPLANATION OF IMAGERY
In Greek mythology, Tartarus is a great abyss that is a place of torment where souls are judged after death. Tantalus, a wicked king, is sent there and in his punishment he is tortured by standing in a pool which recedes whenever he tries to drink the water and fruit which rises out of reach when ever he tries to eat it. Lewis also seems to reference this image in the previous chapter when the Hard-Bitten Ghost says “Of course there never was any question of our staying. You can’t eat the fruit and you can’t drink the water and it takes you all your time to walk on the grass. A human being couldn’t live here. All that idea of staying is only an advertisement stunt.”
“And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.” –Revelation 14:11
The poet William Cowper was one of the closest friends of the great British preacher John Newton. Together they wrote hymns which were compiled into the Olney Hymnal. Cowper is perhaps best known for his hymns“Oh, for a closer walk with God” and “There is a fountain filled with blood.” He struggled with mental illness, shame, and understanding God’s grace. He dreamed he was acceptable to God on his own efforts and would avoid Hell, but woke realizing he was in fact doomed on his own if he did not solely rely on God’s grace.
MAJOR THEMES IN CHAPTER 8
1.Our “image” and external appearance are of no consequence to God and can be an impediment to our spiritual growth.
2.Comparing ourselves with others and feeling “less than” can be a ploy that Satan uses to keep us from the Joy God intends for us.
3. Shame can be a gift from God if it causes us to realize our utter bankruptcy and need for Jesus
4.Our natural inclination to hide and isolate when we feel shame is born of pride and builds a wall between us and God
5.God wants to help us in our shame and draw us into His light and away from the darkness of our sin and self-reliance.
