David, Matt, and Andrew wrap-up “MacDonald Month” by sharing some of their favourite quotations from the George MacDonald anthology assembled by C. S. Lewis.
S7E39: “MacDonald Month: Anthology (Part II)” (Download)
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Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-week
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.
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, Preface
Chit-Chat
…
Toast
- Matt had a mug of coffee and a NA Guinness.
- Andrew had his morning coffee.
- David was drinking Earl Grey tea and a Hazy IPA from Best Day Brewing.
Discussion
01. “MacDonald Exposure”
Q. What have you two read by or about MacDonald prior to MacDonald Month?
“Absolutely nothing”.
Matt Bush
- Andrew, meanwhile, has read a tremendous amount of MacDonald. “Phantastes”, “The Princess and the Goblin”, “The Princess and Curdie”, “The Day Boy and the Night Girl”, “The Golden Key”, “At the Back of the North Wind”, “The Gifts of the Child Christ”, “Diary of an Old Soul”, and “The Light Princess”. In other words, Andrew will be flexing in this episode.
- Word on Fire recently published an edition of “The Golden Key”. There is also an illustrated version published by Maurice Sendak, author of “Where the Wild Things Are”.
02. “Preface Thoughts?”
Q. Was there anything about the preface that jumped out to you?
- Matt described how Lewis gave MacDonald a description of poverty in wealth, because though George enjoyed the finer things in life, he surrendered to God’s will, and was not attached to money.
- George also had a fantastic father figure in his life, who taught him not to let failure impact his disposition. This counters Lewis and his father, who were always afraid of being sent to the poorhouse.
It is against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some of the following extracts can be most profitably read.”
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, Preface
His peace of mind came not from building on the future but from resting in what he called the holy present. His resignation to poverty was at the opposite pole from that of the stoic. He appears to heave been a sunny, playful man, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps significant that his chief recorded weakness was a Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor can be.
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, Preface
- Another section that jumped out to Matt was Lewis’ description of MacDonald’s obedience. Lewis himself was big on obedience, as seen in “The Screwtape Letters”, a quality he likely picked up in part from MacDonald.
And in MacDonald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses the will: the demand for obedience, for something to be neither more or less nor other than done is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience every other faculty somehow speaks as well – intellect, and imagination, and humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable failure of mere morality. 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 seem to be closer, or more continually closer to the Spirit of Christ himself.
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, Preface
- Andrew commented that it is likely that Lewis saw MacDonald as the father figure that he wished that he had growing up, as Lewis was often disappointed by his own father.
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.
George MacDonald
- Surprisingly to some listeners, despite his high praise for the man, Lewis did not find MacDonald to be that spectacular of a writer! However, he thinks him a great among myth-makers…
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… 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… But he does not maintain this level for long… What he does best is fantasy – fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man.
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology, Preface
- Lewis describes myth as a quality within a genre rather than a genre itself in “An Experiment in Criticism”.
03. “Overall Impressions”
Q. What were your impressions of the Anthology?
- Matt saw “The Great Divorce” reflected a lot in the anthology. Meanwhile, Andrew saw many phrases pop up in “Till We Have Faces” and “Mere Christianity”.
04. “Favourite Quotations”
Let’s get on to the main activity of today: sharing some of our favourite quotations from the book.
- David shared his favourite one-liners first:
All that is not God is death.
George MacDonald
People talk about special providences. I believe in the providences, but not in the specialty. . . The so-called special providences are no exception to the rule—they are common to all men at all moments.
George MacDonald
It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God.
George MacDonald
It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.
George MacDonald
There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.
George MacDonald
‘But how can God bring this about in me?’—Let Him do it and perhaps you will know.
George MacDonald
Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us.
George MacDonald, Because of Spiritual Stupidity
- Andrew pointed out that one of the chief jobs of the Christian is to suppress natural desires and submit to God.
It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
By obeying one learns how to obey.
George MacDonald
- Of course, Andrew discovered that many of the concepts from “Till We Have Faces” could be found in the Anthology…
You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.
George MacDonald
“Do not do it,” said the god. “You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also. Die before you die. There is no chance after.”
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, Part II, Chapter 2
Unless a man has love it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.
George MacDonald
“Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. And hatred turns into fear, and fear becomes a pathway to revelation.”
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
- MacDonald shows that the only person who can possess while setting free is God…
It is only when we can be with what we really possess – that is, what is of our kind from God to the lowest animal partaking of humanity –
George MacDonald
“I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.”
“He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.”
“What? Not my own son, born out of my own body?”
“And where is your own body now? Didn’t you know that Nature draws to an end? Look! The sun is coming, over the mountains there: it will be up any moment now.”
“Michael is mine.”
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
“…she was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the words means? Mine!”
C. S. Lewis, Orual, Till We Have Faces
- Matt shared a number of quotes that reminded him of Lewis:
A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread.
George MacDonald
- This next quote was reflected in a chapter in “The Great Divorce”, when a spirit meets the soul of the man who killed his son:
It may be infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that in our microcosm kills the image, the idea of the hated.
George MacDonald
- This quote reminded Matt of “The Screwtape Letters”…
The highest condition of the human will is in sight… not seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp Him at all, it yet hold Him fast.
George MacDonald
Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
There is a LONG pause from 28:59 – 29:05
- And this one made him reminiscent of “He Leadeth Me”, because the author has to learn to take God’s will as opposed to what he wishes was His will. Andrew noted how this concept appeared in “Perelandra” as well, when Tinidril accepts what is sent her way.
A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him.
George MacDonald
- David noticed that Lewis has a similar view to MacDonald on nature and animals, as presented in “The Four Loves”.
How should we imagine what we may of God, without the firmament over our heads, a visible sphere, yet a formless infinitude! What idea could we have of God without the sky? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the God that sent it out to our eyes.
George MacDonald
- There is an echo of this idea in “The Weight of Glory” as well. This quote is wehere Phil Keaggy gets the name for his album “Beyond Nature”.
Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.
And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
- Matt noticed “The Great Divorce” conforming to reality here, as well as a glimpse of “The Chosen”, when the high priests cannot figure Jesus out…
There are those who in their very first seeking of it are nearer to the Kingdom than many who have for years believed themselves of it. In the former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when He calls them they recognize Him at once and go after Him; while the others examine Him from head to foot, and finding Him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs and go to church or chapel or chamber to kneel before a vague form mingled of tradition and fancy.
George MacDonald
There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.
C. S. Lewis, Handwritten in Joy Davidman’s copy of The Great Divorce
- David found some particularly savage quotes from MacDonald…
“I cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and He does not expect it.”—It would be more honest if he said, “I do not want to be perfect: I am content to be saved.” Such as he do not care for being perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, but for being what they called saved.
George MacDonald
The things that come out of a man are they that defile him, and to get rid of them a man must go into himself, be a convict, and scrub the floor of his cell.
George MacDonald
Our friends will know us then: for their joy, will it be, or their sorrow? Will their hearts sink within them when they look on the real likeness of us? Or will they rejoice to find that we were not so much to be blamed as they thought, in this thing or that which gave them trouble?
George MacDonald
- Matt found the concept of assimilation in MacDonald…
All wickedness tends to destroy individuality and declining natures assimilate as they sink.
George MacDonald
Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with ever fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Part III, Chapter 11
- Matt also brought up the concept of slow descent…
A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.
George MacDonald
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts…
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
- Piggybacking off of this is the concept of Hell…
The one principle of hell is—‘I am my own!’
George MacDonald
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9
- In contrast to Hell and pride is love…
Such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son and the many brethren, rush inside the center of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn.
George MacDonald
If we cannot ‘practice the presence of God’, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep.
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
- There is a wonderful extract on alcoholism, which might have made Lewis think of his brother, Warnie…
Alas for the human soul inhabiting a drink-fouled brain! It is a human soul still, and wretched in the midst of all that whisky can do for it. From the pit of hell it cries out. So long as there is that which can sin, it is a man. And the prayer of misery carries its own justification, when the sober petitions of the self-righteous and the unkind are rejected. He who forgives not is not forgiven, and the prayer of the Pharisee is as the weary beating of the surf of hell, while the cry of a soul out of its fire sets the heart-strings of love trembling.
George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie
- This quote reminded David of the first half of “Surprised by Joy”…
Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.
George MacDonald
I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
Being, therefore, free from fear, I will write my complaint against the gods...
C. S. Lewis, Orual, Till We Have Faces
- There is a wonderful statement about goodness…
The Father was all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of His own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man sees goodness, he thinks of his own evil: Jesus had no evil to think of, but neither does He think of His goodness; He delights in His Father’s. ‘Why callest thou Me good?’
George MacDonald
- In another, he discusses the wedding at Cana and Mary’s petition…
At the prayer of His mother, He made room in His plans for the thing she desired. It was not His wish then to work a miracle, but if His mother wished it, He would. He did for His mother what for His own part He would rather have left alone. Not always did He do as His mother would have Him; but this was a case in which He could do so, for it would interfere nowise with the will of His Father. . . The Son, then, could change His intent and spoil nothing: so, I say, can the Father; for the Son does nothing but what He sees the Father do.
George MacDonald
- One particularly touching quotation was about doubt:
To deny the existence of God may . . . involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of His goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood. . . Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.
George MacDonald
- In the episode S7E32: “MacDonald Month: George’s Story”, After Hours with Joyce McPherson, Dr. McPherson discusses the doubts that MacDonald faced in his faith. Additionally, in S7E36 – AH – “MacDonald Month: In the Age of Miracles”, After Hours with Dr. Timothy Larsen, there was a discussion about how MacDonald treated doubters in his personal life, such as Mark Twain.
- Another virtue that MacDonald discussed was prudence. The “beam and mote” reference can be found in “Meditations in a Toolshed” placed in “God in the Dock”.
Had he had more of the wisdom of the serpent … he would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good-remembering well the beam and the mote; that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.
George MacDonald
“Oh God” I cried and that was all. But what are the prayers of the whole universe more than expansion of that one cry? It is not what God can give us, but God that we want.
George MacDonald
05. “Copycat Jack”
I thought that we would wrap up with a document that I wrote, where I took note of every time MacDonald says something that reminds me of Lewis.
- Easy to please and hard to satisfy…
That no keeping but a perfect one will satisfy God, I hold with all my heart and strength; but that there is none else He cares for, is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?
George MacDonald
As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, every father is pleased at the babys first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Part IV, Chapter 9
He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
- Bondage…
A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.
George MacDonald
No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!
George MacDonald
If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Preface
Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
- Deadlock…
Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.
George MacDonald
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World
People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
- The beginning of wisdom…
…For He regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, towards that image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.
George MacDonald
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature… Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
- The Word…
But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’, not the Bible, save as leading to Him.
George MacDonald
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him.
C. S. Lewis, Letter to Mrs. Johnson, November 8th, 1952
- Living forever…
The poor idea of living forever, all that commonplace minds grasp at for eternal life—(is) its mere concomitant shadow, in itself not worth thinking about. When a man is . . . one with God, what should he do but live forever?
George MacDonald
If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Part IV, Chapter 4
- Truth is truth…
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.
George MacDonald
[We should] mark what is said, not who said it…
C. S. Lewis, Letter to St. Calabria, January 14th, 1953
- Command that these stones be made bread…
…There was in these miracles, and I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us. He makes it. . . . Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous. Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once—immediately—than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the corn-field.
George MacDonald
Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes wine. He does so by creating a vegetable organism that can turn water, soil, and sunlight into a juice which will, under proper conditions, become wine. Thus, in a certain sense, He constantly turns water into wine, for wine, like all drinks, is but water modified. Once, and in one year only, God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes wine in a moment: uses earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibres to hold the water. But uses them to do what He is always doing. The Miracle consists in the short cut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one. If the thing happened, then we know that what has come into Nature is no anti-Natural spirit, no God who loves tragedy and tears and fasting for their own sake (however He may permit or demand them for special purposes) but the God of Israel who has through all these centuries given us wine to gladden the heart of man.
C. S. Lewis, Miracles, Chapter 15
- Preacher’s Repentance…this one is like “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer”.
O Lord, I have been talking to the people;
Thought’s wheels have round me whirled a fiery zone
And the recoil of my word’s airy ripple
My heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.
Therefore I cast myself before thee prone:
Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press
From my weak heart the swelling emptiness.
George MacDonald
- There are even more references, which are found in various other books like “The Pilgrim’s Regress”.
They regard the Father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of . . . ‘the glad Creator’, and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical, martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness but for His rights: not for the eternal purities, but the goody proprieties. The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the hope, all the colour, all the worth, out of life on earth, and offer you instead what they call eternal bliss—a pale, tearless hell. . . But if you are straitened in your own mammon-worshipping soul, how shall you believe in a God any greater than can stand up in that prison-chamber?
George MacDonald
- C. S. Lewis said of MacDonald, “My own debt to [Unspoken Sermons] is almost as great as one man can owe to another”.
Wrap-Up
Concluding Thoughts
- Dr. Ditchfield-Lazo recently wrote a commentary for an audiobook version of “The Princess and Curdie”.
The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms–which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work.
George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination
