The Ethics of Elfland

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? PSALM 8:3–4

The most famous chapter of Orthodoxy begins in the nursery. Chesterton said that his first and last philosophy, the one he believed in with unbroken certainty, he had learned not from philosophers but from fairy tales — from the nurse who told them and the common people who had handed them down. He did not mean that fairy tales are true in the sense that a history book is true. He meant that they had taught him the right attitude to the world, long before he had any religion, and that this attitude turned out, years later, to fit the Christian faith exactly.

The world is magic

The first thing fairy tales teach, Chesterton said, is that the world is not a machine. In the stories, apples are golden and trees bear jewels and a frog may be a prince, and the child accepts all of it without surprise. Grown-up people, by contrast, think that they have explained a thing when they have noticed that it happens regularly. They talk of the laws of nature as if the fact that leaves are green and the sun rises in the east were somehow necessary, as necessary as the fact that two and two make four. But it is not. There is no reason in logic why grass should be green rather than scarlet, or why an egg should become a bird rather than a fish. These things are not necessities. They are wonders that happen to be repeated, and the right response to a wonder is not an explanation but astonishment.

He went further. We tend to assume that repetition is a sign of something dead and mechanical, like a clock. But children, who are full of life, love repetition. They want the same story, the same game, the same joke, over and over again. It may be, Chesterton suggested, that God is like that — not too tired to vary the world, but strong enough to delight in doing the same glorious thing for ever. In the chapter called The Ethics of Elfland he put it in one of his best-known sentences: “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.” And a little later: “It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. GENESIS 8:22

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. LAMENTATIONS 3:23

Gratitude

The second thing fairy tales teach is gratitude. The world is not owed to us. It is a gift, and a surprising one, and a gift implies a giver. Long before he believed in God, Chesterton felt that he ought to thank someone for the fact that he existed at all, and for dandelions and sunsets and the shape of his own hands. He put it in the same chapter with great simplicity: “The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom.” Children, he went on, are grateful to Santa Claus for the toys in their stockings; might he not be grateful to someone for putting two miraculous legs in his own?

This is one of the deepest things he ever wrote, and it is profoundly biblical. The Scriptures everywhere treat thanksgiving not as a pleasant addition to religion but as close to its heart, and the failure to give thanks as close to the heart of sin. When Paul describes the human race turning away from God, the first thing he says of it is not that it became wicked but that it became ungrateful.

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. ROMANS 1:21

The doctrine of conditional joy

The third thing fairy tales teach is what Chesterton, with mock solemnity, called the doctrine of conditional joy. In every fairy tale the happiness of the hero hangs on a single condition, often an apparently arbitrary one. Cinderella may go to the ball, but she must be home by midnight. The princess may live in the palace, but she must not open a certain door. The lovers may be happy, but one of them must not look back, or speak a certain word, or eat a certain fruit. The whole wonderful world of the story depends upon one small prohibition.

The modern mind finds this irritating. It asks why the condition should be kept, since no reason is given. But the child does not ask that, and Chesterton thought the child was right. If someone gives you a palace and asks only that you leave one door shut, it is a strange ingratitude to complain about the door. The joy is enormous; the condition is small; and the joy is a gift that could not have been demanded. He saw at once what this had to do with ordinary morality. To complain that marriage requires faithfulness, or that pleasure requires restraint, is like complaining that Cinderella has to leave the ball at midnight. It is to forget that the ball was a gift in the first place.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it. GENESIS 2:16–17

It is not hard to see where this leads. The first story in the Bible is a story of conditional joy. A garden is given, every tree in it but one; and the whole tragedy of the human race begins with the refusal to keep a single small condition.

The world as a shipwreck

The last thing Chesterton drew from the nursery was a sense that the good things of the world are precious because they are rescued. He compared himself to Robinson Crusoe, who counts every object he has saved from the wreck — a knife, a barrel of powder, a few tools — with a kind of awe, because each is all he has and each might have been lost. That, he said, is how the good things of the world ought to look to us: not as a dull inventory, but as treasures saved from a ship that went down. Every ordinary thing is a survivor.

When he came at last to Christianity, he found that it told him exactly this. The world is good, because God made it. The world is also fallen, so that its goodness is not to be taken for granted. And the whole of it is held in being moment by moment by a Giver to whom thanks are owed.

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. PSALM 24:1

Weighing it

There is almost nothing in this chapter to set aside, and a great deal to receive with joy. Chesterton’s sense of wonder and his insistence on gratitude are a sorely needed tonic for believers who have come to treat the faith as a list of duties. Two cautions may be added.

The first is that wonder is not yet faith. A man may feel the strangeness and the gift of the world all his life and never turn to the Giver; and the Scriptures are clear that the witness of creation, though real, leaves us without excuse rather than with salvation. Chesterton knew this. His gratitude led him to look for the One to thank, and he found Him in the creed. The reader should not stop where Chesterton started.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. PSALM 19:1

The second is that Chesterton’s happy account of the conditions of joy can make obedience sound easier than it is. The fairy tale’s one small condition becomes, in the Christian life, a daily cross; and the reason we keep God’s commands is not finally that they are small, but that He is good. Chesterton would have agreed. But the reader who has found a command of God anything but small should know that he is not the first, and should look not to the fairy tale but to the Saviour who kept every command in his place.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Look out of the window, or at your own hand, and try to see it as Chesterton did — as something that need not have existed at all. What do you notice?

2. Read Romans 1:18–23 and notice the place of thanklessness in Paul’s account of human sin.

3. Is there a command of God that you have resented as an arbitrary condition on your happiness? Bring it to Him with thanks for the gifts that surround it.

4. Make a list, as Crusoe did, of the things you have been given that you could not survive without. Thank God for each.

5. Read the chapter of Orthodoxy called The Ethics of Elfland, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You made the sun and You call it up each morning, and You have never grown tired of Your world.

Forgive me for growing old in the wrong way, for taking Your gifts for granted, and for forgetting to say thank you.

Give me the eyes of a child who sees that everything is given, and the heart of a child who knows that the Giver is good.

Where You have set a condition on my joy, help me to keep it gladly, for the sake of Jesus Christ, who kept every one of Your commands for me. Amen.