The Servant Imagination

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. MATTHEW 6:28–29

MacDonald is remembered today less for his sermons than for his stories, and he would not have minded, because he did not think of the stories as something other than preaching. He believed that the imagination is a gift of God, made to see and to show the truth, and that a fairy tale could carry the gospel into places a sermon could not reach. This conviction, more than anything else, is what C. S. Lewis and the writers after him learned from him.

Made to mirror truth

MacDonald stated his view of the imagination most clearly in an essay on the fantastic imagination, and in a longer one on the imagination itself; but it runs through the sermons too. In The Last Farthing, pausing after an imaginative picture of the soul cut off from God, he stopped to explain what he was doing. “True, all I have been saying is imaginary; but our imagination is made to mirror truth.” He believed that the things that appear in the imagination are made, more or less, after the pattern of things that are, and that when we are true, our imagination will mirror nothing but truth.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. JAMES 1:17

He meant that the imagination is not a toy or a means of escape. It is a way of knowing. In The Voice of Job he made the point with a homely comparison. Things, he said, speak their deepest truth through what they show, not through what analysis takes apart. “To know a primrose 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.” The imagination is the faculty by which we know the primrose, and it has its part to play in knowing Christ.

Phantastes

The first of MacDonald’s fairy books for adults, Phantastes, appeared in 1858. Its hero, Anodos, wakes one morning to find his bedroom turning into a forest, and wanders through a Fairy Land of beauty and danger. He is pursued by a shadow that attaches itself to him and spoils whatever it falls on, and the book is in part the story of his long and painful deliverance from himself. Near its end he learns that it is better to love than to be loved, and he dies a kind of death that is the beginning of a better life. It is a strange book, dreamlike and uneven, and it sold poorly. But it was the book that, more than fifty years later, a young atheist named C. S. Lewis bought at a railway station and found, to his surprise, to be holy.

The stories for children

MacDonald’s books for children are his best-loved work. In At the Back of the North Wind, the boy Diamond is befriended by the North Wind, who appears to him as a beautiful and terrible lady and carries him through the night to see the sorrows and the goodness of London. She does things that seem cruel — she sinks a ship — and she tells Diamond that she does them because she must, and that there is a goodness behind them he cannot yet see. The book is MacDonald’s teaching on suffering and providence put into the shape of a story a child can love.

In The Princess and the Goblin, the princess Irene finds, at the top of a forgotten stair in her castle, her great-great-grandmother, a queen of unknown age, spinning a thread too fine to see. She gives Irene a ring tied to the thread and tells her that if she is ever in danger she must follow it, and it will lead her home. When the time comes, the thread leads Irene not away from danger but straight into the goblins’ caves, to rescue the miner’s boy Curdie, and only then home. Few stories have so simply pictured what it means to walk by faith.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. ISAIAH 30:21

The shorter tales — The Light Princess, The Golden Key, The Day Boy and the Night Girl and others — carry the same convictions in smaller compass. MacDonald insisted that a fairy tale should not be an allegory, with a moral to be decoded; it should be a true picture of the world, which each reader will understand as far as he is able.

The poems and Lilith

MacDonald was also a poet, and his Diary of an Old Soul, a short prayer in verse for every day of the year, written in the years when his children were dying, is perhaps the most intimate thing he wrote. His last long story, Lilith, published in 1895, is a dark and difficult book about death, sleep and resurrection, in which the soul must lie down and die to itself before it can wake. It gives the fullest imaginative shape to his hope that every soul, even the most rebellious, will at last be brought home.

Weighing it

MacDonald’s conviction that the imagination is a servant of truth has been a blessing to the church. The Bible itself is full of images, stories, poems and parables; the Lord taught in parables and pointed His hearers to the lilies and the sparrows; and much of the deepest truth of Scripture comes to us in the form of pictures. MacDonald helped recover the sense that beauty and story belong to God, and many Christians who would never read a sermon have met something of God in his books.

Two cautions are worth making. The first is that the imagination, like every other human faculty, is fallen. It can mirror truth, but it can also invent idols, and it is not a safe guide on its own. MacDonald himself said that the imagination mirrors truth when we are true; the Christian will add that it must be disciplined by the written Word, by which every picture is to be tested.

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 2 CORINTHIANS 10:5

The second is that MacDonald’s stories carry his theology with them, including the hope for universal salvation described in chapter sixteen. Lilith especially is shaped by it. Readers, and parents reading his stories to children, will enjoy them most wisely when they know this. The stories for children are, for the most part, simply good, and their pictures of trust, courage and faithfulness are well worth giving to the young.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of a story, poem or picture that has helped you see something of God. Give thanks for it.

2. Spend ten minutes this week simply looking at one created thing — a flower, a bird, the sky — and let it speak to you of its Maker.

3. If you have children or grandchildren, read them The Princess and the Goblin, and talk with them about the thread.

4. Read some of the parables of Jesus in Matthew 13 and Luke 15, and notice how He used pictures to teach.

5. Read 2 Corinthians 10:3–6, and ask God to bring your imagination into the obedience of Christ.

A PRAYER

Father of lights, every good and perfect gift comes from You, and You have made the world full of beauty and wonder.

Thank You for the gift of imagination, and for the stories and pictures that have shown me something of Your face.

Cleanse my imagination of every idol, and bring every thought into the obedience of Christ.

When I cannot see the way, teach me to follow the thread You have given me, until it leads me home. Amen.