In an earlier essay, I lauded the benefits of teaching catechisms to young children. Although I still stand by that piece, I have become convinced that stories—rather than sheer didactic teaching—are central to the shaping of our inner lives, characters, and understanding of God. I suspect that memorizing a catechism without the benefit of a story-formed heart will most likely produce a meager harvest. By God’s design, stories are at the heart of the human experience. Our most fundamental, often unconsciously held beliefs stem from the basic stories about life that have taken root in our hearts. These can be very short stories (“Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”), yet their power over the way we live is tremendous.
Moral Imagination
One way that thoughtful people have described the power that stories have over us comes in the language of “moral imagination.” This term itself has an interesting history, appearing first in a passage from Edmund Burke regarding the “destruction of civilizing manners” during the French Revolution.[1] The history of the concept then passes through other important thinkers, such as George MacDonald and T. S. Eliot; Russell Kirk has popularized the term in our own time, such that it is a recurring theme in Christian home-education circles, where I first encountered it. Vigen Guroian uses the term in the subtitle to his book, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, because the moral imagination is the primary lens through which he engages in literary criticism of children’s tales.
So, what is the moral imagination, and how can stories shape this aspect of our total personality? Part of the definition that the Russel Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal provides for the term is “the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.”[2] Guroian explains that the moral imagination is “the very process by which the self makes metaphors out of images that memory supplies. It then employs these metaphors to suppose correspondences in experience and to make moral judgments.”[3] Guroian contrasts the moral imagination, as would Kirk, with other “undesirable forms of imagination, such as the idyllic, the idolatrous, and the diabolic.”[4]
Of course, the word imagination itself could benefit from definition, but, for the sake of space, I must leave that task to the reader. As a short-hand, more concrete definition I use for my own benefit, I think of the moral imagination as the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes—even the shoes of a more virtuous Yourself. Cultivating a robust moral imagination gives us the ability to see behind the seeming ordinariness of everyday life to the cosmic story of good versus evil, and to imagine what You, as such a character in such a story, must do to fight on the side of the good.
Fairy Tales
This is where stories come in. Stories have such a transformative power over us that those told to children have historically been chosen with much care. In fact, a whole cannon of children’s stories exists, first in the oral tradition and now through writing and other media, that we generally refer to as “tales.” These include folk tales such as “The Three Little Pigs” and “The Little Red Hen” (try Paul Galdone for wonderful picture book versions) as well as classic fairy tales (think of the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, in the West) and modern fairy tales (George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and others). Guroian, focusing on fairy tales specifically, explains:
After a child has read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” or C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, her moral imagination is bound to have been stimulated and sharpened. These stories offer powerful images of good and evil and show her how to love through the examples of the characters she has come to love and admire. This will spur her imagination to translate these experiences and images into the constitutive elements of self-identity and into metaphors she will use to interpret her own world. She will grow increasingly capable of moving about in that world with moral intent.[5]
Fairy tales specifically seem to have great power in this area because the stories themselves combine the ordinary and extraordinary in a way that sets good and evil in the clearest of terms, if not always the simplest.
Tending the Heart
The second edition of Guroian’s book was released earlier this year, and it is this edition that I am reviewing. His introduction includes a short explanation regarding his own entrance into and interest in the world of fairy tales, upon which subject he taught a popular college-level course for several years. His first chapter includes an explanation of the moral imagination from which I have quoted above at length, and a short discourse on the importance of the concept of virtue in moral education as opposed to the teaching of values.
Following this basis are eight chapters on important moral themes in thirteen different children’s stories. The stories include tales made famous by Disney adaptations (adaptations universally deplored by Guroian, which can be painful to a sentimental 90s child!) such as Pinocchio and “The Little Mermaid”; well-known children’s novels, such as The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web; and lesser-known stories, such as “The Nightingale” and The Wise Woman: A Double Story. Guroian explores the different important moral themes present in these stories, such as Love and Immortality, Evil and Redemption, Faith and Courage, Beauty, Goodness, and Obedience. Three of these chapters (covering the stories of Andersen’s “The Nightingale” and “The Ugly Duckling”, the Grimms’ “Cinderella”, John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River, and George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman: A Double Story) are completely new to this edition.
Finally, Guroian concludes with a short bibliographical essay in which he recommends excellent classic children’s stories on the themes covered in the book. He includes additional titles from Lewis, MacDonald, and E. B. White, more fairy tales, and a few familiar children’s books such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (no derision from Guroian for this movie adaptation), A Wrinkle in Time, and Where the Wild Things Are.
Guroian does an exceptional job throughout his book of engaging with other critics’ writing on these children’s stories. He discusses views from Maurice Sendak, Roger Sale, and Jack Zipes, among others. He usually disagrees with these authors’ conclusions, since they often analyze the stories from a modern, psychological perspective. Guroian’s main vocation of theologian provides him with the background needed to unearth the biblical themes in many of these tales that other critics either disregard or do not see in the first place. Guroian’s Eastern Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on iconography, brings a certain bent to his interpretation that Baptists would choose to frame differently, but his insights are still helpful, regardless of denomination.
Guroian’s prose is strong and enjoyable, and his organization of the text is excellent. Summarizing plots in a fashion that leaves the reader interested in reading the actual stories is a difficult task, but Guroian does it well: providing enough information to be meaningful without wringing out all the details that make reading fiction fun. My main complaint with the book is the choice to use endnotes instead of footnotes embedded in the text. Guroian has some important content in the endnotes that I would have preferred in the body of the book. Although a scholar, Guroian’s work is not overly academic, and it would be a great resource to parents when thinking through what types of stories they will prioritize sharing with their children; it may inspire you—as it has me—to read a few just for yourself!
Conclusion
Guroian believes that parents have a duty to tend the moral imagination of their children “like the tea rose in a garden.”[6] He believes fairy tales and classic stories can be a guide for children in the development of their moral life. His book, in turn, is a guide from which we as parents can greatly benefit as we seek to cultivate virtue in the hearts of our children. Virtuous lives and virtuous societies do not develop on their own; they need the often difficult and foreign wisdom of the Tradition, passed down through both literature and loving mentors. Guroian becomes such a mentor through his work in this book. What fertile soil the Spirit of God will have with which to work in our children when we heed the wisdom of such mentors and stories!
[1] Russell Kirk, “The Moral Imagination,” Literature and Belief, vol. 1 (1981), 37–49. Accessed at https://kirkcenter.org/imagination/the-moral-imagination/
[2] “Kirk on Moral Imagination” from the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal website. Accessed at https://kirkcenter.org/by-kirk/kirk-on-moral-imagination/
[3] Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 20.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 25.
[6] Ibid., 268.
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