The Seduction of Story
As adults, most of us remember with delight those stories that filled our imaginations as children. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, Franklin’s Dixon’s The Hardy Boys, or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter are just a few examples. Bible stories also memorably captured our attentions. Think of Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath, or Jonah and the Great Fish. Stories aren’t just for children, though. They’re for adults, too.
What is it about story that is so powerful and profound? So able to penetrate the skin—puncture the soul? It’s no wonder that the best-selling books are most often fictions, especially “children’s books.” In this article, I will explore (1) a theology of story, and (2) its implications in our lives today (hence, faith + practice). This will help us better understand the power of story. Throughout I will give particular attention to the contributions of George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis on this subject.
Faith
a. Like Father, Like Son
Though I am married, I have no children. However, I know enough peers with young children to know that parents count it great joy to hear that their children take after them—be it similar personalities or physical features. “Oh, he’s just like his father,” they say—“like father, like son,” or, “like mother, like daughter.” As persons created by a heavenly Father, the case is similar for us.
Of all of God’s creations, God chose to make mankind in His image (cf. Gen. 1:26). Through the centuries and millennia, authors have spilled much ink over what image-bearing precisely entails. Whatever the disagreements, however, many agree that it at least means this: In some way, human persons bear their Creator’s creativity.
We see evidence of this in everything: architecture, books, films, paintings, and so forth. This capacity to create (or more theologically correct, to make) is seen especially in the invention and propagation of story. MacDonald writes, “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” [1].
MacDonald isn’t alone in his sentiments. “Sub-creation,” remarks Tolkien, “is, I think, too little considered” [2]. “We make,” he continues, “because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker” [3]. Lewis echoes this: “The appeal of the fairy story lies in the fact that man there most fully exercises his function as a ‘subcreator’. . . . This is one of man’s proper functions, [and] delight naturally arises whenever it is successfully performed” [4].
Story matters. The writing and the reading of good stories is an expression of bearing God’s image. Yes, we should read historical, philosophical, and theological texts, but we mustn’t ignore fiction, especially children’s stories.
b. The Heart of a Child
During His ministry, Jesus called a child before Him and addressed His disciples: “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3). Jesus is not suggesting that maturing Christians maintain childish characteristics.
Rather, He is suggesting that we imbibe that childlike spirit of humility and trust—what MacDonald describes as “the essential childhood of the child” and “the deepest heart of humanity—its divine heart” in his sermon on this passage [5]. Surely part of this can mean that we engage our God-given imaginations through the phenomenon of story! By submitting ourselves to story, we submit ourselves to that divine, childlike spirit. And by becoming like children, we actually grow older in Christ.
Yet just as the reading of good stories is a celebration of our image-bearing status and evidence of our childlike spirit, it ultimately points toward that Great Story.
c. The Great Eucatastrophe
Whereas catastrophe refers to a disaster, eucatastrophe refers to a happy ending. Read nearly any classically written story and you’ll find that its protagonist, despite their odds, succeeds in the end. This too is what we long for. Despite life’s many frustrations and set backs, we all long for that happy ending—that eucatastrophe. The Good News is that it’s arrived in that Great Story of Jesus’ Incarnation and Resurrection.
Ultimately, reading good stories points us toward that Great Story as a form of general revelation. Numerous authors have picked up on this. Tolkien writes,
The Gospels contain a fairy-story . . . [that] has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy [6].
Lewis too:
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. . . . By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. . . . For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact [7].
Indeed, stories teach us something of our Lord. Yet having considered what theology says about story, what does it mean for us today?
Practice
a. The Great Story’s Fulfillment Does Not Abrogate Other Stories.
My young nephew recently saw a film. Although he enjoyed it, he didn’t like its ending, because it failed to resolve the film’s plot in a satisfying way. No one engendered this sentiment in him; he simply knew it.
Generally speaking, children live happy, innocent lives. Call it some innate sense or natural law, but children expect the good guys to win, the bad guys to lose, and a satisfactory resolution. No one has to teach them this—again, they simply know it. But as we grow older, we experience life’s disappointments: the good guys don’t live happily ever after, the bad guys often win, and stories don’t end as they should. Jaded by life, we long for that pure, perfect story.
The apostle Paul reminds us that the Great Story is here: “Christ died for our sins . . . was buried . . . [and] was raised on the third day” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). However, this does not make other stories obsolete. Far from abrogating or negating them, the Great Story heightens their importance and effectiveness.
Before Christ, such stories anticipated a greater story; since Christ, they celebrate the greatest story ever told. Tolkien writes, “But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium [Gospel] has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending’” [8]. The reading of good stories is important because it illuminates and reminds us of that greater story.
b. We Should Reclaim the Magic of Our Childhood.
Is Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia for children or adults? What about Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island? In a word: both. Such stories are written for children and adults. “For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether five, or fifty, or seventy-five,” writes MacDonald [9]. Again, we shouldn’t maintain childish characteristics, but rather that essential heart of a child to which Jesus refers in Matthew 18.
“The value of fairy-stories is thus not, in my opinion, to be found by considering children in particular,” remarks Tolkien. “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults” [10]. Lewis memorably offers this autobiographical note: “When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up” [11].
In reclaiming the pure, unadulterated magic of our childhood, we must avoid that tendency to relegate such stories in our minds—as if they’re inferior to adult fiction or dramas. “We must meet children as equals,” Lewis warns, “The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man” [12]. At least in this discussion, children are our literary equals.
Conclusion
By reading stories, we honor the One in Whose image we’re made, we exemplify a childlike spirit, and we celebrate the Great Story. Indeed, stories have much to offer us, even as adults—or better yet, especially as adults. It’s no wonder that part of Jesus’ teaching ministry included parables (i.e., stories)! Stories aren’t exclusively for children, or even primarily so. Rather, they’re for us: you and me. And their power and profundity is undeniable.
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[1] George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), The Complete Fairy Fairy Tales, (Ed.) U. C. Knoepflmacher (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 5-6.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1947), Tree and Leaf (Harper Collins, 2001).
[3] Ibid.
[4] C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1982), 35, 36.
[5] George MacDonald, “The Child in the Midst,” Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III In One Volume (United States of America: Greenbook Publications, llc, 2010), 10, 11.
[6] Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”.
[7] C.S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, (ed.) Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 66-67.
Lewis had previously commented on this in a private correspondence:
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true…in the sense of being the way in which God chooses (or can) appear to our faculties…God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection [C.S. Lewis, “Letter to Arthur Greeves,” The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume I: Family Letters 1905-1931 (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 977].
[8] Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”.
[9] MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” 7; italics added.
[10] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”.
[11] Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” xviii.
[12] Ibid., 42.
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What follows is a non-exhaustive list of some helpful authors and titles who represent the spirit of this essay in some way:
Richard Adams, Watership Down (1974)
Aesop, Aesop’s Fables (ca. 620-560 bc)
Lynne Reid Banks, The Indian in the Cupboard (1980)
L. Frank Baum, The Oz Series (1900-1921), including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass (1871)
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), The Father Brown Mysteries
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mister Fox (1970), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
Arthur Conan Doyle, Stories of Sherlock Holmes
Jean de La Fontaine, The Complete Fables (1668-94)
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)
Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain (1959), Julie of the Wolves (1972)
The Brothers Grimm, Children’s and Household Tales or Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1812)
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Nursery Rhymes of England (1842), Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849)
Joel Chandler Harris, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (1881)
Joseph Jacobs, Fables of Bidpai (1888), Fables of Aesop (1889) English Fairy Tales (1890), Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), Modern English Fairy Tales (1894), More Celtic Fairy Tales (1894), Indian Fairy Tales (1912), European Folk and Fairy Tales (1916)
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1965)
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (1894), Captains Courageous (1897), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902)
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time Series (1962-89), including A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Andrew Lang, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Book (1889-1910)
C.S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy (1938, 1943, 1945), The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), Till We Have Faces (1956)
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and Curdie (1883), The Complete Fairy Tales
L. M. Montgomery, The Anne of Green Gables Series (1908-21)
Ralph Moody, Little Britches: Father and I Were Rangers (1950)
Robert C. O’Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971)
Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883)
Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows (1961), Summer of the Monkeys (1976)
Johanna Reiss, The Upstairs Room (1972)
Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (1972)
Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), The Starlight Barking (1967)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen (1590, 1596)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide (1886)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), The Hobbit or There and Back Again (1937), Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (1954-55), Smith of Wootton Major (1967)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
E.B. White, Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952)
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie Series (1932-1943)
*Though some are listed above, some of the most famous authors and illustrators of fairytales include Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95), Charles Perrault (1628-1703), Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (1654-1724), Benjamin Tabart (1767-1833), Robert Southey (1774-1843), Grimm Brothers (1785-1863, 1786-1859), Hans Christian Anderson (1805-75), Alexander Afanasyev (1826-71), Carlo Collodi/Lorenzini (1826-90), Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), J.M. Barrie (1860-1937), Ruth Manning-Sanders (1886-1988), and Paul O. Zelinsky (1953-present).
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