Is the magic in fairy tales and fantasy books a problem for Christians?

Someone wrote me recently about being admonished by a friend for recommending that her friend’s daughter read the fantasy books of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The books contained magic and witchcraft and her friend felt that this would only encourage an interest in such things.

I told her about a man who came up to me at our exhibit booth at a conference and asked me if I knew of any good educational computer programs that taught certain subjects. He clearly thought that education technology was a good thing. Near the end of our discussion, he looked down and saw that we carried The Hobbit. “Oh,” he said, “I would never use that book with Christian students.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it has magic in it,” he said.

“But you approve of technology?”

“Of course.”

“Well, books like The Hobbit have what I call ‘fairy tale magic’ in them, which is just using some process, the exact nature of which is a mystery to you, to manipulate nature. What’s the difference between magic in this sense and technology?”

Fairy tale magic is the fanciful kind of thing that happens in many fairy tales. When the pumpkin and the rats in Cinderella are turned into a coach and horse, and six lizards into footmen; when the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty and she awakens from her deathly sleep; when Jack plants his magic beans and they grow into a giant bean plant that reaches the clouds; when Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold.

It is this kind of “magic” that Chesterton declares—in his great essay, “The Ethics of Elfland”—if imbibed as a child, helps to inoculate us against the scientific materialism of our age because it helps us to see that what lies behind the world is not a “law” (as the scientific materialist would say), but a Will.

Arthur C. Clarke once famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What he meant was that advanced technology does the very same thing that fairy tale magic does: manipulate nature using a process which you do not understand.

The man I was talking to said something about the fact that even though technology may be a mystery to us, it is not a mystery to scientists who have a natural explanation for it. I responded that that does not change the fact for those of us who are not scientists who use technology: It’s still magic to us.

And besides, even scientific explanations are not explanations, but descriptions―descriptions which themselves appeal to an order which even to scientists is still a mystery. Using an incantation to open a door in a fairy tale is no more magical than using copper to conduct electricity in the real world. And to say that copper conducts electricity because its outer electrons are not localized just begs more questions, since we have only explained one mysterious procedure in terms of another (Why do materials whose electrons are not localized conduct electricity?)

In other words, not only is any advanced technological process magic for us, but ultimately it is magic even to the people to whom we appeal to explain their magic. In the final analysis, it’s even magic to them.

So one way of responding to this objection to fantasy literature is to ask the person if they have a microwave oven in their home or a cell phone in their pocket. If there is a problem with fairy tale magic, then there is a problem with technology. But there is no problem with technology, therefore there is no problem with fairy tale magic (the logical rule of Modus Tollens).

In addition, the kind of “magic” you find in fairy tales―and in fantasy literature like that of Lewis and Tolkien―is not the kind of magic that is prohibited in Scripture. What is prohibited in Scripture is necromancy in particular and fortune-telling in general. It is the consort with specifically demonic forces that is prohibited, as when, at the behest of King Saul, the Witch of Endor calls forth the spirit of Samuel from the dead in the First Book of Samuel.

Again, if you interpret demonic forces too broadly (the occultic), you indict technology. Any definitional net with holes small enough to capture fortune-telling and demonology and large enough to let technology through will also be large enough to allow fairy tale magic through.

Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf does not have dealings with evil spirits, nor does Lewis’ Aslan.

The holes in the net are going to have to be so small as to capture fortune-telling and necromancy, but large enough to let through Joseph’s interpretation of dreams and Daniel’s prophecies. All of which is to say that the problem is not the manipulation of natural things, but the demonic itself. And there is nothing demonic about fairy tale magic of the kind that you find in Lewis and Tolkien. They are simply not calling upon evil spirits to do what they are doing.

And, in fact, it is clear that necromancy is portrayed as evil in The Lord of the Rings, as evidenced by the references to the evil character Sauron as “The Necromancer.” Tolkien certainly seems to recognize this distinction.

The problem is that the people who make this kind of argument want to go way beyond what the Scriptures prohibit. There is a distinction between the use of the word “magic” (in any sense) that is broad enough to encompass fairy tales and fantasy on the one hand, and witchcraft proper on the other.

People who protest Lewis and Tolkien need to have these distinctions pointed out to them.

My list of top 5 Inklings books

Christopher Mitchell of the Marion Wade Collection at Wheaton College selects his five favorite books by the Inklings and those associated with them at Christianity Today. The Inklings was the group of Christian professors at Oxford in the 1940s and 50s and their friends who informally commiserated together in their writings and whose thinking focused on a classical Christian vision of literature and reality. Its most well-known members included writers such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Here is Mitchell's list:

• The Wise Woman, by George MacDonald
• Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
• The Descent of the Dove, by Charles Williams
• The Tolkien Reader, by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Till We have Faces, by C. S. Lewis

This seems to be a rather idiosyncratic list. How can you have a list of favorite Inklings books without the greatest Inkling book of them all: The Lord of the Rings? I have only read three of these five books, but of those three I have read, I would only include one of them on my list: that of a non-Inkling, G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton and MacDonald only make the list, by the way, by virtue of the fact that they are the two major influences on the Inklings.

Here is my list:

• Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
• Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis
• The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald
• Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, by Owen Barfield

Anderson responds on Tolkien vs. Lewis

Matthew Lee Anderson at Mere Orthodoxy responds to my comments concerning the relative literary merits of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a discussion which has again flared up due to the new Prince Caspian movie that has just been released.

Anderson takes issue with my characterization of Lewis's Narnia stories as allegories, a position he shares with Lewis himself. "I would strenuously disagree," says Anderson, "with his characterization of the book as an allegory–it is much more significant than that." If you are taking the term 'allegory' in its most literal sense, I suppose Anderson (and Lewis) is right. If you restrict the application of the term to the kind of almost literal allegory you find, for example, in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, then the term obviously cannot be applied to the Narnia books. But I am certainly not using the term in this restricted sense, and I don't think most people who deal with such things do. I also don't know why an allegory would be any less an allegory for being more significant, since it is of the very nature of allegory to signify.

The Narnia books meet every definition of allegory I know. The books may have elements in them that go beyond allegory, but that doesn't affect their general nature as allegory. I agree with the assessment of Doris Myers, who Anderson quotes, that "It is more than allegory; it has all the mysterious resonance of a myth." But to say that the books are more than allegory cannot justify that they are less than allegory--or not allegory at all. If an allegory has mythic elements in it (as Lewis's books certainly do), that is not a reason for concluding that it is not an allegory. Anderson himself says, "there are clearly allegorical elements to the book." Maybe Anderson and I could settle on the term "allegorical myth," as does John Warwick Montgomery.

Anderson also argues that I did not address his point in my response to his comments on Chesterton:

I am afraid Cothran missed my point, which was less about Chesterton’s fiction and more about his Catholicism. I agree with Cothran’s assessment of Chesterton’s writings, many of which I have read and almost all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed. I raised him only as a counterexample to Longenecker’s argument that Lewis’s didactism stems from his Protestantism. Cothran’s reply does not, as best I can tell, refute the point.

Well, let's roll back the tape here. Anderson was responding to Longenecker's argument that Lewis's imaginary vision was uniquely protestant because of its didacticism. Anderson's response argued that if didacticism was a sign of protestantism, then Chesterton's fiction would have to be accounted protestant because of its didacticism. But Chesterton was Catholic, therefore, the idea that didacticism was a peculiarly protestant trait is mistaken. I was disputing his use of Chesterton here because I don't think Chesterton's fiction is didactic to any significant degree. That is what I was arguing, and it seems to me that it does go to the point Anderson was trying to make.

But I was on my way to another point (about what Chesterton generally shared with Tolkien), and so I think maybe I didn't respond to Anderson's main point as pointedly as I should have. Oh well...

I do think, however, that Longenecker's argument about Lewis's fiction being more didactic than Tolkien's stands, and its assumption that this character of his fiction is peculiarly protestant is a legitimate one. Catholic writers, because of their familiarity with liturgy, simply write in a more incarnational way. I'll can do not better than cite Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, and Walker Percy--and Tolkien. One of the few protestant writers I know who do well what these writers do is Wendell Berry. The incarnational literary vision is best explained by William Lynch in his Christ and Apollo.

Anderson also disagrees with my remarks about the greater difficulty identifying with characters native to Narnia than with characters native to Middle Earth:

In short, while Cothran finds the attraction in the difference, I look to the sameness: there is, in fact, a little bit of Caspian, of Tumnus, of Reepicheep in us. Who doesn’t wish to join Reepicheep on his quest to the edge of the world? Who has not longed to go with him, like Caspian, but been held back by duties and obligations?

Well, we may want to "join" Reepacheep, and "go with him," but it is hard to see Reepicheep in us--he is, after all a mouse. Caspian is probably one of the few characters with which we can identify (it helps that he is human). I won't press this point about character identification too hard, other than to say that when you use animal characters you do make such identification harder, and, as I have said elsewhere, I don't think Lewis did nearly as good a job with animal characters as other writers such as Kenneth Grahame or Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, in fact, is a perfect example of a great writer of myth, and the Jungle Book stories one of the great modern mythic writings.

But I need to say that I feel a little uncomfortable being on the anti-Lewis side of arguments such as this one, since I have spent so much time being pro-Lewis elsewhere, particularly when it comes to his nonfiction writing (although, as I have pointed out, I enjoy his fiction too). So I should perhaps cast my spear into the ground here and say that I heartily agree with this statement by Anderson:

Lewis’s is a great thinker precisely because he stands at a crucial moment in history, synthesizing and distilling the greatest thinkers of the Western tradition.

Amen.

And by the way, Anderson has a great blog which I always enjoy. You ought to visit it.

Tolkien vs. Lewis: Not the Last Battle

Well the truce between the forces of J. R. R. Tolkien and those of C. S. Lewis--two men who were friends during their lifetime, but whose ideological progeny have it out every time a movie comes out based on one of their works--has been broken again. Once again we are fighting about the relative merits of their literary imagination.

The immediate cause of this most recent skirmish is the release of Prince Caspian, a cinematic retelling of the second of C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, and the first shot appears to have been fired by Rev. Dwight Longenecker, at InsideCatholic.com, in a piece that pretty much sums up what I have said about this (only he does it much better). He reminds us once again that Tolkien's vision was deeper and more expansive than Lewis's. Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con adds his amen, a chorus in which I'll join once again.

Tolkien's criticism of Lewis's work did not amount to a literary feud, it was more in the nature of friendly advice. Tolkien had enthusiastically recommended the first two books of Lewis's Space Trilogy to the publisher (one wonders why, since they suffer some of the same faults as Narnia), but he apparently expressed more severe criticism for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. According to Lewis, Tolkien "disliked it intensely."

"I hear you've been reading Jack's children's story," Tolkien told Roger Lancelyn Green. "It really won't do, you know!"

In Carpenter's words,

He disliked works of the imagination that were written hastily, were inconsistent in their details, and were not always totally convincing in their evocation of a 'secondary world' ... Moreover, the story borrowed so indiscriminately from other mythologies and narratives (fauns, nymphs, Father Christmas, talking animals, anything that seemed useful for the plot) that for Tolkien the suspension of disbelief, the entering into a secondary world, was simply impossible.[1]

Longenecker states the case rather well:

In short, Tolkien took myth more seriously. He built his alternative world from the ground up. Beginning with the language of the elves, Tolkien created the race that spoke the language, then conceived and carefully created not only the other races and their languages, but the whole world in which they lived, complete with its geography, history, and comprehensive myth. Tolkien may have been scornful of the rapidity and ease with which Lewis created his stories, but he was so not simply because the works were produced quickly, but because it showed.

Tolkien's real objections to Narnia, however, run deeper. Tolkien disliked allegory, and the Narnia tales were too allegorical for his taste. Lewis protested that they were not an allegory (he had already written an allegory in his Pilgrim's Regress) but an analogy. While it is true that the characters in Narnia do not have a one-to-one allegorical relationship with abstract truths, they do point clearly to greater truths and greater characters in the Christian story. Tolkien objected.

Tolkien disliked allegory so intensely because he felt it was too didactic. It leaves no possibility that any other levels of meaning in the work could exist. Tolkien understood the artist, created in God's image, to be a "sub-creator" -- producing a work of the imagination that functioned best when it followed God's own complex action of creation.

To do this most successfully, a complete alternative world had to be created in which the work of redemption could be played out within its own consistent and logical constraints. It was not enough to create a world with symbolic pointers to Jesus Christ and the cross; that world would have to have a whole history and unique inner dynamic that would incarnate the universal truths in a totally fresh way.

Both men were heavily influenced by George MacDonald, the author of The Princess and the Goblin, but Lewis had other influences, one of which was John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim's Progress, as straightforward an allegory as has been written. In fact, Lewis sometimes seems two parts Bunyan to one part MacDonald.

But the issue of influences is not limited to who influenced the two writers. More importantly it was a matter of how the influences manifested themselves. Although Tolkien certainly had his influences (you can see pretty plainly E. R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany in his work, on top of that of early English writers such as the Anglo-Saxon authors of Beowulf and Pearl), Lewis's used his influences more consciously than Tolkien. Carpenter plays upon this point liberally in his book:

Indeed one can regard all Lewis's most successful literary work as pastiche. He chose a form from on source, an idea from another; he played at being (in turns) Bunyan, Chesterton, Tolkien, Williams, anybody he liked and admired. He was an impersonator, a mimic, a fine actor; but what lay at the heart of it all? Who was the real C. S. Lewis?[2]

Tolkien was, in short, more original than Lewis. Lewis pasted his world together from others he had at hand, while Tolkien created his own world with materials less recognizable. While Narnia is strange and fantastic, Middle Earth is fantastic too, but in a different way. Middle Earth was there before we knew of it; Narnia is a late discovery. This is why Middle Earth can be lived in, while Narnia can only be visited.

Matthew Lee Anderson at Mere Orthodoxy has responded to Longenecker, saying that he unjustly uses Narnia as representative of all of Lewis's fiction. He points to Till We Have Faces as an example of fiction written by Lewis equal to Tolkien's. But ironically, it is the allegorical aspect of Till We Have Faces that is the only really valuable aspect of the book. In fact, it seems to me that it fails the test of a good allegory in a way that the Narnia books themselves do not: that you can enjoy the story quite apart from the allegory. I do think Till We Have Faces does a better job of creating a convincing world, but the story just isn't as compelling as Lewis's children's books.

Anderson doesn't do his case any good either by, I think, misunderstanding G. K. Chesterton. Longenecker argues that Tolkien's vision is innately Catholic in its essential incarnational vision, a point with which Anderson disagrees, and he tries to use Chesterton to make his case:

...[T]he fiction of G.K. Chesterton–no slouch of a Roman Catholic himself–is even more didactic than Lewis’s. At points, his stories serve only as backdrops for his characters’ always amusing and edifying speeches. For Longenecker’s argument to stand, he would have to agree that Chesterton’s imagination was more Protestant than Catholic–a thought, I’m sure, which Chesterton would himself reject, and which would be difficult for any reader of Chesterton to sustain seriously for long.

I don't know which stories Anderson is referring to here. Certainly Chesterton's characters make some interesting speeches, and certainly his fiction has flaws, but you simply cannot look at something like The Man Who Was Thursday (a work written, by the way, when Chesterton was an Anglican) and view it as a backdrop for anything other than Chesterton's own original genius. Chesterton's stories were perfectly suited to Chesterton's vision of the world: a place where mirth and magic underly every ordinary thing.

To say that Chesterton's vision is didactic is sort of like saying that The Divine Comedy is didactic: it's true, but it is so inadequate an assessment as to tell us nothing essential about the work. It also doesn't prove Anderson's point. There is a certain didacticism to Chesterton, but Chesterton, unlike Lewis, isn't trying to create a secondary world. Chesterton doesn't need a secondary world to instruct us about this one. To Chesterton, this world is fantastic enough.

In his Introduction to George MacDonald and His Wife, by Macdonald's son, Greville MacDonald, Chesterton makes an observation about MacDonald's imaginative vision that speaks directly, not just to the difference between Lewis and Chesterton, but to the difference between Lewis and Tolkien:

...[F]or this is the very important difference between his sort of mystery and mere allegory. The commonplace allegory takes what it regards as the commonplaces or conventions necessary to ordinary men and women, and tries to make them pleasant or picturesque by dressing them up as princesses or goblins or good fairies. But George MacDonald did really believe that people were princesses and goblins and good fairies, and he dressed them up as ordinary men and women.[3]

Lewis tries to makes us see our own world by means of a different one; Chesterton makes us see a different world by means of our own. Lewis's thought is replete with Platonisms: he speaks of heaven as being more real than this world. But Chesterton is an Aristotelian, and he would never say this. The real world in Lewis's Narnia books is mundane: it is only Narnia that is fantastic. For Chesterton, the really fantastic thing is this world, "in spite of its defects, such as dragons." Lewis has to create a fantastic world from scratch; for Chesterton, all that is required is to recognize this one for what it is.

In a sense Tolkien's genius is his ability to do both of these things. While being fantastic, Tolkien's world still has a familiarity to it absent in Narnia: that is why it doesn't require a wardrobe to get into Middle Earth. Middle Earth is our own world. I don't think it was an accident that Tolkien chose this particular term, "Middle Earth". You come across the expression frequently in early English literature, and it is never a reference to another world, but always a reference to our own.

Narnia is fantastic because it is different. We may be like Peter, and Lucy, and Susan, and Edmund, but we are not like Prince Caspian, or Mr. Tumnis, or Reepacheep, or the White Witch. The only characters in Narnia with which we can really identify are not from Narnia. Middle Earth, on the other hand, is fantastic because it is familiar. There is a little bit of Frodo in all of us--and Bilbo, for that matter, and Aragorn, and Merry and Pippin.

Why is it that the place constructed from a less original vision should seem so distant, and the place created from the more original vision should seem so familiar?

But we need to be careful here lest we make the perfect the enemy of the good. While Tolkien's world is a more convincing one, the result of a more mature vision, that does not make Narnia any less fantastic in its own right. It is hard to capture the imagination of a child. I have raised four children, and read to all of them. Without exception, they have loved the Narnia books. In fact they see them in a way I have never been able to see them because I read them as an adult. So while we may live in Middle Earth, there is something very delightful, every now and then, about visiting Narnia.

1The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter, p. 223.
2Carpenter, p. 244.
3G. K. Chesterton, "Introduction to George MacDonald and His Wife," by Granville MacDonald.