George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis)
EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY C. S. LEWIS
TO MARY NEYLAN
C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology"
Language: English
Date: Jan 9, 2003
Изд: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., NEW YORK, 1978
OCR: Дмитрий Машковский
Spellcheck: Дмитрий Машковский, Jan 9, 2003
"George MacDonald. An Antology"
EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY
C. S. LEWIS
TO MARY NEYLAN
CONTENTS
1 Dryness
2 Inexorable Love
3 Divine Burning
4 The Beginning of Wisdom
5 The Unawakened
6 Sinai
7 No
8 The Law of Nature
9 Escape Is Hopeless
10 The Word
11 I Knew a Child
12 Spiritual Murder
13 Impossibilities
14 Truth Is Truth
15 The White Stone
16 Personality
17 The Secret in Man
18 The Secrets in God
19 No Massing
20 No Comparing
21 The End
22 Moth and Rust
23 Caverns and Films
24 Various Kinds of Moth
25 Holy Scriptures
26 Command That These Stones Be Made Bread
27 Religious Feeling
28 Dryness
29 Presumption
30 The Knowledge of God
31 The Passion
32 Eli, Eli
33 The Same
34 Vicarious Desolation
35 Creeping Christians
36 Dryness
37 The Use of Dryness
38 The Highest Condition of the Human Will
39 Troubled Soul
40 Dangerous Moment
41 It Is Finished
42 Members of One Another
43 Originality
44 The Moral Law
45 The Same
46 Upward toward the Center
47 No One Loves Because He Sees Why
48 My Neighbor
49 The Same
50 What Cannot Be Loved
51 Lore and Justice
52 The Body
53 Goodness
54 Christ's Disregards
55 Easy to Please and Hard to Satisfy
56 The Moral Law
57 Bondage
58 The Rich Young Man
59 Law and Spirit
60 Our Nonage
61 Knowledge
62 Living Forever
63 Be Ye Perfect
64 Carrion Comfort
65 The Same
66 How Hard?
67 Things
68 Possession
69 The Torment of Death
70 The Utility of Death
71 Not the Rich Only
72 Fearful Thinking
73 Miracles
74 The Sacred Present
75 Forethought
76 Not the Rich Only
77 Care
78 The Sacred Present
79 Heaven
80 Shaky Foundations
81 Fussing
82 Housekeeping
83 Cares
84 God at the Door
85 Difficulties
86 Vain Vigilance
87 Incompleteness
88 Prayer
89 Knowledge That Would Be Useless
90 Prayer
91 Why Should It Be Necessary?
92 The Conditions of a Good Gift
93 False Spirituality
94 Small Prayers
95 Riches and Need
96 Providence
97 Divine Freedom
98 Providence
99 The Miracles of Our Lord
100 They Have No Wine
101 Intercessory Prayer
102 The Eternal Revolt
103 They .Say It Does Them Good
104 Perfected Prayer
105 Corrective Granting
106 Why We Must Wait
107 Gods Vengeance
108 The Way of Understanding
109 Penal Blindness
111 Agree with the Adversary Quickly
112 The Inexorable
113 Christ Our Righteousness
114 Agree Quickly
115 Duties to an Enemy
116 The Prison
117 Not Good to Be Alone
118 Be Ye Perfect
119 The Heart
120 Precious Blame
121 The Same
122 Man Glorified
123 Life in the Word
124 The Office of Christ
125 The Slowness of the New Creation
126 The New Creation
127 Pessimism
128 The Work of the Father
129 The End
130 Deadlock
131 The Two Worst Heresies
132 Christian Growth
133 Life and Shadow
134 False Refuge
135 A Silly Notion
136 Dryness
137 Perseverance
138 The Lower Forms
139 Life
140 The Eternal Round
141 The Great One Life
142 The Beginning of Wisdom
143 "Peace in Our Time"
144 Divine Fire
145 The Safe Place
146 God and Death
147 Terror
148 False Want
149 A Man's Right
150 Nature
151 The Same
152 Doubt
153 Job
154 The Close of the Book of Job
155 The Way
156 Self-Control
157 Self-Dental
158 Killing the Nerve
159 Self
160 My Yoke Is Easy
161 We Must Be Jealous
162 Facing Both Ways
163 The Careless Soul
164 There Is No Merit in It
165 Faith
166 The Misguided
167 The Way
168 The First and Second Persons
169 Warning
170 Creation
171 The Unknowable
172 Warning
173 The Two First Persons
174 The Imitation of Christ
175 Pain and Joy
176 "By Him All Things Consist"
177 "In Him Was Life"
178 Why We Have Not Christs "Ipsissima Verba"
179 Warning
180 On Bad Religious Art
181 How to Read the Epistles
182 The Entrance of Christ
183 The Same
184 The Uses of Nature
185 Natural Science
186 The Value of Analysis
187 Nature
188 Water
189 Truth of Things
190 Caution
191 Duties
192 Why free Will Was Permitted
193 Eternal Death
194 The Redemption of Our Nature
195 No Mystery
196 The Live Truth
197 Likeness to Christ
198 Grace and Freedom
199 Glorious Liberty
200 No Middle Way
201 On Having One's Own Way
202 The Death of Christ
203 Hell
204 The Lie
205 The Author's Fear
206 Sincerity
207 First Things First
208 Inexorable Love
209 Salvation
210 Charity and Orthodoxy
211 Evasion
212 Inexorable Love
213 The Holy Ghost
214 The Sense of Sin
215 Mean Theologies
216 On Believing III of God
217 Condemnation
218 Excuses
219 Impossibilities
220 Disobedience
221 The Same
222 The God of Remembrance
223 Bereavement
224 Abraham's Faith
225 The Same
226 Perception of Duties
227 Righteousness of Faith
228 The Same
229 Reckoned unto Us for Righteousness
230 St. Paul's Faith
231 The Full-Grown Christian
232 Revealed to Babes
233 Answer
234 Useless Knowledge
235 The Art of Being Created
236 When We Do Not Find Him
237 Prayer
238 On One's Critics
239 Free Will
240 On Idle Tongues
241 Do We Love Light?
242 Shame
243 The Wakening
244 The Wakening of the Rich
245 Self-Deception
246 Warning
247 The Slow Descent
248 Justice and Revenge
249 Recognition Hereafter
250 From Dante
251 What God Means by "Good"
252 All Things from God
253 Absolute Being
254 Beasts
255 Diversity of Souls
256 The Disillusioned
257 Evil
258 The Loss of the Shadow
259 Love
260 From Spring to Summer
261 The Door into Life
262 A Lonely Religion
263 Love
264 A False Method
265 Assimilation
266 Looking
267 Progress
268 Providence
269 Ordinariness
270 Forgiveness
271 Visitors
272 Prose
273 Integrity
274 Contentment
275 Psychical Research
276 The Blotting Out
277 On a Chapter in Isaiah
278 Providence
279 No Other Way
280 Death
281 Criterion of a True Vision
282 One Reason for Sex
283 Easy Work
284 Lebensraum
285 Nature
286 For Parents
287 Hoarding
288 Today and Yesterday
289 Obstinate Illusion
290 Possessions
291 Lost in the Mountains
292 The Birth of Persecution
293 Daily Death
294 On Duty to Oneself
295 A Theory of Sleep
296 Sacred Idleness
297 The Modern Bane
298 Immortality
299 Prayer
300 Self
301 Visions
302 The Impervious Soul
303 An Old Garden
304 Experience
305 Difficulties
306 A Hard Saying
307 Truisms
308 On Asking Advice
309 No Heel Taps
310 Silence Before the Judge
311 Nothing So Deadening
312 Rounding and Completion
313 Immortality
314 The Eternal Now
315 The Silences Below
316 Dipsomania
317 Reminder
318 Things Rare and Common
319 Holy Laughter
320 The Self
321 Either-Or
322 Prayer
323 A Bad Conscience
324 Money
325 Scrubbing the Cell
326 The Mystery of Evil
327 Prudence
328 Competition
329 Method
330 Prudence
331 How To Become a Dunce
332 Love
333 Preacher's Repentance
334 Deeds
335 Prayer
336 The House Is Not for Me
337 Hoarding
338 The Day's First Job
339 Obstinate Illusion
340 The Rules of Conversation
341 A Neglected Form of Justice
342 Good
343 Thou Shall Not Make Any Graven Image
344 How to Become a Dunce
345 Our Insolvency
346 A Sad Pity 14*
347 On Method
348 Wishing
349 Fear
350 The Root of All Rebellion
351 Two Silly Young Women
352 Hospitality
353 Boredom
354 Counting the Cost
355 Realism
356 Avarice
357 The Lobster Pot
358 The First Meeting
359 Reminder
360 The Wrong Way with Anxiety
361 Deadlock
362 Solitude
363 Death
364 The Mystery of Evil
365 The Last Resource
Sources
Bibliography
PREFACE
all that I know of George MacDonald I have learned either from his own
books or from the biography (George MacDonald and His Wife) which his son,
Dr. Greville MacDonald, published in 1924; nor have I ever, but once, talked
of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to
mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. MacDonald.
We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in
character and errors in thought which result from a man's early conflicts
with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George
MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost
perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom.
From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at
the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach
that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations
the most central.
His father appears to have been a remarkable man - a man hard, and
tender, and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity.
He had had his leg cut off above the knee in the days before chloroform,
refusing the customary dose of preliminary whisky, and "only for one moment,
when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and
ejaculate a faint, sibilant whiff." He had quelled with a fantastic joke at
his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He
forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without
one. He advised him "to give over the fruitless game of poetry." He asked
from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of
twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score
of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among
farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as
boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless
this tells us as much about the son's character as the father's and should
be taken in connection with our extract on prayer (104). "He who seeks the
Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for
he is not likely to ask amiss." The theological maxim is rooted in the
experiences of the author's childhood. This is what may be called the
"anti-Freudian predicament" in operation.
George MacDonald's family (though hardly his father) were of course
Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of
escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such
emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald's
story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such
stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines,
comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture
and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of
All flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not swallow
the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a
one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been
expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald.
It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of
view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his
intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements
of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is
revolting.
All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn.
All that is best in his novels carries us back to that "kaleyard" world of
granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they
flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery,
the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate
love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how
much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a
theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly
terrible old woman wo had burnt his uncle's fiddle as a Satanic snare, might
well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called "a mere
sadist." Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer
and again in What's Mine's Mine, we are compelled to look deeper-to see,
inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and
even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the
doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth
that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.
He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King's
College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of
Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been
identified. I mention the fact because it made a lifelong impression on
MacDonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and
always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in
Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his
books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the "great
house in the North" was the scene of some important crisis or development in
his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of
German Romanticism.
In 1850 he received what is technically known as a "Call" to become the
Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel. By 1852 he was in trouble with
the "deacons" for heresy, the charges being that he had expressed belief in
a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German
theology. The deacons took a roundabout method to be rid of him, by lowering
his salary-it had been ё150 a year and he was now married-in the hope that
this would induce him to resign. But they had misjudged their man. MacDonald
merely replied that this was bad enough news for him but that he supposed he
must try to live on less. And for some time he continued to do so, often
helped by the offerings of his poorest parishioners who did not share the
views of the more prosperous Deacons. In 1853, however, the situation became
impossible. He resigned and embarked on the career of lecturing, tutoring,
occasional preaching, writing, and "odd jobs" which was his lot almost to
the end. He died in 1905.
His lungs were diseased and his poverty was very great. Literal
starvation was sometimes averted only by those last moment deliverances
which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is
against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some
of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute
condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does
their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological
wishful thinking-the spes phthisica-of the consumptive. None of the evidence
suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the
future but from resting in what he called "the holy Present." His
resignation to poverty (see Number 274) was at the opposite pole from that
of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply
appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can
buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps
significant-it is certainly touching-that his chief recorded weakness was a
Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor
can be.
In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a
writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a
man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we
define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald
has no place in its first rank- perhaps not even in its second. There are
indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I
would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even
burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise,
weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this
level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at
times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a
nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid
ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels),
sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite
dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is
fantasy-fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And
this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with
which we are confronted is whether this art-the art of myth-making-is a
species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the
Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story
of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose
version-whose words-are we thinking when we say this?
For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's
-words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story
supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the
story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident.
What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of
events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some
medium which involved no words at all-say by a mime, or a film. And I find
this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the
Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonius Rhodius (whom I never
finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I
consider his version a very pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the
mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to
take the "theme" of Keats's Nightingale apart from the very words in which
he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form
and content can there be separated only by a fake abstraction. But in a
myth-in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters-this is
not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those
events in our imagination has, as we say, "done the trick." After that you
can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of
communication are words, it is desirable that a letter which brings you
important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor
convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the wastepaper basket
as soon as you have mastered its contents, and the words (those of Lempriere
would have done) are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the
Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the "theme" or "content" is the
soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something
inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series
are not even clothes-they are not much more than a telephone. Of this I had
evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka's Castle
related in conversation and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading
added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.
Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not
consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs
in the modern world a genius-a Kafka or a Novalis-who can make such a story.
MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know
how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory
since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words-nay, since
its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a
sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It
begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has
largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces
works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged
acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest
poets. It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry-or at least to
most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt.
It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated
having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and
"possessed joys not promised to our birth." It gets under our skin, hits us
at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest
certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more
fully awake than we are for most of our lives.
It was in this mythopoeic art that MacDonald excelled. And from this it
follows that his best art is least represented in this collection. The great
works are Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and
Lilith. From them, just because they are supremely good in their own kind,
there is little to be extracted. The meaning, the suggestion, the radiance,
is incarnate in the whole story: it is only by chance that you find any
detachable merits. The novels, on the other hand, have yielded me a rich
crop. This does not mean that they are good novels. Necessity made MacDonald
a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good. They are
best when they depart most from the canons of novel writing, and that in two
directions. Sometimes they depart in order to come nearer to fantasy, as in
the whole character of the hero in Sir Gibbie or the opening chapters of
Wilfred Cumbermede. Sometimes they diverge into direct and prolonged
preachments which would be intolerable if a man were reading for the story,
but which are in fact welcome because the author, though a poor novelist, is
a supreme preacher. Some of his best things are thus hidden in his dullest
books: my task here has been almost one of exhumation. I am speaking so far
of the novels as I think they would appear if judged by any reasonably
objective standard. But it is, no doubt, true that any reader who loves
holiness and loves MacDonald-yet perhaps he will need to love Scotland
too-can find even in the worst of them something that disarms criticism and
will come to feel a queer, awkward charm in their very faults. (But that, of
course, is what happens to us with all favorite authors.) One rare, and all
but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The "good" characters are
always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are
stagey.
This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald's
literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my
extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt
to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly
all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has
given them great help-sometimes indispensable help toward the very
acceptance of the Christian faith.
I will attempt no historical or theological classification of
MacDonald's thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still
more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective
way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher
through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest
when we have murmured "Thomist," "Barthian," or "Existentialist." And in
Mac-Donald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses
the will: the demand for obedience, for "something to be neither more nor
less nor other than done" is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience
every other faculty somehow speaks as well-intellect, and imagination, and
humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was
perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable
failure of mere morality. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which
unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is
never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who
seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ
Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere
else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so
intertwined. The title "Inexorable Love" which I have given to several
individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability-but
never the inexorability of anything less than love-runs through it like a
refrain; "escape is hopeless"-"agree quickly with your
adversary"-"compulsion waits behind"-"the uttermost farthing will be
exacted." Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are
suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so.
MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens
terrible things if we will not be happy."
In many respects MacDonald's thought has, in a high degree, just those
excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to
expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might
easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and "religious experience" too
highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic
in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 37, 39,
351.) His whole philosophy of Nature (Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185,
187, 188, 189, 285) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes
little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and
idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead
than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me
particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but
most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is
merely the starting point-he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His
psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns
that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a
superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King's castle in The
Princess and the Goblins, and the terror of his own house which falls upon
Mr. Vane in Lilith: hence also his formidable critique (201) of our daily
assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function-a
low and primitive, yet often indispensable function-which he allows to Fear
in the spiritual life (Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349). Reaction
against early teachings might on this point have very easily driven him into
a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will
be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none
better) that even omnipotence cannot save the uncoverted. He never trifles
with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but
also as astringent as the Imitation.
So at least I have found him. In making this collection I was
discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I
regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in
which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who
have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the
affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it. And even if honesty did
not-well, I am a don, and "source-hunting" (Quellenforschung) is perhaps in
my marrow. It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought-almost
unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected
it on a dozen previous occasions-the Everyman edition of Phantasies. A few
hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been
waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder
into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that
leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to
that of perversity. Now Phantasies was romantic enough in all conscience;
but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my
thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this
difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange,
it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in
which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it
a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain
quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert,
even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did
nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came
far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the
process was complete-by which, of course, I mean "when it had really
begun"-I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied
me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that
he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was
now telling me was the very same that he had told me from the beginning.
There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the
shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through.
The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out
to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and
ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my
teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was
goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception
is all the other way round-in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness
to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the
sweet air blowing from "the land of righteousness," never reveals that
elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but
sensuous desire-the thing (in Sappho's phrase) "more gold than gold."
It is no part of my aim to produce a critical text of MacDonald. Apart
from my unconscious errors in transcription, I have "tampered" in two ways.
The whole difficulty of making extracts is to leave the sense perfectly
clear while not retaining anything you do not want. In attempting to do so,
I have sometimes interpolated a word (always enclosed in brackets) and
sometimes altered the punctuation. I have also introduced a capital H for
pronouns that refer to God, which the printer, in some of my originals, did
not employ; not because I consider this typographical reverence of much
importance, but because, in a language where pronouns are so easily confused
as they are in English, it seems foolish to reject such an aid to clarity.
- C. S. lewis
GEORGE MACDONALD
AN ANTHOLOGY
[ 1 ] Dryness
That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth
of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the
weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and
say to Him, "Thou art my refuge."*
* The source of this quotation and of the subsequent quotations will be
found in "Sources,"
[ 2 ] Inexorable Love
Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is
imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. . .
. For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness
of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot
love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may
love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected-not
in itself, but in the object. . . . Therefore all that is not beautiful in
the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be
destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.
[ 3 ] Divine Burning
He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: he
is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth
eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that
is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have
purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea,
will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to
its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest
consciousness of life, the presence of God.
[ 4 ] The Beginning of Wisdom
How should the Hebrews be other than terrified at that which was
opposed to all they knew of themselves, beings judging it good to honor a
golden calf? Such as they were, they did well to be afraid. ... Fear is
nobler than sensuality. Fear is better than no God, better than a god made
with hands. ... The worship of fear is true, although very low: and though
not acceptable to God in itself, for only the worship of spirit and of truth
is acceptable to Him, yet even in his sight it is precious. For He regards
men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be
merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that
image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a
thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth
as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A
condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate
a saint.
[ 5 ] The Unawakened
Can it be any comfort to them to be told that God loves them so that He
will burn them clean? . . . They do not want to be clean, and they cannot
bear to be tortured.
[ 6 ] Sinai
And is not God ready to do unto them even as they fear, though with
another feeling and a different end from any which they are capable of
supposing? He is against sin: insofar as, and while, they and sin are one,
He is against them-against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their
hopes; and thus He is altogether and always for them. That thunder and
lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that
visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image
... of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness, of the
unrest of unassuageable repulsion with which He regards such conditions.
[ 7 ] No
When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is
groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more.
. . . The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves
God made shall appear.
[ 8 ] The Law of Nature
For that which cannot be shaken shall remain. That which is immortal in
God shall remain in man. The death that is in them shall be consumed. It is
the law of Nature- that is, the law of God-that all that is destructible
shall be destroyed.
[ 9 ] Escape Is Hopeless
The man whose deeds are evil, fears the burning. But the burning will
not come the less that he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For
Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till
he has paid the uttermost farthing.
[ 10 ] The Word
But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim
to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus,
the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in
whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save
as leading to Him.
[ 11 ] I Knew a Child
I knew a child who believed she had committed the sin against the Holy
Ghost, because she had, in her toilette, made an improper use of a pin. Dare
not to rebuke me for adducing the diseased fancy of a child in a weighty
matter of theology. "Despise not one of these little ones." Would the
theologians were as near the truth in such matters as the children. Diseased
fancy! The child knew, and was conscious that she knew, that she was doing
wrong because she had been forbidden. There was rational ground for her
fear. . . . He would not have told her she was silly, and "never to mind."
Child as she was, might He not have said to her, "I do not condemn thee: and
go and sin no more"?
[12] Spiritual Murder
It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to
forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is
the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood
over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the
idea of the hated.
[ 13 ] Impossibilities
No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is
willing, yea wanting, to forgive him.... If God said, "I forgive you" to a
man who hated his brother, and if (as impossible) that voice of forgiveness
should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How much would the man
interpret it? Would it not mean to him "You may go on hating. I do not mind
it. You have had great provocation and are justified in your hate"? No doubt
God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the
account: but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the
hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from
the hell of his hate. . . . The man would think, not that God loved the
sinner, but that he forgave the sin, which God never does [i.e. What is
usually called "forgiving the sin" means forgiving the sinner and destroying
the sin]. Every sin meets with its due fate-inexorable expulsion from the
paradise of God's Humanity. He loves the sinner so much that He cannot
forgive him in any other way than by banishing from his bosom the demon that
possesses him.
[ 14 ] Truth is Truth
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.
[ 15 ] The White Stone (Revelations 2:17)
The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of
what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the
solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed," spoken to
the individual. . . . The true name is one which expresses the character,
the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own
symbol -his soul's picture, in a word-the sign which belongs to him and to
no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one
but God sees what the man is. ... It is only when the man has become his
name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can
he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection,
the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the
first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom
comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what
the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named
itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God's name
for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom
He had in His thought when he began to make the child, and whom He kept in
His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the
idea. To tell the name is to seal the success-to say "In thee also I am well
pleased."
[ 16 ] Personality
The name is one "which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." Not
only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his
peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own
fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else
can worship Him.
[ 17 ] The Secret In Man
For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a
secret-the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an
inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it
is the innermost chamber.
[ 18 ] The Secrets in God
There is a chamber also (O God, humble and accept my speech)-a chamber
in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the
peculiar man-out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and
strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made-to reveal the
secret things of the Father.
[ 19 ] No Massing
There is no massing of men with God. When he speaks of gathered men, it
is as a spiritual body, not as a mass.
[ 2O ] No Comparing
Here there is no room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above
one's neighbor; and here there is no possibility of comparison with one's
neighbor: no one knows what the white stone contains except the man who
receives it.... Relative worth is not only unknown -to the children of the
Kingdom it is unknowable.
[ 23 ] Caverns and Films
If God sees that heart corroded with the rust of cares, riddled into
caverns and films by the worms of ambition and greed, then your heart is as
God sees it, for God sees things as they are. And one day you will be
compelled to see, nay, to feel your heart as God sees it.
[ 21 ] The End
"God has cared to make me for Himself," says the victor with the white
stone, "And has called me that which I like best."
[ 22 ] Moth and Rust
What is with the treasure must fare as the treasure. . .. The heart
which haunts the treasure house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be
exposed to the same ravages as the treasure.... Many a man, many a woman,
fair and flourishing to see, is going about with a rusty moth-eaten heart
within that form of strength or beauty. "But this is only a figure." True.
But is the reality intended, less or more than the figure?
[ 24 ] Various Kinds of Moth
Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship Mammon. ... It
applies to those equally who in any way worship the transitory; who seek the
praise of men more than the praise of God; who would make a show in the
world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art, by genius of any
kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be treasured in a storehouse of
earth. Nor to such only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of
a more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the
senses in every direction- whether lawfully indulged, if the joy of being is
centered in them-do these words bear terrible warning. For the hurt lies not
in this-that these pleasures are false like the deceptions of magic, for
such they are not; . . . nor yet in this-that they pass away and leave a
fierce disappointment behind; that is only so much the better; but the hurt
lies in this-that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the
everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to
them as its good-clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with
their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion
to the superiority of its kind.
[ 25 ] Holy Scriptures
This story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet may contain in
its mirror as much of the truth as we are able to receive, and as will
afford us scope for a life's discovery. The modifying influence of the human
channels may be essential to God's revealing mode.
[ 26 ] Command That These Stones Be Made Bread
The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a
loaf. No one creative Fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son
are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change
into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such
change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish
and bread before. . . . There was in these miracles, and I think in all,
only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may
ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with
us. He makes it... Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous.
Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of
feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going
forth at once- immediately-than through the countless, the lovely, the
seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield.
[ 27 ] Religious Feeling
In the higher aspect of this first temptation, arising from the fact
that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under certain
conditions of physical well-being dependent upon food, the answer is the
same: A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread.
[ 28 ] Dryness
And when h