Fairy Tales and Faith

This is my response from another discussion that is occuring elsewhere in the e-world. I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of reaction I get from it here as well. It hasn't caused much of a stir in the other discussion.

[Begin my response]

Even though I have only read one of his books (it's the only book I've been able to find to get my eyes and hands on) I have become enthralled with G.K. Chesterton and his book Orthodoxy. My favorite chapter in the book is The Ethics of Elfland. Since I purchased the book about 3 or 4 months ago, I must have read the entire book about 4 times now - it's witty and insightful, refreshing and disarming. In the Ethics of Elfland (which I've read on it's own a few more times than the book as a whole) Chesterton speaks about how fairyland is reality, and everything else is fantastical. It speaks about the practicalness of things in fairyland, that we expect them to be just as they are because that's the way things are.

Therefore, "if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it...If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awdul throne: and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals with eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and begin to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened - dawn and death and so on - as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occuring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between science and mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five." (G.K. Chesteron - Orthodoxy (an exerpt taken from the chapter The Ethics of Elfland), 1906)

Now the difference between what the Christian believes and what everyone else believes is that there is the possibility for "magical trees with magical fruit"; for a creature being formed from dust, or talking snakes, or flaming swords weilded by guardian angels to the entrance of the enchanted garden. The Christian is free to believe in fairyland as being actually so, being actually real, because we have a God who can do those things and make it so. We have a God who can make himself a man and perform "magic" (like Cinderella's carriage turning into a pumpkin) like walking on water, or turning water into wine, or raising himself up from the dead. In our fairyland we expect our God to do these things because that is what God does and they are not fantastical, but quite the opposite. What is fantastical is that people "in spectacles" would deny that such things exist; would deny that such things really are as they have been spoken and written of and would in fact try to convince us that those are just made-up stories with a good moral point. But the reality of it is that the metaphorical and mythical is real and not just a story. Tolkein was much closer to any truth than any scientific textbook would dare to get.

[End my response]

Shawn