Reality & Re-Enchantment (Our World & Fantasy)
“We need to clean our windows. To see things not merely as they are, but as we were always meant to see them.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. ~ G.K. Chesterton
“I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they are five for fifty”. ~ George MacDonald
The term “fantasy” is often used to denote that genre for only very weird geeks who dress up as their heroes in wizard’s robes, carry around swords, and make trees into castle spires. Growing up I would often get odd looks from other students when I would open my locker, revealing all sorts of fantasy novels stacked amidst my notebooks. The Inkheart Trilogy by Cornelia Funke, The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi, Peter Pan by J.M. Berry. These books among numerous others shaped the person I am today. As I got older though, the books became more “adult”, the costumes and books were put in boxes in the attic, and I lost some of those precious stories (much to my dismay now). I, like the majority of people on earth, outgrew fairy-tales…or so I thought.
Fantasy, Tolkien argues, is “not a lower but a higher form of art, indeed the most nearly pure form.” Great news for the geeks among us. But why is this so? Why is this drive to re-enchant ourselves so tenacious? Or even further, why is it important? The reason is that such fantasies point us to a truth about the world, that the physical is woven in with the spiritual.
It’s no secret that we were told lies as children. The Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the idea that Nickelback was a good band. All of it was told to give us an extra bit of wonder in this world. Well, except for Nickelback. This is actually one of the reasons many people don’t believe the Bible. They've been presented with so many lies they deeply believed to be true that when we go to actually present real truth to them, they can’t handle it. As a character in “The King of Elfland’s Daughter” says,
“And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.”
However, there is hope. The story of the Bible and the stories we love are true!
In his book “A Secular Age” Charles Taylor writes:
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.
We have to re-enchant our world, plain and simple. The Bible, the stories and films we love, the world around us, all exist to point us to a God who, as Chesterton wrote is, “younger than we are”. When people spun yarns for the townsfolk around the campfire they depicted heroes defeating monsters. The weak protected from the strong. Mercy was brought to those who did good. Fantasy is what makes people act like people. Without fantasy, without that twinkle in our eye when we were young we wouldn’t be able to act quite right as an adult. Humans need fantasy to be human.
In his great essay titled, “On Faerie Stories” Tolkien makes the claim that fantasy is actually a belief system.
Fantasy is the ultimate act of sub-creation because one has to create an entire Secondary World which is different from the Primary World (giving it an advantageous “arresting strangeness”) but is as entirely internally consistent as the world in which we live. This is difficult because the Secondary World must be consistent enough to “command Secondary Belief.”
Men like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Macdonald understood the stories of the Bible as myth, which is a game-changer. Now, when I use the word myth, I am not meaning it in the way we use the word today. Myth, in its original usage, meant that there was more than just impersonal, mechanistic law behind the world. Lewis sums this idea up well in saying:
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.
So is there a difference between fairytales and myths?”
Not much, you could say that a fairytale is a type of myth. One of the things that distinguish fairy tales from myths, is something Tolkien called Consolation. Consolation is the joy of a happy ending. And the highest form of this Consolation is the kind of happy ending that surprises us. Tolkien coined his own term for this surprise happy ending: eucatastrophe. At the end of the traditional dramatic tragedy, the protagonist experiences a sudden turn for the worse: a catastrophe. But eucatastrophe is different. It is, literally, “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’.” In Tolkien’s own Lord of the Rings, the journey of Sam and Frodo through Mordor and to the fires of Mt. Doom is perhaps the best example of eucatastrophe: just as it seems that the entire quest has been in vain because of Frodo’s final decision, in the end, to keep the ring, Gollum steals it from him and unwittingly falls into the fire, destroying himself and the ring — and saving Middle Earth.
Tolkien goes on to say in his essay”
The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story 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. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.
But it is easy to forget about these things in our rational day and age. And so in our imaginations, we stumble through wardrobes or jump on trains headed for schools of magic. But as we do so, let us not get so lost in the realm of fantasy that we fail to look around us. Let us keep our eyes open for what the Celts called the “thin places” of the world. The imagination does need its checks and balances, as it is able to conceive of ugliness as well as beauty. So it is, in nurturing the imagination, we must be surrendered to the Holy Imagination of the Spirit that dwells in us. We must, in all things, have a prayerful imagination, that is an imagination constantly given over to prayer. Our call as Christians is to have an obedient imagination.
