Vol. VIII • 1985 http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v08n1p06.htm
Creation in the Writings of George MacDonald
Ellen Myers
Creation in the Writings of George MacDonald
Ellen Myers
It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought… the Everyman edition of Phantastes, A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier… 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 baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination… The quality which had enchanted me… turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live.1
Besides this story, so mightily used of our Lord, there are modern editions of Lilith (Ballantine, 1969), Diary of an Old Soul - poetry devotions for each day of the year (Augsburg, 1965 and paperback edition 1975), The Golden Key. a fairy tale for children with beautiful illustrations by Maurice Sendak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), The Gifts of the Child Christ. in two volumes, consisting of "fairy tales and stories for the childlike" (Eerdmans, 1973), Life Essential, the Hope of the Gospel, edited by Rolland Hem (Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, IL 1974), Creation in Christ, edited by Rolland Hem and taken from MacDonald's three volumes of Unspoken Sermons (Harold Shaw Publishers, 19761; The World of George MacDonald, edited by Rolland Hem and consisting of selections from MacDonald's works of fiction (Harold Shaw, 1978), and The Princess and the Goblin, a fairy story for children (Scripture Union Chariot Books, Elgin IL 1978, second printing 1979). The C.S. Lewis anthology probably remains the most popular and influential among all these. It is composed chiefly of extracts from MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons, of which C.S. Lewis testifies:
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 towards the very acceptance of the Christian faith.2
C.S. Lewis gives a brief biography of MacDonald in the preface to this anthology. as well as a brief and poignant summary of MacDonald's thought. From it we learn that after a brief and troubled Stint in England's nonconformist ministry MacDonald had to earn his living by lecturing, tutoring, writing and "odd jobs." Rolland Hem tells us his family when completed numbered eleven children.3
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 4
A little later C.S. Lewis pens the following often-quoted praise of MacDonald's work:
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 Christlike union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.5
To the Biblical Creationist believer of our time it comes as a great joy, perhaps as a surprise. that George MacDonald, after all a contemporary of Darwin and Huxley and also a well educated man whose academic background included degrees in chemistry and natural philosophy (that is, the natural sciences) from Aberdeen University, does not show any trace whatsoever of evolutionism in his writings. Darwin and his teachings might as well never have existed as far as MacDonald is concerned; not only this, but he seems to have seen deeply enough by God's grace to understand the inability of science to give ultimate answers, or even to help formulate the proper questions leading to such answers. To MacDonald, rooted and grounded in the Living God and His creative purpose, "human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry web of God's science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him His intent, that is, His perfected work behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where His work culminates in revelation."7
Throughout MacDonald's work burns the fire of zealous love for God as Creator Whose glorious creative design must not be thwarted, and for each and every man and woman (and child, for MacDonald greatly loved children) to work Out their own glory and bliss by fulfilling the Creator's design and so to become perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect. Typical of his yearning that the Father might see the reward of His work, and of his grief together with the Father and the Son over the creatures' resistance to the Father's perfect will is the following prayerful cry:
0 Lord, what a labor thou hast with us all! Shall we ever, someday, be all and quite good like thee? Help me! Fill me with thy light, that my work may all go to bring about the gladness of thy kingdom the holy household of us brothers and sisters all thy children.8
MacDonald is concerned with arousing and strengthening the life of Christ in us. What man lost in the Fall was life, life essential, the life breathed into him by God at his creation. Christ came to restore that life (John 10:101. MacDonald wrote, Religion (in his time this meant Christianity) is no way of life, no show of life, no observance of any Sort. . . It is life essential. . . The man to whom virtue is but the ornament of character. something over and above, not essential to it, is not yet a man."9 He was not concerned with knowledge about God but with person-to-person knowledge of God, in heartfelt oneness with Christ's own words, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3). This knowledge transforms man as the Christ-life is nurtured and enlarged in him or rather, Christ Himself transforms man as man rejects his pseudo-self made up of ephemeral notions and influences of his own devising and turns to his true root and origin, his Creator the Triune God. Man has no identity except his created identity in God's eternal purpose for him,
This is why "salvation" apart from God is impossible. Although MacDonald has been called a "universalist" (a charge to which some of his statements lend support), C.S. Lewis rightly comments:
MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.". . . 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 unconverted. He never trifles with eternal impossibilities.10
His fantasy Lilith is an outworking of how even the most obdurate rebel against God, the most perverse, proud and evil soul clinging to shadow rather than truth may yet be brought to see her own loathsome pseudo-self as God sees it as utter corruption from the creative purpose and glory intended by her Creator and to desire redemption even though it will cost her the cutting-off of her right hand paralyzed in a grip upon nothingness. While not as instantly recognizable as Christian-biblical parables as are, for example, C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories or his science fiction trilogy for adults, once so recognized the MacDonald stories and fantasies speak perhaps even more deeply to the reader who then agrees with Lewis that MacDonald was Lewis's master. A final thread running through all MacDonald's work is his deep and abiding joy in our Lord, our "glad Creator."11 It is the joy of the Creator spoken of in the very first chapter of Genesis when our holy, righteous and perfect God saw all his works and saw that they were good. Even thus MacDonald sees the end of man. When speaking of the giving of the white stone with the new name to the redeemed (Revelation 2t he writes,
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."12
Hand in hand with God's joy in us upon our restoration to the perfection of His created identity and intent for us goes our own joy in His design. MacDonald writes, "I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of. For to have been thought about born in God's thoughts and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, most precious thing in all thinking."13
Our God Creator is an all-encompassing God Whose treasures of creativity are inexhaustible:
The God Who is ever uttering Himself in the changeful profusions of nature;. . who never needs to be, nor ever is, in haste; Who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed He has sown upon the old fallows of eternity; Who rejoices in the response of a faltering moment to the age-long cry of His wisdom in the streets; the God of music, of painting, of building; the Lord of hosts, the God of mountains and oceans, the God of history working in time into Christianity; this God is the God of little children, and He alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted. Our longing desires can no more exhaust the fullness of the treasures of the Godhead than our imagination can touch their measure; not a thought, not a joy, not a hope of one of His creatures can pass unseen.14
Our God is not the absentee landlord of deism (which was flourishing in MacDonald's youth), nor the modern existentialist god working by fits and starts to help chaos and chance evolve into order. No, "life is no series of chances with a few providences sprinkled between to keep up a justly failing belief, but one providence of God" and "the devotion of God to His creations is perfect; He does not think about Himself but about them; He wants nothing for Himself, but finds His blessedness in the outgoing of blessedness."15
While God's image formed in us at creation has been defaced and perverted, we still bear its imprint and cannot help but obey the law of our created identity as His image-bearers: "Is not all the good in us His image? Imperfect and sinful as we are, is not all the foundation of our being His image? Is not the sin all ours, and the life in us all God's? We cannot be the creatures of God without partaking of His nature,"16
Many more excerpts from MacDonald's writings could be added here to show his commitment to biblical creation, the Personal, Almighty, Omniscient, Perfect and glorious Living God revealed in the Bible, and his yearning for the redemption and restoration of all men in God's perfect image in and by Christ. This, to him, was life. Let us sum up with one final statement by this saint in glory:
To know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, is life; and faith in its truest, simplest, mightiest form is to do His will in the one thing revealing itself at the moment, as duty.17
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