Harry Potter and the Christian Magicians II — Baptizing Dumbledore
A reader writes in to ask three questions:
1. What is the right way to answer the accusation that the fantasy genre turns kids into satanists/gnostics/pagans? One sees this argument most used against Harry Potter, but in recent years I’ve come upon people who believe that the inclusion of magic in a work is so evil they won’t even let their children read Narnia.
2. Related to this, I’m curious what your opinion is in regard to what the proper way is for a Catholic author to handle magic in his work.
3. What would be your response to those who say that all magic ought to be portrayed as evil or only used by characters who are stand-ins for God (Aslan) or who are agents of God (as I have seen some argue that Gandalf is)?
The first question I answered at some length here. The third, and to my mind most interesting, because it asks the relation of entertaining fiction to theological fact, must wait until another day. Let me gird up my loins and address the second.
The second question has deep roots. To discuss it, we need to discuss the relation of Christianity to paganism, of poetry to fantasy, and fantasy to the faith.
Each of these discussions is worthy of its own essay: unfortunately for any longsuffering reader, I will cover all three points below in one long essay to suffer through.
This second question is by no means new. The question was put AD 797, by the scholar Alcuin of the court of Charlemagne, echoing the words of St Paul in an address to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, where the monks spent more time chanting the lays of Ingeld than chanting the liturgies and hours: “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”
Alcuin was perhaps exasperated that the monks should be heeding heroic Norse epics, but it is noteworthy (and may indeed, in this postchristian age, be unknown to the general reader) that the Christian civilization is the only civilization in history which made any attempt to preserve rather than obliterate the memory of their pagan forefathers.
I regret that I live in a new dark age, when I must pause to dwell on this point which all previous generations knew, or to write apologetic for the obvious before addressing the main topic of this essay: the only ark which preserved the Greco-Roman world into the modern age was the Church.
Certainly respect for one’s pagan forefathers is not the attitude of the Mohammedans, as displayed, for example, by their notorious destruction of the monumental Buddha statues of Ghandara by Mullah Omar in 2001AD. Let us also not forget to mention Caliph Omar in 642 AD burning the priceless collection of the Library of Alexandria, on the grounds that all book either disagreed with the Koran, in which case they were blasphemy, or agreed, in which case they were redundant. The Islamic invasions were one of the main causes of the collapse of antique Mediterranean civilization.
This Christian respect for paganism carries over to paganisms not ancestral to them. The lack of curiosity among pagan philosophers and scholars concerning cultures not their own is shocking to the Christian mind: we read with surprise that the Hieroglyphs of Egypt, a mystery that fascinated Europe for centuries, were a living language, legible at the time of Cicero and Seneca, but that no man of letters in scholarly Alexandria at the height of Roman Empire bothered to question the Coptic priests and write down a lexicon.
There were Orientalists among the occident, but no Occidentalists among the orient in the days before Westernization. It is noteworthy that this word, Orientalism, representing the study of the Near and Far East, has been demonized by a famous Middle Eastern writer, Edward Said, as a type of oppression, if not of xenophobia, a contention remarkable for its insolent opposition to reality. The reality is that the word ‘anthropologist’ has no parallel in any language outside Christendom: to condemn the only civilization that studied others and sought to preserve their lore and works of hating all others, and the evidence of that hatred is that study and preservation is a Alice-in-Wonderlandish absurdity only an intellectual could find convincing: like accusing the fireman of arson.
No doubt the general reader, educated in public school, is shocked and flabbergasted to hear that medieval monks scrupulously copied pagan writings and went to great lengths to preserve them. Perhaps you have been taught to parrot the Carl Saganesque dogma that the Greeks and Romans were great scientists and men of learning, and that obscurantist science-hating Christians went on an orgy of book burning, destroying the steam engines, robots and rockets known to the ancient Greeks, and flaying alive Hypatia, the last of the Greek superscientists, just as she was about to discover faster than light drive and non-Euclidean geometry. If so, you’ve been taught a pack of lies.
However, despite what you’ve learned, and despite the protests of Alcuin and the like, Christianity (with exceptions so few that they are shockingly unusual) maintains a respectful attitude toward the previous pagan culture, even a nostalgia.
Mention any famous poet who dabbled in fantastic things: Milton, Dante, the anonymous author of Beowulf, Ariosto, Spencer. A reader not intimately familiar with classical myths could hardly read a page of PARADISE LOST without missing half the allusions. Dante in his DIVINE COMEDY uses classical examples of vice and virtue, saved and damned, in harness with Christian and Jewish examples. The attitude of the most famous Christian poets was the same as that of St Thomas Aquinas toward the pagan philosopher Aristotle: they followed pagan models and baptized pagan things.
Ours is, however, a disapproving nostalgia, a grandson looking back at the life and times of his grandfather, if his grandfather were Long John Silver. While there is, to be sure, some romance to being a bloodthirsty cutthroat, the romance is mixed with utter condemnation. The baptism of the Christian imagination is meant to wash away blood and pollution.
Ours is an attitude of tension between this respectful nostalgia for an appealing falsehood, and a exultant loyalty toward the shining truth. We delight in the delicate if deceptive rose-hued half-light of the dawn called paganism, but we salute with silver sword and golden trumpet the glory of the daystar called Christ, a sun which knows no sunset.
The attitude of the Christian poet toward classical models is best summed up in this passage from Milton concerning the pagan god Vulcan, here identified as the ingenious demon-prince Mulciber:
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer over the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star,
On Lemnos the Aegean isle: thus they relate,
Erring; for he with this rebellious rout
Fell long before; nor aught availed him now
To have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he escape
By all his engines, but was headlong sent
With his industrious crew to build in hell.
Or, to take an example from a happier and more celestial clime, Milton imitates the invocation of the muses as used by Homer and Virgil to inaugurate their poems, this time as a prayer to a Christianized version of the great muse of astronomical ventures, Urania (our beloved the patron of science fiction writers, I hasten to add).
Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing.
The meaning, not the name, I call: for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwellest; but, heavenly-born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song.[…]
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamor drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores:
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
Note how he calls on the meaning, not the name, this is, upon the Christian reality which lurks in the bright depths of the pagan fables; note also how he contrasts the inability of the Muse to save her son, Orpheus, the type of Milton, with that heavenly power who is a very present help in times of trouble.
Examples can be multiplied from the DIVINE COMEDY and BEOWULF, but in this space there is no need.
What is needed is to point out that the spirit of poetry has been thoroughly driven out of the halls of the academy in the modern age: modern poetry is trash. And where poets lead, novelist pursue.
Modern novels of the realistic sort admired by academics are worse than trash, since they serve not to glorify anything in heaven or on earth, nor to bring the blessing of beauty to the reader, nor touch the hem of the sublime, but only to mock, degrade, and uglify. Read ULYSSES by James Joyce if you wish to see the mocking hatred of modern writers for classical models and classical muses on display. I will not dignify Mr. Joyce nor demean these pages by proffering any quote: look for yourself, make your own judgment. I will say only that a respectful treatment of Homeric themes is not what the modern poet intends.
During the Christian Era, for the first time in history, the elite and the common man shared a common vision, and for the time the natural arrogance of the elite was checked: while the common man might prefer the fiddle music of a square dance to the SAINT JOHN’S PASSION of Bach, nothing in the glorious Bach choirs would offend the common sensibilities of the workingman: for the only time in history, the only culture in history, in Christendom, the elite were not the adversaries of the underclass.
This alliance lasted roughly from the time of Saint Augustine to that of Byron. The alliance was severed when the elite, led by philosophers who scorned all philosophy , and artists who hated art, betrayed our common culture, and sought every opportunity to betray it, and demean and destroy.
It is one of the ironies of history that classical models and pagan myths were so intricately intermingled with Christian themes that when the elite rejected Christian civilization, they implicitly rejected Classical paganism as well.
Instead of appealing to the muse of rhetoric to argue my point, allow me to appeal to the muse of poetry. This is by CS Lewis, and bears the awkward name A CLICHÉ CAME OUT OF ITS CAGE:
1
You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it by the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.2
Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).
The two stanzas reflect the Classical and the Norse paganism, here seen as precursors and roots rather than enemies of the Christian world that followed.
For all their fine talk of freedom and of dictatorships of the proletarian, the elite wished nothing other than to bar talk of modesty, decency, fortitude, honor, and self-sacrifice from the public square. They wanted to replace all reasoning about the nature of virtue with rhetoric and oration on feelings about values. To do so, not only Nuns and Knights had to be banished from the public imaginations, but also Vestal Virgins and Homeric Hoplites.
Whence, then, scourged and half-stripped of the golden plumes of their wings, did the trembling muses flee, when they fled from the scornful lashes of modernity?
Why, to the only ghetto that held no love for modernity: to us, we happy few, the sons of fantasy whose eyes were fixed with dreamy nostalgia on the things long past (including pasts that never were) and to the sons of science fiction whose eyes were fixed with mingled hope and fear on things to come.
I submit that a coterie of modernists, delighting in work that scorned both Christian and classical models, and which no longer sought after discipline and beauty in their works, usurped the admiration of an ever more irrelevant and shrinking circle of the elite. I hurl down my gauntlet at any man who says that poetry of JRR Tolkien, of CS Lewis, of GK Chesterton, nay, even of Robert E Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, is inferior to the work of TS Eliot or Dylan Thomas.
If you are surprised that I list Howard and Smith, whose sentiments were notoriously pagan, in the same breath with the magnificent Christian poets and myth-makers of the last century, keep in mind that their pagan sentiments were a deliberate rejection of modernity. The inventor of Conan and Solomon Kane had no more love of the satanic mills and smokestacks of the modern day than did the inventor of Aragorn and Saruman.
But what, may you ask, has poetry to do with cheap paperback novels that have unicorns on the cover? I suggest it is the same relationship that obtained back in the days before the present dark ages between the symphony and the square dance, the relation of the violin to the fiddle.
To use an example near to my heart, allow me to quote the opening lines of DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH by HP Lovecraft:
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.
He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery gates toward further and surprising marvels.
I make no apology for this purple prose, or, should I say, empurpled. Lovecraft is attempting to the height of his powers to recapture the elevated language of Milton and Virgil. He is attempting to play a symphony on his fiddle, and, to my biased and admittedly generous judgment, he succeeds.
Those muses once who lived in marble temples and cathedrals, places of beauty as monumental and supreme as the fabulous sunset city of Randolph Carter, took up mean lodgings among the Science Fiction writers, and, like a spinster taking in laundry, brought the touch of divine gold to all the trashy pulp fiction and comic books we love. In our humble ghetto we shared our gumbo with the divine muses of the Mount Helicon and make them welcome: and they made merry with us.
If the elite will no longer have Stravinsky write an opera about Koschei the Deathless or other timeless and ancient figures, then authors like Mercedes Lackey will make a place for him in the SFF section of the bookstore.
Ask any man under thirty to name a hero from print: he will name a superhero from a paperback or comic, a spy from genre fiction, and never name the protagonist or antihero from a literary novel. It is only in the fantastic worlds that never were or worlds that may yet come that the Homeric themes are met; only in spy thrillers or westerns, or women’s romance novels or will you yet find the fortitude and chivalry of knighthood. Who dares say Clio, the muse of epic, is not there, or Erato who sings of love? Was Polyhymnia absent from Tolkien?
Paganism perhaps has no place among the Puritans, or those who follow a form of one-legged Christianity which acknowledges a Jewish foundation but not a Greek. For the mainstream Christianity, however, the classical pagan themes are part and parcel of our heritage, and live nowhere else.
But what of this theme of magic?
I submit that magic forms an innate part of the pagan worldview. It is, indeed, one of the main respects, if not the one main respect, in which Christianity differs from paganism.
Again, I here have to pause to point at the blatant: the modern skeptics who liken Christianity to magic or magical thinking do not utter that kind of falsehood which is indifferent to the truth, but, rather, that perfect falsehood that is diametrically opposed to the truth. All those evil witchhunts of whom we hear tell were attempts to abolish the old magic, not re-impose it, and had they failed of their object, it is doubtful that modern science would have emerged in Europe, or on Earth.
And the spirit of the witch-hunters lives on. There is a faction among Christians who, fearful of the lure of the occult, will not allow their children to venture into such richly-Christian imaginary lands as Narnia or Middle Earth. The condemnation there apparently overwhelms the baptism.
To that faction, no Christianization of pagan themes and tropes saves them from the risk involved in romanticizing magic. All magic is black magic: the twilight of elfland is but the frontiers of darker and infernal regions.
Since I know more than one person, indeed, more than five, whose first introduction into the dark world of magic and the occult was through the beautiful myths of Tolkien or Lewis, I dare not scoff at this faction.
Indeed, one of the grim ironies of Tolkien was that he wrote at the time when the world was so obsessed with dreary, worldly and mundane things, and the Christian faith had grown so worldly, that readers who felt that impulse of rebellion against the world, the flesh, and the devil who rules them, they rejected instead the world and the faith, and sought the solace of heavenly things in pagan conceits only a trifle less worldly than the world: but to a materialist, any spirit, howsoever low, seems spiritual.
There has always been a tension in Christian art, indeed, in Christianity itself, between the strict Jewish purity and legal clarity of Jerusalem, and the lush pagan imagery and high-flown passions of Athens. As a man’s heart and head are often at odds, Christian theology and Christian enthusiasm are often at odds.
Myself, I think it a mistake to side with one dimension of the human condition or one leg of the Christian world view, and despise the other. As a Catholic, I am allowed to say that I find Puritanism to be as grave a mistake as Paganism.
Therefore I think this faction makes an understandable, if unforgivable, mistake. Because while I can count on one hand the number of people introduced to paganism through the magic of Tolkien and Lewis, those introduced to Christianity, or whose faith was sustained or illumed as if with silver flame, are countless.
The iconoclast who, through zeal, wishes to smash Aslan as an idol, does not see that the Lion of Narnia points toward the Lamb of God, and that Aslan’s magical country over the sundering sea is fair only because it shines in the reflected light of the New Jerusalem, whose foursquare golden walls blaze as a looking glass.
No doubt the patient reader is exasperated after so many pages not to have yet heard me answer the question as asked: what the proper way is for a Catholic author to handle magic in his work?
I submit that the same answer to the general question of how to handle pagan themes applies to the specific question of how to handle the specific theme of magic: one must treat it as respectfully as one treats any falsehood.
One may use the bogus magic of paganism, as Milton does, as a symbol or a shadow pointing at the brighter reality above and behind it. One may use it as a part of the machinery of fairytale, to represent those themes which otherwise cannot be represented. One may use it as an alternative technology, a magic user flinging a fireball being no different than a marine firing a flamethrower.
Ah, but my respect for that faction of anti-fantasy Puritans of whom I spoke resurfaces, because they voice another concern when it comes to magic which other pagan themes do not touch. There are real witches, or, at least, people who think that they are witches, who have submerged their intellects in all fashion of pagan and Gnostic and heretical nonsense, which is not merely damaging to the immortal soul, but damning, since it leads to absolute obdurate rejection of salvation: the witches cannot see the real magic in life, the reality of the divine, since they chase after the figments, seeking divinity not in their souls, but in their sins.
Here I have no easy answer: the Christian poet who touches on magical themes is in the same position as a Christian who writes erotic or epic poetry.
While there are those, like Dante, who can portray the love of man for woman as an image of divine love, the risk poets and writers of less skill run is that any portrayal in the imagination of the reader of the beauty or allure of a woman will excite the lust.
Likewise again, any poet who touches an epic theme runs the risk that the reader’s imagination will turn toward the glory of war rather than the glory of heaven, and will excite bloodlust or hubris. Milton was skillful enough not only to portray the epic virtues of pagan warriors in the magnificent figure of his Lucifer, he was cunning enough (for any reader with eyes to see) to show how hollow and false such tinsel magnificent turns out to be. Milton’s Lucifer is the twin of Homer’s Achilles, gripped by the same passion of wrath, driven to the same glory and bloodshed, but the dark archangel ends the poem merely as one snake among a nest of vermin, crawling on his belly, and for his reward to lick the dust. (There are those readers, such as William Blake, with no eyes to see, who think the Puritan poet glorified the enemy of God and Man: let us pass over Blake’s shallowness in silence, except perhaps to lament that even gifted poets often know nothing of poetry.)
So the Christian writer who decides to put a good witch like Glinda or Hermione or Samantha Stevens or Willow Rosenberg in his story runs the risk that some impressionable schoolgirl out in the crumbling wilderness of the modern world will decide that the path to self-respect and self-actualization is to don a pointy hat and take up her wand, go to an abortion mill, and sacrifice a baby girl to Moloch. One never knows, O Christian writer, whether the last story that schoolgirl read before she read yours was THE GOLDEN COMPASS or INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE or BLINDSIGHT, or some other work firmly in the camp and flying the black banners of the Culture of Death.
Am I saying that Christian writers must never portray romantic nor epic nor magical themes in their works? Heaven forbid! We Christians can portray hellish evil in all its dark glory much more convincingly and profoundly than the poets loyal to hell can manage.
I dare say the characters who made deep and indelible impressions on young readers include the Dark Lord of Tolkien, the White Witch of Lewis, the Lucifer of Milton. By way of contrast: quick! Without looking it up, what was the name of the head of the Magisterium in Pullman?
The closest thing the agnostic world-view can produce to a Satan is either a dictator (oddly reminiscent of agnostic himself), a Republican, or a Southerner. Other than that, they can only portray villains who manifest physical dangers, such as ax murderers and serial killers. Because of their philosophy, people who pose real dangers, such as Islamic terrorists, cannot be portrayed at all, but only people who post no danger in real life but instead produce benefits necessary to life and civilization, such as industrialists, merchants, soldiers, priests, mothers who love their children.
Other magnificent villains of the Christian imagination, creatures such as Don Juan or Faustus, cannot be produced by the agnostic imagination. When there is no white field on which the black wolf is outlined, there is nothing for the moral imagination to see.
If your view of the universe includes as its only moral principle to indulge in vacuous, vain, vulgar or perverse pleasures, and if gluttony and lust define your highest ambition of what you call good, and the only evil in your view of the universe is whatever prudence or authority hinders your boring orgy of self-indulgence, and your only foeman is he whose hand hold you back from suicide, then you can imagine only one villain, a father figure or Pharisee, and he can be guilty of only one crime, hypocrisy, the sin of claiming an authority to which he has no right.
Your villain cannot be craven, or intemperate, or unchaste, or foolish with foolish arrogance, since these are the qualities of your hero. (Of course, real hedonist and nihilist authors rarely portray such protagonists as their philosophy would demand: they merely borrow concepts and standards from chivalric Christian ideals or Homeric pagan ideals, employing them out of context, and with perhaps less than perfect artistic integrity.)
So we cannot leave the fantasy world to the clumsy hands of the agnostics and skeptics. By and large, they can write fair to middling satires of fantasy, but they cannot write classics of fantasy. For something greater than satire, we need Christians like Tolkien or pagans like Howard.
What, then, to do about the question of magic? Magic is not only strictly forbidden by Christian tradition and magisterial authority, but also by Biblical injunction. Even if you and I could call up spirits from the vasty deep, and even if they would come when we call, it is unlawful for baptized Christians to do so.
(Heck, for that matter, I am not even sure Christians are allowed to go to Arisia and get the Lens to join the Galactic Patrol: the mind reading powers of the Lensman certainly smell like occult powers, even if there is a scientific explanation involving third-order rays somewhere in the background.)
So we Christian fantasists have at least some duty not to use our works of glamorize the occult, even accidentally. It is at least on par with our duty not to use our works of art to slander and denigrate the faith, even accidentally: if I write a rip-roaring Western adventure or Pirate story where the padre or the priest is shown conforming to the bigoted stereotype of the damned modern soul, then that poor modern soul’s ability to break free from the sepulcher of untruth in which he has immured himself is by some small but finite measure decreased. I have used the muse for bad ends.
But I don’t think the duty is absolute. One can make the argument that Christian writers can never write pornography, since it exists only to degrade the soul and demean women, or never write pro-Nazi or pro-Soviet propaganda, since it but aids and abets the enemy. But the argument that Christians have a duty never to write fantasy equates fairy tales with Satanism.
That notion is ridiculous. Indeed, the fantastic in literature, far from being a place Christians ought never venture, to judge by the fruits, seems to be a realm where our powers work to best effect, since it is the only literature where the modern reader will take the unseen world seriously. Let me take the two prime examples of the two most famous wizards in literature: Merlin and Prospero.
That Shakespeare was a Catholic I will not here debate: let us confine ourselves to the observation that such themes as the Weird Sisters who beguile Macbeth, Puck who bewilders lovers lost in a wood, or the paternal ghost from purgatory who appears by night to Hamlet are alien to Calvinist theology or austere Puritan simplicity. Even if Shakespeare was not Catholic, his plays were. The figure of Prospero the magician is likewise, and, even though a magician, neither the theme of his famed play, nor the mechanics of his magic, make sense outside the Christian world view: a pagan would never break his charming wand nor drown his books.
The Catholic imagination cannot help but be excited by the romances of Arthur and his knights. While it is possible to do a pagan version of this mythic cycle, or even an agnostic one, the unconvincing flatness of such attempts speak for themselves. The magic of Merlin is an aid, not a hindrance, to introduce the reader to the bright tapestry of the Arthurian stories, at whose core beats the shining wonder of the Most Holy Grail. The somewhat boring image of the Celtic cauldron of plenty has been baptized, and now emerges in splendor as the very cup of Savior’s last supper, the flagon from which he vowed never again to drink of wine until the Kingdom came, the vessel of the hope of heaven invisible to impure eyes.
If the modern Christian fantasy writer is writing nothing loftier than a comic book or a pulp novel, and even if his even if his storytelling skills are only equal to those of HP Lovecraft, I say he cannot go far wrong when he walks in the footsteps of Mallory, Milton, Shakespeare, or Tolkien. Follow their model, O Christian writer, and you will run little risk of bending impressionable schoolgirls toward witchcraft.
We Christians have one weapon in our arsenal in the war with pagans which usually is never mentioned. When we are debating how to portray good witches like Glinda or Hermione, or good magicians like Gandalf or Merlin in our works, we tend to notice that allure of the occult but not the allure of the truly supernal and supernatural. We tend to forget that saints are more impressive than mages, not to mention less mysterious and more forgiving, for unlike wizards, the saint are not subtle, and not quick to anger.
The simple fact is, my pagan friends, is that if magic is real, our magic is stronger than your magic.
And were it not real, if magic is no more than a literary invention, our magic is more satisfying, and indeed more magical than pagan magic.
I have read countless myths and fables from Homer to Bullfinch, and twice that of fantasy tales. I have yet to read anything as majestic and mysterious and, in the real sense of the word, magical, as the theodicy in the Book of Job. Having some nymph whose song is the brook, or some dryad who speaks with the tongue of the trees, or even to hear the staves of the one-eyed All-father lamenting the dooms to come, or riddles of the Sybil unwinding the words of the sun-god who slew Phython, none of them approach the magic of the words out from the whirlwind in Job: it is the universe speaking, it is the voice of eternity.
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth? … Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?
Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?
Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war?
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?
Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?
Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? Or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? Or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?
Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? The glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength … He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha! And he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.
Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. He esteemeth iron as straw … Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear… He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride…
Conjure, if you will, O Magician, whether in truth or in fable, with such deep and simple things as these, awesome in their mystery: for here the word of God has conjured with creation itself, the earth and heavens and the oceans; death and snow and stars; lightningbolts and unicorns and peacocks and ostriches and steeds of war, and the unconquerable dragon of the deeps.
Remember the innate sorrow of the pagan world: their highest hope was the unblinking iron-heartedness of Stoicism, a posture nigh indistinguishable from despair. The last and solemn prayer of Socrates, wisest of all pagans, was to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, in thanks that the disease of mortal life in the world of visible creation was ended, as if life were a disease, and death its cure.
The supernatural wonders committed by pagan gods, chthonic or otherwise, rarely increase human happiness, as the cases of Daphne or Phaethon might attest, and the bitter reward of benevolence to man Prometheus knows and suffers: the deaths of pagan heroes are sober rather than joyful, and Achilles passes to no reward, and even a bathtub of the blood of Agamemnon cures no ills. Even fictional pagans like Conan of Cimmeria are grim and brooding figures, and rightly so.
Even if the witches could so all that they claimed to do, as flying on rafters or cursing their foes with plagues or wearing skins and running with wolves, these are petty and disgusting manifestations of the world beyond this one. They dabble in love philters, and the most their dark arts can do is create a tragedy like that of Tristan and Iseult; or even crueler tragedies, like that of the Chinese Emperor Qin who quaffed a potion concocted by Taoist alchemists to bestow eternal youth, and died when it poisoned him.
By way of contrast, our saints can heal the sick, raise the dead, feed multitudes, and free the oppressed of their fetters: and greater than all these, our magic forgives sins and grants in truth what Qin sought in vain.
With all due respect, I cannot speak to how Lutherans conduct their affairs, but I can attest that any schoolgirl allured by the glamour of witchcraft might be disappointed by the sight of overweight warlocks in the nude or dressed in SCA castoffs jumping with broom in hand to witch the crops grow tall, when compared to the impressive dignity of our magic: each Sabbath day our celibate priests in venture due the season of the sacred calendar call down God Himself from heaven by our gathered prayers, reenact, nay, participate in the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Golgotha, and we eat the imperishable flesh of the divine, the very manna of heaven, and drink that ichor of immortality which is his blood, and so partake of his power.
We have crucifixes to drive back vampires and holy water to scald demons. If you are going to believe in magic and mumbo-jumbo, you owe it to yourself to find the supernal truths of which these abracadabras are but a dark reflection in a bent glass.
To review: the relationship of Christianity to paganism, by and large, is one of condemnatory yet respectful nostalgia. Much as one might admire Aristotle or Epicurus, the attempt to live life as a pagan hero is damned to failure.
The relation of poetry to fantasy is the relation of fine art to popular art, the violin versus the fiddle. Merely because one writes for a wide audience, however, one need not compromise either artistic principles nor Christian ones.
If you are paid to fiddle for a dance held in the barn, then by the rustic muses and playful satyrs of the field, you must fiddle until fire streams from the catgut, and play with your whole heart and soul, or else you have no right to take their coin.
The relation of fantasy to the faith is that it is our realm and playground: the Christian is as at home in fairy tales as he is on Earth, and the supernatural spirit with him makes him more at home than the skeptic, to whom fairy tales are merely tales, idle yarns reflecting no truth.
As a Catholic, I have no argument against using images the eye can grasp to reflect truths no eye can see, nor do I think it sinful to peer into the unseen world through the lavish rainbows of a stained glass window.
Hence, I think it is not unlawful for the Christian poet to incorporate pagan themes and models, provided be baptizes them, and uses their sublime power to reveal the higher truths which (so I maintain) have always been hidden in those myths.
One such pagan theme is magic: it is wiser to portray it in some fashion where the whimsy or supernal beauty or unexpected grace of life’s real magic can be displayed, without accidentally glamorizing the tedious arcanums of the alchemists and cabalists, astrologers and crackpots, or the darker magics of diviners and diabolists, and wizards who peep and mutter.
Magic can be used as a metaphor or example or type of any of the real magic in life without necessarily glamorizing the false arts of Gnostics and numerologists and seekers after psychic powers who do not seek the good of their psyches.
Fairy tales speak to the deepest parts of the human soul; there is no reason why Christian masters of fantasy could not or should not use the magical language of elfland to speak to those souls. Some might even say it is our Great Commission to do so.
The language of the high and unseen things, more real than reality, is native to us: let us not leave the songs of elfland to be sung by clanging tongues never lightened by hymn.
For our theologians and mystics truly have peered into those spiritual depth deeper than any philosopher or psychologist, and beheld both the mystery of evil in the soul of man, and the awe-inspiring light of some figure from deeps even more profound, walking slowly toward us on feet still wounded where we pierced them with nails, feet that walked on the sea.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
