George MacDonald

The Argument

George MacDonald is the most important figure in the literary apologetics tradition that most people have never read, and he is important primarily through his influence on two writers who are household names: C.S. Lewis called him his master and said that a single sentence of MacDonald's had baptized his imagination years before his intellect had accepted Christianity. G.K. Chesterton said something similar. What MacDonald gave both men was not argument but imagination — the sense that the world is enchanted, that goodness is more real than evil, that death is not the end.

His fairy tales and fantasy novels — Phantastes, Lilith, The Princess and the Goblin — are not allegories in the simple sense. They are myths, and they work the way myths work: by engaging the imagination at a level deeper than argument. They present a world in which the spiritual is not separate from the physical but woven into it, in which goodness has a texture and an attraction that evil can imitate but never match.

His sentence — the one principle of hell is, I am my own — is the most concise theological statement of what sin is: the self turned in on itself, claiming sovereignty over its own existence. MacDonald understood that the opposite of this — the self given away, held lightly, offered back to the One who made it — is not loss but the only path to the self one was actually made to be.