Michael O'Brien, Make Up Your Mind!

Frequent commenter Brendon has expanded one of his well-thought-out comments on fairy tales in the post, "Fairy-stories, the Good and the Beautiful." This fine post arose out of a discussion here on the rights and permissions of fantasists regarding the physical appearances of characters.

Clear thinker that he is, Brendon gets things straight: he argues that exterior appearance can be used in fiction to depict interior disposition, but he carefully distinguishes between appearance, disposition, and action. Brendon defends the fantasist's right to use apperance as a symbol of interior disposition, but warns us against equating physical beauty with interior goodness, which he describes as a category error.

More muddled on the subject is Michael O'Brien, who writes in A Landscape With Dragons:

Generally...it is true that the exterior forms that many traditional authors give to the morally or spiritually ugly characters tend to be ugly forms. Likewise, beautiful forms tend to express a beautiful interior life. This is a literary device that works well to reinforce the child's budding awareness of interior ugliness and beauty....

We have lost our sense of the holiness of beauty. By the same token, when exterior beauty is in harmony with a character's interior beauty, then the sign of the value of the tale or the character is greatly enhanced. Similarly, when worship of God is done poorly, it is not necessarily invalid if the intention of the worshiper is sincere. But when it is done well, it is a greater sign of the coming glory when all things will be restored in Christ....

Clearly, God is better glorified by a humble hunchback mumbling badly phrased prayers in a ditch than by a proud aesthete singing hymns perfectly, solely as an art form.... But what if the beautiful heart of that hunchback were to dwell in the developed art of the aesthete? Would not a greater glory be rendered to God by the restoration to harmony of both substance and form? [pp. 35-36, emphasis in original]

What Brendon says, correctly, is that goodness is beautiful and can by represented in literature by physically beautiful characters. What Michael O'Brien says, accidentally (I hope!), is that beautiful people are intrinsically better than homely people and capable of greater worship. Poor, poor, confused man. And did you note his use of the word necessarily in the third sentence of the second paragraph? Fumbling worship is not necessarily invalid if it is sincere, he says. It might just squeak by.

While I'm at it, I must quote O'Brien one more time because it's so much fun to watch him contradict himself. Observe his essay, "The Problem with Harry Potter," in which he writes, "In a consistent display of authorial overkill Rowling depicts...'bad' characters as ugly in appearance." Now compare that to the first paragraph quoted above, in which he praises "traditional authors" (whoever they are) for depicting evil characters as ugly.

In the dark and ugly landscape in which Michael O'Brien dwells, it is good and right to depict good characters as beautiful and bad characters as ugly--unless of course J. K. Rowling does it, for in Michael O'Brien's dark landscape, Rowling can't do anything right. Chesterton once complained that in the minds of some non-Christians, any stick is good enough to beat Christianity with. And in the minds of some of today's Christians, any stick is good enough to beat Harry Potter with.

Finally, as for the rights and permissions of fantasists, the solution to this and similar dilemmas is simple. To the Christian writer of fairy tales, fantasy, and sf, no other command do I give you than this: "Love God, and do as you please."

Telling Quotes

Read. Discuss.

"But I thought all witches were wicked," said the girl, who was half frightened at facing a real witch.

"Oh, no; that is a great mistake. There were only four witches in all the Land of Oz, and two of them, those who live in the North and the South, are good witches. I know this is true, for I am one of them myself, and cannot be mistaken."

--L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

"I wish they taught magic at school," Jane sighed. "I believe if we could do a little magic it might make something happen."

...

"I could begin right enough," said Anthea; "I’ve read lots about it. But I believe it’s wrong in the Bible."

"It’s only wrong in the Bible because people wanted to hurt other people. I don’t see how things can be wrong unless they hurt somebody, and we don’t want to hurt anybody; and what’s more, we jolly well couldn’t if we tried."

--E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet

For example, magic has been used traditionally in fairy stories to give a visible form to the invisible spiritual powers...."Good magic" in traditional fairy stories represents these very realities, symbolizing the intervention of God in the lives of good men put to the test. It is actually a metaphor for grace and miracle, the suspension of natural law through an act of spiritual authority, culminating in a reinforced moral order.

--Michael D. O'Brien, A Landscape With Dragons

While Rowling posits the "good" use of occult powers against their misuse, thus imparting to her sub-creation an apparent aura of morality, the cumulative effect is to shift our understanding of the battle lines between good and evil.

--Michael D. O'Brien, "The Problem of Harry Potter"

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven, nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil's tithe.

...

Even fairy-stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical toward the Supernatural; the Magical toward Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity toward Man. The essential face of Faerie is the middle one, the Magical.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" in Tree and Leaf

Sometimes a possessive mother even grudges a child his dream kingdom.

I remember a little boy who was punished for day-dreaming. His dream kingdom was a deep green forest peopled by wizards and gomes and magic children but where no grown-up people could come. Here he was king. But when I saw him his white face was dirty with tears, and his mother explained that she had punished him because when she asked for his attention, he was "so far away."

--Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

A Landscape with Misplaced Commas

Sooner or later, I am going to start a series critiquing Michael D. O'Brien's narrow-minded, anti-fiction A Landscape With Dragons (no really), but I haven't quite finished amassing source material in the middle of my living room floor, and then there's taxes and Josephus and...well, you know how it is.

Anyway, when I finally start in, I'm going to be sore tempted to criticize something that really has no place in my criticism. I decided I should get it out of the way now so I won't desire to do it later when I shouldn't. Here goes:

I don't know if this is O'Brien's fault or the fault of an editor at Ignatius Press, but for the love of St. William of Strunk, the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks! Take a look at this dialogue from O'Brien's first chapter (all of it sic except my comments in brackets):

"What kind of a monster is it?" [my mother] asked.

My little brother wasn't exactly sure, but I was.

"A dragon", I said.

[A terrible monster who sneakily moves commas where they don't belong!]

"Why don't you draw the dragon."

[Why don't you use question marks?]

"No, No, we would be too askaired!"

[So askaired that we capitalize no twice in a single sentence!]

"It's okay, I'll be right here", she said calmly.

[But it's not okay, Momma! The dragon's moving your commas, too!"]

Whew. Thanks for bearing with me; I know I'm not the world's greatest grammarian, but some things I still have to skewer. Incidentally, did anyone really use the word askaired when he was a little kid? Didn't think so.

In case you're wondering what's going on in this charming scene, I'll tell you: O'Brien is here explaining the basis of his belief that dragons are inherently evil and must always be depicted as evil in works of fantasy lest O'Brien brand the fantasist as an evil tempter who wants to lure children into Satanism. The basis of O'Brien's idea is twofold: first, O'Brien's children have had bad dreams about dragons, and second (as he depicts here), O'Brien had a scary dragon in his closet when he was little; therefore, dragons are evil.

I admit, logic like that is hard to beat.

What is particularly sad about all of this is that O'Brien, who condemns the fictional magic of Harry Potter, can't recognize real magic when it's right in front of his face. His own mother, as he proudly describes in this scene, dispelled the dragon in his closet through a ritual of sympathetic magic: she had young O'Brien draw the dragon, and then she burned the image to kill the monster in the closet. Somehow, O'Brien doesn't recognize this as a magic ritual. This isn't hypocrisy, but inexcusable ignorance.

Sunday Update

Can't talk now. Response to Michael O'Brien's "The Problem of Harry Potter" is currently in composition. I'll probably break it up into installments when I'm ready to post, which won't be for some time yet.

In the meantime, I think Snuffles is just about done with Anime from Akira To Princess Mononoke and will probably have some intriguing comments soon. What I've heard of the book and what I've read is quite thought-provoking.

Michael O'Brien vs. D. G. D. Davidson

I am now beginning the process of preparing the essay for which this blog was created. I decided to write a blog in the first place because I wanted to write a counterpoint to Michael O'Brien's atrociously researched essay, "The Problem of Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Paganization of Children's Literature" and present mythology from an angle both more positive and, I think, ultimately more Catholic.

For the most part, I've scrupulously avoided discussing Harry Potter on this blog. I think the novels may prove ephemeral in the long run; nonetheless, they are a hot topic in Christian circles. I believe this is because there are essentially two views within Christianity on the subject of myth and fantasy. As I hope to demonstrate, the two views are not as different from each other as they at first appear. Rather than choose one view and oppose the other, it is my intent to reconcile them.

I don't consider myself a Harry Potter fan, much as I enjoy the novels while reading them, but they are now the axis on which this debate within Christianity turns, and so when I take to discussing the subject directly in the near future, I will do so by discussing the Harry Potter novels and O'Brien's writing, specifically.

I wish my discussion to be thoughtful, gracious, and well researched. For that reason, I'm now collecting books on Christian views of Harry Potter as well as related works of prime importance, though it is now impossible that my reading on the subject could be exhaustive. I cannot put a date on the upcoming essay.

For now, I will leave you with the following hypotheses, which will show you the angle from which I intend to approach the subject:

There are within Christianity two views of mythology and closely related modern speculative literature. On the one hand is a point of view inherited primarily from J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Many Christians who take the view of these authors read Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" and a smattering of Lewis's writings and come away satisfied that they have the Christian view of mythology. It is unfortunate that popular Christian thinking on the subject has essentially fossilized with these authors. Their view can be summarized as follows: pagan mythology, which contains many elements similar to Christianity, resulted from the myth-makers' divinely influenced ability to perceive ultimate reality. I strongly suspect this viewpoint is heavily influenced by the writing of psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

The recognition that Christianity has parallels in world mythology and non-Christian religions is not new. The Church Fathers knew of it, and most, though not all of them, Lewis tells us in his Reflections on the Psalms, believed it resulted from the influence of demons who revealed forbidden truths before the time allotted by God. This view is more-or-less similar to that of those Christians who regard mythology as something evil to be avoided.

I say these two views are not as different as they appear. Both see myths as the result of spiritual influence. Both see myths as containing truths. And most importantly, both see Christ as the fulfillment of the myths.

G. K. Chesterton became Christian partly because of what he, in his book Orthodoxy, calls "the ethics of fairyland." C. S. Lewis became Christian largely because of his love of Norse Mythology. Lewis's brother Warren became Christian after gazing at a statue of Buddha. My own trip to Catholicism also followed the road to the Church that leads through Faërie. As Tolkien warns in "On Fairy-Stories," this is a hazardous road with many traps and pitfalls, but it is also a road with many special boons.

The debate within Christianity is not over whether or not parallels between Christianity and pagan religions and pagan myths exist. That debate is closed for anyone with eyes to see. The debate is over whether the world is primarily full of darkness or primarily full of light. The debate is over whether Christian parallels and the myths that contain them are good or sinister. On the one hand, Lewis and Tolkien hold them to be good, and sometimes they may have taken this view too far; Lewis, for example, wrote that he was tempted to worship Apollo in Greece, and in Perelandra he suggests (facetiously or otherwise) that sacrificing to pagan gods is acceptable in some circumstances.

On the other hand, today's enemies of Harry Potter see demons (and worse, neo-Gnostics) around every corner. Were they consistent with their own views, they would have to attack Lewis and Tolkien on the same grounds they attack Rowling, for Rowling is only repeating what her masters did before her. In fact, if they were really consistent with their own views, many of them would have to cease being Christians, for many of the arguments against Harry Potter are based on the error that the division between Christianity and myth is so sharp that no commonality exists between them.

It is the opinion of The Sci Fi Catholic that the two views must be wedded. There are in the universe both good and evil, light and dark. Myth should be approached neither naïvely nor unintelligently. Whether the truths contained in myth actually derive from a spiritual source or derive only from the myth-makers' close examination of the world, they contain--and we should expect them to contain--the bright elements of goodness in humanity that reflect the imago dei as well as the dark elements of evil that reflect the distortion of that image. The reader who drinks from the well of myth drinks from a very deep well containing all of human experience, thought, wisdom, folly, and choices of every kind.

Scripture is replete with mythology. Hagiographies are replete with mythology. The Christian who denies myth denies his religion. Even the Protestants who sought and still seek to strip myth from Christianity have not and never will succeed. The key is not to avoid myth but to approach it with fear and trembling, by which I mean approrpiate respect and appropriate discernment. If we do so, we can both avoid the excesses of the Inklings and the abysmal deathtrap worldview of the Harry Potter critics.