Influences and George MacDonald’s Sermons

I’ve been reading George MacDonald’s novels for many years. This year I set aside the fiction in favor of two sets of sermons. I don’t remember who recommended that I read some of his sermons, but I’m glad that person did. MacDonald writes clearly and passionately in these “unspoken” addresses, a difficult combination to pull off. And his lessons are quite good. Some examples: Life has many daily questions the Bible doesn’t answer, which is why we must daily rely on Jesus for guidance. Each follower of Christ will receive in Heaven a new name written on a white stone, unique and secret because each believer can worship God in a way that no one else can. We could not hate our cruelest enemy except for a shred of humanity in him that makes us think he could be different, and that shred is what we can love. Jesus gives the rich young ruler things to do in order to receive eternal life rather than things to believe or things to be partly because when someone asks how to reach the top of a mountain, you don't say, "Put your foot on the peak."

I know of MacDonald only through C. S. Lewis and read him at Lewis’s recommendation. And although I don’t always understand why Lewis admired him so deeply, here in the sermons, I see the influence of MacDonald on Lewis very clearly. Why does God even have his children ask for things if He knows what we need and can give it? Because prayer is the thing we need most, says MacDonald, and I hear the echoes of that excellent point reverberating throughout Lewis’s work. Miracles show the hastening of natural processes, says MacDonald, an idea repeated by Lewis a few decades later in his book on miracles. And when MacDonald says that God will strip away our sin layer by layer, I can’t help but think of Lewis’s Edmund having his dragon skin peeled from him.

Strangely, I also saw influences of Hegel on MacDonald. Hegel, the ultimate philosopher of progress in the century of progress, essentially taught that the purpose of the universe was to evolve to the point that some part of it understood it as a whole. In other words, according to Hegel, the purpose of the universe was to produce Hegel. I see Hegel’s influence where MacDonald talks about progressive revelation as God’s working toward humanity’s comprehension of Him. I see it again where MacDonald says, “Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

I’m far from alone in seeing Hegel as a big problem. Right now, I’m also reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (more on that book in a later post), in which protagonist Joseph Knecht blames Hegel for the world wars of the twentieth century. As Lewis said that MacDonald baptized his imagination, I could say that MacDonald baptized Hegel’s ideas, Still, two months ago, I would never have imagined a line of influence from the pagan Hegel to the Christian C. S. Lewis with only one stop in between.

A Book I Had Not Planned to Read this Year . . . or Any Year

Background bit no. 1:

During my Second Decade Reading Plan, I revisited Sherlock Holmes canon: all four novels and all fifty-six short stories. At the end of those ten years, I knew that I would one day want to read them all yet again – all, that is, except for A Study in Scarlet. The first couple of chapters, in which Watson meets Holmes for the first time, are priceless and indispensable. But on the second reading, after I had found the American backstory involving the vengeful Mormon town once again a tedious diversion from the main attraction, I decided to leave that novel out of my next run-through. (I guess I could say in Doyle’s defense that he didn’t know yet that he had just introduced one of the greatest characters in the history of literature and shouldn’t leave him out of almost half of the book.)

Background bit no. 2:

For a long time, perhaps as long as I’ve been following to ten-year reading plans, I’ve been playing computer logic puzzles by Everett Kaser. I usually play at least one every day. The puzzles use little pixel-art pictures and icons and involve graphic clues that tell you, for instance, that the apple is in the same column as the Japanese flag or that the hammer is above and to the right of the rose. Many involve paths or mazes that must be put together by following the clues to discover where walls and doors are placed. The one I’ve been playing the most lately is something like Slitherlink, but the player has to figure out where the clues go in the grid as well as determining the looping path that satisfies the clues. I love it!

The titles of the games group themselves into several themes. Some games are named after, I presume, family members: “Willa’s Walk,” for instance, and “Floyd’s Bumpershoot.” Others are named after famous mathematicians. The most common theme, though, is Sherlock Holmes. The set is made up of “Inspector Lestrade,” “Baker Street,” “Mrs. Hudson,” “Moriarty’s Dinner,” “Reichenbach Falls,” and several others, including the one with the apples and the Japanese flags, which is entitled simply “Sherlock.” (The games cost more than you may be used to in an age of free phone apps. But you can try each one for free, they don’t include ads, each includes hundreds of puzzles at each of various levels of difficulty, and Everett himself might call you personally if you have any problems. I’ve had one problem in thirty years, and he certainly helped me.)

Main point of today’s post:

One of the latest Kaser puzzle games is “Beckett’s Books,” which presents classic books, one two-page spread at a time, with the pages torn up into little squares. The player places the pieces with margin first (like the edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle) and then, following the spelling and sense of the words and the patterns of white space at the beginning and end of each paragraph, puts the interior pieces in position so the text can be read.

I tried the free demo first, which offered five pages of each of five books. When I paid for the full version, which book did I inexplicably decide to continue? Of course Everett included the first Sherlock novel in his game of reassembling books through deductive reasoning! So there I was for several months earlier this year, reading A Study in Scarlet, two pages per day. All of that to say that, maybe because of the unusual format and pace of reading or maybe just because my expectations were so low, the book was interesting all the way through – even the chapters in Utah. Now I’m really looking forward to rereading the other three novels and the fifty-six stories over the course of my fourth decade of scheduled reading.

Suggestions for Reading Dickens as a Christian Author

A friend has commented on my post from February 11 that she would like to read some Dickens with his Christian message in mind. So I thought I would offer my best ideas on where to start.

If you’d like to start by reading about Dickens, I highly recommend God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author by Gary L. Colledge. Colledge shows the man with all of his faults and all of his spiritual virtues, as well. Some critics have made facile arguments claiming that Dickens was not a true Christian. (The same kind of critics desperately want Handel to be an unbeliever, presumably so they can listen to Messiah without any pressure.) Colledge sets those views aside quickly and starts to show how Dickens exalts Christ in his books and stories.

If you can’t stand just reading about Dickens but must start reading the words of the Inimitable himself, begin with this letter from 1861 to a certain Reverend Macrae:

With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my art, one of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are drawn from the New Testament; all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving. Over and over again, I claim them in express words as disciples of the Founder of our religion; but I must admit that to a man (or a woman) they all arise and wash their faces, and do not appear unto men to fast.

So don’t expect his Christian heroes to say, “According to Romans 8:28 . . . .” Dickens's humbugs and judgmental Christians thump their Bibles, whether literally or metaphorically, on the heads of others. His “good people,” on the other hand, follow the words of the book of James and show their faith by their good works. (The one, glorious exception is Captain Cuttle from Dombey and Son. This nearly illiterate sailor constantly quotes the Bible and the Prayer Book with uproarious imprecision. Yet, he, as much as any character in all of Dickens’s works, is “humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving” and thus shows his true heart.) The piety of these good characters may be represented by a single phrase among the hundred thousand in a typical novel; don’t let these slip past your notice. If Pip says he prays or Bob and Tiny Tim go to church, Dickens is telling us with modest efficiency where the character’s allegiance lies.

Now, what you’re really looking for.

Start by rereading A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens grew up and lived in an officially Christian country. Nearly everyone he knew was baptized as an infant. The purest Christian he ever knew was his sister-in-law, who died in his arms at the age of (I believe) sixteen. Put these facts all together (with a few choice words from our Savior about the faith of children) and it’s easy to see how the author would come to the point of view that Christian faith is something that children grow up with and many adults have wandered away from and that returning to Christ means undoing some adult decisions and going back to take up again a state of childlikeness. Note that Scrooge’s parents raised him in some kind of Christian faith, else they would not have named him the otherwise improbable Ebenezer. Then watch in Stave the Second as young Ebenezer trades in his childlike faith for a love of money. Then, of course, there has to be a child of faith to show Scrooge the way. And of course the child, Tiny Tim, has to die (in one version of the Future) in order to demonstrate the beauty of an entire life lived in devotion to the one “who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Now tell me if you can (and you know you can’t) that Scrooge’s joyous “I am as merry as a schoolboy” doesn’t mean a return to faith in Jesus. If you still doubt, think of Dickens’s checklist as you read the last few pages and note where, after his conversion, Scrooge is humble (check), charitable (check), faithful (check: he goes to church!), and forgiving (check).

Next stop, A Tale of Two Cities. Here Sydney Carton transforms from the most beautiful lost character in all of literature, to Christian (remembering the words “I am the Resurrection and the Life” from his father’s funeral), to Christ figure. On the slight chance that you don’t know the end of the plot, I won’t give it away. But pay attention to these key elements along the way. (1) Dr. Manette is released from prison in a scheme involving the codewords “recalled to life.” Keep in mind this master analogy in all of its deepest Christian connotations as it affects the rest of the book. Prison = death (literal, metaphorical, and spiritual). Freedom = resurrection (literal, metaphorical, and spiritual). (2) Think about Manette’s resurrection and the new Christian’s spiritual resurrection and Christ’s resurrection in comparison to the grave digging done by “the resurrection man.” (3) When one great character finally tells his wife that he approves of her praying, keep in mind that Dickens by that tiny rudder of a phrase turns a whole ship of spiritual meaning and wants us to take the words as a sign of renewed Christian faith. (4) When the drinker (you’ll know who) pours out his drink on the hearth, don’t take it simply as a renunciation of alcohol but also as a pouring out of sacrificial blood on an altar. (5) When Charles Darnay says that inheriting aristocracy, a state that brings a death sentence in the new French Republic, leaves him “bound to a system that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it,” consider the similarities to the Biblical description of the state of sin. (6) When Sydney changes clothes with Charles, consider that Christ took on our humanity that we might “become partakers of the divine nature.” For me, no other novel, not even The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, gives a more powerful, theologically detailed allegory of salvation from sin by substitutionary death.

Little Dorrit contains much less allegory. But it’s there. My post from February outlines the main points. As for the rest of the content of the book, we have a morality play with three main groups: the Christians (“my good people” who quietly go their way demonstrating the character of Christ), the villains (who obviously do the opposite), and the humbugs, chiefly Mrs Clennam, who talk much more about the Bible than Dickens’s heroes but only seem to find in it judgment and cause for anger and revenge.

The Old Curiosity Shop reads like a fairy tale at times with its generically named characters: the Grandfather, the Single Gentleman, the Bachelor. So a little allegory shouldn’t come as a surprise. Little Nell leads her troubled Grandfather through the industrial midlands where they see poor souls tortured in the fires of the furnaces. Hmm. I wonder what that could represent? They find peace in their journey when they hear the bell of a country church, and for the rest of her time, Nell enjoys sitting among the statuary of the saints. The plot is actually barely allegorical. Clearly the good Christian Nell leads her Grandfather, a man mentally and spiritually bound by [I’ll let you discover the secret on your own], from Hell to Heaven by her humble, faithful, forgiving ways.

David Copperfield seems at first like it might be a great Biblical allegory, pitting David against Uriah Heep. (See 2 Samuel 11 & 12 for the story of the original David and Uriah.) But its symbolic message is more in the details of the separate characters. Note especially Agnes (Agnes = agnus = the lamb), who first appears in front of a stained-glass window, standing as one with the spiritual light shining down on David. Aunt Betsey Trotwood is one of the best Christians and best characters in all of Dickens’s works, and David Copperfield is one of the best novels in the history of English literature. So don’t forget that part of Dickens’s Christian message is care for all of humanity as shown in his realistic, carefully crafted attention to detail of character.

Then read any of the other novels with the letter to Rev. Macrae in mind. My recommendations in order: Dombey and Son, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House. If you still like Dickens after all that, you can read Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, and the others.

Enough. Stop reading me. Start reading Dickens.