One of the greatest gifts and joys of the artist, as an artist, is to look upon the work of their own hands with the same delight that God, the Creator of all, looks upon what he has made. Yes, this joy, mediated through the unique work of art, is, insofar as it is pure, but a joy in reality itself, a delight in what is, which art seeks to harness and funnel into greater transparency and radiance. Thus the joy of the human creator, when it is humble and true, is a literal sharing in the joy of the divine Creator. And this joy, thus, is redemptive, mediating the healing and atoning gaze of God more deeply into the universe, into the very fabric of created reality.
There is quite a beautiful paradox here, but one that is important, in fact, not only for artists strictly speaking, but for every person. It is that the most gratuitous and “useless” things are in fact often the most important and fruitful things of all. For what pragmatic purpose does a painting actually serve, or, even more so, a novel or a film? Of course they can be made to serve pragmatic purposes—for example, the pushing of a particular agenda or as a vessel of education—and while this is obviously a part of art, it cannot be the heart of art. I said before that art cannot exist for “art’s sake,” but it most certainly exists for beauty’s sake. And beauty, in the last analysis, cannot be made to serve any ulterior motives other than itself…at least when traced back to its ultimate origin and fulfillment in the One who is infinite and eternal Beauty. The artist tastes this in his or her love for the mystery that they bear within their heart—which their external works of art only ever try to approximate and to express—a mystery that, in the deepest and most authentic cases, is always one that is conceived through inspiration. This in-breathing of the Holy Spirit into the artist’s heart, mind, and imagination—whether they are aware of it or not—is the true criterion of what makes something a masterpiece, in other words, of piece of art given by the true Master, the true Creator.
It does not matter that the piece of art—say a myth—is not “real” in the sense of conforming to strict historical truth (unless of course it parades as history or colors our understanding of real historical events). It becomes real through the creating intentions of God and the co-creating activity of man. It becomes real as myth, as story, as a co-created world existing in the mind and imaginations of all who participate in it, and who are delighted, encouraged, and enriched by it.
After all, the entire universe itself was not yet real before God breathed it forth into existence. And yet he conceived of it, in all of its rich expanse, all of its particularities, all of its drama, from within the heart of his own divine life, and from this birthed it into existence. Of course, when God creates it is from nothing into something, from a void into existence, and he breathes forth the very essence of life to bring angels, human persons, animals, and a vibrant cosmos, into being. The human person cannot create in the same way, since we cannot ever literally bring forth something from nothing; however, receiving what has been given by God and letting it educate the heart, transform the heart, fecundate the heart, it does coalesce into something that has not existed before, something new, as it were. It coalesces into a piece of art that is a crystallization of reality, funneling reality into a single, intense, white-hot glow. And in this lies the co-creative activity of man and woman. They too, if their creations are to be real, and not lies, to be true, and not false, to be transparent, and not opaque, must look to the archetype of all creativity, the origin and fulfillment of all reality: God. For as God looked inward, to the infinite richness of his own Being, his own divine life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and from this gave birth to the universe, so too from gazing upon God and upon the refractions of his light in the real, the human person is enabled to create on the model of this one Reality.
Whether a story is true or not, therefore—in this respect—does not lie in whether it actually happened, but in whether or not it expresses truth in all of its parts. This, in fact, even includes reflecting the truth of the actual historical truth of our world mediated into a non-real world (in fantasy), since history expresses not accidental occurrences that could be any other way, but the very dynamic nature of God’s life and love spread abroad through time and space. And true story also expresses the ontological meaning of reality, reveals the inner consistency of being, even if not all that it portrays is rooted in actual historical fact. This is why a rebirth of a dead person, though it doesn’t happen in historical fact (except in certain moments of the Christian dispensation), is still “true”—it is interiorly consistent with and manifests the truth—whereas the reincarnation of a human person in another body is not. The first lies in a manifestation of a historical “possibility” in a mythical world, whereas the second contradicts an established ontological truth, namely the identification of person and body, i.e. this person with this body, with an event that obscures rather than reveals what it means to be a human person. This does not apply, of course, to mythical races, which have their own unique existence based on, and unfolding, what already exists, but following a trajectory of being that is born of the mythic impulse and not rooted immediately in what already is (e.g. think of Tolkien’s elves).
In fact, one of the beautiful gifts of true myth and fantasy, as paradoxical as it may seem, is precisely to cast an illumining light upon the true historical trajectory of humanity, upon our own story, precisely by “processing” and elucidating it in a mythical context. In this respect, myth in its deepest reaches and its highest expression is biblical, it is typological, meaning that through myth we discover the face of Christ in a thousand faces, and hear echoes of his voice in a thousand voices, and thus come to know him, to desire him, and to seek him more truly and more ardently. Whether this is the threefold office of Christ as revealed in the central characters of the Lord of the Rings: the priesthood of Frodo, the kingship of Aragorn, or the prophecy of Gandalf, or the Christ-like nature of the lion Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, or even the intimations of Christian truth (seeds of the Word, as St. Justin Martyr called them) in the myths of pagan Rome and Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia and India, and so many others—at the heart of all true myth is longing for the Beloved of the heart. This is the case because the very foundation of all fantasy and faerie story, and the root of our deep fascination with it, is the nostalgia for our lost homeland. It is eros. Fantasy is one of the songs that the bridal heart sings, even if unknowingly, in its thirst to return to the home for which she was made, and yet which she has lost.1
However, fantasy is not an end in itself in the sense of being an escape merely in order to be an escape. It is regretful to even need to say this. However, in our contemporary society in which so many hearts have despaired of ever finding the universal truth, or even of believing that it exists, the distinction between a pleasant fantasy in one’s head and the true and everlasting joy of eternal bliss in the real and radiant truth of God’s life has been dulled. I think only of some comments I encountered on a YouTube video of fantasy music, which I paraphrase here not (at all!) in order to criticize, but rather simply to place the finger of our hearts upon the pulse of our contemporary world. One person said something to the effect of the following: “Is it not amazing that this music stirs in all of us a longing, a homesickness, for a place that we have never been and which does not even exist?” Here we see the stirring of eros by fantasy, that primal wonder that the land of faerie enkindles within us, the aching of the heart for the gratuitous beauty of adventure and the radiant freedom of play in the security of a story held totally by the arms of cherishing love. And yet we see the despair of our modern society underneath it, bubbling up and betraying the wonder in the very moment in which it springs forth: But this doesn’t exist! We’ve never been there and we never shall! How sad!
Two other comments responding to the first are worth noting. One person replied, “Just because something happens only in one’s head doesn’t mean it’s not real.” True enough, but also deeply inadequate. It is real, sure, real as imagination, as thought, as the adventure of the heart—and this should not be underestimated—and yet it is not real in the sense that only reality coming to meet me from the outside can be real. And it is only this latter, the radiant truth of a world that precedes me, enfolds me, and offers itself to me—flowing from the generous heart of a loving and creating God—that can give me the liberation, the freedom, the adventure, and the joy that I seek. I can only truly lose myself, can only escape from all that holds me bound, not in the fantastic flights of my own mind, but in the ecstasy into the beautiful embrace of reality. And here, this loss is finding.
The second comment is more apropos: “But it does exist, and we have been there! And we shall be there again!” Wonderful! But one must ask: What? Why? How? What is the content of this “there”? One of the sad parts of our world today is that we take “heaven” for granted (if we want that kind of thing) and yet forget the great price that was paid to open it to us. We want the self-centered joy without the movement out of ourselves into the arms of Love. We want the assurance of happiness after death without even asking the question of what, of who, makes such happiness possible, indeed, of who is that very happiness that we seek. This is akin to saying that having a family is a wonderful thing and yet it is not important either to love one’s spouse or one’s children, but only to kind of “let it happen,” and to enjoy it.
But one of the paradoxical truths of all that I am here trying to express is that these subjectivistic comments, these comments that fail to affirm the objective order of reality and its truth, not only betray reality itself, but also betray fantasy! They betray the very impetus of faerie story! For the heart of faerie is love for the real, wonder at the real! In fact, the truest and deepest safeguard of the wonder that fantasy kindles within us is precisely the Gospel, the revelation of God’s love given in Christ and opening up to us the greatest adventure—the true fantasy—that is the journey of love leading all the way to the heart of the Trinity in everlasting bliss. Here all the wonder of faerie and all the concrete realism of historical truth blend together in the consummating movement of God’s redeeming love, in the revelation of the great Story told by the ultimate Storyteller, the one true Masterpiece that holds all other masterpieces, the Masterpiece in which each one of us is a protagonist.
After all, what is one of the things most fascinating and inviting about fantasy? It is the ability to be the protagonist of a great story, to be a hero, to walk with nobility and courage against forces of evil and darkness, and to stand victorious over them. As G.K. Chesterton said so wonderfully:
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”
This reveals the beautiful truth that at the heart of fantasy, a thread woven into its very heart, is the movement of sacrificial self-gift, of love that conquers death and goodness that overcomes evil. And this precisely is the heart of the Gospel. And when fantasy despairs of this (as in contemporary “dark fantasy” or fantasy in which one can be evil—think of the six different moral options of Dungeons and Dragons), then it betrays the flowing current, the river of life, at its very center.
But is myth, storytelling at its most “epic,” truly this important? Is it a way of feeding flights of fantasy and delusions of grandeur, or is it rather, truly, but an expression of the dramatic nature of human existence, of the warfare between heaven and earth, of the marvelous mystery unfolding through conflict, to climax, unto definitive and everlasting resolution? Yes, it is really this important, as man and woman are “story” beings before they are conceptual beings, personal before they are abstract, relational before they are ideal. We think in stories far more than we realize, and stories that we receive—both in their essential meaning as well as in so many of their accidents, their facets—profoundly shape our human development, character, and personality. This is why myth is so profoundly important, and why every age has its myths, whether good or ill. To again quote the ever-quotable Chesterton:
The things I believed most then [as a child], the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things….Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.
And what is the primal law of the land of faerie? It is wonder and gratitude. These are the secrets to true joy and the foundation of all faith, hope, love, and worship.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. … The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys and sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?
Good myth, as the enkindling of gratitude and wonder, gives us a taste of our final destination even in the heart of the journey, and thus is true “escape,” in the right meaning of the word: escape from the narrow confines of discouragement, or from a merely pragmatic approach to life, or from an existence fueled by mere burdensome responsibility rather than fecundated by the inventiveness and creativity of love. And as the enkindling of gratitude and wonder, myth is a profoundly “erosic” activity (a movement of spiritual eros), a stirring up into flame of the longing for the homeland of heaven. The creation of rich, beautiful, and vibrant imaginary worlds, of stories of profound drama and meaning, is a deeply human activity. It is in fact a deeply divine activity, a participation in the reality of the divine Craftsmanship over the world. A true storyteller, a true creator of myth, will feel for the world born of his or her own mind and heart something of the “trepidation of love,” the intense longing and anxiety, that reflects the anxious care that God himself has over the world that he has made, and over each one of the creatures within it. Aware of the deep and irreplaceable gift of this myth—which, if true and transparent, never comes merely from human ingenuity but from divine inflowing—the person feels fear at a “stillbirth,” a fear that this beautiful reality will be lost. But they also feel a trust that, given by God, by God it will be sustained. And this trepidation of love, just as with the divine Creator, is always held and permeated by the wonder of play and the lightness of gratitude
So too, the real human drama expressed in myth—even if occurring in a fantastical setting with premises not identical to this real world—is a privileged way that we, as men and women born of the dramatic love of God and written into the story of the universe, can process, come to understand, and participate in the greatest Mystery of all mysteries. Thus myth is never merely story; it is sacrament. It is mediator of grace. For it is simply a fact that every aspiration of the human heart, expressed in all the forms of art and in myth in particular, finds fulfillment in Christ and in our participation, through him, with him, and in him, in the inner life of the Trinity. All that we taste of the beauty of heaven in the fascinating, wonder-evoking world of story is found fully alive and consummated in the heart of God, who is the deepest profundity and the widest expanse.
Reality is the most beautiful story of all, the origin from which all other myths derive their impetus and to which they return. Thus the “mythic impulse” in human hearts, the longing to co-create beauty, to fashion worlds and histories and characters from within the bosom of our own contemplation and love, is but a facet of love for the real, of delight in the real. It is a way of processing the deep existential drama that unfolds in the life of each one of us, and in history as a whole—and an expression of the innate heroic nature of our human vocation to complete victory over evil and the definitive consummation of goodness in the true “happily ever after.”
So too, myth is itself a fruitful act, not because it is particularly “productive” in the pragmatic sense of the word, or gives some profitable work in society, or even is an artifact of culture in the superficial sense, but because it is an expression—a profoundly beautiful expression—of that reality which lies at the heart of all existence: childlike wonder and play before the awe-inspiring mystery of reality. “Losing oneself in a good book” can in fact be one of the healthiest and most human of activities, and can be very akin to prayer, to contemplation, and to the pursuit of God (and indeed an expression of this). For at the heart of it all lies true eros, the holy thirst for our definitive homeland, the place in which all the most radiant flights of fantasy throughout history are more than fulfilled, infinitely fulfilled, in the most ravishing harmony of a universe redeemed and restored in God, through his own marvelous storytelling brought to its eternal happily-ever-after.
This all leads us back again to the beautiful realization: the Gospel is the high point of this myth of reality—it the “true Myth,” the greatest of all stories which is more than a story: it is utter historical truth, indeed eternal truth, which takes up and fulfills all other stories! J.R.R. Tolkien, the artisan of the great myth of which Lord of the Rings is the central part, had a deep understanding of this. In his terms, called “faerie story,” this mode of storytelling is in fact a foretaste of the Gospel, of the heart of evangelic truth and joy. For in its very medium—in fact through it, not despite it—it proclaims the definitive victory of God’s love operative in this world through Christ, in the Holy Spirit. It does this, in particular, through what Tolkien came to term “eucatastrophe,” or the “happy-catastrophe.” At the apex of every good myth—and indeed upon profound contemplation every human life—is the marvelous turn of God’s never-ending mercy by which he transforms the greatest possible evil (sin, suffering, and death) into the greatest possible good. Whenever all human resources have run out, and man and woman can do no more—in fact when, on their own, they fail—this is when the true glory and beauty of the Gospel is made manifest: “In this is the love of God made manifest: in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us!” (Rom 5;8). All the aspirations of humanity find fulfillment, not on the basis of our own efforts, but on pure grace and mercy of God poured out into desperate poverty and utter receptivity.
And this is part of what is so profoundly lacking in our world, which is simultaneously fascinated by myth and yet fails to understand its true meaning, breadth, and beauty. We have all kinds of stories, but very little myth. We have very many fantasies, but they for the most part fail to manifest this truth that salvation comes from far beyond man, as a gift descending from heaven. We want to save ourselves, or we think that we must. Of course, part of the magic of a good story is the heroic response of the protagonists, that they invest every ounce of their will, desire, energy, and effort, and even their very life-blood, in order to remain faithful to the gift they have received. But all of this is held by, and yields to, the true Protagonist of every myth, the true Protagonist, in fact, of the history of the entire universe: the God who is creating and redeeming and consummating Love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
*****************
1It is important to note that typology is different than allegory. Typology, which is God’s own way of writing history and of revealing himself in preparation of the coming of Christ—hence the types of the Old Testament, for example Adam, Abraham, and David, revealing in anticipation facets of the person of Jesus before his coming. But allegory is a way of intending a specific individual to “represent” Jesus or another person or reality in a mythical context. J.R.R. Tolkien himself was actually quite averse to allegory, and refused to “equate” any of his characters with a given person or theme in the real world, though he admitted of countless applications. Thus he disliked the direct personification of Jesus as Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia. While I think allegory is a totally legitimate art form—and the above-mentioned an example of it done well—I think myth properly speaking, in its typological nature, can go both deeper and wider since it respects the mystery of the given-world of historical truth and does not seek to “capture” it in a story, but rather to gesture to it, to allow facets of its light to refract in countless different ways in the very fabric of the characters and the story.
Indeed, myth can stand on the dividing-line of history and fantasy, in that it seeks not to re-present historical events in an allegorical way (since our own imaginings can never catch up, even distantly, to the radiant beauty of what God has actually done in history!), but rather seeks to express the real in an imaginative story, being born of deep contemplation of the meaning of the central events of redemptive history and what they reveal of God, of humanity, and of the meaning of the universe itself. Thus myth is ontological contemplation, it is theological reflection, it is prayer and wonder and play, rooted wholly in the real and yet processing it precisely in story. It can even seek to present a pre-Christian society or age of the world, before written history or in a place that history has not touched, and to offer a wholly believable (as far as fantasy goes) representation of an age of the world illumined by the hidden light of Christ that shines upon all things, and thus make more tangible, make more visible, the seeds of his presence in every time and every place.