Myth and Childhood

The infamous atheist Richard Dawkins is at it again. Close on the heels of the news that he is funding ads on London buses that declare "There's probably no God: now stop worrying and go enjoy your life," comes the news that he is resigning from his post at Oxford in order to write a children's story that will teach children "how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking." He intends in particular to dismantle what he regards as the Judeo-Christian "myth," saying that teaching it to children — in his words, "torturing their minds with hell" — is "a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse." But never mind what Tolkien and C.S. Lewis called the True Myth: Dawkins is wary of all myth. He wonders if letting children read stories that "allow . . . the possibility of frogs turning into princes" has "an insidious effect on rationality."

It was only a matter of time before the world's best-known atheist denounced fairy tales. Theistic writers, notably G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, have long recognized the power of myth as a vehicle for deep truth. In his essay "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien provided the best articulation of this view, and it is admirably summarized by Tolkien biographer Joseph Pearce in an interview at Zenit:

“Tolkien . . . was a lifelong practicing, and very devout, Catholic who believed that mythology was a means of conveying certain transcendent truths which are almost inexpressible within the factual confines of a "realistic" novel.

“In order to understand Tolkien´s "philosophy of myth" it is useful to commence with a maxim of G.K. Chesterton: ‘not facts first, truth first.’ Tolkien and Chesterton were both intent on differentiating between facts, which are purely physical, and truth, which is metaphysical.

“Thus a myth or a fairy story can convey love and hate, selfishness and self-sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal, good and evil -- all of which are metaphysical realities, that is, true, even if conveyed in a mythological or fairyland setting.

“There is no need for Christians to worry about the role of ‘story’ as a conveyer of truth. After all, Christ was the greatest storyteller of all. His parables might not be factual but they are always truthful.

“Take, for instance, the parable of the prodigal son. Probably, Christ was not referring to one particular son, nor one particular forgiving father, nor one particular envious brother. The power of the story does not reside in its being factual but in its being truthful.

“It doesn´t matter that the prodigal son might never have existed as an actual person; he exists in each of us. We are all, at one time or another, a prodigal son, a forgiving father or an envious brother. It is ‘applicable’ to all of us. It is the story´s truth, not its facts, that matter.

“This was Tolkien´s point. Furthermore, there is more truth in "The Lord of the Rings" than in many examples of fictional realism.”

Many dismiss Tolkien as mere escapism, but I don't think Dawkins makes that mistake. Tolkien unfortunately has the distinction of being the first in what has become a glut of fantasy, most of which uses at least some of the elements which Tolkien either invented or perfected (elves, for instance, existed in stories before Tolkien, but it was he who made them tall, fair, wise, and superior to men). It is therefore easy to mistake Tolkien with the legions of lesser writers who imitate him. But Tolkien has something they lack: a deep Catholic worldview that gives his story a depth, and indeed a truth, that perhaps no other work of fiction has equalled. Dawkins recognizes that myth can have a detrimental effect on what he calls "science thinking" but what can be more accurately termed "scientistic thinking:" the belief, indeed the worldview, that the only knowledge is what we now call scientific knowledge, which earlier thinkers like Thomas Aquinas recognized as being but a portion of valid human rational knowledge.

But despite Dawkins' attempt to discredit fairy tales, there is little reason to fear him. Childhood is precisely the wrong time to try to destroy the effect of myth on the human soul. Children are by their very nature far more attuned to such stories than adults; for them such tales are real and present in a way that adults cannot experience. Watch a child at play. He creates entire worlds out of his imagination. The child for the duration of his play exists inside that world in way would get an adult locked up by kind people in long white coats. But what would be harmful in an adult is not only harmless in a child, but even beneficial, because his play isn't an "escape" or an avoiding of reality, but a means to discover how to live in reality. A child can learn a lot by spending a few hours as the king of a kingdom of his own imagining! And a child can learn even more by spending time inside the tale of an author who uses myth as a vehicle for truth. In my own childhood the worldview that permeated the Narnia stories also permeated the worlds conjured by my imagination. The nobility, justice, mercy, and truth which characterized the heroes of Narnia were applied to the heroes of my imagination, generally played by myself. I like to think I benefited from it.

Make-believe is such an integral part of childhood that even the Dark Lord of Atheism himself, Professor Dawkins, has no ability to destroy it. Far more insidious and dangerous are those who do not engage in frontal attacks but who sneak secretly in a side door, who do not attack myth but use it as a vehicle to spread not truth but falsehood. Unfortunately, children's literature today is rife with such backwards and dangerous messages.

It used to be that if one picked up a children's book, one knew that it contained a message in accordance with traditional morality. The traditional virtues were demonstrated in clear ways by the characters in the story. Even while the adult world was undergoing the sexual and cultural revolutions and allowing its morals to slip further and further, childhood was still the refuge of the basic virtues. Adult authors writing for children placed these easily-understood virtues at the core of their stories, because at the time everyone recognized what virtue was at that basic level, even if they disagreed on how to implement it, or whether it applied to them.

But the need to justify a laxness of morals caused the corruption and the destruction of traditional ideas of virtue. Now the adult world of virtue has been so damaged that the effects have leaked back into the world of children, and the "virtues" exemplified in children's literature are the same twisted mockeries that now pass for virtue in the adult world. Two of the biggest of these new virtues are tolerance and non-conformity. Traditionalist moralists know that these things are not good or evil in themselves, but depend on what is being tolerated or conformed with. But today they are presented as though they are inherently good. These attitudes are bad enough when placed in a story with a contemporary setting, but are even more damaging when placed within the concentrating vehicle of myth.

It is an interesting exercise to trace children's fantasy through the decades. George MacDonald’s "Curdie" books are a good place to start. These stories seem rather sentimental to us today, but they exercised a powerful influence over children who read them, including G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Decades later, C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia precisely because no one was writing the George MacDonald kind of stories anymore. Lewis "suppositional" work succeeds in giving us perhaps the best representation of Christ in fiction, despite the fact that in these stories He is a Lion. Following Lewis, writers of less great stature nonetheless contributed valuable works to the canon of children's myth. Notable is Lloyd Alexander, a bit of an existentialist in adult life, whose children's cycle, The Prydain Chronicles, is nonetheless thematically similar to The Lord of the Rings, with such messages as the rejection of personal power and dominance over others, putting your head down and doing what is right despite the cost, and even the autumnal feeling of a changing world in which much that was valuable is lost.

Today the top children's fantasy writers are J.K. Rowling, Christopher Paolini, and Philip Pullman. In their stories you will find, respectively, gay wizard mentors, atheistic elves, and deicide. And that is just what is on the surface. Take J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Few would guess from reading the books that Dumbledore is gay (though Rowling's subsequent announcement of it was one of the greatest coups for the homosexual movement). More subtle, and more dangerous, is the attitude of the characters to power. While on the surface the good characters condemn the use of power to dominate the weak, in actuality that power is used when it can provide a joke or the satisfying feeling of getting even. Think of Harry's treatment of Dudley Dursley. Few would deny that Dudley deserves all that happens to him, but still Harry's constant getting even and bursts of temper against his cousin are a far cry from the almost foolhardy mercy exemplified in both The Lord of the Rings and The Prydain Chronicles.

Christopher Paolini is no better. In his best-selling Inheritance Cycle (beginning with Eragon), he apes Tolkien in such a blatant way that it is astonishing that he gets away with it, but he apes only what is on the surface, elements like elves and dwarves and orcs (though he renames the orcs), while Tolkien's deep morality passes over his head. Paolini's elves give long-winded speeches about the lack of evidence for a Creator and show their superiority to men by being smugly vegetarian. And the same harmful attitude toward power is evident in Paolini’s stories that is in Rowling’s. Except for their labels, it would sometimes be difficult to tell his good guys from his bad guys. In one instance, the good army kills the messenger of the evil king before a battle without provocation! Good guys don’t kill messengers. In Tolkien's work the even Mouth of Sauron was not harmed (Peter Jackson's interpretation notwithstanding), despite taking advantage of his hosts' hospitality to mock them and destroy their hopes.

Of all the modern children's writers Philip Pullman is by far the worst, in the first place because he is a very good writer, and in the second place because his message is the most blatantly harmful. Indeed, the reason Dawkins stops just short of outright condemning myth is because, as he says, he loves Philip Pullman's books. And no wonder! At the end of the trilogy, Pullman's characters kill God (in a scene of which Pullman has stated he is quite proud) and establish the "republic of heaven." Pullman's world is described in accomplished and often beautiful prose, but at its heart it is a bleak, weary world, purposeless, meaningless, and dark. The primary motive of the characters is to do what they want without being told otherwise. A fine banner to fight under! But ultimately even that is pointless, as it must end — in Pullman’s world the afterlife is a prison and release brings only a welcome fading into nothingness.

It seems that we are losing not only the normal world to the Enemy, but also the world of the imagination, the heightened world of myth. The follies of modernity have become so widespread that they are taken for granted and applied even to children's literature. We need another C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien to reclaim the world of myth for the truth it is supposed to represent.