Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture) 9781978712188, 9781978712195, 1978712189

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Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination

THEOLOGY, RELIGION, AND POP CULTURE Series Editor: Matthew Brake The Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture series examines the intersection of theology, religion, and popular culture, including, but not limited to television, movies, sequential art, and genre fiction. In a world plagued by rampant polarization of every kind and the decline of religious literacy in the public square, Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture is uniquely poised to educate and entertain a diverse audience utilizing one of the few things society at large still holds in common: love for popular culture. Select titles in the series Fantasy, Theology, and the Imagination, edited by Andrew D. Thrasher and Austin M. Freeman, with Fotini Toso Theology and the DC Universe, edited by Gabriel Mckee and Roshan Abraham Theology and Star Trek, edited by Shaun C. Brown and Amanda MacInnis Hackney Animated Parables: A Pedagogy of Seven Deadly Sins and a Few Virtues, by Terry Lindvall Theology and Batman: Examining the Religious World of the Dark Knight, edited by Matthew Brake and C. K. Robertson Theology and H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Austin M. Freeman Theology and the Star Wars Universe, edited by Benjamin D. Espinoza Theology and the Game of Thrones, edited by Matthew Brake Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination, edited by Brandon R. Grafius and John W. Morehead Theology and the Marvel Universe, edited by Gregory Stevenson

Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination Edited by Andrew D. Thrasher Austin M. Freeman With Fotini Toso

L E X I N G T O N B O O K S / F O RT R E S S A C A D E M I C

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ‌‌ISBN 9781978712188 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978712195 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination Andrew D. Thrasher and Austin M. Freeman‌‌ PART I: INVOCATIONS Chapter 2: The Old Magic Nicholas Adams‌‌





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PART II: CLASSICAL CHRISTIAN FANTASY: RENEWING CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION Chapter 3: Sins of the Imagination Austin M. Freeman‌‌





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Chapter 4: C. S. Lewis, Apologetics, and the Imagination: Breaking the Spell of Secularism Alison Milbank‌‌

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Chapter 5: Between Tolkien and the Philosophers‌‌: Greek and Scholastic Theories of Phantasia Giovanni Carmine Costabile‌‌

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PART III: POST-CHRISTIAN FANTASY: OPENING THE DOOR BEYOND Chapter 6: Why Theology Should Always Be Fantasy: Imagination, Fantasy, and Science-Fictional Messianism in the Writings of Rabbi Shagar Levi Morrow‌‌

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Contents

Chapter 7: Theology in Shadow: A Reflection on Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea 101 Oliver D. Crisp‌‌ Chapter 8: Cosmology as Agnostic Self-Actualization in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld U-Wen Low‌‌

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Chapter 9: Fantastic Inter-Religious Resourcement in Robert Jordan and David Eddings Andrew D. Thrasher‌‌

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Chapter 10: The Hero as God: An Exploration of Mormon Soteriology in the Fantasy Novels of Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson Josh Herring‌‌ PART IV: FANTASY AT PLAY: THEOLOGIZING WITH FANTASTIC GAMES

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Chapter 11: Imaginative Hermeneutical Theology: Paul Ricoeur and Dungeons & Dragons Scott Donahue-Martens‌‌

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Chapter 12: Magic: The Gathering and Meaning: The Theological Outlook of the World’s Most Complex Game Jacob Torbeck‌‌

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Index

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About the Editors and Contributors‌‌‌‌

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Chapter 1

Introduction Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination Andrew D. Thrasher and Austin M. Freeman‌‌

Theology is the study of Reality. Particularly, it concerns itself with that Reality which both transcends and underlies the reality that we experience with our senses. Fantasy, on the other hand, and in the literary sense with which we deal here, is a form of make-believe. These seem mutually opposed to one another. Is it not an insult to religion to associate it with fantasy? Is it not also the case that fantasy requires the willing suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge puts it? How can such a practice therefore mediate Reality? How can a denial of our truth-evaluating faculty engender a relation to Truth itself? Imagination is the common term that mediates fantasy and theology. By imagination we mean a faculty of the mind that constructs images which are not immediately present to the senses. Fantasy is, quite obviously, a production of the imagination. But theology and religion, and indeed all concepts, are also manifested to the intellect and the will through the imagination. C. S. Lewis famously stated that the fantasy of George MacDonald “baptized” his imagination, preparing the way for Christianity.1 What might this mean? The baptism of the imagination does not mean conversion. But it is a step towards that possible end. Nor is it limited to one particular religion. To baptize the imagination means to stretch what we can imagine as possible, opening us up to the claims of faith in new ways. The baptism of the imagination opens us to the possibility of rethinking our reality, of existing otherwise. It weaves new plausibility structures. And yet it is also something contextually shaped by our pre-existing structures, our social imaginaries. These imaginaries also shape what is possible to believe; they illustrate a path through the imagination to alternate worlds that can in turn transform our own. There is a path to Fairyland from the fields we know, and the dust of Fairyland remains 1

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upon us when we return to the mundane world. Fantasy can thus serve to critique or highlight known facts and values. It does not float freely above the world, but instead provides the avenue by which one world may be transformed into the other. CHRISTIAN THEORIES OF MYTHOPOETICS What does it mean to create worlds? How do make-believe worlds implicitly articulate what we believe, or help us imagine a world that is still enchanted? Here lies the central intersection between fantasy and the theological imagination: fantasy functions as a tool to shape the conditions for belief. While the imagination in general is just that—image-making—the fantastic imagination shapes our own world insofar as its images reflect, invert, and reinvent the primary world. The fantastic illuminates the real in its deliberate departures from it. And so, at the intersection of fantasy and theology, the central issue is the way in which fantasy’s representations of religion reveals the essence and accidents of this idea. What elements can be changed while the substance of religion endures? Mark J. P. Wolf argues that there is a development in theological reflection on the construction of fantasy worlds, or what we might call mythopoetics, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, through George MacDonald, and finding fullest expression in J. R. R. Tolkien. To begin, Coleridge draws a distinction between the primary and secondary imagination. He defines the primary imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”2 There is no clear consensus on what exactly this might mean, but on Wolf’s reading, at least, “the primary imagination is what allows us to coordinate and interpret our sensory data, turning them into perceptions with which we make sense of the world around us.”3 The secondary imagination, echoing the primary, is more synthetic and reflective. It “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate, or . . . to idealize and unify.”4 Wolf argues that George MacDonald takes Coleridge’s distinction further. For MacDonald, as for Coleridge, the fairy tale is an echo of God’s own creative activity, and our existence in the image of God includes an imagination modeled after God’s own. In MacDonald’s work, the boundaries between primary and secondary imagination “will often act as constraints on further invention, suggesting or even requiring other laws or limitations that will define a world further as the author figures out all the consequences of the laws as they are put into effect.”5 J. R. R. Tolkien picks up these ideas, refining and combining their remarks about imagination in general and applying them to imaginary

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worlds in particular.6 Tolkien in fact reduces the faculty of imagination—of image-making—collapsing the distinction that Coleridge makes between imagination and fancy. What Coleridge calls imagination Tolkien instead reframes as “Art,” or more commonly, “sub-creation.” Here, fantasy is not the suspension of disbelief with which Coleridge characterizes poetic faith, but something more profound and metaphysical. We are makers, made in the image of the Maker. In creating a fantasy world with the inner consistency of reality, “the storymaker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”7 More than this, Tolkien is distinctly Catholic, and Tolkien’s sub-creations depict fantastic spins on creation that embody the Catholic emphasis on the development of moral virtues.8 His articulation of “eucatastrophe,” or the happy turn after seemingly assured defeat, is a hallmark of his version of fairy tale and fantasy. Eucatastrophe embodies the Christian hope for redemption, and fantastic instantiations of such eucatastrophe can provide existential insight into the deeper truth behind the world we see. Fantasy helps us to escape from our straitened and stale view of the world, recover a clear view of the way reality ought to be, and console ourselves with the promise that this state of affairs will be restored, that all will be well. In reflecting on this, Wolf argues that “a ‘subcreator’ is a specific kind of author, one who deliberately builds an imaginary world, and does so for reasons beyond that of merely providing a backdrop for a story.”9 A Secondary world is situated in a place outside the Primary world and is an all encompassed/encompassing experience of characters within the constitutive elements of that world.10 This Secondary world has clear borders separating it from the Primary world. And yet, just as the structures and frames of the Primary world are reflected within the Secondary world, the religious beliefs and ideas within the Secondary world may enchant our imagination and have the potential to shape how we understand and conceive of the Primary world. In this connection between Primary and Secondary worlds there is an interplay between the actual and the possible. The actual world becomes the centerpoint through which other possible worlds are accessed.11 BEYOND CHRISTIAN MYTHOPOETICS Without a doubt the mythopoetic contributions of J. R. R. Tolkien and his predecessors cannot be overlooked. But the theories of Coleridge, MacDonald, and Tolkien are distinctly Christian. And as we will see throughout this volume, that is not the only way of “doing” fantasy. This is a crucial point in our

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current cultural moment, in the aftermath of modern disenchantment from religion. To some, the supernatural is deemed primitive and superstitious, an obsolete relic within the realms of scientific rationalism. Others forge their own beliefs from the fragments of postmodern pluralistic possibilities, to varying degrees of genuineness, skeptical of any absolute claims. If one compares the multifarious fantasies written across the last two hundred years, one can therefore find a plethora of fantastic instantiations of religious belief. The task of this volume is to discuss the confluences between fantasy, theology, and the imagination, drawing out how authors created a fantastic reality that reflects these very beliefs, both implicit and explicit. Consider the messianic pluralisms of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time, or the latent Mormonism of Orson Scott Card or Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. Throughout this volume we will also see that the post-Christian turn in fantasy also includes an implicit Zoroastrian theology in the fantasy of David and Leigh Eddings, Taoism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, Jewish postmodernism in Rabbi Shagar, and agnosticism and atheism in Terry Pratchett. Implicit authorial beliefs, in all of their variety, are also on display in a study of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. What we find throughout is, most notably, a post-Christian account of mythopoetics that includes a diversity of subaltern traditions within Christianity and a variety of non-Christian religious traditions as well as popular discourses and religious sensibilities at the end of the twentieth century. That is, fantasy’s post-Christian turn expands past Tolkien in ways that reflect the proliferation of new directions in the current Western religious imaginary. This is roughly the trajectory in which we have taken the current collection of essays. MAPPING THE VOLUME A book on fantasy and theology cannot escape the heritage of the Inklings. They are foundational in setting the format of modern fantasy literature in general, but even more so in the religious reenchantment such fantasy can so clearly imagine. This volume displays an indebtedness most notably to the literary criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien, and to a lesser extent C. S. Lewis. Yet while the Inklings cannot be ignored, there is already an abundance of material on their work and we felt no need to add to the pile. We have restricted ourselves to one essay on each author. That said, and precisely because Tolkien and Lewis overshadow fantasy, we thought to open the discourse to theological reflections on other lesser-known fantastic literature, drawing on interdisciplinary and inter-religious methodologies. While the theological imagination obviously transcends

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the literature examined here, the fantastic imagination does as well. There has been an explosion in all forms of fantasy since the late twentieth century, and we could not hope to cover all of even the traditional written examples. But in the age of omnipresent technology, we see that fantastic video games, films, television shows, and even virtual reality experiences are triggering a metamorphosis in the concept of fantasy itself. We can now, in some sense, do more than make-believe. Fantasy can become participatory and active, including bodies as well as minds.12 Furthermore, proposals on the theology of Dungeons & Dragons were so many as to constitute their own volume.13 While there is more to say and examine, we believe that this collection can chart a pathway of theological and religious engagement with the fantastic imagination beyond the Inklings to include analyses of both the post-Christian turn in fantasy and the adaptation of fantasy to play and leisure, or to community rather than private consumption. Throughout the essays below, one will find a variety of approaches to classical Christian and post-Christian fantasy, alongside the religious and theological dimensions of the fantastic imagination found within table-top games. Structurally this volume is organized first with what we have called an “invocation,” a short meditation by Nicholas Adams on the pre-religious sense of the transcendent incipient within many sorts of fantasy, of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans lurking behind organized displays of religion. This subsequently develops in three stages–classical Christian fantasy, post-Christian fantasy, and fantasy at play–wherein each part begins with a more methodological essay before examining particular fantasy authors and works. This book therefore follows a rough chronology of the way fantasy has developed from Romanticism through the early twenty-first century. If the chapters by Austin M. Freeman, Alison Milbank, and Giovanni Carmine Costabile focus on the intersections of Christian fantasy with dogmatic theology, modernity, and Western philosophy, then the chapters by Levi Morrow, Oliver Crisp, U-Wen Low, Andrew D. Thrasher, and Josh Herring chart the turn to post-Christian and postmodern fantasy, which both question modernity and religion while also opening fantasy to the religious other. If modern fantasy is marked by Christian interpretations and ressourcements, then the postmodern turns in the latter half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century mark the challenges to Christian fantasy that open it to other religious perspectives that have been overshadowed by the Christian giants of the genre. *** This volume starts with Nicholas Adams’s invocation of the “old magic” to set the mood, as it were. Adams notes the deeply embedded sensibilities of

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the religious imagination and fascination with power of the magical and mysterious (something we have lost in modernity)—and reflects on the cultural, anthropological, and literary dimensions of fantasy through the eyes of a philosophical theologian. Beginning the section on classical Christian fantasy, Austin M. Freeman takes a dogmatic methodological stance, questioning from the Christian theological tradition what might make a particular work of fantasy good or sinful. Freeman’s chapter offers a Christian framework for approaching fantasy, demarcating when the imagination serves to glorify or subvert God’s good creation. Following Freeman, Alison Milbank offers a reading of C. S. Lewis as an “imaginative apologist” who not only predicted the modern turn to subjectivism, but offers a set of tools—the combination of imagination and reason—to challenge the disenchanting effects of modern secularism. Milbank opens us to the thought-provoking material of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age—something that will be picked up again in later chapters by Thrasher and Herring. To round out the section on classical Christian fantasy, Giovanni Carmine Costabile challenges the notion that Tolkien was not interested in philosophy by arguing how Tolkien’s interpretation of fantasy is indebted to Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas’s ideas of “phantasm.”  In the next section on post-Christian fantasy, we see the turn to subaltern Christian traditions, as well as non-Christian traditions and discourses, reflecting the pluralism of religious sensibilities in our current culture. Levi Morrow opens with a Jewish postmodern study of Rabbi Shagar’s fantastic theological imagination. Morrow argues that for Shagar, fantasy paradoxically helps modern Jewish communities to understand their own heritage and identity. Following Morrow, Oliver Crisp gives an interdisciplinary analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin’s world of Earthsea, offering our first look at postChristian fantasy. Crisp’s chapter illustrates how Le Guin’s work is a cultural stepping stone from classical Christian fantasy to post-Christian fantasy precisely in the way her ideas reflect an Eastern sensibility creatively merged with Western ideas. These two essays reveal that even post-Christian or nonChristian fantasies can be significantly consonant with the Christian imagination exemplified in part one. Next, U-Wen Low opens us to a new way of doing fantasy through a literary analysis of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Low draws out psychological and cosmological elements of Pratchett’s world, asserting that it is best characterized as agnostic rather than atheist. Low begins to reveal that in much post-Christian fantasy, the focus is not on religions per se, but rather on the indifference to religion so common in the last several decades.

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Andrew D. Thrasher writes from another angle, one in which the fantasy of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time and David and Leigh Eddings’s The Belgariad and Mallorean are examples of how new fantasies utilize inter-religious elements that combine Christian, Asian, and Zoroastrian religious themes to examine theology, messianism, and evil in their fantastic subcreations. The next essay by Josh Herring, a critical and descriptive analysis of the latent Mormon theology in the writings of Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson, focuses on a Mormon theological anthropology present throughout their fantasy. Heroes become gods and gods are humanized. Herring brings us an analysis of fantasy written from a distinctly Mormon perspective. The final two chapters open us to the idea of fantasy at play and the modern transformation in the idea of fantasy and its boundaries. Scott Donahue-Martens and Jacob Torbeck make their cases for theological, religious, and narrative readings of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. Donahue-Martens offers a critical-correlational and Ricoeurian account of theological narration in Dungeons & Dragons, also reflecting on the role of community in constructing identity. Jacob Torbeck offers an analysis of the religious and historical sources— and fantastic spins—that influence the popular fantasy card game, Magic: The Gathering. Here Torbeck asks how Magic: The Gathering challenges colonialism and depicts the reality that, for many, religion is a force of evil rather than goodness. Nevertheless, as Torbeck points out, even in the cynicism about religion in Magic, some purer forms of faith exist. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors would like to thank one another and all of our contributors, peer reviewers, and publishers for aiding us in our endeavor. A thanks also goes to our series editor, Matthew William Brake, and to our editors at Rowman & Littlefield, for supporting this project from its inception. We acknowledge Christopher Lohman and the rights to the cover art of “The Golden Tree” by Edwin Austin Abbey via the Creative Commons License (CC BY SA) of Sheryl Lanzel, 2014. Alas, we have each lost those dear to us throughout the writing of this project. Therefore, this book is dedicated to the memory of those we have lost.

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NOTES 1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 181. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917), 159. 3. Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 21–22. 4. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 159–60. 5. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 23. 6. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 23. 7. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy Stories, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 52. 8. Ralph Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003). 9. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 23–24. 10. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 25. 11. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 17. 12. C.f. Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012) for the history of such a phenomenon. 13. We would encourage the reader to look to the forthcoming volume edited by Scott Donahue-Martens and Brandon Simonson, Theology, Religion, and Dungeons & Dragons (forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917. Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955. Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford University Press, 2012. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien on Fairy Stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Wolf, Mark J.P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Wood, Ralph. The Gospel According to Tolkien. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

PART I

Invocations

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Chapter 2

The Old Magic Nicholas Adams‌‌

Stories which explore evil often deal in magic. This is obviously the point in explicitly magical tales like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) and A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), both of which have at their center a boy who goes to a school for wizards to learn magic. But magic also plays a subordinate role in fantasy tales which have at their heart ordinary folk with no special abilities, like Lord of the Rings (1954) or Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), in which hobbits and children are plunged into a world of powers which they do not understand and, for the most part, do not wield. The drama in the explicitly magical tales often unfolds in the dissonance between skill and reserve. There is a tension between increasing proficiency, which is necessary if magic is to be available as a power, and increasing discipline, which is essential if magic is not to unleash chaos. It is a familiar dissonance between freedom and order. This dissonance is often resolved in figures who embody deep wisdom: they possess extraordinary magical powers but rarely use them—often to the immense frustration of their students and companions, to whom such figures appear merely stubborn or pointlessly reluctant. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ogion’s sign is the Closed Mouth. He speaks little, rarely uses magic, and walks much. Ogion, one of the profoundest characterizations of a ‘reluctant’ wizard in children’s literature, serves a crucial role in the narrative late on in the story: it is his patience and attention to detail that permits him to discern that the exhausted bird before him is his former pupil, transformed but too spent to return to his human form. The polarity of freedom and order is dramatized in perhaps its purest form in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which a great master’s power is borrowed, imitated, parodied by one who is incompetent both in magic and in self-discipline, with disastrous consequences. 11

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The drama in the fantasy tales (which include magic) often unfolds in a different dissonance: between habit and control, between small everyday gestures whose outcomes are not calculated and large courses of action which reflect a determinate plan. Here the drama is often not between freedom and order, but between two rival visions of order: one on a small-scale, habitual, woven into the fabric of ordinary life; the other large-scale, planned, ambitious. Luck plays a role in both—in the unpredictable effects of habits, and in the ruining of the best laid plans. Magic here operates at different scales— from casual illusion to tearing the fabric of reality. But beyond wizards’ wands or staffs and the spells written in books lies something ancient, buried, and half-forgotten. The magic which casts illusions or produces action at a distance is visible, accessible, available. But there is before it, and perhaps making it possible, something unnameable, obscure, ungraspable. The old magic appears in texts in a language no longer spoken, in forgotten names, in what has lain hidden for countless generations. The old magic shows up in fragments, in runes and riddles, and is often unleashed into the world through conjuration. The unfortunate one who discovers the old magic speaks words they do not understand, makes gestures whose meaning is unanticipatable, and releases forces they can neither comprehend nor control. For those who understand the old magic are long dead, or are fading “into the West” as Tolkien has it in his description of the Elves’ departure. The catastrophe can be confronted, redirected, and mitigated. But it cannot be reversed, undone, and denied. The damage is done. The costs are great. No one remains the same. The dissonances between freedom and order, between habit and control— these produce the melodies, the harmonies, the counterpoint. But the difference between the old magic and mere spells is of a different kind. It is more like harmonic rhythm, a pace of alteration, of something fundamental but largely unnoticed and rarely named. Harmonic rhythm is not like a melody that one can hum, or harmonies that one can arrange, or counterpoint that one can construct. It is the rate of change. The old magic is not just a lost collection of available spells. It is not one more volume in a series, on a shelf obscured by others, although it may be remembered in such a volume. It inhabits a different kind of time, not measured on a human scale, with its own uncanny periodicity. It is like a sound that was perhaps always there, heard only at the moment of its change. And then it is often decisive—events are already underway. From the point of view of familiar certainties, the old magic appears neither good nor evil, neither light nor dark, neither benevolent nor malign. It is beyond distinction, resistant to language, almost indifferent. It resembles language itself. This is language understood not as a store of mere words with defined meanings but the unavailable power that produces

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them. Some theories of language grasp one aspect of this relation in their core distinctions, such as that in German philosophy between grammatical system and individual expression or that in French philosophy between langue and parole. These are recognizable variants of the relation of order and freedom and the satisfying discovery that despite being distinct they belong together. But such theories do not illuminate the old magic for the same reason that they are more persuasive accounts of prose than of poetry: it is hard to see how they account for both restraint and failure. It is well recognized in the long Christian tradition that to use language of God to speak of God requires such restraint and confronts such failure. It is not wrong to describe God’s radiance, glory, and majesty in simpler forms. Those who drafted what became the Nicene Creed had good reason to make such description central for Jesus Christ, the Son: light of light. It is proper to speak in such terms. But also improper. God is beyond the distinctions of creaturely language, beyond light and dark. To carry on with the work of description, conscious of this transcendence, is to experiment with paradox, contradiction, negation. God is beyond the distinction of light and dark, finite and infinite, even beyond the distinction of creator and creature. God’s revelation is also concealment; what is known—and known truly—is God’s mystery: a deep but dazzling darkness. This is not primarily a recognition of the distinction between order and freedom, but of that other distinction: between habit and control, between power and restraint. Language becomes ruined as it approaches God, just as humanity becomes unrecognizable in its apotheosis, like Jesus in the garden, or on the road to Emmaus. To use such ruined language, as we must, is to have extraordinary powers, but not to be able to use them casually. To those who have yet to make this discovery our restraint, vagueness, our silence may look merely reluctant, pointlessly stubborn. Perhaps even broken or insane. The old magic is the deepest vein of theology in fantasy literature. These are stories in which recent phenomena like Christianity or Judaism play no part. In these stories there is unlikely to be prayer, or worship, or hymns— except as parodies, distortions, idolatries. But the old magic, a memory in these stories, is a vessel for the deepest wisdom of these “new” traditions—of what cannot be fully or clearly spoken, whose incarnation is also ascended, whose truest laws remain unwritten, yet in which all life is implicated, bound, and held. The old magic is always eroding, passing, fading. The memory of the old magic is never quite forgotten, but neither can it be made readily available. The wise tell stories of it, and discipline even their uses of the available spells, which are not the old magic, but bear some relation to it. The foolish conjure with it, and in doing so conjure horrors.

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Such literature has furnished a language to understand many manifestations of Christianity in the modern world. Ours is a tradition whose members often believe themselves entitled to magic. They play with divination. “Lord, I sense that someone here has had an argument with their teen child.” They claim healing beyond the “mere herbalism” of the medical profession: “Lord, heal this child’s autism.” But worst of all they conjure with visibility, accessibility, availability: “Lord, to see you, to know you, is to see God, to know God.” This is no dazzling darkness but a false dawn. Deliverance ministries are sometimes assembled from scattered local prejudices against girls’ agency and imbued with ancient power: “Lord, cast out our daughter’s rebellious spirit! Demon come out!” Or they discover Latin and believe, wide-eyed, that they have stumbled upon the old magic. And so, horrors are unleashed. Prayers morph into magical incantations whose inevitable failures crush the spirits of those whose faith was already stressed by suffering. They turn away from a house of lies tragically believing that they are turning away from church. Worship morphs into an ecstasy of powers that humans can never possess or direct, let alone master. And there is no sorcerer to stride into the room and, with imperious gesture, bid the chaos cease. Latin phrases, once workmanlike answers to technical questions, morph into unanswerable timeless truths, plowshares beaten into swords that cannot rust. God, once simple, impassable, unfathomable love becomes something fully present, fully available, fully visible, extracting a terrible price on the vulnerable, the marginal, the dissenting, the queer. Women, ethnic minorities, the disabled: their suffering is fed into the dark’s maw while the music swells. In Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone the agents of the Dark are led by Mr. Hastings. He appears, shockingly for a children’s book published in 1965, as the vicar of Trewissick. I will not say more, so as not to spoil it for those who have yet to read this wonderful book, other than to note that today it is perhaps less shocking. That is a profound but necessary disappointment. In Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, it is herbalism that saves Ged, the greatest of wizards. It is not to be underestimated. The Elves are endlessly passing into the West. The standing stones are ceaselessly eroded by sun, wind, and water—yet remain. The runes in the Lore-Book lie uneasy and always at the edge of memory. Rarely is the writing on the wall. There is a good deal to be learned from Lord of the Rings, from The Dark is Rising, from A Wizard of Earthsea. They have taught me dimly to see things in Harry Potter that its author perhaps also dimly sees and tries dimly to remember. I learned much of it as a child, when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien, Susan Cooper, and Ursula Le Guin between the ages of 11 and 13. They richly repay reading as an adult. As a child I understood, dimly, that the old

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magic is out of reach. As a Christian adult I have come hesitantly to understand not only its analogy with language, especially in traditions of negative theology, but also understand the old magic as love—no less resistant to knowledge, but less a threat and more a promise, although not to be fully redeemed in my lifetime, or anyone’s. I fear those who clutch it triumphantly, smile confidently, and open their mouths. Theology is in some ways a memory of the old magic. It is ours and not ours, a possession that is no possession. Its wisdom is study and restraint, language and silence, of all things visible and invisible. The old magic is still somehow out of reach. And yet . . . also somehow reachable—strangely and incompletely, new poetry, new music, the edge of the wind.

PART II

Classical Christian Fantasy: Renewing Christian Imagination

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Chapter 3

Sins of the Imagination Austin M. Freeman‌‌

Can fantasy be sinful? At first sight, the answer seems rather obvious. Are we not constantly inundated with invitations to “sinful fantasies,” whether pornographic, gastronomical, or otherwise? The terminologies of both sin and fantasy have been lazily interwoven with ideas of decadence, indulgence, and desire. As early as Plato, practically-minded people have cautioned against using fantasy, or any construct of the imagination, as an avenue of escape from the world. To find our delight in fiction is, for the Socrates of Plato’s Republic, to lead ourselves away from the ultimate truth. We ought to be looking intently at this world, seeking to penetrate the truths of the Forms lying veiled here. Fiction, a copy of a copy, can render no aid. From another angle, a Christian might ponder whether the creation of fantastic worlds does not, explicitly or implicitly, act as an expression of dissatisfaction with the world God has created and the ebullient beauties with which we have already been gifted. Fantasy, then, is an act of discontent, of divine disloyalty. In a sense, both Plato and our hypothetical Christian critic have valid points. Fantasy literature is directly bound to the doctrines of creation and obedience to God. Fantasy can be escapist, discontented, and deceptive. It can also be a means of glorifying the Creator. Plato is, of course, himself a myth-maker, and whether through Atlantis, the Ring of Gyges, the allegory of the Cave, the myth of Er, or the Chariot of the Phaedrus, Plato provides us with deeply impactful mythopoeic pointers toward Truth. The Bible, too, includes many texts we might consider fantastic: Revelation comes to mind. As with most things, abuse does not negate proper use; and as with most things, determining the line between proper and improper use can be difficult. An example may help illustrate such difficulty. In 1954, J. R. R. Tolkien drafted a letter to a man who questioned whether he had not overstepped his bounds as a writer and engaged in theological errors, such as endorsing 19

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reincarnation among the Elves. Tolkien departed from the channels used in the known creation. Is this not a dissatisfied disloyalty? Tolkien denies that merely imagining different modes of life than that which we observe in the primary world is a rejection of God. It is instead a celebration of the possibilities inherent in the creative process. But he also recognizes that fantasy can be sinful (or at least theologically dangerous). Are there any “bounds to a writer’s job” except those imposed by his own finiteness? No bounds, but the laws of contradiction, I should think. But, of course, humility and an awareness of peril is required. A writer may be basically “benevolent” [to his audience] according to his lights (as I hope I am) and yet not be “beneficent” owing to error and stupidity. I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments, that may tend to “bring them home.” But, of course, I may be in error (at some or all points): my truth may not be true, or they may be distorted: and the mirror I have made may be dim and cracked. But I should need to be fully convinced that anything I have “feigned” is actually harmful, per se and not merely because misunderstood, before I should recant or rewrite anything. Great harm can be done, of course, by this potent mode of “myth”—especially willfully. The right to “freedom” of the sub-creator is no guarantee among fallen men that it will not be used as wickedly as is Free Will.1

Tolkien observes that the writer is free (has no bounds) in creating a fantasy world but can use this freedom sinfully. It is the goal of this essay to explore the line between this creative freedom to think otherwise than creation and the treasonous denial of creation and, by extent, the Creator. In short, fantasy becomes sinful when it abandons its proper order and attempts to set up a self-directed form of order, autonomous from creation. As such, we would do well to follow our own proper order in things theological, and begin with Scripture. The first element of this paper will therefore seek a brief biblical orientation to righteous or sinful speech and the role of the imagination. Then, I will offer my own three evaluative points for the theological judgment of fantasy texts, appealing to three interlaced forms of order: the moral, the social, and the creational. I will analyze two divergent theories of fantasy—one properly ordered and one fundamentally disordered—which exemplify the framework I articulate here. Colin Manlove sees the impulse of fantasy as arising from a “delight in being.”2 For such authors as Tolkien, MacDonald, Kingsley, Lewis, Williams, and others, fantasy is a means of praise, of glorifying God for the richness of His creation. By contrast, Rosemary Jackson sees fantasy as a “literature of subversion” that aims to expose the nothingness at the heart of existence.3 It is destructive

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by nature. I argue that Jackson’s theory of fantasy is indeed sinful, and is a form of idolatry. It expresses a rejection and a critique of creation and seeks to set up a new form of creation in its own image. However, it is not the goal of this essay to establish the validity of orthodox Christian theology over and against other competing forms. I here take the truth of Christianity as axiomatic. This is an exercise in dogmatic theology, not polemics. Many will no doubt disagree with my entire approach. But I wish here to provide a toolbox for Christian thinking about fantasy, and about how to make judgments on it. A BIBLICAL ORIENTATION Christian theology has a taxis that begins with the revealed Word of God and applies those truths to life. This is not done woodenly, but after a period of apprenticeship under the Word, in which the Spirit molds the human agent’s discernment so that she can meet new circumstances with wisdom from above. What sort of theological judgments about fantasy does Scripture prepare us to make? John Webster on Speech and Curiositas John Webster models a theological judgment of fantasy for us. While Webster wrote nothing on the theory of fantasy literature directly, he penned two essays—one on sins of speech and one on the vice of curiosity—which, if read together, gesture suggestively toward a position on fantasy in particular.4 Fantasy, as a species of communicative activity, ought to follow the rules of its genus. There may be particular and unique rules to this language game, but it remains guided and governed by a theological account of speech, in general. In other words, it is at least the case that fantasy can be sinful in the same way that speech in general can be sinful, and it is also the case that fantasy, by means of its differentia, can be sinful in ways that many other forms of speech cannot. Studiousness and its opposing vice, curiositas, both stem from an impulse toward the experience of the new—toward an exploration driven by wonder—and neither can proceed without imagination, which projects the possibilities for such exploration. As such, both are akin to the impulses found in writers and readers of fantasy literature, toward the experience of new worlds and magical inhabitants. Only a slight shift, then, will see us applying the principles of sinful speech and misdirected intellectual exploration to a theory of fantasy literature. Beginning at the beginning, then, Webster reminds us that we humans are creatures, and our speech is creaturely. Any discussion of sins of speech

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must recall that sin can never fully displace God’s created order, and sinful speech can never wholly replace properly ordered speech. Its origin is in God, the archetypal speaker after whom all our speech is patterned (Jas 1:18, Deut 30:14, Rom 10:8, Ps 119:105, Prov 6:23). Our speech can be directed toward two unequal objects, God and our neighbor. As such, human speech is governed by the demands of the First Commandment and by the dictates of justice. It ought to be true (Ex 20:16), trustworthy (Prov 15:2, 7; 37:30–31), moderated, loving towards our neighbor, and to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31, Col 3:17, Isa 65:16, Jer 5:3). The proper mode of speech toward God is praise (Ps 9:1, 89:1, 92:1). Praise is an obligation, not in the sense that God autocratically imposes it upon us, but because it is our natural function as humans to offer due worship in verbal form to our Maker and Redeemer. As such, blasphemy, which is the distortion and negation of this blessed duty, consists not in a godly sorrow or struggle with God, but in the determined insult or scorn of God, which “gives voice to detestation of the ‘religious’ relation of creature to creator.”5 It is a mortal sin, as the creature cuts itself off from the source of its spiritual life. Scripture is clear as to the potential power for evil in our speech (Jas 3:5– 11). Our words are not mere sounds but the carriers of meaning and purpose and the expressions of our internal construals of the world. In biblical language, evil speech arises from an evil heart (Prov 15:2, 26:24–6; Mt 15:18). Speaking (or writing) is also a form of action and has profound effects. It can lead to the loss of social or material goods or to other forms of injustice. It can disrupt the community of discourse and invite hatred of our neighbor (Prov 11:9), provoking others toward evil (Rom 3:13–17). Evil speech also harms the speaker, inculcating unrighteous intentions and vicious habits. All speech ought then to manifest a love of God and neighbor and cannot function as a free-floating structure which suspends the ethical obligations binding upon us in every other part of life. This is the vicious habit we term curiosity (in a technical sense). Far from an anti-intellectual condemnation of imagination or investigation—the everyday sense of the term—Webster distinguishes vicious curiosity from studiousness. “Curiosity is to be defined on the basis of studiousness, of which it is a corruption; this, because vices lack any positive independent reality apart from the virtues to which they are opposed, and separate from the natural powers of which they are a misapplication.”6 Both are movements of the intelligence toward knowledge, but studiousness is well-formed while curiosity is deformed.7 Studiousness is not merely passive wondering but eager and focused pursuit that follows standards of excellence both intellectual and moral, since it must have fitting objects, measures, and ends.8 Studiousness is moved by eros, for it involves “an element of discontent; it does not allow itself to enjoy too soon the satisfaction of the desire to know.”9 But because

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it is inseparable from desire, it also contains an “element of ambivalence” which can lead to sin, since human desire is always fallen and prone toward misdirected love.10 Webster thus distinguishes: “What makes curiosity vicious is not the intellectual activity of coming-to-know but the corrupt desire which commands the activity.”11 He elucidates four ways in which this desire to know can go astray. I rearrange them here slightly. First, our intellect can direct itself toward improper objects of knowledge, “that which lies beyond what is legitimate, and so refusing to consent to the given order, shape and therefore limitation of created intelligence.”12 The secret things belong to the Lord, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children (Deut. 29:29/Rom 11:33). Second, it can be pursued for improper ends, such as domination, deception, and so forth.13 Third, and more significantly, intellectual exploration can be inordinate, indiscriminate, and prideful.14 “Curiosity is indiscriminate intellectual greed, not ordered by right judgements about worthy and unworthy objects of intelligence. What matters to curiosity is the novelty of the object of new knowledge and the excitement accompanying its acquisition, rather than the esteem which the object deserves or the utility of the knowledge of it for pursuit of the human good.”15 Curiosity is “a species of intellectual promiscuity, driven by [this] addiction to novelty and a compulsion to repeat the experience of discovery.”16 Here its connection to the experience of writing and reading fantasy becomes clear. Webster, recall, does not critique imagination and discovery as such—note the wording of addiction and compulsion. We should think here of Acts 17:21, of spending one’s time doing nothing but telling and hearing something new. The mind ought to find a place to rest, rather than constantly flitting from one spectacle to the next. This brings us to Webster’s fourth point. Curiosity, in contrast to virtuous studiousness, proceeds without reference to the creator, without coming to rest in God who is the principle of the world. “Curiosity terminates on surfaces.”17 Curiosity is, by definition, shallow, superficial, and rootless. This account depends entirely on the assumption that there is a proper ordering to human activity, one grounded in an objective metaphysics of the human person and her relationship to God and creation. Only in this way can any notion of fantasy as sinful be coherent. If there is no telos to the human person, then a human activity such as fantasy cannot violate this purpose and therefore cannot be sinful. If there is no proper use of the imagination, there can be no misuse.

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Yetzer, Imagination, and Idolatry Let us turn to examine the imagination more directly. In 1658, the Puritan Anthony Burges published his Treatise of Original Sin, in which he argues that since every aspect of human nature has been distorted by original sin, the faculty of imagination must therefore also be corrupted and in need of redemption by Christ. He bases his interpretation on Genesis 6:5 (“And God saw that every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil, and that continually”). While the imagination is a good and glorious thing, it is now turned toward making idols and vanities rather than the praise and apprehension of the Creator. This fabricative aspect of imagination is important for Burges and comes from the root meaning of the Hebrew word for ‘imagination’ used in Genesis 6:5, yetzer. While a full word study is beyond the scope of this essay, yetzer is literally associated with a potter forming clay with his hands, and metaphorically extends its semantic range to cover craftsmanship, creativity, imagination, and interior impulses. Both here and in Genesis 8:21, we see the source for the Jewish doctrine of the yetzer hara or “evil imagination.”18 M. H. Abrams, Richard Kearney, and Trevor Hart all chart the historical development of the creative imagination or yetzer and note a fundamental shift occurring during the Renaissance.19 Prior to the rise of humanism, the imagination functioned as a mirror, reflecting the world as God has made it. Afterward, the imagination is more akin to a lamp, where the individual artist’s inner light spills out from within and shapes the external world. This change directly correlates with the co-option of the vocabulary of “creation,” previously understood in reference to God alone, by individual artists and authors. This new conception of imagination views the artist as illuminating an idealized nature, but the gap between the artist’s enhancement of nature and the correction of nature is very small, and Hart provides the inevitable conclusion. “The world as it comes to us from God’s hand is in some sense unacceptable or unbearable and must be gainsaid, broken, and ‘unnatured’ (rather than ‘cultivated’) for the sake of its being rendered fit for human habitation.”20 Hart continues, “Increasingly, the idea of the artist ‘making something new’ shifted its connotation from ‘renewal’ by working with the grain of a divinely ordered and oriented cosmos to the effective ‘replacement’ by human innovation and agency of a world marked otherwise by absence, formlessness, and chaos.”21 In the end, the givenness of the world, once seen as a source of wonder and praise, “may manifest itself as a ‘cruel fact’ to be railed against and rejected, the denial of a presumed birthright leading to a resentment toward or even a hatred of the given world . . . and to an artistry

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characterized above all by an exasperated struggle for liberation from limits and constraints of every kind.”22 Kearney likewise contrasts the premodern theocentric paradigm of the artist as a craftsman who models his own activity on the divine archetype with the later anthropocentric theory of the artist as inventor. “The modern aesthetic promotes the idea of the artist as one who not only emulates but actually replaces God. Thus we find that the legendary sinners of traditional morality—Prometheus, Adam, Lucifer—become the heroes of modern culture.”23 As a result, “One is no longer troubled whether their transgressions deny transcendent truth or goodness. What matters is the energy of defiance itself. Suspending the relation to an omnipotent deity which kept man in bondage, [this impulse] allows the transcendental imagination to exult in its own self-referential play.”24 The shift from theocentric to anthropocentric paradigm is now complete and self-consciously cast in a Satanic mold. TWO THEORIES OF FANTASY With this biblical orientation finished, let us examine two diverging theories of the function of fantasy literature, those of Colin Manlove and Rosemary Jackson. It will be clear that Manlove’s account of fantasy is in line with the older, “mirror” model of imagination, and consistent with the biblical picture. Jackson’s, on the other hand, instantiates the newer “lamp” model and produces sinful tendencies. Afterwards, we will bring our biblical touchstone to bear and offer a framework for evaluating what exactly makes Manlove’s theory a righteous form of fantasy and Jackson’s, by contrast, a sinful form. Colin Manlove: Fantasy as “Delight in Being” Manlove seeks to weigh in on the contested question of what exactly fantasy is. Here, though, Manlove focuses not only on generic style, but on the impulse that drives the creation of fantasy literature—and finds a commonality. “Overall, under whatever dispensation, and in whatever direction, the essence of fantasy is delight in the independent life of created things. Fantasy is fundamentally a panegyric genre.”25 For Manlove, fantasy is an activity of praise, focused on creation and devoted to a sense of wonder.26 This is not to say that fantasy is intrinsically naive, or that it denies the existence of evil. Instead, the impulse of fantasy is an Augustinian one, which sees Being itself as a great good, a gift, and thus defines evil as a privatio boni. “If [fantasy] does not always operate on the assumption that this world is a good place . . . it certainly is full of the feeling that creation itself is of value; the great enemy of fantasy is nonentity.”27 This evil privation can take

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many forms, not just in sheer absence but in deformation and corruption. So too with fantasy. Therefore, “The obverse of the praise of the identity of things in fantasy is detestation of whatever restricts or reduces being.”28 As could be expected, this leads Manlove to the observation that fantasy is, in large part, a conservative genre. “Most fantasies seek to conserve those things in which they take delight: indeed, it is one of their weaknesses that they are tempted not to admit loss. Their frequent looking to the past is conservative in itself: and the order to which they look and seek to re-create is usually a medieval and hierarchic one, founded on the continuance of the status quo. Many of them portray the preservation of an existing state of things as their central subject.”29 Thus the central trend in most modern fiction is to “save the world.” This, we may note, is one fundamental contrast to the essentially progressive nature of science fiction. Manlove represents, or at least describes authors who represent, the older “mirror” tradition of literature. Such fantasy begins with a reflection on the world as it stands and finds it good. This fantasy expands and explores what exists. It can offer critiques of human acts, but in the context of a deeper approval of human life within the world. Its critique seeks to restore the world to its rightful peace—and such a concept only makes sense in the context of a telos for human existence in the first place, something that defines authoritatively what that “rightful” peace looks like. But the modern world denies this transcendent aspect to anthropology, situating the standard of Being within changeable human institutions or judgments. Rosemary Jackson: Fantasy as Social Subversion Rosemary Jackson represents a second mode of engagement with fantasy literature. She builds on the work of Tzvetan Todorov’s landmark Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Here, Todorov describes le fantastique as a liminal space in which the values of reality and unreality are suspended and questioned. It sits between the uncanny, in which the apparently strange is resolved as natural, and the marvelous, in which the supernatural is accepted as supernatural. Todorov cites Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw as the best example of such a text. Neither Jackson nor Todorov are considered relevant anymore, but Jackson usefully epitomizes an attitude toward fantasy which is certainly still present.30 Jackson seeks to expand Todorov’s theories to address psychoanalytical and sociohistorical concerns. Throughout the book, however, Jackson incorrectly conflates “the fantastic” with “fantasy” (i.e., the “marvellous,” in Todorov’s terminology). This leads to some hugely disorienting passages in which Jackson propounds a theory of fantasy that definitively condemns such practitioners as Tolkien, Lewis, MacDonald, Kingsley, Le Guin, Carroll,

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Morris, and more for failing to grapple with the essence of fantasy. Needless to say, this is likely a sign that the essence of fantasy has here been improperly located. For Jackson, fantasy is motivated by a desire for the absolute. However, social and cultural orders cut off many realms of experience as dangers to the community or to its ruling forces. As a result, “Fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss.”31 It engages with this desire in two ways: it can either represent it or expel it. Many times, as a sort of pharmakos, it does both. Socially acceptable desires may be represented, while transgressive desires must be expelled. As such, a reading of the fantastic highlights “the basis upon which cultural order rests” by showing up the silenced and suppressed.32 Jackson concedes that fantasy is not necessarily subversive, at least thematically. It is a complex genre, and one whose elements have often been reworked “to serve rather than to subvert the dominant ideology.”33 This is why Jackson chooses not to address the most popular fantasies (Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, etc.)—they do not adequately interrogate our socially constructed notions of the real.34 Instead “they move from it, expelling their desire and frequently displacing it into religious longing and nostalgia. Thus, they defuse potentially disturbing, anti-social drives and retreat from any profound confrontation with existential disease.”35 This form of integration with the existing acceptable forms of sociocultural desire “leave[s] problems of social order untouched.”36 Jackson, therefore, bluntly denies the transcendental function of fantasy as a naive and morally culpable form of escapism. “As an ‘art’ of unreason, and of desire, fantasy has persistently been silenced, or re-written, in transcendental rather than transgressive terms. Its threatened un-doing, or dissolution, of dominant structures, has been re-made, re-covered into moral allegory and magical romance.”37 In contrast to this, Jackson argues, “Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new,’ absolutely ‘other’ and different.”38 The true fantastic “refuses to accept supernatural fictions: it remains non-nostalgic, without illusions of superhuman intervention to effect difference.”39 This sort of “No True Scotsman” fallacy increasingly alienates Jackson from the texts she seeks to evaluate—she artificially restricts the definition of fantasy to only those that fit her ideological mold. Jackson notes that the prominent fantasy theorists speak of fantasy as “‘transcending’ reality, ‘escaping’ the human condition and constructing superior alternate, ‘secondary’ worlds . . . fulfilling a desire for a ‘better,’

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more complete, unified reality.”40 This is rooted in “a nostalgic, humanistic vision” which seeks to recapture “a lost moral and social hierarchy.”41 Those modern authors and theorists who follow in the footsteps of MacDonald, Tolkien, and similar thinkers in locating a theological function in fantasy “have sustained these . . . fantasists’ repressive creations.”42 Such fantasies “reinforce a blind faith in ‘eternal’ moral values, really those of an outworn liberal humanism.”43 They support a timeless, ahistorical form of wish fulfilment, rather than engaging with the material forces (historical, social, economic, political, sexual) which really determine a text and its form.44 Jackson singles out Tolkien for extended critique. Besides his nostalgic longing for a patriarchal but coherent medievalism, she also bemoans Tolkien’s yoking of virtue with beauty—something foundational to Western thought since Plato, but also, we might note, subverted frequently by Tolkien himself.45 More ludicrously, Jackson accuses Tolkien of being “repelled . . . by the physical and material.”46 She rejects the “chauvinistic, totalitarian effects of his vision.”47 Such visions are unacceptable because they provide the illusion that the universe is a stable and inherently good place, thus minimizing the need for social critique or intervention.48 Rather than seek after the “dissolution of repressive structures,” such conservative fantasies and theories of fantasy simply accept the insufficiency of the world and escape into something transcendental. “They avoid the difficulties of confrontation, that tension between the imaginary and the symbolic which is the crucial, problematic area dramatized in more radical fantasies.”49 This is also the flaw in the fairy tale as a genre (which Jackson classifies as distinct from fantasy). Fairy tales demand no participation or transformation from their readers, leaving them entirely passive.50 Here, Jackson targets Manlove directly as well. Manlove has made such escapism the centerpiece of his theory, but his social context belies his theory’s usefulness. He is “situated within an academic tradition of liberal humanist criticism, to which transcendentalism is no stranger, but it leaves [his] ideas cut off from those vital theoretical areas essential to an understanding of the fantastic.”51 No doubt this means the areas she herself adopts: the literature of transgression, historical materialism, and psychoanalysis. WHEN IS FANTASY SINFUL? With this basic conceptual orientation, we may now offer a few ways in which fantasy specifically can be considered sinful. How can we apply theological language to articulate the way in which Manlove’s theory is wholesome and Jackson’s sinful? The Psalmist gives a few characteristics for godly theological speech, and since fantasy is a form of speech-act, we can take this

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advice for our own purposes. He writes, “The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks justice. The law of his God is in his heart; his steps do not slip” (Ps 37:30–31). While this method of sorting is somewhat arbitrary, it can nevertheless help us evaluate a few key ways in which sinful fantasy departs from its proper end. Righteous fantasy “utters wisdom,” that is, it offers a sound perspective on virtue and the moral life, at the personal level. It “speaks justice,” that is, it critiques unrighteous social practices and affirms righteous ones at the communal level. And its cleavage to “the law of God” provides a safe path through the world, here taken as corresponding with God’s created ordering of existence. Let us explore each in turn. Moral Order Righteous fantasy utters wisdom: it sees virtue, depicts evil as evil, and accurately illustrates reward and consequence for sinful behavior. Now, of course, by virtue I mean Christian virtue; Philip Pullman no doubt wishes us to perceive Lord Asriel as virtuous in some Nietzschean, supermannish sense. There may be a mixture of virtue and vice in any particular character—no need for a simplistic white hat versus black hat scenario—but the author and the reader should want the virtue to flourish and triumph, and the vice to be overcome. Nor does this mean that good fantasy must be reduced to a Comics Code version of conflict, eschewing violence or anything that even smacks of questionable content. Fantasy can depict evil, even extensively and perhaps in some circumstances graphically, but not in such a way that it subverts the moral order. This means a clear moral perversion not in the characters or plots, but in the authorial stance and in the text’s perlocutionary effect on the reader. It should not glorify evil actions, nor glamorize evil ways of life. Fantasy should never make evil attractive or desirable. Evil can and ought to be honestly depicted, but not for titillation, and it should reap the proper consequences of its nature. The appeal to sex or to the pornography of violence as a means of reader engagement rather than plot progression should be resisted. Framing fantasy as intrinsically transgressive or subversive in the most literal moral sense therefore violates this order of wisdom. It fails to act as a means by which we can clarify our stance in the world and align our lives with God’s good design. Social Order Righteous fantasy speaks justice: it celebrates shalom in its fully orbed sense, as good harmony and richness of life. Fantasy at its root is based not in a desire for social change or critique but in wonder at creation and a desire for

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its enrichment. Fundamentally, fantasy is an affirmation of an existing order of things as instituted by God. It opposes sinful disorder and affirms godly order at the social level, but only insofar as it weighs its circumstances against this positive state of shalom. It is the doctrine of the Fall, of the affirmation that human desires and actions in themselves begin as always and already off the proper course, which allows any legitimate form of social critique as instituted by fantasy. This is a tricky point. Fantasy can be a form of dissatisfaction, but those who center fantasy’s essence in this realm, the realm of re-making, are incorrect. Fantasy should remake only insofar as its remaking is a restoration or a new mode of celebration of the created order as outlined in Scripture—a sub-creation rather than a substitution. Deciding when such a process is valid or invalid thus relies on the knowledge of an objective order of morality. This is not merely a case of “conservative” versus “progressive.” Doctrine is an anchor, and the boat afloat on the currents of culture will find it sometimes to the left, and sometimes to the right. Tolkien, for instance, was deeply discontented with elements of his society which were at the time quite socially acceptable to the conservative class. He resisted the appeal to capitalist business exploitation or to mindless obedience to authority. He was an opponent of the British Empire. But he also decried the decadent tendencies toward lax morals and rebellion for its own sake. Righteous fantasy also rejects its own commodification. It resists viewing the creation of fantasy as a means to simple profit rather than as a work undertaken with an intent for excellence. Profit can and should be the reward for work well done, but it is unethical to take satisfaction with producing a knowingly shallow fantasy that exists only so that someone can garner cash from the less savvy consumer. Bad or generic fantasy does not have to be sinful, unless done knowingly. I do not here impugn the motives of any particular mass market paperback authors, but question the virtue of a system that views art as yet another consumer product. The vice of curiositas, recall, terminates on surfaces. Such fantasy does not love God or neighbor: it does not love God, because it sees the creation as a means of exploitation rather than praise, and it does not love the neighbor, who is the object of such exploitation and who would otherwise have been encouraged by such praise. Created Order Finally, righteous fantasy keeps the law of God in its heart. It rejoices in God’s design for existence. It submits to the rulership of God over creation, and thus by extension over created sub-creators and their sub-creations. It affirms the entirety of the work of creation as it proceeds from the hand of God and rejects any degradation or destruction of it, especially as it precedes

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an idolatrous re-creation in one’s own image. Because of the Fall, nature and the human mind are red in tooth and claw, always both victim and victimizer. The work of creation, because of us, has been marred. Fantasy should remain loyal to the intended form of the created order, and not to its current defective state. It is thus a glimpse of restoration, of a creation in which the soul once more finds delight; or it is a chance for what Tolkien calls recovery, the renewed appreciation for an existent good by encountering it in an unfamiliar form.52 Sinful fantasy, by contrast, rejects any idea of a proper ordering at all, and (either explicitly or implicitly) replaces the relationship of Creator, creation, and sub-creation with its own standard of judgment, in which (willingly or unwillingly) the artist shoves the Creator out of the way, seeking to erase the canvas and paint something “better.” These qualifiers are important, however. Fantasy does not have to be explicitly Christian or even theistic in order to be good. Some, like Tolkien, would argue that explicitly Christian elements actually reduce the effectiveness of fantasy, since they (a) prevent the reader from experiencing the good in an unfamiliar way and thus regaining a clear view, and (b) highlight the insufficiencies of any particular sub-creation by direct comparison with reality.53 As such, the important element in a theory of fantasy is not its explicit religion but whether its theological presuppositions are consonant with the truth. The Daoist underpinnings of Le Guin’s Earthsea are powerful because Daoist and Christian ethics are largely harmonious.54 That fantasy which goes with the grain of creation, and which follows its trajectories into new areas, taps into the force of reality and harnesses it to give power and depth to its own new world. But it begins with receiving existence as a gift and not a restriction, and by responding to this gift in a delighted impulse toward expansion rather than destruction. CONCLUSION We began this essay with the observation, aided by John Webster, that the Bible shows a particular telos or design for human speech and imagination. And if such a state of affairs exists, then by definition a departure from it is sin. Where no transcendent moral standard for human behavior exists, sin does not exist. We then turned to a history of the development of the faculty of imagination from Jewish philosophy into the present day. Following Abrams’s helpful metaphorical dichotomy, the imagination can either be seen as a mirror or a lamp. The mirror model aligns with the biblical picture, reflecting God’s creation in praise. The lamp model leads to becoming one’s own creator and rejecting the world—to the idolatry of self. We see this borne

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out in the theories of two particular authors, Colin Manlove and Rosemary Jackson. Manlove sees fantasy as a conservative genre, depicting a delight in being as such, in the existence of the other. It is a celebration of things in themselves, and even of other avenues the Creator might have used. For Jackson, however, consciously rejecting a teleological paradigm for humanity, fantasy becomes rejection, subversion, and destruction. Her explicit denial of transcendence means that fantasy is simply the war of one human thought-structure against another. It is this conscious defiance and rejection that characterizes fantasy as sinful. NOTES 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter with assistance from Christopher Tolkien (​​ London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 194. 2. Colin Manlove, The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (London: Macmillan, 1983), ix. 3. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 2009). 4. John Webster, “Curiosity,” in The Domain of the Word (New York: T&T Clark, 2012), 193–202; “Sins of Speech,” in God without Measure, vol. II (New York: T&T Clark, 2016), 123–140. 5. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 132. 6. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 193. 7. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 194. 8. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 194–195. 9. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 195. 10. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 195. 11. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 195. 12. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 195. 13. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 197. 14. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 196. 15. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 197. 16. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 198. 17. Webster, “Sins of Speech,” 196. 18. Helpfully expounded in the second of N. P. Williams’s 1924 Bampton Lectures on original sin, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927). 19. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and The Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), though Abrams places this development, at least in literary theory, much later than that discussed by Kearney and Hart. See Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (London: Routledge, 2003)

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and Trevor Hart, Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014). 20. Hart, Making Good, 199. 21. Hart, Making Good, 197. 22. Hart, Making Good, 228. 23. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 12. 24. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 188. Kearney here speaks specifically of a form of Romanticism, but it seems clear that many Romantics, such as Coleridge, Ruskin, MacDonald, and others, see things far differently. 25. Manlove, Impulse, xii. 26. Manlove, Impulse, 156. 27. Manlove, Impulse, xii. 28. Manlove, Impulse, 155. 29. Manlove, Impulse, 31. 30. John Clute, S.V. “Jackson, Rosemary,” in Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant (London: Orbit, 1997). Not to say that a subjective judgment of “relevance” ought to determine the value of a work. 31. Jackson, Fantasy, 2. 32. Jackson, Fantasy, 2. 33. Jackson, Fantasy, 102. Emphasis in original. 34. Jackson, Fantasy, 5, 25. 35. Jackson, Fantasy, 5. 36. Jackson, Fantasy, 90. 37. Jackson, Fantasy, 101. 38. Jackson, Fantasy, 4. See also Thrasher, Chapter 10. 39. Jackson, Fantasy, 104. 40. Jackson, Fantasy, 1. 41. Jackson, Fantasy, 1. 42. Jackson, Fantasy, 89. 43. Jackson, Fantasy, 91. 44. Jackson, Fantasy, 2, 31. 45. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy Stories, ed. Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 72–73. Sauron the deceiver frequently appeared as a beautiful being in order to tempt his enemies. Very few of Tolkien’s major heroes in The Lord of the Rings are externally beautiful, save Legolas. Instead we read of Aragorn the rough-bitten Ranger, simple plain Sam, scraggly road-worn Gandalf. 46. Jackson, Fantasy, 91. How can Manlove cite Tolkien as a paradigm for fantasy as a delight in the independent existence of created things and Jackson deplore him as disgusted by them? How could any serious reader of The Lord of the Rings see Tolkien (ardent lover, family man, gardener, smoker, drinker) as anything other than in love with the world? 47. Jackson, Fantasy, 91. Needless to say, anyone accusing Tolkien of endorsing totalitarianism has missed something important. 48. Jackson, Fantasy, 101.

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49. Jackson, Fantasy, 91. 50. Jackson, Fantasy, 90. 51. Jackson, Fantasy, 102. 52. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories, 67. 53. Tolkien, Letters, 144. 54. C.f. the chapters by Crisp and Thrasher in this volume.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and The Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Clute, John and John Grant. Editors. Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit, 1997. Hart, Trevor. Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 2009. Kearney, Richard. The Wake of Imagination. London: Routledge, 2003. Manlove, Colin. The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. London: Macmillan, 1983. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with assistance from Christopher Tolkien. London: ​​ George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. ———. Tolkien on Fairy Stories. Edited by Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger. London: HarperCollins, 2014. Webster, John. “Curiosity.” 193–202 in The Domain of the Word. New York: T&T Clark, 2012. ———. “Sins of Speech.” 123–140 in God without Measure, Vol. II. New York: T&T Clark, 2016. Williams, N. P. The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: A Historical and Critical Study. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927.

Chapter 4

C. S. Lewis, Apologetics, and the Imagination Breaking the Spell of Secularism Alison Milbank‌‌

Charles Taylor has famously described the nature of human identity in the modern world as “buffered.” The human subject is protected like a fairgoer in a dodgem-car from intrusion by supernatural forces: The buffered self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundary of the mind, indeed, negate the very idea of there being a secure boundary . . . This sense of self-possession . . . is all the stronger, if in disenchanting the world, we have also taken the anthropocentric turn and no longer even draw on the power of God . . . This anchoring ensures our invulnerability. But it can also be lived as a limit, even a prison, making us blind or insensitive to whatever lies beyond this ordered human world and its instrumental-rational projects. The sense can easily arise that we are missing something, that we are living behind a screen.1

This essay will argue that the most effective element of C. S. Lewis’s apologetic project is that which seeks to challenge this naturalistic invulnerability. In so doing, Lewis attempts to make readers aware of their “buffered” condition and its limitations. Scenes in Lewis’s fiction dramatize moments of such awakening, which, I shall argue, suggest promising ways forward for a new imaginative apologetics, which offers a more compelling account of reality that speaks to the whole person and the fullness of their experience. It also has implications for the way in which the natural world is treated, as it too is liberated and accorded agency, when the spell of secularism is broken. 35

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Taylor’s carapaced human is in accord with a self-sufficient immanent order, which also shows itself in a renewed positivism, much at play in the biological sciences and evolutionary theory. It is the favoured language of the new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and it has a nineteenth-century confidence about its assertions and a mechanistic understanding of what it is to be human. As nested in wholly secular bureaucratic and state institutions, the buffered self is also very much an individual: self-disciplining and self-enclosed, no longer “porous” to what is now defined as outside influences. But paradoxically, alongside the new positivism there has emerged the perspectival view of truth, in which Enlightenment reason stands accused of masking a will-to-power and of being used in the service of colonial exploitation. Truth, for those in the tradition of Michel Foucault and other poststructuralists, is necessarily relative and depends on one’s point of view. It is always, to quote a title by Alasdair MacIntyre, “Whose Justice” and “Which Rationality” rather than one common idea of Reason. There are only strategies and subversions of this concept in which Foucault privileges the point-of-view of the marginal and the outsider. Already, in The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis had an intimation of a challenge to rationality and to a fit between the mind and the world. He noted a growing subjectivism, reaching down to the level of school textbooks, which questioned the grounds for belief in an objective truth. Appealing, therefore, to a shared understanding of reason in the mode of traditional Christian apologetics is difficult in the face of such an audience as this. While Foucauldians and the New Atheists may seem to represent opposing viewpoints, they are united in viewing morality and aesthetics as subjective, and in their naturalism. They both hold to an immanent frame for experience. Christian apologetics therefore needs to be critical, questioning the master-discourses of its age, showing up the limitations of scientism and out-narrating the secular liberation stories of Foucault. IMAGINATIVE APOLOGETICS AS RESPONSE TO DISENCHANTMENT Christian responses to this disenchanted world have taken two main forms: first, classic apologetics, which might seem appropriate in addressing the New Atheism, but presumes a shared understanding of reason, which can too easily put reason above faith, since belief becomes self-evident and thus rationalist.2 Christians do believe, however, that their creed is not subjective but true and trustworthy. It stands or falls on the actual physical presence of God in human history at a certain place and time. There is a Christian realism, in

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which, to quote Chesterton, “the Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.”3 Christians may not believe in the upper Alpine meadow of neutral rationality of the Enlightenment, because that is to conceive truth beyond God, as it were, but they do believe that God is truth. The narrative of faith is compelling because it accords with all that is real about ourselves, our experience and the world we inhabit. Faith is in continuity with our natural reason seen as a kind of trust in things, rather than as being a matter of irrefutable evidence or logic, as an excessively rationalist mode of apologetics tends to assume. The second response is to seek to overturn the disenchantment of a naturalistic account of reality, as described by Max Weber, by turning to the natural world or to the arts as sources of wonder.4 This approach too has its limitations, because New Atheism has corralled such a project and Dawkins has a book entitled, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998). Here it is scientific discovery that evokes wonder and awe and can bring poetic delight. Again, C. S. Lewis was prescient in defining the Christian apologetic solution quite differently in his celebrated sermon of 1942, “The Weight of Glory”: Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.5

The answer Lewis gives is to recognize the positivism and perspectivalism as themselves forms of magic that hold us back from a fuller conception of what it is to be human. He seeks to awaken us to the fact that the castle of the buffered self is Sleeping Beauty’s palace, where all lie slumbering under a malign spell and which may even be a prison. From this quotation, it seems that “the strongest spells” of imagination are needed to free us. And yet Lewis does not consistently trust imagination and its power. To “weave a spell” might be a metaphor for the process of writing about a fantastic world that convinces and enchants its readers. It speaks in Weberian terms of a time before disenchantment and the denigration of religion as superstition, when, as Charles Taylor puts it, human experience was “porous,” traversed by spiritual forces, and in which the animal and plant creation were seen as signs of the divine power and invention.6 Nothing in the medieval worldview was dead and inert. And yet, while invoking this enchanted cosmic order, as Lewis does so powerfully in The

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Discarded Image and in his lecture, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” he concludes: “it had, of course, one serious drawback. It wasn’t—or a good deal of it wasn’t—true.”7 Having got his reader outside to look up in the sky to imagine a world full of music and angelic intelligences, he seems to undercut his own vision. Yet so full and delightful an account has been given of the medieval singing cosmos that he leaves his reader disappointed and wishing the earlier astronomy were the true reality. He has nudged at the immanent frame of our experience of space and breached its carapace to some degree. Similarly, in the “Weight of Glory” the spell that Lewis has in mind is one of disenchantment. He has, however, like his mentor G. K. Chesterton, whose defence of fairy-tales as logical lies behind this passage, the desire to reverse the usual understanding of disenchantment as a flattening return to a world explicable in purely naturalistic terms.8 Instead, he establishes that it is the Enlightenment which is the “evil enchantment” and that what a religious perspective does is awaken us to the real rather in the manner of the Platonic philosopher in the Republic, liberating the enchained cave-dwellers and leading them out from shadows to the light of the Good, which is the truly real.9 IMAGINATION AND REASON IN TENSION Lewis endured for years a personal agon in which his imagination and reason were at war, prior to his conversion to Christianity. It finds expression in the poem, “Reason,” who is personified as the goddess Athena, “A virgin, arm’d, commercing with celestial light,” while imagination is embodied by Demeter, “dark, imagining, / Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night.”10 The speaker longs to reconcile the two warring ideas within himself. If reason and imagination could be aligned, he could believe in the existence of the divine. As Malcolm Guite points out insightfully in his study of this poem, the paradox of the Blessed Virgin Mary will enable the reconciliation of the “mother and maid,” inaugurating the true myth of the Incarnation, and the concord of earth and heaven.11 And we know from Lewis’s book Miracles that he believed powerfully in the importance and veracity of the Virgin Birth as inaugurating a new creation.12 Peter Schakel, among others, has charted the development of a more positive conception of imagination in Lewis’s later writing as the “organ of meaning.” Yet, as Lewis’s ongoing debate with Owen Barfield indicates, he never quite accepted a wholly Coleridgean understanding of creative imagination, wishing to stress the otherness of “facts.”13 In early life, he had been quite idealist, but, as he suggests in his autobiography, he had been equally concerned

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about a lack of hold on the objective world and a fall into subjectivism, which the darkness of Demeter in the poem seems to represent.14 So Lewis combines a Platonic stress on the transcendence of the Real with an Aristotelian stress on particulars, which might have made him ripe for Thomas Aquinas’s moderate philosophical realism, but oddly did not, at least overtly. Indeed, he is on record as disliking the thought of Aquinas.15 One can observe the combination of these two modes at work in the following extract from an article, “Image and Imagination”: What we do when we imagine is to suppose a reshuffling of universals taken from the actual world. When we imagine Britomart we take our idea of “a girl,” which is part of our general knowledge, and our idea of “medieval knight,” which is another part of our general knowledge, and put them together. To get into imagination itself what we mean by either of the two terms is impossible. They are not imaginations: they are summarised knowledge of the real. Always the real world is the bank on which the poet draws his cheques.16

Lewis’s aim in this essay was to counter Benedetto Croce’s idealist criticism, which tended, for example, to deny the historical reality of Dante’s Beatrice, in favour of a purely mental, imaginative conception. As a Platonic realist Lewis holds to universals, but does not sustain, with the entire PlatonicAristotelian tradition, the way in which we initially experience the universal only through a concrete embodiment of a girl or a knight, or as Dante did, through a specific woman. Much less does he entertain the Thomist view that our human finite thoughts are only completed through a “return to the phantasm,” a kind of concluding image which marks for us the most attainable precision. Although Lewis’s philosophy is somewhat wooden, when he writes imaginatively, whether in a sermon or in his fantastic fiction, he transcends his dichotomous view and stages the breaking of spells with real imaginative power, precisely because he believes in the truth of what he is describing. His combined emphasis on reason and imagination is now a strength. Moreover, as he often confessed, his stories often begin with an intensely realized visual picture, which he finds highly suggestive of something beyond itself. This represents indeed, an example of a concrete expression of the universal and a completed, rounded, instigating and generative thought.17 FANTASY AS LIBERATION As a way of illustrating the suggestive of something beyond itself, Lewis offers imaginative expressions of fantasy through The Silver Chair and Till

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We Have Faces as a way of liberating modernity’s materialism from its disenchanting effects. The Silver Chair One of the most powerful scenes in the Narnia novels stages moments of disenchantment from naturalist unreality in an irreducibly imaginative mode. It enacts a breach of the immanent frame and reveals that we might be prisoners in the manner described by Charles Taylor, “making us blind or insensitive to whatever lies beyond this ordered human world and its instrumental-rational projects.”18 The Silver Chair describes how the wicked Queen of Underland holds Prince Rilian of Narnia a prisoner under a spell, in which her victim embodies what Chesterton describes as the modern condition: We have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.19

Rilian has forgotten he is Prince of Narnia. In the nighttime when the enchantment tends to wane, he remembers but is unable to escape the bands that hold him in the silver chair until the child protagonists and Puddleglum liberate him. The Queen then resorts to music and smells from a green substance to reassert her control; she appeals to the senses and to music as media, in Lewis’s opinion, that cannot of themselves carry any referent and thus any rationality.20 Lewis replays the Myth of the Cave from Plato’s Republic, in which the shadows of objects carried in front of a fire are taken for real things. In Plato, of course, it is the Good, represented by the Sun, which is reality, and to which the enslaved are led out, to see by its light. In The Silver Chair the Queen denies the very existence of the sun and calls for a definition: “Please it your Grace,” said the Prince, very coldly and politely. “You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky.”21

Similarly, Socrates says that “as goodness stands in the intelligible realm to intelligence and the things we know, so in the visible realm the sun stands to sight and the things we see.”22 The light from the sun enables us to see the world, just as Rilian says the light of the lamp illumines the room. But

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where for Plato the fire in the cave is the Sun and the philosopher must leave the cave to see the Good, for Lewis, it is the natural world which has to be fought for and where one finds the real. The divine Aslan is encountered within the world of Narnia, amid its forests and islands. As with Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories,” Lewis wishes to restore real woods, lions, and islands to our apprehension, now drenched in divine radiance. Imagination is here the ability to conceive of something one cannot see physically in the form of a mental image which aids the reason. As with Plato a false fantasy, which hides reason is being exposed and yet exposed only through the power of an imaginative allegory. So, the Queen wishes to destabilize the children’s understanding of diurnal reality as the means of opposing Aslan and Narnia. She wants them to believe that the underworld is all there is: Narnia is an illusion. When Jill manages to articulate the name of Aslan, the Queen employs euhemerist arguments to claim that she has aggrandized a cat into a lion, which is an imaginary creature. In classical euhemerism, a mortal is taken for a god, but here the Queen questions the natural creature’s existence. For Lewis, the reality of the world of the senses is crucial in establishing the existence of the divine. And it is trust in the goodness of ordinary Narnian life that enables Puddleglum to stamp out the fire and assert that he would rather live as if Narnia were real, even if it is a dream, since the Queen’s world is “a pretty poor one.”23 This enables Lewis to ally belief in the divine with belief in the existence of the sun, moon, and stars. His readers, who know such a diurnal reality, are thus brought to God’s side through trust in their senses and ordinary experience. The atheist position is made to seem limiting and counter-intuitive, while the religious/Narnian perspective opens us to a wider and more generous vision, grounded in the evidence of our senses. Of course, such a reading does not preclude the truth that for Lewis the story of the denial of ordinary physical reality is (as again with Plato’s tale) a symbolic allegory of the greater reality of the transcendent realm, which physical reality tends to hide from us, but it does serve to point out that Lewis is, as it were, doubling down on realism, in the phase of a new modern naturalism sceptical even about the appearances of things, in the name of both reductive atomism and sceptically empiricist perspectivalism. Till We Have Faces Lewis replays The Silver Chair scene for adult readers in his late novel, Till We Have Faces. In a retelling of the Psyche myth, the narrator, Orual, encounters Psyche, the sister she thought dead, alive in a beautiful valley, dressed in rags, and claiming to inhabit her lover’s glorious palace. As Orual leaves, she has a sudden revelation of the palace as Psyche described it:

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Solid and motionless, wall within wall, pillar and arch and architrave, acres of it, a labyrinthine beauty. As she had said, it was like no house ever seen in our land or age. Pinnacles and buttresses leaped up—no memories of mine, you would think, could help me to imagine them—unbelievably tall and slender, pointed and prickly as if stone were shooting out into branch and flower.24

What Orual describes is a Gothic architectural fantasy, akin to the vision of the heavenly city granted to the narrator of the medieval poem, Pearl, who is similarly positioned on the other side of a river from his lost beloved, as Orual is originally from Psyche.25 Modern readers know such a Gothic vision is beyond the knowledge or invention of a woman in the ancient world of Asia Minor. They are thus inclined to believe in the reality of what Orual saw, even though Orual herself quickly discounts her vision. Unlike The Silver Chair, in this novel, it is not two interpretations of the natural world that are pitted against each other, but a world of divine beauty and relationality as against one in which the gods act as distant judges and jailors. Orual’s realm of Glome suggests the gloomy Underland of The Silver Chair, but what is at stake here is not the existence of the divine realm so much as its capacity to take up the human into its life: the relation of the soul to God and equally the particular to the universal. There is a rationalist character, the Fox, who forces some metaphorical interpretations of the gods even upon Ungit’s priest, and who gives the euhemerist interpretation of Psyche’s lover as a mere man, possibly a mountain bandit. But the main problem, as has been long attested, is Orual’s attempt to keep Psyche mortal and in her emotional possession: in terms of the categories of The Four Loves, to exercise stifling familial storge rather than self-giving agape.26 There is a passage in Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” which is helpful here. In his discussion of the role of fantasy as a recovery of a clear view, Tolkien stresses how fantasy allows us to refresh our viewpoint on the world, so that “things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness and familiarity, from possessiveness.”27 Not only does this describe Orual’s problem, but the essay becomes even more apposite to Lewis’s novel as Tolkien continues: “Of all those faces those of our familiars are the ones both most difficult to play fantasy’s tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness, that they are faces, and unique faces.”28 Psyche’s face is transformed by her union with the god, but although Orual describes it, she is so distressed at the distance between herself and the joyful and fulfilled Psyche, that she refuses to receive it as “other,” a unique face, and seeks to expunge its joy. She wounds herself to force Psyche into sad agreement to break her vow not to look at the god. Tolkien’s vision of what fantasy can do is predicated on its making as an act of liberation, in imitation of the divine creative act, which freely establishes

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the world in its alterity. Lewis shares this understanding ethically and philosophically, as he seeks to witness to the objectivity of the world beyond the self. Consequently, the two fictional episodes I have discussed stage scenes of confinement and liberation, with an inner “buffered” self-imprisonment operative in both cases: the Prince, self-deluded and in erotic thrall to the Green Lady, and Orual in bondage to her fixation with Psyche and her desire to keep her sister within the confines of the natural. THE ECOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE REAL Lewis also shares Tolkien’s ecological concerns, though in a more muted form. In The Great Divorce, an account of the borderlands of heaven, he presents a world which has agency and even personality, as in the case of a speaking waterfall, which warns the greedy Ikey to put down the heavy golden apple which he seeks to steal away: “stay here and learn to eat such apples. The very leaves and blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you.”29 For Purgatory or heaven’s borders is truly real, and therefore not only do leaves take on a teaching role, but physical objects are heavier: the metaphysical realism (in full keeping with ancient Platonism) grants an enhanced physicality and presence to natural things, freed from subjective appropriation. To this end Lewis also satirizes a liberal bishop: “What does existence mean? You will keep implying some sort of static, ready-made reality which is, so to speak, ‘there,’ and to which our minds have simply to conform.”30 The world of The Great Divorce is far from static but it is, and one can literally stub one’s foot against it. Tolkien wrote of the desire to hold converse with creatures and Narnia famously has talking beasts like the mouse, Reepicheep, and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. The marsh-wiggle, Puddleglum, is traumatized by the thought he might have inadvertently eaten a talking deer in The Silver Chair. Lewis makes such vitalism and panpsychism (so to speak) part of the original creation song of Aslan in The Magician’s Nephew: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”31 And as with Tom Bombadil’s mastery in The Lord of the Rings, which involves each tree or beast belonging to itself, so Aslan goes on to sing, “Creatures, I give you yourselves.”32 He grants them the land of Narnia, the dumb beasts to care for and the gift of himself. Writing close to the time of the publication of The Lord of the Rings, and in constant communication with Tolkien, Lewis is evidently highly influenced by his fellow writer in his view of fantasy as liberation and relation.

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NOVALIS An earlier literary influence on Lewis was the German Romantic writer, Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the name “Novalis” and offered a Platonic realist modification of German Idealism. He too has his contribution to make to the ecological dimension in Lewis’s imaginative writing. Novalis’s philosophical novel, Friedrich Von Ofterdingen, is one of the marvelous texts that gives Lewis wholly new sensations in his essay, “On Science Fiction.”33 His autobiography, Surprised by Joy, describes his younger self as a “votary of the blue flower” and Adam Barkman points out his limited attempt to translate Novalis in his teens.34 The “blue flower” reference by Lewis refers to the most celebrated scene in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The protagonist has a strange dream in which he swims through an enchanted landscape: But what attracted him with great force was a tall, pale blue flower which stood beside the stream and touched him with its broad glistening leaves. Around this flower were countless others of every hue, and the most delicious fragrance filled the air [but] he saw nothing but the blue flower and gazed long upon it with inexpressible tenderness. Finally, when he wanted to approach this flower, it all at once began to move and change; the leaves became more glistening . . . the flower leaned towards him and its petals displayed an expanded blue corolla wherein a delicate face hovered.35

At this point his mother awakens him but ever after, the flower becomes the emblem of his longing: “I feel that it reaches into my soul as into a giant wheel, impelling it onward with a mighty swing.”36 Similarly for Lewis, the idea of longing, for which he later used Schiller’s term, sehnsucht, was a key element in his theology, as well as his mode of writing. In The Pilgrim’s Regress it is prompted by a window giving on to a wood full of primroses. While he strains to grasp the memory it evokes, “there came to him from the wood a sweetness and a pang so piercing that he forgot his father’s house, and his mother, and the fear of the Landlord, and the burden of the rules. All the furniture of his mind was taken away.”37 Like the blue flower, the primroses in the wood lead beyond themselves to open an unending quest, impelling his imagination. For Novalis’s dream opens the familiar world to something strange, in which a flower leans of its own accord, ceasing to be an object in his perceptual control. It then reveals a face, opening the encounter to the relational. The blue flower is an opening to adventure, to desire, to the infinite. This experience has a threefold dimension. First, it discerns beauty beyond the self which calls out the deepest feelings; secondly, the object becomes a

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subject and relational in some way; thirdly, the experience opens up a trajectory calling the self beyond itself into the mystery of existence. Novalis helps us to understand that the evangelistic task is not to “sell” God as an object of credence, so much as to offer a holistic way of regarding our life and beginning to reintegrate our experience. This is where Novalis’s second project becomes important. For Novalis nature is a “magic petrified city,” which lies as if under a spell, and it is the task of the philosopher-poet to bring this frozen entity back to life by means of his imagination. He wrote: The world must be made Romantic. In that way one can find the original meaning again. To make Romantic is nothing but qualitative raising to a higher power . . . By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it Romantic.38

Novalis called this poeticizing of reality “magic idealism,” whereby everything is revealed as a work of art and a symbol: “the transformation of the visible world into the higher truth of the symbolic.”39 This activity is akin to Adam naming the creatures; it is a priestly action whereby the chaos of nature is given meaning and value and becomes a demonstration of divine creativity. In this way, the natural world is no longer dead but revivified and in the same action its relation to its divine origin is re-established. This breaks the spell that renders the world around us petrified, a mute series of objects, and empowers it, raising it to subjectivity and relating it to ourselves. Rather than nature being separate from us and an inert or powerless thing to be manipulated and exploited, it shares with us in its creatureliness. We are all related as God’s making and the realism of the world beyond the self is established. Lewis dramatizes this revivification of the natural world in the liberation of the creatures who have been turned to stone by the White Witch in Chapter 16 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aslan breathes on the statues and they come back to noisy, colourful life. The Cosmic Trilogy The Novalis project undergirds Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, which can be seen as an extended meditation on the raising of nature into relationship, in accordance with magic idealism. The unwilling space-traveller, Ransom, conceives of aliens as just that: “no twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely in an alien world.”40 And yet the aliens he encounters on Malacandra are friendly and delightful, with an unfallen innocence unknown on earth. His first encounter is with what he takes to be

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a pure animal and he is completely at sea when it begins to speak. Viewed in human terms the hrossa is a monster, since it fits no category we can understand, but “starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have—glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth—and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason.”41 To Ransom’s human kidnappers, the inhabitants of Malacandra are just animals to dominate and commodities to be exploited, but they command Ransom’s respect, awe and love. In the Cosmic Trilogy the world has been made Romantic. DEFAMILIARIZING THE FAMILIAR Central to Novalis’s “blue flower” experience is a de-centering of the self, as the boy forgets himself before the joy of the experience and for whom, as for Lewis’s Pilgrim, the furniture of his mind has been taken away. For Ransom this occurs early on in Out of the Silent Planet when he looks through what he takes to be an airship window at the moon, only to realize that it is the earth itself he views and this decentring is all the more shocking when he learns that earth is the odd one out in the solar system: the silent planet, out of harmony with the angelic intelligences that rule the others. Similarly, every time a child enters Narnia, by means of a painting or behind a school gymnasium, Lewis dramatizes this de-familiarising moment. It is one of his strongest apologetic moves, and perhaps the main reason why he eschews the creation of a distinct fantasy world. Even the kingdom of Glome in Till We Have Faces is situated as a barbarous neighbor to ancient Greece, whose literary and philosophical texts adorn its small library. What I have described as “imaginative apologetics” begins by defamiliarizing our conception of the world in Lewis’s manner.42 For those inhabiting the “immanent frame” of a wholly naturalistic account of human experience, it offers a way of questioning those limits, and Lewis does that by dramatizing the moment of crossing into another reality and making it compelling. The fantastic is a necessary mode here precisely because of its articulation of difference as a beautiful, diverse fantastic world, which is intrinsically attractive and for which we can yearn. Naturalism has to be shown up to be a limitation on the human imagination and desire and as a confinement of reality. It should not be difficult to awaken this desire when our contemporary world so over-values procedures and bureaucracy. Today, the professions have lost faith in their own expertise and traditions and are dominated instead by procedures of mammoth complexity, supposedly in the service of “fairness” and equality, but in practice immobilising us by mountains of forms and routines. If you are sick or poor and need to claim benefits, the task before

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you in this administrative wonderland is horrendous in its difficulty and intricacy. And yet no one really questions any of this, lest they be accused of unfairness. We have all become fatalists, wedded to a belief that the world will grow ever more secular and instrumental, and that there is no way out of the way we now conduct ourselves. C. S. Lewis’s words have become ever more prescient: “Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”43 It is as if we were all under some sort of spell, immobilized by some invisible Wizard of Oz, or under the magic of a Narnian White Witch Queen, who decrees that it is always winter but never Christmas. In his 1961 Preface to The Screwtape Letters, Lewis already believed himself to be living in “a managerial age” and announced that his view of Hell was of a bureaucracy.44 Nazi efficiency in the administration of the Final Solution as well as Communist police states played their part, no doubt, in giving rise to this viewpoint, but Lewis implicitly regards them as but an exacerbation of the way in which liberal regimes are also tending through their subservience to technocracy. Lewis also saw clearly the relation between a certain scientific attitude and that of the magician, united by the desire to turn the world into inert “nature” or controllable objects: the inversion of Novalis’s magic idealism.45 So Screwtape himself can sound like a frustrated bureaucrat on occasion, as Lewis turns the dullest of roles fantastic in order to reveal its demonic potential. Lewis’s fantasies are frequently referred to as parables, most precisely by Daniel Warzecha, who applies Ricoeur’s narrative typology to them.46 It is an interesting genre to suggest, since the Greek word means literally to throw something alongside, just as Lewis tends to yoke metaphysical thought and fantasy, or reason and imagination. Christ made his teaching primarily through parable and used images to appeal to the imagination of his hearers. For the poet James McAuley Christ’s parables, and even his acts, are “living poems” which require interpretation, as shaped and active pictures.47 To use stories, art, music and film to make Christianity good to think is an appropriate mode in a time of perspectival truth, when the propositional approach is suspect, but it is so much more. Works of the imagination, just like Jesus’s parables, are proposals of a way of seeing reality. They are performances of an argument, and they can take us behind our immediate experience to see things differently: to make the ordinary world strange. Christians themselves are somewhat under the spell of secularism, especially when they are apologetic about their faith and its realism. They too need to renew their imagination. In the words of Romans 12.2: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” Imaginative apologetics begins when we ourselves stand apart from ourselves and receive our faith freshly, as if for the first time. So

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much of our missiology tells us to give the people the familiar: in style the soft-rock, the dry-ice show, in content the gospel shorn of all its challenge. This, we are told, is acculturation. This essay suggests the opposite: that we should make our faith truly strange first to ourselves, and then to those we hope to attract. If someone lives a buffered existence within the fortress of materialism, we have to help them question those limits to experience and the real, so that we may show them Christ in his true depth and strangeness. Apologetics then is not so much knock-down syllogisms as a critique of the adequacy of naturalistic accounts of human understanding and desire. THE APOLOGETICS OF DESIRE Lewis’s apologetic writing evokes the Patristic and Thomistic natural desire for the supernatural, which he sometimes turns into what John Beversluis terms “the argument from desire.”48 In The Pilgrim’s Regress he argues: If a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come at last to the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given . . . in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience. This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle—the chair in which only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist.49

The appeal to Aristotle in the idea that nature makes nothing in vain means that only God, the infinite source of being, can be adequate to this desire for an “object never fully given.” And while that is true, what Lewis offers us here is a somewhat wooden formulation, which, without meaning to, casts God as an achievable object, as if our desire for God were merely a desire for another finite thing, rather than something mysteriously allied to our rejoicing in the presence of being as such. Apologists can point to a particular desire and suggest that it must be there for a reason, but if one lacks this rejoicing, then there can be no arguing with that person at all. The point of apologetics is, rather, to alert people to this rejoicing as something that no one is really without. At its best, however, Lewis’s writing does just this. It shows this desire in action and is truly evocative, indeed eliciting from the reader his own “longing for he knows not what” which “stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.”50

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This ability to move the reader beyond the limits of her own world has metaphysical realism behind it, so that the desiring imagination becomes a means of enlarging her understanding. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the spell of the White Witch was destroyed and undone by the death of Aslan: a deeper magic that does not dominate but gives itself in love to the world. This deeper magic liberates and Christian apologetics today has need of the union of imagination and reason that Lewis at his best offers us, in order to weave spells that will break the prison-house of the White Witch and bring the enchanted statues to life. NOTES 1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap Press, 2007), 300–302. 2. See John Hughes, “Proofs and Arguments,” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition (London: SCM, 2011), 3–11, 6. 3. G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933), 175. 4. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ann Swidler (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993 [1920]). 5. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’s Most Memorable Addresses (London: HarperCollins, 2013), 25–46, 31. 6. Taylor, A Secular Age, 35–37. 7. C. S. Lewis, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, coll. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 41–63, 62. 8. See G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1957 [1908]), especially 74–6. 9. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 514a–518b. 10. C. S. Lewis, “Reason,” in Poems of C. S. Lewis, Preface by Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins 2017 [1966]), 126. 11. Malcolm Guite, “Telling the Truth Through Imaginative Fiction: C. S. Lewis on the Reconciliation of Athene and Demeter,” in C. S. Lewis in Poets’ Corner, ed. Michael Ward and Peter S. Williams (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2017), 15–24, 18. 12. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (London: HarperCollins, 2002 [1947]), 223–4. 13. Peter Schakel, Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds (Columbia NY: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 10–11. 14. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: HarperOne, 2017), 168. 15. See Bede Griffiths, “The Adventure of Faith,” in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, James T. Como, ed. (San Francisco CA: Ignatius Press, 2005), 76–95, 90. 16. C. S. Lewis, “Image and Imagination,” in Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 49.

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17. See C. S. Lewis, “Of Other Worlds,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harvester, 1994), 42: “All my seven Narnian books . . . began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” 18. Taylor, A Secular Age, 302. 19. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 81. 20. On Lewis and music, see Peter Schakel, Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis (Columbia MI: University of Missouri Press, 2002), especially 99–105. With an understanding of musical structure, there can be an intellectual appreciation, however. 21. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (London: Fontana, 1983 [1953]), 153. 22. Plato, Republic, 508c. 23. Lewis, Silver Chair, 156. 24. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, 2008 [1956]), 132. 25. The West Midlands poem was of continual interest to J. R. R. Tolkien, whose edition with E. V. Gordon finally appeared in 1953. Lewis’s interest in the poem is explored by T. S. Miller, “The Pearl-Maiden’s Psyche; The Middle-English Pearl and the Allegorical-Visionary Impulse in Till We Have Faces,” Mythlore 30, no. 1–2 (2011): 43–76; and Tiffany C. Schubert, “’I wolde be be there: Byyonde the Water’: Consolation in Pearl and The Silver Chair,” Mythlore 39, no. 1 (2020): 35–50. 26. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: HarperCollins, 2012 [1960]), 39. 27. J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 109–161, 146. 28. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, 146. 29. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: HarperCollins, 2002 [1946]), 49. 30. Lewis, Great Divorce, 42. 31. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (London: Collins, 1983 [1955]), 108. 32. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring (London: HarperCollins, 1991 [1954]), 122; Lewis, Magician’s Nephew, 109. 33. C. S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” in On Stories and Other Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (New York and London: Harvester, 1982), 65–66. 34. See Adam Barkman, “Rudolf Otto: The Idea of the Holy,” in C. S. Lewis’s List: The Ten Books that Influenced Him Most, ed. David and Susuan Werther (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 113–134, 118. 35. Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1964), 17. 36. Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 19. 37. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (London: HarperCollins, 2018 [1933]), 7. 38. Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 60. 39. Bruce Donehower, ed., The Birth of Novalis: Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with Selected Letters and Documents (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 13.

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40. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, The Cosmic Trilogy (London: Bodley Head, 1989 [1938]), 29. 41. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 50. 42. Alison Milbank, “Imaginative Apologetics: Making Strange,” in Imaginative Apologetics, ed. Andrew Davison, 31–45, (38). See also Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith (Steubenville OH: Emmaus Road Press, 2017). 43. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943), 50. 44. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: MacMillan, 1980 [1942]), vii–viii. 45. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 53. 46. Daniel Warzecha, “C. S. Lewis’s Parables as Revisited and Reactivated Biblical Stories,” Miranda 14 (2017), online at https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.4000​/miranda​.9890 Accessed 15/9/21. 47. James McAuley, “An Art of Poetry,” in The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. Donald Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 293–4, 293. 48. John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 8–31. 49. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, xiii. 50. C. S. Lewis, “Three Ways of Writing for Children,” [1952] in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, 30.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barkman, Adam. “Rudolf Otto: The Idea of the Holy.” In C. S. Lewis’s List: The Ten Books that Influenced Him Most, 113–134. Edited by David and Susan Werther. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Beversluis, John. C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985. Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. London: Bodley Head, 1957 [1908]. ———. Thomas Aquinas. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933. Donehower Bruce. (ed.), The Birth of Novalis: Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with Selected Letters and Documents. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. Griffiths, Bede. “The Adventure of Faith.” In Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, 76–95. Edited by James T. Como. San Francisco CA: Ignatius Press, 2005. Guite, Malcolm. “Telling the Truth Through Imaginative Fiction: C. S. Lewis on the Reconciliation of Athene and Demeter.” In C. S. Lewis in Poets’ Corner, 15–24. Edited by Michael Ward and Peter S. Williams (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2017). Hughes, John. “Proofs and Arguments.” In Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, 3–11. Edited by Andrew Davison. London: SCM, 2011.

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Lewis, C. S. Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages.” In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 41–63. Collected by Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. ———. Miracles. London: HarperCollins, 2002 [1947]. ———. Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. New York: Harvester, 1994. ———. “On Science Fiction.” In On Stories and Other Essays, 81–104. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York and London: Harvester, 1982. ———. Out of the Silent Planet, The Cosmic Trilogy. London: Bodley Head, 1989 [1938]. ———. “Reason.” In Poems of C. S. Lewis. Preface by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins 2017 [1966]. ———. Surprised by Joy. New York: HarperOne, 2017. ———. The Abolition of Man. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943. ———. The Four Loves. London: HarperCollins, 2012 [1960]. ———. The Great Divorce: A Dream. London: HarperCollins, 2002 [1946], ———. The Magician’s Nephew. London: Collins, 1983 [1955]. ———. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (London: HarperCollins, 2018 [1933]). ———. The Screwtape Letters. New York: MacMillan, 1980 [1942]. ———. The Silver Chair. London: Fontana, 1983 [1953], ———. “The Weight of Glory.” In The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’s Most Memorable Addresses, 25–46. London: HarperCollins, 2013. ———. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, 2008 [1956]. McAuley, James. “An Art of Poetry.” In The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 293–4. Edited by Donald Davie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Milbank, Alison. “Imaginative Apologetics: Making Strange,” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, 31–45. Edited by Andrew Davison. London: SCM, 2011. Miller, T. S. “The Pearl-Maiden’s Psyche: The Middle-English Pearl and the Allegorical-Visionary Impulse in Till We Have Faces.” Mythlore 30, no. 1–2 (2011): 43–76. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). Henry von Ofterdingen. Translated by Palmer Hilty. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1964. Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Translated by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. Ordway, Holly. Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith. Steubenville OH: Emmaus Road Press, 2017. Plato, Republic. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schakel, Peter. Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis. Columbia MI: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Schubert, Tiffany C. “‘I wolde be be there: Byyonde the Water’: Consolation in Pearl and The Silver Chair.” Mythlore 39, no. 1 (2020): 35–50.

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Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard Belknap Press, 2007. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. London: HarperCollins, 1991 [1954]. ———. “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, 109–61. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Warzecha, Daniel. “C. S. Lewis’s Parables as Revisited and Reactivated Biblical Stories,” Miranda 14 (2017), online at https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.4000​/miranda​.9890 Accessed 15/9/21. Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Translated by Ann Swidler. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1993 [1920].

Chapter 5

Between Tolkien and the Philosophers‌‌ Greek and Scholastic Theories of Phantasia Giovanni Carmine Costabile‌‌

What hath Tolkien to do with philosophy? This chapter sets out to navigate the confluences between Tolkien and ancient and medieval philosophy, notably that of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, on the notions of fantasy and imagination. It begins by demonstrating that, contrary to common opinion, Tolkien was concerned with philosophy, and particularly with the metaphysics of mind. Then it develops in three sections the relations between Tolkien and Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas on their notions of phantasm and phantasia, concluding with Tolkien’s indebtedness to Greek and especially Christian scholastic philosophy in his understanding of fantasy. TOLKIEN AND METAPHYSICS In his seminal essay on methodology in fantasy, Tolkien stated: “Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers.”1 Preeminent Tolkien critic Tom Shippey seems to extend this implicit critique, writing “Philosophy is too important to be left to philosophers.”2 But such statements might leave one wondering whether philosophical involvement is really so bad. After all, Tolkien and Lewis both strove to popularize their philosophical and theological concerns, denying 55

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that academic philosophy and “street philosophy” are two separate, unrelated things. Tolkien brings the English everyman Bilbo up from the hay-fields of the Shire all the way to Elrond’s library in Rivendell. In fact, while The Hobbit begins with Bilbo sitting on his bench smoking his pipe, The Lord of the Rings ends with “Extracts from the Elven Lore translated by Bilbo.”3 In other words, Bilbo becomes the leading Hobbit scholar not only in Elvish philology but Elvish philosophy. The two subjects belong together for Tolkien, based on his readings of classical figures like Plato, Aristotle, Boethius,4 and Aquinas,5 alongside modern thinkers such as Barfield6 and Collingwood. Indeed he wrote his own philosophical dialogues, such as Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, clearly Platonic.7 Nor would he despise Aristotelian philosophical treatises, for he also wrote the Osanwe-kenta, or Enquiry into the Communication of Thought, as well as “Reincarnation of Elves.”8 I have previously proved how Tolkien was inspired by the Christian Neo-Platonist philosophy of Augustine’s Confessions.9 So despite Shippey’s skepticism (“Are St. Augustine and Aquinas still productive in the modern world? I doubt it”10), Tolkien would no doubt think medieval theologians and thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas have great theoretical relevance. In fact, after refusing to involve himself with philosophers, Tolkien adds: “though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are—or were—meant to see them,’ as things apart from ourselves.”11 Such a normative phrasing means that rather than involving himself with philosophers—epistemologists, in this case—he does choose to involve himself with theologians.12 In this, Tolkien was chiefly concerned with classical Greek and Latin philosophy, the early and medieval Catholic theological tradition, and a few contemporary thinkers, such as Barfield and Collingwood. More precisely, then, we can categorize Tolkien as part of the Catholic reinterpretation of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, or in the modern theological practice of “retrieval.” In order to demonstrate this, I will focus on some key aspects of the ancient and medieval tradition on phantasia—often overlooked—to show how Tolkien was clearly influenced by it. We begin with Plato. Our own notion of things such as fantasy and imagination are the result of centuries of elaboration after Plato.13 When we discuss Plato himself, however, it is necessary to use the original Greek word phantasia to make it clear beforehand that we must clear our minds of all contemporary associations related to fantasy and imagination, remembering that Plato’s notion is a different thing from our own, arising as it does after this long process of development. Plato’s discourse on phantasia has to be understood in the light of his theory of knowledge, as expounded first in the simile of the Divided Line, and then in the Myth of the Cave in Republic VI-VII. There Socrates states there are four kinds of knowledge: eikasia, pistis, dianoia, and noesis. These



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might be roughly translated as: “perception of likeness,” “belief,” “speculative thinking,” and “intuition,” respectively. Each of these steps is then represented as a stage in the path of the prisoner from the shadows of the Cave (eikasia, perception of likeness) to seeing the statues casting those shadows (pistis, belief) and then, outside the Cave, from reflections on waters (dianoia, speculative thinking), all the way up to the vision of stars and moon, finally to stare at the sun itself, symbolizing the Form of Goodness (noesis, intuition). Plato is here delineating the path to knowledge based on notions of to eikon, “the image as likeness,” whence the word eikasia.14 More specifically, Plato thinks there is a world of transcendent Forms, of which our world is a mere copy. But it is not just any copy; he describes it as a reflection in a mirror of a reflection in another mirror. Thus we have four things: a Form, the reflection of the Form in the first mirror, the second reflection of the Form in the second mirror, and the infinite series of further reflections in both mirrors. If we could imagine an end to the infinite series of reflections, that would be hyle, or pure matter. The word Plato uses for “reflections,” such as in waters and pools, is phantasmata, or “phantasms.”15 Plato interestingly utilizes the same word for paintings as well.16 Another category of images cast on surfaces is skiai, “shadows.” For instance, the prisoners in the Cave are forced to keep watching the shadowplay of the puppeteers over and over again. Allan Silverman importantly notes that phantasia in Plato is not necessarily false, but deceptive, because its appearances (phantasmata) can suggest wrong judgements, for example that a stick immersed in water is bent or that a colossal statue seen from a distance is actually small.17 As a result, Plato is reticent to advocate for artistic media that he believes simply take us further away from the contemplation of the Good in itself. While different interpretations abound of whether Plato banishes the poets and artists from his Republic, Silverman argues how appearances are only susceptible of being deceptive, but are not false, meaning that they do not by themselves take us away from the Good, but only in our judgment, which also applies to artworks. If we judge them correctly, they may not only not hinder, but even help our progress towards the Good. Even in the Republic, where Plato is stricter than anywhere else in his works, art is accepted as long as it has a didactic purpose, which is the same as saying that it helps our progress towards the Good. Tolkien’s colleague and acquaintance R. G. Collingwood argued that actually it is even in establishing such limitations for his ideal city that Plato reveals himself as the subtle propounder of a deep philosophical aesthetics.18 The prisoners in the cave have to see the statues born by the bearers before leaving the cave. Phantasia is a stage, a step on the ladder.

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TOLKIEN’S PLATONIC PHANTASMS As noted in the introduction, Tolkien was inspired by both Platonism and Neo-Platonism, and surely wanted to “save the myths” as much as Plato did, without distracting from the truth of things.19 We should therefore expect to find Platonic notion of shadows, phantasms, statues, and reflections on waters, as steps on the path to light and goodness. And in fact, we do. Most obviously, Mordor is the land “where the shadows lie.”20 Shadows and darkness are often representative of false thoughts and/or feelings, as those induced by the Ring itself. Sam, “weary and feeling finally defeated” in the tower of Cirith Ungol, feels “the darkness cover him like a tide” before his own song restores hope in him.21 Or, even more poignantly, Tolkien writes in The Lost Road, “there is a shadow, but it is the shadow of the fear of death.”22 Intimately related to this, Sauron’s chief servants are the phantasmic Nazgûl, or Ringwraiths, consumed by the powers of their rings until they become immaterial. Tolkien calls this “fading,” a term he also applies to the Elves, whose fate is sooner or later to fade.23 As Gandalf explains, “A mortal . . . who keeps one of the Great Rings . . . fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings.”24 More strangely, we also observe that paintings are virtually absent in The Lord of the Rings.25 However, statues abound: even by excluding Bilbo’s petrified trolls,26 we still have the Argonath,27 the headless king Frodo and Sam see near the bottom of the stairs to Cirith Ungol, and the Two Watchers.28 There are, furthermore, reflections of dead people in unholy waters (the Dead Marshes) and the reflections seen in Galadriel’s mirror of “things that were, things that are, and things that yet may be.”29 The accent on vision which is common to shadows, reflections, phantasms, and invisibility (dependent as they are on the metaphysics of light that both Plato and Tolkien share) is also stressed in the following: The high Elves “do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.”30 The notion of two worlds, visible and invisible, is peculiarly Greek and obviously Platonic, later to be developed in Christianity.31 Aristotle is often considered to be a much more balanced thinker than Plato. Whereas the latter strived to reach the transcendent world of Forms above the heavens, his disciple Aristotle insisted that we never experience any Form detached from its physical counterpart. Human souls are always embodied. Goodness is no separate entity we might contemplate aside from deceptive images, but always a quality we find in good men, good behavior,



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etc. There is no abstract idea of triangularity; instead, we receive the idea of a triangle from, say, the rough profile of a mountain seen from a distance. Yet Aristotle’s notion of phantasia is even more problematic than Plato’s. Alfredo Ferrarin, whose account I will follow here, mentions numerous different possible meanings of the word “imagination”: Integrating the discontinuities of perception into a unitary picture, anticipating the possible development of a plot, or of a shape partly hidden from view, deciphering a sketchy image and interpreting it as the two-dimensional abbreviation or snapshot of an event, giving rise to a world alternative to the perceptual one, dreaming, phantasizing and having reveries, recognizing someone in a portrait, not to mention constructing a plot, envisaging or picturing one, drawing a figure, writing a poem—all seem to be very different, yet not unrelated functions of the same imagination. The several modes at work are not only disparate, often they are conflicting, too, as when we oppose an escape from reality to an effort at better understanding it.32

Aristotle refuses the four steps of knowledge, eikasia, pistis, dianoia and noesis, his being no philosophy of speculation to be explained by two mirrors facing each other. Nor does he consider opinion an independent, inferior form of knowledge categorically opposed to true knowledge, let alone a faculty of our mind (psyché, one and the same with our notion of “soul”). Resultantly, while in Plato phantasia had an intermediate position between sensation and opinion (or belief), in Aristotle it is instead positioned between sensation and thinking. Aristotle in fact says that phantasia is caused by perception, but that, contra Plato, phantasia differs from opinion in being voluntary, summoned at will whenever conjuring a mental picture or visualizing anything internally.33 On the contrary, I cannot simply get an opinion about anything any time I want. Furthermore, whereas opinion is inherently something one believes, phantasia does not necessarily involve conviction—in other words, it does not entirely depend on the mental image itself whether I choose to hold it as a true representation of reality. This moves phantasia much further toward being a rational activity. While arising from sensation, phantasia also differs from sensation, for five reasons.34 First, we may have the former without the latter, as in dreams. Second, all animals have perception, whereas not all of them are able to form internal images. Third, phantasia can be false, whereas sensation is always true (this is a large departure from Plato, who as we have seen considered perception to be false). Fourth, phantasia may be unclear, whereas perception is always clear. Fifth and finally, phantasia is a continuation of sensation, as when I keep seeing a picture even after I have closed my eyes.

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Following Ferrarin, I should let us focus on how Aristotle differs here from Plato in providing phantasia with the ability to judge unclear perceptions. For Plato, recall, this function is fulfilled by opinion, while phantasia only offers an image.35 Aristotle instead claims that phantasia comes together with an opinion concerning its truth or falsity, which may later be contradicted or corrected.36 Coherently, in De Somnibus we read how in dreams we never contradict an impression we get, because the ability to think and therefore judge appearances is suspended, whereas phantasia is fully at work.37 Exactly as in Plato, though, Aristotle emphasizes the visual, light-related connotations of phantasia by associating it with the word for light itself (Greek pháos).38 This should not, however, induce us to think that the phantasmata are solely visual, since they might belong equally well to each of the five senses, as in Plato.39 In modern parlance we still speak of phantom sounds or phantom pains. Since the image is the presence of a thing materially absent, we should also consider it as representation. Memories and recollections are also phantasmata, even when they are memories of abstract ideas. This is particularly noteworthy since it makes phantasms the objects of thought, those things which we call concepts.40 It is important to consider, though, what Ferrarin later specifies, i.e., thinking does not use images based on their sensory origin, but separates them from their material origin into sheer disembodied images.41 Finally, we also have phantasia as a “means to an end,” when “the object represented as the goal is the unmoved mover of the action.”42 For example, one cannot desire to obtain a goal without picturing the goal itself, however much our image of the goal may differ from the goal in actuality. This on one hand implies that phantasia, far from some escapist principle, is a central motive for practical action. On the other hand, since for Aristotle the ultimate goal of everything is God, this also implies that we conceive of God through phantasia. In fact, most of medieval theology was influenced by, and based on, Aristotle’s thought. TOLKIEN’S IMPLICIT ARISTOTELIANISM Tolkien is aware of Aristotle’s understandings of phantasm and phantasia as an activity requiring reason. Consider how Tolkien understands the imagination as the human power of mental “image-making” of subcreations as something higher than popular reductions of the “operations of Fancy” because popular misconceptions of the imagination as fanciful fails to appreciate the imagination’s power to image-make a creation with “inner consistency of reality.”43 In short, Tolkien denies the post-Coleridgean distinction between imagination and phantasia. That Tolkien was here inspired, if not by Aristotle



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himself, then by the Aristotelian tradition, is particularly obvious given Ferrarin’s argument that Aristotle’s situation of phantasia as a form of rational activity was at the time unprecedented.44 To get the full picture we only have to connect these observations with Tolkien’s writing, but we must again quote the passage in full: Fantasy is a rational, not irrational, activity . . . Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion. For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen.45

Verlyn Flieger asserts that the word “recognition” is key here. “It places the emphasis where it belongs: on the beholder rather than on something called ‘reality,’ about which there could be and often is disagreement.”46 However, we should note further that the importance of “recognition” hinges not on mere subjectivity, but on the idea of a correspondence between a thing and its image, which makes the latter recognizable as an image of the former, thus enabling the former to be represented by the latter. This, and not the subjective experience alone, is what allows the representation’s “freedom from fact,” and it is this which seems inescapably related to Aristotle’s insistence upon the representative nature of phantasia, discussed above.47 In fact, the expression should be related to the subsequent statement, that fantasy’s ability to create images of things which do not exist in the primary world is its greatest strength. “Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent,” Tolkien concludes.48 Like Aristotle, Flieger discusses the etymology of “fantasy” in her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, relating it to Owen Barfield’s theory of proto-semantic unity.49 This theory argues that, over time, words developed more specialized meanings, in contrast to the fewer original words which, because of this smaller vocabulary, each held within themselves a massive field of potential meanings. Flieger then proceeds further back in the etymology, tracing it to the Indoeuropean root BHA1-, related to BHA2-, from which phoné, or ‘sound,’ derives, thus showing us another potential

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reason to suppose that the phantasmata of phantasia need not always be visual, but could also pertain to the other senses, or, at least here, to hearing. Aristotle’s discussion of memories as phantasms is thus also relevant to Tolkien, a well-known lover of the past, both in his personal recollections of his blissful rural youth in the Midlands and in the broader sense of tracing the roots of England to its medieval and Anglo-Saxon origins, or even further. Indeed, in his unfinished The Lost Road, the protagonist actually experiences glimpses of ancestral memory in dreams. We see this also in Merry’s dream in the Barrow-downs, also probably a recollection of the past, not to mention the concept of the Nazgûl, who still appear to Frodo in their original forms of noble Men and crowned kings whenever he wears the Ring. Here, the Wraiths are phantasms in a philosophical sense as well, reduced to the mere recollection of a single aspect of themselves. Finally, in discussing the possibility of Elven reincarnation, Tolkien theorizes that reincarnated Elves might rebuild their own bodies from memories.50 THOMAS AQUINAS ON PHANTASMS AND PHANTASIA In the period we commonly refer to as the early and high Middle Ages, Aristotle’s philosophy was further elaborated by Hebrew and Arabic philosophers such as Maimonides, Averroes, and Avicenna, subsequently shaping medieval scholasticism. Preeminent scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (about 1225–1274) was so influenced by Aristotelianism that his thought is often pictured as the union of Christianity and Aristotelianism. Aquinas often simply named Aristotle “the Philosopher,” much like his rough contemporary Dante Alighieri would call him “the master of those who know.”51 In Aristotle’s treatise De Anima, he mentions three functions of the animal and human soul, which in humans are the intermediaries between the five senses and the superior intellect. The three functions were: the common sense (theoretical origin of the other five), memory, and phantasia. Subsequent Arabic interpreters expanded Aristotle’s three ‘internal senses,’ as they now termed them, to four (Averroes) and then five (Avicenna), adding the estimative power (what we could roughly call the instincts) as well as a second kind of phantasia. It is to this tradition of interpretation that Aquinas immediately responds, by once more reducing Avicenna’s account to four: common sense, the estimative or cogitative power, memory or recollection, and phantasia. Like Plato’s Divided Line, we can see this classification as a four-fold division comprised of two two-fold divisions. First is the sensory power, wherein phantasia acts as both producer and preserver of the sensory impressions



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(phantasms) received through the common sense, and second is the mnemonic power, wherein, in pretty much the same way, memory produces and preserves the phantasms of the instinctual reactions triggered by the estimative or cogitative powers. Phantasms in Aquinas, as in Aristotle, are not only the images of things currently perceived, but also of things perceived a long time since, or of things never perceived, or even of things unperceivable. Therefore, phantasms do not only occur in phantasia, but also in cogitative power and memory.52 For Thomas, there is a further kind of phantasia that is either combinative or dissociative. But phantasms are not simply mental images, but perceptions themselves. What Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas mean when they talk of phantasms is that what I see with my eyes is a phantasm, what I hear with my ears is a phantasm. Mental images of a creative sort (imagination as now we mean it) are a further kind of phantasms, as much as memories and hopes/goals. In combinative or dissociative phantasia, phantasms join or separate other concepts, “as when from the imaginary form of gold and imaginary form of mountain, we compose the one form of a gold mountain, which we have never seen. But this operation is not to be found in animals other than men, in whom the imaginative power [phantasia] suffices thereto.”53 One cannot help but thinking that a “Gold Mountain” sounds like a very fitting definition for Erebor. Robert Pasnau compares phantasms to sensation per accidens, a perception immediately suggesting a concept. When I see a man, I am usually immediately aware that I am seeing a man and not simply such-and-such a colorful shape. But since the concept ‘man,’ though derived from sensory impressions, is related to universal concepts of the intellect, sensation per accidens acts as a bridge between sense and intellect. Aquinas therefore writes: “Our intellect both abstracts intelligible species from phantasms, inasmuch as it considers the natures of things universally, and yet it also cognizes those natures in phantasms, because it cannot cognize even the things whose species it abstracts, except by turning toward phantasms.”54Aquinas goes so far as to echo Aristotle in declaring, “man does not understand anything without phantasms.”55 Pasnau writes about St. Thomas’s view, “Unlike angels, we are not well suited to receive pure intellectual inspiration. We need pictures.”56 Human embodiment, in other words, entails phantasia. TOLKIEN, AQUINAS, AND INCARNATE PHANTASMS We may summarize by stating that for Aquinas the intellect grasps its universal concepts through the visualization of the phantasms, and then turns back again to phantasms whenever it has to apply those same concepts, because

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pure abstraction is intolerable to an incarnate mind. Embodied agents turn to language in order to understand and shape their world. Tolkien often refers to the idea of incarnate mind in his Letters, specifically including in this idea Elves, Men, Istari, and even Orcs, despite their wickedness.57 Only the Ainur are “rational spirits or minds without incarnation,” in which even the physically manifest Valar wear forms more akin to clothes than true bodies.58But Tolkien goes even further with Thomas, writing in On Fairy-Stories that “the incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”59 Tolkien then adds that the human mind has “the powers of generalization and abstraction” to potently produce a world of Faërie through the incantations and spells of language an ability to discriminate and describe through adjectives the ability to conceive, imagine, and illustrate with the mind the magic of a sub-creation in inventive ways.60 Here Tolkien is clearly basing his point on the Thomistic, Avicennian concept of the second type of phantasia, the combinative or dissociative imagination which can “take the imaginary form of gold and imaginary form of mountain” and put them together to “compose the imaginary form of a gold mountain, which we have never seen.”61 Flieger agrees that this is likely to be Tolkien’s explicit aim.62 Tolkien then concludes: “We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such ‘fantasy,’ as it is called, a new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”63 We are sub-creators because the reality of our own actual world is a “secondary reality, subordinate to [God’s] own, which we call primary reality.”64 Both Jonathan McIntosh and Amber Lee Peace underline Tolkien’s theological distinction between God’s creative power and our ability to make, or sub-create. They stress his remark that “since that the whole matter [of Middle-earth] from beginning to end is mainly concerned with the relation of Creation to making and sub-creation (. . .), it must be clear that references to these things are not casual but fundamental.”65 In line therefore with one of the major themes of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes, “all things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their causes and effects.”66 For McIntosh, this statement is “perhaps intended to express Tolkien’s Aristotelian conviction, shared by St. Thomas, that creatures, having received their being as a gift from the Creator himself, are no mere Platonic shadow-realities, but have real ontological consequence, dignity and weight.”67 At the same time, in a letter to Camilla Unwin, Tolkien points out how, even though things would still exist if we did not, “one of their functions is to be contemplated by us.”68 Or, might we say, understood, pictured, recombined, and dissociated? McIntosh and Peace also agree with Austin



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Freeman’s chapter in the present volume, attesting that the necessary relation of creature to Creator does not infringe the former’s free will; on the contrary, it is that very same relation that constitutes its necessary premise. Thus St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica shows how, by moving voluntary causes, God does not prevent their actions from being voluntary.69 We see this in the way the Ainur also take on the role of sub-creative agents in Middle-earth. The impersonal series of reflections which shaped Plato’s conception have here been given a personal form as a chain of beings, of actual persons, as Tolkien loved to point out, proceeding in mediated form from God himself, instead of some vague Form of Good. As St. Thomas writes: “God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their [material] essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that upon which it acts immediately, and touch it by its power; hence it is proved in the Physics that the thing moved and the mover must be together.”70 We see in the work of the angels a God whose goodness turns perception, meditation, and thought into uttered word (like Eä) but also into actual practice, present in and through moral agents who are themselves ultimately directed back toward their origin in God in a movement of exitus and redditus. In their journey “there and back again,” the Ainur become mediators of this presence, helping those who come after toward the same goal.In his letter to Camilla Unwin, Tolkien points out how, even though things would still exist if we did not, McIntosh significantly concludes, “At one level Tolkien’s literary theory involves him in a kind of scholastic collaboration and synthesis of faith and reason in their respective roles.”71 This constitutes further proof of the “innate philosophical affinity” and deep “intellectual sympathy” Tolkien felt for St. Thomas Aquinas.72 CONCLUSION A recent finding documented by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond revealed that in an unpublished typed letter from 6 December 1965 to G. S. Rigby Jr. of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, Tolkien declared, “There is, in fact, quite a lot of theology included in The Lord of the Rings (I was surprised to find how much when the work was analysed some time ago in a theological periodical), though perhaps it is made more palatable by a sugar coating.”73 Despite the Professor’s usual modesty, and his reticence to discuss “philosophy,” what he is saying is transparent. It is the very same notion Tolkien underlines in his essay On Fairy-Stories, a theological view of the world’s divine “createdness.” So, to conclude, Tolkien shows himself to be perfectly aware of the philosophical and theological tradition of phantasms and phantasia in Plato,

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Aristotle and Aquinas, and in his essay On Fairy-Stories he writes along the same theoretical lines when proposing his theory of fantasy. Perhaps some “elvish craft” is still left in this world, which we can use to compose an astonishing “green sun.”74 Perhaps we might even have the green sun shine on a gold mountain, and on Mount Caradhras Gandalf could rebuke Legolas: “If Elves could fly over gold mountains, they might fetch the Green Sun to save us.”75 NOTES 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories, Eds. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: Harper Collins, 2008), 67. Henceforth as OFS. 2. Franco Manni and Thomas A. Shippey, “Tolkien tra filosofia e filologia” in Tolkien e la filosofia, Eds. Roberto Arduini and Claudio Antonio Testi (Genova-Milano: Marietti 1820, 2011), 19. My translation. Henceforth as “Tolkien.” 3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: Harper Collins, 2001); 1st ed. George Allen & Unwin, 1968), VI, x. Henceforth as LotR. 4. John William Houghton and Neal K. Keesee, “Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius: Platonist Views of Evil in The Lord Of The Rings,” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 131–59. 5. Manni and Shippey, “Tolkien,” 22. Claudio Antonio Testi owns Tolkien’s copy of a volume from the Summa Theologica by Aquinas, including handwritten annotations. 6. Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light. Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002; 1st ed. 1983). 7. J. R. R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 2015; 1st ed. 1993), 303–66. 8. Carl Hostetter, ed., Vinyar Tengwar, no. 39. Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, (July 1998), 21–34; Michael Devaux, L’Effigie des Elfes. La Feuille de la Compagnie N.3 (Paris: Bragelonne Essais, 2014), 139–53. 9. Giovanni C. Costabile, “Stolen Pears, Unripe Apples. The Misuse of Fruits as a Symbol of Original Sin in Tolkien’s The New Shadow and Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions,” Tolkien Studies Vol. 14, no. 1 (2017), 163–67. 10. Manni and Shippey, “Tolkien,” 38. 11. Tolkien, OFS, 67. 12. Cf. Jonathan McIntosh, The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas and the Metaphysics of Faërie (Dallas, TX: University of Dallas, 2009), 64. Tolkien also distinguished between metaphysics and theology, identifying his decisions with the latter (Letter 153). Any religion might have a metaphysics—indeed there could even be a non-religious metaphysics—whereas theology is always concerned with God, and Christian theology with the Christian god. 13. If Alfred North Whitehead was right, then “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to



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Plato.” Alfred N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929), Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1. 14. Robert S. Brumbaugh, “Plato’s Divided Line,” Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 4 (1951), 529–34; A. S. Ferguson, “Plato’s Simile of Light. Part I: The Similes of the Sun and Line.” Classical Quarterly 15, no. 3–4 (1921). 131–52. A. S. Ferguson, “Plato’s Simile of Light. Part II: The Allegory of the Cave,” Classical Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1922), 15–28; Richard Foley, “Plato’s Undividable Line. Contradiction and Method in Republic VI,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 1 (Jan. 2008), 1–23; Andrew Gregory, Plato’s Philosophy of Science (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2015); Francis MacDonald Cornford, “Mathematics and Dialectics in Plato’s Republic VI-VII (I),” Mind, New Series 41, no. 161 (Jan. 1932), 37–52; Francis MacDonald Cornford, “Mathematics and Dialectics in Plato’s Republic VI-VII (II),” Mind, New Series 41, no. 162 (Apr. 1932), 173–90; Corinne Praus Sze, “Eikasia and Pistis in Plato’s Cave Allegory,” The Classical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (May 1977), 127–38; John Earle Raven, “Sun, Divided Line and Cave,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 3, no. 1/2 (Jan.–Apr. 1953), 22–32. See also Giovanni C. Costabile, I portatori nel mito della caverna (Pisa: Università di Pisa 2010); Giovanni C. Costabile, “La caverna e l’anello. Saggio sull’influenza della filosofia platonica sull’opera di J.R.R. Tolkien,” Frammenti di filosofia contemporanea 14, 2016. 99–114. 15. Plato, Republic VII, 532c. 16. Plato, Philebus, 40a-b. 17. Plato, Republic X, 602c-603a; Plato, Sophist 235d ff.; Cf. Allan Silverman “Plato on ‘Phantasia,’” Classical Antiquity, 10, No. 1 (Apr., 1991): 123–47. 18. R.G. Collingwood, “Plato’s Philosophy of Art,” Mind, New Series, 34, no. 134 (Apr., 1925): 154–72. 19. C.f. for Ring of Gyges: Robert E. Morse, “Rings of Power in Plato and Tolkien,” Mythlore 7, n. 25 (1980), 38.; Frederik A. De Armas, “Gyges’ Ring: Invisibility in Plato, Tolkien and Lope de Vega,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, n. 4 (1994), 120–38; C.f. for Neoplatonism: Mary Carman Rose, “The Christian Platonism of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara (Norfolk: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1981), 203–12; John Cox, “Tolkien’s Platonic Fantasy,” Seven 5 (1984), 53–69; Verlyn Flieger, “Naming the Unnameable: The Neoplatonic ‘One’ in Tolkien’s Silmarillion,” in Diakonia: Studies in Honour of Robert T. Meyer, eds. Thomas P. Halton and Joseph Willman (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 127–32; C.f. for Saving the Myths: Gergely Nagy, “Saving the Myths: The Re-creation of Mythology in Plato and Tolkien,” in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 81–96. 20. Tolkien, LotR I, ii. 21. Tolkien, LotR VI, i. 22. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1987), 68. 23. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Shaping of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015; 1st ed. 1986), 21.

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24. Tolkien, LotR II, i, italics added. 25. But consider the “many woven cloths” in the Hall of Meduseld, in Tolkien, LotR III, iv, one of which represents Eorl the Young. 26. Tolkien, LotR I, xii. 27. Tolkien, LotR II, ix. 28. Tolkien, LotR IV, vii and VI, i. 29. Tolkien, LotR II, vii. 30. Tolkien, LotR II, i. 31. Plato regarded the intelligible realm as comparable to eyesight, in the same way as English “I see” implies understanding (an Ancient Greek word for Form being eidos, “the visible”). Yet, strictly speaking it is unseen and invisible, one and the same with Hades, the realm (and god) of the dead. The name Hades was commonly interpreted as A- idés, “Un-seen” or “Invisible,” whereas Plato (Cratylus 403 a-d) explained it from eidénai, “to know,” related to aforementioned eidos and idés. 32. Alfredo Ferrarin, “Aristotle on Phantasia,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 21 (2006), 90. 33. Aristotle, De Anima III, 3, ed. Christopher Shield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016). 34. Found in Aristotle, De Anima 428a10-16. 35. Ferrarin, “Aristotle on Phantasia,” 100. 36. Aristotle, De Anima, 428b2-3. 37. Aristotle, De Sonmibus, 460b16-20 in Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, ed. David Gallop (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1990). 38. Aristotle, De Anima 429a3. 39. Ferrarin, “Aristotle on Phantasia,” 102. 40. Aristotle, De Memoria 450a12-13 in Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, ed. David Gallop (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1990). 41. Moreover, intellect needs images when it is our intellect, whereas Aristotle also mentions disincarnate intelligences who do not have to think through images, and only think pure abstract intelligibilities, which are what in Aristotle’s thought might most resemble the Platonic Forms. And truly one has to observe how the idea of memories and thoughts as images might perhaps be traced back to Plato as well. 42. Ferrarin, “Aristotle on Phantasia,” 108. 43. Tolkien, OFS, 49. 44. Ferrarin “Aristotle on Phantasia,” 109–10. 45. Tolkien, OFS, 60n, 65. 46. Verlyn Flieger, Green Suns and Faerie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2012), 6. 47. Tolkien, OFS, 60. 48. Tolkien, OFS, 60. 49. Flieger, Splintered Light, 45–46: “Both terms—phenomenon and fantasy— derive from Greek, phenomenon from phainesthai, ‘to appear,’ and fantasy from phantazein, ‘to make visible.’ The difference is that one, phainesthai, is an intransitive verb having no object, and the other, phantazein, is transitive; that is, it affects an object external to and other than itself. Both phainesthai and phantazein come from



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an earlier Greek phainein, ‘to show,’ which as the prior and less distinct concept must then predate the transitive-intransitive distinction that separates, by the word used, things that appear from that which makes things appear. Nevertheless, much the same concept is contained in all three words.” These etymological connections are even more interesting if we add the word phantasma to the group, as we have been doing, which would also allow us to construct a simple sentence like Aristotle’s phantasma phainetai (De Anima 450b29), strictly unreproducible in English, but translated by Macierowsky as “something illuminated brings itself to light” in Thomas Aquinas, Commentary in Aristotle’s ‘On Sense and what is Sensed’ and ‘On Memory and Recollection,’ eds. Kevin White and Edward M. Macierowsky (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005): 247, ch. 3, n. 1. 50. But a memory can also be a ruin, or a tower, as Michael D. C. Drout justly writes, connecting it as well with the (Platonic?) statues we examined in the preceding section: “The ruin in the landscape—both in Tolkien’s world and in our world—catalyzes this change, linking together the imagination, the vision of the tower and the perception of the ruin, entwining past and present with each other so that they are ‘more than memory,’ transmuting into something still sad but now blessed, without bitterness, the pain of the exile and separation that is brought about by the never-pausing flow of time”; in Michael D. C. Drout, “The Tower and the Ruin: the Past in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works,” in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City, Eds. Helen Conrad-O’Briain and Gerald Hynes (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 175–90, 189. On one hand the notion relates to Tolkien’s re-appropriation of the past. On the other, we have hopes we might come to relive that past, even further improved and enriched, as expressed by Tolkien’s notion of Arda Remade, or the world being eventually liberated from evil at the end of days in Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 400. Future, then, might be entwined with both past and present, and, as in Galadriel’s mirror, it might be hard to tell one from the others. Even more so, then, the process redeems the pain of the exile, so to make the past itself “more than memories.” 51. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume One: Inferno, ed. Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), IV, 131. 52. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles: Book Two: Creation, ed. James F. Anderson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), II.73.19; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, eds. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1987) I.89.5. 53. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.78.4. 54. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.85.1.5. 55. Thomas Aquinas and Raimondo Spiazzi, S. Thomae Aquinatis In Aristotelis libros De sensu et sensato, De memoria et reminiscentia commentarium, third edition / ex integro retractata, cura et studio Raymundi M. Spiazzi (Taurini: Marietti, 1949), tr. II, l. 2, n. 4; Cf. Aristotle De Anima III, 431a16-17. 56. Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 1st ed. 2002), 287.

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57. All in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (London: Harper Collins, 2006; 1st ed. 1981): Elves and Men (279), Wizards (216), and Orcs (207). Henceforth as Letters. 58. Tolkien, Letters, 300; cf also 447. 59. Tolkien, OFS, 41. 60. Tolkien, OFS, 41. 61. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.78.4. 62. As I thank Dr. Annemieke Verboon for inspiration in such respects, I should point out I received very favorable responses to such a proposal from both editors of the critical edition of On Fairy-Stories, Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. Anderson specified that “when putting together Tolkien On Fairy-stories (2008), Verlyn Flieger and I tended to stay close to Tolkien and his attested sources—that is, those specifically mentioned in his notes. I don’t recall even mentioning Aquinas in the book, which is a fertile field to cover in comparison with Tolkien” (e-mail 14 October 2017). Professor Flieger wrote: “I think you are very much on the right track, and your association of that crucial passage in On Fairy-stories concerning Tolkien’s power-adjective ‘green’ in Thomas’s transfer of gold from the tiara to the mountain rings true” (e-mail 19 October 2017), wherein a tiara is the item we used to represent whatever golden object we first saw. 63. Tolkien, OFS, 41–42. 64. Tolkien, Letters, 279. 65. Tolkien, Letters 206; c.f. Amber Lee Peace, Medieval Philosophy in Tolkien’s Writing (Elizabethton, TN: Milligan University, 2015), 26. 66. Tolkien, Letters, 76. 67. McIntosh, The Flame Imperishable, 133. 68. Tolkien, Letters, 431. 69. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.83.1. 70. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.8.1. 71. McIntosh, The Flame Imperishable, 56. 72. McIntosh, The Flame Imperishable, 33. 73. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: I: Chronology (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 648. 74. Tolkien, OFS, 63, 61. 75. Paraphrase of Tolkien, LotR II, iii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume One: Inferno. Edited by Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary in Aristotle’s ‘On Sense and what is Sensed’ and ‘On Memory and Recollection.’ Edited by Kevin White and Edward M. Macierowsky. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. ———. Summa contra Gentiles: Book Two: Creation. edited by James F. Anderson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.



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———. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1987. Aquinas, Thomas, and Raimondo Spiazzi. S. Thomae Aquinatis In Aristotelis libros De sensu et sensato, De memoria et reminiscentia commentarium. Third edition / ex integro retractata, cura et studio Raymundi M. Spiazzi. Taurini: Marietti, 1949. Aristotle. Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism. Edited by David Bloch. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007. ———. Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams. Edited by David Gallop. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1990. ———. De Anima. Edited by Christopher Shield. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016. Brumbaugh, Robert S. “Plato’s Divided Line.” Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 4 (1951): 529–34. Collingwood, R.G. “Plato’s Philosophy of Art,” Mind, New Series 34, no. 134 (Apr., 1925): 154–72. Costabile, Giovanni C. I portatori nel mito della caverna. Pisa: Università di Pisa, 2010. ———. “La caverna e l’anello. Saggio sull’influenza della filosofia platonica sull’opera di J.R.R. Tolkien.” Frammenti di filosofia contemporanea 14, 2016. 99–114. ———. “Stolen Pears, Unripe Apples. The Misuse of Fruits as a Symbol of Original Sin in Tolkien’s The New Shadow and Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions.” Tolkien Studies 14, no. 1 (2017): 163–67. Cox, John. “Tolkien’s Platonic Fantasy.” Seven 5, 1984. 53–69. De Armas, Frederik A. “Gyges’ Ring: Invisibility in Plato, Tolkien and Lope de Vega.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts vol. 3, no. 4 (1994): 120–38. Devaux, Michael. L’Effigie des Elfes. La Feuille de la Compagnie N.3. Paris: Bragelonne Essais, 2014. Drout, Michael D.C. “The Tower and the Ruin: the Past in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works.” In J.R.R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City. Edited by Helen Conrad-O’Briain and Gerald Hynes, 175–90. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013. Ferguson, A. S. “Plato’s Simile of Light. Part I: The Similes of the Sun and Line.” Classical Quarterly 15, no. 3–4 (1921): 131–52. ———. “Plato’s Simile of Light. Part II: The Allegory of the Cave.” Classical Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1922): 15–28. Ferrarin, Alfredo. “Aristotle on Phantasia.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 21 (2006): 89–123. Flieger, Verlyn. Green Suns and Faerie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2012. ———. “Naming the Unnameable: The Neoplatonic ‘One’ in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.” Diakonia: Studies in Honour of Robert T. Meyer. Edited by Thomas P. Halton and Joseph Willman, 127–32. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986. ———. Splintered Light. Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002; 1st ed. 1983.

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Foley, Richard. “Plato’s Undividable Line. Contradiction and Method in Republic VI.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 1–23. Gregory, Andrew. Plato’s Philosophy of Science. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2015. Hostetter, Carl (ed.). Vinyar Tengwar, no. 39. Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, July 1998. Houghton, John William, and Neal K. Keesee. “Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius: Platonist Views of Evil in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 131–59. Lee Peace, Amber. Medieval Philosophy in Tolkien’s Writing. Elizabethton, TN: Milligan University, 2015. MacDonald Cornford, Francis. “Mathematics and Dialectics in Plato’s Republic VI-VII (I).” Mind, New Series 41, no. 161 (Jan. 1932): 37–52. ———. “Mathematics and Dialectics in Plato’s Republic VI-VII (II).” Mind, New Series 41, no. 162 (Apr., 1932): 173–90. Manni, Franco and Thomas A. Shippey. “Tolkien tra filosofia e filologia.” Tolkien e la filosofia. Edited by Roberto Arduini and Claudio Antonio Testi, 13–66. Genova-Milano: Marietti 1820, 2011. McIntosh, Jonathan. The Flame Imperishable: Tolkien, St. Thomas and the Metaphysics of Faërie. Dallas TX: University of Dallas, 2009. Milbank, Alison. Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. Edinburgh: T&T Press, 2007. Morse, Robert E. “Rings of Power in Plato and Tolkien,” Mythlore 7, no. 25 (1980): 38. Nagy, Gergely. “Saving the Myths: The Re-creation of Mythology in Plato and Tolkien.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Edited by Jane Chance, 81–96. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pasnau, Robert. Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 1st ed. 2002. Plato. Cratylus. Edited by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Sophist. Edited by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. ———. The Philebus of Plato. Edited by Robert Gregg Bury. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896. ———. The Republic of Plato. Edited by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. Praus Sze, Corinne. “Eikasia and Pistis in Plato’s Cave Allegory.” The Classical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (May 1977): 127–38. Raven, John Earle. “Sun, Divided Line and Cave.” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 3, no. 1/2 (Jan.–Apr. 1953): 22–32. Rose, Mary Carman. “The Christian Platonism of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams.” In Neoplatonism and Christian Thought. Edited by Dominic J. O’Meara, 203–12. Norfolk: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1981. Scull, Christina, and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: I: Chronology. London: Harper Collins, 2006. Silverman, Allan. “Plato on ‘Phantasia.’” Classical Antiquity 10, no. 1 (Apr., 1991): 123–47. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: Harper Collins, 2006; 1st ed. 1981.



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———. The Lord of the Rings. London: Harper Collins, 2001; 1st ed. George Allen & Unwin, 1968. ———. The Lost Road and Other Writings. London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1987. ———. Morgoth’s Ring. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins, 2015; 1st ed. 1993. ———. On Fairy-stories. Edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: Harper Collins, 2008. ———. The Shaping of Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, London: Harper Collins, 2015; 1st ed. 1986. Whitehead, Alfred N. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan Co., 1929.

PART III

Post-Christian Fantasy: Opening the Door Beyond

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Chapter 6

Why Theology Should Always Be Fantasy Imagination, Fantasy, and Science-Fictional Messianism in the Writings of Rabbi Shagar Levi Morrow ‌‌

In a small room in a caravan just over the green line, tables and shelves piled high with tomes of Jewish law and arcana, a rabbi with a long brown beard lectures his students. Bending over his hand-written notes, he comes to a rousing conclusion: “Artistic imagination creates a free, empty space in which—and only in which—the divine truth, infinite and without limits, can dwell. We must break away from the functional, pragmatic intellect . . . [the] aesthetic carries within it perceptions and concepts from a world that is loftier, more imaginary, and more divine.”1 Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (d. 2007), better known by the Hebrew acronymic Shagar, was an Orthodox Israeli Rabbi who lived, wrote, and taught in the heart of the National-Religious community in Israel.2 He studied in many of its flagship institutions, and taught in the institutions of its fledgling avant-garde—while quite parochial from the perspective of many secular Israelis, many in the National-Religious community saw him as quite radical. From within these institutions on the communal margin, Shagar critiqued the religious and political ideologies of the National-Religious mainstream, and was known for his willingness to incorporate twentieth-century philosophy within his theology.3 The blending of thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Lacan with traditional Jewish theology and texts is a key feature of 77

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Shagar’s writings.4 He termed it “translation” and saw it as necessitated by the way National-Religious Jews “live in multiple worlds,” fully immersed in both religious and secular societies.5 A second key feature of Shagar’s writings is their consistent critiques of “rationalism”—of any attempts to make reason a supreme principle within religious life. This typically manifests as a sort of romantic existentialism, an emphasis on wordless “faith” contrasted with “ideology,” and with the emphasis on imagination and fantasy which is the focus of this chapter. This chapter has three parts: The first section lays out Shagar’s theoretical considerations about the concerns, possibilities, and necessity of the imagination for religious life. Taking his cues from medieval Jewish philosophers, Shagar contrasts imagination with reason and notes the real problems with imagination, but ultimately comes down on the side of imagination as the only path to both faith and freedom. Despite this, it is a medieval critique of imagination as “combinatory” that becomes important for Shagar’s use of imagination, as the rest of the chapter demonstrates. The second section then lays out Shagar’s analysis of the fantastic folktales of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav (d. 1810). Shagar frames the stories as a form of inter-cultural “translation” and as a path to mysticism within Jewish religious life. This section highlights the role he gives to the element of fantasy in these stories—it is the very foreignness of fantasy to religious life, Shagar claims, that is critical when the two are combined. Finally, the third section demonstrates how Shagar applies this same logic to science fiction and rabbinic homilies about the messianic era, arguing that science fiction can engender mystical experiences, and that the apocalyptic speculations of classical rabbinic texts should be read as a form of science fiction, though not in any reductive sense.6 This chapter constitutes an intervention in the burgeoning Jewish Studies sub-field of Shagar studies, breaking new ground and pushing back against some existing claims. In the larger context of this book on fantasy, theology, and the imagination, this chapter seeks to present some of the dynamics of these topics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Jewish theology. Of particular note for the relationship between Jewish theology and the fields of theology and philosophy writ large is the peregrination into Shagar’s thought—by way of medieval Spain and nineteenth-century Ukraine—of a theory of the imagination which ultimately derives from Greek and Greco-Arabic philosophy. Readers without an interest in Jewish studies per se may therefore find this historical traversal and the use Shagar makes of this concept of the imagination quite interesting.

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A THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION Shagar lays out his theory of the imagination in three separate essays, and his discussion takes the same basic form in all three:7 He contrasts Moses Maimonides’s (d. 1204) negative opinion of the imagination with the more positive opinion of Judah Halevi (d. 1141), and then jumps to Naḥman’s elevation of imagination to the very center of faith.8 Shagar’s understanding of the imagination is thus a composite of twelfth- and eighteenth-century theorizing, repurposed for twentieth-century purposes. Maimonides and Halevi stake out opposing positions on a variety of medieval theological issues, perhaps chief among them the nature of prophecy and the role of imagination therein.9 Both, Shagar says, see imagination as central to prophecy, but while Halevi sees imagination as critical for the prophet to receive privileged divine information, Maimonides sees imagination as the faculty through which the prophet renders intellectually-comprehended information into a form compelling for their society.10 Prophecy, for Halevi, is thus about the attainment of truths via the imagination, while for Maimonides prophecy is about explaining otherwise entirely reasonable truth in a manner persuasive to the masses.11 Both figures frame “imagination” as a human faculty for intentionally calling to mind previously experienced sense perceptions—particularly from the visual field—and for combining this previously experienced perceptions in new, creative ways. Thus, Halevi sees imagination not only as the conduit for prophecy, but also as a tool for inspiring the self, saying that a Jew should imagine dramatic scenes from the Hebrew Bible in order to inspire herself to fear and love God. Most people, Halevi claims, are primarily moved not by truth but by sensory information, and the imagination can replicate or even generate that sort of sensory information on command.12 For Maimonides, that sort of volitional synthetic activity is exactly what makes imagination so dangerous; truth is arrived at by abstracting universal principles from concrete, particular objects, or by working from first principles, while the imagination simply recalls and combines concrete, particular objects and qualities in a potentially irrational manner.13 This enables a person to imagine something they never actually experienced (like scenes from the Hebrew Bible), but also to imagine things that are simply false, and even things that are logically impossible. For Maimonides the imagination is thus a source of sin, while for Halevi it is a source of religious inspiration.14 For Shagar, the practical significance of this medieval debate is that prophecy and imagination are both liberated from the chains of rational, worldly truth.15 As Shagar glosses on Maimonides, “choice, in the sense of a capacity to do the wrong thing, arises from an incomplete worldview.”16 Doing the

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“wrong” thing—something irrational—requires the freedom to defy rational comprehension of the world. For Maimonides, this is only possible given the distortions of the imagination, while for Shagar it is exactly this that makes imagination great.17 Shagar sees imagination, in its role of creating new sense perceptions detached from reality, as enabling the individual to make choices guided by personal inspiration and meaning rather than by some perceived natural law.18 The focus on freedom, absent in the medieval debate, is not Shagar’s innovation. It is foregrounded by Naḥman in an extended discourse which identifies faith with both imagination and the redemptive renewal of the world, in opposition to scientific causal determinism.19 “Faith begins where reason stops,” claims Naḥman, because reason derives a causally-necessary worldview from intellectual reflection upon the world, but only faith can transcend the world to conceive of the Creator who acts freely.20 Imagination thus provides a necessary basis for faith by freeing the individual to imagine new possibilities, both in terms of theology and in terms of utopianism and messianism. Shagar compares this to Herbert Marcuse’s critique of “instrumental reason” and the liberatory function of utopianism.21 Shagar’s theory of imagination thus stands alongside his other critiques of rationalism. Shagar claims that faith is always a wordless manifestation of the believer’s deepest self, and further that God transcends any particular formulation of faith—attempts to accurately represent the divine in demonstrable formulations are doomed to fail, at best, and fundamentally idolatrous, at worst.22 This also leads to Shagar’s wariness about imagination, minimal though it may be. By virtue of being disconnected from reality, imagination is both freeing and potentially dangerous. It can mislead, convincing people to follow their biases and desires, and it can lead people to ignore reality and hold onto ideologies that have long-since lost any explanatory power.23 Shagar thus counterbalances his emphasis on imagination with an emphasis on authenticity, sincerity, and close attention to lived reality, though he fails to address the tension between these two poles directly.24 Shagar thus portrays faith as akin to poetry, and encourages free creativity with an eye toward the possible rather than the necessary, or even toward the impossible that challenges preconceived notions of necessity.25 A word of critique is in order at this point. Shagar is knowingly and intentionally adopting a theory of imagination which entered Jewish theology in the Middle Ages, with roots going back all the way to Aristotle’s De Anima. This theory understands the imagination as a faculty or set of faculties innately given to individual use and experience, outside of any sort of cultural or ideological mediation.26 This is similarly the case with the paired conception of reason or the intellect which Shagar receives and makes use of

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alongside this theory of the imagination. Shagar depicts reason and imagination as a set of paired but oppositional faculties, to be understood primarily in reference to one another. While a model of this sort may have made sense in antiquity or the Middle Ages, this sort of essentialism runs aground upon encountering modern historical sensibilities. While Shagar might simply accept the ahistorical nature of his presentation, it creates problems for the details of his arguments which critical readers might find it harder to ignore. Shagar’s argument that imagination presents the possibility of escaping the chains of rationality and arriving at new possibilities may require believing that imagination itself exists outside all cultural and ideological contexts.27 If, on the other hand, imagination is always steeped in—and therefore perpetuates—cultural and ideological frameworks, then it cannot be a vehicle for escape and there are no new possibilities in the offing. Similarly, the absolute, even oppositional dichotomy between the two terms may break down; perhaps reason requires exactly the sort of analogous thinking afforded by more sensuous engagement with the world. Additionally, because Shagar does not address the tension between his emphasis on imagination and his emphasis on truth and authenticity, he cannot provide standards for determining when a poetic creation meets his standards and when it fails to do so. These critiques do not render Shagar’s argument entirely inoperative, but they do recommend a more critical examination of its component parts and conclusions. As we shall see below, Shagar ultimately emphasizes the negative role of imagination in a way that may not require its ideological purity, imaginative clarity, or strict difference from reason, but caution is still in order. THE FANTASTIC TALES OF RABBI NAḤMAN Stories have never been foreign to the Jewish tradition—from the earliest biblical texts onward—but Naḥman’s tales stand out. Even in his immediate Hasidic context where storytelling took on new religious meaning, Naḥman’s stories were exceptional, for one primary reason: They are fantasies.28 Whereas Jewish stories had previously featured exemplars of Jewish life and behavior, Naḥman’s tales feature lost princesses, pirate captains, and invisible kings, swapped identities and fantastic inversions.29 Near the end of his life, Naḥman suddenly made these stories much more central in his teaching, seemingly driven by messianic sensibilities. Many of Naḥman’s stories constitute an intervention in the traditional Jewish figure of the Messiah, and the practice of telling the stories may have been an attempt to hasten the arrival of the messianic era.30 Shagar’s analyses of these stories focuses more on their effect on the reader rather than their supposed messianic effect on history.31

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In a programmatic introduction to the stories, he lays out his understanding of the unique nature and function of Naḥman’s tales.32 While he goes on to suggest additional value contributed by the very mode of telling stories as opposed to giving sermons,33 Shagar’s introduction focuses primarily on what introducing literary elements, particularly fantasy, directly into religious discourse does to religiosity. As Shagar notes, the question of what does or does not belong within religious discourse is essentially a function of convention. Something might be foreign to religious discourse in one social and historical context, but not in another. Naḥman’s stories have been a part of Jewish discourses for over 200 years, so contemporary readers can fail to notice the strange combination of elements they represented at the time. Shagar therefore suggests that his students and readers imagine a rabbi today telling stories straight out of contemporary fiction for the sake of religious edification. We have already become accustomed to the presence of the Hasidic story on the Jewish bookshelf. The archaic language, the unique content matter—which we do not identify with the literature of our own era—make it easy to perceive an atmosphere of piety, ethics, and fear of God in the story. But as we shall see, Rabbi Naḥman’s tales introduced into religious literature forms and content no less foreign than a modern novel . . . !34

Shagar goes out of his way to argue that Naḥman need not have used such unexpected literary elements. The plots of the tales bear distinctly secular characteristics: heroes that aren’t Jews . . . kings and princesses, hunters, soldiers, and men of the forest. None of these elements belong to Jewish reality, rather they come from [Naḥman’s] non-Jewish surroundings, to its myths and [cultural] world of images . . . Couldn’t he have told nice stories using characters closer to the world of Judaism?35

Shagar wants to emphasize that Naḥman made a clear choice to go outside of Judaism, and even outside any religious framework whatsoever to find material for his stories. Shagar argues that these foreign elements—and their foreignness itself—are not incidental to Naḥman’s literary project; they constitute a critical religious tool for Naḥman’s aims.36 So what was Naḥman’s aim? To answer this, Shagar contrasts the content of the tales with the socio-religious character of the person telling them. We are talking about Rabbi Naḥman’s creative capacity as the religious leader (tzaddik) of Bratslav. In particular, we are speaking of the capacity for religious renewal, radically interpreted as the renewal of divine presence in the world,

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or at least as the renewal of the vessels which enable this presence . . . because Rabbi Naḥman, leader of a Hasidic court . . . is the one telling the story, this throws the listener and his religious background into a fantastic literary world to which he himself does not belong. Rabbi Naḥman renews religiosity through incorporating elements that were initially strange to it.37

Shagar argues that when the leader of a Jewish religious community tells fantastic folktales to his followers, this has a dramatic effect on their religious discourse and their individual life. To begin with the discursive effect, the leader creatively blends religious and non-religious, Jewish and non-Jewish elements, creating a new communal religious discourse constituted by the foreign and the strange. This new religious discourse is what Naḥman, and Shagar after him, calls “the primary construction of the holy language,”38 or as Shagar puts it, The strange language penetrates the feeling of at-homeness of the holy language, creating a new formulation . . . This is the important and crucial process by which the world of religious terminology—the holy, fear and love of God, and devotion to God—receives new and unexpected meaning from the elements and formulations assimilated into it.39

On a fundamental level, Shagar thinks that religious language must always incorporate foreign elements. This is a prescriptive statement—it’s not that religious discourses always do incorporate foreign elements, it’s that they always should. This leads to a religious discourse that assumes a mystical divine ontology underlying the world in which believers live. While binaries of the sacred and the profane remain dominant within the religious discourse, the line between them is constantly transgressed as elements from the profane are “translated” into the sacred. “Secular folktales become a medium for devotion and faith. This idea contains a paradox, because it is specifically external worlds that are necessary for attaining holiness.”40 This is indicative both of Shagar’s fundamentally monistic worldview—he claims that on some level all things are divine—and of his insistence of the real plurality of human experience.41 Combining disparate elements of believers’ lived experience reveals or affirms the underlying unity of those elements within the divine, without denying that they are experienced as different. Holding that paradox together—the simultaneity of unity and difference—echoes the sort of mystical experience that is the second, non-discursive effect of Naḥman’s tales (according to Shagar). For Shagar, the existential ramifications of an idea are always paramount. It is not enough that this sort of paradoxical, combinatory discourse reflects Shagar’s pluralistic monism, it must also—in fact, primarily—be suited to the Jews who participate in it. Indeed, it is for this reason that Shagar’s writings

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on translation also emphasize the idea of “living in multiple worlds.” Shagar argues that modern Jews do not exist on a spectrum between traditional religiosity and modern secularism, but rather exist in both worlds simultaneously. Instead of a harmonious religious life, the modern believer has one leg in tradition and one leg in modernity, and “manages a confusing and often even schizophrenic set of relationships between them.” This modern believer’s “religiosity does not define itself with the regular religious definitions, but enables a weaving of unusual identities, integrating multiple worlds.”42 Speaking to this modern believer requires a religious discourse that is just as multifarious. “For many of us, the rousing effect of [Tolstoy’s] story will be much greater than that of [traditional religious] study.”43 A religious discourse constituted in part by fiction and fantasy can thus speak to the modern believer much more compellingly than an uncomplicatedly traditional discourse. Beyond the way Naḥman’s tales shape Jewish religious discourse, Shagar also emphasizes the mystical effect they have on their audience (this topic will be discussed more in-depth in the following section but must be touched on here). “There is a close link between the literary form, the non-Jewish content, and the mystical experience which the story enables a person to reach.”44 Shagar suggests that the very experience of reading Rabbi Naḥman’s tales can engender a mystical experience. He does not flesh out the nature of this mystical experience, but he connects the discussion back to the imagination in one tantalizing and helpful line: “The imagination—the ability to break free from a monolithic, exclusive form of perception—[and imagining] that indeed we can think a new, better world—this itself is faith . . . ”45 The emphasis in this sentence is on the negative function of imagination, on the way imagination enables a breaking-away from narrower forms of thinking and perceiving. The mystical experience might therefore be considered a form of apophasis, a negative mysticism where paradox and negation are used to undermine the totalizing aims of rationalism.46 Shagar sees rationalism—in the sense of making reason a fundamental principle of individual and collective life rather than a secondary element—as constraining human life, which is not inherently reasonable. Imagination—the ability to generate new ideas, images, and forms of life not rationally-derivable from pre-existing conditions or assumptions—thus becomes liberatory, and even redemptive. In sum, Shagar frames Naḥman’s tales as injecting a foreign element— fantasy—into the heart of Jewish religious discourse. This element’s foreignness upsets the binary assumptions of traditional Jewish religious discourse, and spurs the process of “translation” between the sacred and the profane. In doing so, it also encourages the individual’s imagination, driving them toward a form of negative mysticism wherein the expansive possibilities and combinations made visible by the imagination undermine the strict rules of logical reason.

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MYSTICAL SCIENCE FICTION AND SCIENCE-FICTIONAL MESSIANISM Shagar discusses science fiction in two contexts: the first is as part of a broad discussion of postmodernity and mysticism, and the second is in regard to rabbinic homiletic depictions of the messianic era.47 In the first, science fiction itself is under discussion as Shagar argues that it can induce a mystical effect in its audience,48 while in the second, science fiction becomes a useful lens for thinking about classical rabbinic texts about messianism. He thus himself enacts the same sort of personal and discursive effects which he attributed to Naḥman’s tales. Shagar is known in the Religious-Nationalist community in Israel—for better and for worse—as a herald of a postmodern, mystical religiosity.49 As part of the theoretical background for this religiosity, he argues that postmodernity lays the groundwork for mystical forms of life, and that science fiction is the genre most characteristic of the postmodern era.50 The logic behind this claim, Shagar explains, is that both science fiction and postmodernity are concerned with ontological questions: they explore the nature of what is, rather than merely asking how we can know what is. This means that science fiction involves imagining reality as if it were radically different from the reality in which we live, and imagining that this different reality is somehow the future of our own reality.51 Although science fiction is widely misperceived as dealing mostly with the advent of fantastical technological advances, its primary concern is that of changes in conscious-ness. Rather than emphasize the technology in the futuristic worlds it describes, science fiction highlights the mental developments that technology engenders. Alongside copious depictions of starships, exotic worlds, robots, powerful artificial intelligences, and time machines, the genre also features all manner of bizarre states of consciousness and shifts in awareness. . . . Another major theme of science fiction pertains to alternative modes of existence: The genre portrays countless alien worlds that are fundamentally different from our own.52

These depictions, Shagar says, are “imbued with a sense of unreal reality” and “generates the excitement of knowing what has yet to transpire but is destined to become reality. This excitement generates a mystical experience.”53 The paradoxical “unreal reality” of these radically different visions of the future “disrupts our normal consciousness” and “merely thinking about them can trigger a mystical experience.”54 The person reading or watching science fiction material both maintains their understanding of reality and immerses themselves in a strange—and estranging—world.55

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Living in the real world and the fantasy world simultaneously opens the individual up to a mind-bending mysticism, simultaneously affirming two mutually-negating options. The “mystical experience” to which Shagar refers should probably be understood as a form of negative mysticism or apophasis.56 Apophatic discourses involve the simultaneity of affirmation and negation, paradoxically negating that which is also asserted to be true. This leads to a moment of mystical experience involving the “anarchic” breakdown of principles and binaries, centered on the negative experience itself rather than on the experiencing subject (the mystic) and the object of experience.57 Sells emphasizes as well the importance of affirmation in the process of apophasis: negation on its own is meaningless, it is only the negation of affirmation that leads to the mystical moment.58 This also means that these negative mystical moments, which always involve a divine that transcends any specific religious tradition, can also only take place within a specific religious tradition with its specific affirmative statements.59 Similarly, for Shagar, it is the contrast between the specific understanding of reality that a person affirms in their daily life and the realities affirmed when they immerse themselves in science fiction that creates the moment of mystical consciousness. Shagar’s mysticism is not focused on an experience of the messianic future or of the fantastic, but on the experience of mystical negation resulting from combining these elements with the banal present. Shagar expands on his literary comparison in an essay exploring various forms of messianism within the Jewish tradition.60 Discussing supernatural depictions of the messianic era, Shagar appeals to science fiction in order to explain them. In order to understand these wondrous, magical depictions, which are not of this world, we can look to a somewhat parallel literary phenomenon, science fiction. Both science fiction and the rabbis’ homilies about the future redemption describe an alternative world. This world’s primary purpose, if we can speak of such a thing, is to lay bare the mystery of our lives, aiding the collapse and destruction of our banal, boring everyday life. Both [literary phenomena] have a similar effect on their readers—they often arouse mystical sensations within them. In the rabbis’ days there were no rockets; the eschatological homilies don’t talk about distant galaxies or about worlds full of robots and beyond-human creatures. However, they contain just as much magic, and wonders just as great [as science fiction contains]. They provide the realistic possibility of a substantive alternative to this world, an alternative that many of the rabbis certainly thought would arrive one day . . . In this way, the miraculous and the wondrous burst into the world and disrupts its factual, scientific stability.61

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For Shagar, rabbinic homilies depicting the future redemption share science fiction’s estranging function. Even though they lack science fiction’s technological trappings, they “fracture our fixed reality” in just the same manner.62 If science fiction is defined primarily by “changes in consciousness . . . the mental developments that technology engenders,” then we could rightly call rabbinic messianic homilies “science fiction.”63 These messianic homilies not only constitute a path to “mystical sensations,” they also introduce contingency into religious life in the present. Imagining a different reality, one that “takes part in the real,”64 asserts quite powerfully the limited nature of the present reality. Messianic pronouncements, understood in this manner, are not primarily confident statements about what will happen in the future. Instead, they are attempts to imagine a radically different reality, with the primary emphasis being on the radical difference rather than the specific content of the pronouncements. The emphasis is on negating any sense of permanence or necessity that might accrue to the present reality.65 Regardless of the content or verity of what is imagined, Shagar asserts that its sheer otherness accomplishes—or can accomplish—the apophatic task of negating existing forms of individual and collective life, exposing their contingency. This passage also represents a great example of the discursive shift Shagar discusses in context of Naḥman’s tales. In his literary comparison, Shagar expands the bounds of Jewish religious discourse to include science fiction, scandalizing the line between sacred and profane. It’s easy to imagine traditionally-minded religious thinkers insisting that science fiction is fundamentally foreign to religion and thus the two should never be spoken about in the same breath. Science fiction, they might claim, is secular and lowbrow, designed merely to entertain, and has nothing to do with religion and messianism. While accepting that claim of foreignness, Shagar refuses the conclusion that the two genres should therefore be kept separate. Instead, this foreignness provides a religiously-significant opportunity. Shagar “translates” rabbinic homilies into the ostensibly secular category of science fiction, while also endeavoring to show the mystical significance of science fiction as a genre. In each of these two discursive acts, Shagar traverses the line between secular and religious, creating a broader religious discourse supported by his underlying monistic ontology, while also—Shagar suggests—leading the individual believer toward a mystical experience. CONCLUSION This chapter has described Shagar’s medieval-modern theory of the imagination, showing how he identifies the imagination with freedom in contrast to reason which he identifies with necessity. In the process, he notes

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Maimonides’s critique of the imagination as combining things that are logically incompatible. This set the stage for the next two sections, which explored Shagar’s discussion of the fantastic folktales of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav and Shagar’s thinking about the mystical significance of science fiction as a genre. When discussing Naḥman’s tales, Shagar emphasized the way the tales—unique among traditional Jewish stories—are fantasies, and explored what it might mean for a religious leader to tell fantasy stories to his followers. Shagar’s discussion highlighted two effects of the tales: mystical sensations and hybridization of Jewish religious discourse. The mystical effects were generated by the combining of fantasy with the socio-religious stature of the Hasidic leader, typically thought to be incompatible. The discursive effect was seen as an example of what Shagar calls “translation,” wherein elements of typically non-Jewish, non-religious forms of life are introduced into Jewish religious discourse, rendering it more “complete” and enabling it to speak to the lived experience and concerns of modern Jews. Shagar’s own thinking about science fiction follows these same two paths, asserting a mystical effect to reading/watching science fiction, and enacting the same sort of “translation” by using science fiction as a lens through which to understand rabbinic homilies about the messianic era. The parallels between the discussion of Naḥman’s tales and the discussion of science fiction highlights the deep influence of Naḥman on Shagar. Naḥman’s presence is pervasive throughout Shagar’s writings, and Shagar taught classes on Naḥman throughout his career.66 He will often cite Naḥman’s authority when differing from the mainstream theology of his community.67 But it also highlights Shagar’s tendency to project himself onto Naḥman. His readings of Naḥman often have as much—if not more—to do with his own theological and religious concerns as with Naḥman’s. The flow of themes like the importance of imagination is thus bidirectional—it is Naḥman’s influence on Shagar, but also Shagar’s projection onto Naḥman. The degree to which Shagar’s identification with Naḥman enables him to see what Naḥman is really doing or keeps him from seeing Naḥman clearly remains a question for the interpreter in each individual instance. To sum up Shagar’s thinking on the importance of imagination and fantasy for theology, it has emerged in this chapter that Shagar wants faith and theology to be free from rational necessity and from the limits of present reality. Rather than deriving, abstracting, or extrapolating faith from reality, Shagar wants the believer to imaginatively create it. Moreover, this imaginative activity should involve incorporating elements from outside faith and tradition into a believer’s religious discourse, creating an expansive, mystical discourse of faith fit for the modern believer (Shagar is speaking from within a particularistic, Jewish framework, but his assertions do not depend on it). This fits well with Shagar’s emphasis on the mystical function of challenging

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existing realities.68 As discussed above, apophatic mysticism manages a dialectic relationship between negation and affirmation—while negation may trigger the mystical moment, this negation depends on a preceding affirmation in order to have this effect.69 Apophatic mysticism thus always exists within a cataphatic tradition, and Shagar’s imaginative challenge to existing orders depends on those orders themselves. Existing within a specific socio-historical moment, political situation, and religious tradition, Shagar calls on his readers to set themselves free within their moments, situations, and traditions. In combining the conservative and the radical, Shagar sees the possibility of mystical grace. NOTES 1. Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, We Will Walk in Fervor: Selected Essays, ed. Zohar Maor (Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2008), 62. All quotations from Shagar have been translated by me, with exception of citations from the volume: Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Faith Shattered and Restored, ed. Zohar Maor, trans. Eliyahu Leshem (Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2017). 2. One of the primary ways people commonly divide up Jewish society in Israel is along religio-political lines, yielding a threefold division into secular, Ultra-Orthodox, and National-Religious communities (the latter two both maintain strictly traditional models of Jewish law [halakhah], and are distinguished primarily by the manner and degree of integration with contemporary secular culture). These distinctions aren’t always clear, and there are important subcommunities (like the National-UltraOrthodox community), but it is sufficient for a paper on Shagar, who saw himself as working primarily within the National-Religious community, though not totally separate from the Ultra-Orthodox, and as situated within the secular hegemony of broader Israeli society. Shagar’s writings—some 20 volumes as of this writing—have largely been published posthumously, and almost entirely in Hebrew. One collection of selected essays has been published in English translation, and a book of holiday sermons in English translation is forthcoming. Shagar’s theology is the focus of small but growing academic attention within Israel, and is discussed in three English language books. See Ephraim Chamiel, Between Religion and Reason (Part I): The Dialectical Position in Contemporary Jewish Thought from Rav Kook to Rav Shagar, trans. Avi Kallenbach, Studies in Orthodox Judaism (Academic Studies Press, 2020); Miriam Feldmann-Kaye, Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019); Daniel Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism (De Gruyter, 2018). 3. Shagar was an autodidact. He never went to university, choosing to remain within the walls of Orthodox religious institutions his entire life. He also does not seem to have read extensively in English, if at all. His footnotes to non-Jewish texts

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are made up of Hebrew translations of philosophical works and Hebrew secondary literature from Israeli scholars. 4. He himself refers to its centrality for his religious and discursive projects in an early introduction to a book of sermons for the Jewish holiday of Purim. See Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Pur Means Lottery: Sermons for Purim, ed. Odayah Tsuriyeli (Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2005), 8. 5. See the essay “On Translation and Living in Multiple Worlds” in Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, The Remainder of Faith: Postmodern Sermons for Jewish Holidays, ed. Yishai Mevorach (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2014). More on this below. 6. The relationship between the science fiction and fantasy genres has been explored at length in the secondary literature. For the purposes of this essay, what matters is less how the genres might actually be related and more how Shagar sees them as related, which we will detail below. 7. See Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, “On Faith, Art and Imagination,” in We Will Walk in Fervor: Selected Essays (Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2008), 251–57; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik: The Imagination According to R. Naḥman of Bratslav,” in We Will Walk in Fervor: Selected Essays (Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2008), 127–37; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World,” in Expositions on Likkutei Moharan, vol. 2 (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2014), 444–68. There is a decent amount of overlap between the three essays, and the editors of “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World” attest to using some sections of the other two essays to flesh out lacunae in the text. 8. All three of these figures, though particularly Maimonides and Halevi, have been the subjects of voluminous academic study. For two good studies of Maimonides and Halevi, respectively, see Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (Princeton University Press, 2015); Diana Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari (SUNY Press, 2012). For the imagination in medieval Jewish philosophy more broadly, see Dianna Lynn Roberts-Zauderer, Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought: Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2019). For two key studies on Naḥman, see Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav (Woodstock, NY: Jewish Lights, 1992); Zvi Mark, Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (London: Continuum, 2009). As both Mark and Shagar note, Naḥman is drawing directly on Maimonides presentation of prophecy in his Guide for the Perplexed. 9. Much of the ground Shagar covers is rehashed in Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 41–49. Reiser also helpfully addresses secondary literature and interpretive debates regarding Halevi and Maimonides’s opinions in a way Shagar does not. The medieval debate should also be contextualized within broader medieval and ancient discourses (Jewish and otherwise) around the place of the imagination within religion. For some of that context, see Austin Freeman’s chapter in this volume on religion and the sin of imagination.

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10. Rosenberg, “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik,” 129–31; Rosenberg, “On Faith, Art and Imagination,” 252–255; Rosenberg, “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World,” 453–58. 11. The truths Halevi has in mind are facts about reality that can be formulated as propositions, but which cannot be known through reason or experience—they require the privileged access granted by prophecy. According to Halevi, questions like “Which actions are most desirable to God?”—the issue driving the narrative of The Kuzari—can be expressed clearly, but only once they have been divinely revealed. See Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 14–15, 83–84. 12. See the fifth paragraph in the fourth section of Halevi’s chief work, The Kuzari. There and elsewhere in the book, Halevi takes as given that people are moved by direct experience to a much greater degree than by—or perhaps to the exclusion of— rational thought. This is a broader theme within Shagar’s writings as well. See, for example, Rosenberg, Faith Shattered and Restored, ed. Zohar Maor, trans. Eliyahu Leshem (Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2017), 22–23. 13. Maimonides’s concerns with objects and qualities derives from Greco-Arabic Neo-Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic discourses, a discussion of which exceeds the scope of this chapter. So too Maimonides and Halevi’s respective assertions about the imagination and the intellect. 14. Rosenberg, “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik,” 130. 15. Shagar was broadly concerned with freedom in a manner that cannot be covered here. A good example is the essay “Freedom and Holiness” which touches on many, but not all, of Shagar’s thoughts on freedom. See Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Faith, 67–84. 16. Rosenberg, Faith, 75. 17. Rosenberg, “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik,” 132–133; Rosenberg, “On Faith, Art and Imagination,” 252, 254, 257; Rosenberg, “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World,” 455–66. 18. This is obviously reductive, particularly insofar as Maimonides is concerned, but will suffice for the purposes of this essay. 19. Specifically, the eighth teaching of the second volume of Likkutei Moharan. This teaching provides the basis for “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World,” and receives a thorough treatment in Mark, Mysticism and Madness, 1–24. 20. Rosenberg, “On Faith, Art and Imagination,” 256–257; Rosenberg, “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik,” 132; Rosenberg, “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World,” 455–57. 21. Citing from Ilan Gur-Zeev, The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996). 22. See Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, A Time of Freedom: Sermons for Passover, ed. Yishai Mevorach (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2010), 79–85; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, To Illuminate the Openings: Sermons and Essays for the Days of Hanukkah, ed. Yishai Mevorach (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2014), 114; Rosenberg, Faith, 21–24, particularly 23–24. These sources capture some of Shagar’s more romantic and existentialist critiques of rationalism. In other texts, he puts forward a

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critique that might be called “Post-Structuralist,” “Postmodern,” or something to that effect, where the claim is that language and particularity impinge unavoidably on rationality. For a good, if sometimes over-reaching analysis of Shagar’s “Postmodernism,” see Feldmann-Kaye, Jewish Theology. 23. Rosenberg, “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik,” 133–135; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Tablets and Shards of Tablets: Jewish Thought in the Face of Postmodernism, ed. Zohar Maor (Jerusalem: Yediot Aḥronot, 2013), 181–193, 407–410; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Expositions on Likkutei Moharan, ed. Netanel Lederberg, vol. 1 (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2012), 269–271. 24. One would be hard-pressed to source all the places where Shagar speaks of authenticity, but for a few good examples, see Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Return, My Soul: Grace or Freedom, ed. Yair Dreyfuss, 2nd edition (Efrata: Siach Yitzhak, 2004), throughout, but particularly 124–150; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Commemorating the First Day: Sermons for the High Holidays, ed. Odayah Tsuriyeli, 2nd ed. (Efrata: Siach Yitzhak, 2007), 15–25; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Expositions on Likkutei Moharan, ed. Netanel Lederberg, vol. 2 (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2015), 332–371. Notably, authenticity and attention to reality serve as a basis for critiquing both imagination and over-confident rationalism simultaneously. 25. See Rosenberg, We Will Walk in Fervor, 241–250; Rosenberg, Expositions on Likkutei Moharan, 2012, 1:269–271; Rosenberg, Tablets, 422–423; Rosenberg, Remainder, 41–44; Rosenberg, Faith, 36–38. 26. The lack of mediation is an important theme for Shagar. For a discussion of this topic in context of Shagar’s mysticism, see Leore Sachs-Shmueli, “Shagar’s Mystical Space: Moving between the Languages of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Rav Kook,” Religions 13, no. 1 (January 2022): 10, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3390​/rel13010010. 27. For a piercing study of some of the way imagination and aesthetics more broadly have been theorized exactly as tools of culture and ideology, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990). 28. See Green, Tormented Master, 337–367, particularly 341–344, 351. As with Naḥman’s more theoretical writings, libraries of both devotional and scholarly literature have been written on Naḥman’s tales. A particularly good work in context of the present study is Ora Wiskind-Elper, Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Naḥman of Bratslav (Albany: State University of New York, 1998). 29. Wiskind-Elper, Tradition and Fantasy, 42–43.One of Naḥman’s most famous tales, “The Story of the Seven Beggars,” features six characters each characterized by some sort of lack (blindness, deafness, etc.) which they ultimately explain as an illusion resulting from such a great degree of presence (of sight, hearing, etc.) that it in no way resembles normal presence. 30. Green, Tormented Master, 224–229, 337–350; Wiskind-Elper, Tradition and Fantasy, 26–33, 48–50. 31. Shagar is not alone in this contention. Shaul Magid claims that “Naḥman’s turn to the tales may have been his final attempt to fix the imaginative faculty of Israel before his death.” See Shaul Magid, “Associative Midrash: Reflections on a

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Hermeneutical Theory in Likkutei MoHaRan,” in God’s Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 65 n.155. 32. Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, “Introduction to Rebbe Naḥman’s Tales,” in Life of Yearning: New Interpretation to the Tales of Reb Nachman of Breslov, ed. Roee Horen (Aviv: Miskal—Yediot Aḥronot Books and Chemed Books, 2010), 11–31. While Shagar presents himself as analyzing Naḥman’s stories, he does not do so from a disinterested posture, but rather with the specific goal of inspiring his audience. Shagar’s essay is long and contains divergent themes and interpretive trajectories. In this chapter I discuss only those relevant to the topic at hand. 33. In one felicitous section, Shagar compares the telling of stories to contemporary “narrative therapy,” a form of therapy wherein the patient “re-tells” the events of their life in a manner that grants them new, healthier meaning. See Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 26–31. 34. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 12. 35. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 14. 36. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 18. 37. Rosenberg, Remainder, 97–98. 38. Jewish mystical traditions like the Kabbalah have often focused on linguistic forms of mysticism. The following classic article is a good place to start on this topic: Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” Diogenes 20, no. 79 (September 1, 1972): 59–80; Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala: (Part 2),” Diogenes 20, no. 80 (December 1, 1972): 164–94. 39. Rosenberg, Remainder, 97–98. 40. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 25. 41. Rosenberg, Faith, 97–99, and 32–33. Shagar is vague on the exact nature of this monism that renders all things in some sense divine. Is the divine present in the very substance of all things? Is God equally providentially-concerned with all things, thus leveling all value-distinctions between different things without changing the relationship between those things and God? Some other option? Shagar does not this these question (though his citations from Hasidic thinkers perhaps gesture toward actual divine presence in the substance of things). Shagar’s emphasis is on the way that no one ideology or way of life can lay claim to “the absolute” or to a “metaphysical handhold” to the exclusion of all others. The tension between an underlying monistic ontology and the pluralism of human experience (assumed by the basic permitted/forbidden binaries of Jewish law) was a key feature of internecine Jewish polemics in the eighteenth century. For a good study of the theology on either side of this debate, see Menachem Lorberbaum, “Rethinking Halakhah in Modern Eastern Europe: Mysticism, Antinomianism, Positivism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law, ed. Christine Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 232–59. A key feature of this debate was the ramifications for the normativity of Jewish law: If divinity is all-pervasive, then what does it mean to consider something “impure,” “unclean,” or “forbidden”? Shagar himself never explicitly takes an antinomian or hypernomian position, though some

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of his texts may gesture in that direction. See, for example, Rosenberg, Tablets, 140; Rosenberg, Remainder, 143–145. For a broader study of this topic in modern Jewish mysticism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 42. Rosenberg, Remainder, 100. 43. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 21. 44. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 24. 45. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” 26. 46. This chapter highlights the negative function of the imagination in Shagar’s writings, which emerges as a dominant theme from his various discussions on the topic. However, this does not rule out the possibility of imagination also serving a more positive, affirmative role. See, for example, Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Lectures on the Tanya, ed. Elhanan Nir (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2021), 45–46. The emphasis there remains on the way imagination opens the believer up to something new, but the framing is distinctly positive. 47. See Rosenberg, Faith, 122–126; Rosenberg, Tablets, 58–63; Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, On That Day: Sermons and Essays for the Holidays of Iyyar, ed. Yishai Mevorach (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2012), 165–66. 48. In a footnote, Shagar’s editors suggest that he is speaking of mystical “consciousness” rather than mystical “experience.” See Rosenberg, On That Day, 166 n. 5. To the degree that this difference is significant, it falls outside the scope of this chapter, and I will continue to refer to mystical “effects,” “sensations,” and “experiences” without significant differentiation. A discussion focused on Shagar’s mysticism would obviously correct this lacuna, and remains a desideratum. 49. Many of the early responses to Shagar are helpfully discussed in Feldmann-Kaye, Jewish Theology. 50. Shagar bases this claim on the work of Abraham Balaban, who himself cites Brian McHale. See Abraham Balaban, A Different Wave in Israeli Fiction: Postmodern Israeli Fiction (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1995); Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (North Yorkshire: Methuen Publishing, 1987). The translation of Shagar in Rosenberg, Faith, 122–126, does cite McHale, but it does not appear in the Hebrew original. 51. This futurity gives substantiality and significance to the imagined reality of science fiction, “enabl[ing] it to take part in the real,” in Shagar’s language. See Rosenberg, Faith, 123–124. However, we have already seen that Shagar does grant significance to fantasy in his discussion of Naḥman’s folktales. There, Shagar attributes the significance and substantiality of the stories to the social status of the person telling them, the Hasidic communal leader (the tzaddik). Futurity and the tzaddik thus both function to grant weight to otherwise imaginary stories, giving the audience a reason to open up to the possibilities contained therein. 52. Rosenberg, Faith, 123. 53. Rosenberg, Faith, 124. 54. Rosenberg, Faith, 123, 124.

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55. There is a long history of scholarly work on the alienating effects of science fiction on its audience. For a few key examples, see Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979); Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?,” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 147–58; Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000); Tom Moylan, “Reading Utopia, Reading Utopian Readers,” Science Fiction Studies 31, no. 3 (November 2004): 421–27; Simon Spiegel, “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of ‘Estrangement’ in Science Fiction Theory,” Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 3 (November 2008): 369–85; Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 56. The literature on negative mysticism and apophasis is vast, but for a classic on the topic that is useful for understanding Shagar’s aims, see Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For recent work charting the role of negative theology in modern Judaism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Michael Fagenblat, ed., Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017). Even beyond this specific topic, Shagar is broadly interested in combining religious and theological affirmations with a fundamental, underlying negation. See, for example, Rosenberg, Return, 27–28; Rosenberg, Tablets, 39–45; Rosenberg, Faith, 92–97. This understanding of negative mysticism in Shagar’s writings should be seen as different from—but perhaps complementary to—the understanding presented by Leore Sachs-Shmueli in her article, “Shagar’s Mystical Space: Moving between the Languages of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Rav Kook.” Sachs-Shmueli wonderfully lays out some of Shagar’s unpublished statements on the topic, but fails to note the negative characteristic of much of his published writings on mysticism. She comes close in noting the way Shagar often arrives at mysticism via the play of multiple contradictory elements, but the majority of the article does not focus on or think through this approach. See Sachs-Shmueli, “Shagar’s Mystical Space,” particularly 2, 8. 57. Sells, Mystical Languages, 209. 58. Sells, Mystical Languages, 209–210. 59. Sells, Mystical Languages, 209–214; for an excellent discussion of this issue in a specifically Jewish context, see Gershom Scholem, “Mysticism and Society,” Diogenes 15, no. 58 (June 1967): 1–24. 60. Jewish messianism has typically taken two forms: the natural, political model, on the one hand, and the utopian, apocalyptic, and cosmic model, on the other. The classic work on this topic remains Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 61. Rosenberg, On That Day, 165–166. 62. Rosenberg, On That Day, 166. 63. Rosenberg, Faith, 123. 64. Rosenberg, Faith, 123.

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65. “Reality” here should be taken broadly to refer not just to social dynamics and political structures but to religious life as well. Jewish life is—to varying degrees— governed by the rhythms of Jewish law and the commandments, but there have been texts and voices since antiquity describing the annulment of the commandments in the messianic era. For some of Shagar’s texts on these issues, see Rosenberg, Pur Means Lottery: Sermons for Purim, 48–51; Rosenberg, On That Day, 217–224, 226–243, 335–346, 361–367, and many other places throughout. 66. Some of these classes have been collected in Rosenberg, Expositions on Likkutei Moharan, 2012; Rosenberg, Expositions on Likkutei Moharan, 2015. There are reported plans to publish a volume of Shagar’s classes on Naḥman’s tales as well. 67. A particularly good example is the essay “Religious Zionism in a Postmodern Era” in Rosenberg, Tablets, 139–162. 68. To better understand Shagar’s aims, it is worth considering Shagar’s statements about faith—and particularly messianic faith—as challenging the existing order. This sort of idea has obvious social and political ramifications, and Shagar himself was prone to critiquing the State of Israel from exactly this sort of posture. He articulates a messianic ideal of what a Jewish state might look like, and criticizes the concrete, contemporary state of Israel for not living up to it (Rosenberg, On That Day, 133–134, 228–230). However, this is not exactly a liberation theology. At his most antagonistic toward the State of Israel, Shagar calls first for the establishment of a “truly prophetic” left-wing religious political party, and then for disengaging religious life from the state while still being “loyal patriots” who “thrill” at the sound of the national anthem (Rosenberg, On That Day, 241; Rosenberg, We Will Walk in Fervor, 350). Shagar imagines a redemptive future when Jews and Arabs stand side-by-side as equals in Israel, but cannot imagine how to get there (Rosenberg, On That Day, 346). As free as Shagar’s imaginative theology is, it always exercises its freedom in relation to the status quo. It will thus at most achieve gradual change from within that order rather than the order’s total replacement, which it pushes off to the messianic era, outside the realm of agency. More often, this theology simply creates alienation from the regnant order, and perhaps cynicism toward it, but not necessarily positive engagement in active change of any sort (though he does speak positively of grassroots change in pushing for a more ethical society. See Rosenberg, Tablets, 345–359). For a recent volume collecting these and other texts on the State of Israel, as well as previously unpublished material, see Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, My Covenant of Peace: Right and Left, War and Peace (Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings & Miskal—Yediot Aḥronot Books and Chemed Books, 2020). 69. See note 48 above and the discussion there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Balaban, Abraham. A Different Wave in Israeli Fiction: Postmodern Israeli Fiction. Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1995. Chamiel, Ephraim. Between Religion and Reason (Part I): The Dialectical Position in Contemporary Jewish Thought from Rav Kook to Rav Shagar. Translated by

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Avi Kallenbach. Studies in Orthodox Judaism. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2020. Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Fagenblat, Michael, ed. Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017. Feldmann-Kaye, Miriam. Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age. Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019. Green, Arthur. Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. Woodstock, NY: Jewish Lights, 1992. Gur-Zeev, Ilan. The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996. Halbertal, Moshe. Maimonides: Life and Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982): 147–58. Lobel, Diana. Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012. Lorberbaum, Menachem. “Rethinking Halakhah in Modern Eastern Europe: Mysticism, Antinomianism, Positivism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law, edited by Christine Hayes, 232–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Magid, Shaul. “Associative Midrash: Reflections on a Hermeneutical Theory in Likkutei MoHaRan.” In God’s Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, 15–66. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. Mark, Zvi. Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. London: Continuum, 2009. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. North Yorkshire: Methuen Publishing, 1987. Moylan, Tom. “Reading Utopia, Reading Utopian Readers.” Science Fiction Studies 31, no. 3 (November 2004): 421–27. ———. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000. Reiser, Daniel. Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Roberts-Zauderer, Dianna Lynn. Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought: Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Moses Maimonides, and Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2019. Rosenberg, Shimon Gershon. A Time of Freedom: Sermons for Passover. Edited by Yishai Mevorach. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2010. ———. Commemorating the First Day: Sermons for the High Holidays [Hebrew]. Edited by Odayah Tsuriyeli. 2nd ed. Efrata: Siach Yitzhak, 2007. ———. Expositions on Likkutei Moharan [Hebrew]. Edited by Netanel Lederberg. Vol. 1. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2012.

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———. Expositions on Likkutei Moharan. [Hebrew] Edited by Netanel Lederberg. Vol. 2. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2015. ———. Faith Shattered and Restored. Edited by Zohar Maor. Translated by Eliyahu Leshem. Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2017. ———. “Imagination, Faith, and the Renewal of the World.” In Expositions on Likkutei Moharan [Hebrew], 2:444–68. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2014. ———. “Introduction to Rebbe Nahman’s Tales.” In Life of Yearning: New Interpretation to the Tales of Reb Nachman of Breslov [Hebrew], edited by Roee Horen, 11–31. Aviv: Miskal—Yediot Aḥronot Books and Chemed Books, 2010. ———. “Joseph the Dreaming Tzaddik: The Imagination According to R. Nahman of Bratslav.” In We Will Walk in Fervor: Selected Essays [Hebrew], 127–37. Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2008. ———. My Covenant of Peace: Right and Left, War and Peace [Hebrew]. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings & Miskal—Yediot Aḥronot Books and Chemed Books, 2020. ———. “On Faith, Art and Imagination.” In We Will Walk in Fervor: Selected Essays [Hebrew], 251–57. Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2008. ———. On That Day: Sermons and Essays for the Holidays of Iyyar [Hebrew]. Edited by Yishai Mevorach. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2012. ———. Pur Means Lottery: Sermons for Purim [Hebrew]. Edited by Odayah Tsuriyeli. Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2005. ———. Return, My Soul: Grace or Freedom [Hebrew]. Edited by Yair Dreyfuss. 2nd edition. Efrata: Siach Yitzhak, 2004. ———. Tablets and Shards of Tablets: Jewish Thought in the Face of Postmodernism [Hebrew]. Edited by Zohar Maor. Jerusalem: Yediot Aḥronot, 2013. ———. The Remainder of Faith: Postmodern Sermons for Jewish Holidays [Hebrew]. Edited by Yishai Mevorach. Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2014. ———. To Illuminate the Openings: Sermons and Essays for the Days of Hanukkah [Hebrew]. Edited by Yishai Mevorach. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2014. ———. We Will Walk in Fervor: Selected Essays [Hebrew]. Edited by Zohar Maor. Efrata: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2008. ———. Lectures on the Tanya [Hebrew]. Edited by Elhanan Nir. Alon Shevut: Institute for the Advancement of Rav Shagar’s Writings, 2021. Scholem, Gershom. “Mysticism and Society.” Diogenes 15, no. 58 (June 1967): 1–24. ———. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. ———. “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala.” Diogenes 20, no. 79 (September 1, 1972): 59–80. ———. “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala: (Part 2).” Diogenes 20, no. 80 (December 1, 1972): 164–94.

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Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Spiegel, Simon. “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of ‘Estrangement’ in Science Fiction Theory.” Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 3 (November 2008): 369–85. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Wiskind-Elper, Ora. Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. Wolfson, Elliot R. Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Chapter 7

Theology in Shadow A Reflection on Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea Oliver D. Crisp‌‌

One of the greatest works in modern fantasy fiction is the Earthsea sequence by Ursula K. Le Guin.1 Widely fêted as a work of fiction and world-building, it also raises important existential, spiritual, and philosophical-theological questions. This is particularly true of the first volume, in which the eponymous wizard, Ged/Sparrowhawk, lets loose a shadow upon the world that he then has to face and destroy. The story is about his quest to deal with this terrible entity that he has released into the world, and about how, in facing his fear, he finally becomes whole. In this chapter I offer a reflection on Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Although Le Guin did not write as a person of any particular faith, her work is imbued with religious and spiritual symbols, and raises important questions for those working in Christian theology. *** Way back in 1968, decades before Harry Potter was a twinkle in J. K. Rowling’s eye, Ursula Le Guin wrote a landmark work of high fantasy that included magic, dragons, a school of wizardry, and a boy who encounters and faces a great supernatural evil. This book, a modern classic in the genre, is A Wizard of Earthsea.2 It is, in essence, a bildungsroman. That is, its focus as a novel is upon the development and maturation of its central character as he faces a great existential crisis. In an essay written in the mid-1970s, seven years after the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea and reflecting on it, Le Guin comments, “most of the great works of fantasy are about that journey,” 101

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that is, the journey of self-knowledge. This is because “fantasy is the medium best suited to a description of that journey, its perils and rewards. The events of a voyage into the unconscious are not describable in the language of rational daily life: only the symbolic language of the deeper psyche will fit them without trivializing them.”3 The world of Earthsea is an archipelago, the central islands of which are populated by rustic agrarian communities of limited technology bound together in local alliances and fiefdoms. They are societies dominated by local custom, bound by magic, and watched over by mages. These are common enough tropes in the genre. Yet something about her world transcends schlock fantasy. There are several reasons for this. Partly, it is because of the thoroughness of her craft in forming, as Le Guin once put it, a world made of words, “where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation.”4 It is easy to suspend disbelief in reading Le Guin’s prose and to find oneself walking in the groves and over the hills and mountain paths of the island world she has made. For it is, we might say, a world that is complete. The artifice is so carefully wrought that after a few sentences one finds oneself having crossed over into Earthsea without ever consciously noticing the working of the illusion. This is due in no small measure to her rhetorically plain style. There is in her use of language a kind of studied simplicity: carefully turned sentences that convey in their honest utility something of the mythological. The sophistication of Le Guin’s worldbuilding is also evident in the manner in which the histories and context of the characters are drawn throughout the novel, and the care with which these things are, as creative writers say, shown rather than told. The distinction is something like this: to show a thing is to so integrate it into the narrative so that the reader registers it as a feature that seems to be a natural part of the whole. To tell a thing is to switch roles from storyteller to pedagogue, expounding aspects of the narrative in a way that jars and interrupts its flow and the reader’s immersion in it. Hence, the best creative writing unfolds the details of a story by means of showing, not telling. As the story proceeds, we are introduced to features of the culture and history of Earthsea such as the festivals that mark seasons like Sunreturn on the winter solstice and the Long Dance of midsummer eve, to intimations of the creation myths of Éa, and to ancient heroes of the dawn of history such as Erreth-Akbe, who died slaying the dragon Orm on the island of Selidor. But another reason why Le Guin’s world is so rich and plausible is surely that, though it is clearly a work of imagination, it bears the marks of verisimilitude. That is, its characters and their actions seem real; they and the things they do chime with our own experience of the world. Among philosophers, Bertrand Russell makes the case that there is a distinction to be had between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance.5 Knowledge by

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description is propositional. It is knowledge that such and such is the case— for instance, that honey is sweet to the taste. Such knowledge can be gained by reading books about apiary culture independent of any contact with honey itself. One might know all there is to know by description about honey without ever feeling it on your tongue. By contrast, knowledge by acquaintance is non-propositional. It is the knowledge gained by actually tasting honey, and knowing for oneself just how delicious it is.6 The verisimilitude of Le Guin’s Earthsea is something like knowledge by acquaintance. It is non-propositional. It has to do with the experience we have of the actual world and its inhabitants, the “taste” and “feel” of what we encounter in everyday life. In reading her work we find people and places that have a particular texture, that seem, in some respects, to be real or at least that bear the hallmarks of things that are real. The reason for this is surely that she has grasped how to present Earthsea in a way that ensures her characters and the world in which they are placed bear the relation of verisimilitude to the familiar seemings of the actual world we inhabit, which is (I suggest) the mark of a superior mythopoeic imagination.7 We can see this in an interview with Brian Attebery toward the end of her career in 2007. There Le Guin says of her work in fantasy that she is, “actually writing about real people and real problems, using fantasy metaphors and images, which allow one to separate out a problem such as being expected to be gifted in some way.”8 What, then, is A Wizard of Earthsea about? A brief recapitulation of some of the salient points of the narrative seems appropriate. The protagonist of the story is a boy called Sparrowhawk who hails from the backwater village of Ten Alders in the mountains of Gont, an island dominated by its single mountain peak. From time to time Gont is ravaged by the Kargs, Viking-like fair-skinned invaders from the North East. One such occasion provides the opening action of the narrative. Sparrowhawk, or Duny as he is named by his aunt, the local witch who helps rear him after his mother’s demise, is found to be the bearer of power. She teaches him minor local spells so that, when the marauding Kargs climb the hillside to attack the village from the valley below, Sparrowhawk works a weather charm that shrouds the village in a mist, discombobulating the invaders. As a consequence, they leave the village largely unscathed, and the community is saved. This action brings Sparrowhawk to the attention of the local mage, Ogion the Silent. He arrives and gives the boy his true name, Ged, in a kind of rite of passage ceremony. He takes him as an apprentice, but the arrangement does not last. Ged/Sparrowhawk is a restless and impatient lad, longing for mastery over his abilities and finding Ogion’s solitary ways and insistence on restraint and the balance of power frustrating. Thinking he might press ahead on his own, he foolishly attempts a spell in an old lore book when his master is away, and finds instead that in reading the half-understood runes he has

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inadvertently summoned a shadow that only the power of Ogion is able to dispel. Once Ogion has dealt with the shade and the darkness Ged has conjured, he offers him a choice: to stay and learn in quiet about the balance of power, or to leave Gont for the School of Wizardry on the isle of Roke. Ged chooses the latter, and sets sail for the Island of the Wise in a trading vessel ominously named Shadow. He arrives at the school and quickly proves himself a scholar adept in the various arts he must master. But he also finds a rival in Jasper, an older, haughty student from a well-to-do family. Eventually, in a kind of game of dare and in part to spite Jasper, Ged unleashes a great evil. By means of his art he tears a rent between the world of the living and the Sheol-like world of the dead, and in so doing lets loose the shadow he had initially summoned on Gont. The dark, crouching, formless shade attacks and horribly scars Ged before disappearing into the world. It is the event upon which the whole novel turns. Eventually leaving Roke, Ged spends much of the rest of the narrative tracking the Shadow down across Earthsea in the hope of removing it from the world it blights, encountering various adventures along the way. His final meeting with the Shadow at the edge of the world in the denouement of the novel is one of the great eucatastrophes of fantasy literature. Since its publication, and the writing of the other books in the original trilogy (subsequently expanded), a critical literature has grown up focused on Le Guin’s work and the world of Earthsea. Yet there is very little by way of theological reflection on her work of which I am aware. There are important reasons for attempting such reflection. After all, theology is the discipline that, according to the late Professor John Webster, focuses on God and all things in relation to God.9 And fantasy is that genre of creative writing that is, in many ways, the most obviously theological. This is not just because the states of affairs generated by the makers of such imaginary worlds are normally forged, ordered, and shaped by supernatural power—that is, the power of magic. It is also because a genre in which such powers are so obviously at work lends itself in an uncomplicated way to matters of a theological and philosophical nature. Such worlds presume there are powers that are beyond our ken, and outside the material realm. Thus, on the face of it, a high fantasy like A Wizard of Earthsea seems to be primed for theological analysis. This is hardly a novel thought. As J. R. R. Tolkien says in the Epilogue to the published version of his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories,” “in God’s kingdom . . . story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending’ [i.e. the eucatastrophe]. The Christian still has work to do, with mind as well as body . . . but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed.” He goes on to suggest that “in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.”10

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That may be true, and may even provide some motivation for the theological assessment of, and engagement with, fantasy literature of a decidedly non-Christian variety, like that of Le Guin (a matter to which we shall return). But it is surely also true that such worlds are not merely the creative work of makers of secondary worlds (as Tolkien calls them11), but are also frequently the garb for theological and philosophical ideas—an idea much more familiar in that close relative of fantasy literature, science fiction. It seems to me that both of these claims are true of Le Guin’s work. In an interview about her writing, Le Guin is asked how she planned Earthsea and developed its languages, characters, places, and so on. She replies, “But I didn’t plan anything, I found it.” “Where?” her interlocutor inquires. “In my subconscious” comes the reply.12 Elsewhere she has said that “fantasy is the language of the inner self.”13 No doubt that is the case. Yet, it is equally true that her novels are novels of ideas, especially political, social, moral, and religious ideas. Such things are not merely discovered, but fashioned and formed.14 THREE SOURCES OF A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA The narrative of A Wizard of Earthsea is informed by three major concerns, present in her other writings are well. These are Daoism, Jungian archetypes, and (by a kind of familial osmosis) cultural anthropology. Let us consider these in turn before considering some of the theological questions they, and her story, raise. Daoism is notoriously difficult to define, and I do not propose to do so here.15 Nevertheless there is good evidence of it in Le Guin’s work in general, and Earthsea is no different in this respect.16 One of the recurring themes of the book is the need for ontological balance. As Le Guin once quipped in summing up her work, “Don’t meddle. Keep the Balance. Man is Mortal.”17 There is an implicit acknowledgement of the danger in the use of power in the way that the mages of Earthsea approach their art. This is not just because, to borrow a hackneyed trope, with great power comes great responsibility. It is also because the use of power has effects that cannot always be fathomed, and that are often deleterious. As the throwing of a pebble into a pool generates ripples across the surface of the water, so the use of power (meaning, in the context of Earthsea, the power of magic) affects and unbalances the world. This idea is at the very heart of the narrative structure of the novel. It is Ged’s impetuosity and pride, and his unwillingness to take the slow, sure way of humility and patience exemplified in Ogion that leads him to disaster precisely because of his misuse of power. As Ogion says to Ged after he summoned the shadow the first time when illicitly reading the book of lore, “Have

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you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”18 More fundamentally still, the way in which this catastrophe of loosing the shadow is resolved in the narrative is by means of Ged embracing his shadow-self. It is the acknowledgement that he and the shadow are, in fact, two aspects of one whole that resolves the central problem of the novel. This is a profoundly Daoist idea: there is no light without dark, no good without bad. Ged plays the role of the yang to the yin of the shadow. But what is striking about Le Guin’s conclusion of the novel is the way in which she resolves this in the person of her protagonist. Ged himself sublates light and dark, good and bad. He is not just connected to the shadow that he is hunted by, and eventually hunts. He and the shadow are one whole; in meeting, they are united. The Shadow is also a Jungian archetype. Carl Jung developed a number of the ideas of his one-time mentor, Sigmund Freud. One of these, the collective unconscious, is a kind of psychic storehouse populated, among other things, by various archaic symbols or archetypes that are shared across cultures and people, though they may be refracted by particular cultural conditions in the life of a given individual in the repository of the personal unconscious. Jung writes, “[T]his part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is . . . a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.”19 According to Jung archetypes are expressed in art, culture, and dreams, and include things like the Great Mother and the Trickster—one aspect of which is the Shadow.20 The personification of one of Jung’s four central archetypes in one of the characters of her novel is one of Le Guin’s great literary achievements. However, Le Guin herself disavows such an attribution. She claims that the shadow motif is; “[a]s I found it: having never read a word of Jung when I wrote the book.”21 Be that as it may, and whether with or without the explicit help of Jung, Le Guin literally clothes an idea with a form—or rather, she clothes what looks very like a Jungian archetype with a formless shape that swells and changes, expressing in her depiction of the Shadow what it is about this archetype that troubles and challenges the reader. As Le Guin puts it in an essay on the use of Jungian archetypes in her work, The shadow is the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind. It is Cain, Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde. It is Vergil who guided Dante through hell, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu, Frodo’s enemy Gollum.

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It is the Doppelgänger. It is Mowgli’s Grey Brother; the werewolf; the wolf, the bear, the tiger of a thousand folktales; it is the serpent, Lucifer. The shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don’t want to, can’t, admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used.22

Such things occupy a kind of primitive, liminal space in our imaginations, standing between darkness and light, never fully seen or acknowledged, but lurking in wait ready to consume us if we are unwary enough to step into its path or stray too close to the penumbra in which it exists. As Archmage Gensher of Way says, when confronting Ged after the loosing of the shadow, “You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the Powers of unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Evil, it wills to work evil through you. The power you had to call it gives it power over you: you are connected. It is the shadow of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast. Has a shadow a name?”23 It is precisely this Jungian (or Jung-like) worry that Le Guin personifies to express both the dread we feel regarding the concept of the shadow, and its connection to Ged as the dark side of his own psyche, finally reconciled in the last action of the novel. The third major influence on her work is less direct. It has to do with Le Guin’s upbringing as a child of cultural anthropologists. One of the features that immediately strikes the reader upon entering the world of Earthsea is the central place that names have as the source of magical power. To know a thing’s true name, is to have power over it, to be able to control it. Thus, to avoid becoming the vassal of another, one must guard one’s true name, keeping it secret. This is the Rule of Names. In a short story originally published several years before A Wizard of Earthsea but set in the same world, Le Guin gives an early account of this conceit.24 As one of the characters in the story points out, the reason for this rule is that “the name is the thing . . . and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing.”25 Ged is a truename; Sparrowhawk is what Le Guin calls a “use-name,” that is, a name by which a person is commonly known in public. Early in the narrative, while studying with Kurremkarmerruk the Master Namer whose name means nothing in any language, we read that Ged “saw that in this dusty and fathomless matter of learning the true name of each place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the bottom of a well. For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.”26 One of the terrifying things about the shadow that Ged sets loose on the world is precisely that it has no name, and so cannot be controlled by the use of spells and charms. This device, to which we will return presently, is owed in large measure to the promptings

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provided by the research carried out by Le Guin’s parents, who were eminent cultural anthropologists. This is explained in a study of Le Guin’s rhetoric by Warren Rochelle. He writes, The first task of Adam in the biblical story was to name the animals in the Garden of Eden. Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Ursula Le Guin’s parents, studied this use of naming to order reality in the Yurok and other California Indians. For these Native Americans, to know the name of someone was to have power over them. Each individual had a use-name and a private, true name, revealed, if at all, only to a trusted few. Le Guin echoes this idea of the importance of naming and language in her Earthsea cycle where knowing the name of everything in True Speech is the art-magic of the wizards.27

It is interesting to discover that so basic an aspect of Le Guin’s narrative as the use of true names in magic may, in fact, be a notion borrowed from Californian Native Americans. For, without their views about names, mediated to Le Guin by the research of her parents, Earthsea would not have featured the central idea on which the narrative, and the world in which it is situated, hangs. A THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION Having considered these three sources of central themes in the novel, let us now turn to consider the theological dimension to Earthsea. To begin with, let me remove an old and hoary obstacle to such discussion. The obstacle in question is Le Guin’s use of magic as the power that binds Earthsea together. A theological objection to such things is not hard to come by; the practice of magic is, after all, forbidden in Scripture (e.g., Deut. 18:10–12). The objection might be baldly stated thus. We ought not to attend to literature that recommends the practice of magic any more than we ought to attend to literature that recommends the practice of infanticide or some other thing that Scripture explicitly forbids. What are we to make of this? Following Sir James Frazer, we may define magic as it is often understood today as “practices designed to bring spiritual or supernatural forces under the control of human agents.”28 If that is our understanding of magic, then Le Guin’s Earthsea is certainly a place where it is practiced via the Rule of Names. But Le Guin herself disavows any interpretation of her work that suggests she approves of occultism. She writes, “Probably it’s not necessary to say this. But I do loathe occultism, and so feel impelled to remind my more positivistic readers that one can go a very long way with Jung and the I Ching, as I do, without the slightest leaning towards occultism or

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obscurantism.”29 True, the narrative depends on magical practices, including necromancy or the summoning of the dead (cf. Lev 19:31). But the use of magic as a means of conveying power in a particular world does not, as Le Guin herself suggests, imply an endorsement of such practices in the world in which we live. In the context of Earthsea, magic has a much broader remit, and one that is concerned with an altogether different message. As Robert Galbreath remarks, in Le Guin’s work, “The occult thus calls forth a ‘larger’ response from the individual, awakening an enlarged understanding which in turn implies a far more complex reality that cannot be exhaustively known by a single faculty. The complementarity of a yin/yang universe requires a corresponding shift in perspective (of protagonist, narrator, author, or reader) from either/or exclusivity to both/and complementarity.”30 Le Guin’s Earthsea is a place of balance, where the Rule of Names governs the use of magic in a context without absolutes—a very Daoist notion. It is not an end in itself but a device by means of which to convey something about the need for equilibrium. Thus, the use of magic is not a real theological objection to the work. But attending to this worry does raise more fundamental concerns that are properly theological. These have to do with the Daoist and Jungian undercurrents in the text, which may seem to press the reader in a direction away from properly Christian theological concerns. This worry can be made clearer by attending to the eucatastrophic climax of the story. At the end of the narrative, Ged has tracked the shadow to a shapeless spit of land at the end of the known world with the help of his old school friend, Vetch. He and the Shadow move toward each other across the sand, Ged illuminating the scene with the werelight of his Wizard’s staff. As it approaches, the Shadow slips between different forms it has assumed in the narrative, until, at last, as they come together it resumes its original black shapelessness. They face off. Then, Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow’s name, and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: “Ged.” And the two voices were one voice. Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.31

No doubt in the melding of the two it might be thought that Daoism or the Jungian language of unconscious archetypes is implied or at least intimated. Perhaps that is true. Nevertheless, this is surely a denouement with deep theological resonance. It would be tempting to characterize such resonance in a way analogous to the use of Epimenides in the Pauline corpus in Acts 17 and Titus 1:12, where he is quoted in order to make a theological point—thus, “plundering the Egyptians” as an earlier generation of theologians might have

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put it, mindful of the way in which the Hebrews helped themselves to the spoils of their Egyptian masters as they fled in the Exodus. Although there is an apologetic tradition of appropriating the thought of pagan authors for theological purposes in this way, that is not what I am proposing here. Rather, I propose that it is precisely in its alterity that we should encounter the meeting of Ged and his shadow. Eschewing any attempt to domesticate Le Guin’s philosophical and religious assumptions, and letting the text stand and speak to us, I suggest that another way to read this theologically is to treat it as a window into a deep psychological and theological truth, namely, that we are alienated from what we should be by means of sin, and that we cannot address that problem by seeking to disassociate ourselves from that state, but rather, by addressing it. Ged becomes whole when he acknowledges and then embraces the fact that the nameless shadow, he has let loose in the world is, in fact, a shadow he himself casts. And he is made whole only when he is finally willing to embrace that understanding of himself. In Le Guin’s narrative salvation is brought about by this act of self-realization. As he climbs back into the boat with Vetch after the meeting with the shadow, Ged says, “[I]t is done. It is over” and “the wound is healed . . . I am whole, I am free.”32 The reason this resonates is because there is something about it that speaks of verisimilitude. To be reconciled, and to find a place of peace, a place that resolves our existential crises and that enables us to finally put to rest our shadows is, I think, a profound meditation on the human condition, and on the hope many of us have for something better than the disjointed state in which we find ourselves. But equally, Le Guin’s resolution, attempted against the backdrop of a worldview that is inimical to Christian theology, cannot be the whole story—at least, not from a theological perspective. Tolkien was surely right. The Gospel does not (or does not necessarily) vitiate fairy tales, it hallows them. For they often convey deep moral and psychological, as well as religious, truths. That is the case with A Wizard of Earthsea too. Yet, as Tolkien goes on to say, the Christian “still has work to do, with mind as well as body.” Could it be that this includes taking up the aspirations and resolutions of fantasy literature such as Le Guin’s and transposing them to a theological register in the hope that “in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation”?33 NOTES 1. My thanks to the members of the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (ITIA) in the University of St. Andrews who offered comments on an earlier draft of this essay in March, 2021, and to the editors of this volume for their assistance in completing revisions to the essay.

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2. The book is the first of a trilogy. A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) is succeeded by The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972). Le Guin returned to the world of Earthsea later in life with Tehanu (1990), “Dragonfly” (1997), Tales from Earthsea (2001), and The Other Wind (2001). She also wrote several short stories set in Earthsea, which are important keys to underlying themes in the work. These include “The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names” both of which are found in her early collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975). I will be using the edition of A Wizard of Earthsea found in The Earthsea Quartet (London: Penguin, 1993). Cited hereinafter as Earthsea, followed by page number. 3. Ursula Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32, no. 2 (1975): 139–148, 144. 4. Ursula Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: Putnam, 1979), 95. See Greer Gilman, “The Languages of the Fantastic,” in Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 134–146, 134. 5. The locus classicus is Russell’s paper, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 11 (1910–1911): 108–128. 6. Of course, there is a sophisticated literature on this topic, and the distinction is disputed. But that need not concern us here. The classic example in the modern philosophical literature is Frank Jackson’s thought experiment about Mary’s Room as part of what epistemologists call the “knowledge argument.” For an up-to-date discussion of this, see Martine Nida-Rümelin and Donnchadh O Conail, “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located at: https:​//​plato​ .stanford​.edu​/entries​/qualia​-knowledge​/. Last accessed, March 30, 2021. 7. This has been noted by a number of literary critics. For instance, Charlotte Spivak in her critical account of Le Guin’s mid-career oeuvre, Ursula K. Le Guin (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 4. See also Marek Oziewicz, One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card, Foreword by Brian Attebery, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 6 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008) who speaks of the way in which Le Guin utilizes what he calls the mythopoeic imagination that involves “sustaining the higher human faculties and awakening the sense of wonder, of the sacred, and of the human potential” (57). 8. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery, “A Conversation about Fantasy with Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17, no. 4.68 (2007): 371–382, 373. 9. See John Webster, “Principles of Systematic Theology” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11, no. 1 (2009): 56–71. See also Judith Wolfe, “Christian Theology,” Saint Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology, located at: https:​//​www​.saet​.ac​.uk​ /Christianity​/ChristianTheology (published 10 August, 2022). This refrain goes back to Thomas Aquinas, of course. 10. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harpercollins, 2006 [1983]), 156.

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11. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 155. 12. Taken from the interview of Le Guin that begins her essay, “Dreams Must Explain Themselves,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin 1972–2004 (London: Gollancz, 2018), 5. 13. Le Guin “The Child and the Shadow,” 148. 14. This is true despite Le Guin’s modesty and self-deprecation. In response to an issue of Science Fiction Journal that discussed her oeuvre in the mid-1970s, she writes, “By God! did I really think all that? The answer is, No. I didn’t. I did think some of it. The rest of it I felt, or guessed, or stole, or faked, or intuited; in any case achieved, not deliberately and not through use of the frontal lobes, but through humbler and obscurer means, involving (among others) imagery, metaphors, characters, landscapes, the sound of English words, the restrictions of English syntax, the rests and rhythms of narrative paragraphs.” Ursula Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS#7),” in Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 1 (1976): 43–46, 44. 15. A recent philosophical account can be found in Chad Hanson’s article on “Daoism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located at: https:​//​plato​.stanford​.edu​ /entries​/daoism​/ (last accessed 18th March, 2021). Hanson writes, “Daoism per se has no ‘constant dao.’ However, it does have a common spirit. Dao-centered philosophical reflection engendered a distinctive ambivalence in advocacy—manifested in their indirect, non-argumentative style, their use of poetry and parable. In ancient China, the political implication of this Dao-ism was mainly an opposition to authority, government, coercion, and even to normal socialization in values. Daoist ‘spontaneity’ was contrasted with subtle or overt indoctrination in any specific or social dao.” 16. In responding to some critics of her work that deal with her penchant for Daoism (= Taoism), Le Guin comments rather caustically, “The central image/idea of Taoism is an important thing to be clear about, certainly not because it’s a central theme in my work. It’s a central theme, period.” Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS#7),” 45. 17. Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS#7),” 45. 18. Le Guin, Earthsea, 31. 19. Carl Jung, Four Archetypes (London: Routledge, 2003 [1972]), 2. 20. See, e.g., the discussion of these things in Four Archetypes, especially ch. 1, “On the Concept of the Archetype.” 21. Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS#7),” 45. It is difficult to know what to make of this claim given that it is clear from other things she has written that she certainly has been influenced by Jung in her writing. 22. Le Guin “The Child and the Shadow,” 143. Earlier in the essay she comments, “the great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious symbol and archetype” (141). 23. Le Guin, Earthsea, 68. 24. Le Guin, “The Rule of Names,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose. SF Masterworks (London: Orion, 2015), 75. The Rule of Names has two aspects. These are to never ask a person her true name, and to never reveal your own.

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25. Le Guin, “The Rule of Names,” 76. These words are uttered by Mr. Underhill, who is the dragon Yevaud disguised as a rather hopeless, bumbling wizard. 26. Le Guin, Earthsea, 50. In this passage Master Kurremkarmerruk provides an extended lesson on the nature of true names, and on the need to ensure that all magic preserves equilibrium, so as to ensure the balance of power. See also 70, where Le Guin provides a longer account of names and naming. 27. From Warren Rochelle, Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2001), 6. 28. Cited by Ronald Hutton in his excellent study of the development of modern hermetic practices, The Triumph of The Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 66. 29. Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS#7),” 46. Le Guin’s equivocation on this matter is discussed in Robert Galbreath, “Holism, Openness, and the Other: Le Guin’s Use of the Occult (Holisme, ouverture et altérité: L’usage de l’occulte dans l’oeuvre de Le Guin)” in Science Fiction Studies Special Issue on Science Fiction by Women 7, no. 1 (1980): 36–48. 30. Galbreath, “Holism, Openness, and the Other,” 46. 31. Le Guin, Earthsea, 164. 32. Le Guin, Earthsea, 165. 33. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 155–156.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Galbreath, Robert. “Holism, Openness, and the Other: Le Guin’s Use of the Occult (Holisme, ouverture et altérité: L’usage de l’occulte dans l’oeuvre de Le Guin).” In Science Fiction Studies Special Issue on Science Fiction by Women 7, no. 1 (1980): 36–48. Gilman, Greer. “The Languages of the Fantastic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 134–146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hanson, Chad. “Daoism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located at: https:​//​ plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/daoism​/ (last accessed 18th March, 2021). Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of The Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Jung, Carl. Four Archetypes. London: Routledge, 2003 [1972]. Le Guin, Ursula. “A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS#7).” In Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 1 (1976): 43–46. ———. Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin 1972–2004. London: Gollancz, 2018. ———. “The Child and the Shadow.” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 3, no. 2 (1975): 139–148. ———. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Putnam, 1979. ———. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 1993.

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———. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose. SF Masterworks. London: Orion, 2015. Le Guin, Ursula and Brian Attebery. “A Conversation about Fantasy with Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17, no. 4.68 (2007), 371–382. Nida-Rümelin, Martine and Donnchadh O Conail. “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument.” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located at: https:​//​plato​ .stanford​.edu​/entries​/qualia​-knowledge​/. (Last accessed, March 30, 2021). Oziewicz, Marek. One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card. Foreword by Brian Attebery. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 6. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Rochelle, Warren. Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2001. Russell, Bertrand. “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.” In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 11 (1910–1911): 108–128. Spivak, Charlotte. Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Harpercollins, 2006 [1983]. Webster, John. “Principles of Systematic Theology.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11, no.1 (2009): 56–71. Wolfe, Judith. “Christian Theology.” Saint Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology, located at: https:​//​www​.saet​.ac​.uk​/Christianity​/ChristianTheology (published 10 August, 2022).

Chapter 8

Cosmology as Agnostic Self-Actualization in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld U-Wen Low ‌‌

INTRODUCTION: ATHEISM AND THE DISCWORLD Terry Pratchett’s literary universe, the Discworld, presents readers with a world filled with divinities, powers, and magic—where the gods quite literally play games involving the destinies of mortal beings. Pratchett’s stories often involve a complex interplay between the personal agency of individual characters and “Fate,” both as a narrative device as well as a “god” within the universe. Pratchett often subverts existing narratives and presents them in an absurdist, satirical manner that serves the true purpose of his humor: to “give Pratchett a comic distance from reality in order to criticise the world of the everyday.”1 Despite, or perhaps because of, the Discworld series’ immense popularity, it has received relatively little scholarly attention until recently, with one of the first major scholarly works examining his writing (Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature)2 published in 2000, and several published between 2010 and 2020. This lacuna is somewhat surprising given the depth of Pratchett’s work: the sheer volume of “intertextual references” to literature, art, and daily life within the Discworld novels means they are potentially fruitful ground for any literary scholar as Pratchett has covered a wide range of subjects—usually with a strong focus on what it means to be human.3 Pratchett frequently explores the human condition through his engagement with divinity. During his own lifetime, Pratchett seems to have self-identified as an atheist. In one 1998 interview, he called himself “an atheist of the 115

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Victorian sort” (which in his words represents a person “happy to disbelieve . . . until such [divinity] actually, personally comes and discusses things with you for half an hour”), though he went on to note that even his atheism was strongly Christian-influenced given his own upbringing within the Western Christian tradition.4 At first glance, the Discworld novels largely echo this belief, as the cosmology consistently presented in Pratchett’s universe is a flat one where the gods themselves are created beings whose existence is entirely dependent upon others. Pratchett is praised on internet message boards as an author whose works enabled many atheists to see beyond the religious traditions in which they were raised. Despite his professed atheistic stance, or perhaps as an expression of it, Pratchett engages strongly and consistently with important theological questions; here, I argue that a careful examination of his work reveals a clear ethos of agnosticism, or at least an openness to the concept of a Supreme Being, as within the Discworld Pratchett depicts both Creator beings as well as a seemingly all-powerful Azrael, the ultimate Death. It is facetious of me and perhaps in the spirit of Pratchett’s work, therefore, to draw a parallel between Pratchett and the character Dorfl, a blasphemous, atheistic golem who is attacked by a god-sent lightning bolt shortly after being given unholy life, yet goes on to declare its doubt in the existence of divinities (Feet of Clay). Though Pratchett expresses his own hostility toward the gods and divinity both in his own life as well as in his writing, he seems to acknowledge the importance of the quest toward divinity as part of the human condition. It is therefore not surprising that Pratchett was ultimately an agnostic rather than the militant atheist that his fans might suggest. In this chapter, I explore Pratchett’s construction of cosmology as representative of Pratchett’s view on self-actualization and the importance of personal choice, ultimately concluding that Pratchett’s critiques are not of faith itself, but rather the construct of religion—and that his novels clearly demonstrate some elements of agnosticism rather than outright atheism. Even though Pratchett seems to have arrived at agnosticism later in life, here I show that seeds of agnostic thought are found throughout his works, particularly with regard to his writing on divinity. Though I will engage more broadly with Pratchett’s oeuvre as appropriate, the discussion will largely be centred on the Death novels (Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather, and Thief of Time) as well as Small Gods.

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SELF-ACTUALIZATION AND NARRATIVE DETERMINISM An important key to understanding Pratchett’s worldbuilding is that his protagonists are actively self-deterministic in ways that defy conventional or established narrative patterns. Pratchett’s characters are generally written as a complex interplay between morality, self-determination, innate nature, societal pressures, and narrative causality/destiny. Kristin Noone points out that this is a reflection of Pratchett’s deeper desire to ask questions about how people “created and construct the narratives of our lives,” and the importance of personal choice or self-belief against seemingly predetermined factors like narrative causality.5 In the same volume, Kathleen Burt argues that Pratchett’s characters largely undergo a “journey of self-discovery” in order to position themselves to do the “most good for themselves and others”6—henceforth referred to as “humanism.” That is to say, Burt interprets Pratchett’s narratives as having an inherently ethical dimension—through the narrative, characters discover themselves, and use this journey to act altruistically, often against expectations to the contrary. As we shall see, this journey of self-belief is akin to apotheosis in Pratchett’s world—an ability to act against conventions and expectations is the mark of a fully actualized human protagonist. A helpful tool for understanding this process is the idea of self-actualization. A controversial yet influential concept popularized by psychologist Abraham H. Maslow, self-actualization is the final step on what Maslow termed a human “hierarchy of needs,” the basic motivators of human beings. Maslow describes self-actualization as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”7 Once basic needs are met, fully self-actualized individuals are able to retain a strong sense of self whilst also working toward the benefit of others.8 Notably, this is a characteristic found in several of Pratchett’s protagonists, such as Sam Vimes, Esmerelda Weatherwax, or Lobsang (Time). Individuals who self-ranked as highly spiritual (regardless of religious affiliation or adherence) were found to have higher levels of self-actualization, indicating the importance of spirituality and the search for the “transcendent” for human well-being.9 Narratively, the journey toward self-actualization often aligns closely with a protagonist’s arc as they embark on a quest of self-discovery in order to resolve a problem. This also helps to explain the tiered nature of many cosmologies: as believers self-actualize through their faith experiences and therefore spiritually transcend, they “ascend” to higher tiers of existence. This is by no means unique to the Abrahamic religions, of course—similar concepts are found in almost all religious beliefs, which is subsequently reflected in their cosmology. Beings who occupy the higher tiers are presumably fully

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self-actualized and transcendent, or at least so far removed from having “needs” that they are completely separate from humanity. Because Pratchett’s universe does not present a tiered cosmology, however, the challenges faced by his characters take on diverse forms rather than being solely religious or spiritual—there is nowhere for them to transcend to, and so their route to self-actualization occurs through subverting their own stories in order to make the right decisions. Several scholars note that Pratchett’s characters defy “narrative determinism” or what Pratchett describes as “narrative causality,” the “story shapes” found throughout human history that dictate the form of narratives and set expectations for story arcs.10 Narrative causality is Pratchett’s way of describing the expectations that accompany the stories that he is subverting; his characters are able to challenge and even triumph against narrative causality despite the fact that the world around them reshapes itself in adherence to narrative demands.11 One example of this subversion can be found in Carrot Ironfoundersson, a recurring character in many Discworld novels. When he appears, it is made clear that he is the true and rightful king of Ankh-Morpork, fitting “a pattern established by medieval romance: restoring the rightful heir.”12 As such, readers are shown a constant tension between narrative causality (Carrot reclaiming the throne and becoming king) and Carrot’s self-actualization (he actively chooses not to become king, instead subverting expectations by remaining a watchman). Carrot’s choice to defy causality is exemplified by an in-universe comment by a character in Jingo: “this man can make water run uphill and he has a commander” (322). Carrot’s humanism is a substantial factor in his self-actualization, as he defies his kingship in order to better serve the public. Pratchett’s work suggests that these narrative patterns are to an extent ingrained into human consciousness—to paraphrase Pratchett himself, “a bit like a grand piano—you could put a cover over it, but you could still see what shape it was underneath” (The Fifth Elephant, loc. 102). As a result, characters are compelled to follow narrative causality, but are also able to contest it. The true test of a character’s self-actualization in Pratchett’s work is whether they are able to do what is most right for the common good, rather than what is demanded of them by narrative determinism. Through Pratchett’s writing, readers learn that what is most important is the individual’s choice and self-belief; in this worldview, an individual who has sufficiently self-actualized is able to defy external pressures (whether they be self-doubt, narrative causality, or others’ opinions) in order to achieve “good”—which in Pratchett’s universe creates opportunities for others to further self-actualize. They are not guided by an externally imposed morality or by divine edict, but rather create their own paths through a strong sense of belief in themselves. In other words, Pratchett’s ideal character has no need for the gods or religion, or to be told what is right or wrong, but is

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driven by an internal force for good. In this, Pratchett makes clear that moral frameworks should be self-determined in relation to other beings (that is, they should be contextual), rather than externally imposed through religious structures—and this seems to be reflected in the cosmology of the Discworld. The Discworld’s cosmology is deliberately “flat” in comparison with other religious cosmologies, which are deliberately tiered. This reflects Pratchett’s emphasis on self-actualization, and his idea that the ultimate goal of the being is humanism rather than transcending beyond humanity. THE FLAT COSMOLOGY OF THE DISCWORLD Hebrew Bible scholar John Walton argues that “people in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system.”13 He terms this a “functional ontology” whereby the function of objects was to the ancients more important than their form—that is to say, in the ancient world, the purpose of (for example) the sun as a source of life is more important than its chemical composition or status as a star. In this view, everything exists for a specific, particular reason, and therefore there exists both an inherent logic and an ideal order behind all of creation, hence the common theme of order from chaos found in many creation myths—similar to an author creating a literary universe. Most literary universes possess their own functional ontology, as everything described (or created) within each such universe exists for the purposes of advancing the narrative’s plot. This functional ontology aligns closely with the idea of “narrative causality” found in many discussions of Pratchett’s work, though as Farah Mendlesohn points out, Pratchett also challenges the construction of identity solely through morphology, instead showing that the self-determination of an individual can overcome their morphology.14 Regardless, it is clear that the way that either a culture or an author constructs their cosmology provides insights about their ontology and their systems of belief; as Walton puts it, “cosmic geography is culturally descriptive rather than revealed truth.”15 In other words, Pratchett’s cosmology acts as a reflection of his views on humanity. Unlike the majority of world religions, the Discworld does not present us with multiple accessible tiers of existence; it is almost entirely flat. That it is shaped like a disc is no accident: as we shall see, it is reflective of Pratchett’s egalitarian beliefs that shape the world, where characters’ choices are of paramount importance, and self-determination rather than narrative expectations rule the day. The gods themselves are shown to be beings that are created and sustained by belief, themselves participants in the narrative. In this universe,

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everyone is given equal opportunity to shape their own destiny. In many of Pratchett’s character arcs, this means breaking free of narrative determinism and achieving self-actualization. As we see in Small Gods, this can happen even to divine beings! On the Discworld, the gods live in Cori Celesti, a mountain at the Hub (center) of the Discworld (The Last Hero, 9), a “Good Address” for the right kind of god. Despite being “gods,” that is beings who are worshipped and manifest divine power, the gods of the Discworld nonetheless dwell in the same tier of existence as all other beings—they are “divine” only in the sense of being bestowed power through collective belief. In The Last Hero, numerous characters are able to successfully invade the space of the gods without much difficulty. There, they threaten the gods, though with a rather more complex death: if Cori Celesti is seen to have exploded, they reason, then belief in the gods will cease, causing them to stop existing. In Pratchett’s universe, the gods are not unstoppable cosmic forces, but can be threatened or killed, and are in many ways indistinct from other beings. It is notable that the protagonists do not have to “transcend” to a separate plane in order to reach the realm of the gods: though both groups undergo significant trials in attempting to reach Cori Celesti, it is made abundantly clear that Cori Celesti is on the Disc, a physical location accessible by everyone else. Occasionally, readers are shown a few “thin places” where creatures or visions from other dimensions (the Dungeon Dimensions, the realm of the elves, our own reality) are able to leak into the Discworld. Pratchett is always clear, however, that these incursions into the reality of the Discworld are trans-dimensional rather than trans-locational; that is, creatures cross over from reality or dimension to another, rather than from one plane to another within the same reality. In short, the construction of the Disc as a single plane indicates that all things are equal, or at least have the opportunity to be equal, whether they be gods, living beings, undead, or neither-living-nor-undead. In the Discworld, the gods are there simply because of belief—they are shown to act as a locus for religious thought, but are themselves largely ineffectual and self-absorbed. To the casual observer, Pratchett’s characterisation of gods paints them as being outmoded and an impedance to progress. To this point, we have seen through its cosmology that the Discworld is an egalitarian, humanist reality—an atheist’s vision of a world that simply does not need gods. The most logical conclusion to draw from what has already been discussed is that the Discworld is in fact an atheistic universe—that is, it recognizes that power can be bestowed upon people rather than inherited, and that fate, destiny, and narrative causality—so-called “higher powers”—can in fact be challenged and subverted by a sufficiently strong-willed individual. In the Discworld, a person does not need to possess divine power to challenge fate, only a firm moral conviction. As Mendlesohn puts it, “the moral structure

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of Pratchett’s work rests on a conviction that only personal integrity is a useful foundation for free will and true choice; all else is self-deception.”16 To Pratchett, morality and ethical behavior come not from religion or gods, but rather from a process of self-actualization resulting in personal conviction. However, in the Death series of novels, readers are shown that there does exist another plane of existence that is separate to the Discworld: the realm of Death. The fact of this plane’s existence, as well as some of the narratives in which Death is involved, indicate the possibility of a move toward a more agnostic worldview—Pratchett does not preclude the existence of a higher power, Azrael, and clearly does not intend to provide a definitive answer concerning death and the afterlife. DEATH AND ALL OF HIS FRIENDS: TRUE POWER IN THE DISCWORLD A consistent, recurring character in almost every Discworld novel is Death, a figure imbued with personality despite his rather grim role. Like many of Pratchett’s other characters, Death subverts dominant expectations: whilst he is an “anthropomorphic personification” tasked with ushering beings into the afterlife, he views it simply as a job, and several narratives show him trying to experience life for himself—that is, attempting to self-actualize. Reaper Man points out that “Death, the personality” is distinct from death, the process, and that he was given shape by human belief: “he was Death long before humans ever considered him; they only added the shape and all the scythe and robe business to a personality that was already millions of years old” (Reaper Man, loc.155). In the figure of Death, we see a summation of what I have already argued above: that divine or mythic figures are bestowed their status by collective belief, and that all beings are equal in being able to seek self-actualization. Death embodies Pratchett’s worldview and demonstrates his agnostic beliefs. Death is a Constant Death appears in all but two of the Discworld novels. Throughout Pratchett’s narratives, characters frequently encounter Death in the process of dying, often allowing them brief moments of reflection before moving on. Throughout the series, Pratchett deliberately provides only vague details concerning the afterlife: most beings who encounter Death conduct a brief conversation with him before fading away, and the only time any sort of afterlife is seen is in Small Gods, where it appears as a manifestation of the individual’s belief.17 There is

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no “heaven,” nor is there a “hell,” it seems—only an unknowable “beyond” despite the existence of numerous religions across the Disc. The continuity of Death across the Discworld novels shows Death as the inescapable, inevitable final power of the universe. The events in Thief of Time show that Death is not subject to either the flow or the stoppage of time, and Mort shows that he considers himself above even the gods: “The gods can demand nothing of me. Even gods answer to me, eventually” (Mort, loc. 422). Pratchett makes it clear that nothing can escape Death (except perhaps reincarnation, which is not touched upon in sufficient detail to discuss), and by creating a flat cosmology, shows that what one does during their life matters more than a future hope of a coming eschaton. At the same time, in Small Gods, Pratchett allows that individual beliefs might shape the experience of death, as according to their beliefs, Death transports each Omnian to a desert of black sands, at the end of which lies an unspecified judgement (Small Gods, locs. 130, 271, 465, 501). Pratchett does not prescribe oblivion, nor does he categorically deny the possibility of existence beyond death, only making it clear that it is unknowable—far from an atheistic outlook, which might never address the issue. At the same time, this “afterlife” is left murky, meaning it is neither reward nor punishment—it is simply the next step. This reinforces Pratchett’s philosophy that actions undertaken across one’s lifetime are important not because of a future judgment, but because they allow one to express free will and thought. Death Defends Life Death is seen to also be curious about life, adopting a daughter, raising an apprentice, employing a manservant, and interacting with his granddaughter. Thief of Time shows that the true enemy of Death is not life, but rather stasis; as the Apocalypse occurs, the Four Horsemen and Chaos ride out against the Auditors of the universe, who represent order through stasis. Here, Death realizes that his identity is inextricably linked to his profession, and that he is a defender of life rather than a taker—and that stasis means redundancy for all beings including himself. The agency that Pratchett gives Death and the Horsemen in combating stasis is unusual, as one might have expected a true atheist to have instead shown a mortal protagonist contesting the issue. In Pratchett’s view, stasis or the collapse of time is far worse than the passage of time and the inevitability of death, as it marks the cessation of all activity which gives life meaning. This outing concludes Death’s arc from Reaper Man, where Death is shown to learn the meaning of being human through his existence as Bill Door. Following his defeat of the new Death, he makes an appeal to Azrael to

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allow for a caring rather than dispassionate Death: “What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?” (Reaper Man, loc. 398). To Pratchett, death should not be cold and callous, but rather deeply personal and understanding, reflecting life and humanity rather than oblivion; given the random nature of death, this can really only be achieved in his narratives through the intervention of an immortal being. Though it cannot be directly construed as a theistic viewpoint, it is certainly a viewpoint that is sympathetic toward theistic expressions, indicating Pratchett’s openness toward higher powers. Death Accesses a Separate Plane Seen most prominently in Mort, Soul Music, Reaper Man, and Hogfather, the realm of Death appears to be a completely separate location accessible only by Death and those he selects: his erstwhile apprentice Mort, his adopted daughter and granddaughter Ysabell and Susan, his servant Alberto Malich, and his horse Binky. Death’s realm is a space where the anthropomorphic personification spends his time and explores his own identity—like other beings in the Discworld, Death is attempting to achieve self-actualization; in this instance by finding fulfilment outside his pre-ordained role. As Nickianne Moody points out, Pratchett uses these narratives to critique systems of work and the formation of self-identity around said systems, and to show that people “have agency albeit not under circumstances of our own choosing.”18 Once again, we see that agency lies at the heart of Pratchett’s worldview. This location is not quite a “tier” of the cosmos, but is notable for being the only trans-locational place in the Discworld—as mentioned, all others are trans-dimensional. This is in line with Pratchett’s perspective that death is the highest power in the universe, a state of being that is completely inescapable for all. Rather than elevating gods or other beings to another plane of existence, it is only Death and those related to him who are able to escape the bounds of daily life; however, even Death’s daughter and her husband do not escape death (Soul Music, loc. 7). As we have seen, all beings seem to be subject to Death—with a couple of notable exceptions which I will now discuss. Death Answers to a Higher Power Contrary to a “true” atheistic worldview, Pratchett does surprisingly depict transcendental beings who exist on a different tier of existence to the Discworld, who seem to have infinite power in governing existence. Featured together in Reaper Man are both Azrael, called the “Great Attractor, the Death of Universes, the beginning and end of time” (Reaper Man, 326), and the Auditors, whose job is to observe and audit reality. The Auditors do not

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appear to be “beings” so much as manifestations of a mechanical sense of order, who are “offended” by the chaotic nature of life and so seek to either terminate it or to stop time so as to be able to catalogue it; that is, they represent stasis. Whilst powerful, they can be fought by beings such as Death and Susan (Reaper Man, Hogfather, and Thief of Time). Azrael, on the other hand, seems to be closest to an Almighty being in the Discworld. Called “Lord” by Death (Reaper Man, loc. 396), Azrael is shown to be the keeper of “the Clock,” the “mainspring from which all time poured” which “told Time what time is” (Reaper Man, loc. 400). Despite seeming disinterested in participating in the workings of the Discworld, Azrael acts as an arbitrator between the Auditors and Death, granting Death a “handful of Time” in order to fulfil his wish. Reaper Man closes with a look at Azrael, “at the end of all stories” and “who knew the secret,” who thinks “I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN” (Reaper Man, loc. 435). Notably, unlike Death’s speech, which is rendered in small capitals, Azrael’s speech is rendered in full capitals, emphasising Azrael’s otherness and power. Whilst Azrael could simply be understood as finality, its very existence shows that Pratchett does not exclude the possibility of the existence of a truly divine, higher being—despite the egalitarian nature of his literary universe. Pratchett, however, does seem to argue that transcendental beings are inherently removed from common humanity, either due to their immense power (Azrael), or their busyness (the creators in Eric). They are, largely, dispassionate or uninterested in the narratives of the Discworld, and so their status as “divinities” deserves careful consideration. Are these transcendental beings really “gods” in the true sense of the word? Rather than providing a concrete answer, Pratchett instead allows the power of self-actualization to act as the driving narrative force in the Discworld universe. Unlike most cosmologies where the self-actualization of beings leads them to access a higher plane or tier of existence, self-actualization in the Discworld does not lead one to transcend anywhere, as it is implied that transcendence causes one to become disconnected from life itself (a la Azrael and the Auditors). In fact, when a character in the Discworld becomes self-actualized, they become more fully grounded within their own context, seeking to serve it as best they can. They are able to defy narrative determinism and challenge the expectations of the reader, in doing so symbolically defying the powers that be. In other words, Pratchett presents a truly agnostic perspective on the gods and divinity—he suggests the possibility of the existence of non-created, transcendental, truly “divine” beings on a separate tier of existence, but clearly depicts them as uninterested and removed from daily life on the Disc. Their existence is only important insofar as it explains particular aspects of the world—otherwise, they have little to no bearing on the narratives that play out. Thus, on the Discworld, the question is transformed from “does God

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exist?” to “does it matter if God exists?” By posing this question, Pratchett allows room for those to whom a higher power is self-evident, yet his narratives challenge them to consider the importance of self-actualization and self-belief rather than reliance in a potentially disinterested transcendental being. One might well argue that Pratchett is interested in divinity rather than religion. On the other hand, we do see other “gods” in the Discworld, who occupy the same plane as all other beings and are clearly different to the transcendental beings like Azrael or the Auditors. As we shall see, they have little impact on the overall running of the universe—they do not dictate or ordain events. Instead, in proper agnostic fashion, Pratchett allows free will and humanistic morality to contest the narratives that play out across the Discworld. YE GODS: BELIEF AND THEOLOGY IN THE DISCWORLD Pratchett’s Small Gods deals almost entirely with the nature of divinity in the Discworld universe, showing that the “gods” of the Disc are created and sustained by belief, and their powers wax and wane according to their followers. Pratchett here makes a clear distinction between genuine faith or belief and ritual action; the god Om is shown to be able to find only a single true believer to sustain him amidst an entire country devoted to his worship. This is explained through the writings of Abraxas the Agnostic, whom Om quotes: “Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed” (Small Gods, 250). Here we see Pratchett’s ambivalence; though religion may be powerful, he regards it as a lifeless shell that is often far removed from its original intention or purposes. Small Gods is perhaps the clearest example of Pratchett’s attitude toward faith and religion: though Pratchett understands that belief is both important and powerful, he views the edifice of religion as a hollow shell that actively discourages true belief, where people are exploited and used in order to gain power. This viewpoint is made most clear through the figure of Vorbis, who begins the novel as a deacon and head of the Quisition, and is named prophet and leader of the church toward the end of the novel despite never actually speaking to or hearing the god Om. Vorbis is shown to be calculating, opportunistic, and amoral—he takes advantage of protagonist Brutha to engineer an invasion whilst on a diplomatic mission, and is feared by all within the church. Vorbis represents Pratchett’s issues with organized religion; in particular, Vorbis is trapped by his own position and authority and cannot self-actualize to the point of challenging his own status.

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On the other hand, the one true believer, Brutha, is strongly implied to be of limited intellectual capacity and is easily overlooked by other characters. Brutha is shown to be a devout follower of Om who mindlessly follows the rules and regulations of Omnianism—until he encounters Om for himself, after which point his character develops into a rather more complex being, and eventually is anointed the Eighth Prophet of Omnianism. It is clear that Pratchett is not attacking belief so much as he is attacking the structures of religion which stifle self-actualization; Pratchett shows through the relationship between Om and Brutha that faith, or rather belief, should be simple and pragmatic, as it can easily be distorted and warped. Indeed, when the Discworld is taken as a whole, it is clear that one of the most powerful forces within it is belief; Pratchett consistently shows that belief has its own power, whether it is belief manifested as faith, or self-belief. There is a complex interplay between self-belief (following self-actualization), belief, and narrative causality. For example, as we have already discussed, the gods are created by the beliefs of others, and resultantly subject to the whims of the faith of their followers: most gods are “people-shaped” because “people don’t have much imagination, on the whole” (The Last Hero, 10). As “gods became what people believed they ought to be” (Small Gods, loc. 325), Pratchett shows that religion can be dangerous because unfettered belief can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, Pratchett shows that whilst belief can sustain religion, as it grows institutionalized, belief is expunged—implying that true religious belief is to be found outside of institutional religion. Unlike the other characters in the Discworld, the gods cannot self-actualize because they are entirely dependent upon the faith and belief of others—even their shape is dictated by external belief. This means that whilst the gods are powerful, they are also weak: over the course of his journey, Om encounters numerous “small gods” who have lost their followers and are on the verge of death. Whilst the gods are beings of extraordinary power, they exist on the same tier as the other beings of the Disc and so can be challenged by them: in a clear allusion to the Gordian knot, Cohen defeats Fate in The Last Hero by cutting a die in half. In Pratchett’s universe, the gods are not truly divine in the conventional sense, but simply wield power that has been ceded to them through belief. This reiterates the importance of a flat Discworld: every being is, in a metaphysical sense, equal in that they are all subject to the same rules, and are all mortal to a degree. Humans (and presumably trolls, dwarves, etc.) can be bestowed with divine powers, and gods can be stripped down and even die. In Moving Pictures, Victor is able to challenge the creature from the Dungeon Dimensions because of the gathered audience’s belief both in him as a screen actor and in the rules of the narrative: the hero must win the day (Moving

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Pictures). There is also an unspoken, complex interplay between self-belief and the belief of others (which often manifests as narrative determinism); though everyone in Ankh-Morpork knows and expects Carrot to be the rightful king, his self-belief allows him to defy their collective belief. Pratchett’s perspective is perhaps best summarized as humanistic rather than theistic: his protagonists act altruistically, but often need to combat narrative determinism in order to achieve an outcome that may disadvantage them personally yet achieves maximum good for everyone. Notably, Pratchett believes that there are inherent rules that govern the universe: in the narratives in which they appear, Azrael, the Auditors, and semi-divine beings Death, War, Famine, Pestilence and Kaos are bound by “the Rules,” which are unspoken and unwritten yet fastidiously adhered to. Pratchett leaves the “Rules” and the higher powers deliberately ambiguous, but there is absolutely no doubt that they do exist within the universe. Given Pratchett’s focus on self-actualization in service of what is “most right” to the individual and to the largest number of others, it is reasonable to surmise that these “Rules” are in fact fundamental to the universe and intrinsic to all beings within it; natural laws which balance order with chaos and prevent the collapse of the Discworld (though Pratchett shows that these can be bent in service of humanism). When considered alongside the existence of beings like Azrael, Pratchett’s “Rules” hint again at his acceptance of the possibility of a divine higher power who has some level of authority over the universe. CONCLUSION The cosmically flat plane of the Discworld contains both gods and creatures, yet features no true higher powers. Instead, the various characters of the Discworld share one thing in common: they overcome a variety of circumstances including narrative causality and morphology, and achieve agency through self-actualization. As part of this journey, they are often forced to divest themselves of power or advantage in order to best serve the communities and people around them. As a whole, they choose to do this not because of their adherence to religious dogma or belief, but because it is contextually the right thing to do given the circumstances—it is the most “humanistic” action. Simply put, there is no need for any kind of higher-tier divinity on the Discworld as its characters do not require external motivation—their experiences and journeys inform their identities, which push them to act ethically. Whilst this could be (and generally is) interpreted as humanistic atheism which aims to return agency to individuals, there is room for agnosticism within Pratchett’s universe. Though a flat cosmology is presented, readers are

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nevertheless shown external beings of great power akin to traditional divinities, rather than the gods of the Discworld which are constructs of belief. These external beings are aloof and largely disinterested, perhaps reflecting Pratchett’s own disinterest in a deity: though he is happy to leave open the possibility of a god, or a divine being, Pratchett is far more interested in the narratives of individuals and the lessons we can learn from them. As the various characters of the Discworld overcome their challenges without divine help, Pratchett suggests that we too can do the same without the need for an externally imposed set of theological beliefs, instead relying on the natural knowledge of what is right. At the same time, he recognizes that belief is important as a stepping stone to greater ideals, as encapsulated in this dialogue between Death and his granddaughter Susan: Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. “Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—” Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies. “So we can believe the big ones?” Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing. (Hogfather, loc. 355)

Pratchett’s critique of religion and religiosity is not aimed at divinities per se—he recognizes that atheism itself is deeply theological in its thinking about gods—but rather seeks to enlighten readers concerning the dangers presented by religious structures and those who abuse said structures. In a 2008 article in the Daily Mail, Pratchett noted that I don’t have much truck with the “religion is the cause of most of our wars” school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.19

Pratchett is no staunch atheist; in fact, his novels show a deep sympathy toward the faithful (rather than religion), and a clear understanding of the power of belief in the lives of humans. His caution is that we utilize this power with care and self-reflection, as noted in his final words in the article: It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

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I don’t think I’ve found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.20

NOTES 1. Andrew M. Butler, “Theories of Humour,” in Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, ed. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd Edition (Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004), 69. 2. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds., Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, 2nd Edition (Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2002). 3. Marion Rana, “Shedding the ‘Light Fantastic’ on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: An Introduction,” in Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana, eBook edition, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 5. 4. “The Big Question: Terry Pratchett Interview - 01/02/98 by Mark Lawson,” The L-Space Web, 1998, https:​//​www​.lspace​.org​/about​-terry​/interviews​/question​.html. 5. Kristin Noone, “Something That Gods Are: Acts of Creation in Terry Pratchett’s Early Science Fiction,” in Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond, ed. Kristin Noone and Emily L. Leverett, eBook Edition (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2020). 6. Kathleen Burt, “Self-Discovery, Free Will and Change: The Ethics of Growing Up in the Fantasy Novels of Terry Pratchett,” in Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond, ed. Kristin Noone and Emily L. Leverett, eBook Edition (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2020). 7. A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, 1943, 9. 8. Scott Barry Kaufman, “Self-Actualizing People in the 21st Century: Integration With Contemporary Theory and Research on Personality and Well-Being,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 7 November 2018; Lloyd Greene and George Burke, “Beyond Self-Actualization,” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 30, no. 2 (2007): 120. 9. Itai Ivtzan et al., “Linking Religion and Spirituality with Psychological Well-Being: Examining Self-Actualization, Meaning in Life, and Personal Growth Initiative,” Journal of Religion and Health 52, no. 3 (2013): 915–29. 10. Terry Pratchett, “Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories,” Folklore 111, no. 2 (2000): 166. 11. Daniel Luthi, “Toying with Fantasy: The Postmodern Playground of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels,” Mythlore 33, no. 1 (125) (2014): 139. 12. Emily L. Leverett, “‘At Times Like This It’s Traditional That a Hero Comes Forth’: Romance and Identity in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!,” in Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana, eBook Edition, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 47. 13. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 26.

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14. Farah Mendlesohn, “Faith and Ethics,” in Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, ed. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd Edition (Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004), 241. 15. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 18. 16. Mendlesohn, “Faith and Ethics,” 259. 17. Mendlesohn, “Faith and Ethics,” 248. 18. Nickianne Moody, “Death and Work,” in Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, ed. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd Edition (Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004), 169. 19. Terry Pratchett, “I Create Gods All the Time - Now I Think One Might Exist, Says Fantasy Author Terry Pratchett,” The Daily Mail, 22 June 2008, https:​//​www​ .dailymail​.co​.uk​/femail​/article​-1028222​/I​-create​-gods​-time​-​-I​-think​-exist​.html. 20. Pratchett, “I Create Gods All the Time - Now I Think One Might Exist, Says Fantasy Author Terry Pratchett.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Burt, Kathleen. “Self-Discovery, Free Will and Change: The Ethics of Growing Up in the Fantasy Novels of Terry Pratchett.” In Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond, edited by Kristin Noone and Emily L. Leverett, EBook Edition. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2020. Butler, Andrew M. “Theories of Humour.” In Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd Edition, 67–88. Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004. Butler, Andrew M., Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature. 2nd Edition. Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2002. Greene, Lloyd, and George Burke. “Beyond Self-Actualization.” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration 30, no. 2 (2007): 116–28. Ivtzan, Itai, Christine P. L. Chan, Hannah E. Gardner, and Kiran Prashar. “Linking Religion and Spirituality with Psychological Well-Being: Examining Self-Actualization, Meaning in Life, and Personal Growth Initiative.” Journal of Religion and Health 52, no. 3 (2013): 915–29. Kaufman, Scott Barry. “Self-Actualizing People in the 21st Century: Integration With Contemporary Theory and Research on Personality and Well-Being.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 7 November 2018. Leverett, Emily L. “‘At Times Like This It’s Traditional That a Hero Comes Forth’: Romance and Identity in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!” In Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, edited by Marion Rana, EBook Edition, 159–76. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Luthi, Daniel. “Toying with Fantasy: The Postmodern Playground of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels.” Mythlore 33, no. 1 (125) (2014): 125–42. Maslow, A. H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, 1943.

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Mendlesohn, Farah. “Faith and Ethics.” In Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd Edition, 239–60. Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004. Moody, Nickianne. “Death and Work.” In Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd Edition, 153–70. Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004. Noone, Kristin. “Something That Gods Are: Acts of Creation in Terry Pratchett’s Early Science Fiction.” In Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond, edited by Kristin Noone and Emily L. Leverett, EBook Edition. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2020. Pratchett, Terry. Eric. London: Gollancz, 1990. ———. Hogfather. London: Gollancz, 1996. ———. “I Create Gods All the Time - Now I Think One Might Exist, Says Fantasy Author Terry Pratchett.” The Daily Mail, 22 June 2008. https:​//​www​.dailymail​.co​ .uk​/femail​/article​-1028222​/I​-create​-gods​-time​-​-I​-think​-exist​.html. ———. “Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories.” Folklore 111, no. 2 (2000): 159–68. ———. Jingo. London: Gollancz, 1997. ———. Mort. London: Gollancz, 1987. ———. Moving Pictures. London: Gollancz, 1990. ———. Reaper Man. London: Gollancz, 1991. ———. Small Gods. London: Gollancz, 1992. ———. Soul Music. London: Gollancz, 1994. ———. The Last Hero. London: Gollancz, 2001. ———. Thief of Time. London: Doubleday, 2001. Rana, Marion. “Shedding the ‘Light Fantastic’ on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: An Introduction.” In Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, edited by Marion Rana, EBook edition., 1–20. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. The L-Space Web. “The Big Question: Terry Pratchett Interview - 01/02/98 by Mark Lawson,” 1998. https:​//​www​.lspace​.org​/about​-terry​/interviews​/question​.html. Walton, John H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009.

Chapter 9

Fantastic Inter-Religious Resourcement in Robert Jordan and David Eddings Andrew D. Thrasher‌‌

If modernity since at least Descartes entails the instrumental use of reason and foundational epistemology to understand to certainty of what is real or true, then postmodernity since at least 1970 entails the doubting of universal reason and the deconstruction of truth, reality, and modern social constructs. Encompassing elements of both, late modernity focuses on the complex continuities and discontinuities between both modernity and postmodernity, especially in terms of the crisscrossing effects of globalization.1 These globalizing effects of late modernity highlight the interaction between not only cultural, social, or political systems, but also religious systems. One thing that distinguishes late modernity from modernity or postmodernity is the proactive possibility of religious re-enchantment. Today, there is a proactive renewal in how we imagine the possibilities of belief—ranging from a variety and interaction of religious institutions, religious sects, and beliefs to the flourishing of spirituality, atheism, agnosticism, and nones. Re-enchantment entails the recovery, resourcement, and renewal of spirituality and religion in the aftermath of modern disenchantment, where religion was eclipsed and collapsed into the social, political, moral, and rational forces of modernity.2 With modern disenchantment, technocratic, instrumental reason dominates the world, at the exclusion and expense of religion and spirituality.3 But late modernity is marked by the re-enchantment, renewal, and resourcement of religion as a response to a world marked by alienation, fragmentation, and isolation.4 This chapter argues how the fantasy of Robert Jordan and David and Leigh Eddings plays a re-enchanting role to late modernity that imagines 133

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religious ideas anew via the role of the pluralistic nature of their fantastic imaginations.5 This chapter argues that the inter-religious resourcement in the fantasies of Robert Jordan and David and Leigh Eddings plays a role in re-enchanting a late-modern imaginary. Religious resourcement can be defined as the recovery and exegesis of religious ideas found within a discourse. Resourcement is a term used in the traditions of Nouvelle Theologie and the Radical Orthodoxy Movement to refer to the use of classical Christian sources to theologically re-narrate and offer genealogical accounts of modernity. While resourcement is a theological tool used in contemporary Christian theology, it may also be used inter-religiously in the context of fantasy literature. In the first generations of modern fantasy, the religion resourced was Christianity. But if for Lewis and Tolkien the fantastic imagination was used for the Christian re-enchantment of modernity, inter-religious resourcement in this chapter articulates a pluralistic re-enchantment of late modernity. Late modernity is marked by pluralism and the explosion of religious options and syntheses. Charles Taylor calls the explosion of new religious forms in late modernity the Nova Effect—where religion explodes and imagines new modes of belief and practice in ways that draw upon a plurality and pluriformity of religious ideas.6 While the plurality of religious ideas refers to the multiplicity of religious sources we can draw upon, the pluriformity of religious ideas refers to the forms by which religious sources and ideas are reconstructed and created. Plurality refers to the many possible sources, while pluriformity refers to how they are syncretized and constructed for late-modern believers. The fantasy of Robert Jordan and David and Leigh Eddings portrays a pluriformity of examples where their pluralistic inter-religious resourcement reconstructs and re-imagines religious and theological ideas. While inter-religious resourcement implies pluralistic re-enchantment, it also entails the fantastic syncretization of primary world religious systems in secondary worlds of the imagination. While there are implicit religious motives within secondary worlds, in Jordan and Eddings are not merely fictional religions, Gods, rituals, and worldviews. Jordan and Eddings’s fantastic sub-creations utilize inter-religious resourcement through the imagination to transform and renew the possibilities of rethinking religion in late modernity. This chapter analyzes the pluralistic resourcement of religion within Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and in David and Leigh Eddings’s The Belgariad and The Mallorean. While the analogy between the fantastic imagination and a late-modern imaginary does not necessarily imply that fantasy shapes religious belief, the religious imagination in fantasy does simulate the believability of religion as a process of re-enchantment.7 This chapter will first address inter-religious resourcement in Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time. It analyzes the pluralistic

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dimensions of Jordan’s fantastic imaginary through the creation of a fantastic world that combines deism with Asian religious ideas. The section on Jordan analyzes not only how Jordan plays with Chinese cosmological and religious ideas, but also how Jordan imagines a coherent pluralistic theology that offers answers to evil through a combination of deism and reincarnation. The second part of the chapter addresses the Zoroastrian resourcement of David and Leigh Eddings’s The Belgariad and The Mallorean, arguing how they also imagine theological solutions to the problem of evil in a pluralistic subcreated world that combines polytheism with Zoroastrian theological themes. Finally, this chapter closes with an analysis of how the fantastic imagination and inter-religious resourcement re-enchants and simulates religion in late modernity, arguing for the importance of pluralism and human agency as key characteristics of a late-modern imaginary. PLURALISM AND THE WHEEL OF TIME Robert Jordan’s fantastic imagination found within the creation of The Wheel of Time8 offers a key element to the late-modern imaginary: pluralism. Pluralism is often popularly defined as the idea “all religions are equally true or lead to the same end, God, or salvation.” But this popular definition of pluralism lacks a level of nuance in the study of world religions and must be redefined. If pluralism is redefined as an inescapable element of late-modern cultural and religious experience, then pluralism plays a role in simulating religion and religious belief via popular culture because popular culture implicitly shapes the contemporary imagination. This section argues how the fantastic imagination in The Wheel of Time imagines a coherent religious pluralism that draws on Chinese, Indian, and Christian religious resources and ideas. Before analyzing Jordan’s inter-religious resourcement it is helpful to first look at his pluralistic mythopoetics. Robert Jordan’s Mythopoetics Before offering an account of how Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time articulates a pluralistic resourcement of Chinese, Indian, and modern religious ideas, it is worthwhile to address the plot of the story and elements included throughout the story that shape Jordan’s combination of a multiplicity of religious ideas. By addressing key religious elements of Jordan’s subcreation, this section fronts the background material to the story helpful to understand how Jordan offers a pluralistic inter-religious resourcement. Jordan’s mythopoetic subcreation imagines a world that is yet future and past. It imagines, arguably, the future as an unfallen utopia that has never

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known war and is marked by peace. And yet it also imagines a fall. The fall from utopia is marked in the series by the opening of the Bore to the Dark One, whose influence over the world led to that world’s destruction. Thousands of years before the series begins, the Dragon, Lews Therin Kinslayer Telamon, sealed the Dark One at Shayol Ghul. Unfortunately, the sealing of the Dark one was imperfect. In retaliation, the Dark One tainted the male half of the One Power, driving the male Aes Sedai (those who wield the One Power) to madness, which led to the breaking of the world.9 Lews Therin Telamon’s madness led him to be called the kinslayer, and in a moment of clarity after what he had done he drew on too much of the One Power and self-destructed, forming Dragonmount, on the slopes of which it was prophesied the Dragon would be reborn to save the world from the powers of the Dark One when the seals of his prison weakened.10 There are a variety of kingdoms, peoples, and cultures in what the Aiel (the “people of the Dragon” who dwell in a desert east of the Spine of the world as a tribal society) call the Wetlands: a variety of nations that span from the borderlands in the North that guard against the forces of the Dark One to the western and southern coasts of the continent and the mountainous Spine of the world in the East. This world also includes the Seanchan returning from across the sea, the mysterious Sharans, and the desert-dwelling red-haired Aiel. Within each of these peoples we find cultural idiosyncrasies, physical characteristics, and especially religious myths. These myths may differ among the various peoples, but they are all centered around a messianic figure who will both break the world again and seal the Dark One away forever—and renew the world in peace and flourishing. For the Wetlands this is the Dragon Reborn, for the Aiel the Car’a’carn, and for the Sea Folk, the Coramoor. For the many nations in the Wetlands, the prophecies of the Dragon speak of the reincarnation of Lews Therin Telamon, the Kinslayer. The Wheel of Time tells the story of his rebirth, his shattering of customs and nations and their reformations, and his victory over the Dark One, all in the midst of his growing madness, but also in his acceptance of his reincarnation as Lews Therin for the hope of the redemption of his love.11 Theology and Evil in The Wheel of Time Within The Wheel of Time are many religious sources, most of which draw upon a deistic creator of the Pattern. The Pattern in The Wheel of Time is made of the many threads and lives across time, and these threads of life are reborn throughout history. The idea of the Pattern in The Wheel of Time implies the Indian understanding of cyclical existence (samsara). The three main characters within the story, Rand Al-Thor, Mat Cauthon, and Perrin Aybara, spend much of the series fighting against the Pattern, trying to escape

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it, only to find themselves pulled back into its determinism. But The Wheel of Time also draws upon monotheistic ideas of the devil, naming the Dark One Shai’tan, a Near Eastern name more commonly encountered as “Satan.” In The Wheel of Time, though in fact a multiverse of potential worlds, still maintains a monotheistic understanding of God and evil: There is one Creator, who exists everywhere at once for all of these worlds. In the same way, there is only one Dark One, who also exists in all of these worlds at once. If he is freed from the prison the Creator made in one world, he is freed on all. So long as he is kept prisoner in one, he remains imprisoned on all.12

Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil, we find a common theme across Ancient Near Eastern religions: the pattern of redemption from evil.13 But in The Wheel of Time, Jordan throws in a new caveat: reincarnation. Jordan introduces Eastern notions of reincarnation to the Western emphasis on redemption and the conquering of evil throughout The Wheel of Time. Characteristic of The Wheel of Time, its inter-religious resourcement portrays a fantastic imagining of messianic redemption through reincarnation—one that offers a coherent theology that can only be found in a subcreation because of the irreconcilable differences in primary world religions. While Abrahamic religions portray a personal creator actively at work within His creation, this is not something we see within The Wheel of Time. Rather, The Wheel of Time depicts a Deistic Creator, sovereign yet removed from creation. The Creator in The Wheel of Time created a self-sufficient Pattern constituted by threads of life. The Dark One is the Pattern’s antithesis and its potential destruction. The Pattern is frayed by the evil impositions of the Dark One’s will to deceive, distort, and annihilate the Pattern. But the Pattern itself is neither inherently good nor evil. Moiraine states, “The Creator is good, Perrin. The Father of Lies is evil. The Pattern of Age, the Age Lace itself, is neither. The Pattern is what is. The Wheel of Time weaves all lives into the Pattern, all actions. A Pattern that is all one color is no Pattern. For the Pattern of an Age, good and ill are the warp and the woof.”14 Creation thus, is understood not only as a pattern, but as the Pattern, which may be read by those apt to understand the Pattern of its threads. Jordan describes it as: A great cosmic loom in the shape of a seven-spoked wheel, slowly spinning through eternity, weaving the fabric of the universe. The Wheel, put in place by the Creator, is time itself, ever turning and returning. The fabric it weaves is constructed from the threads of life and events, interlaced into a design, the Great Pattern, which is the whole of existence and reality, past, present, and future. The Wheel touches what might be, what might have been, and what is. It touches the world of dreams as well as the world of waking.

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In this world where there is no one beginning or one end, for each spoke of the great Wheel represents one of the seven Ages, receding into the past and returning in the future as the Wheel spins, the fabric of each age changing only its weave and pattern with each passing.15

The Wheel of Time serves not only as the title of the story, but also more importantly as a metaphor within the story to illustrate how Jordan imagines time, history, cosmology, and metaphysics. At the center of this is his idea of the Wheel of Time as a weaving Pattern that both determines and bends around particular life threads throughout time and history. This Pattern to Time and history is one supported by the idea of reincarnation and rebirth, where certain figures called “ta’veren” are reborn throughout Time to change the historical course of the world according to their (and the Pattern’s) will. Just as the Pattern is made of the threads of cyclical existence, the purpose of the Pattern is to shape history towards its end in the defeat of evil. At the locus of the Pattern are those threads that seem to personalize an impersonal Pattern. Certain individuals, called ta’veren, both shape the Pattern through their actions and are further driven and used by the Pattern towards the purpose of defeating evil. Reflecting on the nature of the Pattern as both deterministic and allowing the role of free will that the ta’veren play into history, Jordan states that: The Wheel of Time weaves the Patterns of the Ages, and the threads it uses are lives. It is not fixed, the Pattern, not always. If a man tries to change the direction of his life and the Pattern has room for it, the Wheel just weaves on and takes it in. There is always room for small changes, but sometimes the Pattern simply won’t accept a big change, no matter how hard you try . . . But sometimes the change chooses you, and sometimes the Wheel bends a life-thread, or several threads, in such a way that all the surrounding threads are forced to swirl around it, and those force other threads, and those still others, and on and on. The first bending to make the Web is ta’veren, and there is nothing you can do to change it, not until the Pattern itself changes. The Web— ta’maral’ailen, it’s called—can last for weeks, or for years. It can take in a town, or even the whole Pattern. Arthur Hawkwing was ta’veren. So was Lews Therin Kinslayer, for that matter, I suppose.16

Ta’veren are both driven by the Pattern and become the locus of the Pattern in ways that draws the tension between free will and determinism. They have the ability to bend the Pattern to their will but they are also bound to the direction the Pattern intends them to follow.17 As the locus of the Pattern, ta’veren shape the Pattern through their interactions with others, who are themselves drawn to the ta’veren.18 The Pattern both determines the purpose and goal of human lives and allows the space for free will of individuals to bend the

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Pattern to their whims. When directed inevitably towards an end, the determinism of the Pattern cannot be escaped. Like the Hindu notion of karma and the Christian debates over predestination and free will,19 The Wheel of Time illustrates how we must not over-emphasize either determinism or free will in our actions. Rather, the Pattern holds in tension the human ability to choose the way of their life as ordered by the impersonal sovereignty of the Pattern. The ta’veren are those who have more power to shape the Pattern to their purposes insofar as the threads of the Pattern swarm around them and are ordered by them. Because ta’veren are at the center of the Pattern as major agents to fulfill the Pattern’s purposes in history, they are in some sense both more determined by the Pattern (there are things they must do because the Pattern created them to do them) and are allowed more free will as the shape and bend the Pattern and others to their will. As the loci of the Pattern, ta’veren attract people to them and the will of ta’veren play a role in determining the future, both of people and nations, and of time and history. And this future is oriented towards the binding of Shai’tan, the Dark One, and evil. *** The Wheel is patterned towards the resolution of evil throughout The Wheel of Time and it addresses the problem of evil through the Pattern. The Pattern resolves the problem of evil through the agency of the Dragon as a messiah who is reincarnated to lead the fight against the Dark One and bind him again in his prison. As such, the Wheel of Time resolves the problem of evil through the idea of messianic reincarnation. To explain this concept, it is worth offering parallels between Biblical Theology and the resolution to the problem of evil in The Wheel of Time. In The Wheel of Time, the conception of creation as the Pattern as geared towards harmony and peace comes from the Jewish notion of shalom found within the Garden of Eden. But evil is something outside the Pattern itself. Evil is the antithesis of the Creator of the Pattern. But while the origins of evil within the Garden of Eden are left unexplained, a common thread between The Wheel of Time and the Genesis account is that sin or evil comes with temptation to knowledge and power. While Adam and Even were deluded by the serpent in wanting to become like God in knowing good and evil, Lanfear in The Wheel of Time was also tempted by both knowledge and power by the Dark One, which was motivated by her lust for Lews Therin. But the knowledge of the Dark One was deceptive and her desire for power was masked by the hope of progress. The Bore was opened by Lanfear because she sought to better her world through unlimited power. But the destruction and war that resulted literally tore the world apart, reshaped the very geography of the world, and changed the very structures of human life, culture, and society.

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The problem of evil is resolved in The Wheel of Time by a redemptive messianism articulated through the reincarnation of the Dragon. The redemption of Lews Therin’s kinslaying comes through the redemptive possibility of loving again. It is through reincarnation that evil is defeated. But redemption from evil requires agency, and the Dragon Reborn, Rand Al’Thor, has his own problems to wrestle with. The Dragon, the now-insane Lews Therin Telamon, manifests as a voice in Rand’s head. Lews Therin’s memories become the key to sealing the Dark One, but they only come when Rand reconciles and accepts the madness of Lews Therin, and this includes his fears of killing his loved ones. In a lucid moment of engagement with Lews Therin at the end of The Gathering Storm, Rand makes peace with Lews Therin and truly becomes the Dragon, by realizing reincarnation allows human agency the ability to redeem the past with the possibility of a new life and to love again.20 For the Dragon Reborn, reincarnation is not limited to the determinism of Lews Therin’s madness: there is space for his free will to chart anew a pathway of redemption for what it means to be the Dragon. And this is a saving grace, not just of the Dragon Reborn, but also for all peoples and nations because the way the Dragon Reborn reconciles his madness and the memories of Lews Therin becomes the key to seal the Dark One again. But Rand Al’Thor does not only save people from the Dark One by sealing him away. The Dragon Reborn also breaks and reforms the very nations and the binding ties of people to one another with his attempt to restore peace between the nations in his accords at the beginning of A Memory of Light. However, there is also a fundamental contrast between Jordan’s (Western) depiction of reincarnation and how it is viewed by Asian traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The way reincarnation and rebirth are conceived between Indian and Western traditions differs. While in the West reincarnation is viewed positively because of the potential for a better life, a do-over, in Indian traditions, reincarnation is ultimately a prison to be escaped. In Indian traditions, reincarnation and rebirth are viewed as relative goods, but as ultimate evils. It is a relative good because Hindus can do their dharma in Hinduism and Buddhists can alleviate the conditions of suffering through the practice of the eightfold path—both of which result in a better rebirth. But the ultimate goal in Indian traditions is not to be reborn at all. The ultimate goal is liberation from cyclical existence. The ultimate goal is never to be reborn again. Why? Because to never be reborn again means never to suffer again. With rebirth comes both pain and pleasure, joy and suffering. To be reborn may entail the possibility of joy and pleasure, but certainly includes the reality of pain and suffering. The difference between Jordan’s depiction of reincarnation and that found within Indian traditions is striking. In The Wheel of Time, the idea of samsara appeals to the western views on reincarnation

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rather than that traditionally found within Indian traditions, because Jordan imagines salvation as coming through a messianic figure who is reborn again to save the world from evil. Jordan’s understanding of salvation, which is couched in the idea of a messianic reincarnation, is not oriented towards the liberation from cyclical existence. Rather salvation in The Wheel of Time comes about through the agency of the Dragon Reborn to seal the Dark One away. Reincarnation in the Wheel of Time is a part of the Pattern that purposefully uses reincarnation as a means to overcome evil. But reincarnation is not the only Eastern religious theme resourced in Jordan’s fantastic imagination. Jordan also uses elements of Chinese traditions in his appropriation of the yin and yang to explain the use of magic—the One Power to which we now turn. Chinese Analogies with the One Power While Jordan imaginatively plays with the ideas of cyclical existence and messianism, probably the most notable place where Jordan draws on Asian religious themes is his idea of the One Power. Arguably Jordan’s account of magic in the One Power is analogous to the Chinese cosmological notions of Zhou Dunyi’s Taiji symbol and an inversion of Daoism’s notions of yin and yang. This section fleshes out these analogies between Chinese traditions and Jordan’s account of magic as the One Power. Throughout the mythical history found within The Wheel of Time, the greatest of wonders of the world came through the use of the One Power by both male and female Aes Sedai. The Aes Sedai throughout The Wheel of Time are those men and women who could channel the One Power. The One Power has its source in the True Source, a power that taps into the Creator’s power and the flow and force of creation. But this One Power has two, complementary parts: for men it is Saidin, and for women it is Saidar. Furthermore, the One Power has five elements or “threads” that may be woven together for good or ill. These threads of the One Power are water, air, spirit, fire, and earth. From these elements also come a general duality of certain strengths: women are generally stronger in water and air, men in earth and fire, while both generally receive equal portion of spirit. The interaction of these “threads” of the One Power not only may be “weaved” together for miraculous and dangerous purposes, but however they are wielded, they come from the same source: The One Power comes from the True Source, the driving force of creation, the force the Creator made to turn the Wheel of Time. Saidin, the male half of the True Source, and Saidar, the female half, work against each other, and at the same time together to provide that force . . . The True Source cannot be used up, any more than the river can be used up by the wheel of the mill. The Source is the river; the Aes Sedai, the waterwheel.21

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In the inexhaustible nature of the True Source, the Aes Sedai are able to draw on it as a source of their ability to wield the One Power. And yet, the One Power is a fantastic spin on both the Chinese ideas of yin and yang and the philosophy of Zhou Dunyi’s Taiji, or the Great Ultimate. The great ultimate is the source of nothingness out of which all things are generated and produced, and to which all things return.22 In the generation of all things through the five elements (water, fire, earth, wood, and metal) in Chinese thought, like the Wheel of Time’s spiritualization of the elements of power, there is a duality and complementarity of male and female—of Daoist understandings of yin and yang. These analogies between Jordan’s understanding of magic and Chinese ideas are developed below. The Neo-Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi was a key figure among the Northern Song Neo-Confucian philosophers. Zhou Dunyi’s synthesis of Chinese metaphysics—of Neo-Daoist views of the Dao as nothingness and of the yin and yang as productive forces that move into one another, creating balance, to the I-Ching’s views of the generation of things out of the five elements—is clearly a source from which Robert Jordan created his idea of the One Power. The Taiji Symbol, a well-known disc of black and white teardrops, explains the generation and production of all things out of the Dao. The Dao is, most notably, nothingness, but a nothingness that generates creation out of the interactions between the yin and yang—which then produce the myriad of things out of the interaction of the five elements. All things are created out of the Dao through the rhythmic interactions between the opposing extremes of the yin and the yang and through the intermingling of the five elements. In Chinese thought, the five elements—water, fire, earth, wood, and metal—generate the myriad of things and all creation through their mixtures and intermingling. In Zhou Dunyi’s thought, if the generation of things starts from nothingness, they are then generated by the interplay and balance of the yin and yang, which then generate the five elements. Out of the intermingling of the five elements, the myriad of things are created. Furthermore, as religious Daoism developed in the first millennium CE, in the hope of generating long life, Daoist practitioners turned to the study of alchemy to see how these elements intermingled with one another, in hopes of leading to immortality and longevity. Likewise, the Aes Sedai in Jordan’s world do not age, or rather, through the continued wielding of the One Power, it marks their faces as ageless, prolonging their lives beyond the normal lifespan. Within this framework the Daoist and Neo-Confucian focuses on immortality and the generation of all things is analogously reflected in The Wheel of Time through the channeling and weaving of the five threads of the One Power. While it is clear that Robert Jordan does not seek to explain Chinese cosmology, it is also clear that Jordan adapted and inverted elements of

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Zhou Dunyi’s Taiji and of the yin and yang cosmology to articulate his own fantastic spin on primary world religious ideas.23 But Jordan adopts the Taiji symbol into his fiction, with one significant change. While the yin represents the female, the dark, the passive, and the receptive in Daoism, the yang represents the masculine, the light, the aggressive, and the controlling. However, in The Wheel of Time, while the female half of the One Power, Saidar, definitely represents the attributes of yin, it is not symbolized by darkness. Rather, the female half of the One Power is symbolized by the white “flame” of Tar Valon. But the completion of the ancient symbol of the Aes Sedai is not merely the white flame of Tar Valon. Rather it includes in its completion the black “dragon fang” that represents the curse of madness that taints Saidin, the male half of the One Power. This taint is like an oily sludge that smears the raging torrent of Saidin. Saidar by contrast, is like a mellow river. While Saidar must be opened to like a budding flower through surrender, Saidin must be grappled with and controlled through restraint and struggle.24 Both of these elements reflect the Daoist understanding of yin and yang, while only the colors of light and darkness are inverted. Jordan’s appropriation and inversion of Chinese philosophical and religious ideas serves as an important point of contact between his secondary world and primary world religious traditions and ideas. His fantastic resourcement of Chinese religious ideas offers a fantastic spin upon primary religious ideas and the analogies between the two are striking. Jordan’s the One Power reflects elements and inversions of Chinese ideas in ways the clearly reflect examples of Jordan’s inter-religious resourcement in his fantasy. Furthermore, by creatively imagining a world in which reincarnation trumps evil and becomes compatible with a deistic worldview, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time successfully creates a pluralistic religious imaginary. Jordan’s fantastic inter-religious resourcement demonstrates how in the creation of fantasy, primary world religious ideas are used and appropriated in secondary worlds. While Jordan reflects one example of fantastic inter-religious resourcement, David and Leigh Eddings offer another. Therefore, the following section analyzes the fantastic resourcement of Zoroastrianism in the fantasy of David and Leigh Eddings. DAVID AND LEIGH EDDINGS: ZOROASTRIAN FANTASY If Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time offers an account of pluralistic religious resourcement, David Eddings’s two series The Belgariad and The Mallorean offers a similar takeaway. However, if Jordan and Sanderson highlight Chinese analogies and offer a pluralistic

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resourcement of Indian and Abrahamic religious ideas through the idea of messianic reincarnation, then Eddings starts with polytheism and reconciles the clear duality between good and evil through a Zoroastrian monotheism. For Eddings, evil is resolved through a theology of choice. It is a choice between darkness and light, made precisely through human agency. For Eddings, human agency and the choice between good and evil, are the marks of what it fully means to be human. David and Leigh Eddings’s25 fantasy offers us a great insight into what it means to create worlds based on religious resourcement. And yet it is also relevant to articulate elements of Eddings’s subcreation before turning to analyze his religious resourcement of Zoroastrianism. *** Within the ten books of Eddings’s world of The Belgariad and The Mallorean, a gruff, devious, and debaucherous character named Belgarath the Sorcerer plays a central role. This sorcerer is a disciple of Aldur, one of the seven Gods. In the series and their three companion volumes, Belgarath is said to have lived for seven thousand years, taken a wife who was originally a wolf, had two daughters at the age of four thousand, and was a drunkard and scholar among other things. But in those seven thousand years, he served his master with his brothers and sisters throughout a time when an evil God, Torak, both stole Aldur’s jewel and, with it, cracked the world in two. Separating the peoples of the West (those who primarily worship six of the seven Gods and their Father UL) from the Angaraks (those who worship Torak), was a vast ocean that filled the crack in the world. While Torak still maintained the Orb of Aldur he could only look on it with agony. When Torak cracked the world, the Orb of Aldur burned half of Torak’s body and face with a flame that would ever after flare with unbearable pain when Torah gazes on it because of the Orb’s childish anger and innocence at being used to kill and destroy. The Orb of Aldur is the jewel of the Light, to be wielded only after by those pure of heart. A few thousand years after the cracking of the world, the Orb of Aldur was recovered by Belgarath and the Alorn (the people group who worship the God Belar) King Cherek and his sons, Dras, Algar, and Riva. It was to Riva and his descendants who would then become the protectors of the Orb ever after. A day would come when the promised Child of Light would come through the bloodline of Riva—who was destined to destroy Torak. Thus, throughout The Belgariad and The Mallorean, the reader comes to know this

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Child of Light, Belgarion, and follows him in his adventures with his grandfather Belgarath and his aunt, Polgara the Sorceress.26 *** Despite the apparent polytheism within the world and adventures of Belgarath the Sorcerer, there is a dualistic theology that shines throughout the series. Throughout Eddings’s fantasy, evil is always seen as something dominating, twisted, and distorted. However, throughout Eddings’s fantastic corpus, goodness always seems to triumph. But underlying both good and evil in the world of Belgarath are two Purposes or consciousnesses, one of light and the other of darkness.27 Each of these Purposes can only act through the human choices of those who follow the prophecies of light and dark. These Purposes cannot act directly against one another, or they would destroy the cosmos. Because these Purposes are of equal power, they cannot directly confront one another and require human agents to mediate their Purposes. But the Purposes play a role in shaping, but are also dependent upon, human agents and their choices to determine which Purpose would triumph. If the Purposes of Good and Evil are examined within the world of Belgarath the Sorcerer, and the game of the choice between them,28 then there is a distinctive Zoroastrian theology of good and evil resourced in Eddings’s fantasy worth analyzing. Though the debate exists between whether Zoroastrianism was influenced by or influenced the formation of Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity,29 Zoroastrianism is marked by the spiritualization of Good and Evil as divine entities. The dualism between God and angels, Satan and demons, is part of the common Ancient Near Eastern worldview. Within Ancient Near Eastern theologies those who followed God saw themselves as the children of light as opposed to the children of darkness. But Zoroastrian theology is not just the dualism between light and dark. A basic distinction between Abrahamic traditions and Zoroastrianism has to do with how evil is viewed. Within Abrahamic faiths, evil is seen as privation and distortion of the good—it has no substance. But within Zoroastrianism, both good and evil are deified and given substance. Good and evil are black and white and the evil God, Angra Mainyu (or Ahriman) can only act in response to the acts of the good God, Ahura Mazda. This implies the priority and determinism of good over evil, the sovereignty of the good over the existence of evil. But this is where a similarity between Zoroastrianism and the Abrahamic traditions is revealed: that the good God remains sovereign, and that evil is only responsive and not original to creation. In Zoroastrianism, Angra Mainyu works against the purposes of Ahura Mazda, but can only act after Ahura Mazda has made a move. S. A. Nigosian highlights the dualistic theology of the Zoroastrian tradition by articulating

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the basic dualism between truth and falsehood. Nigosian argues that Zoroaster “came to see that this fundamental tension existed both in the material as well as in the spiritual spheres. Over against a transcendental good mind stood an evil mind; over against the good spirit stood the evil spirit; and so on. Yet on every level, a choice had to be made. This insistence on the freedom of choice was the marked characteristic of Zoroaster’s teaching.”30 However, the nature of Good and Evil are not only grounded in the character of human choice to follow Ahura Mazda or Ahriman: it is also cosmic. Nigosian states further: The universe is an eternal battleground where a pair of coexistent, divine, and warring principles combat. In every sphere and in every situation demanding a decision between two opposites, human beings have to make a choice between these two principles. The consequences alone would imply that the principle of good is more powerful than the principle of evil, and that therefore Ahura Mazda eventually triumphs.31

Within Eddings’s fantasy, there are similar notions. The battle between light and darkness lies in the choices the Child of Light and the Child of Dark (those agents of the Purposes of Light and Darkness) make against one another. It is described like a game of chess where the choices are made by human agents who are guided by the dualistic Purposes of Good and Evil until there remains only One Purpose. In the world of Belgarath, the dualism between Good and Evil Purposes was not intended at creation. Illustrated throughout the Mallorean, the final decision between the Purposes of Good and Evil will not only be decided by a neutral party, but that when a Purpose is chosen, the two would become One Purpose. Within the series the possibility of the victory of either the Evil Purpose or the Good Purpose is laid upon human choice. This is climactically resolved in the Korim Reef by the choice of the Seeress of Kell. The Seeress of Kell is the neutral party because she is part of the Dal people who studied the stars and the Purposes without allying to either. Though she was blindfolded to better see into the mystic arts of her people, it is only when her eyes are unbound that she sees what Good and Evil look like. She finally sees Evil as Evil and Good as Good, and chooses Good.32 The choice between Good and Evil is something central to Zoroastrianism, and humans have the ability, responsibility, and agency to choose between them. Here there are striking similarities between Eddings’s fantasy subcreation and Zoroastrian religion. Just as Zoroastrianism is a response to central Asian religious polytheism, while there are several gods within The Belgariad and The Mallorean, it is clear is that these gods, though of great power, are not the essentially good or evil. The gods in turn were created by the Purposes of their father UL and

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Mother Time to serve the Purposes of Good and Evil, which split cosmically from one into two Purposes. Likewise in Zoroastrianism, there are divine beings created by the Good and Evil Gods, but these divine angelic powers are in the service of the Good and Evil Gods. Those six that were created by Ahura Mazda are called the Amesh Spenta and those six created by Angra Mainyu to pair the Amesh Spenta are called the Spenta Mainyu. Furthermore, the purposes of the Spenta in Zoroastrianism are to distort or cultivate human choices for Good, just as in Eddings’s fantasy the Gods serve the Good and Evil Purposes. That said, while there are six good and evil Spenta in Zoroastrianism, in Eddings’s fantasy there are seven Gods descended from the Father of the Gods and Time. Of these seven, six are good and one is evil. While Eddings does not offer a one-to-one correlation with Zoroastrianism, we do see likenesses in the fact that there are six Gods who follow the Good Purpose—and this is alongside Eddings’s fantastic spin that there is only one Evil God that does not share power. Likewise, another discrepancy between Eddings’s fantasy and Zoroastrianism is the fact that the seven Gods are fully Gods and not angelic like beings as we find in Zoroastrianism. Furthermore, another analogy between Eddings and Zoroastrianism is the role of Time to bring forth the Gods. The Zurvan branch of Zoroastrianism argues that Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were created by Time, while in Eddings’s fantastic world the Gods were created through the procreating thought of UL and Time. Zurvanism creates a true monotheism while Eddings still works with dualism and polytheism. These comparisons illustrate Eddings’s striking similarities and spins on Zoroastrianism through the creation of the Gods in the world of Belgarath. These fantastic spins and parallels between Zoroastrianism and Eddings’s fantastic world illustrates important analogies and theological threads of inter-religious resourcements in the fantasy of David and Leigh Eddings. In the works of David and Leigh Eddings, there is a dualistic theology of good and evil—and one where good triumphs. But there is also the centrality of a theology of choice. Likewise in Zoroastrianism, humans become the agents of choice, and choices for truth and goodness over falsehood and evil results in either their salvation or their condemnation. When humans choose truth and goodness over falsehood and evil, humans are seen as righteous and are rewarded by Ahura Mazda because of their active choice for what Ahura Mazda represents: goodness, light, and truth. But when humans choose falsehood and evil over goodness and truth, they ally themselves to Angra Mainyu and are rewarded with condemnation. Do I choose good and truth or do I choose evil and falsehood? Human agency is grounded in a theology of human choice between good and evil. It is marked by the decision between good and evil and is informed by a morality embodied within a Good God (or Purpose) and an Evil God (Or Purpose). In the Zoroastrian context, there

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is a salvation that is given to humans based on their ability to see, perceive, and choose good over evil, truth over falsehood: to choose to follow a good purpose over an evil one. Within The Belgariad and The Mallorean, there is a fantastic spin upon Zoroastrian theology, and one that yet resources Zoroastrianism into the late-modern imagination. THE FANTASTIC RE-ENCHANTMENT OF LATE-MODERN IMAGINARIES This chapter analyzed two examples of religious resourcement within the late-modern fantastic imagination. While Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson offer a pluralistic resourcement of religion in their fantasy, David and Leigh Eddings offer a Zoroastrian resourcement of religion in their fantasy. This chapter has argued that late-modern fantasy not only invites us into sub-created worlds, but also that they draw upon real religions in ways that creatively innovate and simulate religious traditions in the fantastic imagination. But the fantastic imagination does not necessarily become an actual reality: the sub-created worlds of The Wheel of Time and Belgarath the Sorcerer are not actual worlds. They are subcreations of the author’s imagination that simulate mythical worlds where religious ideas may re-enchant the imagination in the primary world and what may be deemed believable in creative ways. By articulating how The Wheel of Time, The Belgariad, and The Mallorean imagine and resource religious ideas, there are confluences within the late-modern setting. Late modernity is marked by the pluralistic explosion of new religions, beliefs, and practices in ways that draw upon global sources. Within this nova effect of the recovery and discovery of religious ideas in the fantastic simulations of religion, late modernity is allowed to (and allows us to) imagine the world in new ways. This chapter notes three important ways in which the fantastic imagination reflects the late-modern imaginary. First, these fantasies show the influence of contemporary pluralism through the syncretism of ideas from multiple religions. Second, they emphasize the importance of human agency and choice. Third, they simulate an answer to the problem of evil through the imagination and inter-religious resourcement. In the plurality of religious options from which humans can create and imagine what is believable, the question of religious truth remains implicitly unasked. The simulations of a pluralistic imaginary entail the porous boundaries between what is imaginable and what is real, allowing the religious ideas found in fantastic subcreations the ability to not only reflect real world religions, but also the ability to change what humans may deem possible to believe. What the fantastic influence upon

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late-modern imaginaries of belief offers is its ability to create new religious possibilities of making sense of reality and imagining the world. Fantastic worlds shape what may be deemed possible to believe. They also raise systematic problems religions seek to address, especially the problem of evil, in creative ways. Through the method of inter-religious resourcement, evil is portrayed in ways that reflect monotheistic theological traditions. Within The Wheel of Time and the world of Belgarath the Sorcerer, the evil and good Purposes, the Creator and Shai’tain, are two opposing points of contrast. But evil is seen not merely as the opposite of good. It is seen as the absence or distortion of good. Furthermore, the monotheistic fantastic imagination within both series illustrates the importance of the role of human agency in choosing between good or evil. But underlying both good and evil in both series are theological and cosmological patterns where these opposing forces are directed towards their resolution. In The Wheel of Time, this is through the impersonal Pattern, where redemption comes through a messianic interpretation of reincarnation. Within the world of Belgarath the Sorcerer, the dualism between good and evil is an effect of an unintentional split in the cosmic Purpose that is resolved through human choice. But in these fantastic imaginaries, good and evil are not only present because of unintended cosmic disruptions or the human will to power. They are theologically resolved by human agency to choose good over evil and to act in ways that are conducive to the purposes of the good. These theological and religious sources are imaginatively simulated to explain and solve the problem of evil. This chapter has surveyed Robert Jordan’s and David and Leigh Eddings’s mythopoetical subcreations, demonstrating how they offer fantastic spins on Asian and Zoroastrian religions. If Jordan taps into Chinese cosmological ideas and creatively reconciles evil through messianic reincarnation, Eddings taps into a Zoroastrian monotheistic worldview where the Gods exist according the dualistic purposes which contrast good and evil through human agency and choice. This re-enchantment is one that produces and creates an imagined world that yet simulates and implicitly becomes formative of what may be found believable in the world. Just as the imagination opens people to the possibility of religious re-enchantment, the simulations of a fantastic late-modern imaginary create anew the possibility of believing through the imaginations of the world in ways that opens the West again to the divine. NOTES 1. Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead, A Sociology of Religious Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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2. C.f. Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31–53; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 49–162; Tone Svetelj, “Rereading Modernity: Charles Taylor on Its Genesis and Prospects” (Boston, MA: Boston College, 2012), 394–443; James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). 3. C.f. Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is Enchantment?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 145–65; David McPherson, “Re-Enchanting the World: An Examination of Ethics, Religion, and Their Relationship in the Work of Charles Taylor” (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University, 2013), 261–265; Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 287–302. 4. C.f. Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000), 136–168; Anthony C. Thistleton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation, and Promise (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995); Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996); Stanley Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). 5. For C. S. Lewis, the re-enchantment of the imagination is key to the re-enchantment also of the will and the soul. Re-enchanting our imagination is a step to conversion, because if our imaginations are awakened to religious sensibilities and longings, we get a glimpse of what is missing in a disenchanted world: which is itself evidence that there is something more that faith provides. C.f. David Downing, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 8–33; Robert Holyer, “C.S. Lewis on the Epistemic Significance of the Imagination,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 74, no. 1 & 2 (1991): 215–241. 6. C.f. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 299–422; James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, 60–78. 7. C.f. on simulation: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (USA: Semiotext[e], 1983), 11–12; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glasser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. 8. Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time was left unfinished before his death in 2007. However, Jordan left extensive notes for the final book, which Brandon Sanderson used to finish the series with the final three books. While the first eleven books and the prequel were written by Jordan, the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth book was written by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. 9. C.f. Robert Jordan, The Shadow Rising, vol. 4, 14 vols., The Wheel of Time (New York: TOR Publishing, 2010), 404–420. 10. Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World, vol. 1, 14 vols., The Wheel of Time (New York: TOR Publishing, 2019), ix–xiv.

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11. Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, The Gathering Storm, vol. 12, 14 vols., The Wheel of Time (New York: TOR Publishing, 2010), 759. 12. Robert Jordan, The Dragon Reborn, vol. 3, 14 vols., The Wheel of Time (New York: TOR Publishing, 2019), 239. 13. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 14. Jordan, The Dragon Reborn, 378. 15. Robert Jordan and Teresa Patterson, The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time (New York, NY: TOR Publishing, 2001), 13. 16. Jordan, The Eye of the World, 554. 17. Jordan, The Dragon Reborn, 47: “Ta’veren. All of us, all of our lives affect the lives of others, Min. As the Wheel of Time weaves us into the Pattern, the life-thread of each of us pulls and tugs at the life-threads around us. Ta’veren are much the same, only much, much more so. They tug at the entire Pattern—for a time, at least—forcing it to shape around them. The closer you are to them, the more you are affected personally. It is said if you were in the same room with Artur Hawkwing, you could feel the Pattern rearranging itself . . . But it doesn’t only work one way. Ta’veren themselves are woven to a tighter line than the rest of us, with fewer choices.” 18. Jordan, The Eye of the World, 644. 19. C.f. Arvind Sharma, Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99–100. The soteriological debate between Arminian theology of free will and the Calvinist emphasis on predestination and the sovereignty of God is an example of the two extremes within the Christian tradition. 20. Jordan and Sanderson, The Gathering Storm, 759. 21. Jordan, The Eye of the World, 168. 22. Robin R. Wang, “Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained (‘Taijitu shuo’): A Construction of the Confucian Metaphysics,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 66, No. 3 (2005), 307–323. 23. C.f. Young-Chan Ro, “Cosmogony, Cosmology and Kosmology: Yin-Yang and Taiji Symbolism,” CIRPIT Review 4 (2013): 145–53. 24. Jordan, The Shadow Rising, 152–153: “That’s nothing like what I do. Let it fill me? I have to reach out and take hold of Saidin. Sometimes there’s still nothing there when I do, nothing I can touch, but if I didn’t reach for it, I could stand there forever and nothing would happen. It fills me all right, once I take hold, but surrender to it? Egwene, if I surrendered - even for one minute - Saidin would consume me. It’s like a river of molten metal, an ocean of fire, all the light of the sun gathered in one spot. I must fight it to make it do what I want, fight it to keep from being eaten up.” 25. David and Leigh Eddings were a married couple that wrote together several series and volumes throughout their career. While the Belgariad and Mallorean are authored solely by David Eddings, his wife Leigh had a major influence over the series, enough that from the publication of Belgarath the Sorcerer forward, every book and series by the Eddings were co-authored by the couple. 26. David and Leigh Eddings, Belgarath the Sorcerer (New York: Del Rey, 1996); David and Leigh Eddings, Polgara the Sorceress (New York: Del Rey, 1998).

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27. The inconsistencies in capitalizing “Purpose” (as well as “Good and Evil” later in the chapter) are deliberate, to illustrate Eddings’s own language when speaking of the Two Purposes that become One. I purposefully capitalized Purpose and Good and Evil to signify references to Eddings’s ideas and usage. Where I do not capitalize, that is because (1) Zoroastrianism does not usually capitalize good and evil even while they are deified and (2) where I do not capitalize purpose/purposes is where I am not explicitly referring to Eddings's understanding, or where my interpretation or use of the word is used in a different way that Eddings uses it. 28. Throughout the series, the contestation between Purposes is referred to something by the Purpose of Good as a game of chess, of strategic movements between the Purposes through the choices and human agency of those who serve the Purposes. 29. Lenore Erickson, “The Problem of Zoroastrian Influence on Judaism and Christianity” (paper presented at the World Congress on Mulla Sadra, Tehran, 25–27 May 1999), p. 16; Opt. cit. in Marietta Stepaniants, “The Encounter of Zoroastrianism with Islam,” Philosophy East and West 52, No 2. (2002): 159–172, 160. 30. S. A. Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 21–22. 31. Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith, 88. 32. David Eddings, The Seeress of Kell (New York: Del Rey, 1991), 289–291.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations, translated by Sheila Faria Glasser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. USA: Semiotext[e], 1983. Bilgrami, Akeel. “What Is Enchantment?” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, 145–65. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Downing, David. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Eddings, David. The Seeress of Kell. New York: Del Rey, 1991. Eddings, David and Leigh. Belgarath the Sorcerer. New York: Del Rey, 1996. ———. Polgara the Sorceress. New York: Del Rey, 1998. Grenz, Stanley. A Primer of Postmodernism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. ———. The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Holyer, Robert. “C.S. Lewis on the Epistemic Significance of the Imagination,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 74, no. 1 & 2 (1991): 215–241. Jordan, Robert. Lord of Chaos. Vol. 6. 14 vols. The Wheel of Time. New York: TOR Publishing, 2010. ———. The Dragon Reborn. Vol. 3. 14 vols. The Wheel of Time. New York: TOR Publishing, 2019.

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———. The Eye of the World. Vol. 1. 14 vols. The Wheel of Time. New York: TOR Publishing, 2019. ———. The Shadow Rising. Vol. 4. 14 vols. The Wheel of Time. New York: TOR Publishing, 2010. Jordan, Robert, and Teresa Patterson. The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. New York: TOR Publishing, 2001. Jordan, Robert, and Brandon Sanderson. The Gathering Storm. Vol. 12. 14 vols. The Wheel of Time. New York: TOR Publishing, 2010. McPherson, David. “Re-Enchanting The World: An Examination Of Ethics, Religion, And Their Relationship In The Work Of Charles Taylor.” Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University, 2013. Nigosian, S. A. The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Edited by Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Riis, Ole, and Linda Woodhead. A Sociology of Religious Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Ro, Young-Chan. “Cosmogony, Cosmology and Kosmology: Yin-Yang and Taiji Symbolism.” CIRPIT Review 4 (2013): 145–53. Sharma, Arvind. Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Smith, Dennis. Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999. Smith, James K. A. How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. Stepaniants, Marietta. “The Encounter of Zoroastrianism with Islam.” Philosophy East and West 52, no 2. (2002): 159–172. Svetelj, Tone. “Rereading Modernity: Charles Taylor on Its Genesis and Prospects.” Boston, MA: Boston College, 2012. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. Dilemmas and Connections. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. ———. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. “Modes of Secularism.” In Secularism and Its Critics, edited by Rajeev Bhargava, 31–53. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Thistleton, Anthony C. Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation, and Promise. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. Wang, Robin R. “Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained (‘Taijitu Shuo’): A Construction of the Confucian Metaphysics.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 3 (2005): 307–23.

Chapter 10

The Hero as God An Exploration of Mormon Soteriology in the Fantasy Novels of Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson Josh Herring‌‌

In “On Fairy-Stories,”1 Tolkien develops a Christian literary theory that elevates fantasy writing to the level of a theological enterprise. For Tolkien, each author functions as a “sub-creator” whose work succeeds or fails to the extent that the reader perceives the “inner consistency of reality” within the fantasy world. Original as an author may want to be, Tolkien contends, his work’s “secondary reality” is inevitably shaped by his understanding of “primary reality.” As a Catholic, Tolkien saw his creation of the Legendarium, the additional stories building out the world of Middle-Earth, as working out the doctrine of the imago Dei. The fantasy he created developed from his understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. Out of Tolkien’s Christian convictions about the Fall, sin, redemption, and restoration grew a fantasy about human frailty and greatness, and the necessity of fighting sin balanced against the impossibility of its eradication through purely human means. The Lord of the Rings contains, as several scholars note, a distinctly Christian structure.2 Tolkien was honest when he wrote about detesting allegory; he did not write his stories to didactically teach Catholic doctrine.3 Instead, because his convictions were held so deeply, everything he wrote was inevitably shaped by his convictions. “On Fairy-Stories” offers a literary defense of fantasy through a notably Christian lens4; does such a claim extend to other faith communities? This essay contends that the answer is yes, and will demonstrate the ways in which Mormon theology serves as fertile ground for the imaginative works of Orson 155

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Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson. As will be detailed below, Mormonism differs from Christian theology in significant ways, so much so that Tolkien would not recognize it as a source of thought connecting the author to primary reality. An additional concern for Tolkien’s theory lies in the growth of secularity between delivering “On Fairy-Stories” as a lecture and the early twenty-first century. Where Tolkien wrote and spoke in a religiously friendly era, the contemporary age sees little value in religious belief. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age charts the rise of the secular west, and in such a climate, spiritual foundations seem less essential than Tolkien considered them. Taylor implies that our age ignores the spiritual roots of ideas, preferring unconnected inspiration; Tolkien connected an author’s understanding of primary reality, which lay within the religious answers to fundamental questions, to his literary productivity. Tolkien proved the efficacy of his literary theory in drawing from Catholic conviction to highlight the moral transformation of Bilbo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin over the course of The Lord of the Rings, but it remains an open question whether Tolkien’s approach holds true for other foundations. If this theory is correct, then an unintentional consequence of secularism is a dearth of strong sources from which story-tellers draw. While Tolkien considered his Catholic faith the source of ultimate truth, this essay seeks to explore whether an alternate faith (Mormonism) works in a similar way. The writings of Card and Sanderson show that Mormonism is also a fruitful source of literary creation. While extension into other global religions lies beyond the scope of this essay, Card and Sanderson support the view that religious faith serves as a fruitful foundation for imaginative literature. It is also perhaps significant that neither Card nor Sanderson attempt to draw on their faith in utilitarian ways; they are authentically Mormon by conviction, and their writings are Mormon because those ideas well up from within the authors. If this theory is correct, it further suggests that authors with deep spiritual heritages are more equipped to create literature than those who reject a spiritual foundation; it seems a corollary that adopting a faith purely for this effect would be disingenuous and unlikely to prove effective. If faith connects to world-building and storytelling, that faith must be real. Card and Sanderson both show that convictions matter for literary fruitfulness. Card and Sanderson each draw upon their theological tradition (Mormonism) and its rich tradition of theosis (deification of the human) to craft their story universes. Each author follows a pattern of divinizing the hero in a way which fits with Mormon theology, supporting the broader claim that drawing upon a strong spiritual heritage enables literary creativity. Before beginning an exploration of Mormon theology, one must note that Mormons consider their faith a denomination of Christianity. Card refers to himself as a Christian.5 Terry Givens explains that the Book of Mormon has “unavoidably been seen by readers past and present as emulating Christian

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Scripture in innumerable ways, even as it subverts Christian ideas about the closed nature of the Christian spiritual canon.”6 The argument of this essay does not depend on answering the question “Is Mormonism a Christian denomination?” in one way or the other, but instead seeks to describe a Mormon imaginary as distinct from the Christian imaginary developed by Tolkien.7 For clarity’s sake, I do not consider Mormonism to be in alignment with Nicene Christianity, and will treat the two faiths as differing theological perspectives.8 MORMON THEOLOGY: A MYTHOPOEIC RESOURCE AND DOCTRINAL SURVEY As Terry Givens makes clear in Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, Mormon theology is a mythopoeic project9 that begins with accepting (or experiencing) a vision: “As surely as the Catholic Church grounded its own claims of authority on the rock of Peter, so did Mormonism ground its own on personal revelation.”10 Rather than the propositional logic of medieval Scholasticism, the Mormon faith begins with a vision of a cosmos, and the beings within that cosmos. Givens shows through an historical survey of Mormon theological literature that defining Mormon theology is itself a nearly impossible task: “Mormon Church authorities have been loath to propound creeds or catechisms to establish a baseline for orthodoxy . . . This history, and the church’s steadfast reliance on the principle of ‘continuing revelation’ have resulted in a tradition of church teachings that is highly fluid and generally hard to pin down.”11 Nevertheless, three elements of Mormon thought remain consistent throughout their tradition and relevant to writing fantastic literature: the materialist view of the cosmos, the doctrine of God, and the relationship between human nature and theosis. The prevalence of Christianity in Western civilization has resulted in a widespread acceptance of a dualistic view of reality articulated in the Gospel of John: “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (4:24) and again in St. Paul: “But I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). Christianity views reality as composed of spirit and matter: the person is a fusion of flesh and soul. The ancient Hebrews wrote of the breath of God which filled Adam and gave life to inert matter (Genesis 2:7). The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation depends on the remarkable description of God-as-spirit becoming flesh, and in doing so dignifying flesh as worthy to be divine. The difference between the material world of normal human existence and a spiritual plane of reality appears in passages such as Isaiah 6 (the prophet’s vision of the divine throne

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room), Christ’s statement to Mary Magdalene that he must “ascend” to his Father, and the Revelation of St. John. Spirit and matter, in Christian thought, are two different substances and the relation between them is of ultimate theological concern. Mormon theology begins from a different premise. In Mormon thought, “matter and spirit are not just similarly eternal; they are ultimately two manifestations of the same reality or substance. The consequence in Joseph Smith’s thought is a collapse of the radical divide between body and spirit, the earthly and the heavenly.”12 Rather than being two substances, Mormonism collapses reality into a single substance expressed in different ways. “Mormonism’s underlying materialist cosmology . . . offers a vigorous challenge to a Christian orthodoxy rooted in a metaphysics of spirit.”13 Rather than reducing the value of the spiritual, this view raises all existence to the dignity of spirit, and makes plausible the transformation of matter as eternal substance. Mormonism’s materialist cosmology grounds a unique doctrine of God. In contrast to the “Greatest Possible Being” of theistic philosophy, or the omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God of Christianity, Mormonism posits a divine who is “personal, passible, and embodied.”14 The personal God of Mormonism is the source of ongoing revelation. A central tenet of Mormon thought is that God continues to reveal teaching in each generation. Joseph Smith was the prophet, but each generation since has had multiple prophets. Rather than an impassible, unchanging God, Smith proclaimed a God who fully empathizes with the human experience: “From the first months of the church’s organization, Smith portrays not just a passable Jesus but a God the Father whose love causes him to suffer, grieve, and even weep in divine empathy with the human.”15 Such a view is possible because God the Father is not wholly other, but instead was once like us. Early Mormon leader Orson Pratt wrote that “the true God exists in both time and space, and has as much relation to them as any man or any other being. He has extension, and form, and dimensions, as well as man. He occupies space; has a body, parts, and passions; can go from place to place—can eat, drink, and talk, as well as man.”16 God the Father, in Mormon thought, experiences reality in much the same way that humans do. The Christian doctrine of God stresses the supreme difference between God and man; several moments throughout the biblical narrative rely upon the difference: the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses in the “cleft of the rock” permitted only to see YHWH’s back, the terrifying expectation of “Be ye holy as I am holy,” or the death of Uzzah after touching the Ark. The God of Mormonism, rather than being unchangeably other, represents in his existence the telos of human existence.

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Smith taught that “humans are inherently more godlike, God is more anthropomorphic, and God’s purposes are more oriented towards human theosis than is the case with earlier Christian conceptions.”17 Theosis (i.e., divinization) refers in this case to the eventual ascent of the Mormon to the Celestial Society of perfected divine beings within the larger cosmos. Lorenzo Snow expressed this conviction through the following couplet: “As man is now, God once was; as God now is, man may be.”18 God was once a man like us, and his work is to invite us to become as he now is so that we might join him in the ongoing task of creation. Givens explains that Mormons associate at least three conditions with the divine nature, and orient their own quest for salvation around them; (1) God is primarily a relational being—that is, his perfect happiness arises primarily from his loving relationship with other beings. (2) God is perfectly good and virtuous. His name, Elohim, means “Man of Holiness.” (3) God is a dynamic, infinitely wise, and infinitely creative being.19

Mormon salvation entails becoming divine and then participating in the work of extending creation. But the deification of humans also becomes a central part of Mormon eschatology. President Snow of Brigham Young University offered a clarifying comment: . . . these children are now at play making mud worlds, the time will come when some of these boys, through their faithfulness to the gospel, will progress and develop in knowledge, intelligence, and power, in future eternities, until they shall be able to go out into space where there is unorganized matter and call together the necessary elements, and through their knowledge of and control over the laws and powers of nature, to organize matter into world on which their posterity may dwell, and over which they shall rule as gods.20

Ascent to godhood, Snow illustrates, is a foundational component of the Mormon imaginary, flowing from prior convictions about the nature of matter, God, and humanity. The connection between theological propositions is sound: all reality is a single substance, God is the most highly developed being of that substance, and his prophecies reveal the way that humans can continue developing until they reach a similar divine state. Mormon soteriology gives rise to an expansive materialist eschatology: “In a vision [Joseph Holbrook] saw ‘endless suns and planets moving in their orbits, vast systems waiting only to be filled and governed.’”21 Such a “metaphysical dream”22 lends itself to the creation of fantastic literature. When considered as bodies of literature, Card and Sanderson’s narrative universes develop in distinctly Mormon patterns: discrete planetary systems, divinization of the hero, and, most clearly

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in Sanderson, the development of a Celestial Society between the gods of different planets. ORSON SCOTT CARD: MAKING THE HUMAN MORE HIMSELF Orson Scott Card’s works fall into at least three categories: his Mormon writings (Homecoming Saga, The Tales of Alvin Maker, Saints, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah), his speculative long fiction (Ender’s Game and its many spin-offs, Treason, Wyrms, Hart’s Hope, Songmaster), and his short fiction (Maps in a Mirror, The Worthing Saga, Keeper of Dreams, Folk of the Fringe). Across these different literary forms, Card weaves together the classic story elements of plot, character, worldbuilding, dialogue, prose, and poetry to, above all else, tell excellent stories. His novels are character-driven: Card values the integrity of his stories too highly to use narrative to proselytize. Like Tolkien, Card’s spiritual beliefs are so deeply engrained that they permeate his writings. In his treatment of the hero-protagonist, the Mormon shape of Card’s fiction becomes clear. Card typically introduces the reader to a protagonist who is thoroughly human. As the protagonist develops through the plot, some attribute is highlighted that makes the protagonist unique. By the denouement (resolution of action in the plot) the protagonist transcends human limitations, expanding his unique quality beyond what any other character could do. In moving toward an immanent transcendence, Card portrays a Mormon vision of the hero undergoing theosis and becoming, in most cases, a godlike figure who retains sympathy23 with normal humanity. The section below outlines the major plots of seven of Card’s primary story worlds which illustrate the argument. Card’s stories do not fall into clearly demarcated science fiction and fantasy categories, so these seven stories occasionally bridge that divide. Seven Card Novels: Theosis in Practice A Planet Called Treason (later republished as Treason) is set on a planet named for a never-revealed act of treason committed by a conspiracy group; sentenced to a planet with little iron, each member of the conspiracy became the head of a family. Each family specializes in their founder’s skill, gift, or knowledge. Lanik Mueller’s family has the ability to regrow limbs and instantly heal injuries. “But we Muellers have long since learned that our present shape is not our self at all. We can have many different shapes and still be who we always were . . . We bred ourselves to regenerate lost

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or broken body parts . . . Our self is not our shape.”24After Lanik’s ability morphs into an uncontrollable state called “radical regeneration,” he begins journeying across the world. He discovers that the different skills—time manipulation, earth movement, mental illusion—can all be learned. Lanik learns that one group is using their powers to take control of what little iron exists in the world. Using his combined powers, he kills that group and then retires with his wife to be a physician in the most pastoral of the countries (Humping). “When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done,” Lanik concludes, “then the price, once paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value. Here among the shepherds, my cup is filled with the water of life; it overflows.”25 Lanik is nothing unique; his discovery that powers can be learned allows him to do what anyone on Treason could have done. By the conclusion of the story, he and his wife have gained such mastery both of themselves and of time that they can live forever if they so choose. Lanik becomes godlike through acquiring the skills and knowledge available for everyone; his uniqueness lies in taking advantage of the opportunities before him. Songmaster follows a wildly different plot set in a galactic empire. The emperor Mikal is aging, and he applies to the Songhouse for a Songbird (a specially trained child-singer). Card draws on the Italian castrato tradition to build a narrative where gifted children are trained for musical performance from birth and then sent out for a set term (five years) as the most expensive luxury the rich can seek. The Songhouse, as the sole incorruptible institution in the galaxy, can then approve or deny application. Ansset the Songbird is sent to Mikal, but things go awry after his term is nearly complete. Instead of returning to the Songhouse after his term, he goes into a career as a governor and eventually becomes emperor himself. The novel concludes in Ansset’s return to the Songhouse, not as a young adult coming home to teach but as an old man steeped in power and its use. He is initially forbidden to sing out of fear that his voice, laced with cruelty and the evils of life outside the Songhouse, will corrupt the next generation of singers. When he does sing, his song changes everything about the Songhouse. It took time for the effects to be felt. At first all the songs in all the Common Rooms and Chambers were worse: all the children staggered under the weight of what had been given them. But after a few days some of the children began to incorporate Ansset’s life into their songs. After a few weeks, to one degree or another, all the children had. And the teachers, too, were colored by the experience, so that a new depth sang throughout the halls of the Songhouse.26

Ansset’s knowledge of suffering infuses reality into the Songhouse; far from destroying the beauty of the music, Ansset’s life experiences deepen

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the Songbirds’ appreciation of human existence. Ansset’s ascension is more subtle; he rises above his peers through different experiences, and helps transform the music of the Songhouse from innocence to maturity. He merges the godlike and the human in his life, and shows this movement between human and divine through the rise and fall of power. Ender’s Game has, as of this writing, led to eighteen follow-up novels in four different series or collections. Ender Wiggin is taken to Battle School (an elite military school in outer space), where he trains as one of hundreds of high-achieving children who may one day fight in the next war against aliens (the Formics) who have previously invaded earth. Over the course of the novel, Ender develops a supreme level of battle strategy, maximizing his human and academic resources to turn an army of rejects into school champions in the battle-room. Ender’s greatest gift is not battle strategy, but rather his sense of sympathy. This sympathetic connection allows him to lead his squadron; it also allows him to perceive the alien psychology of the Formics. Deceived into thinking he is still playing war games rather than conducting a real war, he ultimately exterminates the Formics. Ender’s Game could have ended with a celebration of the death of the other, but instead the story follows Ender into a distant future where he searches for a safe place for the last Formic queen to begin rebuilding her species. As a way of processing his guilt over committing xenocide, Ender writes a manuscript, The Speaker for the Dead, that gives rise to a new religion spreading throughout the human colonies. “And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked for a long time.”27 Ender is a precocious child who does what the adults refuse to do: thinking that he is playing a game, he transcends the moral limitations of the military. Out of the consequent trauma, he develops a compassion for others that results in a new method of commemorating the dead. Ender represents godlike power combined with prophetic repentance. If Card explored psychological connections in Ender’s Game, the parallel novel Ender’s Shadow illustrates the trade-off between mental and biological superiority. A secondary character from Ender’s Game, Bean, becomes the protagonist; Bean is a tiny boy, but his mind is unparalleled in its brilliance. At one point, Ender tells Bean, “Because even though there are some better soldiers in Dragon Army—not many, but some—there’s nobody who can think better or faster than you.”28 Eventually, the reader learns that Bean’s brain power comes from an illegal genetic experiment, the subjects of which “grow slowly, but they never stop. That’s what Anton’s Key does. Unlocks the mind because the brain never stops growing. But neither does anything else. The cranium keeps expanding—it’s never fully closed . . . There is no adult height. There is just height at time of death.”29 The price of Bean’s brilliance lies in his short lifespan: if Bean stays in Earth gravity, he and his

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eventual children will die in their twenties. Bean demonstrates Card’s attention to developing this sort of human divinity in secondary characters as well; Bean’s intellectual divinity is paired with the very human limitation of impending death. The six-volume Tales of Alvin Maker displays Card’s most overt blending of fantasy and Mormon hagiography. Alvin discovers his “knack” (ability) of “making” (changing material substance), a lost art in a reimagined America. Having mastered his art, he tries to teach others to become makers. He succeeds at various levels, but the story concludes with Alvin taking his followers across a crystal bridge into the less-inhabited lands west of the Mississippi and planning to build a crystal city. Alvin is clearly a Joseph Smith figure, and this series is a fantastic reimagining of Smith’s biography and work. Though Alvin’s brother also develops makery, as does a secondary character named Arthur Stuart, no one comes close to approaching Alvin’s ability to create and manipulate substance. By the conclusion of The Crystal City, the creation of a unique community becomes both the most difficult and the most important kind of making: And I finally realized, here in this town, watching all these people—the reason the Unmaker is gonna lose, in the long run, isn’t because someone like me or you does some big heroic deed and knocks him for a loop. It’ll be because of all these people, hundreds of them, thousands of them, each building something in his own way—a family, a marriage, a house, a farm, a sturdy machine, a tabernacle, a classroom full of students just a little wiser than they were. Something.30

Alvin Maker’s greatest desire is not to build a city out of crystal: he wants to equip and inspire everyone to become as much of a maker as lies within that person’s grasp. Alvin transcends his human limitations, but his most defining characteristic is causing others to also transcend their humanity within a community of makers. If the Tales of Alvin Maker are a reimagining of the life of Joseph Smith, The Worthing Saga imitates Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while recalling Asimov’s Foundation. Published first as the separate short story collections Capitol (1979) and Hot Sleep (1979), The Worthing Saga (1990) revises the larger story arc within a narrative frame. The first set of stories takes place within a decadent galactic empire governed by the central planet Capitol. This empire lacks faster-than-light travel, but they have a drug called somec that allows those who merit it the ability to sleep years away, waking occasionally. Somec allow the rich and powerful to plan across centuries, while those without access to somec die in relatively short order. The second set of stories describes a genetic experiment where the descendants of Jason Worthing, a telepath, interbreed with each other over centuries and

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become a sort of nanny-race, watching over all humanity to preserve them from pain. Card develops two godlike figures in this story-universe: the first, Abner Doon, is a diabolic figure determined to destroy Capitol and the somec system; the second, Jason, is a telepath who survives the fall of the empire and crashes on a colony planet with enough raw materials and memory-wiped citizens to begin a new world. Jason cultivates the new world according to his desires and abilities, and then uses somec to periodically check in on its development. While his descendants have more impressive mental powers than Jason, Jason is the point of continuity between the two sections of The Worthing Saga. Hot Sleep contains an alternate ending cut from The Worthing Saga: Doon arrives and has a final conversation with Jason centuries later. They congratulate each other on the successful plan to create a diverse cosmos of individually developing planets rather than the sameness that Capitol and somec had caused. This meeting has the appearance of Jesus and the Devil meeting together to congratulate each other on forming a world where virtue could be tested and cultivated; though opposites, they worked together to achieve a bigger goal. “From one man who’s spent his life playing God to another,” Doon said to Jason, “I must say you’ve done a fine job.”31 The Worthing Saga in its variations showcases Card’s use of theosis as a pattern; he explores its limitations while also making successful plot structures outs of the human desire to live beyond a natural lifespan. It also locates those divinized figures within a material cosmos. Neither Jason nor Doon aspire to a spiritual realm; their eternities are lived out in the physical galaxy. Saints represents Card’s contribution to the historical-fiction genre; here, he tells the tale of Dinah Kirkham and her family’s journey from a Hard-Times-esque industrial England to the Mormon frontier, joining Joseph Smith as settlers first in Nauvoo and continuing to Salt Lake. Kirkham becomes one of Smith’s first plural wives, and eventually a wife of Brigham Young. Just after swearing her vows in a Celestial Marriage ceremony, Kirkham closed her eyes. What have I done? she asked. And then, in answer, the light erupted within her. It was stronger than it had ever been before. She dared not open her eyes, or it would blind her; she dared not speak, or she would be left mute. At last, when she thought she could bear no more, the light brimmed and flowed over, through her hand where the Prophet held her, rushed into him and left her exhausted and exalted and, for the moment, sure.32

Kirkham experiences a similar mystical moment upon hearing the Mormon gospel preached and has similar experiences along her journey. Through Kirkham’s character, Card shows the relationship between experience, faith, and authority in Mormon thought: the Prophet instructs, Kirkham steps out

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in faithful obedience, and that obedience is confirmed through the testimony of the inner light. Kikrham stands out among Card’s characters, illustrating a feminine theosis alongside the predominantly masculine lead characters. Card demonstrates different skills in writing this novel; he creates a plausibly historical setting, but one that pulses with mystical visions. His descriptions of Joseph Smith make clear the epistemological burden Mormonism places on its adherents: If Smith really received revelations from God, then the rest of Mormon teaching follows. Dinah’s life transcends the typical Mormon story. She becomes a teacher and interpreter of Smith; through her own mystical revelations, she parallels Smith in terms of prophetic authority. Rather than use her position to oppose Smith, she supports his teaching and persuades others to do the same. Hart’s Hope is a different kind of story. Here, Card writes a mystical fairy tale to explain to the conquering king why he should not kill Orem Scanthips (the protagonist). Hart’s Hope shows Card’s most clear depiction of limited gods—the story turns upon three deities who have been imprisoned; the gods can give visions, but no longer directly act in the world. They bring about Orem’s conception, and eventually nudge him into the magical opposite; Orem negates the powers of the evil witch who imprisoned the gods. One of the gods tells Orem: Oh, Orem, we are feeble now, and what we do is slow. We can still send visions here and there, still do little works, but it’s a labor hard to bear. We made you, Orem. Shantih and I awoke your mother, named her Bloom, taught her to come to the riverbank; the Hart brought Palicroval; God gave you Avonap and Dobbick to make you who you are. We bent your life to bring you here, watched and shaped you where we could. You must not disappoint us now.33

The pantheon of Hart’s Hope comprises the Sisters, the Hart, and God; these three imprisoned deities are at the mercy of human magic. Orem is not divinized, but his powers elevate him beyond other magicians and allow him to restore right order in the world. Beyond Hart’s Hope’s internal theology, this story remains one of Card’s best fantasies. *** Card goes beyond the hero’s journey archetype to show a divinized hero, one who surpasses humanity while ascending to a godhood that maintains continuity with his past. Abner Doon articulates this theosis process: “You’re the prize in my collection, Jason. The best I ever found. That’s the best part of being God, you know—when you create someone who surpasses you.”34 Jason later remarks to his wife Arran that “Being God is the worst damn job in the universe.”35 Card’s characters tend to follow a path of transcending

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their humanity, resembling the soteriological vision of Mormon theology. In several places, Card has clearly denied the charge of his writing being a kind of Mormon propaganda; instead, his writing emerges from a place of deep conviction. At a conference of the LDS Publishing and Media Association, Card said: “I learned that I didn’t have to think about putting in Mormon stuff to write Mormon fiction. Anything I wrote was going to be Mormon fiction.”36 Card writes these heroes due to his theological convictions that all humans can become divine. His mythopoeic worldview contains a material cosmos of infinitely expansive planets, each governed by a unique god; such a “metaphysical dream” provides fertile ground for excellent speculative fiction. BRANDON SANDERSON: GOING BEYOND THE HUMAN Card’s stories are occasional, in the sense that they were each written at a specific time and sit within independent story universes. Brandon Sanderson’s work is different in at least two key ways. First, Sanderson had a difficult time breaking into publishing, and wrote twelve interconnected novels before publishing his first novel (Elantris). These novels formed the basis of Sanderson’s Cosmere, a universe with sixteen different divine forces splintered in a distant past. Novels set in the Cosmere, though they are set on different planets, exist within the same narrative universe. Sanderson explains, “I knew I wanted to create something like [Asimov’s Foundation series], an epic bigger than an epic. A story that spans worlds and eras.”37 Second, Sanderson’s mythos involves particular expressions of a universal divinization process. In each world, the process of breaking into the higher state of being is different, but each world in the Cosmere contains a magic system that allows for the divinization of the protagonist. Sanderson’s deification separates the protagonist from his humanity more fully than Card’s. Once the protagonist becomes fully divine, he moves beyond the typical human life and into a spiritual plane of existence; that spiritual plan of existence shares much commonality with the material plane, allowing figures to move between spiritual and material planes as needed from the plot. This section will follow the same format introduced above, with paragraphs surveying the major Cosmere novels published as of April 2021. Elantris follows the adventures of Raoden, a prince who has come down with a dreaded disease called the Shaod. Over the course of the novel, the reader learns than the world of Sel is divided into those who have access to a magic system and those who do not; the “gods” have access to a kind of magic and wield it through drawing arcane symbols with light called Aons;

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the magic had become broken and the gods turned from glorious immortals to insane, decrepit untouchables living in an unclean city. Elantris was beautiful, once. It was called the city of the gods: a place of power, radiance, and magic. Visitors say that the very stones glowed with an inner light, and that the city contained arcane marvels . . . as magnificent as Elantris was, its inhabitants were more so. Their hair a brilliant white, their skin an almost metallic silver, the Elantrians seemed to shine like the city itself. Legends claimed they were immortal, or at least nearly so . . . They were divinities. . . . Eternity ended ten years ago.38

By the conclusion of the novel, Raoden fixes the magic: the Shaod is a result of a geographic anomaly. Significant geographical change had to be reflected in the shape of the magical symbols employed. In Elantris, the spiritual and material planes overlap. Physical changes cause spiritual blockage. Restoring access to the spiritual (to regain magic) requires fixing the physical, relegating the spiritual to a subset of the material plane. Once the modification is made, Raoden is able to rule as both King of Arelon and leader of the restored gods. Elantris introduces the reader to Sanderson’s first magic system, and illustrates the idea, worked out most fully in The Stormlight Archive, that knowledge is the route to ascension. Godhood in Elantris is a function of using Aon-based magic, and it is not limited to the good characters. Sanderson tends to work through parallelism, and one primary way he accomplishes that structure is through an affirmative method of magic use (Raoden becomes more than he was through the use of Aons) and a negative use (evil priests become less—their magic is formed through warping their bone structure). This same parallelism exists in both Mistborn and Stormlight Archives series. To date, Mistborn is Sanderson’s most prolific series with the original trilogy complete (Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages), The Wax and Wayne Series is in progress (The Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, The Bands of Mourning), and a projected future series explores the technologically advanced future of the planet Scadrial. The original trilogy establishes the magic system of Scadrial, which involves consuming, or “burning” metals for the effects that follow. The original trilogy follows the overthrow of the empire, the establishment of a new government, and the ascension of Sazed the Terrisman to become the titular “Hero of Ages.” The conclusion of the trilogy develops through an explanation of the theological dimensions of Scadrial. This planet has two gods; Ruin and Preservation. They have both extinguished their minds by the final fight, and Sazed takes up their power to unite their forces within himself. The power of the gods is distinct from the mind that governs that power; Sazed is able to step into the absent position of governing mind, and can wield both creative and destructive power

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in re-creating the world. Sazed brings to this task the accumulated religious study of millennia of Terris (his people group) scholarship, revealing that each religion of humanity contained certain truths enabling him to restore Scadrial to a functioning, healthy state: “Every religion had clues in it, for the faiths of men contained the hopes, loves, and lives of the people who had believed them.” Sazed concludes that “the religions in my portfolio weren’t useless after all . . . None of them were. They weren’t all true. But they all had truth.”39 Sanderson closes Hero of Ages on this note: “Somebody would need to watch over the world, care for it, now that its gods were gone. It wasn’t until that moment that Sazed understood the term Hero of Ages. Not a Hero that came once in the ages. But a Hero who would span the ages. A Hero who would preserve mankind throughout all its lives and times. Neither Preservation nor Ruin, but both. God.”40 Scadrial’s existential threat was not the Lord Ruler (the primary antagonist), but limited gods who needed unification; in forming a new divine being, the planet is able to be healed. Ascending to godhood requires Sazed to leave his friends behind—he now exists on a different level—for the good the whole. Warbreaker is another of Sanderson’s stand-alone novels; it contributes to the overall Cosmere mythos, but does not yet have a sequel. This story follows Susebron’s rise to becoming an actual, as opposed to figurehead, emperor. Susebron is a Returned, one who has died and come back to life for a specific purpose; to remain alive, he must consume one Breath per week. (“Breath” in this story refers to the soul every person has that can be extracted and sold.) By the conclusion of the novel, a secondary character (Lightsong the Brave) sacrifices his life to give Susebron the ability to speak and thus tap his wealth of Breath. The Breath magic system is fascinating—Sanderson constructs a system where the soul allows for deeper perception of color, sound, and smell in the world, yet that very soul is removable. Warbreaker posits the commodification of the soul, including competing religious interpretations divided over the moral question of selling or consuming Breath. Gods in this story are resurrected humans who are then sustained by the use of Breath taken or purchased from those who are not Returned; higher abilities manifest by accumulating more Breath than necessary. Lightsong’s high priest tells Lightsong, “You are a god. To me, at least. It doesn’t matter how easily you can be killed, how much Breath you have, or how you look. It has to do with who you are and what you mean.”41 Godhood in Warbreaker is a result of resurrection from death, and fusion of spiritual within the material plane. The gods were all once human, but are now something ontologically distinct and must be sustained by humans. At the end of the novel, success lies in higher knowledge of Breath and its inner workings. Warbreaker is, as with many Sanderson stories, ripe for expansion and continued development.

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At four published volumes of a ten volumes series, The Stormlight Archives is Sanderson’s most ambitious project. Set on the planet Roshar, the series tells an epic tale of war between multiple civilizations. The heart of the story is the recovery of Ideals that allow a warrior to bind a spirit, called a “spren,” the first step in becoming a Knight Radiant. Different kinds of spren result in different orders of Knights Radiant. Two characters deserve mention: Kaladin Stormblessed, and Dalinar Kholin. Kaladin is the first to bind an Honor spren, and each book is structured around his discovery of the Ideal needed to rise to the next level of knighthood. These Ideals, in the form of an oath, must be realized; the knowledge of them has been lost, and to swear the next oath, Kaladin must both live out the expectations of that level of knighthood and determine the form and content of the Ideal. As the new Ideal is sworn, new powers are unlocked. Kaladin exemplifies the idea that anyone can become a Knight Radiant—he is not noble, he rose from slavery, and his path involved persistent swings between suffering and leadership resulting in wisdom. Rhythm of War deepens Kaladin’s character; this time, he must wrestle with his limitations and the reality of death in battle. His power reignites, and he ascends to the Fourth Ideal, when he swears: “I accept that there will be those I cannot protect.”42 Accepting his own finitude, even as a powerful Knight Radiant, is the moral reality that Kaladin must realize to continue his movement through the Ideals. Godhood, in this case, requires recognition of reality and acceptance of limitations. Dalinar Kholin is the king of Alethkar (a major country on Roshar) who both loses his kingdom and unites a coalition to fight the forces of Odium (the evil god). Through Dalinar, the reader gains an awareness of the spiritual conflict on Roshar between the forces of Honor, Cultivation, and Odium (all gods). Rhythm of War focuses significantly on the spiritual realm paralleling Roshar; this domain is called the “Cognitive Realm.” The spren are natural inhabitants of this spiritual realm, and with the right bond a Knight Radiant can move humans in and out of the spirit realm. The Stormlight Archive continues the concept of godhood developed in Sanderson’s other works, highlighting the connections between knowledge, humanity, and ascension. Through the right knowledge, gained either through didactic teaching or experiential discovery, the human is able to rise to the divine. As in his other magic systems, Sanderson establishes parallel divinities in tension: good characters, through their moral growth, rise to new heights of human potential as they approach an affirmative divinity, and evil characters sink to new depths of negation of themselves and of life as they move towards the negative divinity. On Roshar, Honor and Cultivation form the positive divinities that good characters rise towards, while Odium is the telos for evil characters. These two sides, positive and negative, are themselves the contenders in the grand battle that is coming. When setting the terms of the duel with Dalinar,

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Odium states: “The other foolish kingdoms of men can keep fighting if they wish, but your people and mine will begin preparing for the true war: the one that will begin when the gods of other worlds discover the strength of Surgebinding”43 (the magic of Roshar). The conflict on Roshar appears to be the central conflict of The Stormlight Archive, but the real battle will eventually occur between the gods of each planet, with ascended warriors playing their parts on each side. This coming battle highlights the celestial community of planets within Sanderson’s Cosmere paralleling the Celestial Community in Mormon theology. In 2016, Sanderson published Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection. Few contemporary authors develop a complex enough mythology to justify a set of explanatory essays, but Sanderson has written just that. Arcanum Unbounded gathers a series of short stories, most previously published, but brackets each with “an annotation from Khriss, the woman who has been writing the Ars Arcanum appendixes at the end of the novels.”44 These explanatory essays detail the different planetary systems of the Cosmere. Here, Sanderson makes explicit the mythological origins of the Cosmere. In the distant past beyond reckoning, God was singular; something happened to divide God into sixteen Shards. Each shard contains seemingly infinite power, but limitations emerge when the Shards come into conflict with each other. The Shards are dispersed throughout the universe, governing different planetary systems. Preservation and Ruin, from The Mistborn Trilogy, are two such shards; Honor, Odium, and Cultivation are others. Each of Sanderson’s story worlds are connected through these Shards, as well as the Cognitive Realm (this hinted connectivity becomes explicit in The Stormlight Archive). The Shards manifest as different magic systems unique to the different planets; the “surgebinding” of Roshar is different from the “AonDor” of Sel (Elantris). Through these faux-scholarly essays, Sanderson explicates a superstructure system where, through various ways, humans can take up the Shards and ascend to a level of cosmic godhood and in so doing bring the spiritual and material planes closer together and create a Celestial Community. *** Much like a survey of Card’s novels, a survey of Sanderson’s novel reveals a clear connection between Mormon theology and the fantasy the author creates. Sanderson also divinizes the hero, though he does so with greater clarity than does Card. Where Card reads as an occasional writer who, in each book, is dedicated to telling that specific story, Sanderson reads like an author creating a mythology on an epic scale. His process of theosis is clearer, typically depicting an ontological change in the character after divinization. By placing

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these different stories in a complementary cosmology, Sanderson enhances the believability of each new magic system. He also builds the reader’s anticipation for an ultimate resolution, while also rewarding the faithful hunter for additional clues that tie books together. Sanderson’s novels demonstrate the same three Mormon theological convictions outlined above: the cosmos is functionally materialist in essence,45 God is a limited being in terms of power, knowledge, and essential goodness, and the human has within him- or herself the capacity to become divine. CONCLUSION It’s been said that Tolkien (following MacDonald’s Phantastes) invented modern fantasy; fewer people recognize that Tolkien also developed the literary theory to explain the work of writing fantasy as a significant literary craft. For Tolkien, writing fantasy functioned as an act of “subcreation.” Just as God created man, so man creates imaginary worlds. Subcreation, unlike divine creation, proceeds from “primary reality” to secondary reality; Tolkien argues that authors create from what they experience and know about reality, rather than ex nihilo. The test of successful fantasy lies in whether the reader experiences the coherency of the secondary reality, upon which believability depends. Such a view of writing fantasy proved highly fruitful for Tolkien. His work reveals that an orthodox Christian mythopoeia can give rise to excellent fantasy. Card and Sanderson indicate that the Mormon metaphysical view of reality functions in the same way. They both take the traditional concept of the hero and show that the hero’s journey is not just about arriving home, or solving a problem, or defeating the enemy; the real triumph of the hero is to transcend human limitations and become “like God.” Their heroes exist within a cosmos that blends the physical and spiritual into a single substance; in the hero’s ascension lies the hope of the reader to transcend the limitations of the human condition. Card and Sanderson tap into a universal human desire to defeat death and remake reality. They approach these universal questions from a Mormon perspective, and in doing so, prove the efficacy of their faith as a foundation for excellent fantasy. Through their convictions about primary reality shaped by their faith, Card and Sanderson are able to create secondary realities that leave their readers with the ring of truth; far from being unable to suspend their disbelief, readers are able to enter into these secondary realities and enjoy the narratives. Card and Sanderson, like Tolkien and Lewis before them, illustrate the way that firm convictions about the nature of ultimate reality serve as fertile soil for excellent storytelling; rather than a hindrance to crafting stories, their religious faith equips them with frameworks, structures, and ideas to work out through the plot,

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worldbuilding, and character transformation. Their faith functions as a fertile foundation for writing excellent fantasy, and as such advances the theory that theological convictions enhance rather than detract from an author’s ability to create new stories. NOTES 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (New York: Harper Collins, 2006): 109–61. 2. Bradley J. Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003) is one such work; Joseph Pearce’s Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002) is another. See also Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003). 3. In an unpublished letter, Tolkien wrote, “I am glad that you have discovered Narnia. These stories are deservedly very popular; but since you ask if I like them I am afraid the answer is No. I do not like ‘allegory,’ and least of all religious allegory of this kind. But that is a difference of taste which we both recognized and did not interfere with our friendship (emphasis in original).” See Josh. B. Long, “Disparaging Narnia: Reconsidering Tolkien’s View of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Mythlore 31.3/4 (2013): 39. 4. See Andrew Thrasher’s chapter which argues for a pluralistic nuance to Tolkien’s influence in Jordan and Eddings. 5. Orson Scott Card, Rusty Humphries, hosts, “We Review the Publishing Business, Writing Software, and More” We Review Everything (podcast) July 30, 2017, accessed April 18, 2021, https:​//​podcasts​.apple​.com​/us​/podcast​/we​-review​-publishing​ -business​-writing​-software​-more​/id1266095299​?i​=1000390516282. 6. Terry Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. 7. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. Taylor coins the term “imaginary” to refer to the way people imagine their world. C.f. Charles Taylor, “Afterword: Apologia a pro Libro Suo,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 300–321. 8. See Freeman’s chapter in this volume on the importance of dogmatic theology as opposed to polemics; we share this approach. C.f. David Rowe I Love Mormons: A New Way to Share Christ with Latter-Day Saints (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005) and Travis S. Kerns The Saints of Zion: An introduction to Mormon Theology (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008) both articulate the distinction between Christian trinitarian theology and Mormon theology being sharp enough to require delineating separate religions.

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9. The Oxford English Dictionary defines mythopoeic as “That creates or gives rise to a myth or myths; of, relating to, or characterized by the creation of myths.” Accessed on 9/20/22, https:​//​www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/124703​?redirectedFrom​ =mythopoeic​#eid. 10. Terry L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80. Hereafter Givens, Wrestling the Angel. 11. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 6–7. 12. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 57. 13. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 53. 14. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 4. 15. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 86. 16. Orson Pratt, quoted in Travis Kerns, The Saints of Zion: An Introduction to Mormon Theology (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2018): 29–30. 17. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 264. 18. Lorenzo Snow, quoted in Kerns, The Saints of Zion, 30. 19. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 266. 20. Quoted in Kerns, The Saints of Zion, 31. 21. Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 295. 22. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 18. “Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.” 23. I am using “sympathy” in the sense developed by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Smith, sympathy is a kind of connection between human beings where the mutual desire for esteem leads to positive behavior. 24. Orson Scott Card, Treason (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1988), 3. 25. Card, Treason, 275. 26. Orson Scott Card, Songmaster (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1987), 373–74. 27. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1991), 324. 28. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Shadow (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999), 298. 29. Card, Ender’s Shadow, 206. 30. Orson Scott Card, The Crystal City (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2003), 339. 31. Orson Scott Card, Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle (New York: Ace Books, 1979), 402. 32. Orson Scott Card, Saints (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1984), 376. 33. Orson Scott Card, Hart’s Hope (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1983), 242. 34. Card, Hot Sleep, 404. 35. Card, Hot Sleep, 405.

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36. Andrew Zaugg, “Orson Scott Card Unintentionally Shares Faith in Writing” in The Daily Universe published November 5, 2018. Accessed on April 18, 2021 online at https:​//​universe​.byu​.edu​/2018​/11​/05​/orson​-scott​-card​-unintentionally​-shares​ -faith​-in​-writing. 37. Brandon Sanderson, Arcanum Unbound: The Cosmere Collection (New York: Tom Doherty, 2016), xi. 38. Brandon Sanderson, Elantris (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2005), i. 39. Brandon Sanderson, Hero of Ages (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2008), 551. 40. Sanderson, Hero of Ages, 552. 41. Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2009), 602. 42. Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2020), 1140. 43. Sanderson, Rhythm of War, 1176. 44. Sanderson, Arcanum Unbounded, xii. 45. Sanderson is more complex than Card in terms of his cosmology, but at the point where bodies can transition into and out of the spiritual plane, there is not a real difference between spirit and matter; they are different modes of one substance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Birzer, Bradley J. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003. Card, Orson Scott. Capital. New York: Ace Books, 1979. ———. The Crystal City. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2003. ———. Ender’s Game. New York: Tom Doherty Associates,1991. ———. Ender’s Shadow. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999. ———. Hart’s Hope. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1983. ———. Hot Sleep: The Worthing Saga. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1990. ———. A Planet Called Treason. New York: Dell Books, 1979. ———. Saints. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1984. ———. Songmaster. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1987. ———. Treason. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1988. Card, Orson Scott, and Rusty Humphries. “We Review the Publishing Business, Writing Software, and More.” On We Review Everything (podcast) July 30, 2017, accessed April 18, 2021, https:​//​podcasts​.apple​.com​/us​/podcast​/we​-review​ -publishing​-business​-writing​-software​-more​/id1266095299​?i​=1000390516282. Givens, Terry L. Feeding the Flock: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Church and Praxis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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Kerns, Travis S. The Saints of Zion: An Introduction to Mormon Theology. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2018. Long, Josh. B. “Disparaging Narnia: Reconsidering Tolkien’s View of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Mythlore 31.3/4 (2013): 31–46. Pearce, Joseph. Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002. Rowe, David. I Love Mormons: A New Way to Share Christ with Latter-Day Saints. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005. Sanderson, Brandon. Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2016. ———. Elantris. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2005. ———. Hero of Ages: Book Three of Mistborn. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2008. ———. Rhythm of War: Book Four of The Stormlight Archive. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2020. ———. Warbreaker. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2009. Taylor, Charles. “Afterword: Apologia a pro Libro Suo.” In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Craig Calhoun, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Michael Warner, 300–321. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010 ———. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006. Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Wood, Ralph C. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Zaugg, Andrew. “Orson Scott Card Unintentionally Shares Faith in Writing.” In The Daily Universe published November 5, 2018. Accessed on April 18, 2021 online at https:​//​universe​.byu​.edu​/2018​/11​/05​/orson​-scott​-card​-unintentionally​-shares​-faith​ -in​-writing.

PART IV

Fantasy at Play: Theologizing with Fantastic Games

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Chapter 11

Imaginative Hermeneutical Theology Paul Ricoeur and Dungeons & Dragons Scott Donahue-Martens‌‌

While many components of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) initially drew me into deep imaginative play, the theological potential of the game especially caught my attention. This might have had something to do with my first character’s prescribed flaw. Despite being a cleric, a class traditionally associated with being an emissary or agent of a deity, Vondal did not believe the gods cared about mortal affairs. Throughout the starter set campaign, I responded to events with this flaw in mind. This flaw became a major hermeneutical lens through which I role-played Vondal. It was the main way Vondal saw and interpreted unfolding events. Through the back and forth between life and game, I began to think about D&D from the perspectives of narrative phenomenology and hermeneutics. Narrative phenomenology considers how narrative plays a central meaning-making function for people, and hermeneutics is interpretation theory. As cooperative storytelling, D&D can be a place of meaningful theological activity and creative intersubjective theological formation. The lives of the players are the intersecting locations between the real world and imagined fantasy world which holds meaningful and formative potential. Therefore, D&D is not just an escape from the real world. It can be a purposeful theological event whereby players engage a religiously pluralistic landscape and consider complex morally laden situations. The human imagination allows for role-playing to impact the lives of those present; thus, underscoring that playing D&D performs a formative function. I argue D&D can be theologically eventful because it can be a means by which people come to experiences or understandings of God, humanity, and Creation, 179

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especially when critically correlated with existing traditions and sources of authority like sacred texts and traditions.1 The hermeneutics and narrative phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur opens the possibility for the imaginative world of D&D and the actual world to function as correlated horizons. The correlation between the game and life is essential to the formative potential of the game. This correlation occurs because D&D draws people into a space that dialogically carries over meaning between worlds as the real and imaginary interact. In other words, players bring their real lives to the table when playing D&D, and then leave the table changed from the experience of narrative play. This occurs because narratives disclose a possible way of being in the world actualized through its semantic innovation in a world projected by the narrative where meaning is negotiated dialectically with interpreters.2 While this hermeneutical possibility, and existing research on the formative function of D&D, will be discussed in greater detail throughout the chapter, it means that narrative role-play has a creative capacity which shapes understanding and identity in conversation with the life of the interpreter. D&D shapes the theological beliefs, actions, and identities of people in the real world, partly because many aspects of D&D have theological analogues.3 The D&D universe involves gods, religions, and spiritualities. As real entities in the imagined world, players must contend with these frames of reference as they contribute to the collaborative narrative. This contending can be analogous to the work of theology, which seeks to provide an understanding of experiences between God, humanity, and Creation. Moreover, the pluralistic environment of D&D offers similarities with spirituality in postmodern settings. D&D tasks players with making choices stemming from theological beliefs, even if those choices and beliefs reject deities or belief structures.4 Learning to navigate religious and spiritual differences, as well as identifying core beliefs and belief structures through fantastical imaginative play, can have implications on the real-world. D&D, THE IMAGINATION, AND FANTASY D&D was the creation of many individuals but owes its existence especially to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax and Arneson were board game enthusiasts and both designed war games before the creation of D&D. They collaborated on what became D&D in the 1970s by introducing fantastical elements to a war game designed by Arneson. A myriad of factors contributed to the proliferation of D&D, especially the substantive addition of fantastical elements. Existing war games required imagination and even included role-playing, but the combination of role-playing, imagination, and fantasy in

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D&D contributed to its success. D&D launched new modes of role-playing games (RPGs).5 The combination of open-world exploration and interaction with expansive rules fostered productive possibilities from role-playing and narrative perspectives. It was partly this crossover that allowed D&D to “form the foundation upon which modern game design is built.”6 The Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual provide the necessary explanations, rules, mythos, and frames for the game. The game of D&D requires players and a dungeon master (DM). Players and the DM work together to play D&D as an imaginative narrative. According to the official source material, “The DM creates a world for the other players to explore and also creates and runs adventures that drive the story.”7 Both the DM and players use dice that determine whether actions or events happen, with the DM having the final authority. The DM is the “architect of a campaign” and is tasked with helping “the other players visualize what’s happening around them.”8 Each non-DM player has a character with stats, attributes, faith perspectives, beliefs, moral alignments, flaws, and equipment. The DM role-plays non-playable characters (NPCs) who interact with the players. Usually, a DM has a general outline of the overall campaign, which can last for months or years, and the particular adventure being played, which usually lasts 2–6 hours per session. The DM is a guide who does not force characters to do what she wants but entices them to follow a general narrative flow. Characters are free to go their own way but generally stay close to the main unfolding narrative. The world is open for players to interact with and is changed by their actions. Understanding D&D requires consideration of the productive intersection of its narrative and rule-based play aspects. Rules are important to D&D, but they are not the point of the game. They are crucial to the narrative progression. The comprehensive rules foster a sense of realism for seemingly endless imaginative possibilities. The rules of D&D provide a structure that differentiates it from childhood games of make-believe where arguments ensue over what happened because there is no way of adjudicating imaginative assertions. In D&D, by contrast, dice, DMs, and rules provide a way of determining whether your character actually did dodge that attack. A bad roll can be the difference between a critical success and a critical failure. Thus, in a way that reflects real life, players are not in complete control of events, actions, and consequences. This makes the game hermeneutically rich because players cannot do anything they want whenever they want, which lends elements of realism. Part of the success of D&D is the fictional realism afforded by fictional truth. Fictional truth embraces fiction as a location of disclosure, even as it recognizes that the described events did not happen. Writing on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and narrative, Kevin Vanhoozer says, “fictions have

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revelatory and transforming power because of their contrast with actual experience. Freed from the everyday, fiction frees the reader for new evaluations of reality and himself.”9 Thus, fiction can disclose elements of existence and reality. In D&D, a player “contributes to the plot or storyline of the game by making it fictionally true” which allows players to form evaluations and experiences of reality and the self.10 D&D provides a mutually agreed upon setting and rules for characters to exist in the collective imagination of the D&D group. These elements are important because they provides a “realistic” frame for action to take place. Realism is the sense that events could unfold the way described given the structure provided by the game. For example, D&D does not ask you to believe that magic is real in our world, but to imagine it as real in another place. Given this possibility, realism considers what could happen under those conditions. D&D provides a deeper level of immersion than many other games or forms of a narrative. Much about the world-building activity of D&D involves the DM and players in significant manners. While the current makers of the game provide substantive guides, including pantheons, maps, and descriptions of just about anything you can imagine, everything in the universe is moldable. The level of immersion and engagement can be greater in D&D than other forms of fantasy and imagination because players become a part of the history of these places. Players contribute to the unfolding events in the world which shape the world. In the imagination and through narrative, people become a part of these worlds. The creation and exploration of these worlds change the lives of players. The changes might not always be meaningful. They might not always be good. But the potential for change is always present. At one level, this occurs because of the game’s narrative structure. PAUL RICOEUR AND NARRATIVE How do people find or make meaning in life? What is our experience of being? These questions were central to the work of Ricoeur. Ricoeur did not seek to solve these questions definitively but looked for ways of making them productive and intelligible. Throughout his extensive works, narrative was a key approach that Ricoeur used to explore these questions of life. In his threevolume work Time and Narrative, Ricoeur asserts that narratives help people make sense of time. Ricoeur considers different uses of narrative, but two are particularly important. First, narrative offers a structural meaning-making frame. This is partly because narrative offers an organizing structure to experience. In other words, stories help us interpret being and experiences of our being because they provide a way of seeing life in an organized, coherent, and intelligible manner. People learn how to interpret life by borrowing the

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components of narrative. Ricoeur says, “We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated.”11 A second major way that narrative impacts meaning making and experiences of being is through particular narratives. The actual act of reading or watching a story result in changes in the life of the interpreter. Narrative is structurally meaningful because it helps people discover and create meaning in life. Individual stories are meaningful as cohesive units of narrative. D&D embraces elements of each use of narrative. To make his argument, Ricoeur mediates an Augustinian understanding of time as discordant and an Aristotelian understanding of plot as a concordant structured representation of life. Briefly, this means time is experienced as chaotic or un-ordered, whereas narratives are ordered depictions of events. Time borrows concordance from narrative and narrative borrows discordance from time to tell stories. The combination of the two can produce an intelligible synthesis through plot in which, “we re-configure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal experience.”12 What this means is that people bring pre-figured lives to a con-figured narrative which results in a re-figuration of the interpreter. In other words, people do not just tell stories because they are aesthetically pleasing; stories and narrative structure help people make sense of reality and our place within reality. Stories offer a way of “seeing-as” which has the potential to shape “being-as.”13 This can take place because time and narrative form two halves of an unfolding hermeneutical circle. We are constantly interpreting and re-interpreting experiences in time through narrative. This work does not always rise to the level of life-changing re-figuration every time we read a story or watch a movie. That would be exhausting. However, the mimetic narrative potential is structurally present and borrowed in life. Ricoeur understanding mimesis in terms of representation.14 Narrative configuration is a concordant representation of discordant elements of life. From a structural standpoint, narratives provide concordance or cohesion through their “emplotment” in time, which organizes discordant experiences in the life of the interpreter.15 In other words, narratives offer a way of meaningfully seeing and interpreting what otherwise would be raw chaotic sense data. For Ricoeur, narrative is an avenue by which people, subjects, engage reality and other people. Narrative recognizes that seeking to understand the self, or aspects of the self, requires public and private engagement. Thus, narrative is crucial to identity formation and understanding identity itself. Narrative structures allow for the naming of social locations and their impact in intelligible manners. Beyond naming, narrative frequently reveals the significance of social location to identity, life, and interpretation. Narrative provides a framework that considers the relationship between internal and external identity factors. In other words, people come to understand aspects of their

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selfhood in relation to and with others by utilizing the resources of narrative. Narrative is one place where this interchange, both public and private, can take place.16 Ricoeur maintains that narrative has the capacity to orient experiences of time because of plot. “The plot of a narrative . . . ‘grasps together’ and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple scattered events, thereby schematizing the intelligible signification attached to the narrative taken as a whole.”17 In other words, plot brings together various components, including time, to make experiences understandable. It is plot that allows time to be experienced in understandable and meaningful ways. Plot performs its connective work in time and through time. For example, a boy and a wolf without a plot are not necessarily meaningful or intelligible, but when the element of time is plotted, a potential story of a boy who cried wolf comes to existence. The appropriated story is meaningful as people interact with it through interpretation. Ricoeur does not argue that texts and narrative are without authorial meanings; however, texts take on a meaningful life of their own by extending beyond the author’s horizons.18 Beyond being meaningful, the story of the boy who cried wolf is formative. The narrative helps describe elements of reality in a way that children can understand. Following Aristotle, Ricoeur asserts that narrative relies on the mimetic function of action. Narrative can represent or imitate life in meaningful manners and life has a pre-narrative quality. This links plot with a mode of doing that seeks to make experience intelligible. Ricoeur’s thesis is, “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.”19 For Ricoeur, narrative is a central meaning-making frame that provides an opportunity for interpreting and understanding action, experience, and life. Narratives draw people into a world where meaning is negotiated primarily between the story and the interpreter. The life of the interpreter becomes central as the reader rescues the meaning of narrative through appropriation. This occurs in a world in front of the narrative which discloses a new mode of being. It is important to note that Ricoeur is not suggesting that a narrative means whatever its reader says it does. He is not advocating for a pure reader-response theory. “The reader rather is enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.”20 Responsible interpreters respect the narrative as something other than the interpreter, even as this mode of being is negotiated between the reader and the narrative. While narrative itself is capable of this function, it is important to recognize that not all narratives carry the same formative potential. For adherents of a religious tradition, narratives from sacred texts tend to hold central formative and orienting potential. These traditions become lenses through which other interpretation often takes place. Religious traditions offer a particular way of plotting experience and being.

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THEOLOGY AND THE IMAGINATION Having seen the potential of narrative in general, we can now consider a role of the imagination in theology, which also deepens the role of the imagination in narrative.21 For those who adhere to a religious or spiritual tradition, faith can be a central interpretive frame to experiences in life.22 Faith is an interpretive lens of being and events in the world. Theologian Garret Green puts it this way, “religion offers a way of seeing the world as a whole, which means that it is a way of living in the world, an ultimate frame of reference for grasping the meaning of life and living in accordance with that vision.”23 Religions are a particular way of “grasping” and “seeing”—the same language Ricoeur uses about plot. Green’s assertion relies on the link between theology and hermeneutics and is concerned with the deep realities of life. From a hermeneutical standpoint, faith is partly about making sense of the world and depends on narrative for expression. Drawing from Barth, Green asserts that the imagination is necessary for Christians to interpret Scripture and witness God in the world. Theology, for Green, is a way of faithfully imagining the world.24 Yet, this way of imagining depends on story and narrative for understanding and expression. For Green, Scripture and the Holy Spirit fund the imaginative paradigm for Christians to properly imagine and interpret the world.25 Adherents of other traditions use different paradigms and may refer to similar events or concepts differently. The important point to take from this is that each tradition employs paradigms and narratives rooted in the imagination.26 Each tradition has its own text(s), practices, and/or guiding elements which contribute to the formation of its adherents. The same event may be referred to as grace, karma, or luck depending on the tradition, paradigms, and the beliefs of the individual. From a postmodern perspective, one might say positionality impacts interpretation and the paradigms used for interpretation. What we see depends on the unfolding plot we interpret ourselves as being in. We see or interpret things a certain way depending on our prior knowledge and experiences. This means that social locations impact how interpretation and meaning making. People are embedded within social systems, religious traditions, and locations. Pre-understandings always shape interpretive efforts.27 That does not mean that we can never interpret differently; it recognizes that no interpretation is ever purely objective and that epistemic locations impact interpretation. Traditions are paradigms which offer a way of seeing, understanding, and interpreting being and the world generally from within an unfolding narrative. Not all religious or non-religious traditions offer a complete narrative from the beginning to the end of time; however, traditions generally offer a participatory story frame. These frames often include

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mythic elements and material components that sweep people imaginatively into the narrative. In time, people come to see themselves in and through the unfolding story, often guided by sacred texts or a higher power. In other words, the narratives religious traditions tell offer a way of making sense of experiences for adherents. The overall narrative lends structure and insight to the particular events and experiences of the person’s life by providing points of understanding. Players bring their pre-understandings and paradigms with them to D&D, even as the unfolding narrative impacts them. D&D can be one part of an unfolding hermeneutical spiral whereby players come to understandings. These pre-understandings are a “mixture of fabulation and actual experience. It is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and open to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from fiction or from history.”28 D&D provides a fictional framework which can be organizing and productive. This productive fictional framework robustly depends on the imagination as it allows for the possibility of organization. To embrace D&D as a location for theological discernment and to see it as an opportunity for revelatory experience requires a robust embrace of the imagination. Green shows how the imagination, in different ways, is essential to life, faith, and science. As a brief example of the imagination in everyday life, he writes about seeing one side of a drinking cup but being able to imagine the other side while reaching out to grasp the cup with a hand. The imagination fills in gaps that sense information in unable to grasp on its own. In other words, what is imagined does not have to be imaginary. In extending this argument, he says that “imagination can be employed realistically, in the service of truth.”29 This “realistic imagination functions throughout human experience, enabling us to envision the whole of things, to focus our minds to perceive how things are ordered and organized—in other words, it allows us to see what is really there.”30 For Green, the imagination is fundamental to all understanding, including theological understanding. The imagination performs a crucial synthesizing function which utilizes paradigms and creates paradigms to interpret reality. Faith and theology are paradigms which depend on the imagination and narration; albeit, in different manners for different traditions. Communicating and understanding the synthesizing function through paradigms calls for narrative and narration.31 Mystery and divine hiddenness require the imagination to see and interpret events as a part of an unfolding narrative. David Tracy argues that hermeneutics is the meeting place for the correlation of experiences and traditions for theology.32 Hermeneutics allows for understanding and correlation to occur in the lives of interpreters.

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The synthesizing function of the imagination is just one connection between theology and the imagination. It is one that bear remarkable similarities to aspects Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative. The imagination, even outside of its narrative use, was important to Ricoeur. Ricoeur challenged epistemologies which feigned objectivity and denied the imagination. Vanhoozer argues “the distinction between the real and imaginary, Ricoeur believes, is symptomatic of a deeper dualism, namely, the metaphysical cleavage between being and non-being.”33 He notes how Ricoeur’s use of mimesis performs a mediating function whereby fiction is “paradigmatic of the creative imagination” and shapes the real because the real and imaginary are not opposing dichotomies.34 Vanhoozer articulates that narrative is a “wager” for Ricoeur which is “the form of language that best expresses human temporality.”35 I meet Ricoeur’s wager with one of my own, that D&D opens a space whereby theological discernment can take place because it mediates the real and imaginary through narrative play. It should be noted that individual players and groups have a role in determining whether the imagined space opened through D&D promotes good or bad ends. While it is important not to reduce imagination and narrative to moralism, Ricoeur does assert that narratives are not ethically neutral. “Telling a story . . . is deploying an imaginary space for thought experiments in which moral judgements operate in a hypothetical mode.”36 Ricoeur connects this work, telling a story, with the ethical aim of narrative identity: “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”37 Justice and equality are the aims of ethical narration. This does not mean that every story, including those told through D&D, is good or just, but Ricoeur asserts that a part of narrative’s function is meaning making concerning what is good and just. “The thought experiments we conduct in the great laboratory of the imaginary are also explorations in the realm of good and evil. Transvaluing, even devaluing, is still evaluating. Moral judgement has not been abolished; it is rather itself subjected to the imaginative variations proper to fiction.”38 Acknowledging this does not safeguard D&D from being used for bad ends, it underscores its imaginative disclosive potential. The imagination can be a critical tool employed by narrative role-play and can facilitate productive ends. ROLE-PLAY WITH PRODUCTIVE POSSIBILITIES Fantasy and imagination are foundational to D&D. The narrated events are not actually happening; however, that does not mean that they cannot have any impact on reality. D&D becomes a possible horizon for the development and employment of imaginative hermeneutics in the lives of those who play the game. The interpretation that takes place around D&D occurs through

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play which does have different implications than interpreting aspects of life. While the hermeneutical tasks utilize different aspects of sense perception and interpretive frames, they depend on a common symbolic paradigm.39 In other words, the paradigm utilized for interpreting narratives also interprets life. As Ricoeur argues, time and narrative, life and stories, form a hermeneutical circle.40 The common symbolic structure allows for truth and meaning to be carried over from one context to another as the hermeneutical circle unfolds. Ricoeur sees some forms of narrative play as providing the imagination the room to explore and try different possibilities.41 Play is not necessarily an escape from reality, then; it can be a means to explore reality and to have reality re-described. Play can be a means to explore theological beliefs, attitudes, and actions that are otherwise confined to the realm of serious commitment. Creative play offers theologically rich formative potential. The play and game aspects of D&D have theological importance. Theologian Courtney Goto sees a certain mode of play as being theologically revelatory and potentially healing. She writes, “we play for the sake of experiencing that which reveals us as able to be loved and to love more and more fully.”42 It might be odd to think of D&D as potentially revealing loving play, yet the bonds and friendships formed in the game are reflective of this potential. Attentive D&D groups are woven together through playful narrative stitching which crosses the lines of fantasy, imagination, and life.43 Goto asserts that communal play participates in revelatory experiences of God’s new creation as a type of grace.44 As a Christian theologian, I interpret this to mean that play that enables people to experience the love of God is grace. This graceful play also has the potential to be theologically formative in ways that are obscured by other epistemological experiences. Goto believes that the “creative imagination” can be utilized “to deepen faith.”45 This is because the creative imagination can be a way of encountering the Divine, self, and others in “life-giving ways.”46 Therefore, life-giving D&D can be theologically meaningful, even for the sake of play. Play can be a form of relating to God, humanity, and creation in creative and generative manners. Just as Ricoeur’s understanding of the imagination and use of narrative is not neutral, play itself is not neutral. There is the potential for the imagination, narrative, and play to be destructive and harmful. While imaginative role-play can promote good and ethical behavior, it can also promote harmful and violent actions.47 Therefore, consideration of the notion that play, even cooperative play, can be harmful is a necessary caution.48 A prime example of role-playing gone wrong which led to harm is the famous Stanford prison experiment. The experiment ended early because the people role-playing prison guards treated the people role-playing inmates so poorly.49 Still, recent studies have confirmed that roleplaying games like D&D can be used to

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“conduct therapy,” “stay connected,” and “support children and adolescents in their development” among other positive possibilities.50 While D&D has been portrayed negatively by some Christians, there is less direct controversy over whether or not it contributes, as a largely violent game, to a violent society. However, studies have considered whether links exist between video games and violence. After reviewing studies which have suggested a causal link between violent video games and major acts of violence in the United States, Patricia Markey and Charlotte Markey conclude, “contrary to the claims that violent video games are linked to aggressive assaults and homicides, no evidence was found to suggest that this medium was a major (or minor) contributing cause of violence in the United States.”51 They even suggest that video games might perform a cathartic function which decreases violence. “In other words, when people play violent video games, they are able to release their aggression in the virtual world instead of in the real world.”52 At the same time, the authors are clear, that the data does not support a simple conclusion about causal links between violence and video games for reduction or escalation. They do note that “there is ample evidence that violent video games do increase aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and some aggressive behaviors.”53 Thus, violence in D&D may not be so innocent. The studies on violence and video games yield interesting but ultimately inconclusive conclusions about fantasy violence. Focusing more directly on D&D, and after taking a similar review of the studies on violence and video games as outlined above, Jennifer Wright, Daniel Weissglass, and Vanessa Casey explore D&D as a “medium for moral development.”54 They say: Like cooperative pretend play, imaginative roleplaying games generate communities of players that have to work together to achieve the goals, maintain/ protect the values, and uphold the commitment generated/identified by the group. This encourages morally relevant interaction at two levels: first, the group members must cooperate and otherwise behave in ways that are supportive of and loyal to their fellow-group members and second, to the extent that the game itself involves morally relevant decision making (e.g., should we try to negotiate peacefully with members of an out-group or just attack them?), it requires a collective discussion and negotiation of social and moral norms and active moral decision making within the context of the game.55

They cite studies which underscore positive developmental impacts from other types of games as support for the possibility of moral development through D&D. Their study concluded that: Our findings—through preliminary—support the contention that imaginative role-playing games can serve as an enjoyable medium for promoting (and

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protecting) moral growth. In particular, gaming that involves the encounter of morally relevant situations appears to facilitate a shift away from concern for one’s own personal interests and toward the interests of others, both in one’s reasoning about moral scenarios and in the expression of one’s values. In addition, gaming may also facilitate stronger development in postconventional reasoning, especially for individuals who are developmentally immature (relative to their relevant demographic group).56

I am not aware of any existing study which considers the theological function of D&D; however, the potential for moral development opens the possibility for similar functions with theology, which often connects ethics, morality, and beliefs. Joseph Laycock’s Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds explores ways in which the moral panic over D&D has led many to misunderstand and misportray the game. Religious opponents of D&D, largely conservative Christians, argue the game is demonic and violent.57 As previously noted, the empirical evidence about roleplaying games does not support such a straightforward conclusion. I argue that D&D is more like a sandbox for the imagination. While it is necessary to know that the sandbox is not neutral, the type of moral development, and theological value of playing D&D, is likely impacted most by what morality, ethics, and spirituality the DM and players bring to the table. The game can be played very violently and aggressively, or it can be played without violence and destruction. While it is true that D&D typically involves violence, it can also reward players for finding non-violent solutions to morally laden and theologically complex situations. THEOLOGY, D&D, AND RICOEUR Religion is a core part of D&D. Different pantheons appear in the source material, some character classes revolve around a connection to a deity, and higher powers impact world events. The world of D&D is a place where “the gods are real and embody a variety of beliefs.”58 From a character perspective, “The follower of a god serves as an agent of that god in the world. The agent seeks to further the ideals of that god and defeats its rivals.”59 Players have to consider how their individual life and story fits into the larger story and purposes of the deities. This means that players role-play theology and spirituality as a part of their character. The linking of certain player actions and classes with spirituality and rituals also concretizes the work of doing theology while playing the game. Now, D&D does not necessitate that this type of theological thinking be critical, informed, or in any sense meaningful,

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but it does allow the possibility of developing theologically meaningful skills and frames. From a hermeneutical perspective, players bring their understandings of faith and religion to these aspects of the game as they play. The playful doing of theology can develop hermeneutical tools and frames which impact what a person believes to be true in the real world. Beyond the presence and activity of deities and divine agents, a plurality of religious systems exists within a created D&D world. This increases the potential depth of theological thinking as players consider the structure of spiritual beliefs, not just individual beliefs. When combined with elements of realistic fiction, this calls for cohesive theologically informed narratives. Thus, the D&D universe can simulate a pluralism of beliefs and a pluralism of religious systems, although it is often played with forms of syncretism. Players not only interact with people who disagree with beliefs, they also engage with people who adhere to completely different belief structures. This exposes players to a variety of belief structures and enables them to see the implications of those structures on beliefs. D&D provides an abstract frame that concretizes different approaches to faith. In other words, D&D provides a relatively stable frame of reference that explicitly reveals how gods are intimately involved in the imagined world. The stability allows the process of seeing and interpreting this involvement to develop as theological thinking. For Ricoeur, “showing is at the same time creating a new mode of being.”60 The “showing” done in imaginative play can impact the “being” of players. The imaginative D&D horizon provides an opportunity to consider, through the eyes of an imagined other, a possible world and possible meanings. Through D&D, “we can try on new faces and new identities, play with personalities and character traits that are different than our own, and, when the game is over, go back to being ourselves with a little more understanding.”61 D&D provides a structure for negotiating beliefs across differences when players view their characters as moral or religious others, assuming that the character and player do not share the exact same set of beliefs. Engaging in the necessary empathy and dislocating understanding of another, even a fictional other, leads to an understanding of the self. We can partly come to know what we believe to be true about the world and the Divine by considering the beliefs of others. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur argues that viewing the self as another is central to identity. Narrative plays a central role in this process.62 The alterity of another is therefore potentially revelatory. By imagining through lenses that require interpreting as another, D&D players gain new perspectives and, more importantly, develop frames through which to interpret life and meaning in our world. This means that D&D characters do not have to have the same beliefs or spiritual traditions as their players to do theology while playing D&D. In fact, it might be theologically more imaginative and productive for there to be vast differences. This could result

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in more empathetic, real-world theology which seeks mutual understanding rather than seeking to assert itself as the exclusive understanding of truth. Sarah Lynne Bowman draws from the work of Piaget and ethnographic studies to see the “as if” component of role-playing games as functioning in a similar manner. She writes, “Role-playing offers gamers the opportunity to become more open-minded in the broadest sense and experience, both as participant and observer, the thoughts and feelings of the hypothetical self of the character.”63 Her reliance on developmental psychology and sociological data provides interdisciplinary support to the general argument that D&D opens the way for recognition through otherness. It is important to recognize that while spiritual and religious traditions provide a coherent and cohesive narrative, postmodern spirituality is generally skeptical of the strong centralized authority that meta-narratives presume. This acknowledges that people tend to pick and choose aspects of various religious and spiritual traditions that they find compelling and revelatory. The work of discerning and incorporating any tradition is theological. Due to the de-centering of religion in the United States, this theological discernment is largely happening on more individual and personal scales. The structure of D&D and the group size make it conducive to theological exploration. Because of this, D&D becomes a possible location for theological discernment and revelatory experiences, possibly even taking on roles previously occupied by formal religious gatherings. D&D does this because it imagines a world where beliefs and religions are abundantly creative and generative. D&D allows people to play with ideas and beliefs in ways that are theologically formative, revelatory, and generative. Unlike typical narratives which have the refiguring potential described by Ricoeur, D&D has even greater formative potential as an unfolding collaborative narrative. While much of Ricoeur’s work focuses on the re-descriptive function of narrative, when combined with the imagination Ricoeur sees the potential for a “projective function.”64 The projective function seeks a potential meeting point which results in further understanding. He goes on to assert that “it is indeed through the anticipatory imagination of acting that I ‘try out’ different possible courses of action and that I ‘play,’ in the precise sense of the word, with possible practices.”65 D&D is a structure for the anticipatory imagination through its combination of play and narrative. D&D players imaginatively and cooperatively contribute to a narrative through playful anticipatory imagination. Because of this, the imagination can disclose productive possible ways of being. Players try out beliefs and religions in the cooperative narrative. While it is possible that the experiences could lead to something like conversion, engagement which leads to various forms of understanding is more likely.

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Ricoeur asserts that the new way of being unlocked through re-descriptive narration is present first in the imagination and is freed through playful engagement. “In the same way that play frees, in our vision of reality, new possibilities held prisoner by the ‘serious’ mind, play also opens possibilities of metamorphosis in subjectivity.”66 Ricoeur goes on to say, “it is in the imagination that this new being is first formed in me.”67 We might say that the imagination holds possible ways of being that the narrative structure of D&D allows to be formed in the real world. This unfolds because of the unique intersection of play, narrative, and imagination. This discloses both a projective function and a re-descriptive function of narrative. D&D offers people a way of understanding what has happened to them and who they will be moving forward in time. D&D provides a structured playground for the imagination to explore the realm of good and evil. The imaginary playground structured by D&D enhances the process through highly interactive components which mimic the experience of being to a greater degree than reading a novel or playing a video game. “The experience of actually playing a character in an RPG” resembles “the business of finding meaning and value within our own life.”68 The projective narrative possibility of D&D being actualized in the real world stems from the fact that players need “to choose actions, not merely reflect on them.”69 Commitment to an informed action is played out in the unfolding communal narrative. Even in play, the group holds each other accountable for their chosen actions. This lends a sense of credibility and realism to the game which pushes the imaginative event from being mere introspection to possibly being intersubjective. D&D is an intersubjective event. This means that it happens in the space between people, even as it brings the whole person into this space at a specific moment in time. Part of what the game asks everyone to do is consider beliefs and actions “within the (shared) imaginary construct of the game world through the lens of your character’s particular sensibility and defining traits.”70 This element of sharing is essential to the game and the game’s potential. Even when players engage in more competitive modes of play, with each other or with the DM, the space opened by the game is a shared space. At its best, D&D is cooperative rather than competitive. Players share in the creative work of D&D, often bringing their lives, personalities, and beliefs into the game space. D&D is communal, collaborative, and creative play. This means the game can be more than introspective, even as introspection is a helpful way of understanding some of D&D’s purposeful potential. D&D creates opportunities for shared consciousness that honors the uniqueness of individuals contributing to the game and fostering change.

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CONCLUSION As cooperative playful storytelling, D&D provides a rich lens to consider intersections between the imagination and theology. Players not only respond to the narrative; they help imagine and construct the fantastical story. From a narrative standpoint, this affords greater participatory potential, especially as the cooperative element expands individual participation into communal participation. Because D&D is partly an exercise in creative, responsive, and engaging narrative hermeneutics, it requires players to mutually interpret and co-create a narrative. When considered through theological paradigms, this type of creative play can represent aspects of the work of theology. The world of D&D is a horizon full of actionable potential and functions similarly to Ricoeur’s notion of a world in front of a text which draws interpreters to negotiate meaning. While you cannot win D&D, as Ricoeur maintains, narrative play can allow people to see differently which has the potential to disclose new ways of being. The experiences of D&D might start in the imagination, but these experiences have the potential to spill over into the actual world. Playing the game affords players the opportunity to interpret their lives, their world, and their beliefs. Game experience can correlate with experience in the real world and experiences in the real world can correlate with game experiences.71 This correlation does not always need to be positive identification. It can also be negative. In other words, there might be times where the correlation is between like experiences and unlike experiences. Someone who has just experienced the loss of a loved one might lament throughout the course of play that the world of D&D contains resurrection spells whereas our world does not. This observation can turn into reflection through difference; however, this illustrates exactly the point of the current chapter—the game prompts reflection on events, experiences, and emotions in the real world. The thesis that D&D is theologically formative does not mean that it will always function in this manner for every player. It is possible to play D&D and avoid these experiences. It is also important to recognize that D&D does not have a single purpose and serves various purposes. While theological frames assert that D&D can serve purposes, it should not claim that the game always does. The open creative components of D&D mean that it serves different functions and purposes for different groups. This illustrates the robust dialogical component of D&D. The lives of the players are in conversation with the game even as the game is in conversation with the lives of the player. Players can eschew the work of theology and spirituality that the game discloses. Players can also engage in the work of doing theology in meaningless ways that do not impact the real world. Therefore, the lives of the players

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hermeneutically impact how the game functions, especially whether the game functions in theologically rich manners. This means that subjectivity, social location, and existing beliefs are important factors when considering whether D&D is actualized in theologically revelatory and formative manners. The intersections of game and narrative in D&D make it a unique hermeneutical enterprise with formative theological implications. The fact that most campaigns take place over months and even years allows for people to act in-game, reflect on actions, and return at later points in time. This is similar to action-reflection-action models of theology and hermeneutical theology which embrace an understanding of a hermeneutical spiral involving praxis. As players change in the real world, their characters also change. As characters change in the game, players have further opportunity for change or greater understanding. Narrative phenomenology and hermeneutical theology reveal how D&D can resist individualistic modes of being by inviting players into an intersubjective empathetic imagination. This work can be theologically formative as players come to greater understandings of what they hold to be true about God and the world. NOTES 1. Here I draw from the insights of the New Hermeneutic which attempted to engage theology through existentialism. The New Hermeneutic emphasized the interpreter as the being whereby a meaningful existential actualization of a text takes place. For some, this is “eventful” because it shapes the being of the interpreter in relation with the Divine other, or the meaning of the text is understood by incorporating the text into the life horizon of the interpreter. This incorporation takes places as an event in time. Thus, hermeneutics is not solely about understanding ideas. This type of hermeneutical theology tends to be less centered on historical objectivity, although historical and cultural work is foundational to hermeneutical theology, and more on the subjective appropriation of interpreters seeking to interpret rightly in the present. Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 8–33. Hermeneutical theology attempts to mediate objectivity and subjectivity in productive manners while recognizing the limitations of both objectivity and subjectivity and avoiding relativism. The existential situation or life of the interpreter becomes the place where the gap of the past and the present meet, largely through language, as a sort of event. The New Hermeneutic’s emphasis on language makes it particularly suited to consider D&D which also relies heavily on the inventive, poesis, aspect of language in meaning-making. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 8. For a wider theological method on this topic, see David Tracy’s work on mutual critical correlation. David

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Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, (New York, NY: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1991). 2. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 89–95. 3. This type of thinking follows the public theology of Tracy; rather than, theology which focuses on confessional particularities. In other words, this theological work and meaning is typically broad and general. It focuses on questions of existence and ultimate reality. Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 5–14. 4. While official D&D materials largely imagine worlds where gods exist and influence world events, individual characters or certain iterations of the game allowing for play without deities. “In other campaigns, impersonal forces of nature of magic replace the gods by granting power to mortals attuned to them.” Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford, D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2014), 13. 5. Michael Witwer, Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015), 164–184, 225. 6. Rodney Thompson, as quoted in Witwer, Empire of Imagination, 226. 7. There are extensive guides to assist this process. Mearls and Crawford, D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, 4. 8. Mearls and Crawford, D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, 4. 9. Kevin Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 99. Vanhoozer emphasizes the aspects of Ricoeur which focus on the effect of fiction truth and the sense of texts, whereas, following Tracy and the Chicago tradition, my work follows the referential emphasis in Ricoeur’s work. Ricoeur holds sense and reference as a dialectic of understanding and explanation, so both are necessary. However, the emphasis on correlation in reference and semantic autonomy, as opposed to sense and authorial intent, results in a different narrative theology than that conceived by the postliberal school. For a brief overview of the divergent narrative traditions, see Gary L. Comstock, “Two Types of Narrative Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 4 (1987): 687–717. 10. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, eds., Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2012), 69. 11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Volume 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), x–xi, 75. 12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, xi. 13. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, xi. 14. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 33. 15. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 72–78. 16. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 33–37. 17. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, x. 18. Ricoeur does not completely do away with the author’s intended meaning; however, texts are not bound by their author’s meaning. He says, “But this de-psychologizing of interpretation does not imply that the notion of authorial

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meaning has lost all significance” even as he also maintains that “What the text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it.” Ricoeur mediates these dialectical understandings within hermeneutics by saying, “The authorial meaning becomes properly a dimension of the text.” Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 30. 19. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 20. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 94. 21. A comprehensive explication of the tradition of the imagination and theology is beyond the scope of this chapter. What I present is a basic understanding which merely outlines connections. 22. My notion of faith here is intentionally broad. I want to avoid identifying it exclusively with any tradition in particular like Christianity or a group of traditions, like the Abrahamic faiths. My desire to resist a simple definition of faith attempts openness toward various religious and non-religious traditions and beliefs. While I maintain this openness, I write as a Christian theologian largely imagining a Christian audience. 23. Garrett Green, Imagining Theology: Encounters with God in Scripture, Interpretation, and Aesthetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), 107. 24. Green, Imagining Theology, 35, 38. 25. Green, Imagining Theology, 38. 26. Green, Imagining Theology, 7. 27. Ricoeur follows Gadamer on this point. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 93. 28. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 162 29. Green, Imagining Theology, 10. 30. Green, Imagining Theology, 10. 31. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 77. 32. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 53. 33. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 9. 34. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 10–11. 35. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 86. 36. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 170. 37. Of course, readers may have a different understanding of the ethical aim of narrative. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. 38. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 164. Ricoeur uses the category of “just” to assert that narrative is not an ethically neutral mode. 39. Ricoeur might say that they share elements of pre-figuration or mimesis1. Mimesis1 presupposes symbolic structures which allow for correlation. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 58. 40. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 54–55. 41. Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 177. 42. Courtney Goto, The Grace of Playing: Pedagogies for Leaning into God’s New Creation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016), 136.

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43. My use of “blur” is different from critics of the game who argue that players are unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality. Certain Christian and secular groups have argued that the game is Satanic or encourages escapism and suicide. My understanding of blur connects to the participatory nature of D&D and how Ricoeur breaks down the false dichotomy of real and imaginary. Unlike fantasy movies or books, D&D requires players to make active choices which impact the game and story. This hermeneutical participation blurs the interpretive fusion of horizons to a greater degree. “Because fantasy worlds are ultimately derivative of the world of daily life, they are a reflection of this world and enable a reflection on this world”; in Joseph Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 187. See Laycock for a detailed response to why and how D&D critics tend to misunderstand and mis-portray D&D as a dangerous game. The purpose of this chapter is not to argue morality or debate good and bad ends; therefore, I refrain from sustained analysis of the moralistic implication of the central thesis that D&D can be theologically formative. It is the case that what one person considers religiously or theologically problematic, another person or tradition might embrace as theologically good and positively formative. My intent is not to adjudicate competing uses or traditions but to discuss D&D as a place where ultimate concerns are engaged. 44. Goto, The Grace of Playing, xvii–xviii. 45. Goto, The Grace of Playing, xviii. 46. Goto, The Grace of Playing, 3. 47. While a qualifier about play and grace exists in the previous paragraph, I am grateful to peer review comments which challenged a mostly uncritical consideration of play in an earlier draft. 48. There are also wider ethical implications associated with various levels and conditions of privilege and gaining insights into life and experiences from gaming. Terry Eagleton argues that the aesthetic frequently represents and pushes against dominant ideologies. “The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought”; in Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1990), 3, 9. 49. The experiment is controversial and still receives questions about its quality, merits, and significance. Thibault Le Texier, “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment,” American Psychologist 74 no. 7 (2019): 823–826. 50. Sören Henrich and Rachel Worthington, “Let Your Clients Fight Dragons: A Rapid Evidence Assessment regarding the Therapeutic Utility of ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health (2021), 1–2. 51. Patrick M. Markey, Charlotte N. Markey, and Juliana E. French, “Violent Video Games and Real-World Violence: Rhetoric Versus Data,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 4, no. 4 (2015): 290. 52. It does provide a good introduction and overview of some of the studies on the topic. Markey, Markey, and French, “Violent Video Games and Real-World Violence,” 291.

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53. They are clear thought that, “The rhetoric about violent video games does not match the data” in Markey, Markey, and French, “Violent Video Games and Real-World Violence,” 292. While the violence and video games studies are applicable in and of themselves, they bear relevance because Wizards of the Coast, the company who makes D&D, produces D&D video games as well. 54. They do note that studies which consider D&D are mixed regarding its benefits or detriments, and the results are complicated by the media, politics, and spiritual beliefs. One difficulty with sifting through the studies related to D&D, or role-playing in general, is that many studies are limited in scope and have contradictory elements with other studies. For an overview of the studies which have found negative and positive results see: Jennifer Cole Wright, Daniel E. Weissglass, and Vanessa Casey, “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development: Dungeons & Dragons Provides Moral Training,” The Journal of Humanistic Psychology 60, no. 1 (2020): 100–101. 55. Wright, Weissglass, and Casey, “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development,” 101. 56. Wright, Weissglass, and Casey, “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development,” 118. 57. Laycock, Dangerous Games. 58. Mearls and Crawford, D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, 9. 59. Mearls and Crawford, D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, 9. 60. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 88. 61. Cogburn and Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, 179–180. 62. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 114–115. 63. Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Function of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010), 58. 64. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 177. 65. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 177. 66. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 100–101. 67. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 101. 68. Cogburn and Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, 61. 69. Cogburn and Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, 27. 70. “Shared” appears in parenthesis in the original. Cogburn and Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, 127. 71. Patrick Williams, Sean Hendricks, and Keith Winkler, eds., Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games Gaming as Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Richard. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.

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Bowman, Sarah Lynne. The Function of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010. Cogburn, Jon and Mark Silcox eds. Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2012. Comstock, Gary L. “Two Types of Narrative Theology.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 4 (1987): 687–717. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1990. Goto, Courtney. The Grace of Playing: Pedagogies for Leaning into God’s New Creation. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016. Green, Garrett. Imagining Theology: Encounters with God in Scripture, Interpretation, and Aesthetics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020. Henrich, Sören and Rachel Worthington. “Let Your Clients Fight Dragons: A Rapid Evidence Assessment regarding the Therapeutic Utility of ‘Dungeons & Dragons.’” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health (2021). Laycock, Joseph. Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Le Texier, Thibault. “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment.” American Psychologist 74, no. 7 (2019): 823–39. Markey, Patrick M., Charlotte N. Markey, and Juliana E. French. “Violent Video Games and Real-World Violence: Rhetoric Versus Data.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 4, no. 4 (2015): 277–95. Mearls, Mike and Jermey Crawford. D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2014. Thiselton, Anthony C. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009. Tracy, David. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York, NY: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1991. ———. Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. ———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Vanhoozer, Kevin. Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Williams, Patrick, Sean Hendricks and Keith Winkler, eds. Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games Gaming as Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006. Witwer, Michael. Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015. Wright, Jennifer Cole, Daniel E. Weissglass, and Vanessa Casey. “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development: Dungeons & Dragons Provides Moral Training.” The Journal of Humanistic Psychology 60, no. 1 (2020): 99–129.

Chapter 12

Magic: The Gathering and Meaning The Theological Outlook of the World’s Most Complex Game Jacob Torbeck‌‌

Created in 1993 by Richard Garfield as a short game to play in between sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering has grown to more than 40 million players worldwide in its physical and digital iterations. In thirty years, Magic has printed over 25,000 unique cards across more than 100 sets, making it the most complex game in existence. As is the case with many fantasy games, Magic’s in-game world and its narrative—explored now for three decades in both its cards and in a parallel line of books and short stories—borrow heavily from real-world religious traditions and historical myths and legends to create an immersive play experience. This borrowing of especially historical religious aesthetics is a citation of the past as a shared cultural text, which allows players to come to Magic’s fantasy multiverse pre-loaded with knowledge of religious meaning and fantasy tropes to assist them in making sense of both card function and the game’s associated narrative. The way pop culture engages with, appropriates, and even influences the way we make sense of deep questions of meaning in general is the impetus for this volume, but is also taken up explicitly in the penultimate video essay for the PBS Idea Channel, “A Defense of Overthinking Pop Culture.” Therein, Mike Rugnetta argues that no cultural object is devoid of meaning that goes beyond itself: media in any form— whether films, games, comics, etc.—are not only sources for philosophical work but also do that work themselves.1 Thus, through the interaction of players with the virtual and material aspects of the game, Magic adopts, utilizes, 203

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comments on, and even contributes to theological discourse surrounding those same stories, traditions, and tropes it borrows. This chapter examines how, through its use of references to real-world sociocultural and religious traditions, the popular fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering creates an immersive game world and narrative for its players that comments on and contributes to discourse around the contemporary social issues and historical religious concepts it borrows. By analyzing the narrative and design choices portrayed on these cards and in Magic’s novels and short stories since 1993, I hope to show that for much of its history, Magic has assumed a generally cynical posture toward religion and faith, critiquing (sometimes subtly but other times overtly) institutional religions as tending toward corruption and deception of their adherents, although this portrayal has recently begun to shift. Two recent and positive representations of faith are both presented as service to the ideals of deceased goddesses, echoing contemporary turns toward finding value for religions precisely in their poverty and weakness, in the wake of the “death of God.” In these, I argue, Magic is not only critiquing contemporary religious expressions, but puts forward its own vision of what an ethical faith looks like beyond the bounds of its fictive multiverse, in our own world. THE SATANIC PANIC AND RELIGION IN EARLY MAGIC As Halloween approached in the autumn of 1994, in the golden light of morning pouring through dusty school bus windows, I caught my first glimpse of Magic: The Gathering cards. As a slight, geeky 11-year-old kid who loved anything in the fantasy genre, I was immediately transfixed. The backs of the cards conjured to mind a grimoire of long forgotten arcana; and the card fronts, with flavorful frames and art depicting fantastic creatures, artifacts, and spells, enraptured me such that for several weeks they were all I could think about. At the time, I did not have the foggiest idea how the game was played and owned no cards myself. Yet even divorced from the context of play, the cards had the capacity to build worlds in my friends’ minds and my own. Indeed, the booster packs themselves invited us to “visit the shores of imagination!” How they did this was a question on our parents’ minds, however. The 1980s saw the beginning of “the Satanic Panic,” and even throughout the 1990s, God-fearing Christian parents were wary of depictions evoking magic, demons, or anything that could be seen as a gateway to the occult.2 Dungeons and Dragons had been at the center of a national moral panic over supposed

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Satanic ritual abuse, and Magic: The Gathering was only a few years behind it with similar imagery. Were there, as two women in Bedford, New York argued, the “signs and rites of at least 30 satanic cults” functioning as “inducements [. . .] to engage in destructive, cruel cult practices” in Magic?3 Even though I attended a public school, I remember my seventh-grade shop teacher becoming suspicious and questioning me when I incorporated symbols from those early Magic cards into a wood burning project. “What does this mean?” he asked with an eyebrow raised. Good question. Borrowing Baal Rather than being merely “occult,” Magic—much like D&D—initially borrowed mythology and fantasy tropes from wherever they could be found. From a design standpoint, this makes great sense for a new game. In a 2014 essay, Professor Rabia Gregory of the University of Missouri argues that fantasy games “cite the medieval”—including medieval religion—as a means of establishing an in-game “world-building infrastructure.”4 For example, angels and demons—creatures native to the cosmology of pagan Greek and Abrahamic faiths—are appropriated in Magic, where they obey the meaning they possess in Christianity: angels are represented as good-aligned winged warriors who protect the weak, and demons are spiritual beings who seek to corrupt mortals for the side of evil. Thus, the card “Lord of the Pit,” representing a demon that the player can “summon,” makes sense in part because of general awareness of how Christians historically have imagined Hell as an abyssal chasm full of demons torturing the damned (cf. Dante’s Inferno, in which Hell is the pit created when the fallen angel Lucifer plummeted from heaven and the eighth layer of hell, Malebolge, is a series of smaller pits). The mechanics of the card functions in accord with its theme: the player must keep sacrificing other creature cards to Lord of the Pit, or the player is penalized. Put another way, Magic  used controversial depictions of witchcraft and satanic symbols, such as the pentagrams on the cards “Demonic Tutor” and “Unholy Strength,” among other religious notions and well-known tropes, to infuse the cards and the game itself with a kind of fictive realism via the meaning that the players bring to it from our own familiarity with myth, legend, and religion.5 However, this kind of meaning-making is not merely one-directional. In many cases, the combination of the card’s features—its name, color, art, rules text, flavor text, its situatedness within its set and within the Magic story, and so on—can also (even if inadvertently) make theological statements. For example, the choice to associate black with demonology, witchcraft, and Christian conceptions of Hell while associating

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white with faith, chivalry, and divine action sets up a clear, easily recognized dichotomy in a manner that tracks with historical European Christian values.6 Beyond the card art and the card names, Magic’s card frames also serve to convey information that helps its players immerse themselves in the fictive reality of the game world. Blue, red, and green cards have frames that recall elemental forces of wind and water, stone, and plant life, respectively. The white card frame uses a fine white lace background, recalling religious vestments, or altar dressing. The black card frame, with its worn parchment text box and bubbling margin, recalls the clandestine necromancy of a witch’s magic cauldron.7 This too, engages our religious understanding of what magic is and how we locate it within the game’s internal logic. When Christian hermeticists like Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa sought to make their case about the virtuous utility of magic to Christian authorities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they contrasted what they sought to do—white magic, motivated by a sense of wonder and reverence for the world—with black magic, which sought to manipulate and make use of the secrets of the world for selfish and evil ends.8 The “dark arts” of black magic was said to rely on the profanation of dead bodies—a practice represented on cards such as “Animate Dead” and “Raise Dead”—and consorting with the denizens of hell. This latter practice, dramatically depicted in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, would go on to become part and parcel to the “color identity” of the black suit in Magic: The Gathering, as depicted on the aforementioned “Demonic Tutor,” “Demonic Hordes,” and “Contract from Below.” These represent pacts or alliances with the evil supernatural forces. For fear that these overt references to these traditions might draw (more) unwanted attention from concerned parents and Christian leaders (like what had happened with Dungeons & Dragons); the game’s references to the “demonic” disappeared in 1995, not to return until 2002. Art was censored and changed to remove pentagrams, and the words “demon” and “demonic” were removed from the game’s cards and rules text. As game designer Mark Rosewater explained in a 2004 column: Because demons had become personifications of evil, they proved very useful as religious archetypes. Mythology blended into theology. Now remember, the demon archetype is much older than almost all modern religions, but their role has become so intertwined that the religious connotation is what most people are aware of. As such, they hit one of the two cultural hot buttons (religion and politics).9

Rosewater’s caveat about the relative age of the archetype of “evil personified” strikes me as inconsequential, given that the images used for all of

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Magic’s early demons borrow heavily from Christian and Jewish conceptions of them. Why would it matter if the archetype was older if the images and concepts used are those of the popular imagination? In any case, despite their removal early on, these references to the demonic were cemented as part of black’s “color identity”—a concept within the game that describes the real and expected set of game actions that a particular suit has at its disposal. Moral Questions after Moral Panics Artists and designers of Magic’s  first card pool leaned heavily on the iconography and symbols of real-world religions and what those communicated to us, the players, to fashion the fantasy world of Dominia in our imaginations. Indeed, former designer and art director Jesper Myrfors has said that Magic wasn’t initially intended to have an expansive, proprietary in-game setting.10 Rather, the initial goal was simply to make use of existing mythologies—which is why, incidentally, the initial expansion to the game was an adaptation of the 1,001 Nights. If we believe Mark Rosewater when he says that “Fantasy . . . at its core is all about morality,”11 then we may consider that Magic is (or was) also reiterating a very conventional statement about the morality of various religious traditions. In Magic’s ruleset, black magic is opposed to white magic; black is presented as the enemy of religious piety, represented in its various manifestations on white cards like “Blessing,” “Guardian Angel,” and “Piety.” For better or worse, the religious references of early Magic promoted a vision of late medieval and renaissance Christian religious and occult practices that have become fundamental to the game even now: black magic is characterized as willing to trade any resource for power, and is still the color most associated with witchcraft, necromancy, and demonology inside the game’s multiverse. Despite now having its own proprietary narrative, Wizards of the Coast remains happy to borrow widely from real religions and historical periods, and to make use of their established motifs and inner tensions for narrative benefit. One question that emerges from this citation of real-world religions is whether this “borrowing” is harmless—as I once claimed to skeptical adult critics when I was in middle school—or is it at least in some cases pernicious? The moral panic over the presence of pentagrams and demons on cards was largely overblown, but that doesn’t make Magic’s  fantasy any less “about morality.” If anything, events like the Satanic Panic of the ’80s and ’90s obscured real moral questions that Magic might have provoked about how we understand and categorize European religious history, and about how a game might itself comment on that categorization.

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Designing Religion’s Dark Side The use of religious and occult symbols to convey meaning in Magic’s earliest sets was not simply for the sake of creating an immersive game world. A mere year after its debut, Magic: The Gathering was already making subtle and not so subtle statements. The Dark is a set that is about subversion. Designer Jesper Myrfors wanted to correct certain problems with the game environment with 1994’s expansion to the core game, entitled The Dark.12 Myrfors wanted to shift the mechanical environment and disrupt expectations; thus, he designed cards that made use of synergies between “enemy” colors, broke players’ expectations about what particular colors could do, and featured a more uniform art style according to his own preference for horror. The Dark also subverted Magic’s initial representation of what “white magic” was, indicating that Magic’s designers were aware of certain moral overtones, and even self-critically commenting on them, in a fashion. Myrfors has said that he wanted to push back on early Magic’s seeming identification of white with goodness: “It was a set in which I wanted to show that White was not all kisses and flowers, that White could descend into theocracy and fascism.”13 In an interview with Hipsters of the Coast in 2015, he states that The Dark “was a commentary on the evils of organized religion,”14 adding elsewhere that it was “about religious intolerance, which is a theme I return to often. It was the horror of puritanical America.”15 While the terrifying and uncanny nature of black remained, one of the scariest things about the fictive world of The Dark is that there is nowhere for its inhabitants to run. Rather than the welcoming Northern Paladin, who wears a Christian cross on his tabard, or the aspirational Swords to Plowshares (recalling the prophetic anticipation of the end of violence, from Hebrew Scripture), the white cards of The Dark greet us with artistic and mechanical representations of an “Angry Mob,” a clergyman preaching “Fire and Brimstone,” and cards such as “Martyr’s Cry” and “Blood of the Martyr.” While previously, white had been associated with healing and piety, in The Dark, it is also the color of zealotry, lashing out at the other colors of Magic for their impurity, and even turning in upon itself. Jeff Grubb’s novelization of the events of this early set in The Gathering Dark doubles down on this characterization. In his telling, The Church of Tal, an increasingly anti-magic religion, grows in power as the populace seeks a means of making sense of the destruction wrought by the Brothers’ War. Out of a fear of history repeating itself, the Church eventually established a theocratic rule that heavily persecutes spellcasters, ultimately going on “witch hunts” to find and execute magic-users and artificers. Already, the art direction of The Dark evoked real-world witch trials and used Christian symbolism; Grubb borrows Christian scripture to make the thin metaphor even

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thinner, placing an infamous passage from the book of Exodus on the lips of the Preacher: “‘Suffer not the Magician to live.’”16 The entry of official fiction like The Gathering Dark into Magic’s worldbuilding in the mid-1990s would change how and to what degree Magic was adopting and commenting upon religion and ideas about faith. Prior to the existence of Magic’s own short stories and novelizations, players were left for the most part to bring their own values to the game and could come to different conclusions about the nature of the religious symbols presented. For example, the “Book of Tal” referenced on the aforementioned Northern Paladin in the game’s core set could not have initially been known to have belonged to the same Church that was burning folks at the stake in The Dark. Even with their flavor text, cards often left much to the players’ imaginations; the fiction would make this explicit. THE CORRUPTION OF RELIGION IN MAGIC’S FANTASY FICTION Thus far, I have addressed how Magic’s appropriation of familiar tropes and religious trappings facilitate a ready-made fantasy mythos for its players, and have begun to describe how Magic’s depiction of religion moved from a simple fantasy worldbuilding tool, present only in the cards, to more intentional explorations of the historical failings of Christianity through analogous churches, written about in accompanying fiction. With few exceptions, this posture of cynicism has defined Magic’s portrayal of institutional religion; in the following sections, I examine several instances in which in-story institutional religions are portrayed as corrupt along lines that enable players who engage the story to interrogate the notion of religious belief as compromised in nearly inextricable ways, before pointing to places where religion seems to be represented positively, and what these contrasting visions might mean for how Magic’s designers view religion. Religion as an Opiate for the Masses on Magic’s Innistrad In the fall of 2011, Magic returned to horror as an inspiration for a fantasy setting, bringing players to the world of “Innistrad,” a setting based on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and based on stories such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the stories of witches, werewolves, and ghosts that shortly became mainstays of popular culture. The situation on Innistrad is grim: humans are beset on all sides by

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the monsters of the world; most notably, aristocratic vampire families feed on the world’s populace, werewolves stalk the forests, and bodies buried without proper rites rise from the dead to terrorize the living. When the players are introduced to the world, the humans have paltry few defenses, save for the Archangel Avacyn and her eponymous Church, headed by bishops and holy warriors (called “cathars”) who fend off the denizens of the night. Angels, we are told, can hear the desperate prayers of the faithful, and often swoop in at the last moment to rescue a lost child or fend off a prowling werewolf. With these champions, humanity manages to maintain a fragile equilibrium, a delicate balance of power where no faction is ever able to gain much ground. Players later learn that this stalemate was orchestrated by one of the game’s cast of powerful “planeswalkers” (beings who can travel between worlds), Sorin Markov, a native to Innistrad, and a vampire. In Colin Kawakami’s short story, “The Lunarch’s Journal,” a cleric of the Church of Avacyn learns the truth from another hierarch’s writings: Seeing that our destruction and [the vampires’] were inexorably linked, Sorin created Avacyn, a force to rally our remaining angels, a force that we could unite under. A force constructed to hold in check the very vampires who created her. From there, the church was designed to give us the power to protect and grow our numbers, but not enough to ever bring us victory over those that fed on us . . . We are livestock. We are unwitting participants in our own cultivation. The church to which I have dedicated my life, the being that I have loved since birth, the boundaries of my world, all of it is a sinister lie.17

That is, the trappings of religion were created by a vampire as a method of control, regulating both humans and other vampires so that the vampires did not perish due to over-consuming their human prey. For Innistrad, Magic takes Karl Marx’s famous passage in extremis and makes it the premise of their setting’s dominant religion: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”18 Because of a confluence of tragedies, of which this revelation is only one, the Church of Avacyn all but crumbles. The delicate balance of the world is upset, and a return to non-institutional religious expressions—previously suppressed by the dominant and corrupt institutional Church of Avacyn—begins. This return, first addressed in 2021’s Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, will be worthy of mention later, as it has something to say to the positive role of religion that Magic narrative designers see religion playing.

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Religion as Corrupted and Conquering Where the story of Innistrad seems to critique religion writ large uses the trappings of a European hierarchical Church mostly to invoke traditional understandings of a fantasy religion, other Magic sets have chosen to utilize more direct analogies to real-world events and offer a more poignant critique of real-world traditions. For example, in 2017, Wizards of the Coast released a game expansion, Ixalan, thematically linked to the ancient cultures of Central and South America, as well as to the arrival of Spanish colonizers and Caribbean pirates. In the wake of its release, Wizards employees Blake Rasmussen and Alison Lührs sat down to talk about the real-world inspirations for Ixalan. As she begins to talk about doing a Mesoamerican setting, Lührs admits that to use this inspiration means “actively deciding to tackle the imperialist baggage that comes along with it. The nice thing about fantasy is we get to look at the real world and decide what stays and what goes. . . . ”19 In so doing, Wizards of the Coast chose to cast the conquistador faction not as a colonizing power, but as co-competitors in a race to claim (or re-claim) a magical artifact that was once theirs.20 The in-world reference to Spanish conquistadors was not wholly white-washed, however. A strong element of moral critique remains. The “Legion of Dusk,” as they are called in the game, are all vampires. The bloodthirsty, vampiric conquistadors of Ixalan are an intentionally thin metaphor, Lührs says.21 Chasing the story’s Fountain of Youth-like MacGuffin, supposedly located within an El Dorado-esque lost city, the Legionnaires sail west to Ixalan from their Spanish-coded home of Torrezon aboard ships that resemble floating gothic cathedrals. While Magic no longer makes use of real-world religious symbols like crosses, the cards and the fiction offer obvious parallels that remove any doubt that the religion integral to understanding these characters is Catholicism. The cards contain obvious references to the Christian rite of baptism, use of the language of “heresy,” the hierarchical structure of the fictional Church of Dusk (which has its own “Pontifex”), and even the theological emphasis on the saving power of blood, driving home the impression that behind the creation of the Legion of Dusk is a cultural critique not just of the Catholic Church’s complicity in colonization, but also the active role many individual Christians and the institution itself historically played.22 While these vampires are not strictly speaking invaders from an officially Roman Catholic kingdom, they certainly look the part, with hair styles and armor recalling renderings of Spanish conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. The legacy of colonialism and the violence it brought to the Americas hangs over the aesthetics of the set like a funeral pall. The card “Legion’s Landing,” for example, sends echoes of the classic line attributed

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to Christopher Columbus, “I claim this land in the name of Spain!” as the armored vampire pictured, named Adrian Adanto of Lujia, plants his flag upon a beach. This borrowing of colonial history is not without some nuance, however. The lore of Ixalan appropriates and repudiates the real-world history in creative ways. Despite being called conquistadors and establishing outposts, the vampiric Legion of Dusk function within the narrative in a manner more akin to explorers like Walter Raleigh than colonizers like Columbus or Cortez. Ixalan uses the aesthetic trappings of the Spanish Conquest without directly recapitulating the narrative of colonization. Somewhere between saint and savior, the founder of the vampires’ faith, Elenda, is an archetypal hero who gives rise to legend; she finds the “fountain of youth.” Rather than a holy relic, this fountain is a source of dark magic that grants her immortality— immortality that is crucial to her sacred mission to guard a precious artifact known as “The Immortal Sun.” After returning to Torrezon to share this gift with others so they may join in this sacred duty, she sails back to the continent of Ixalan and is not heard from for centuries. In her absence, the true meaning of Elenda’s gift of vampirism becomes distorted in myth. Rather than understanding their vampirism as a burden accepted as a means to eternally seek and protect the artifact, the Legion of Dusk come to view the Immortal Sun as that which will free them from the burden of vampirism, granting them immortality without the need for blood. One might reasonably conclude here that the storytelling team at Wizards is making a popular point here about religion: that pure systems become mythologized over time, and that behind our modern misconceptions lies something true and perhaps better, purer than whatever corrupted iteration history has given us.23 Despite their misunderstanding, like any members of a religious group, the individual vampires of Torrezon belong to the Church of Dusk for various reasons: Vona, Butcher of Magan reminds us much of historical figures like Cortez, who sought conquest and glory. Mavren Fein, Dusk Apostle, one of Elenda’s first converts, is on a spiritual quest akin to that of the Dominican friars who came aboard Columbus’s ships to spread the gospel. When Vona and Mavren Fein come face to face with Elenda in the chamber of the Immortal Sun, their reactions recall early events in the history of Spanish conquest. Mavren Fein, believing the truth of his revered saint, repents of his mistakes; Vona, more loyal to the cause she has internalized than the original impetus for the cause, has to be chastened. In this, Mavren Fein again resembles Fra Antonio Montesinos and other friars who, when confronted with suffering natives, saw the truth of the matter and put themselves on the side of the Good.

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Upon their return to Torrezon, however, not all accept Elenda’s reappearance with reverence or docility. When Elenda and Mavren Fein testify to the disappearance of the Immortal Sun and preach humility, the priest Vito grows indignant and symbolically rebukes the living saint, spilling a carafe of blood across the floor of a church. Vito represents the “fail state” for Elenda’s return: rejection of the Church of Dusk’s original purpose and the embrace of its distortion. We can imagine the same indignance in the congregation in the wake of Antonio Montesinos’s December 21, 1511 sermon, which admonished the colonizers for their treatment of the natives of Hispaniola, or in the event of excommunications from Bartolome de las Casas, when plantation owners refused to free their slaves. One might also have seen these emotions on display in the ever-polarized American political discourse in 2020. In many ways, what Black and indigenous activists and allies were and are still asking other Americans to do is not so different from what Fray Antonio Montesinos, or Ixalan’s Elenda asked others to do: grapple with the reality that they have misunderstood or been blind to the source of our own convictions; that they have internalized a distorted version of their own national mythology. A similar trend can be seen in stories centered on the world of Ravnica, a world that, in its entirety, seems to be based on Vienna and Prague in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. Czech cathedrals inform the visual identity of the urban fantasy setting; skyscrapers with gothic spires or baroque domes punctuate the city of Ravnica’s skyline, overshadowing dark alleys, teeming markets, and busy parkways. In this world’s narrative, flowing vestments, gilded spires and stained glass form the aesthetic identity for a guild called the “Orzhov Syndicate,” an institution of clergy who serve as the spiritual face of a bank, which acts as the cover for an organized crime ring. The church sells absolution from sin and protection from harm, often in exchange for indenturing the soul of the absolved beyond the bounds of death, into the afterlife. The twisted reference to late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century sales of indulgences by Christian clergymen like Johannes Tetzel is hard to miss; the corruption of the guilds is clearly meant to mirror the political corruption of the Catholic hierarchy during that time. In each narrative arc set on Ravnica (there have been three so far), heroes struggle against magical, world-threatening evil amidst a backdrop of corrupt institutions, elaborate bureaucracies, and byzantine legal structures. Positive manifestations of idealism and faith seem to exist entirely despite institutions, rather than being maintained and fostered by them. Like in Ixalan’s Church of Dusk, the institutionalization of the spiritual cause twists it: indulgences become indebtedness, community becomes conformity and complicity.

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Religion as Powerful Communal Belief Beyond the notions that religions exist as the distortion of ancient truths and the corruption of institutions, Magic also explores the idea that our religions might simply be the force of collective human belief, given power because of our devotion to them. In the short fiction that explains the world of 2013’s game expansion, the Greek-mythology-inspired Theros, the cosmological realities of the expansion’s setting are addressed thus: Koblios, in Meditations, said, ‘“The gods are simply patterns personified,” before he was stoned for his heresy. Sad that, despite the price he paid, he was still wrong. Gods are the patterns we recognize, personified. The difference is in the creator. Through the power of Nyx, we are responsible for our gods. Perhaps we are even responsible for Nyx . . .24

Out of the power of human ideas, the gods of the fictional world of Theros are born, and, aware of their reliance on mortals, seek followers and champions. These deities, bound as they are to their plane of existence, are in some ways more limited in power than the heroes of Magic’s decades-spanning narrative, who can travel between planes by virtue of their inner magical “spark.” In the fiction released alongside the cards, Heliod, the sun god of Theros, recruits one of these heroic planeswalkers, a woman named Elspeth Tirel, to be his champions. However, he quickly becomes suspicious of her knowledge and jealous of her abilities. After Elspeth slays Xenagos, a satyr planeswalker who had attempted apotheosis, Heliod kills her, saying to her: Even if you hadn’t given yourself to Erebos [the god of the dead, in exchange for the life of her lover], I wouldn’t have permitted you to live . . . You are too much like the satyr. Your eyes have seen things I can’t fathom. And a champion cannot know more than her god. I am lord of the pantheon. I am the greatest of these.25

In a manner not unlike the Greek Gods as portrayed by the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium,26 the gods of Theros grow suspicious of mortals who become too powerful, and scheme against mortals and against one another. However, unlike the deities of ancient Greece, these gods are supposed to be the manifestations of mortal sensibilities. Magic’s Theros is a world where gods made in our image vie for power and favor; our collective ideas made manifest are the cosmic source of our oppression and liberation. Elspeth later uses the power of belief to escape the underworld of Theros. By insinuating the belief among the denizens of the underworld that it was she, and not the sun god, who carried the weapon called the “Sun Spear,” she was able to shape reality such that this “story” became true, enabling Elspeth

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to defeat the sun god and enabling the other deities to punish him in a manner akin to Atlas: Heliod is forced to bear the weight of the cosmos on his shoulders. While perhaps unintentional, Magic thus offers a narrative that critiques notions of religious orthodoxy and has striking, perhaps unsettling, resonances with the rise of conspiracy theories and “alternate facts” that wide swaths of the American public have accepted as truth. The power of certain ideas, even fictions, becomes so powerful that they take on a reality of their own, and even a religious valence. For example, Jason Springs notes that: Many Trump-era evangelicals embrace “end-time” and messianism-inflected conspiracy theories that permeate Trump-driven Republican politics and policy-making. From this ensues a proclivity to position their political and cultural opponents on the far side of a Manichean divide and to imbue contemporary politics with cosmic urgency.27

The narrative of Theros admits the power and reality of collective belief while demonstrating and warning that these beliefs can coalesce into forces beyond our control which are interested in their own survival and power. MAGIC’S “DEATH OF GODDESS” THEOLOGY In recent years, however, Magic has created three examples that it has called out as laudable religious expressions: The Church of Serra, the planeswalker Basri Ket and his followers, and most recently, the common folk of Innistrad. Each of these religious groups, however, have a curious similarity to one another—they all feature the faith of their followers persisting through the literal death of their goddess figure. The Church of Serra and its story were slowly introduced beginning with Magic’s very first set. Over the following years, the name “Serra” was revealed to belong to a powerful, benevolent planeswalker, who was revered as a deity by her followers and for a time lived with those followers in a world she had created with magic and populated with angels of her own making. At one point, Serra departs the plane, causing it to become unstable; her people are evacuated before the world ends and bear their memories and ritual practices with them to their new home. Meanwhile, Serra had journeyed to other worlds, and was among some traveling refugees when she was set upon and wounded by a bandit—with the last of her strength, Serra sanctified the land, and a cathedral was constructed over her tomb. The in-game narrative regarding the various groups of Serra’s followers describes a history of conflict, debate, and the blending of traditions such as one sees in the branches of

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Buddhism, or in various cultural iterations of Christianity that arose because of isolation from other communities. Despite these conflicts, however, Kelly Digges has said that the Church of Serra as revisited in 2018’s set Dominaria is “Everything it claims to be,” a church that helps the vulnerable, that has angels and clergy to protect the weak, and advance the cause of justice.28 The second most notable example of salutary religious belief is the recent introduction of Basri Ket. Basri Ket is a planeswalker from the Egyptian-inspired setting of Amonkhet, who followed Oketra, a goddess of solidarity inspired by ancient Egypt’s cat-headed deities Bastet and Sekhmet. Basri was a pious follower of the goddess who competed and succeeded in the goddess’s ordeal, and experienced such spiritual elation that his latent planeswalker spark ignited and he shifted away from the plane. Upon his later return, Basri found his home plane devastated. The gods had been killed, and it was revealed that the deities and their trials were tools in an elaborate plot by a powerful dragon to raise a magical army.29 Amidst a crisis of faith, Basri still saw a need for the teachings of his deceased goddess. The suffering people of Amonkhet were in the same place he was, reeling from the collapse of the religious and political structures of their societies. In an interview with Liz Leo, game designer Sydney Adams described Basri’s situation thus: With nothing to hold onto, Basri experiences a crisis of faith. It would have been easy for Basri to forget Oketra, renounce his faith, and for that to be his process of moving forward. Instead, Basri sees his people struggling and hurting and understands that he still has a job to do. He rounds up the injured and weary, encourages them with what he knows, and realizes that Oketra’s teachings are still true. Basri realizes that while Oketra is gone, her teachings of truth, respect, and solidarity live on in her people and through him. It’s at this point this character makes an incredible shift—a coming of age in a way. Oketra is this maternal figure who gave him so much, and Basri comes to a personal understanding that Oketra is always with him and that he can use what he’s learned to change the world yet.30

The third and final example, alluded to above, is the populace of the plane of Innistrad. After the destruction of their angelic protector, Avacyn, and in the wake the collapse of her Church, the people are in the midst of a spiritual and existential crisis. Some have turned to another angel, Sigarda, saying fervent prayers for her aid and protection, while others have begun to return to the “old ways,” the hedge magic of their ancestors, in hopes of warding off the creatures of the night. Many others do both, blending their familiar faith in the angel with the ancient magics, a syncretic expression of spirituality common in the real world as well.

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This period of religious reconstruction and the difficulty of navigating the historical scars of religious suppression are seen in the characters Arlinn Kord (formerly a priest of Avacyn) and Katilda (a witch of the Dawnhart Coven), who must cooperate to protect the populace from the threat of an eternal night—a calamity in almost any imaginable world, but especially dire in a world populated by vampires and werewolves. When Katilda blames Avacyn for turning people away from old rites, Arlinn clearly bristles, but opts to let the polemics slide: there are more important things at stake than whatever Katilda thinks of her faith tradition. Despite still feeling the sting of persecution she experienced prior to the Church’s collapse, Katilda, too, understands they have common cause. “We must save each other,” Katilda says.31 The show of solidarity that follows is reminiscent of how in places like Canada, Egypt, France, Norway, and Cameroon, Muslims, Jews, and Christians stand guard around one another’s places of worship, to prevent acts of terror. In K. Arsenault Rivera’s short stories, the remnants of the Avacynian Church form a protective circle around the Dawnhart Coven’s Harvesttide ritual, putting their bodies between ravenous werewolves and the witches they once persecuted.32 Despite Avacyn being a false savior, and despite her destruction, the values of her Church nevertheless infuse Arlinn and the other Avacynians’ response to Katilda’s requests, the ideals of hope and standing up for the vulnerable motivate Arlinn just as Oketra’s ideals of solidarity motivate Basri. The spirituality lives on, loose from its once corrupt institution. These three faith expressions—the Church of Serra, Basri Ket and his followers, and the remnants of the Church of Avacyn—are reminiscent of the late twentieth-century movement called “Death of God” theology. For scholars like Thomas J. J. Altizer, while there once was a God, God is now dead. The God of Christianity really was put to death on the cross, in history, and is now absent.33 For Altizer, the incarnation and the cross are God’s acts of self-negation, a kenosis that wholly pours the divine into the world, enabling the sacralization of profane existence.34 In absence, God is radically immanent. This is more than Arlinn Kord, Basri Ket, or the Church of Serra claim, but the persistence of the spirit, ethos, and power of the dead goddess figures remains an evocative parallel. CONCLUSION: AN ETHICAL FAITH (ACCORDING TO WIZARDS OF THE COAST) This chapter has analyzed how Magic has utilized religion since its inception in 1993, arguing that while most often making use of the semiotics of western European religion, the game itself often takes a cynical approach to religion and faith, both critiquing (sometimes subtly but other times overtly)

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real-world religious faith and showing nearly all in-game religious traditions to be corrupt, deceptive, exploitative, or all of these. Some of this has been intentional—in the case of Jesper Myrfors in Magic’s early days—with designers wanting to portray something that bent or inverted the stereotypes of holy benevolence so common in fantasy. Later portrayals may be due in part to following this early precedent and in part the non-religious bias of the designers. One former designer, Kelly Digges, when asked about the prevailing sinister thread in Magic’s representation of religion (and the reaction from players and fans), remarked, “It never occurred to me to think about the fact that for a lot of people, faith is a comfort . . . that it is a source of meaning and joy.”35 In any case, the critiques Magic levies against organized religion or even broader spiritual traditions have been consistent, giving us a clear picture of what an ethical expression of faith is not, according to the game’s designers. In lieu of religion, Magic elevates the reliable nature of spellcasting and planar travel as a kind of science, bending the fantastic elements of the multiverse toward science fiction, and elevating its players and lead characters to semi-divine status. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) critique of especially organized religion is couched in a discussion of socially relevant issues: Magic has tackled issues of the persecution of difference by religious authorities, colonialism, environmentalism, and the threat of fascism in recent years. In these narratives, we can notice trends in Magic’s cards and narratives that point us to its overarching theological outlook, which I summarize as a suspicion, if not outright hostility toward organized religion, with the implication that a god is something that at best is well-meaning but fallible, but more often a pernicious vestige of our misremembered past or a hostile manifestation of our own mortal beliefs. Instead of religion giving us strength, Magic’s worldview is essentially “secular humanist”;36 it is the players (taking the role of planeswalkers), not gods, who possess the power to change the multiverse for the better. Ethical faith, as imagined by Magic in its first 30 years, is a faith in which the existence of God or gods is nigh irrelevant. Insofar as this ethical faith is faith at all, it is faith in oneself, one’s community, and one’s ideals to triumph over evil; it is hope in the face of adversity, so long as this hope is not resting in an institution or deity. It should not surprise us that for a game subtitled “the gathering,” ethical faith focuses on coming together for the greater good, with common cause. Drawn from Magic’s most recent depictions of laudable faith, the greater good includes concepts like solidarity with the weak or oppressed, protecting the environment, and giving others space or accompaniment for their personal growth and transformation. These are praiseworthy ideals; perhaps in the future Magic’s designers will draw more from how religious people pursue them because of, rather than in spite of, their faith.

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NOTES 1. Mike Rugnetta, “A Defense of Overthinking Pop Culture,” PBS Idea Channel, August 24, 2017, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​-KY​-TGmXQik. 2. For a more in-depth look at this phenomenon, see Joseph Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 3. Kate Stone Lombardi, “Bedford’s Struggle With the Devil,” The New York Times, November 26, 1995, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1995​/11​/26​/nyregion​/bedford​ -s​-struggle​-with​-the​-devil​.html. 4. Rabia Gregory, “Citing the Medieval: Using Religion as World Building Infrastructure in Fantasy MMORPGs.” In Finding Religion in Digital Gaming, edited by Heidi Campbell and Gregory Grieve (Indiana University Press, 2014), 134–153, 137. 5. Aaron Forsythe, “Recapturing the Magic with Magic 2010,” Magic.Wizards.com, February 23, 2009. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/news​/ recapturing​-magic​-magic​-2010​-2009​-02​-23. 6. The symbolism of color in Christianity and pre-Christianity in Europe and its later transference onto ethnicity is investigated in Roger Bastide, “Color, Racism, and Christianity,” Daedalus 96 (1967): 312–27, and Ann Schmiesing, “Blackness in the Grimm’s Fairytales,” Marvels & Tales Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall 2016): 210–233. Schmiesing notes that despite being prior to “whiteness” and “blackness” as ethnic and sociological identifiers, the valuation of black skin as an affliction demarking a curse or inhumanity is a thematic forerunner to these future realities. Wizards of the Coast seemed to tacitly acknowledge this in 2020, with the banning of “Cleanse,” a white card that destroys black creatures (See Wizards of the Coast, “Depictions of Racism in Magic,” Magic.Wizards.com, June 10, 2020. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​ /articles​/archive​/news​/depictions​-racism​-magic​-2020​-06​-10)—overtones of “ethnic cleansing” were seen to be problematic enough, despite the card colors not being intended to be associated with race or ethnicity. 7. Sam Gaglio, “Frames,” Rhystic Studies, February 18, 2018, https:​//​youtu​.be​/qOE​ -lNs6qe4​?t​=205. 8. On this phenomenon, see Laina Saif, “Early Modern Astral Magic: Marsilio Ficino,” in The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 95–123, 95–96; D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); and Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance: From Ficino, Pico, Della Porta to Trithemius, Agrippa, Bruno (Leidens, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007). 9. Mark Rosewater, “Where Have All the Demons Gone?,” Magic.Wizards.com, July 5, 2004, https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/making​-magic​/where​ -have​-all​-demons​-gone​-2004​-07​-05. 10. Neysan Chute, “TEG Interviews: Jesper Myrfors, MTG’s First Art Director,” The End Games, March 1, 2020, https:​//​youtu​.be​/FnMN9s5jVM4​?t​=2210. 11. Rosewater, “Where Have All the Demons Gone?.”

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12. Chute, “TEG Interviews,” https:​//​youtu​.be​/FnMN9s5jVM4​?t​=2625. 13. Joe Fiorini, (Islandswamp), “Magic History: Art of Darkness with Jesper Myrfors,” April 14, 2016, https:​//​www​.mtggoldfish​.com​/articles​/magic​-history​-art​-of​ -darkness​-with​-jesper​-myrfors. 14. Matt Jones, “Arting Around: Jesper Myrfors Interview,” Hipsters of the Coast, June 29, 2015, https:​//​www​.hipstersofthecoast​.com​/2015​/06​/arting​-around​-jesper​ -myrfors​-interview​/. 15. August Undin, “Interview with Jesper Myrfors,” Casualhörnan, August 7, 2015, https:​//​casualhornan​.blogspot​.com​/2015​/08​/interview​-with​-jesper​-myrfors​ .html. 16. Jeff Grubb, The Gathering Dark (Seattle: Wizards of the Coast, 1999), 261. 17. Colin Kawakami, “The Lunarch’s Journal,” Magic.Wizards.com, August 13, 2014, https:​//​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20220521040516​/https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/ articles​/archive​/ur​/lunarchs​-journal​-2014​-08​-13. 18. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, edited by J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 131. 19. Blake Rasmussen and Alison Lührs, “Magic Story Podcast: Ixalan,” Magic. Wizards.com, August 30, 2017. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/feature​ /magic​-story​-podcast​-ixalan​-2017​-08​-30. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. For examples, see especially cards such as “Ritual of Rejuvenation” (baptism), “Sanguine Sacrament” (asperges), which can be viewed at https:​ //​ tagger​ .scryfall​ .com​ /tags​ /artwork​ /legion​ -of​ -dusk. For notes on the history and structure of the world, see “Planeswalker’s Guide to Ixalan: Part 2,” Magic.Wizards.com, November 8, 2017, https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/feature​/planeswalkers​-guide​ -ixalan​-part​-2​-2017​-11​-08. For background and explorations of Christianity’s role in colonization, see James Muldoon, ed., The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), and David W. Kling, “Catholics in Colonial America (1500–1700),” in A History of Christian Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 325–355. 23. Cf. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated by James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). Girard argues that the origins of mythology are historical events, covered over with years of retelling and meaning making. A similar kind of move exists within some iterations of Protestant Christianity, such as the Anabaptists, who point to “Constantinianism” as the corruption of early and authentic Christian practice by institutionalism and the acquisition of political power. For more on this, see John D. Roth, editor, Constantine Revisited: Leithart, Yoder, and the Constantinian Debate (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2013). This trope can also be seen in Magic’s treatment of their take on Lovecraftian horrors, the “Eldrazi” of Zendikar, which over eons come to be worshipped as benevolent gods, despite being world-eating monsters imprisoned in stone. See Kelly Digges, “The Rise of Kozilek,” Magic.Wizards.com, December 9, 2015. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​ /en​/articles​/archive​/uncharted​-realms​/rise​-kozilek​-2015​-12​-09.

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24. Ken Troop, “Dreams of the City,” Magic.Wizards.com, April 23, 2014. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/magic​-story​/dreams​-city​-2014​-04​-23. 25. Jenna Hellend, Journey Into Nyx: Godsend, Part 2 (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2014). See also Tom LaPille, “Ajani’s Vengeance,” Magic.Wizards.com, July 23, 2014. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/ajanis​-vengeance​-2014​ -07​-23 26. See Plato, Symposium, see especially 189c-190d. 27. Jason Springs, “QAnon, Conspiracy, and White Evangelical Apocalypse,” in Contending Modernities, June 16, 2021. https:​//​contendingmodernities​.nd​.edu​/ theorizing​-modernities​/qanon​-evangelical​-apocalypse​/. For a theological critique of Christian Nationalism, see Kyle Edward Haden, Embodied Idolatry: A Critique of Christian Nationalism (London: Lexington Books, 2020); for more on nationalism and religion more generally, see Peter van der Veer, “Nationalism and Religion,” in John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2013), 655–671. 28. Shivam Bhatt, “Kelly Digges,” Casual Magic Episode 34, Sept 15, 2020. https:​ //​casualmagic​.libsyn​.com​/casual​-magic​-episode​-34​-kelly​-digges. 29. An earlier example of the “your religion is actually an elaborate lie” trope can be found in the story of Innistrad, mentioned above. Cf. Colin Kawakami, “The Lunarch’s Journal,” Magic.Wizards.com, August 13, 2014, https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​ /articles​/archive​/ur​/lunarchs​-journal​-2014​-08​-13. 30. Liz Leo, “Creating Basri Ket,” Magic.Wizards.com, June 8, 2020. https:​//​magic​ .wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/feature​/creating​-basri​-ket​-2020​-06​-08. 31. K. Arsenault Rivera, “Episode One: The Witch of the Woods,” Magic.Wizards. com, September 2, 2021. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/news​/magic​-story​/episode​-1​ -witch​-woods​-2021​-09​-02. 32. K. Arsenault Rivera, “Episode Four: Harvesttide,” Magic.Wizards.com, September 22, 2021. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/news​/magic​-story​/episode​-4​ -harvesttide​-2021​-09​-22. 33. Cf. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: The Bobbs-Merrill, Co., 1966), 95. 34. Ibid., 90 & 98. 35. Bhatt, “Kelly Digges.” 36. Bhatt, “Kelly Digges.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altizer, Thomas J. J. and William Hamilton. Radical Theology and the Death of God. Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: The Bobbs-Merrill, Co., 1966. Arsenault Rivera, K. “Episode 1: The Witch of the Woods.” Magic.Wizards.com, September 2, 2021. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/news​/magic​-story​/episode​-1​ -witch​-woods​-2021​-09​-02. ———. “Episode 4: Harvesttide.” Magic.Wizards.com, September 22, 2021. https:​//​ magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/news​/magic​-story​/episode​-4​-harvesttide​-2021​-09​-22.

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Bastide, Roger. “Color, Racism, and Christianity.” Daedalus 96 (1967): 312–27. Bhatt, Shivam. “Kelly Digges.” Casual Magic Episode 34, Sept 15, 2020. https:​//​ casualmagic​.libsyn​.com​/casual​-magic​-episode​-34​-kelly​-digges. Chute, Neysan. “TEG Interviews: Jesper Myrfors, MTG’s First Art Director.” The End Games, March 1, 2020. https:​//​youtu​.be​/FnMN9s5jVM4​?t​=2210. Digges, Kelly. “The Rise of Kozilek.” Magic.Wizards.com, December 9, 2015. https:​//​ magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/uncharted​-realms​/rise​-kozilek​-2015​-12​-09. Fiorini, Joe (Islandswamp). “Magic History: Art of Darkness with Jesper Myrfors.” MTG Goldfish, April 14, 2016. https:​//​www​.mtggoldfish​.com​/articles​/magic​ -history​-art​-of​-darkness​-with​-jesper​-myrfors. Forsythe, Aaron. “Recapturing the Magic with Magic 2010.” Magic.Wizards.com, February 23, 2009. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/news​/recapturing​ -magic​-magic​-2010​-2009​-02​-23. Gaglio, Sam. “Frames.” Rhystic Studies, February 18, 2018. https:​//​youtu​.be​/qOE​ -lNs6qe4​?t​=205. Girard, Rene. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Gregory, Rabia. “Citing the Medieval: Using Religion as World Building Infrastructure in Fantasy MMORPGs.” In Finding Religion in Digital Gaming, edited by Heidi Campbell and Gregory Grieve, 134–153. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. Grubb, Jeff. The Gathering Dark. Seattle: Wizards of the Coast, 1999. Haden, Kyle Edward. Embodied Idolatry: A Critique of Christian Nationalism. London: Lexington Books, 2020. Hellend, Jenna. Journey Into Nyx: Godsend, Part 2. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2014. Jones, Matt. “Arting Around: Jesper Myrfors Interview.” Hipsters of the Coast, June 29, 2015. https:​//​www​.hipstersofthecoast​.com​/2015​/06​/arting​-around​-jesper​ -myrfors​-interview. Kawakami, Colin. “The Lunarch’s Journal.” Magic.Wizards.com, August 13, 2014. https:​//​magic​.wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/ur​/lunarchs​-journal​-2014​-08​-13. Kling, David W. “Catholics in Colonial America (1500–1700).” In A History of Christian Conversion, 325–355. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. LaPille, Tom. “Ajani’s Vengeance.” Magic.Wizards.com, July 23, 2014. https:​//​magic​ .wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/ajanis​-vengeance​-2014​-07​-23. Laycock, Joseph. Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Leo, Liz. “Creating Basri Ket.” Magic.Wizards.com, June 8, 2020. https:​//​magic​ .wizards​.com​/en​/articles​/archive​/feature​/creating​-basri​-ket​-2020​-06​-08. Lombardi, Kate Stone. “Bedford’s Struggle With the Devil.” The New York Times, November 26, 1995. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1995​/11​/26​/nyregion​/bedford​-s​ -struggle​-with​-the​-devil​.html.

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Index

Abrams, M. H., 24, 31 agnosticism, vi, 7, 81, 84, 86, 88–89, 95, 116, 124, 127 Altizer, Thomas J. J., 217 apophatism, 13 Aristotle, 6, 55–56, 58–63, 66

“Death of God,” 215, 217 deism, 135–37, 143 demons, 205–8 determinism, 137–40, 145 disenchantment, 4, 6, 36–38, 40, 133 divinity, 115, 120, 122, 125 dualism, 145–47, 149 Dungeons & Dragons, vi, 4–5, 7, 179–95

Buddhism, 140 buffered self, 36–37, 43 Card, Orson Scott, vi, 4, 155–56, 159, 160–66, 171 Carroll, Lewis, 26 Catholic, 211, 213 Chinese traditions, 135, 141–44 church, 208–13, 215–17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2–3, 33, 38, 60 colonialism, 211–13 conservatism, 26–28, 30 Cosmere, 166–68, 170 cosmology, vi, 7, 115–20, 122, 124, 127, 129, 131, 135, 138, 141, 143, 149, 151, 153, 158, 171, 174, 205, 214 cosmos, 24, 38, 123, 145, 157, 159, 164, 166, 171, 173, 175, 215 curiositas, 21–23, 30 Daoism, 4, 105, 109, 112–13, 141–43

Earthsea, vi, 11, 14, 31, 101–5, 107–13 Eddings, David and Leigh, vi, 4, 7, 134, 144–48 eucatastrophe, 3, 102, 104 evil, 7, 11–12, 22, 24–25, 29, 37–37, 66, 69, 72, 101, 104, 106–7, 135, 137– 41, 143–49, 161, 165, 167, 169, 187, 193, 205–6, 208, 213, 218–19, 222 fantasy, v, vi, 1–7, 11–13, 19–21, 23, 25–34, 37, 39, 41–43, 46–47, 55–56, 61, 64, 66, 77–78, 81–84, 88, 90, 94, 101–5, 110, 111–14, 128–31, 133– 35, 143–49, 155, 157, 159–60, 163, 165, 170–72, 179–80, 182, 187–89, 194, 198–200, 203–5, 207, 209, 211, 213, 218, 219, 222 fiction, v, 181–82, 186–87, 191 folk tales, 78, 81–84, 86, 92

225

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Index

free will, 137–40, 144, 147 Freud, Sigmund, 106 Green, Garrett, 185–86 Halevi, Judah, 79, 88, 90–91 Harry Potter, 11, 14, 101 Hart, Trevor, 24 hermeneutics, vi, 7, 179–81, 185– 87, 191, 194 hero, vi, 7, 155–56, 159, 165, 167–68, 170–71 Hinduism, 140 humanism, 117–18, 123, 125, 127 imagination, v, vi, 1–2, 79–81, 84, 87–88, 92, 94 imaginative apologetics, 6, 46–47, 49 Indian traditions, 135, 137, 139–40, 144 Jackson, Rosemary, 20–21, 25–28, 32 James, Henry, 26 Jordan, Robert, vi, 4, 7, 134–43, 148 Jungian archetypes, 105–7, 109 Laycock, Joseph, 190, 219 Le Guin, Ursula, vi, 4, 6, 11, 14, 26–27, 31, 48, 78, 101–14, 135, 217, 220 Lewis, C. S., v, 1, 4, 6, 20, 26–27, 35–55, 67, 72, 134, 150, 152, 171 Kearney, Richard, 24–25 Kingsley, Charles, 20, 26 MacDonald, George, 1–3, 20, 26, 28, 171 magic, v, vi, 6, 11–15, 21, 27, 37, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 64, 86, 101–2, 104–5, 107–9, 113, 115, 142, 165– 71, 182, 196, 203–8, 210–23 Maimonides, Moses, 79, 88, 90–91 Manlove, Colin, 20, 25–26, 28, 32 Marx, Karl, 210 messianism, v, 7, 81, 86–87, 95–96, 136–37, 139–41, 144, 149

metaphysics, 3, 23, 43, 47, 49, 55, 58, 126, 138, 142, 151, 153, 158–59, 166, 171, 173, 187 monism, 83, 87, 93 Mormon, vi, 4, 7, 155–60, 163–66, 170–71 Morris, William, 26 mysticism, 78, 83–86, 88–89, 94 mythology, 67, 72, 102, 136, 141, 148, 156, 166, 170, 186, 203, 205–7, 212–14, 221 Naḥman of Bratslav, 78, 81–84, 86, 88, 90 narrative, 7, 117–18, 120, 126–27, 179, 182–84, 185–86, 191 nature, 24 Neo-Confucianism, 142–43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29 ontology, 64, 83, 85, 87, 105, 119, 168, 170 paradigm, 185–86 phantasia, v, 55–57, 59–64, 66 phantasm, 6, 55, 57–58, 60, 62–65 philosophy, v, 5–6, 13, 31, 39, 43, 49, 51–52, 55–56, 59, 62, 65, 77–78, 90–91, 97, 101, 104–5, 110, 122, 142–43, 158, 203 Plato, 6, 19, 55–60, 63, 65, 214 play, 7, 133, 141, 147–48 pluralism, 4, 6, 83, 93, 134–35, 143–44, 148, 179–80, 191, 197–98, 200 polytheism, 135, 145, 147 Pratchett, Terry, vi, 115–32 Pullman, Philip, 29 reincarnation, 135–41, 143–44, 149 religion, vi, 1–7, 22, 27, 31, 37–38, 41, 49, 51, 53, 66, 77–79, 81–90, 92, 95–97, 101, 105, 110, 116–22, 125–30, 133–37, 141–44, 146–150, 153, 155–56, 162, 167–68, 171,

Index

179–80, 184–86, 190–92, 196–98, 200, 203–12, 214–19, 221–22 resourcement, vi, 5, 7, 133–35, 143–44, 147–49 Ricoeur, Paul, vi, 7, 180, 182–84, 186–88, 190–94 role-playing games, vi, 7, 181, 189–90, 192 Rowling, J. K., 11, 14, 101 Rule of Names, 107–9, 111–13 samsara, 136–37, 140–41 Sanderson, Brandon, vi, 4, 135, 143, 148, 155–56, 159, 160, 166–71 Satan, 25, 136–37, 139–41, 145, 147, 149, 164, 204–7 scholasticism, v, 6, 55, 62, 65 science fiction, v, 78, 85–88, 90, 95 secularism, v, 6, 35–55, 77–78, 82–84, 87, 89, 133, 150, 152–53, 155–56, 172, 175, 198 self-actualization, vi, 117–18, 120–23, 125–27 shadow, vi, 101, 103–5 shalom, 29–30, 139 simulation, 134–35, 147–49 sin, 19–32 Smith, Joseph, 158, 163, 164, 165 soteriology, vi, 155, 159, 166 subcreation, 3, 7–8, 60, 64–65, 134–37, 143–46, 148, 155–56, 171 Taylor, Charles, 6, 35–37, 40, 49–50, 53, 134, 148, 150, 153, 156, 172, 175

227

telos, 158, 169 theology, v, vi, 1–2, 4–7, 13, 15, 19–34, 44, 49, 51–52, 60, 65, 77–80, 88–89, 92–93, 95–97, 101, 104–5, 108–11, 114, 116, 124–28, 134–37, 139, 144–49, 155–60, 165, 170, 179–80, 185–88, 190–92, 194–98, 200, 203– 6, 211, 215–18, 221 theosis, 7, 156–57, 159–60, 164–66, 168–71 Thomas Aquinas, 6, 55–56, 62–63, 65–66 Todorov, Tzvetan, 26 Tolkien, J. R. R., v, 3–4, 6, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 26–28, 30, 41–43, 50, 53, 55–58, 60–62, 64–66, 104–5, 110–12, 114, 134, 155–57, 160, 171–72, 174–75 Tracy, David, 186 transcendence, 118, 120, 125 vampires, 210–12, 217 verisimilitude, 103, 110 Webster, John, 21–23, 31 Williams, Charles, 20 world-building, 101–2, 135–36, 144–45, 155–56, 160–66, 171–72, 182, 205 yetzer, 24 yin and yang, 141–43 Zhou Dunyi, 141–43 Zoroastrianism, 4, 7, 135, 143–49

About the Editors and Contributors‌‌‌‌

Austin M. Freeman (PhD systematic theology) is the author of Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology through Mythology with the Maker of Middle-earth and the editor of Theology and H.P. Lovecraft. He has written numerous articles and chapters dealing with various fantasy authors and texts. He teaches at Houston Christian University and King’s College New York. Andrew D. Thrasher is pursuing his doctorate in theology and religion from the University of Birmingham and is an adjunct instructor of religious studies at George Mason University and Tidewater Community College in Virginia. He is a scholar of Raimon Panikkar, having contributed to Peter Phan and Young-chan Ro’s Festschrift and won an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Panikkar Prize with a forthcoming monograph with Lexington Books/Fortress Academic that connects Panikkar to Martin Heidegger and contemporary Anglo-Catholic Theology. He specializes in comparative philosophical theology and his doctoral research is on postsecularism. He is also currently working on a monograph on Post-Christian Religion and Popular Culture (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield). *** Nicholas Adams is professor of philosophical theology at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Habermas and Theology (CUP, 2006), Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Blackwell, 2013) editor of The Impact of Idealism: Volume 4 Religion (CUP, 2013) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (ed. Adams, Pattison, Ward, Oxford: OUP, 2013). His primary research interests are the impact of philosophy, especially German idealism, on theology, and philosophical problems in interreligious engagement, especially in the practice of scriptural reasoning. 229

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About the Editors and Contributors

Giovanni Carmine Costabile (MPhil) is an Italian independent scholar, translator, writer, and teacher. He presents at conferences in Italy and abroad and has published in several international academic journals and volumes dedicated to the Middle Ages, medievalism, and Tolkien. He is the author of a monograph on Tolkien in Italian (“Oltre le Mura del Mondo,” 2018), of a commentary in English on Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-stories (“The Road to Fair Elfland,” 2022), and conducted authorized research in the Tolkien Archive in Oxford. He translated more than ten volumes both from Italian into English and from English into Italian. He is the editor of Phronesis Publishers’ “Silmarilli” series of Tolkien criticism, and a writer for the “Fellowship & Fairydust” foundation and magazine from Maryland. For Phronesis he is also the author of the high fantasy trilogy Cronache di Arlen. Oliver D. Crisp is principal of St. Mary’s College and head of the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. His research ranges over analytic theology, philosophy of religion, systematic and historical theology, and legal theory. His most recent publication is Participation and Atonement (Baker Academic, 2022). Scott Donahue-Martens is a PhD candidate in practical theology at Boston University School of Theology. Scott expects to defend his dissertation, which focuses on intersections between Paul Ricoeur and homiletics, in 2023. He is ordained in the Wesleyan tradition. In addition to teaching, he has worked as a pastor and hospital chaplain. Scott co-edited and contributed to Theology, Religion, and Dystopia. He is also the co-editor of Theology, Religion, and Dungeons & Dragons (forthcoming). Josh Herring hopes to defend his doctoral dissertation on C. S. Lewis’s gender theory in May of 2023. He writes at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and history. For ten years, he has held various roles within Thales Academy; currently, he is the dean of classical education for Thales Academy Apex JH/HS. He writes for Law and Liberty and the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty, hosts the podcast The Optimistic Curmudgeon, and tweets at @TheOptimisticC3. He and his wife Jennifer live in Wendell, NC. U-Wen Low is assistant professor of public religion at the University of Birmingham and a postdoctoral research fellow of the University of Divinity, Australia. His primary research foci include the book of Revelation, postcolonial criticism, performance criticism, and Pentecostal theology, but he is also a keen reader of science fiction and fantasy. He particularly appreciates the way authors engage with the human condition through fiction.



About the Editors and Contributors

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Alison Milbank is professor of theology and literature at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (T&T Clark, 2008) as well as monographs on Dante and the Victorians and on Victorian Gothic. Her most recent book is God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Reality in English Literature (OUP, 2018). Levi Morrow is a PhD candidate in Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing on the political theology of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. He has an MA in Jewish philosophy from Tel Aviv University, where he wrote his thesis on Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg’s appropriation of the theology of Franz Rosenzweig for the sake of his own Post-Kookian political theology. Levi received his BEd in Hebrew Bible and Jewish thought from Herzog Academic College. He has published articles on the writings of Rosenberg and his circle, on Rosenzweig, and Soloveitchik. Jacob Torbeck is a Lilly Fellow and lecturer in philosophy and theology at Valparaiso University, in Valparaiso, Indiana. His scholarly work focuses on the intersection of mysticisms and philosophy, especially in the Platonic and Neoplatonic heritage of Christian theology. Recent work of this kind has been published in Michael Andrews & Antonio Calgano’s volume Ethics and Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Edith Stein (Springer, 2022), and in the Anglican Theological Review (Winter 2023). His current project is a monograph on “attention” as a theological discipline. He publishes regular short essays on the use of religion in fantasy games at the online gaming news site Hipsters of the Coast.