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Yet our society embraces an anti-human trinity of utilitarianism, subjectivism, and relativism that denies the existence of a moral sense or moral law.
My principal objective is to be a helpful guide through some of the most beloved fairy tales and classic and contemporary stories written for children.
G. K. Chesterton observes in Lunacy and Letters, “For it is a mark of the essential morality of fairyland (a thing too commonly overlooked) that happiness, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery if we want to get past it.”
“a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”
Moral living is about being responsive and responsible toward other people. And virtues are those traits of character that enable persons to use their freedom in morally responsible ways.
Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues.
Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in such a way that it is attractive and stirs the imagination.
A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature.
“Beauty and the Beast” teaches the simple but important lesson that appearances can deceive, that what is seen is not always what it appears to be.
The paradoxical truth that the story portrays is that unless virtue is present in a person she will not be able to find, appreciate, or embrace virtue in another.
“Beauty and the Beast” embraces one last important moral truth: a person’s decisions in life will define what kind of person she becomes.
Like all the great fairy tales, “Beauty and the Beast” invites us to draw analogies between its imaginary world and the world in which we live.
The important question is what kinds of imagination our contemporary culture is engendering. There are other undesirable forms of imagination, such as the idyllic, the idolatrous, and the diabolic.
A measure of the impoverishment of the moral imagination in the rising generation is their difficulty in recognizing, making, or using metaphors that will enable them to act responsibly and morally.
We are living in a culture in which metaphor is discarded for these so-called facts. We train minds to detect these facts much as one breaks in a baseball glove. Meanwhile, the moral imagination suffers.
Poesis is an activity of making that is imaginative.
And when we put into words this experience of the external world with its forms and images and relate that to our inner experience, our humanity in all its depth and complexity of meaning flowers and is unveiled.
If one scratches just beneath the surface of the moral outlook of many Americans, one bumps into the rather naively but also often vehemently held assumption that the individual is the architect of his or her own morality, built out of value “blocks” that the individual independently picks and stacks.
morality is much more than, indeed qualitatively different from, the sum of the values that an essentially autonomous self chooses for itself.
human morality is substantial, universal, and relational in character, founded and rooted in a permanent good, in a higher moral law, or in the being of God.
Love freely given is better than obedience that is coerced.
It is up to Pinocchio to make more of his life than just a rogue’s tale. To do so he must become able to interpret his world and his own purposes truthfully.
The notion that who I am is mostly what is done to me and what happens to me rings true to a young child’s subjective experience.
In his little gem, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, the philosopher Josef Pieper recalls a popular saying of the Middle Ages: “A man is wise when all things taste to him as they really are.”
So long as self-deception is at the source of a person’s perception of things, he or she cannot mature into the fullness of being human or lead a successful course through life.
Just as the appetites require discipline that they may be directed toward their proper ends, so the imagination needs to be guided by reason, sound memory, and the common stock of human wisdom about the world and its possibilities.
But Pinocchio eventually outgrows these vain imaginings. As his experiences accumulate—relationships with responsible moral agents, the discomforts of following foolish whims and being driven by blind fear, and the spontaneous acts of his good heart when he rescues his fellow puppet Harlequin from Fire-eater’s stove or the mastiff Alidoro from drowning—Pinocchio gains a moral imagination.
Josef Pieper writes, “Every brave deed draws sustenance from preparedness for death, as from the deepest root.”
Death is the great despoiler of life, but there is the even greater truth that death is powerless over life if love is received and love is returned.
As Lucy fears in C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, “Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here [in Narnia], so that you’d never know which was which?”
We all must experience some darkness, otherwise how can we appreciate the light? We all must experience the nearness of despair, otherwise how can we know when to celebrate the triumph of hope? We all must at some time or another face forthrightly the tragedy of love and death, so that one day the pain of separation might be replaced by the joy of reunion with the beloved one.
The wisdom of evil is this: that it uses our personal suffering as well as our greatest hopes and fears to tempt us to sin.
Aristotle said it a long time ago: “Without friends no one would choose to live.”
Complementarity and not uniformity is the spice that adds flavor to good friendships, with special needs and unique gifts mixed and matched to create strong bonds of companionship.
He who goes looking for a friend is the least likely of persons to find a friend.
Play is not “killing time” or an “escape” from work; it is an activity that gives life to the moral imagination.
The mentor, therefore, is someone who brings the student to self-knowledge and instills confidence in her charge to pursue a successful course in life.
Charlotte says to Wilbur, “By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.”
Thus the mentor’s selection of the pupil is the crucial and defining act of the mentoral relationship.
The mentor has a vital stake in choosing the right mentee. And so he dedicates himself to engendering in the mentee essential qualities of character or skills that are not merely private or personal but ultimately crucial to the continuance of a practice, special art form, or way of life.
Being a mentor requires ascesis, a special struggle of discipline and self-denial.
The heart represents the center of personal existence, the unifying power of the self, the center of willing and purposive action.
Once upon a time the devil invented a magic mirror that had a strange power. It made anything that was good or beautiful that was reflected in it look horrid, while everything that was wicked and ugly appeared desirable and attractive.
Nicholas Berdyaev writes that “the struggle against the Creator is waged not only by those who distort with evil the image of the created world, but also by those who suffer from the evil in it.”
the heart of evil is the cold heart of a self in isolation vainly imagining that by being autonomous it is free and complete.
communion and love are the highest goals of human association.
The good that the Snow Queen abhors is not an abstract principle but the communion of love that heals the primal rift forced by Adam and Eve when they succumbed to the promise of an impossible twisted autonomy and immortality.
C. S. Lewis explores the dynamism of evil that immobilizes and destroys our humanity and forcefully depicts the struggle between good and evil that is waged within the human heart.
Evil is vanquished in the human soul when the person turns against his own pride and selfishness back toward God. That turn may well begin in the compassionate act of loving the suffering other as one would love oneself.
Rather, for him, imagination is a power of perception, a light that illumines the mystery that is hidden beneath visible reality; it is a power to help “see” into the very nature of things.
