Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

Fairy tales might not qualify as scientific hypotheses or theories, but they do resonate with the deepest qualities of humanness, freedom, and the moral imagination. At the same time, they deny the psychological and material determinism that lurks behind much of the modern talk of human liberation, and they discredit the hubris of reason and rationality that displaces faith and confidence in truth. Again, they show us a way of envisioning the world—a world in which everything that is need not have been, and in which the real moral law connotes freedom and not necessity. The fairy-tale philosopher, writes Chesterton, “is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it could have been scarlet. . . . He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been done,” that there is something willful in all of it, as if someone decided that things ought to be this way instead of another way and that these things are repeated either in order to improve them or simply because they are a source of delight in their repetition.16 The fairy-tale philosopher respects the deeper mystery of freedom in its transcendent source.