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

by Vigen Guroian

Provoked by a trend in the publishing industry to produce bowdlerized versions of the fairy tales and new tellings bent to the latest ideology or social movement, Charles Dickens in 1853 issued an impassioned defense of fairy tales, titled “Frauds on the Fairies.” He urged that in “a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.” Indeed, he could not imagine the survival of English culture itself were these stories to be altered according to the latest fashion, for then the original stories would soon be forgotten and disappear. “Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force”—all of these things, and more, are nourished in “a child’s heart by this powerful aid” of the fairy tale, he argued.

Every parent who has read a fairy tale to a young son or daughter is familiar with what I venture to say is a universal refrain of childhood: “But is he a good person or a bad one?” or “Is she a good fairy or an evil fairy?” What stronger proof or assurance could we want that God and nature have endowed even the youngest human beings with a moral constitution that needs to be nurtured and cultivated? Yet our society embraces an anti-human trinity of utilitarianism, subjectivism, and relativism that denies the existence of a moral sense or moral law.

Flannery O’Connor, that marvelously gifted American writer of the past century, spoke a simple though profound truth when she said that “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.”1 The great fairy tales and fantasy stories communicate the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, where characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. Not didacticism but rather the narrative, the dramatic action, makes the fairy tales meaningful. Narrative supplies the imagination with important symbolic information about the shape of our world and appropriate responses to its inhabitants.

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. The mere ability, however, to use moral principles to justify one’s actions does not make a virtuous person.

Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil feels coerced. 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. And stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education, by which I mean the education of character.

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. In this sense also our destinies are not fated, for we decide our own destinies.

When we tell our children that standards of social utility and material success are the measurements of the value of moral principles and virtues, then it is not likely that our pedagogy is going to transform the minds or convert the hearts of young people. As Buber observed in his own classroom, all that we will accomplish is to confirm the despair of the weak, darken the envy of the poor, justify the greed of the rich, embolden the deceitfulness of the liar, and encourage the aggression of the strong.

The moral imagination is not a thing, not even so much a faculty of the mind, but rather the very process by which the self makes metaphors out of images that memory supplies. It then employs these metaphors to suppose correspondences in experience and to make moral judgments.

The important question is not so much whether imagination is waxing or waning in youth today. For wherever there are human beings imagination exists and is exercised, much as wherever there are spiders webs are spun. 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.8 And these unhealthy forms of imagination are on the rise in a culture dominated by a pervasive media and ubiquitous advertising.

College students today do not lack an awareness of morality, although they often are confused or puzzled about its basis or their personal ownership of it. Nonetheless, I have found that many are perplexed when reading a novel or short story because they have not learned how to find and follow the inner connections of character and action, the narrative itself, and the moral meaning that is communicated. This is a failure of imagination, not of knowledge that can be tested.

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. It is the earmark of play itself, which seems to come naturally to young children, not so easily to college-age youth.

Fairy tales and fantasy stories transport the reader into other worlds that are fresh with wonder, surprise, and danger. They challenge the reader to make sense out of those other worlds, to navigate his or her way through them, and to imagine oneself in the place of the heroes and heroines who populate those worlds. The safety and assurance of these imaginative adventures is that risks may be taken without having to endure all of the consequences of failure; the joy is in discovering how these risky adventures might eventuate in satisfactory and happy outcomes. Yet the concept of self is also transformed. The images and metaphors in these stories stay with the reader, even after he has returned to the “real” world.

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. We suddenly run into the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche. There are real and very important differences between what we now call values and the virtues as they were traditionally understood. Let me put it this way. A value is like a smoke ring. Its shape is initially determined by the smoker, but once it is released there is no telling what shapes it will take. One thing is certain, however. Once a smoke ring has left the smoker’s lips it has already begun to evaporate into thin air. Volition and volatility are characteristics of both smoke rings and values. By contrast, a virtue might be compared to a stone, whose nature is permanence. We might throw a stone into a pond, where it will lie at the bottom with other stones. But if at some later date we should want to retrieve that stone from the bottom of the pond, we can be sure that the shape of the stone has not changed and that we will be able to distinguish it from the rest of the stones.

The virtues define the character of a person, his enduring relationship to the world, and what will be his end. Whereas values, according to their common usage, are the instruments or components of moral living that the self chooses for itself and that the self may disregard without necessarily jeopardizing its identity. Accordingly, values are subordinate and relative to the self’s own autonomy, which is understood as the self’s highest value and essential quality. But when we say in the traditional speech of character that Jack is virtuous and that he is a courageous person, we are saying that the virtue of courage belongs to the very essence of who and what Jack is. Being courageous is not subject to a willing for it to be so or a willing for it not to be so. Virtues and vices define the will itself and also properly describe the willing person. The color orange is both a quality of an orange and an inescapable description of it. If we find an object, however, that looks like an orange but is brown, either it must be an orange that has gone bad or it is not an orange at all. Similarly, it makes no moral sense to say that a courageous man has decided to be a coward. We cannot say on the basis of some subsequent behavior we have observed in Jack that he must have decided to become a coward. If Jack’s recent actions were indeed cowardly and not courageous, then we are obliged to revise our original description of Jack.

Classical, Jewish, and Christian sources, such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. John Chrysostom, Maimonides, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, insist that morality is neither plural nor subjective. Instead, they maintain that 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. From this standpoint, values and decisions whose claims of legitimacy extend no further than individual volition are as effervescent as the foam that floats on top of the waves. They cannot be reliable guides to moral living.

Teaching reasoning skills, rather than the virtues, is considered the means to a moral education; values clarification, not character, is regarded as the goal. These educators think that moral education is like teaching children reading or arithmetic. But even that is not quite accurate, because in the case of moral education children are supposed to be permitted to discover and clarify for themselves their own values and personal moral stance in the world. Yet we do not permit children to invent their own math; rather, we teach them the multiplication tables. Nor do we encourage children to make up their own personal alphabets; rather, we teach them how to read. What might be the outcome of an education that did permit children to invent their own math and alphabets? No doubt the result would be confusion or chaos. Should we be surprised at the outcome of our recent efforts to help children clarify their own values—in fact, invent their own personal moralities?

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.

Second, fairy tales show us that there is a difference between what is logically possible and what is morally felicitous, between what is rationally doable and what is morally permissible. In fairy tales the character of real law belongs to neither natural necessity nor rational determinism. Rather, real law is a comprehensible sign of a primal, unfathomable freedom and of a numinous reality and will. Real law, the realest law, can be obeyed or broken, and in either case for the very same reason, because the creature is both subject of and participant in this primal freedom. Fairy-tale heroes are called to be both free and responsible, thus virtuous and respectful of the moral law.

Fairy tales lead us toward a belief in something that, if it were not also so veiled in a mystery, common sense alone would affirm: if there is a story, there must surely also be a storyteller.

What kind of a story would Pinocchio be, after all, if all that was entailed in the fulfillment of Pinocchio’s (or Geppetto’s) wish is that his wooden frame be magically transformed into human flesh without the accompaniment of an increase in his moral stature? Actually, neither the Disney film nor the Collodi story portrays Pinocchio’s wish and transformation into a flesh-and-blood child this way. In both stories Pinocchio wants to be more. He wants to be a real boy, a good boy, a genuine human son.

In the Disney animation, real boyhood is bestowed on Pinocchio as a reward for being good by the Blue Fairy with a touch of her magic wand—or, as the Blue Fairy herself says, because Pinocchio has proven himself “brave, truthful, and unselfish.” In Disney’s imagination this is magic. In theological terms this is works righteousness. By moral description, the Disney story presents the virtues as the completion and very essence of Pinocchio’s humanity: once he has proven himself “brave, truthful, and unselfish,” he is transformed into a real boy. Collodi views things differently. In his story, Pinocchio becomes a real flesh-and-blood human child after he awakens from a dream in which the blue-haired fairy forgives him for his former waywardness and present shortcomings, while she also praises him for the good path he has taken by demonstrating a son’s love for his father. For Collodi, real boyhood is not so much a reward as it is the visible sign of a moral task that has been conscientiously pursued, a task that even at that moment when Pinocchio is transformed from wood into flesh and blood is not yet wholly completed. Pinocchio’s filial love, obedience, truthfulness, and self-expenditure for the sake of others ultimately triumph over his primal propensity to be selfish and self-centered. His good heart with its innate capacity to love finally dominates over his wooden head. The flesh he acquires represents a significant stage in the perfection of his humanity—that is, chil...

In the Disney film, Geppetto wishes that the wooden puppet would become a real boy. In the Collodi fairy tale, it is Pinocchio who makes the wish, not Geppetto, and what Pinocchio actually wishes for is that he become a fully grown man. The blue-haired fairy then explains to Pinocchio that he has to “begin by being a good boy” (p. 132) and that this involves obedience, truthfulness, an education, and consoling one’s parents. Collodi wants his child readers to understand that being a good boy or girl means being in a proper relationship to one’s parents. This is the real genius of his story.

His wooden head—his laziness, selfishness, and rebelliousness, in no small way compounded by his inexperience—overrules his good heart, his innate capacity to love and act responsibly.

The theme of filial love and responsible relationship with parents and siblings is, as I have stated already, at the very core of Collodi’s story. Being a real human child means being a responsible and beloved son or daughter. Being good is not a means to gaining boyhood or girlhood as a reward. Rather, being good is a quality of respect and responsibility toward others you love, firstly and especially one’s parents and siblings. This, insists Collodi, is essential to becoming a complete human being. A status as son or daughter, brother or sister, and mother or father deeply defines our humanity.

In Collodi’s story, Pinocchio’s humanity is present from the start within that mysteriously animate piece of wood out of which Geppetto fashions the puppet—a prehistory not told by Disney. The wood is Pinocchio’s own recalcitrant nature, a nature affected by a will turned against that nature’s own good. The puppet must overcome this destructive willfulness in order to become a faithful son and real human child.

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.”8 This sums up why people need to look at reality without deceiving themselves. 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.

The complete truth about being a human being is often falsified or at least partially obscured by a young child’s subjective experience. A person has to grow as a moral self in order to transcend this childlike subjectivity and primitive narcissism. He must begin to take a view of the world that is conditioned by an internal discipline of the passions and a “receptivity to teaching [and] . . . willingness to accept advice.”9 This is certainly what Pinocchio’s pilgrimage toward maturity is about. This mature way of experiencing and knowing the world is not the objective knowing normally associated with physical science, nor is it the subjectivity of solipsism. It is an intersubjective and relational way of experiencing and knowing. It is a way of interpreting the world that requires memory and a moral imagination; otherwise a moral self cannot come into being. 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.

Josef Pieper writes, “Every brave deed draws sustenance from preparedness for death, as from the deepest root.”13 And Pieper continues: To be brave is not the same thing as to have no fear. To be sure, fortitude excludes a certain kind of fearlessness, namely, when it is based on a mistaken appraisal and evaluation of reality. This sort of fearlessness either is blind and deaf toward actual danger or else stems from a reversal in love. For fear and love limit one another: one who does not love does not fear either, and one who loves falsely also fears falsely.

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?”15 Comically, tragically, and, sometimes, ruthlessly, Collodi explores this mystery. In spite of that, his book is not so dark as Sendak would have us believe. 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.

In Pinocchio, Collodi emphasizes the need for the puppet to love others and in so doing overcome a deadly self-centeredness. Williams emphasizes the other pole of love’s reciprocity—being loved by another. Loving and being loved make us real, say these authors, and the stories they have written state that fact powerfully. Yet, in my view, Williams’s story explores an even deeper meaning of becoming real: immortality.

Jack Zipes’s discussion of Andersen in his study Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion is another example of this social-psychological approach to Andersen and his work. Zipes argues that “Andersen never tired of preaching self-abandonment and self-deprivation in the name of bourgeois laws. The reward was never power over one’s life but security in adherence to power.”

Eventually, we need to make sense of what Andersen might have intended by making merpeople without souls. But I am reminded here of something C. S. Lewis says in Letters to Malcolm. Lewis writes: “What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses.”

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. The sea-witch offers the Little Mermaid the opportunity to wreak a splendid revenge on the prince in a perverse mockery of ritual sacrifice and eucharistic offering. She can take his life and save her own with a knife that is figuratively connected to the piercing pain in her feet that has afflicted her since she journeyed up above.

Aristotle said it a long time ago: “Without friends no one would choose to live.”

“It is more characteristic of a friend to do well by another than to be well done by,” Aristotle continues.

Grahame thinks of friendship as a calling. By grace and not just chance are we sent forth into the world for fellowship and communion with others. Friendships even sound the call to a higher and transcendent communion with God. Mole and Rat hear this call in the wind in the willows.

In an age in which people obsessively shift back and forth from work to working at making recreation, we are in jeopardy of forgetting the value of unplanned leisure and spontaneous play. When the child leaves home, we believe, he leaves play and goes to work. We say that play is for children. But is this really true? There is an ancient wisdom that says, quite to the contrary, that play is the necessary condition for the establishment and health of a truly social world and the role that friendship plays in it.

Friendships thrive in the open air and wind and sun. Their value is missed or misunderstood in a world in which money is mistaken as the measure of nearly everything and utility becomes the sole test of value. Friendships exist for their own sakes. Yet a healthy social world and culture itself are the felicitous outcome of robust friendships.

Friendships—unlike, for example, coworker relationships—are not supervised by another party or assigned to a specific task or pursued for profit. Mole and Rat meet accidentally or by destiny, but not according to a plan. He who goes looking for a friend is the least likely of persons to find a friend.

Aristotle says of friendship: “It helps the young to keep from error; it aids activities that are failing from weakness; those in the prime of life it stimulates to noble actions—‘two going together’—for with friends men are more able to think and to act.”

As Aristotle also observed, friendships help to satisfy the neediness we have in common as finite creatures and social animals. If we were gods and entirely self-sufficient, we might be able to do without friends. But we are not gods and so we need friends in order to flourish and be happy. Ironically, this neediness, which is sometimes mistakenly thought of as weakness, is the soil in which the mutuality and reciprocity of friendship grow.

Whereas parents do not choose who their children are or children their parents, Charlotte chooses Wilbur as a friend and Wilbur willingly accepts that friendship. That is, Charlotte is a mentor to Wilbur and theirs is a mentoral friendship. This takes into account the fundamental inequality in their friendship, while it also keeps in view the important characteristic of mutual affection that belongs to all true friendships. Again, Aristotle is our best guide. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he discusses relationships of inequality like Charlotte and Wilbur’s and defines these as friendships of a special sort. “But there is another kind of friendship,” Aristotle notes, “that which involves an inequality between the parties, e.g. that of father to son and in general of elder to younger” and the like. In such friendships the love that the lesser gives to the greater makes up the difference. In other words, “when the love is in proportion to the merit of the parties, then in a sense arises equality, which is certainly held to be characteristic of friendship.”6 Without wanting to understate Charlotte’s true affection for Wilbur, we still are bound to say that Wilbur’s love is of greater intensity and is the more all-consuming, just in the same way that his need for a friend is greater. Yet, according to Aristotle, this is as it should be: a proportionality in love appropriate to kind establishes ground for a true friendship.

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. The relationship is not unlike a teacher toward a pupil, and, at least as much as in that kind of relationship, the mentoral relationship is characterized by a fundamental inequality.

Thus far, I have led the reader from a discussion of pure friendship in The Wind in the Willows through the mentoral friendship in Charlotte’s Web. In Bambi, Salten shows us the meaning of pure mentorship. Whereas friendships necessarily entail equality of one sort or another, mentorship presupposes a fundamental inequality between mentor and pupil. The mentor’s selection of the pupil is the defining act in such a relationship, since the mentor has a vital stake in choosing the right pupil.7 He wants to ensure that the special knowledge and skills he possesses are transmitted to another.

In a true mentoral relationship, the mentor chooses the mentee, and for very good reasons. Not surprisingly, mentoral relationships still happen in the performing arts, such as in dance or music. The market and a hyperegalitarian ethos have chipped away at the master- protégé relationship but have not completely eliminated it. Most anyone with the financial resources can purchase ballet or violin lessons, but in the end the master still chooses the protégé for special attention and instruction. It is hard to imagine how the arts would survive if this were precluded. Thus the mentor’s selection of the pupil is the crucial and defining act of the mentoral relationship. The relationship is from the start asymmetrical and discriminative. By means of physical gesture, tone of voice, and behavior, the mentor communicates his special knowledge and skill and also a piece of his own character. There is no such thing in this relationship as being informative without also being formative. 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.

Salten introduces the theme of knowing how to be alone early in the story, and throughout he explores its importance for survival in the woods. In one sense being alone is what any young buck or doe must learn in order to mature. It is a part and parcel of personal autonomy, and it necessitates the courage and confidence to successfully live apart from the mother. This is a precondition for mating and perpetuation of the species. Salten is a careful observer of the life and behavior of deer. Yet he is not a naturalist who records the animals’ life cycle. He is a moralist who uses his knowledge of nature to tell a moral tale. In his book knowing how to be alone has ethical and spiritual significance.

Man, the hunter, represents the irrationality of evil that always threatens to rob life of meaning. Bambi needs to understand the nature of this destructive force. In the face of danger and even death he has to learn a discipline of vigilance and self-possession in order to survive and be heir to the stag. His desire to go deep into the woods is not merely an impulse to escape. He is driven to be truly free and not a captive to the blinding and incapacitating fear that he has observed in the other deer and inhabitants of the woods. By the end of the story, Bambi has learned how to be alone, The old stag’s role and his responsibility for the lives of the deer and other animals in the woods will now devolve upon him as the stag goes off to die alone.

Of all the animals and deer, the old stag is the most at home in the woods and the least afflicted by desolation. This is because he understands the order of existence and trusts in its Source. The aloneness to which Bambi is called is a way of learning important skills of survival. In this manner Bambi is prepared to become the guardian of the herd—not that he rules by might, but rather that he leads like the biblical prophet, through discernment and familiarity with the way of Being itself. The old stag brings up Bambi in this singleness of life for the good of all. And the last and most important lesson he teaches Bambi is about the true order of Being. At the close of the story, the old stag leads Bambi to the still and bloodied body of a poacher: “Do you see, Bambi,” the old stag went on, “do you see how He’s lying there dead, like one of us? Listen, Bambi. He isn’t all-powerful as they say. Everything that lives and grows doesn’t come from Him. He isn’t above us. He’s just the same as we are. He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way. He can be killed like us, and then He lies helpless on the ground like all the rest of us, as you see Him now.” There was silence. “Do you understand me, Bambi?” asked the old stag. “I think so,” Bambi said in a whisper. “Then speak,” the old stag commanded. Bambi was inspired, and said, trembling, “There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.” “Now I can go,” said the old stag. (pp. 187–88)