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

by Vigen Guroian

Being a mentor requires ascesis, a special struggle of discipline and self-denial. The mentor has to be tough and withhold a full expression of friendship in order that his skill and wisdom are passed on to his protégé. Effective parenthood also requires elements of the mentoral relationship. Children need parents who are good mentors, but they also need mentors who are not parents, who like Charlotte and the old stag are able to keep a studied distance from their young charges. As I have repeatedly suggested, the office of mentorship runs against our democratic and egalitarian ethos. The paucity of genuine mentoral relationships in contemporary society, however, should give us reason for concern. That is because this special form of “friendship” is necessary for the maturation of the individual as well as the health and growth of community and culture.

Andersen seems to have believed that the good memories of childhood possess profound redemptive power and are capable of opening our hearts to goodness and love for the rest of our lives. I do not think this is mere sentimentality. A similar thought is expressed by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. In the closing scene, which I recalled many times when raising my own children and continue to recall when I am with my grandchildren, Alyosha Karamazov, the youngest brother, addresses a group of boys for whom he has become a mentor and role model. He makes his speech after the funeral of one of their young comrades whom the boys had once taunted and persecuted but later were reconciled with and grew to love.: You must know[Alyosha states] that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve one day for our salvation.

And over Edmund’s pleas of “Oh don’t, don’t, please don’t” (p. 127), she waves her wand and turns them all into statues. Once the terrible deed is done, the witch strikes Edmund hard on the face and says, “Let that teach you to ask favor for spies and traitors” (p. 128). Lewis now interjects, “And Edmund for the first time in this story felt sorry for someone besides himself.” Having come so near to being turned into a statue himself, or perhaps even fearing that the same would befall him soon, he now finds empathy and pity shifting his imaginings to the dreadful meaning of such a fate. “It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away” (p. 128). Edmund feels compassion. And compassion is a powerful impulse in the human breast. It has deep, even physiological resonances. It comes from the very guts of our being. It taps a primal sense that we are all bound one to another in a solidarity of flesh and spirit. Compassion binds us especially to the suffering of others so that we share their suffering vicariously and want to do something to alleviate it. No one who is without compassion deserves forgiveness. But he who has compassion is already far along toward repentance. Compassion not only awakens us to the suffering of others but moves us to see how we are responsible for having brought about some of that suffering.

Evil in Narnia, as in the Bible, is fundamentally a rebellion against the deity. 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.

The Princess and the Goblin,

MacDonald did not exaggerate the power of the imagination. Imagination is a power of discovery, not a power to create. The latter capacity he reserved to God alone. Nor did MacDonald equate imagination with mere fancy, what we used to call “vain imaginings.” 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. Reason alone, MacDonald argued, is not able to recognize mystery or grasp the moral quiddity of the world. As the sensible mind needs eyes to see, so reason needs the imagination in order to behold mystery and to perceive the true quality of things. Imagination takes reason to the threshold of mystery and moral truth and reveals them as such. Reason may then approve or submit. But it remains for the heart of courage with the will to believe and the vision of imagination to embrace the beauty of goodness and the strength of truth as the foundation of virtuous living.

MacDonald advised parents: “Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams.”

I think that MacDonald makes Irene’s first adventure up the stairs into a metaphor for a process wherein the self (in this case Irene, but really any child) is challenged by its most primal fears to risk safety in order to learn more and be in command of its own powers. When Irene runs down the stairs thinking she has found her way back to her “safe nursery,” MacDonald adds enigmatically: “So she thought, but she had lost herself long ago. It doesn’t follow that she was lost, because she had lost herself, though” (p. 9).

Irene’s belief in her grandmother and willingness to obey her launch her on an important journey toward moral and spiritual maturity—a passage by trial that calls on her to risk even her life in order to save the life of another.

In every respect, the grandmother is surrounded in mystery, literally clothed with numinous qualities, so some commentators have associated her with the ancient Greek goddess Demeter, the daughter of Cronos and Rhea, sister of Zeus.3 In my view, the striking symbolism of the blue sky, the moon, and the stars suggests more strongly Christian meaning—namely, the person of the Virgin Mary. Traditionally, it is with just such symbolism that Mary is represented in Christian art and poetry as the Queen of Heaven.

To be a princess means ultimately to claim a status as a child of God the Father (and perhaps also Mary, the Queen of Heaven, if I have read MacDonald accurately) and to become a full member of the household of God. How one achieves this status is what his story is really about. And faith and courage are strongly associated with this special identity and calling. Together they are virtues that have the power to open our lives onto the mystery of our relationship as sons and daughters of God.

MacDonald also demonstrates that courage and fear are paradoxically related. They have fundamental things in common and yet they point to very different outcomes. Both arise from the same deep wellsprings of our human condition. Both originate in our creaturely finiteness and our mortal nature as well as from our capacity and our need to love and be loved. Both are psychologically and spiritually counterpoised to death. Unlike fear, however, courage enables us to stand fast in the face of danger, not to waver or flee from it, but instead to thwart danger before it brings harm to us or to others.

MacDonald believed that the height of fear is also its transcendent focal point. Biblical religion speaks of this fear as the “fear of God.” And when all of our common fears are successfully referred to this one “fear,” then all that remains is love and obedience to God. Thus, MacDonald distinguished between our common fears and the fear of the Holy. The former challenges the self to face and overcome the existential reasons that give rise to fear, the possibilities of personal diminishment and death. The latter perfects the courage that the common variety of fear demands of the self. And it transforms this fear into a bridge to complete obedience to God. “Obedience is but the other side of the creative will. Will is God’s will, obedience is man’s will: the two make one,” MacDonald observed.

The child in each one of us expects to be able to share with friends our greatest joy. In her childlike innocence, Irene quite simply assumes that Curdie will see her grandmother and believe everything she has told him. Instead, she learns the hard truth that we cannot make even those whom we love most believe as we believe, and that, if we truly love them, we must permit them to come freely to that belief.

When Irene “lets go” of Curdie, her trust in the grandmother gives life to a new form of courage within her. The philosopher Josef Pieper has called this “ ‘mystic’ fortitude.”12 Irene ceases fearing for Curdie, not because she no longer cares for him but because she believes in someone who cares for him even more. Mystic fortitude is an attribute of the faithful self that abandons itself for the sake of the other, letting go of earthly fear and natural desire. Mystic fortitude is entrustment of oneself and those one loves entirely to God. “The self is given to us that we may sacrifice it,” wrote MacDonald. “It is ours, that we, like Christ, may have somewhat to offer—not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly: then it can no more be vexed.”

The paradoxical relationships of fear and faith and fear and courage are never wholly resolved in our temporal lives. Indeed, “fear is better than no God,” wrote MacDonald, “better than a god made with hands. [At least in] fear [lies] deep hidden the sense of the infinite.”15 While fear may sweep us into nothingness, it is also the condition under which a finite and sinful human being finds the faith and courage to yield herself up entirely to God. Baptism is an initiation into and the beginning of a whole new way of being, a way of being whose ultimate end is life unspoiled by fear and ripened instead by Love. Irene will no doubt fear again. But she has also embarked on a new life. Fear will never be quite the same. Love will see to that.

When we trust in our bodily eyes we see what we desire, and normally (in our sinful and spiritually immature condition) what we immediately desire is not God.

This scene is reminiscent of the scene in The Princess and the Goblin when Irene is bathed by her grandmother in the bottomless water of the mysterious silver basin. Like Irene in that scene, Lucy feels remarkably refreshed and spiritually regenerated. MacDonald uses the baptismal symbolism of water and light to mark an important change in Irene’s character, whereas Lewis returns to the eucharistic motifs of food and refreshment to signify an important change in Lucy.

“A time comes to every man,” wrote MacDonald, “when he must obey, or make such refusal—and know it.”

John Henry Newman says in one of his Oxford sermons: “Every act of obedience is an approach—an approach to Him who is not far off, though He seems so, but close behind this visible screen of things which hides Him from us.” And, Newman writes, “you have to seek his face; obedience is the only way of seeing Him.”

Never is a good story merely about one thing.

Sister Joan Chittister, while reflecting on monastic wisdom, speaks of the imperiled state of beauty in the modern world. Her description of how in our time beauty is in jeopardy is sympatico with Hans Christian Andersen’s viewpoint in “The Nightingale.” She argues that what “may be most missing in this highly technological world of ours is beauty.” “Even when what is presented to us is called art,” we desire functionalism and efficiency over beauty. “We prefer plastic flowers to wild flowers. . . . We forgo the natural and the real for the gaudy and the pretentious.”2 We mistake the dazzling for beauty and are awash in the banal. And when genuinely beautiful things give us pleasure, that pleasure very often sinks to smugness or ostentation.

In remote China, the fairyland of Andersen’s story, much as in our society, science and technology rule over the minds and imaginations of the people, machines and devices have become small gods, while efficiency trumps creativity. Faith and pride in humanity’s rational powers expel mystery from life. Pride in what humans have made and can understand supplants reverence for what God and his nature have given. When it is discovered that the real Nightingale has fled, this is all the justification needed to officially banish it and its music from the kingdom.

Elaine Scarry in her little volume titled On Beauty and Being Just argues that beauty “is a compact . . . between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver.” This compact is an act of freedom and love, the gift of one to the other without condition. Within this compact, within this milieu of beauty, fairness and justice may come to be. “Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness” of others, Scarry continues.

The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. —Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God”

I will not recite all that the Ugly Duckling encounters on his journey—indeed, his odyssey. In the middle of the story, however, Andersen places an episode that is crucial for our understanding of the nobility of the Ugly Duckling, the nobility that so touched the heart of Jenny Lind. Though this episode is left out of all the picture book versions of the story that I have seen, it is the axis of Andersen’s story. For in it the duckling demonstrates a new maturity. He takes control of his life and becomes the agent of his own destiny whether life or death..

Faced with this ridicule, the Ugly Duckling decides to leave the hut and seek out what he loves most in life. His decision to flee the henyard was a negative choice—he wanted to escape from the pain and anguish that its inhabitants were inflicting upon him. This new decision, however, is not principally about removing himself from a place in which he is unwelcome. Rather, it is a resolve to join something greater than himself that is a source of immense joy. He cannot yet name this something, but he knows it exceeds anything the cat and the hen can claim possession of or are capable of imagining.

The King of the Golden River,

Perrault’s Cinderella is most certainly good, but she also is inherently passive. Things happen to or for Cinderella. Her triumph is brought about by the unilateral intervention of a fairy godmother who suddenly appears, without explanation, except that she has observed Cinderella in tears. By the mere tap of her magical wand, this fairy godmother provides Cinderella ex machina with all that she needs to attend the royal ball and capture the prince’s attention. By contrast, the Grimms’ Cinderella forges her own destiny, though not without crucial assistance. And she exhibits independence right from the start: “After her mother’s death the maiden went every day to visit her grave and weep.”2 Cinderella makes these visits on her own initiative, whereas her father does not once visit his wife’s grave. Later she decides on her own, despite the obstacles thrown before her, to go to the royal festival in which a bride will be chosen for the prince.

“If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious,” writes Flannery O’Connor, “if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself . . . because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.”

We are, after all, creatures, and our wills, however free they may be, are finite and limited, thus vulnerable to sin and error. Yet MacDonald also maintains that our willing of that which is good, that which is righteous (in the Bible’s speech), is God acting within us. In other words, when a person wills that which is good or righteous, this is by and through God’s grace.14 Therefore, we are bound to say that God begets this willing in us. MacDonald is not finished. Behind this truth about our “ingraced” willing of the good is a deep paradoxical truth: “Because God wills first, man wills also” (my emphasis).15 That is to say, God’s grace, his willing, is antecedent to all of our willings. What is more, no matter whether we ourselves will for good or for ill, it is the will of God that will ultimately prevail in his Creation.

It bears repeating that he strongly insists that the kind of moral and spiritual person we become is not fated. Rather, character must be understood as a destiny enacted freely under a sign of divine wisdom and mystery.

“Obedience is the road to all things. It is the only way to grow able to trust him [God]. Love and faith and obedience are sides of the same prism,” MacDonald declares.20 “Will is God’s will, obedience is man’s will: the two make one.”

Beauty is not merely an object of sight: beauty is mysteriously related to purity, to a seeing and a doing that are not greedy, grasping, or self-referential.