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Philosophies and Fairy-Tales
By Mary McDermott Shideler

"We shall not know the truth until we have learned how the various truths are related, each to every other, omitting none. It is a task that the intellect alone cannot perform, because the truths of heart and spirit cannot be stated as philosophical propositions or mathematical formulae…. We shall never be complete in our living, or our theology or science or history, until we have brought into the dance those realm of our selves that are accessible only by means of images, and until our intellects and imaginations and bodies and spirits are integrated."

NO philosophical or theological enterprise will be complete unless it entails the exercise of our imaginative functions. It is fitting, therefore, that this inquiry be introduced by a story.

I

Once upon a time, in an important city, the king-who was a very wise man-looked around at the way his people lived, and was grieved. All the makings of peace and prosperity were at hand, but the citizens were divided into political and religious and occupational factions, most of them expressions of ideas or motives that were greedy or superstitious or just plain silly, and each at the throats of all the others. After long study and meditation, the wise king concluded that if only his people would learn to be reasonable, most of their personal and social troubles would be solved.

So the king started teaching the people to be reasonable, and making laws to enforce it, and he succeeded so well that after a few years, the city was permeated with the attitude of reasonableness. People became thoroughly sensible in their affairs, organizing their institutions according to what was intelligent and judicious, and

Mary McDermott Shideler is the author of several articles and books, among the most recent being Consciousness of Battle (1970) and "Art and the Art of Theology" in the July, 1971 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

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sure enough, many of their problems disappeared. The transformation of the city was not complete, however, because some of the citizens refused to be reasonable. A few of them pretended to be; others, who were more openly rebellious, were cast outside the city into the countryside where they formed little villages which took as their motto, "Be Unreasonable." They danced and fought and got drunk, spent hours watching the flowers grow and playing with their children. They cleared the ground to grow food, built rickety shacks which they could change or leave when they felt like it, dressed in whatever they found to put on, and in general did as they pleased.

If the Reasonable and Unreasonable people could have stayed utterly apart, all might have been well. But they could not. The city needed the food which the villagers grew; the villagers needed tools and medical care from the city. But the more they interacted, the more they distrusted and disliked each other, and when some of the Reasonable young people began sneaking off to the villages for a happy evening or weekend, or to stay, the citizens became gravely concerned and started talking-reasonably-about walling the city in, or driving the Unreasonable people clear away, by force if necessary. Tension grew higher and higher.

It happened that the son of that king was old enough to be deep in his father's counsels, and young enough to sympathize with certain of his friends who bad visited the Unreasonable villagers. He saw how difficult and complex was the problem, and searched diligently for a way or ways to handle it. He asked, one by one, everybody be knew for ideas, and finally, in despair, he climbed the long stair to the tower room where his grandmother lived, to seek comfort from her.

Back and forth across her room he paced, telling her all that was in his mind. Now and then be would pick up an ornament from the mantel or a table, and finger it as he talked. Then on one of his turns, be caught sight of his old guitar, half-hidden in a comer where he had left it years before after be understood that there was nothing reasonable about playing it. Now, not thinking, be pulled it out and started to strum on it as be talked. The chords became an accompaniment to his words. A little more, and they led his words and thought into a song, a very old song which his grandmother had taught him when be was a child. Something about the song-the rhythms, the repetitions, the sweet arrangement of the lines into stanzas and chorus-woke in him a sense of order, a feeling that within the disturbances and conflicts which engulfed him, there might be discovered a pattern. And the simple clarity of the words, added to the thrust and pull of the melody, gave to the pattern a light like a flame. Order, which is the gift

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of Reason, and Freedom, which is the gift of Unreason, were joined by means of a song.

His grandmother smiled at him. "Now you know what to do," she said, and he kissed her, and slung his guitar over his shoulder, and went out into the crowded streets to sing.

II

For the past four hundred years or thereabouts, in Western culture, reason and unreason have developed almost in isolation from each other, and until the last very few years, reason was unmistakably dominant. Poetry was written, and read, as a language game or for the luxury of self-expression. Fantasy was turned over to children and those presumed to be childish. Myths were discarded as being lies. Religion was tolerated because supposedly it propagated morals and social reform. Sex was licensed on the reasonable ground that human beings are animals, and animals need sex. The study of legends was accepted as a way of analyzing the philosophical bases of other cultures. Toys were designed to be educational.

Outside the city walls, however, and underground in the city, the energies of unreason have been bubbling. Generally ignored, denied, or despised by reason, unreason has not quietly kept its place behind the woodwork, but has stealthily manifested itself in two distinct but related ways. One has been named, and superbly described, by Lewis Mumford in an article called "The Revolt of the Demons."¹ When our unconscious hungers are not fed, be says, and when our unconscious drives are not consciously identified and directed, those hidden forces will erupt in all kinds of ways, from riots, criminal attacks, and pornography, to absurdities which we rationalize to make them sound plausible. Mumford's own illustration for the latter is the colossal expenditures of human and natural resources that have gone into the expeditions to the moon. Even materialistic man does not live by bread alone; as those masters of government, the Romans, well knew, he demands both bread and circuses. But the moon-landings have been circuses in place of bread, imposing monuments to technical skill and human courage in the service of vanity and self-deception.

We may not agree with Mumford's illustration, but his thesis remains intact. We cannot repudiate any considerable part of human nature, physical or mental, without paying an enormous price. Our predecessors for several generations believed sincerely that mankind could live by reason alone-that with proper education and enlightened training, the unreasonable portions of our

¹ Lewis Mumford, "The Revolt of the Demons," The New Yorker (May 23 1964), pp. 155-185.

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nature could be brought firmly under rational control. It was a very powerful and beautiful dream: we should not underestimate or scorn it. Most of us now living have grown up during its decadence. We have seen its inadequacies and corruptions more clearly than the vision which informs it. But the failure is one of achievement, not of aspiration. Our parents and their parents aimed as high as we do. They have grown weary in their heroic struggle to realize the dream of Reason, yet they have abandoned only the hope that they themselves will attain it, not their faith that it can and will and should be attained by those who follow after them.

I am enough a child of my time to reverence and to love man's reasoning capacity. But I cannot accept it as the sole source of value or director of our energies. The revolt of the demons will not be subdued by philosophical argument, by an appeal to a "better judgement," or even by the clearest demonstration of the dangers of unreason to the self and society. The craving for ecstasy, for example, cannot be met or controlled by reason. Nor can the hunger for power-political, economic, social, black, white, female, or flower. Demons are exorcised not by intelligence, but by angels. And while our ideas can be modified by philosophers, we are not converted, born again, except by the imagination, through fantasies, myths, and fairy-tales, art and love and worship.

III

Unreason has declared itself not only in the revolt of the demons, but also in works of imaginative art that are more like flights of angels. There have always been individuals and small groups who have refused to submit to the tyranny of the detached rational intellect, passing from band to hand such books as George Maedonald's Phantastes, Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia, and Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. Quietly, the lovers of fantasy have gone their own way, neither attacking the mood of their time nor concealing their enjoyment despite lifted eyebrows and condescending smiles. Part of the pleasure in fantasy and myth is aesthetic; many imaginative works are wonderfully beautiful. Beyond this, however, lies a deeper satisfaction. The worlds of faerie and epic, the images of kings and castles and magicians and sacred trees, penetrate to levels of experience and need that are otherwise unknown and unfulfilled. Unconscious energies are tapped, liberated, and set to singing, not against reason and not always apart from reason.

It was a dozen years ago or so that the despised imagination broke forth conspicuously in a passionate social movement. If my memory serves me correctly, its first notable manifestation was the

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flower children-young men and women who openly rejected the creed of their fathers, "Be Reasonable," and proclaimed instead a gospel of spontaneous love and joy. Like their parents, they held fast to the conviction that goodness is natural to humanity-that we are all born loving and cooperative and happy. Where they differed was in whether these qualities were to be consummated by intellectual discipline or by impulsive emotion.

That earliest of the modern rebellions against reason was gentle, almost tentative, a lovely, tender gaiety as if the door to the unconscious had opened only enough to let the cherubs through. After them came the greater angelicals: ferocious, ecstatic, hypnotic, terrifying. Almost no one was prepared for that outbreak, and so was equipped to explain what was happening and to direct those tremendous energies into creative channels. And because destruction is always easier, and usually more immediately satisfying than creation, some of the results were appalling and are appalling. That phase is not yet over. But also, some of the results were and are good.

We are only now discovering (or more correctly, re-discovering) our imaginative resources, and are drunk with our delight in them. Like a baby who has just discovered its toes, we are fascinated with our new toys of perception, imagery, and mysticism. Their possibilities appear to be unlimited, their joys unending. Nothing seems to be required of us for our full possession of those realms except to shake off the stupid rules of logic and society, the dead traditional forms of thought and the dying institutions.

It may have been an accident-I do not believe it was-that about the time when the so-called "mind-expanding" drugs were first taking hold in our culture, J. R. R. Tolkien's three-volume fairystory for adults, The Lord of the Rings, began its surge toward popularity. Here were two imaginative break-throughs at once: the drug-taker into a world of unsurpassed intensity, though also of supreme loneliness; the myth-maker into a world of astonishing richness and complexity, and into a most intimate companionship. The one experience was self-enclosed and self-limiting, the other indefinitely expansive. The one was exclusively emotional and perceptual; the other synthesized emotion and perception with intellect, decision, and action.

IV

Imagination, like reason and emotion and the body and all other human functions, is itself good, but is capable of being used well or badly-and I speak here not of moral excellence, but of skills, as a carpenter may be said to use his tools well or badly, whether what be is constructing be harmful or beneficial. Does he hit his

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thumb more often than the nail head? Does be drive the nail in straight? Does he need to hit the nail only once or twice, or does it take a dozen blows? So, for example, in using our imaginations, do we flail our images around, tossing them helter-skelter without relating them to one another, much less to any standards of thought or course of action? This is imagination without external control, and it includes not only the visions provoked by the psychedelic drugs, but also the dreams we have in sleep. In both of these, the unconscious energies and images are released into consciousness on their own terms, without art or skill. Such free-wheeling can be harmless or even helpful; indeed, recent experiments indicate that dreaming may be important for mental health. But liberation without control can also be dangerous, as any natural force is when it is unrestrained. The release by means of drugs can open the channels between the conscious and unconscious minds in the way that a dam breaks. The waters rush out in a flood, tearing up and hurling away all that lies in their path, drowning crops and forests and homes and people.

The unleashed power of water, wind, fire, or any of the elementals in nature, is a terrible and sometimes a beautiful thing, and so is the unleashing of the human unconscious. But what beauty there is in floods and hurricanes and earthquakes and the frenzies of mankind lasts only for an instant, and the havoc they produce is enduring. At the same time, it must be said that the walls which divide the consciousness and unconsciousness are sometimes so thick and high that we feel as if they cannot be penetrated by less drastic means. This way of doing so, however, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the fabled community which, suffering from drought, held a prayer meeting to ask for rain. The rain came, in torrents. After two weeks of it, the minister called another prayer meeting, and this time be prayed: "O Lord, thou knowest that we needed rain. Thou knowest we prayed for rain. And thou didst send us rain. But Lord, this is ridiculous!"

It is easy to go to extremes, which is probably why so many people do. But it is a lazy way of living: one shuts away some part of himself, some part of life-imagination or intellect or whatever-refusing to go beyond the little he can handle comfortably. Technically, extremism manifests the sin of sloth, and it results in despair-not as a divine punishment, but as the inevitable consequence of taking a road that is literally a dead end. The tyranny of unconscious images is no improvement over the tyranny of abstract ideas. Neither the rampaging flood nor the elegantly engineered water channels are sufficient for enabling the desert to blossom like the rose, or to produce food. If only the deluge can be directed, controlled, disciplined, and if only the dry water-

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courses can be filled . . . and human history exhibits two areas in particular where these have been accomplished: in art, and in religion.

I do not mean to suggest that every work of art manifests a fusion of reason with imagination. Some deliberately do not; others try but fall short of their aim. And some religious movements have been exclusively ecstatic, others almost completely cerebral. But the great and enduring religions and works of art are those which evoke both an intellectual and an imaginative response, which speak not only to the conscious, analytic mind but also to the deep and silent recesses of the unconscious.

It is the sovereign task of fairy-tales, myths, and legends in literature, and of religious rituals, to cast the spell which will fuse all the parts of man into an integrated being. Other literary and religious forms may generate such an enchantment; these must, or they utterly fail. And enchantments are created by evoking the images that inhabit the unconscious, an achievement which requires not only consummate skill with the tools of language (and in ritual, of bodily movement), but also an intelligence swift to discern the order inherent in the images, and a delicate sensitivity to those images which, like Sleeping Beauty, are only waiting for a kiss to wake them.

The great myths and legends and fairy-tales are those which cast a spell upon many people in many ages, because their images are so nearly universal. To give only a few examples, there is the image of The Battle as in the stories of Troy and Beowulf, of The Search as in the legend of the Holy Grail, of Other Worlds as in faërie and Paradise, of The King as in the Arthurian cycle. The list could be very long, and many individual stories, such as The Lord of the Rings, contain a whole throng of these basic images. But a spell-binding story needs to do more than bestir the unconscious and the imagination. It must also be internally consistent so that it does not affront the fretful, demanding intellect. The mind must not be lulled to sleep. Rather, it must be satisfied by the pattern within the framework of the story, or the spell will break. The laws and logic of faërie or Paradise may not be those of twentieth-century life in Milwaukee or Boulder or Long Beach, but because the worlds are consistent and coherent within themselves, we can be at home in them, even though only temporarily as visitors in a foreign country.

Ideally, of course, we learn the courtesies and skills of foreign travel while we are still very young, whether we are visiting England or Middle Earth, Japan or Oz. But at what age, and by whom, were we taught that two of those foreign realms are unreal and the stories about them are lies? Probably most of us cannot

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remember, it was so early in our childhood. Conversely, who first revealed to us that there are some things we can learn only through such stories? How much training have we had in differentiating the ways of using imagination-arbitrary symbolism, analogy, allegory, imagery, affirming and rejecting images, and the like? Or are we so unschooled that imagination means to us merely the ability to close our eyes and visualize what a landscape or a person looks like?

V

There is more to imagination than visualizing, and when-having learned how to use images-we enter imaginary worlds, we return with gifts of refreshment and wisdom that are bard to come by in any other way. Four of them are especially worth our attention.

The first has already been described in some detail: the building of bridges between our conscious and unconscious lives, and so enabling them to interact creatively. It should be added that "the unconscious" is a catch-all word to identify, rather than explain, two facts: that frequently we do not know why we do what we do, and that some areas of our experience are only known and expressed by images. If, therefore, we are ignorant and unskilled in imagery, our conscious and unconscious functions will not be in harmony except by accident. They will be like two musicians in the same room, playing different compositions or, perhaps, the same composition but one largo and the other presto.

The difficulties of relating imagination and intellect are frequently only a matter of bad timing. Most of us have been diligently trained in the techniques of examining, questioning, classifying, and analyzing, but not in the arts of accepting, appreciating, and sympathizing. Consequently, we leap too quickly into philosophical and scientific dissection" or in reaction against our unbalanced education, we abandon ourselves too readily among the teeming images. It is all very well to insist that consciousness and unconsciousness, like body and spirit, and indivisible-and so, in some sense, they are. Usually, however, those elements or functions are not in balance. The "feeling intellect" is a state we achieve only rarely. The noble word "integrity" describes what we should be, not what we are. How any of us should redress his particular balance is for him to determine, but it is unlikely that be can do so wisely except as he has companions to share with, and learn from, and teach. "No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly."²

² Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1965 [first published 1931]), p. 187.

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The second gift we bring back from our visits to imaginary worlds is an increased ability to enter the minds of other people. Obviously we cannot think with Plato's mind, for example, but by imagination we can bring his ideas to life for ourselves, so that whether we agree with them or not, we can feel what it is like to live in the kind of world be was describing. Many of us find this exceedingly difficult. We can apprehend Plato's philosophy, but we cannot share his vision unless we have help from such sources as Charles Williams' The Place of the Lion, a fantasy in which Platonic archetypes-strength, beauty, subtlety, wisdom-appear in modern suburban England as a lion, a butterfly, a snake, and an eagle, each huge, terrifying, and incredibly magnificent, and each drawing into itself the persons and things which are like itself. Or for entering the medieval mind, there is C. S. Lewis' book The Discarded Image, which attempts to make the medieval world view not only intelligible, but imaginable, so that for a little while we can look at the world through medieval eyes. Thus Lewis writes:

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out-like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model, you would feel like one looking in. . . . And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, "the army of unalterable law," but rather the revelry of insatiable love.³

To enter other lives in this way is to break free, for a time, from the prison of our individuality, and thereby to "correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. . . . Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is the old paradox: 'he that loseth his life shall save it.'"⁴

A third gift of imagination, and of fantasy especially, is that it takes us out of the world of actual day-by-day living, and leads us to a vantage point from which we can see "actuality" from a new perspective. Anyone who has visited or lived in a foreign country will know at once what I mean. One's native land looks extraordinarily different when we see it from India or Turkey or Denmark; mark; it is better in some respects than we bad hitherto realized, worse in others, and in still others simply changed. And the reverse cultural shook of re-entering one's own land can be more severe than that of meeting an entirely new culture. The fine

³ C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge. The University Press, 1964), pp. 118-119.
⁴ C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: The University Press, 1961), p. 138.

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novel, Islandia, has that effect on many readers. The real impact of the book is manifested when one returns with the hero from Islandia to America.

We effectively identify our assumptions only by looking at our ideas from an alien position. When someone else attacks our presuppositions, naturally we rise to their defense, and though we may learn quite a lot from that adversary method of education, it is nothing to what we learn when we have willingly entered another world-Islandia or Doon or Battle Hill, or a distant historical period on our own planet-and look back from there with our own eyes. When, instead of a battle between antagonists, we have an illumination of differences in which we learn to be critical of our own ideas by ourselves seeing the contrasts.

A fourth gift of the imagination is its power to extend our ideas of reality by initiating us into other worlds, including that of the spirit. My own first suspicion that there were kinds of reality other than those of everyday living and scientific investigation came through my childhood addiction to fairy-tales. My first commitment to a real belief in another world was made when I was six or seven, and an adult whom I knew only slightly asked me if I still believed in fairies. I knew, beyond question, that the correct answer was No, but I knew also that fairies symbolized for me something real and very beautiful in which I did believe, and which I would not betray even in the horrid certainty of being judged still a baby. I bad neither the concepts nor the language for expressing what I knew, but in shame and fear and an odd kind of defiance, I answered Yes.

A belief in fairies is certainly not a necessary precondition for believing in an invisible yet potent God, but it can be a valuable preparation. The transition from faërie realms to a spiritual reality is less abrupt than from scientific materialism and psychological behaviorism to the holy. When we have lived for a while in one foreign country, real or imaginary, we learn techniques and acquire attitudes that ease our way when we go on to another. If nothing more, the experience undermines the insidious belief that our habitual ways of looking at the world have a universal validity. However firm our intellectual persuasion that cultures vary, nothing rubs it into our extra-intellectual awareness like inhabiting another world for a while, even though that world be not charted on any maps of terrestrial geography.

VI

But does imagination lead us into truth? That depends upon which truth we are concerned with: scientific truth, historical truth, the severely logical truths of philosophy, the passionate truths of

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the heart, the secret truths of the unconscious, or the divine truths of the spirit. The truth, final, complete, and -perfect, surely includes them all in an exquisitely balanced interaction, as swift and joyful as the Great Dance that C. S. Lewis describes in Perelandra, and of which he writes, "All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for."⁵

We shall not know the truth until we have learned how the various truths are related, each to every other, omitting none. It is a task that the intellect alone cannot perform, because the truths of heart and spirit cannot be stated as philosophical propositions or mathematical formulae. Neither can the imagination alone fulfill that task; it is too volatile and personal. There is only one way by which we can achieve the union of all the truths so far as it is available to finite creatures-and the way cannot be taught, although others can help us learn it: by becoming complete and integrated human beings.

Integrity. Coherence. Coordination. Wholeness. It is hard enough to coordinate philosophical with historical truths, or body with mind, or any other two or three of our functions. We have been trying to do so for centuries, and have not succeeded very well. To add still another seems like madness. Yet conceivably the most recently restored, the imagination, will prove to be the critical one. If so, it will not be because the imagination is the most important. Here, as in the Trinity, "none is afore or after other; none is greater or less than another." It will be because any function that is lacking throws the whole pattern out of kilter. Thus we shall never be complete in our living, or our theology or science or history, until we have brought into the dance those realms of our selves that are accessible only by means of images, and until our intellects and imaginations and bodies and spirits are integrated.

Myths and fairy-tales may not be true, but they reveal truths. They give us not philosophies, but visions. Those visions may issue in philosophies or theologies, or works of art or quietly radiant lives or social movements or any of a thousand other forms. They may be precise or vague, petty or magnificent, good or evil, but where there is vision, there is vitality, and "Where there is no vision, the people perish." It is high time for us to go back-or is it forward?-to fairy-tales and myths and legends, until like the young prince in the story, we can unite intellect and imagination, reason and unreason, order and freedom, and go forth into the streets of our cities, singing.

⁵ C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1944), p. 233.