George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles Read online

  It was easy and commonplace, however, to think and speak that way in the late Victorian period. Far more interesting are the trendsetters earlier in the century who pioneered this theological shift, often in the face of the spirited opposition from members of the older generation who were deeply committed to their own, particular view of the nature of the atonement as the heart of the Christian message. One such leader was the Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872). It would be difficult even to catalog all of the numerous ways that George MacDonald bound himself in love and devotion to F. D. Maurice. MacDonald was himself an early adopter of the gospel of the incarnation and a pioneering spirit who experienced some opposition from the old guard. MacDonald therefore first became attracted to Maurice through his writings and the attacks he endured because of them, sensing right away that they shared a theological affinity. They soon became friends. One of my favorite moments in their relationship is in 1856 when MacDonald became quite ill, his symptoms including coughing up blood. Maurice visited him at his sickbed and read to him John Ruskin’s moving account of the risen Christ revealing himself to his disciples while they were fishing in the lake of Galilee.8 The MacDonalds eventually joined St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, London, and thus Maurice became George MacDonald’s pastor as well as his friend. MacDonald even wrote a poem in his honor, “A Thanksgiving for F. D. Maurice,” and dedicated a book to him, The Miracles of Our Lord.9 MacDonald also paid homage to Maurice by turning him into a fictional character in one of his novels and organized a testimonial gift and tribute for him on the grounds that Maurice was “a teacher come from God.”10 Perhaps most touchingly of all, Maurice became the godfather to the MacDonalds’ eighth child, a son whom they christened Maurice in honor of this pastor-theologian-friend who had come from God. As Great-Great-Grandmother Irene so wisely observes in The Princess and the Goblin, “A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same. I have a good many such things.”11

  As an undergraduate student, Maurice was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, an exclusive intellectual society. In an illuminating study, the historian David Newsome has argued that their commitment to Platonic thought led the Apostles of Maurice’s day, like early church fathers such as Justin Martyr before them, to focus on the Johannine teaching on the Logos and therefore to lay “particular stress on the incarnation and its centrality within the Christian revelation.”12 Maurice’s controversial Theological Essays, published in 1853, highlighted this emphasis. While traditionalists focused their attacks on his willingness to call into question the necessity of believing in the traditional doctrine of eternal punishment, Maurice forcibly stated his objections to the old view of the atonement, arguing that “these notions are becoming more and more intolerable to thoughtful and earnest men.”13 Writing during Advent 1876, the most distinguished Unitarian theologian of the Victorian era, James Martineau (1805–1900)—observing developments among Trinitarians from the outside—gave Maurice the bulk of the credit for this fundamental theological shift: “He has been the chief cause of a radical and permanent change in the ‘orthodox’ theology,—viz. a shifting of its centre of gravity from the Atonement to the Incarnation.”14

  A lot could be at stake in these doctrinal disputes. The MacDonalds’ son Greville passed along a family anecdote regarding an aunt of his: “One of the Misses Powell deferred for many months accepting her lover until he could formulate satisfactorily his views on the Atonement; which at last, and most fortunately for the world, he contrived to do.”15 The difference between the Age of Atonement and the Age of the Incarnation was, however, often a generational divide. Part of the reason why MacDonald’s calling as the minister of the Congregational church in Arundel was not successful was because his flock found their twenty-something pastor’s theological views too progressive. Tellingly, one of his theology professors from Highbury College, the place where he had trained for the ministry, recommended that MacDonald look instead for a congregation to serve that had a high percentage of “young men” in it.16 Several years later, when things were still not working out, MacDonald would encourage himself in his calling with these words: “I have to do something for the young people of this country.”17

  This generational divide is often dramatized in MacDonald’s novels. In his first realist novel, David Elginbrod, the foil is Mrs. Elton. She pronounces authoritatively on what a clergyman must include in his sermons:

  He ought in order that men may believe, to explain the divine plan, by which the demands of divine justice are satisfied, and the punishment due to sin averted from the guilty, and laid upon the innocent; that, by bearing our sins, he might make atonement to the wrath of a justly offended God.18

  The new spiritual sensibility, by way of contrast, is represented by a boy named Harry:

  They were sitting in silence after the close, when Harry started up suddenly, saying: “I don’t want God to love me, if he does not love everybody;” and bursting into tears, hurried out of the room. Mrs. Elton was awfully shocked at his wickedness.19

  To MacDonald’s credit, however, the traditionalists are often presented sympathetically in his novels as people who are not themselves as heartlessly punitive as one might expect given their creed. This approach of insisting that a severe figure nevertheless be thought of with affectionate respect is most thoroughly taken in the portrait of Robert Falconer’s grandmother, a formidable woman who is, as it were, the Age of Atonement incarnate. Falconer himself struggles his way to an incarnational theology centered on the revelation that God is Love, resisting his Grannie’s understanding of the scheme of salvation: “But, laddie, he cam to saitisfee God’s justice by sufferin’ the punishment due to oor sins; to turn aside his wrath an’ curse.”20 Over the course of several hundred pages we watch as Robert Falconer, on behalf of young people everywhere, rejects the harsh rigidities of the old faith and learns how to formulate the new.

  This dynamic is recapitulated in What’s Mine’s Mine. When Ian gives his spiritual testimony, his mother is distressed for the state of his soul by its omissions: “There was nothing in it about the atonement!”21 In a chapter titled “The Gulf That Divided,” the two of them have the great dialogue between the old and the new theology. Ian defiantly protests, in what is, of course, MacDonald’s own view, “I do not believe what you mean by the atonement; what God means by it, I desire to accept.”22 There is a great gulf that divides here indeed. As the raven observes in Lilith, “You and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.”23

  Tellingly, after MacDonald has set aside the old theory of the atonement in “The Gulf That Divided” we are led straight away, as it were, into the Age of the Incarnation in the very next chapter which is titled, “The Clan Christmas.”

  THE ADVENT OF THE CHILD CHRIST

  And so we come to the Victorian Christmas. Today when we think of celebrating the birth of Christ, our minds often gravitate to the nineteenth century. The town where I live, Wheaton, Illinois, advertises its holiday events under the general heading “Dickens of a Christmas.” We know that many features of yuletide that feel traditional were first introduced to Britons and Americans in the Victorian age, not least Christmas cards and Christmas trees. Less well known, however, is that during the nineteenth century, Christmas became “the most wonderful time of the year.” Previously, Easter held its preeminent place as the greatest of Christian festivals. Denominations influenced by the Reformed tradition usually did not observe the birth of Christ at all. MacDonald, of course, was a Scotsman who was taught the Westminster Catechism as a boy and raised in Scottish Calvinism, and the Church of Scotland did not even begin to have Christmas services until as late as 1873.24 In its early years, Wheaton, the Christian college in Illinois where I teach, so much made a point of disregarding Christmas as to include it in the Fall semester. In 1864, for instance
, the final examinations for the term were held on December 26.25

  I am positing that this theological shift to the centrality of the doctrine of the incarnation in the Victorian era was a contributing factor in the elevation of Christmas as the supreme holiday in that same time period. F. D. Maurice’s first collection of sermons was suggestively titled Christmas Day and Other Sermons. In it, he refers to the celebration of the Nativity as “the great Christian Festival.” (Note the definite article; he did not even prudentially say “a” great Christian festival so as to leave a place for Easter to at least be on an equal plane.)26 In his book-length dramatic poem, Within and Without, MacDonald referred to December 25 as “this one day that blesses all the year.”27 Likewise, Grenville MacDonald learned from his parents that Christmas is “the Day of Days.”28 The celebration of Christ’s birth looms large throughout his biography of his parents, even warranting an entire chapter on this theme, which is titled “Adeste Fideles.”29 While this has become so much to be expected for us that we would not find it much worth commenting upon, it was clearly viewed as a novelty at the time that the MacDonald family prioritized gathering together every year for the Christmas season. And their enthusiastic celebrations were often commented upon by outsiders. Georgina Mount-Temple, for example, reported this on Christmas Eve 1883 at Bordighera, Italy, where the MacDonalds had come to live, and where she had rented a villa and was staying to recuperate after a bad fall:

  On Christmas Eve, we were dining in our little room looking on the olive wood, and we heard the sound of many voices, and looking out, lamps glimmered among the trees, and figures carrying lanterns and sheets of music. Who should they be but the dear MacDonald family visiting the houses of all the invalids in the place, to sing them carols and bring them the glad tidings of Christmas. The next day they had beautiful tableaux of the Annunciation, the Stable, the Angels, and the Shepherds, ending up with the San Sisto [i.e., the Madonna and Child], in their wonderful room in the Coraggio [the MacDonald’s house], and they had invited the peasants to come and join this, for them novel representation of the events of the blessed Christmastide.30

  In MacDonald’s realist novels there is often a Christmas chapter or scene (and there is even one in his long poem Within and Without). In Annals of a Quiet Neigbourhood, the narrator is a clergyman and he explicitly states that his goal is to increase the importance of Christmas in his congregation.31 He prepares a sheet of Christmas hymns and carols that contain the true meat of God’s Word in them, to distribute to his parishioners, and MacDonald cunningly reproduces it in toto in the novel as a kind of appendix to the chapter so that his readers are also surreptitiously provided with a full kit for celebrating the birth of our Lord in all of its spiritual richness.32 MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul is a book that offers a poem for every day of the year. In it, not only does he ignore the possible significance of any other date in the year, but the entry for December 25 even makes it explicit that he is violating this deliberate policy because Christmas is the single occasion in our annual calendar that cannot be ignored:

  Thou hast not made, or taught me, Lord to care

  For times and seasons—but this one glad day

  Is the blue sapphire clasping all the lights

  That flash in the girdle of the year so fair

  When thou wast born a man—because always

  Thou wast and art a man through all the flights

  Of thought and time, and thousandfold creation’s play.33

  Which leads us on to MacDonald’s poetry. In The Poetical Works of George MacDonald there is not a single poem which has any of the following words (or any such related terms) in its title: Good Friday, Easter, Holy Week, Holy Saturday, atonement, crucifixion, the cross, ransom, blood, sacrifice, substitution, justification, propitiation, Golgotha, or Calvary. The closest is “The Burnt-Offering,” a poem about making one’s life a daily sacrifice unto God.34 On the other hand, there are no fewer than fourteen poems that have the word “Christmas” in their very title, and numerous others beside these which are also Christmas poems. (In another illustration of my point, when Robert Browning published Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day: A Poem, MacDonald wrote a review that completely ignored the Easter half and instead discussed exclusively Christmas Eve.)35 In his Unspoken Sermons, as he had explicitly set aside penal substitution, MacDonald imagines readers asking him what, then, his own theory of the work of Christ on the cross is, to which he defiantly replies, “I answer, None.”36 Again, an apophatic approach to a doctrine is likely to make one rather taciturn on the subject matter. From clues from his letters, by contrast, it is clear that MacDonald was in the habit of writing a Christmas poem annually as part of his own, personal celebration of the holiday. In fact, a handful of poems in the published collection simply have the date for their title: “Christmas-Day, 1878,” “Christmas, 1880,” and so on. Moreover, to MacDonald’s great credit, his yule poems are about the Good News of the coming of God as a human being into the world rather than focusing on the cultural aspects of the season. “Christmas, 1884” even goes so far as to set the one against the other:

  Though in my heart no Christmas glee,

  Though my song-bird be dumb,

  Jesus, it is enough for me

  That thou are come.37

  One of my favorites is “The Sleepless Jesus.” It is so much better than the Victorian carol, “Away in the Manager,” with its Docetic-tinged “no crying he makes.” In MacDonald’s vision, Jesus is a real, human baby who—to the frustration of his worn-out mother—is not cooperating with the bedtime ritual. Here is the opening stanza:

  ’Tis time to sleep, my little boy:

  Why gaze thy bright eyes so?

  At night our children, for new joy

  Home to thy father go,

  But thou are wakeful! Sleep, my child;

  The moon and stars are gone;

  The wind is up and raving wild,

  But thou are smiling on!38

  The American Civil War led to great distress and deprivation for the laboring classes in the North of England as so much of the economy of the region was based on textile mills which used as their raw material cotton supplied by the Southern states. Moreover, these workers had heroically agreed—to their own, personal ruin—that the need to stand against the evil of slavery meant that boycotting the Confederacy was the right policy to pursue. Here is the first stanza of MacDonald’s “A Christmas Carol for 1862, The Year of the Trouble in Lancashire”:

  The skies are pale, the trees are stiff,

  The earth is dull and old;

  The frost is glittering as if

  The very sun were cold.

  And hunger fell is joined with frost,

  To make men thin and wan:

  Come, babe, from heaven, or we are lost;

  Be born, O child of man.39

  When he sent his annual Christmas poem to a friend in December 1886, MacDonald remarked on its theme, the Nativity, “If the story were not true, nothing else would be worth being true. Because it is true, everything is lovely-precious.”40

  MacDonald also wrote Christmas-themed short stories. The most poignant of these is “The Gifts of the Child Christ.”41 Mrs. Greatorex is a twenty-something wife who has a little girl they call Phosy and who is pregnant with their second child. Her husband, alas, has been becoming more and more skeptical and dismissive of spiritual realities as he is correspondingly becoming more materialistic. In an ominous sign regarding the state of his eternal soul, we are told that “he had given up reading poetry.”42 Mr. Greatorex’s heart is also becoming more and more emotionally detached from his wife and—anxious and not knowing what to do—she senses that she is losing him. Meanwhile, Phosy, being but a child, has the import of Advent all jumbled up:

  From some of his [the preacher’s] sayings about the birth of Jesus into the world, into the family, into the individual human bosom, she had got it into her head that Christmas Day was not a birthday like that she had herself last
year, but that, in some wonderful way, to her requiring no explanation, the baby Jesus was born every Christmas afresh.43

  Mrs. Greatorex goes into labor during the night before Christmas, but the baby is stillborn. The infant’s dead body is placed in the spare room, where Phosy, rising early on Christmas morn as children are wont to do, discovers it all by herself, not knowing the tragic event that had unfolded while she lay sleeping. Eventually she is found by the rest of the household. “‘Jesus is dead,’ she said, slowly and sadly, but with perfect calmness. ‘He is dead,’ she repeated. ‘He came too early, and there was no one up to take care of him, and he’s dead—dead—dead!’”

  This ghastly scene jolts her father back into spiritual vitality. Rising to the moment, he makes a true confession: “‘No, no, Phosy!’ they heard him say, ‘Jesus is not dead, thank God. It is only your little brother that hadn’t life enough, and is gone back to God for more.’” Faith and family are both renewed: “Such were the gifts the Christ-child brought to one household that Christmas.”44

  The more substantive point, however, is not that MacDonald wrote about Christmas but that he is a fine representative of the Age of the Incarnation in terms of the theological themes that he stressed throughout his life, work, sermons, and ministry. Central to his message was the Fatherhood of God. God’s great father-heart reveals that he is fundamentally a God of love and that this inexhaustible divine love is directed specifically towards us, his children. “Papa’s Story (a Scot’s Christmas Story)” is a modern retelling of the parables of the lost sheep and of the prodigal son, biblical passages that MacDonald would return to again and again because they reveal that God is a loving Father.45 In the incarnation, the Son came to earth to make known to us his Father in heaven. During his earthly life, Jesus of Nazareth modeled for us how to be a true, obedient child of the Father. One of MacDonald’s favorite Christological titles, therefore, was to refer to Jesus as our Elder Brother.46