Abstract
Many people, faced by the term ‘Christian fantasy’, will feel a slight sense of surprise. What has Christianity, which is supposed to be concerned with what is true about the universe, got to do with works founded on invention? Christianity is not fantasy; it is meant to be fact. Surely, if one turns it into a work of imagination, one is suggesting the very thing the atheists maintain — that the Bible story itself may be a fable, created by man to assuage his own uncertainties?
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Notes
Quoted in George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) p. 55.
The initial stimulus for this was David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (1835).
See Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1974) chs 12, 14;
Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (eds), The Literary Guide to the Bible (London: Collins, 1987). One of the most seminal works of theology this century has been Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologising essay ‘New Testament and Theology’ (1941).
On the last see Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1982); Alter and Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible;
and David Jasper, The New Testament and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1987).
J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964) p. 62.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605),
in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), I, 7.
Sir William Davenant, ‘Preface to Gondibert’ (1650), ibid., II, 5.
Abraham Cowley, ‘Preface to Poems’ (1656), ibid., II, 89–90.
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (1583),
in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1904) I, 157.
I have defined fantasy’s more general use of the supernatural in similar terms in C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) ch. 1;
supplemented in C. N. Manlove, ‘On the Nature of Fantasy’, in Roger C. Schlobin (ed.), The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982) pp. 29–30. By ‘unambiguous’ here, in relation to the supernatural, I am referring to the definition of ‘the fantastic’
(not fantasy) by Tzvetan Todorov in his The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970), tr. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973): ‘The fantastic... lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from “reality” as it exists in the common opinion’ (p. 41).
This is the sort of disguised ‘fantastic’ to be found in some of the novelists described in Malcolm Scott’s The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1989f).
On such visions and reports see Howard Rollins Patch, The Other World: According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950) chs 4, 5;
and Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) chs 2–5.
Lewis has another reason: that the Bible has all sorts of ‘Sunday school’ associations that put us off. To get past those ‘watchful dragons’ he put scriptural truths in a ‘farian’ context. See his ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said’ (1956), repr. in his Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966) pp. 36–7.
Charles Williams, ‘He Came down from Heaven’ and ‘The Forgiveness of Sins’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1950) pp. 25, 102–3.
C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, 3rd edn (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965) p. 171.
Wendy Holden, ‘Non-Vital Statistics in Minds of Americans’, Daily Telegraph, 12 Aug 1989, p. 3: ‘1% of Americans do not believe in God’. Cf. also Observer, 31 Mar 1991, p. 18: ‘232 million of the 266 million inhabitants [of the United States] profess to be Christians.’
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© 1992 Colin Manlove
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Manlove, C. (1992). Introduction. In: Christian Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12570-8_1
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