George Macdonald wrote a number of books that explore the imaginative ways of expressing Christian truths. Most notable among these are At the Back of the North Wind, Phantastes and Lilith. C.S. Lewis was profoundly influenced by Phantastes, which he described as baptising his imagination. According to Lewis, it gave him a new way to perceive the world. He wrote:

The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness.

— Lewis, George Macdonald: An Anthology

Lewis later described Phantastes as serving “to convert, even baptise … my imagination”, though, as he said “it did nothing to my intellect nor (at the time) to my conscience”.

A quick glance through the fiction section of a Christian bookstore reveals books set in Biblical times (one I saw recently told the tale of one of Solomon’s concubines) or books in which the characters are Christians. These books do give novelty to our reading: instead of reading about today’s world or atheists, we read about yesterday’s world and Christians. However, if the only change is in the characters or the setting, with no change in the underlying story, then we emerge unchanged from our encounter with them. But what about books that illumine Christian principles—that seek to change the way we look at the world?

I recently reread MacDonald’s Lilith. He makes use of a certain amount of fluidity of ideas. One character, Mr Raven is at the same time a bent librarian in a black frock coat and a raven with a beady eye. He claimed to be a sexton in God’s acre—and to prove it, he plunged “his beak deep in the sod, and [drew] out a great wriggling red worm. He threw back his head, and tossed it in the air. It spread great wings, gorgeous in red and black, and soared aloft.” The narrator, much puzzled, remonstrates, only to be told that the true business of a sexton is to “have the air full of worms”.

As MacDonald continues to draw the threads of the story along, one thing that becomes clear is the narrator’s inability to accomplish what he wishes for himself. He finds that he brings sadness and pain where he goes. Instead, he needs to set himself to sleep (which, in some way, is to die) so that he can truly wake.

As the book unfolds, the shifting layers of the text and the multiple identities of each character begin to make one wonder, with the narrator, whether “the whole thing [is] too mad”. But with the ending of the book, MacDonald brings his metaphysical speculations together in a satisfying way that nonetheless leaves a reader pensive and with the thought that there might be more to life than he knows.

Somehow, I think MacDonald’s way of firing the imagination is more helpful than the average Christian novel in a bookstore. It does not pretend to be a argued case for Christianity; that would be tedious in a novel. Nor does it moralise; that would be uncomfortable. But all the same, it illumines some of the truths of Christianity. As Lewis wrote:

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere – “Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.”

— Lewis, Surprised by Joy