I do not mean that school stories for boys and girls ought not to be written. I am only saying that they are far more liable to become ‘fantasies’ in the clinical sense than fantastic stories are. And this distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other a disease.
The tension (a weak word) between the temporality of sentences and the eternity that would render them and the strivings they portray superfluous is powerfully captured in my final example, a sentence from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Although I have read and taught this sentence hundreds of times, it never fails to knock my socks off. Bunyan’s hero, Christian, has become aware that there is a burden (original sin) on his back and he will do anything to rid himself of it. He is told that he must fly from the “wrath to come”—that is, from eternal damnation—and in response he begins to run:
Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began crying after him to return, but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! life! eternal life.
The sentence is about two levels of “perceiving,” two kinds of crying, and two kinds of lives. Christian’s wife and children perceive the head of their household abandoning them. The obligations he pushes away with a “but” (you can feel it) are great; that is why he puts his fingers in his ears. But the pull of what he runs toward is even stronger, even though he does not yet see where it is to be found. (He just runs, we have been told, “towards the middle of the plain.”) His family’s crying has its source in all the human ties that bind; his crying has its source in Eternity’s severe requirements and the reward it holds out, however obscurely, to those who are faithful to them: “Life! life! eternal life.” The sentence names the reward, but cannot bestow it; it can, however, make us feel both its inestimable price and the price we, as mortal sentence makers. time-bound creatures, are asked to pay. And given a choice between eternity and some of the sentences we have lingered over together, who knows?
Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence (2011), 156–157.
Christian classics—such as Athanasius’ treatise On the Incarnation or Augustine’s Confessions—possess the ability to tether us to our collective past, offering us resources that not only inform us about our faith but also reveal the blind spots of our own chronological parochialism. They anchor us to a continuous tradition of reflection, allowing us to see the great questions and problems of our own time and culture through the eyes of others. As Lewis observed in his own introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, we need to ‘keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.’
Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought, 18.
What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him, because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention is distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.
The ultimate test of whether we have grasped theological truth is thus not so much whether we have comprehended it rationally, but whether it has transformed us experientially. In an important sense, we are not called on to master theology, but to allow it to master us.
Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought, 84.
