Overview

The essays below are by Michael Phillips, who led the revival of interest in MacDonald over the past forty years, and Barbara Amell, the publisher of Wingfold, a renowned quarterly journal about the Scotsman and his works. Both are recognized as among the foremost experts on George MacDonald.

To jump to a section, please select one of the following:

• The Theology of George MacDonald

• George MacDonald as Literary Critic

by Michael Phillips (fatheroftheinklings.com)

An increasing number of men and women around the world consider the theological writings of George MacDonald—though not as voluminous as those produced by many other authors through history—perhaps the most significant body of Christian writings since New Testament times. I realize what a stupendous claim that is. It is the conviction of those sharing this perspective that the writings of George MacDonald’s corpus are transformational and will one day change the way a large part of Christendom thinks about God.

As one of these myself, I consider George MacDonald’s theological writings to be prophetic in the full sense of the word. I do not make such an assertion lightly. It is based on fifty years of reading, study, prayer, and I hope growth into a greater understanding of God and his ways. MacDonald anticipates the perspectives of eternity, which is truly the most far-reaching kind of prophetic vision.

The anchoring grounding of George MacDonald’s life came from following the example of his Master. The Lord’s foundation was MacDonald’s foundation. That was simply a revelation of the Father. All his writing reflects a stupendous underlying truth—that the universe was created by, is ruled by, and will ultimately be reconciled into an eternal unity of purpose by an infinitely good, infinitely loving, infinitely trustworthy, and infinitely forgiving Father-God whose intrinsic nature is simply Fatherhood.

As Jesus came to reveal the Father, MacDonald wrote to reveal the Father. He sought to do as Jesus did—in MacDonald’s own words, to think his thoughts, use his judgments, see things as he saw them, feel things as he felt them. MacDonald wrote to reveal God’s true nature and being, to explain his character of infinite love and forgiveness.

MacDonald’s life-mission was to reveal God as a good Father, in whom all the confusions and quandaries of mortal existence (good vs. evil, the reason for hell, why suffering exists, life’s myriad inequities, how a good God can allow evil, the role of Satan in man’s affairs, creation vs. chance evolution, man’s cruelty to man, and a thousand other complexities that have puzzled philosophers since time immemorial, and upon which many base disbelief in a supreme being) will be revealed in the light of eternity to have Infinite Love (in ways we cannot presently comprehend) at the core of their Fatherhood-purpose.

Such, I believe, is the first and essential pillar of George MacDonald’s life—the revelation of the infinite and reconciling goodness of the divine Fatherhood. Upon that foundation everything else is built. Obedience flows out of the divine Fatherhood. Childship proceeds from the Fatherhood. Both together produce the Christlikeness that is the eternal objective toward which God is leading all the sons and daughters of his creation.

In summary then, as I have pondered MacDonald’s life and the message inherent in his far-reaching corpus, I have perceived a threefold essence of spiritual vision that defines the purpose of his life. That vision can be summed up in three terms:

The goodness of divine Fatherhood.

Chosen obedient-childship.

Growth into Christlikeness.

Much could be added about belief, doctrine, and theology (on ten thousand points of scriptural interpretation)—all perhaps summed up in MacDonald’s own words: A man’s real belief is that which he lives by. All these innumerable particulars, however, are gathered up and glorified in this threefold focus of truth to which he devoted his life to proclaim to the world.

George MacDonald’s non-fiction theological writings (four volumes of sermons, a volume of studies on Jesus’ miracles, and scattered chapters and sermons and digressive treatises imbedded within other books) may be the most important of his works. They are also the most challenging to penetrate with understanding. Calling them the most important is accurate in one sense but inaccurate in another. Because MacDonald’s theology cannot be separated from the other areas of his writing. The divine Fatherhood interpenetrates, in a sense, impregnates his novels, his fantasies, and his poetry with their own particular genius. The same is true of his imagination. It, too, impregnates, gives life to the whole. Everything is interwoven and interconnected. MacDonald is not “divisible,” so to speak into separate creative selves. George MacDonald was a unity. As we conceive of God as three personalities or expressions within the oneness of his Being, the unity of MacDonald’s personhood was creatively expressed through these four literary methods which all functioned in harmony.

Though his theological outlook, is the informing foundation of the whole, the writings in which that outlook comes to us can be difficult to penetrate. To call them abstruse is an understatement. MacDonald’s writing style can be circuitous, wordy, vague, and mystifying. He is dealing with high and complex spiritual truths, yet does so with a linguistic style that sometimes makes them even more confusing! As the luminosity of MacDonald’s realistic fiction can be obscured by the difficult dialect and long tangential digressions, so too the gold of his non-fiction writings often lies buried beneath so much verbiage that it is difficult to unearth and see with clarity.

For the same reason, therefore, that I have edited his novels, I have also produced new editions of MacDonald’s sermons—to bring the gold to the surface where its brilliance can shine forth. This process is perhaps even more important in the case of MacDonald’s theological writings because so much is at stake. We must get at the gold!

You can learn more about these editions and my approach to editing MacDonald's writings in Getting at the ‘Gold’ of MacDonald’s Theology: Studies and Compilations.

George MacDonald’s non-fiction writings explore in some fashion nearly every aspect of Christian doctrine and theology. MacDonald’s knowledge of Scripture was vast. Most of his sermons are in reality in-depth Bible studies. The gospels are his preferred text, with selections from Matthew outnumbering those from the other three gospels combined.

The above overview of what I call MacDonald’s “threefold essence of spiritual vision” sends down roots into the full scriptural sub-soil of Christian belief: Salvation, faith, heaven, hell, the atonement, forgiveness, the trinity and nature of the Godhead, Christian brotherhood, the unforgiveable sin, prayer, the parables, self-denial, Jesus’ prayers on the cross, the role of fire in God’s economy, suffering, righteousness, etc. The breathtaking multi-dimensionality of topics is revealed in a quick perusal of some of the sermon titles:

The Consuming Fire

The Temptation in the Wilderness

The Eloi

Love Thy Neighbor

Love Thine Enemy

The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity

The Word of Jesus on Prayer

Man's Difficulty Concerning Prayer

The Last Farthing

Abba, Father!

The Fear of God

Self-Denial

The Truth in Jesus

The Creation in Christ

The Knowing of the Son

The Truth

Justice

Light

Righteousness

Salvation from Sin

The Reward of Obedience

The Salt and the Light of the World

George MacDonald’s Most Notable Theological Writings

(Recommended in the comprehensive edition of MacDonald’s sermons in a single volume: George MacDonald’s Transformational Theology of the Christian Faith)

Unspoken Sermons, First, Second, and Third Series

The Hope of the Gospel

by Barbara Amell

George MacDonald’s career in literary criticism, like every other aspect of his life, had deep spiritual roots. As editor of Wingfold, a quarterly magazine devoted to George MacDonald since 1993, it has been my pleasure and privilege to research and restore reports of MacDonald’s extempore literary lectures, and to present evidence regarding the extraordinary history of his accomplishments as author and lecturer on literary subjects.

Wingfold Summer 2019 documents an unusual letter the Rev. George MacDonald received in June 1853, when he was minister of Trinity Congregational Church at Arundel, England. The letter, written in one formidable paragraph which covered eight pages, was from Rev. John Godwin, MacDonald’s former tutor at Highbury Theological College in London, and soon to be his brother-in-law. Godwin had recently visited the MacDonald family, and was writing to express his concerns regarding MacDonald’s intent to leave Arundel and preach as an independent minister in the Manchester area. Godwin listed the alleged faults he had observed among MacDonald’s assets which he believed had weakened the young minister’s spiritual discernment, one being a lack of what Godwin considered proper sacred literature: “In looking over your books, I could see very few that appear to be likely to be of much service to you, in respect to your chief work.” It is easy to understand that a minister might think the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Alighieri, Robert Burns, Tom Hood, etc., would be of little use in preparing a sermon, or in strengthening a clergyman’s spiritual insights. Yet an extensive examination of the history of George MacDonald’s diverse career, not only as the author of novels, poems, fantasies, essays and fairytales, but as the author and preacher of sermons, reveals that poetry was a core element of his life, intertwined with every aspect of his livelihood, inseparable from what he regarded as holy. 

A report of MacDonald’s lecture on The Art of Poetry, illustrated by Tennyson’s Lyrics, reads in part: “He would assert for poetry that it is the highest and simplest form of human speech. He believed if we were perfect people in certain high modes of thought and feeling, it would be more natural to express ourselves in poetry than prose … It was because there were so many common-place things in our life that we talk prose.” (Middlesbrough Daily Gazette 10/21/1874.) MacDonald repeatedly maintained that “the drama was the highest form of art,” and called the works of Shakespeare “our special English Bible.” “I have studied Shakespeare,” he told a lecture audience, “more than any other book except the New Testament, and I say this—that there is but one God and Father over all, and from Him came Shakespeare as certainly as the Apostle Paul.” (Reading Mercury 3/20/1875.) “Was not Shakespeare our greatest poet; was not Hamlet his greatest poem.” (Birmingham Daily Post 10/29/1891.)  A report of MacDonald’s lecture on Milton read in part, “He should not have ventured to speak of him but that he revered him—but that, in the old, great meaning of the word, he ‘worshipped’ him.” (Birmingham Daily Gazette, 3/26/1869.) By the time John Godwin had expressed his concerns about the supposed lack of sacred value in secular literature, Rev. George MacDonald had already established a pattern that would continue so long as he was fit to speak in public: he gave lectures on poets and plays which were interspersed with his religious teaching, and he preached sermons in which he quoted from his lecture subjects.

 “MacDonald was lost on the people here,” an Arundel resident later declared. “A man like the author of David Elginbrod was trying to chop blocks with a razor when, Sunday after Sunday, he addressed them in prose-poems. I do believe some of them thought he was not quite right in the upper storey.” (Aberdeen Journal 9/22/1905.) But George MacDonald had his own spiritual standards when it came to preaching, and unusual as they may have seemed to many, he held to them throughout his life. By 1858, his conflicts with Protestant doctrine had caused him to resign from the ministry as his salaried profession. He thus began preaching extempore as a layman, declining to accept money from any church where he was invited to speak, and gradually attracting crowds too large for any church to accommodate. Those who gained admission to these services heard the celebrated author quoting Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante and other poets during his sermons. An understanding of how potentially problematic this could be is illustrated by the experience of MacDonald’s friend W. R. Nicoll, who was warned by a fellow minister after quoting Shakespeare during a sermon that “my using Shakespeare’s name in the pulpit had given great offence, and he counselled me never to do it again.” (T. H. Darlow, William Robertson Nicoll, Hodder & Stoughton, 1925, p. 37.) 

The objections were reversed for MacDonald’s extempore lectures. A report of his discourse on Robert Burns from the New York World, 1/22/1873, commenced with the quotation: “People complain of too much preaching in my lectures.” The critic added, “From beginning to end the discourse was a sermon rather than a lecture, which might not inappropriately have been delivered from the Plymouth pulpit, and it purported to be a lecture. Mr. Macdonald admonished his hearers of faults, commended to them virtues, endeavored to inspire them with a love of naturalness and simplicity, instructed them in the qualities of true poetry—all over the back of Robert Burns, using his subject as a means rather than as an end. He lectured as one who has a mission to perform, higher, perhaps, but at all events distinct from unfolding the character of his subject artistically, and not content with leaving the performance of it to the impression inevitably left by an artistic work of any kind, which it is safe to say can be a lecture as well as aught else.” The hundreds of press reports on MacDonald’s vast array of lecture subjects demonstrate that he could amply and passionately preach “over the back” of any of them, ranging from Tom Hood’s humorous poems to Shakespeare’s misanthrope Timon of Athens. Yet a consistent element of these discourses was the speaker’s reverence for the literary material represented. “Poetry,” he told an American lecture audience, “is all about us, and the human heart, whether it knows it or not, is always encircled by poetry.” (New York Evening Mail 1/22/1873.)

By 1883, George MacDonald was offering what he called Sermons from Shakespeare, which he sometimes presented in courses, and for which he charged admission. He used brief passages from a play or a sonnet as a text on which he expounded at length. The notes that MacDonald’s daughter Winifred took on her father’s Sunday evening services at their winter home in Bordighera, Italy reveal that recitation of poems by George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and several other poets commonly preceded his scripture readings. There is no indication that any of the voiced objections to any of these peculiar manifestations over the years caused the preacher’s standards to alter. George MacDonald lived his life on his own spiritual terms, and under those terms, poetry was nonnegotiable. 

While MacDonald’s primary source of fame in his day was as a novelist, there is no record of him ever having chosen a novelist as a lecture subject. Sir Walter Scott was one of six poets MacDonald featured for his lecture course on Great Poets of the Last Generation; but reports of the Scott lectures indicate MacDonald referenced Scott’s novels only briefly. We learn much from MacDonald’s numerous lectures on the plays of Shakespeare about how he regarded plot development, and MacDonald’s correspondence often indicates that he was an avid reader of novels. But MacDonald’s ongoing focus upon Shakespeare and poetry as a lecturer for at least thirty-five years indicates he took seriously his claim that poetry was superior to prose. It is however interesting to see the extent to which MacDonald’s lecture topics impacted plots for his novels, as well as his fairy tales and fantasies. The Jewish banker who rescues the Protestant merchant in MacDonald’s novel Guld Court is a reversal of the plot for The Merchant of Venice, reflective of MacDonald’s denunciation of anti-Semitism in his Merchant lectures. Characters in his novel There and Back discuss the various versions of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem to which MacDonald devoted entire lectures in the later years of his lecture career. The little boy Diamond in MacDonald’s classic children’s tale At the Back of the North Wind must determine whether his nightly encounters with a force of nature are real, or whether the creature is evil, just as Hamlet needed to determine whether to trust the visions of his father’s ghost. A plot to kill the King of Gwyntystorm in MacDonald’s fairytale The Princess and Curdie parallels in many ways the plot to murder King Duncan in Macbeth. These are but a few samples of the frequent influence that MacDonald’s literary lectures had upon his fiction.

There are three primary books that represent George MacDonald’s efforts at literary criticism: A Dish of Orts, England’s Antiphon, and The Tragedie of Hamlet. In considering these, it is important to first understand how MacDonald himself regarded literary criticism. “When acting the part of a critic,” MacDonald told an audience for his lecture on Tennyson, “he would endeavour to do so in the form of an expositor. That was the only thing in criticism which he had yet found worthy of his attention.” (Buchan Observer 1/3/1868.) A report of Mac Donald’s Wordsworth lecture reads, “In his opinion, the true calling of a critic was to enable people to see what was good, and put down what was bad. Criticism was almost a disease in the present day. Instead of taking what a wise man had to teach us, we were always trying to pick him to pieces. He pitied the critics, because they could not hurt any true workman. Theirs was a dangerous calling, and ought to be exercised very carefully.” (Hull and Eastern Counties Herald 4/13/1868.) The consistency with which MacDonald adhered to these principles, as demonstrated in the reports of his hundreds of lectures and in his own book reviews, is truly remarkable. “It may be said of the author of Robert Falconer,” a newspaper reporter wrote, “that if he had not become one of the noblest of the Christian teachers of his age, he might have become its foremost literary critic. Listening to some critics (and we allude to men of genius) when they rise to enlighten their audience on the qualities of an author, is like listening to a pedantic schoolmaster. When Mr. MacDonald comes as interpreter between author and audience, the latter hear, as it were, the voice of a wise and affectionate counselor. Should listeners dissent from his conclusions, they are pleased with the critic’s enthusiasms and unstudied eloquence. And the subject which Mr. MacDonald may take up is with him but as a vestibule to the temple of spiritual truth, which heavenly temple he tries to unlock with the keys of sympathy and reverence.” (Hampstead and Highgate Express 6/9/1880.)

To learn more about MacDonald’s work in this genre, please visit the Literary Criticism section.