Introduction
My small obsession of searching out literary novels of Christian experience1 led me a couple of years ago to George Macdonald’s Thomas Wingfold, curate, the first novel of his Wingfold Trilogy (see this post). I was fascinated by Macdonald’s capacity to depict its title character’s coming to faith in a way that had the reader inside his mind and emotions as his faith grew—faith in a loving God revealed in Jesus Christ who moulded Wingfold’s actions even while he was still unsure of what he believed.
So I have just finished reading the second novel of the trilogy, Paul Faber, surgeon, published in 1879, six years after Thomas Wingfold. I suppose I was hoping for more of the same, but what I found was different.
First, though, a little about the narrative, without giving too much away. Like the first novel, it is set in the country town of Glaston. We meet some characters from the first—Thomas Wingfold and Helen Wingfold née Lingard,2 and the Polwarths. But Thomas and Helen’s appearance is mostly limited to episodes through Thomas’ contact with new characters: Paul Faber, a medical doctor; Juliet, who marries Paul; Thomas’s employer, the rector; and Walter Drake. retired minister of a dissenting congregation,3 and his daughter Dorothy. Another major character from the first novel, the gatekeeper Polwarth, hardly appears before chapter 39 of this novel’s 54 chapters, after which he and his niece play a redeeming role in Juliet’s life, reminiscent of his role in Wingfold’s path to faith in the first novel.
Paul Faber is an atheist and scienticist,4 and a central theme of the novel is what Macdonald believes goes on in the mind an atheist. Wingfold’s role is to allow Paul to put to him his arguments against Christianity, and Thomas always responds with characteristic grace. We also see Helen and him provide a haven for a troubled Juliet and then boating through flooded Glaston to save its less fortunate inhabitants from the water. Thomas and Helen exemplify Macdonald’s belief that a person’s Christian faith should, indeed must, be expressed in their service to others.
I will say very little about Faber’s story, partly because this would spoil the novel for the reader and, in all honesty, because I found Macdonald’s presentation of Faber’s motivations unedifying and somewhat improbable.
Interwoven with Paul Faber’s story is Mr Drake’s. His story is evidently inspired by Macdonald’s own. Macdonald had left the Scottish Presbyterian Church because its theology “crushed the hearts of men by attributing injustice to their God.” (Paul Faber, surgeon, ch 10), and became the minister of the Congregational Church in Arundel, but the deacons forced him out after two years because of his theology of God’s unending love.5 In the novel Mr Drake had been a dissenting6 minister first in London then in Glaston, but when we meet him, he is a poverty-stricken retiree living on a meagre pension from his ungenerous former diaconate.
The reason why Paul Faber, surgeon didn’t evoke the same measure of joy in me that Thomas Wingfold, curate did is identified by Michael Phillips: Paul Faber “is the only skeptic, unbeliever, and atheist to take the spotlight as a featured title character” in any of Macdonald’s novels.7 Macdonald regards atheism as sterile and ultimately unliveable, so his title character cannot call forth the joy that Thomas Wingfold does. But there is still much to rejoice about in Paul Faber, surgeon.
Phillips also finds Macdonald’s prose wanting in this novel, and writes, “Not only are MacDonald’s authorial asides and digressions long and numerous, the dialogue between the characters are often seem to be excuses for MacDonald to enclose his own sermonettes between quotation marks. Much of the dialogue thus drifts into lengthy theological monologue.”
C. S. Lewis compiled a collection of 365 daily readings from Macdonald’s work.8 In his Preface, Lewis agrees with Phillips about Macdonald’s writing. It is, he says, not of the first rank, and hardly of the second. But what motivates Lewis’ anthology is the great wisdom and holiness he finds in Macdonald’s novels. He clearly includes several excerpts from Thomas Wingfold, curate in the anthology—but apparently none from Paul Faber, surgeon.
George Macdonald’s theology
Nonetheless, whilst I agree with the criticisms of Macdonald’s style, as I read his passages of “lengthy theological monologue” I was drawn well and truly into his theology, unusual as it is. I will present it here as far as possible in Macdonald’s own words, as a summary in my language will not do justice to his thought.
Through the growth of Wingfold’s faith over time, in Thomas Wingfold, curate we glimpse Macdonald’s conviction that the growth of the individual Christian’s faith over a lifetime is the result of God working in them. In Paul Faber, surgeon Macdonald makes this conviction more explicit, and, although his theology is imaginative and emotive rather than systematic, it becomes clear that this lifelong process is for him the process of being born again. For him, the present-day evangelical distinction between justification (“rebirth”) and sanctification (“growth”) does not exist. However, the lifelong process is delayed or broken by sin and the thoughts and acts it generates, and there is for Macdonald a point in the process when a person wakes up, as it were, to God and starts to obey him actively rather than unconsciously. The endpoint of this process comes into view when the narrator remarks that if Dorothy had asked Wingfold about God, he would have said
that the only way to be absolutely certain of God, is to see Him as He is, and for that we must first become absolutely pure in heart. For this He is working in us, and perfection and vision will flash together. (ch 21)
Walter Drake
This life process is illustrated in various ways in the lives of his characters. In the case of Mr Drake, it is also tied up with his being a dissenting minister. Drake was spiritually corrupted during his student days:
But he was injured both spiritually and morally by some of the instructions there given. . . The master-duty of devotion to Christ, and obedience to every word that proceeded out of His mouth, was very much treated as a thing understood, requiring little enforcement; while, the main thing demanded of them being sermons in some sense their own — honey culled at least by their own bees, and not bought in jars, much was said about the plan and composition of sermons, about style and elocution, and action — all plainly and confessedly, with a view to pulpit-success — the lowest of all low successes, and the most worldly. (ch 10)
Towards the end of his ministry in Glaston Drake
. . . grew humble before the Master, and the Master began to lord it lovingly over him. He sought His presence, and found Him; began to think less of books and rabbis, yea even, for the time, of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, and to pore and ponder over the living tale of the New Covenant; began to feel that the Lord meant what He said, and that His apostles also meant what He said; forgot Calvin a good deal, outgrew the influences of Jonathan Edwards, and began to understand Jesus Christ. (ch 10)
But this results in his forced retirement on a miserly pension by the leaders of his congregation, who reflect Macdonald’s Arundel elders. Drake is ground down by poverty and pride, and also falls back spitirually. The narrator says,
I will freely allow that if his faith had been as a grain of mustard seed, he would not have been so haunted with a sense of his poverty, as to be morbidly anxious to confess it. He would have known that his affairs were in high charge: and that, in the full flow of the fountain of prosperity, as well as in the scanty, gravelly driblets from the hard-wrought pump of poverty, the supply came all the same from under the throne of God, and he would not have felt poor. A man ought never to feel rich for riches, nor poor for poverty. The perfect man must always feel rich, because God is rich. (ch 21)
Thus God working in us is a two-way street. We must work with what God reveals to us. Describing Drake in his poverty, the narrator asks,
But why then did God leave him thus without faith? Why did not God make him able to trust? He had prayed quite as much for faith as for money. His conscience replied, “That is your part—the thing you will not do. If God put faith into your heart without your stirring up your heart to believe, the faith would be God’s and not yours. It is true all is God’s; he made this you call ‘me’, and made it able to believe, and gave you Himself to believe in; and if after that He were to make you believe without you doing your utmost part, He would be making you down again into a sort of holy dog, not making you grow a man like Christ Jesus His Son. (Ch 22)
Drake’s story touches on theodicy, the issue of affliction. For Macdonald it is a part of the growth process, and recognised as such retrospecively:
but God must wait with his own patience — wait long for the child of His love to learn that her very sorrow came of His dearest affection. Who wants such affection as that? says the unloving. No one, I answer; but every one who comes to know it, glorifies it as the only love that ever could satisfy his being. (ch 38)
Finally, Drake comes into a large and unexpected inheritance, and quickly buys the town’s manor house and sets out to improve the living conditions of the town’s poorest residences. At the time he makes these purchases, his daughter Dorothy has reason to question her father’s wisdom.
The main cause whence arose his insufficiency and her lack of trust was, that all his faith in God was as yet scarcely more independent of thought-forms, word-shapes, dogma and creed, than that of the Catholic or Calvinist. How few are there whose faith is simple and mighty in the Father of Jesus Christ, waiting to believe all that He will reveal to them! How many of those who talk of faith as the one needful thing, will accept as sufficient to the razing of the walls of partition between you and them, your heartiest declaration that you believe in Him with the whole might of your nature, lay your soul bare to the revelation of His spirit, and stir up your will to obey Him? (ch 31)
Nonetheless, Drake’s motive for helping the poor is based on his Christian belief and illustrates Macdonald’s belief that right action contributes to one’s development even if one’s understanding lags behind. But Drake does come to realise that the doctrines of a dissenting minister that he has held for much of his life are out of alignment with God’s love, and begins to come into a more real relationship with God.
The rector
Macdonald’s belief that action can lead to understanding (as well as vice versa) comes out in the narrator’s words in ch 9: “I think when the sun rises upon them, some people will be astonished to find how far they have got in the dark.”
This is illustrated in the life of the rector:
Every body liked the rector, and two or three loved him a little. If it would be a stretch of the truth to call a man a Christian who never yet in his life had consciously done a thing because it was commanded by Christ, he was not therefore a godless man; while, through the age-long process of spiritual infiltration, he had received and retained much that was Christian. (Ch 8)
The rector fades out of the narrative rather unsatisfactorily, but in ch 18 we read, “The rector’s was a quiet awakening, a gentle second birth almost in old age.”
Dorothy Drake
Dorothy and Juliet (who shares something of her husband’s scepticism) have a vigorous discussion.
“What God must feel like, with this world hanging on to Him with all its pains and cries — !”
“It’s His own fault,” said Juliet bitterly. “Why did He make us — or why did He not make us good? I’m sure I don’t know where was the use of making me!”
“Perhaps not much yet,” replied Dorothy, “but then He hasn’t made you, He hasn’t done with you yet. He is making you now, and you don’t like it.” (ch 36)
Dorothy understands that life is a process in which God and each of us is involved. A little later she alludes to the issue of the human will in a little more detail.
“If God has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him you have to go for help to become good. When you are good, then you will know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and right — so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one who was not good. I don’t think,’ he said, ‘you will ever get a thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself for it — and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is to understand the answer.”
Strangely, although Dorothy’s understanding is limited, it is this conversation with Juliet that causes her to leap forward herself. Another example of action leading to growth.
Had it not been for Wingfold’s help, Dorothy might not have learned these things in this world; but had it not been for Juliet, they would have taken years more to blossom in her being, and so become her own. Her faint hope seemed now to break forth suddenly into power.
Thomas and Helen Wingfold
Thomas Wingfold recognises the ongoing change in himself. He tells his story to the rector:
. . . Wingfold told him how through great doubt, and dismal trouble of mind, he had come to hope in God, and to see that there was no choice for a man but to give himself, heart, and soul, and body, to the love, and will, and care of the Being who had made him. (Ch 9)
And later to Faber:
. . . the faith of Jesus in His God and Father is, even now, saving me, setting me free from my one horror, selfishness; making my life an unspeakable boon to me, letting me know its roots in the eternal and perfect; giving me such love to my fellow, that I trust at last to love him as Christ has loved me. (Ch 30)
A little over halfway through the novel, Thomas preaches in the chapel that the rector had built on his own property. In it he expresses not just his own experience, but Macdonald’s. It is one of his more striking pieces of writing. Here are a couple of excerpts.9
God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on, from fact to fact divine He advances, until at length in His Son Jesus, He unveils His very face. Then begins a fresh unveiling, for the very work of the Father is the work the Son Himself has to do — to reveal. His life was the unveiling of Himself, and the unveiling of the Son is still going on, and is that for the sake of which the world exists. When He is unveiled, that is, when we know the Son, we shall know the Father also. The whole of creation, its growth, its history, the gathering total of human existence, is an unveiling of the Father. He is the life, the eternal life, the Only. I see it — ah! believe me — I see it as I can not say it. From month to month it grows upon me. The lovely home-light, the One essence of peaceful being, is God Himself. (ch 31).
Towards the end:
If we do not thus ourselves open our house, the day will come when a roaring blast of His wind, or the flame of His keen lightning, will destroy every defense of darkness, and set us shivering before the universe in our naked vileness; for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known.
The passage above is not, I think, to be taken as a threat of divine judgement but as a suggestion that somehow the purification process is brought to its end in all of us. This seems to be confirmed two chapters later.
For I see and understand a little how God, giving righteousness, makes pure of sin, and that verily — by no theological quibble of imputation, by no play with words, by no shutting of the eyes, no oblivion, willful or irresistible, but by very fact of cleansing, so that the consciousness of the sinner becomes glistering as the raiment of the Lord on the mount of His transfiguration. I do not expect the Pharisee who calls the sinner evil names, and drags her up to judgment, to comprehend this; but, woman, cry to thy Father in Heaven, for He can make thee white, even to the contentment of that womanhood which thou hast thyself outraged. (ch 33)
Wingfold’s wife Helen also senses God at work working new birth in her:
And through it all, reviving afresh with every sign of Nature’s universal law of birth, was the consciousness that her life, her own self, was rising from the dead, was being new-born also. She had not far to look back to the time when all was dull and dead in her being: when the earthquake came, and the storm, and the fire; and after them the still small voice, breathing rebuke, and hope, and strength. Her whole world was now radiant with expectation. (Ch 30)
A few lines later we read:
her life was an active waiting for the revelation of its object in splendor before the universe. The world seemed to her a grand march of resurrections — out of every sorrow springing the joy at its heart, without which it could not have been a sorrow; out of the troubles, and evils, and sufferings, and cruelties that clouded its history, ever arising the human race, the sons of God, redeemed in Him who had been made subject to death that He might conquer Death for them and for his Father — a succession of mighty facts, whose meanings only God can evolve, only the obedient heart behold.
Polwarth
The character whose growth towards purity of heart and obedience to God has developed furthest is Polwarth, demonstrated by his saintly conduct towards Juliet in the novel’s later chapters. The narrator alludes to Pilgrim’s Progress when he compares him to Drake:
In reality, little Polwarth could have carried big Drake to the top of any hill Difficulty, up which, in his spiritual pilgrimage, he had yet had to go panting and groaning — and to the top of many another besides, within sight even of which the minister would never come in this world. (ch 25)
and a few lines later:
. . . he was alive all through, because the life eternal pervaded every atom of his life, every thought, every action.
Polwarth’s motivation:
I am one of those, Mrs. Faber,” he went on after a moment’s pause, but his voice neither became more solemn in tone, nor did he cease his digging, although it got slower, “who, against the non-evidence of their senses, believe there is a Master of men, the one Master, a right perfect Man, who demands of them, and lets them know in themselves the rectitude of the demand that they also shall be right and true men, that is, true brothers to their brothers and sisters of mankind. It is recorded too, and I believe it, that this Master said that any service rendered to one of His people was rendered to Himself. Therefore, for love of His will, even if I had no sympathy with you, Mrs. Faber, I should feel bound to help you.” (ch 41)
Paul Faber
Faber’s atheism means that he is stuck fast at a point very early in the process Macdonald describes, but this doesn’t mean that God is doing nothing with him. Tucked away in a time of great despair is the following:
Faber’s pride grew and grew as he sat and brooded, or, rather, was brooded upon. (Ch 37; bolding is mine)
One little thing
Perhaps not so little. It depends on one’s perspective.
Dorothy quotes Wingfold as follows:
He says it is not from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in some possible measure, as He knows Himself. (ch 32)
Macdonald thus puts Jesus above the Bible. This meshes with the view of those who say we should read the Bible through the lens of Jesus and with the Holy Spirit’s guidance; the Bible takes us to Jesus, and he is paramount.
Conclusion
There are those who regard Macdonald’s theology as heretical, but I have not read much of him beyond the two novels, and his alleged universalism is not an issue I have seen in the novels. His talk about the afterlife in Paul Faber, surgeon is open to various interpretations.
What blows me away in this novel is Macdonald’s obvious and passionate love of Jesus and of the God we see through Jesus, and there is much, much more of this than I have quoted in this post. I know some may argue that this is just imaginative writing, not theology, but love for God and his love for us are not nice formulations: they are a reality into which Macdonald wants to draw his reader. And theology is supposed to be about reality.
Macdonald’s picture of the process of life as a process of rebirth in which the God who created us participates in order to draw us to him transgresses against present-day evangelical formulations. But Macdonald’s insistence that God is interested and engaged in the entire life of every one of his creatures from the moment of our creation is one that I can’t argue against, differ though it may from some current Christian frameworks. I have indicated above that I see an autobiographical element in the novel. I must also say that there is much in my 82 years of life that causes me to identify with Macdonald’s view of life’s unfolding, complete with its valleys and hilltops.
We may find Macdonald’s theology and his expression of it unusual. A-hundred-and-fifty years ago it was revolutionary. Small wonder, perhaps, that he chose to live abroad for much of his life after his work in institutional churches came to an end.
I close by quoting from the most sympathetic work on Macdonald’s theology that I have found (but I haven’t searched very far):10
The crucial issue for this book is not the quality of MacDonald’s literary contribution, but the extent to which his use of the imagination enables him to truthfully and effectively convey the nature of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, the nature of humans created and re-created in God’s image, the role of the imagination, and the nature of the human pilgrimage, both now and eternally.
Footnotes
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- See the post on novels of Christian experience and posts on individual novels: Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Dostoyevsky’s novel The brothers Karamazov and Robinson’s Gilead, as well as Thomas Wingfold, curate. ↩
- They have married between the two novels. ↩
- That is, a non-Anglican Protestant congregation. I don’t think Macdonald ever identifies the denomination. ↩
- No, this isn’t a misspelling. Scientism is the belief that science explains everything we need to understand, and that religious belief is unnecessary. ↩
- Arundel is an English country town in (now) West Sussex. ↩
- That is, Protestant but not Anglican. ↩
- Michael Phillips, George MacDonald: A writer’s Life. New York: RosettaBooks, 2019. ↩
- George Macdonald, An anthology 365 readings, edited and with a preface by C. S. Lewis. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ↩
- These are only a small part of Wingfold’s/Macdonald’s sermon. The whole of it is worth reading. ↩
- Kerry Dearborn, Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006, p171. ↩
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