Many years ago, during a late-night walk through Oxford’s beautiful Botanical Gardens, two men discussed whether the life and death of Christ was a fairy story. Both men agreed that indeed it was: one man, an atheist literature professor, averred that the life and death of Christ was no more than a fairy story, but the other, a Catholic philologist, argued that it was the one true fairy story, of which all other fairy stories were but pale shadows. The latter argument, proffered by J.R.R. Tolkien, won the day, and C.S. Lewis converted to Christianity. "The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man's history." A key element of Tolkien’s thought on Christ’s life and death as fairy story was detailed in his lecture and essay, “On Fairy Stories.” First of all, the Professor carefully clarifies that a “fairy story,” properly understood, is not a story about fairies, the diminutive, winged, sprite-like figures so often pictured in children’s books and the like. Instead, a “fairy story” is one which takes place in the world of Faerie, a mythical, mystical land of magic. Norse mythology had Valhalla, the Greek gods had Olympus, Arthur had Camelot, and the list goes on. These are mere imaginings, for the most part, but they do reflect reality: Valhalla is a pagan shadow of Heaven, Olympus yearns to be the court of the archangels, and Camelot bears a striking resemblance to the Church. The master-stroke of Tolkien’s argument, though, is what he calls “eucatastrophe” or “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’” The Professor clarifies that eucatastrophe is not “escapist” or what in narrative terms might be seen as a deus ex machina device, but is “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.” He continues: It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, gi...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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