In his "realistic" novels there is more ambivalences about these figures: rigid, pessimistic Sabbatarians, their Scots Presbyterianism nearly overshadows their positive attributes. According to MacDonald's son, Greville, MacDonald's father, revered by his son, inspired MacDonald's personal view of God--a stern but loving father. For MacDonald, Christianity was a religion of hope, a hope grounded in an intense awareness of the contingent nature of human existence (he was tubercular throughout his life). In an autobiographical comment in one of his novels,
Robert Falconer (1867), he has young Robert declare that he did not wish to be loved by a God who did not love everybody.
This view of God so colored his religious attitudes as to place him very much at odds, in later life, with the religious tenets of his upbringing. He eventually went so far as to advocate the ultimate salvation of all creatures--including animals and Satan himself--a daring step made only in his last fantasy, Lilith (1895). In The Great Divorce (1946) C.S. Lewis depicts a MacDonald, in the afterlife, recanting this extreme-and to Lewis heretical--view of salvation. Equally important to MacDonald is faith in the power of imagination and a belief in the reality of the unseen.
This is a free page. This page contains 187 words. This
biography contains 5,349 words (approx. 18 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our George MacDonald Access Pass.
