I am a latecomer to George MacDonald’s The Diary of an Old Soul. I knew about the Scotsman MacDonald (1824-1905), of course; had read his fantasy novels Phantastes and Lilith, as well as his fairy tales. I also knew he was admired by such luminaries as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, and W.H. Auden — a remarkable fan club. Lewis cast him in the role of Virgil-like spiritual master in The Great Divorce, while Auden located him in the first ranks of mythopoeic writers, praising his insight into the psychology of dream life. Yet for all this, MacDonald’s greatness always eluded me. Was it that he wrote “children’s literature”? But then, so did Lewis. Was it that he carried a whiff of the Victorian moralist about him? Yet the man displayed a profound grasp of the Christian gospel of grace; and besides, we need our moralists. Whatever the reason, MacDonald remained an author I could admire, but mostly from the outside looking in.
But this past spring, I heard a talk given at our college by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, an accomplished MacDonald scholar, and a passionate advocate for the man and his work. She noted that some readers rate MacDonald more highly for his poetry than for his fiction—perhaps because the poetic form requires a particular kind of concentrated thought—and singled out The Diary of an Old Soul for special praise. Intrigued, I ordered a copy, in the handsome edition recently published by InterVarsity Press, with helpful notes by Timothy Larsen.
The Diary is essentially one long poem, consisting of 366 seven-line stanzas, recording the author’s day-to-day wrestling with the things of faith. The full title of the work, in fact, is A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. The element of “strife” is a large part of what makes the poem so valuable. This is no feel-good spirituality, but a remarkable record of a serious Christian’s good days and bad, times of exaltation and times of despondency (what the desert fathers would have called acedia). MacDonald clearly intended his diary for devotional use: early editions were printed with a blank page facing each page of text, so that the reader might record her own spiritual struggles and insights. The InterVarsity edition revives this salutary practice.
Like Augustine’s Confessions, MacDonald’s Old Soul allows the reader to listen in on the author’s conversation with God. And as with the Confessions, both the human “I” and the divine “Thou” are set in strong relief. Consider the lines for May 19:
O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. / Take me and make a little Christ of me.
If I am anything but thy father’s son, / ’Tis something not yet from the darkness won.
Oh, give me light to live with open eyes. / Oh, give me life to hope above all skies.
Give me thy spirit to haunt the Father with my cries.
Haunting the Father! As a friend of mine noted, the only possible improvement to these lines would be capitalizing the word Spirit. In seven lines, MacDonald offers a trinitarian conception of the Christian life as union with Christ, animated by the Spirit, and issuing in stubbornly persistent prayer to the Father. As a “book of strife,” the work also powerfully evokes the power of evil, both inward and outward. This comes to expression in a particularly harrowing sequence in late June and early July. The sequence begins innocently enough: on June 29, the author pictures himself sheltered beneath “Beauty’s tent,” ministered to by the “doves” of Art, Knowledge, Will, Conscience, and Reason. These doves are perceived by Fancy, referring to the human faculty of imagination, which plays such an important role in MacDonald’s anthropology.
But imagination alone will not save us. In the entries for the next two days, the vision is disrupted by the intrusion by evil:
ALAS, my tent! see through it a whirlwind sweep! / Moaning, poor Fancy’s doves are swept away. /
I sit alone, a sorrow half asleep, / My consciousness the blackness all astir. /
No pilgrim I, a homeless wanderer— / For how canst Thou be in the darkness deep, /
Who dwellest only in the living day? /
It must be, somewhere in my fluttering tent, / Strange creatures, half tamed only yet, are pent— /
Dragons, lop-winged birds, and large-eyed snakes! / Hark! through the storm the saddest howling breaks! /
Or are they loose, roaming about the bent, / The darkness dire deepening with moan and scream?— /
My Morning, rise, and all shall be a dream.
Notice how the sense of God’s presence — normally so vivid throughout Old Soul — recedes, in favor of a fantastical picturing of evil powers. The“dragons, lop-winged birds, and large-eyed snakes” sounds like something out of Tolkien’s Mordor. Or we might think of Luther’s assaults by the demonic, his Anfechtungen. But as the dream is dispelled, the sense of divine presence returns:
Not thine, my Lord, the darkness all is mine— / Save that, as mine, my darkness too is thine: /
All things are thine to save or to destroy— / Destroy my darkness, rise my perfect joy; /
Love primal, the live coal of every night, / Flame out, scare the ill things with radiant fright, /
And fill my tent with laughing morn’s delight.
As Timothy Larsen notes, MacDonald has often been called a “mystic.” The term may be allowed, so long as we do not make the mistake of reducing mysticism to the psychology of religious experience. Thus, MacDonald ponders the presence of God with him precisely in those moments when he, the human subject, is least aware. So the entry for July 18:
How do I live when thou art far away?— / When I am sunk, and lost, and dead in sleep, /
Or in some dream with no sense in its play? / When weary-dull, or drowned in study deep?— /
O Lord, I live so utterly on thee, / I live when I forget thee utterly—
Not that thou thinkest of, but thinkest me.
God, our Creator, does not think “of” us, as though we enjoyed an independent reality that God — passively — happens to notice. Rather, God thinks us. If one were to press this point in an explicitly metaphysical direction (MacDonald does not), we might arrive at a Berkeley-like occasionalism, in which created things are nothing more — but also nothing less! — than God’s ideas. As God thinks us, so we are. As God loves us, our love inevitably seeks him, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”
These verses are but a sampling of the riches to be found in Old Soul. To be sure, not all the stanzas are equally compelling. Sometimes I find myself skimming the lines for a given day, and finding that they don’t especially speak to me; perhaps next year it will be different. Moreover, since spiritual tempers differ, I’m sure not everyone will find the poem helpful. But in the short time I’ve spent with Old Soul, I’ve found it to be a remarkably fruitful aid to devotion. It has also sent me back to some of the author’s other works, such as The Princess and Curdie, with fresh eyes.
MacDonald’s personal address to God has a way of rendering God startlingly real, a loving Father who wants us to “haunt” him with our cries. The Diary of an Old Soul has a place among the Christian spiritual classics. Take and read.
