This article is excerpted and adapted from “The Magic is Real” and is reposted with permission from the author.
My favorite volume from The Chronicles of Narnia is The Magician's Nephew. I love a great beginning, that wondrous place where potency has a pulse you can put your thumb on. And for the beginnings of Narnia, that pulse is strong, and it comes through song. Digory, the main character, and a cab-horse named Strawberry stand in its mesmerizing beauty.
A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from which direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinny a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar. (Chap. 8)
The voice goes on. And with it comes reality itself.
And as [the Lion] walked and sang, the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. Digory did not know what they were until one began coming up quite close to him. It was a little, spiky thing that threw out dozens of arms and covered these arms with green and grew larger at the rate of about an inch every two seconds. There were dozens of these things all round him now. When they were nearly as tall as himself he saw what they were. "Trees!" he exclaimed. (Chap. 9)
Creation is Profoundly Magical
That's the fantasy account of Narnia's birth, a place of talking animals and unexplainable magic. The substance of that world comes through sound, not through the construction or gathering together of pre-made stuff. And so more rational readers will say, "Ah, yes. Narnia is a pleasant fiction, strange and creative."
But what about the biblical account of creation? Isn't that also where substance comes through sound (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24), where voice leads to vegetation? Familiarity makes us fumble right past this. But I would say the creation account is profoundly magical. It's magical not in the sense of being fictional, but in the sense of being enchantingly supernatural.
Think of the fantasy-like aura around the creation of animate beings. God called the living creatures up out of the land—bison from the black earth, rhinos from rock, crickets from clay, dogs from the dirt. A walking, snorting, braying, buzzing entourage of Eden.
And then comes the creation of man. "The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature" (Gen. 2:7). What sort of potent potter is this? An invisible three-personed Spirit lifts up dust from the earth, shapes it into a human form, and then blows holy wind into its nose holes. A little dust, a little divine breath, and there you have it: a human. Is that so far from the common portrayals of magic in fantasy?
Our own faith is, in a sense, more magical than any fantasy writer could dream. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that many fantasy authors who have written a creation account (Lewis and Tolkien among them) are drawing on Genesis 1-3 for inspiration. It's not that the Bible is non-magical while fantasy writing is magical. It's that the Bible is the deeper magic that inspires the fantastic imagination. Supernatural truth is, and should be, wonderfully enchanting.
Creation, Deeper Magic, and Wonder
So, if Narnia is a world of magic, creation is the world of deeper magic. It's not the lack of unexplainable magic that makes our world "normal"; it's the pervasiveness of deeper magic that goes unnoticed—from the caterpillar in chrysalis to the starling in diaconate drift. Creation is ultimately impenetrable by the laws of logic. Surely, a divine logic is at work in creation, the constant soundings of the supernatural, but such logic reflects the mysterious character of God, which we can gape at but never grasp. We cannot rid truth of its supernatural enchantment. That is part of what makes it true. Its supernaturalism goes happily beyond us. The sound of God's voice made our world what it is, directs it in ten million places, and calls out for childlike wonder.
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