George MacDonald integrated his understanding of biography as “God’s story” into the very fiber of his fiction. Characters such as Anodos in Phantastes, Wilfrid in Wilfrid Cumbermede, and Belorba Day in The Flight of the Shadow are all autobiographers chronicling their personal transformations. Critics have long noted that MacDonald’s fiction derives its strength from this autobiographical resonance; works like Alec Forbes of Howglen and Robert Falconer are deeply rooted in the settings and experiences of MacDonald’s own life.
This method is consistent with MacDonald’s view of biography as a narrative that allows the reader to understand God and meaning—even when that narrative is fictionalized. As Rebecca Ankeny notes in The Story, the Teller, and the Audience in George MacDonald’s Fiction, MacDonald maintained a “skepticism about all attempts to state truth unambiguously.” He believed we are hampered by point of view, vocabulary, and limited experience—the inherent constraints of being finite human beings attempting to “know and be known.”
To MacDonald, a person could be fully known only by their Creator. He was skeptical of the modern biography that focused on a didactic retelling of empirical facts, believing that finite minds could not fully grasp infinite truths. This skepticism even extended to his view of the Bible. While he treasured the Scriptures as God’s inspired Word, he refused to believe they were the only Word of God:
“By the Word of God, I do not understand The Bible. The Bible is a Word of God, the chief of his written words… but everything God has done and given man to know is a word of his, a will of his.”
MacDonald believed that humanity plays an active role in the cosmic story of God. Thus, history is a chronicle of selected lives whose stories lead people to an ultimate purpose in Christ. For MacDonald, the stories in the Bible transcend the merely factual to reveal the divine.
This worldview is beautifully illustrated in one of his most symbolic tales, The History of Photogen and Nycteris. He tells of a witch named Watho who harbors a “wolf” in her mind that hungers to know everything. Photogen (a master of light) and Nycteris (a beauty of the night) eventually overcome their captor, growing in courage to face a world they do not fully understand. In the end, they come to love the foreign world best because it represents their love for one another: Nycteris comes to love the day because it is the “crown of Photogen,” and Photogen comes to love the night as the “home of Nycteris.”
This tale is perhaps the most autobiographical reflection of MacDonald’s own philosophy. Like Photogen and Nycteris, MacDonald’s seemingly opposing influences—Calvinistic Christianity and German Romanticism—form a relationship where each reveals meaning in the other. Through the lens of Coleridge and Novalis, MacDonald’s rigid upbringing gave way to a belief that all life is a “fiction from the hand of God,” where the spirit of the law outweighs the letter.
In an age where history meant extracting truth from known facts, MacDonald wrote fiction about the unknown—and it was true. To MacDonald, “history” meant “story,” and the truth of that story emerged from the relationship between the author and the reader. Truth was synonymous with Spirit.
While MacDonald’s combination of Christianity and Romanticism foreshadowed aspects of postmodernism, he parts ways with the modern secular mind. Where the postmodernist might say truth is an inaccessible personal freedom, MacDonald insisted that this freedom must be used in the service of something greater than the self. He implored his readers to look outside the spheres of “human inventions”—such as empirical facts and rigid creeds—to behold the transcendent.
Truth is interpretive not because it lacks solidity, but because we do; not because truth is finite, but because we are. MacDonald suggests that our finite natures often seek truth as a quantity to be measured, when we should be seeking it as an entity to be encountered. As it is written: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
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