Secondary Worlds and the Contemptus Mundi

Secondary Worlds and the Contemptus Mundi

This essay originally appeared on my Substack, Marginalia Mundus. I thought it would be an appropriate first entry for my writing here. This essay, like all of my work, is written without the aid of AI at any step in the process.

“As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God, and make no confusion there, for there they had their birth, the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.”

- George Macdonald, A Dish of Orts

I am a man possessed by the drive for other worlds.

Even before I fully understood the concept of an imaginary other-world, I was already participating in it. Maps were scrawled in 50-cent notebooks, imaginary histories for cities that never raised their towers to the sun. Armies crawled across the teeming circumference of my adolescent mind. Empires rose and fell. Peaceful lands of dwarves and elves and whatever else basking in the warm sun and blue sky of a summer’s daydream. Every adventure story, every bit of Bradbury or Robert Louis Stevenson, was melted down and recombined into fodder for pretend games, even just for myself. Sometimes, inspiration took the strangest sources. When I was a child, I heard the Grateful Dead song "Deep Ellum Blues," and, not knowing that Deep Elm is, in fact, a real neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, I confabulated a world-space, map, and milieu for the "fictional" city, based on tropes from gangster films I was too young to watch (a la The Untouchables and The Godfather). Strange bit of alchemy that.

Whether they serve the purpose of escape, as in the hedonist's paradise of Cockaigne, or the exaltation of society's highest ideals, as in fable-like realms of chivalry that were Arthur’s Britain, secondary world fantasy as a literary device is at least as old as the Middle Ages. This is to say nothing of countless folk tales handed down throughout the ages which largely transpire in the aetherial and atemporal realms of Once Upon a Time, of Elfland. In the background of both the literary and the folk traditions are the various Other-worlds and Under-worlds of pre-Christian myth: Sheol, Olympus, Alfheim, etc.

The human drive to plumb the depths of the unknown, I imagine, drove the creative impulse over time. The mythological story about the nearby mountain being a portal to a heavenly realm falls by the wayside when it is mined for iron ore. The confabulated travel narrative of Marco Polo, once the East did not seem so far away and exotic as another world, gives way to the chivalric romance inhabiting the uncharted country of the distant past. Eventually, as academic history and archeology demystified that past, the fantasists beat a retreat to the inner keep. The Romantic, the dreamlike, the world of the interior and fable, older than science and more primeval than reason. Figures like MacDonald, Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison, even Lovecraft in his Dreamlands Cycle, lead the charge into the world of dreams and the poetic unconscious. In the modern world, fantasy as genre fiction emerges not just because of its aesthetic differences from literary fiction, but because the literature of the last two centuries, dominated by the novel, has gravitated more and more towards the same material occupations and concerns as our workaday lives. In Thomas More's Utopia from the 16th century, the social critique of the predatory landowning class and the pauperization of the peasants was nested within a self-consciously fantastic story about "No-Place" delivered by a man named Raphael "Hytholoday," a Greek-rooted neologism for "speaker of nonsense." In the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, social critique is delivered openly, nakedly, using exaggerated versions of real-world subjects: Mr. Gradgrind and Ebenezer Scrooge, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. The rise of the novel as an art form, with a focus on realism, coinciding with modern social trends towards new and Enlightened ideologies led to the ghettoization of fantasy, such that by the time of Tolkien he may, in his essay "Faerie Stories," remark on the way that fantasy had been relegated to the realm of the nursery by the parochialism and taste of adults.

This trend, let's call it the "constriction of mythopoesis," continues to this day, and is perhaps even worsening. Typical fodder for faerie stories, we might think, has changed little in a thousand years. People still want tales of high adventure and true romance, of true good and true evil, of worlds where morality exists and the choices of the characters are transcendent rather than merely eminent in scope. Since the genre fantasy boom of the 1970's, it is difficult (not impossible) to find the exploration of these themes outside of the genre, as the wider market for fiction has coarsened and become dominated by not just the realism that was the hallmark of the early days of the novel, but now by the cynicism, politicking, low morals, and generally poor taste of the present mass culture. Works like The Wheel of Time, formulaic and patently in the mold of Tolkien though they were, maintained the spark of nobler human sentiment and drive for enchantment even as it was rapidly disappearing from elsewhere in literary life, perhaps life in general.

Now even the worm has begun to eat its tail, for given the success of a newer crop of fantasy writers more preoccupied with worldly concerns of power and Machiavellian struggle, epitomized by G.R.R. Martin, the cynicism has overtaken even the walled ghetto of genre fantasy. It is much like (and is perhaps merely a subspecies of) the metastasizing cancer of the "childfree" movement, wherein childless adults petition slowly but inexorably to ban children from public spaces, complaints ranging from the noise and smell of little people to more misanthropic beliefs about the value of childrearing at all. Such, I feel, is the fate of genre fantasy. Adults who confuse cynicism, coarseness, and hedonism for "maturity," slowly colonizing what they take to be a childish medium but what is really one of the final bastions of good sense in an insane world.

But I began this essay by talking about my own relationship to fantasy, to the secondary world in particular, for as the real world grows ever darker many more people retreat to the worlds of fiction, and even to airy realms of their own imagining. Never before have there been so many people engaged in what modern writers term "world-building," but what in saner times might have merely been called "imagination."

It has not escaped my attention that this runs in tandem with the general demoralization and prolification of the working classes especially the rural people, who have always carried the torch of raw poesy and folklore. The problem is compounded by the higher echelons of creatives (non-working aristocrats, professors, and sponsored artists) having become essentially defunct as a class, or having been subsumed by the endless capitalistic drive to bean-counting and monetization. These types would have codified and put to pen the untutored insights and genius of the smallfolk, but no longer.

When the world feels cramped and shrinking still, the retreat into fantasy isn't just a way to preserve those essential human things which are tread mercilessly under the foot of Capital, it is also a means of escape from present unsalutary conditions. And here is the rub, hasn't the world always been full of evil and darkness and predation? Why now, in what is materially a much more comfortable era, do we increasingly retreat so far as to leave the world entire? I believe I speak for many when I say that the material comforts of the present age seem but a mask for deeper decay. Sane folk would gladly trade calorically dense artificial food and climate controlled artificial houses for bread and beans among true friends and a drafty house of real timber and a well-loved hearth. Faerie stories especially teach us that wealth, or the appearance thereof, often masks what is otherwise empty and hollow, or else depraved.

I cannot speak for everyone, but when I search myself, two streams emerge and feed into one another like the River Ouroboros.

The first is the incalculable drive to create and explore, to transcend the workaday and enter a realm where the highest things in man are everywhere on display, and not hidden behind the drudgeries of work and the often unglamorous duties of domestic life. To be clear: true nobility and virtue lie in these things. Simple humility and self-sacrificing care for others are the epitome of the Gospel. Yet, I have never claimed to be a humble or virtuous man, nor even a sensible one. And just because a man thinks upon St. George and the slaying of dragons does not mean he cannot apply the same vigor and manly courage to his own less ostentatious duties. In fact, they are in some ways more a credit to him for the fact of their obscurity.

The second is the weariness with the world as it is, with its myriad flaws and deprivations and, what is most important: the ever-present sensation that all is crumbling and falling apart and I, a lone man, can do nothing to solve it. Then it is especially seductive to retreat into the realm of the fantastical, into faerie, where great lords and heroes and magery can conquer the odds, beat back the forces of evil which, in the waking world, threaten always to swallow us and everything we love. This too, without a moderating force, can become merely a disguised form of despair. For, after all, good men have existed in our world as in fiction. Real heroes have taken stands, and have raised swords. There is always the threat that those who would walk among titans in the world of fiction could be titans to their family, their community, nation, perhaps the world. Christ was one such man, radically present, transcending all myth to bring what was great and holy and true in the whole creative tradition of the human race into Incarnation.

Both of these streams, the flight to fantasy and away from the trevails of the modern world, are understandable. They are even in some sense commendable. Soldiers cannot be ever and anon fighting at the front, or the front will collapse. A rotation of the regiments from the spiritual trench warfare of our present society into the infirmaries which the fictional worlds nourished by true myth present for us may be necessary. It may be that for us to serve, in this day in age, as good Christians we must be also, in some sense: good Narnians, or good Hobbits, or good denizens of Faerie as our stations allow.

Think, then, of this analogy in the context of the old Christian idea of contemptus mundi, or ataraxia, a contempt for the world and for the flesh. For what is an infirmary in comparison to a battlefield other than a small compartment of Home within the Tumult of War? The soldier resting upon the bed, his wounds healing, is being restored by those comforts: warmth, tenderness, and companionship devoid of threat, which characterize the Homeland for which he fights. Danger is never far away, never truly out of mind, but so long as the front remains and there are stalwart comrades to man the guns, we can remain there for a time.

Faerie, for some of us, then, is that small glimmer of Heaven which we retreat to when we must have strength for the battles ahead. It restores us and it teaches us the greatest lesson that art has to give: this is not our ultimate home. We sojourn on this Earth, like wayfarers, and we look toward our own Kingdom, and along the way we tell stories to one another about the splendors of that Kingdom, and the dangers we will face along the way, and how, if we are brave and stalwart, we shall overcome them.

"Once upon a time," we say to one another, not unlike the Man who, long ago, in a faraway desert, spoke to His friends thus:

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto..."