How the Brothers Grimm Overthrew the Evil Empire

 The following was originally published in Books and Culture, in September / October, 2005. 

How the Brothers Grimm Overthrew the Evil Empire

A fairy tale.

September/October 2005

It is rumored that, due to the cumulative effect of small atmospheric variations, downdraft from a butterfly's wings on one side of the world may cause a typhoon on the other. Similarly, Ray Bradbury told how a tourist traveled in time to the Jurassic Era and stepped on a butterfly. He returned to the 20th century to find tyranny had replaced democracy. The Butterfly Effect, as it is called, thus refers to "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," in particular the spell cast by small causes on large events at a distance.

What good is a fairy? In an era when fantasy was under suspicion, Bruno Bettelheim wrote an ingenious and fruitful book with a title, Uses of Enchantment, that justified Tinkerbell in just such utilitarian terms. Bettelheim argued that fairy tales not only entertain, but "enlighten (a child) about himself" and help him "find meaning in life." J. R. R. Tolkien had already pointed out that fairy tales teach children the wonder of simple things. If we lend credence to the Butterfly Effect, we may add a further use of enchantment: Grimm fairy tales helped win the Cold War.

What did Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have in mind when they gathered, edited, and rewrote their collection of Central European folk tales? Bettelheim hinted at spiritual dynamics beneath his own gently Freudian reading of the Grimms. In The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimm's Magic Fairy Tales, Jesuit scholar Ronald Murphy explored those depths.1 Within the gingerbread of beloved tales—"Hansel and Gretel," "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood"—he detected strangely familiar dogmatic latticework. Most obviously, perhaps, in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves":

Once it was the middle of winter, and the snowflakes fell from the sky like feathers. At a window with a frame of ebony a queen sat and sewed. And as she sewed and looked out at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell in the snow. And in the white snow the red looked so beautiful that she thought to herself: "If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in the window frame!" … When the child was born, the queen died.

Snow symbolizes purity, and Snow White the young, innocent but vulnerable soul. The drops of blood from the queen's finger are Trinitarian: her death hints at divine purpose in suffering.

Like a traveler admiring a mountain stream, one can attend to the surface flow of the story or focus on the spiritual bedrock over which it pours. Snow White finds refuge among seven dwarves with seven candles (the church, which exists to warn and protect lost travelers). She undergoes a series of temptations, the first two—"Pretty things for sale!" "Now, for once, I'll comb your hair properly"—appealing to the vanity that ensnared her stepmother. Giving in, she falls down "as if dead," only to be revived by the dwarves. The third temptation involves an apple. Like Eve, Snow White falls, not "as if dead," this time, but "dead, and she remained dead." The dwarves anoint her with water and wine, but cannot revive her. They place her in a glass coffin on a hill, where owl, raven, and dove watch over her still form.

Scanning the Greek New Testament that Wilhelm Grimm read in morning devotions, Murphy found themes from the Grimm fairyland in the passages Wilhelm underlined: "The Spirit of God, divine providence, love of God and of neighbor, faithful confidence, ecumenical acceptance of other faiths, the Resurrection to eternal life."

One passage Wilhelm highlighted was the "Mars Hill" narrative in which Paul quoted Greek poets about a God who transcended culture: "As even some of your poets have said, 'For we are indeed his offspring.'"

At first glance the owl, raven, and dove by Snow White's grave may seem as ornamental—and even more incidental to the story—as Flower the skunk to Bambi or the English sheep dog to Disney's Little Mermaid. But in fact their presence carries deep theological meaning. By them, the Grimms symbolically address the great question that confronted Paul in Athens, and confronts us today: How do the religions of the world fit together? Should we simply reject other beliefs and (with Karl Marx) "abolish all eternal truths?" Should we welcome all beliefs to an undifferentiated and indifferent parliament of sectarian fowls?

The Grimm birds bring three spiritual civilizations to the grave of Snow White: Greek (owl), German (raven), and Hebrew (dove), the traditions on which the brothers drew for their stories. The cultures of the world, this scene implies, are beautiful, and can lead (like the white duck that carried Hansel and Gretel home) toward truth.

Yet in the end, salvation itself comes from another source: "A king's son happened to come into the forest and went to the dwarves' house to spend the night." The Prince, Lord of the seven churches, brings Snow White to life. (Wilhelm also marked the Johannian phrase, "en auto zoe en … phos ton anthropon": "in him was life, and the life was the light of men.") Confessing his love, the Prince took Snow White to his "father's palace" as wife. The evil stepmother put on "red hot slippers" and danced till she dropped dead.

The Brothers Grimm thus hint at what Paul Tillich called a "universalism" that "did not mix" but subjected other beliefs to "an ultimate criterion." That criterion is Christ, the King's Son (who appears in various guises in many of their most popular tales). Not only Jewish Scripture and Greco-Roman philosophy and poetry but also German folk tales could serve as "tutors to Christ," in Justin's famous formulation. And the stories do not fail to note the fate of wicked stepmothers, because Christian tradition is a free, therefore perilous, universalism: the cross stretches in all directions, yet still crucifies.

Adults who keep a foot in Never-Neverland continue to enjoy the simple narrative flow of these childhood stories. We may also sense their psychological depths. But before Murphy's detective work, few I think recognized the spiritual bedrock over which the stories flowed. Yet this quietly redemptive Grimm subtext set in motion a chain of events, like dwarfish dominos, or an avalanche released by the tread of leprechauns across powder snow, that ultimately toppled the castle of one of the most wicked philosophical "stepmothers" of our day.

Domino one. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton explained how fairy tales brought him to Christian faith. "The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now," he confessed in a chapter called "Ethics of Elfland," "are the things called fairy tales." Chesterton tipped his hat to "the fine collection of Andrew Lang," senior romantic at the Illustrated London News.2 But his examples were mainly drawn from the Brothers Grimm: "That giants should be killed because they are gigantic." "The terrible allegory of Sleeping Beauty … how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death, and how death also may perhaps be softened to sleep." Beyond specific lessons, the air of Fairy awoke in Chesterton a childlike wonder at the elementary phenomena of nature. "These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Fairy tales led Chesterton to five theological conclusions: "This world does not explain itself"; "There was something personal in the world"; "This purpose is beautiful in its old design, in spite of defects, such as dragons"; "The proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint"; and "All good was a remnant."

Just as owl, raven, and dove perched by the coffin of Snow White but could not save her, so Chesterton argued, in Everlasting Man, that mythology, while beautiful, had by the birth of Christ been "drained to the dregs." "Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep." Christ himself gathered enchantment into the fold of redemptive history.

Domino two. J. R. R. Tolkien's understanding of fairy tales and their relation to faith owed much to Chesterton. In his essay "On Fairy-Stories," he mentioned Chesterton several times, and (in a passage that could almost serve to list the material assets of Hobbiton) echoed "Ethics of Elfland": "It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; trees and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."

"Snow White"'s happy denouement suggested a conclusion even beyond the magic of nature. This Tolkien christened the "eucatastrophe," the good disaster. Fairy tales not only breathe the magic of renewed sight into earthly beauty, but hint that God will breathe life into mankind again:

It has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt-making creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories … But this story has entered History and the primary world … The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.

Domino three. Reprieved from trench warfare in France, C. S. Lewis read Everlasting Man and "for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history" in a form that made sense. Echoing New Testament passages that Wilhelm Grimm underlined, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy:

The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, "Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?"

When Lewis returned to postwar Oxford, he fell in with "Tollers," and it was Tolkien who helped him see Christ as the answer to that question. (Phantastes, a "Fairie Romance" by another Grimm disciple, George Macdonald, also played a role.)

Domino four. Charles Colson is the first person in the lineage I am tracing to hold political power. He read Lewis' Mere Christianity just as he lost that power—the very moment students of Fairyland know to anticipate great things. In Born Again, Colson described the transforming impact of his conversion to Christ at that moment when he had hit bottom.

Domino five. A few years later, an imprisoned Filipino senator, Benigno Aquino, read Born Again and experienced spiritual renewal. Exiled to the United States, Aquino heard sociologist Tony Campolo speak on "Authority and Power in Social Change." Campolo argued that God redeems society through love, not force. (Without, however, specifically mentioning the prince's kiss in "Sleeping Beauty.") After the lecture, Aquino told Campolo he was "willing to die" for truth: "You have given me hope," Aquino said. "I know that when I return to my homeland I will be powerless: but you have helped me to see that I will have authority." Recounting their conversation in his book The Power Delusion, Campolo reflected, "I will be anxiously waiting to see how this once powerful leader affects the people in his native country."

Neither anxiety nor hope were misplaced. Aquino was shot to death at Manila International Airport. (Now named in his honor.) When the dictatorial President Ferdinand Marcos attempted to steal the subsequent election from Aquino's widow, millions of citizens poured into the streets and gave birth to what was called "People Power." Like the huntsman in "Snow White," Marcos' soldiers refused to fire on the demonstrators, and their king and queen (known, by the way, for her collection of slippers) danced off the archipelago to political doom.

Copy-cat revolutions erupted soon afterward in Burma and China and were suppressed. Then, on the turn of an autumn tide, the masses of Eastern Europe, inspired by People Power revolts, toppled statues of Lenin and smashed the Berlin Wall, fragments of which were sold in Western department stores to stuff stockings on Christmas 1989.

Redemptive history moves in mysterious ways. Events set in flow by the Incarnation touch individual lives, but the full causal pattern is (as Paul hinted) greater than those lives, and ultimately beyond human comprehension. Now and then, some small part of that great pattern comes to light.

"The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road," Chesterton whimsically informed us. The line of causation I have traced may appear (as his poem put it) to "ramble round the Shire." But in the company of such as Tolkien and Grimm, what better place to wander? As that great Shire rambler, Bilbo Baggins himself, remarked, "Step into the Road, and … there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." If you follow my hobbit logic, it may be that a spell cast on the world by the Greek Prometheus (to whom Marx and Engels were in thrall) was broken by the angelic wings of German fairies, beating in tune to the canonical, and still useful, multiculturalism of St. Paul.

David Marshall is director of Kuai Mu Institute for Christianity and World Cultures. His newest book is entitled Why the Jesus Seminar Can't Find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could: A Populist Defense of the Gospels (Kuai Mu Press).

1. Ronald Murphy, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

2. Aside from his famous "color" collections of fairy tales, which remain popular with children, it was also Andrew Lang who cast doubts on two standard anti-Christian arguments of his day: Edward Tyler's theory of the evolution of religions, and James Frazer's theory that the gospels belonged to a common mythological pattern of "dying and rising gods."

Did Reza Aslan Eat Brains to Get Smarter?

Eating Brains Shows Reza Aslan Doesn’t Have Any, Or A Chest By: David Marshall Originally published in The Federalist March 26, 2017 When I heard that Muslim scholar Reza Aslan was caught on camera eating human brains with a Hindu cult, as author of a book refuting his best-selling but absurd notions about Jesus, I was tempted to respond, “The man could use more brains, though there are better ways to get them!” But Aslan’s stunt raised questions in many minds. Is cannibalism really so bad? A Facebook friend volunteered that he wouldn’t mind (health considerations aside) having his own brains consumed after death. Other observers took the opposite tack: “Aslan is defaming Hinduism! Mainstream Hindus would never do such a thing!” Who or what defines a religion? We’ve Become Men Without Morality I can well believe Aslan might defame Hinduism, considering how he has treated Judaism and Christianity. In his bestselling book “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” Aslan cherry-picked Bible verses to portray Judaism as blood-thirsty and purely hostile to Gentiles, and Jesus (incredibly) as a bigot who sought to overthrow Roman rule by force and set himself up as universal king. But in his dining choices in India, what Aslan defamed was the moral sense of most of humanity. In his classic “The Abolition of Man,” C. S. Lewis warned us not against men without brains, but against “men without chests”: They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardor to pursue her … Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” Lewis described “the Tao,” a universal awareness of moral truth, and warned of those who “reduce our species to the level of mere Nature.” (Cuisine?) Such was a “magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return.” There Are Moral Truths We Should Know Inherently The Tao consists of moral truths that “we can’t not know,” as Jay Budziszewski put it: truths implanted in our hearts. This is indeed how the great Chinese philosopher Confucius used the word, borrowing from pre-“Taoist” Classics. Aristotle noted that aside from scientific reasoning, one can test truth claims by the consensus of “the wise, the old, and the skillful:” recognized elders of a community. Lewis knew that within one culture even the wise might stumble. But moral truth perceived by great men and women of many ages and civilizations is likely to be well-grounded. This is what many “moral revolutionaries” today miss more than brains: that middle form of reasoning that derives from traditional wisdom and common human experience. Skeptics may build a case for cannibalism. Sure, we feel an instinctive repugnance, as of feces or bad meat, which protects us from neurological diseases like Kuru, which afflicted cannibals in New Guinea. Evolution was wise to place that warning bell in our heads, but now we understand physiology better. Just cook the meat well! Add a dash of salt and a pinch of pepper, beware of too much cholesterol, give a knowing “Look at daring me having a convention-defying cross-cultural experience!” mug for the camera, and you’re good to go. To the devil, perhaps. We Try To Assert Our Power Over Nature My friend Don Richardson worked as a missionary among the Sawi people in New Guinea, who also practiced cannibalism. Another of their customs, before he and his wife introduced them to Christ, was “touching the stench.” After a body had rotted in the jungle heat for a few days, a relative of a deceased person worked himself up into a paroxysm of sorrow to touch, even thrust his or her hand into, the defiling corpse. Don realized it was the very obscenity of the act that motivated practitioners: “I knew it would not be enough simply to tell them, ‘Look here! Stop doing this!’ . . . Obviously the very unniceness of it was somehow related to its purpose.” Richardson concluded that “touching the stench” allowed a person to gain power “over the whole supernatural world,” perhaps to “coerce an eventual abrogation of death itself.” Which Richardson believed Christ had already achieved by dying and rising from the dead. Aslan Sought Power Through The Obscene Now what is Hinduism? The word derives from the root “Indus,” the river, or “India,” the country. Unlike Islam or Christianity, Hinduism was not founded by one person, but evolved near the Indus over many centuries from a variety of beliefs, tribes, customs, and sacred texts. Hindus adhere to ideas like reincarnation, caste, guruism, and various concepts of God—He created all, is in all, is one or millions of gods—theologies churning and bubbling like an amorphous glob of papaya pudding over a stove. One such bubble which grew into Tantric Hinduism and thence into Tantric (Tibetan) Buddhism, though usually pricked and deflated by ritual, was the idea that one could seek power through “touching the stench,” as it were—by eating disgusting things, engaging in obscene sex acts, perhaps even acts of human sacrifice. Reza Aslan was just seeking ratings! You may reply. Yet ratings are a form of power. And the power of those ratings lay in flouting what we know, in our chests if not heads, to be right. Maybe that is also why some women wear hats in the shape of sex organs at protests. Why Peter Singer announces that pigs may be more worth saving than babies. Why abortion has become a sacred ritual. Why florists who refuse to patronize a “wedding” of two men must be legally disemboweled. We scoff at the “old, wise, and skillful” of tradition to gain power over Nature, Nature’s God, and one another—at whatever cost to our debunked and naturalized souls in the bargain. It has become trendy to be both sanctimonious and Satanic at the same time. Adolescent posturing, the “rebel culture” of the 1960s, has become our new, most sacred ritual. Why did Aslan eat brains? Not really for want of intellect, my jibes aside. He did it to show off. For want of understanding that comes of humility, for want of “chest.” David Marshall owns a doctorate in the theory of religions and is author of nine books, most recently "Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels." He helps prepare Chinese students who wish to study in American universities.