Mountains, Faerie Land, and the Pursuit of Perfection

Mount Si (May 7th, 2024)

Recently, I moved to Washington. The school semester terminated in April, and I emerged academically victorious. An opportunity for a sales job in Seattle and the surrounding cities had presented itself a few months prior, and immediately following my last class I set off in high spirits. I arrived in Seattle a few days later, invigorated by a new job and a new city. However, after a little more than a week, I realized that sales—especially door to door sales—was not a viable option, for a variety of reasons you would not care to know and I would not care to relate.

All that to say, there I was (and here I am still at the time of this writing) in a new city, unsure of what lies ahead and hundreds of miles from familiar places and faces. And I love it. Opportunities abound, and I know, even now, that this will be a summer that I am forever grateful for. This is all a prelude to the subjects at hand, which I will engage now that you have some understanding of my predicament.

Having quit, I had the entirety of yesterday open. Washington abounds with beautiful mountains and forests, which I discovered with glee upon my arrival. I needed time to think, and I desperately wanted to resume the audio book I was currently undertaking (Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I daresay is a lot more manageable when listened to). Therefore, I went on a hike.

I trudged through a magnificent forest that exploded with lush vegetation, furs, and pines. It had been raining, and a light mist dominated the landscape. As I climbed higher, that mist evolved into a cloud, and I soon became entranced by the ethereal beauty of it all.

My mind drifted to the great fantastical literature of previous centuries. I thought of the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, when their blindfolds were removed by the Galadhrim Elves and they gazed awestruck on the untainted beauty of Lorien. Then I thought of Faerie Land in Phantastes. In this lesser known story, a young man named Anodos awakes to find that he has been transported into a new world, a world of sublimity and darkness, of knights and goblins, a world where dames needed rescuing and monsters needed slain. The author, George MacDonald, does a brilliant job of transporting the reader into this world. We watch with Anodos and laugh as the faeries play in the bushes. We gaze with him upon the beauty of the Beech tree. We feel the dread of darkness as the Ash tree stretches out its fearsome tendrils to snatch up all that is good and beautiful. We are there.

I was there yesterday, wandering through the wooded cloud. No faeries were to be eschewed, but if I had but closed my eyes I could have seen them. I stumbled along like Anodos, gazing into the perfection of God's creation.

"Glimpse of heaven" is a cliche, and the theological legitimacy of the statement is questionable in most contexts. Nevertheless, that thought is what this scene proffered. But you see, I am rambling (which tends to happen when I write late at night). What then is the point of this jabbering? Well, it is this: there is a connection between divinity, Faerie Land, and the mountains. There is something perfect about it all, or nearing perfection. A feeling swells within us when we draw near—a feeling of sadness and joy, of being lost and happy to be lost. Our souls are tickled. 

But why?

Well, the answer can be traced back to creation. God happens to be a aesthetical connoisseur, and when He designed the world and all that is within it, He did so very critically. Beauty is deemed beautiful by the LORD. His standard is quite particular, and us humans, having been designed in His image, carry that same standard (albeit flawed and exiguous in comparison). 

In other words, we know that true, objective beauty exists, that there is a rightness to be pursued. The Greco-Roman philosophers knew this. The artists of the Renaissance knew this. The great modernists of the Enlightenment, the Romantics chasing the sublime, even the comedic Postmodernists of today knew this. To be fair, all of these stopped short, but they could not shake the fact that God had made them all to be beauty-hunters. 

God reveals Himself in His creation (what we Christians call general revelation). That is what beauty is—a picture of divinity. We are left awestruck by the beautiful nature of our Creator, and we are inspired by the excellence of it all to write, to sing, to dance, to worship. Middle Earth, Faerie Land, and every fictional landscape are inspired by what God has shown us. 

The end result is His glory. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of His hands" (Psalm 19:1, CSB). The majesty of the mountains, the magic of the forests, and our attempts to relate them glorify Him. And the best part is: what here on earth astounds, inspires, and leads us to worship, is but a small picture of what is coming.