Interview with Malcolm Guite

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Wolfgang: Nice to meet you. My name is Wolfgang. I run a newsletter called The Art Newsletter.

Malcolm Guite: Nice to meet you.

Wolfgang: We talk about contemporary Christian arts. And by contemporary, I mean anyone who's been making art for God in the past 50 years. That's kind of the main focus.

Malcolm Guite: I probably fit into that somewhere. So, my name is Malcolm Guite. I'm an Englishman — you could probably say three things I do. I'm a professor of literature and theology, I'm retired; I'm a priest in the Church of England; but I suppose I'm also, rather more particularly for this purpose, a poet. So, priest, professor, and poet.

I've written books about the realm of literature and theology — a book called Faith, Hope and Poetry. I wrote a book specifically aimed at Christian creatives to encourage them and give them some theological underpinning, called Lifting the Veil. We've got a big conference about that book in Boston this October. And I've published five collections of lyric poetry — shorter poems. I'm known for my use of form, so I've published sonnets and poetry with rhythm and rhyme.

And most recently, my big project is a ballad cycle — an epic retelling of the stories of King Arthur — coming out in four volumes. The first volume came out this spring; it was called Galahad and the Grail, and it's been doing very well. The second volume, The Coming of Arthur, comes out this November. After Galahad and the Grail there are two prequels and a sequel — the final volume will likely be out in the spring of 2028. So it's a big project.

Wolfgang: I think that leads into the first question I wanted to ask. C.S. Lewis famously said the Gospel is "myth become fact." Why does myth matter so much to you — why myth when you write about Christ, or about your Christianity?

Malcolm Guite: Let's take it back to C.S. Lewis for a minute. I think he said that myth became history. Very much part of Lewis's conversion story is the realization that this greatest of all stories — creation, fall, and redemption, the whole Christ event — has mythic resonance. It's got the same resonance as all the other beautiful stories he'd ever loved about dying and rising gods, like Balder the Beautiful or Adonis. But his problem was he couldn't trust those, because they were just myths in the sense of not being true. He wanted something that was both imaginatively resonant — working on the deepest parts of him — but also reliable and solid, not an insult to his reason. He needed to know there were reasons for being Christian.

Let me give you a bit more background on Lewis, because it'll help. In his book Surprised by Joy — the story of his conversion — he describes what it was like as a young man in Oxford, teaching philosophy, thinking he's an atheist, having read all the great masters of suspicion, the Marxists and Freuds and nature-writers of the world saying everything is just a grim mechanism unfolding in the vacuity of space, no final meaning, meaning is something we make up around the firelight on a Saturday night with no bearing beyond that. He'd swallowed that. He describes his mind at the time: "The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast: on the one side a many-islanded sea of myth and poetry, on the other a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly everything I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly everything I believed to be true I thought grim and meaningless."

He needed something to bring those two hemispheres of his mind together — to realize his imaginative apprehensions and intuitions might be telling the same truth as the things he could verify.

The famous story is that in September of 1931, he was walking with his great friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in the grounds on Addison's Walk at his college. He's still not a believer, but Tolkien and Dyson are, one a Catholic and the other an Anglican. They get on the subject of myths and all the myths they love, and Lewis is really eloquent about how much these myths can mean. But in the end he says the problem with myths is that — although they're breathed through silver — they're lies. And Tolkien stops him in his tracks and says no, they're not lies. We're made in the image of God. We're made as makers. We may not get it right factually, but the deep resonance and inner truth of story is always given of God — there's something about these stories that carries divine truth. Lewis doesn't refute that, but he doesn't fully accept it either — though he can see Tolkien is saying there's more to the myths he loves than he'd thought.

Later on they get onto the subject of Jesus, and Lewis says: even if you persuaded me — which I think you could — that this man rose again from the dead, that he was born in Bethlehem and lived this life and said these astonishing things and was crucified and rose again — what difference does that make to me? That's 2,000 years ago. Bully for Jesus. But here am I, stuck here.

And his friend Tolkien says, "Jack, I can't believe you just said that. We've just been talking about your favorite myths — Balder the Beautiful, who's slain by his blind brother, and Odin, who hangs himself for nine days on the tree in order to go down and find his son. You love that stuff." And Lewis says, "Yeah, yeah, I do — but like I said, I wish it were true, but it's not true." And Tolkien says: can't you see that the story in the whole world of mythology that you find most meaningful and most deeply attractive has actually come true in this one instance? It's been made fact. It's been history. And if you read the Gospels, you'll see they're not set in some mythology in a neverland or a Valhalla — they're set in real places, Nazareth and Bethlehem and Palestine, with historical dates and real people. This is history. This is reliable. And yet by being reliable history it doesn't cease to have the beautiful meaning that reaches as deep into the soul as all great mythological writing does.

When Lewis hears Tolkien say this, you can almost see the two hemispheres of his mind coming together over this satisfying incarnation — not only of love and of logos, the word, but an incarnation, if you like, of the greatest story into reliable history. He subsequently wrote, in an essay called "The Grand Miracle," that it's like the missing chapter of the novel of the universe — not only a great story that's both mythological and historical, but one that makes sense of what all the other mythological stories were pointing to.

A few days later he becomes a Christian, and writes to his friend Arthur Greeves that his long night talk with Tolkien and Dyson had a lot to do with it. That event releases a power in his writing — both his apologetics, like Mere Christianity, which is never dry theology, always illustrated with a brilliant image or story, and later The Chronicles of Narnia and The Ransom Trilogy.

Lewis also talks about picking up a book by George MacDonald — the grandfather of fantasy literature — when he was sixteen, still an atheist. He didn't become a Christian for another ten years, but he says his imagination was baptized by that book. That is exactly my story. I love poetry and myth. I was brought up in a Christian household but rejected my faith. One of the things I read when I was young, loved, and then reread just before I became a Christian again, was The Chronicles of Narnia — alongside the New Testament for the first time, and the dialogues of Plato, as it happened. It all came together and made sense. The sheer storytelling — mythos is simply the Greek word for story — won most of me over first. But I needed to know it wasn't just whistling in the dark, just wishful thinking. I needed to look at the evidence — who moved the stone, how a group of people who were going to be crucified themselves stuck to their story that Jesus had risen, when it would have been much easier to say they made it up. The fact that they stuck to it through thick and thin, generation after generation of people meeting the risen Jesus one way or another, gives confidence that this really happened in the history of the world as well as in the realm of myth and story.

Wolfgang: I want to touch more on that idea of "baptizing the imagination." I think for a lot of people watching — I grew up in Texas, and I feel like this aspect of myth is almost missing from American Christianity specifically. People would be apprehensive about taking what is maybe not literally true and weaving it in with what is true — Christ — to tell a story that draws people's imagination and spirit toward him. What is the limit, would you say, in terms of myth? How far can we take it?

Malcolm Guite: We have to be clear about what we're doing. If I tell you a story I know isn't true, but tell it in a way meant to make you think it is true — I really did meet a goblin last night — that's deceiving you, that's lying. But if I say, "I'm going to tell you a story about goblins and elves," we both know I don't expect you to believe in their actual physical existence. You're not being deceived. As Coleridge said, whenever you go to see a Shakespeare play, you willingly suspend your disbelief — you enter voluntarily into the storytelling world. Why? Because apart from the pleasure and entertainment, there's something about the conflict of good and evil being more outwardly visible in story — clearer than it is in life, where it's all mixed up — that helps you see things better.

But if we want to know whether telling a story is a good way of telling the truth about Jesus, in a way Jesus himself would approve of, let's cut out the middleman and go straight to Jesus. What does he do to get his teaching across? He tells stories. Think about the parable of the prodigal son — the deep truth that even when we screw up, God still loves us. "While he was still a long way off, the father saw him and ran to meet him." Even while we're still a long way off, God comes to find us where we are — looking after pigs, the most disgusting thing a good Jewish boy could be doing. It doesn't matter how far we've fallen; we can still come to ourselves, turn around, come back. There's a beautiful prayer in the Anglican Communion: "While we were still a long way off, you met us in your Son and brought us home." At one level that's one of the truest stories telling the most important truth ever — but I don't need to know whether there was an actual guy with a prodigal son who went away. It's not truth on that level; it's not meant to be what you'd have seen if you'd been standing there with an iPhone recording. It's meant to be a story. And there's a sting in the tail — maybe you're not the prodigal son, maybe you're the self-righteous older brother who resents that a sinner's been forgiven, who keeps score of wrongs — and the father has to go find that son too, lost not in a pigsty but in being a self-righteous person who thinks he's better than everyone else. Just as much a sin.

Jesus tells these stories constantly. Think of the Good Samaritan — I don't have to believe there was a historical Good Samaritan, but I believe there was a historical Jesus who told the story. Story works at many levels. The story of Jesus, to be about how he really became human and saved us, has to be true both at a literal and a symbolic level. But there are plenty of stories that don't have to be true at a literal level in order to be really true at a symbolic level.

Or take one of the most vivid moments in the Old Testament — where you can see where Jesus gets it from. King David sins with Bathsheba, has Uriah killed, and nobody dares tell the king he's doing wrong. Nathan realizes that if he just confronts David directly, he'll get nowhere — he'll lose his own head. So he tells the king a story: a rich man with all these sheep, and his poor neighbor with just one little lamb, and the rich man steals the neighbor's lamb. The king is morally outraged — "bring that man here, we need to set this right" — and all Nathan has to say is, "You are the man." That's a story that shows you storytelling can awaken your moral imagination — you may be capable of seeing a truth about yourself in a story about somebody else that you couldn't see directly.

Wolfgang: If I can continue to play devil's advocate — the holidays are coming up, and I know you often dress up as Santa Claus. A lot of people would say that St. Nicholas becoming Santa Claus is exactly this path taken too far. What would your response be to someone who says that?

Malcolm Guite: It's an interesting one. Of course, we say Father Christmas, and Santa Claus is a shortening of St. Nicholas — there was a real St. Nicholas, a bishop, who really did do good. Father Christmas as a figure represents, for children, all sorts of beautiful things — in the end, the generosity of God's sheer giving, and that God cares how we live and wants us to try to be good. There's a lot of good wrapped up in that. Some parents worry that when kids find out Father Christmas isn't literally true, they'll put "Our Father in heaven" in the same category — and depending on how the story is told, there may be some danger in that. But I think on the whole it does more good than harm. Older kids often enjoy joining in with their parents to help younger siblings keep believing, and look back and say that was good for me — it helped me feel part of a bigger story. I think around the same time a parent tells their children Father Christmas is a made-up story that carries a lot of good and true things, they also need to talk to them about how our Christian faith is full of true and good things too, but it isn't a made-up story — it's a real one.

Wolfgang: I want to go back to something you mentioned — you wrote a book on Christian creatives, and I think that's something a lot of our audience is interested in. I feel like in our age, if you're not extremely successful as an artist by your mid-twenties, it feels like you've failed. What would your advice be to someone young, trying to figure themselves out, wanting to put themselves out there as an artist — specifically a Christian artist?

Malcolm Guite: First of all, don't give up. Let me tell you — I'm very fortunate that in the last ten, fifteen years my poetry has gotten out there, I finally got published and well reviewed, I sort of accidentally started a YouTube channel almost without knowing what it was, just trying to be there for my students during lockdown. All that started happening to me in my early fifties. But I started wanting to be a poet — wanting to write poetry about King Arthur — when I was sixteen. I didn't get my first book of poems published until 2012. I was born in 1957, so do the math — I was in my fifties. I'd been writing for nearly forty years, and my mother and my wife and my dog knew about it, and a few Christian friends, and eventually some of my poems got read in church, and it spread a little from there — into a few magazines, and eventually a publisher.

But I wasn't just doing it alone — I already had a community of people around me who valued what I did, even if it was just my local church. And I knew — this is a special advantage of being a Christian artist — that I was already loved and valued by God. I knew God had already said yes to me in Jesus, an enormous yes that nothing can ever take away. So I didn't have to do my art to justify my life. I was never in that awful situation of being only as good as your last piece. As a Christian, my worth doesn't depend on other people's opinion. It's given to me because I'm made in the image of God, redeemed and loved by Jesus, seen by God in Christ as his beloved child. No number of likes on Facebook or good reviews is ever going to be as good as that — and that sets you free. God is going to love me whether I'm a successful, famous artist or an unknown one. Van Gogh, Keats, Blake — Blake sold about two hundred books in his entire lifetime, and now he's world famous, and we're all still listening to what he says. You don't know the outcome.

I'd say to a young creative person: God made you to make. In Genesis, we're told we were made in the image and likeness of God — and about the only thing you can say about what God is like is that he loves making stuff. The whole first chapter of Genesis is him making things, including us, doing the thing anybody who's made something does: "this is good," "this is very good." On the seventh day he contemplates it. And of everything he made, only one thing is said to be made in his image and likeness — that's you and me. So at least one big part of being made in the image of God is that we're made to be makers. As Tolkien wrote in one of his poems, we make still by the law by which we're made. There's a big difference between us and God — God makes everything out of nothing, God is the prime creator, creation ex nihilo. We're creatures; we're already made. What we do with our creativity is take God's creation and recombine bits of it into something new and beautiful, and that something new and beautiful is part of our praise of God.

Keep going. Be encouraged. Whatever you do, do it unto the glory of God. Make the best work you can, because you're making it in God's providence — other people will see it too, and they'll love it. But the main thing is to be able to bring your day's work to God and say, "How about that?" — and have him smile on it. I'll say this too: some churches, when they do so-called art, and some Christian music too, if I'm honest, is actually pretty shoddy — it's not the best it could be, but people think because it's Christian that makes it okay. On the contrary — if you're a consciously Christian artist, nothing but the best is good enough for God.

I think the Christian creative is in a unique position, which on the one hand presents unique pressures, but by the same token offers unique opportunities. There's always something a bit edgy about being an artist — you have to get to the edge to look at things from a different perspective. If you're an artist in a church, a lot of churches have lost touch with art. In the Middle Ages the church and art were completely connected, but that split apart in the Reformation and afterward, especially in the development of Protestant Christianity in America. A lot of mainstream Christians don't really get art, and don't notice it — so if you're in their church and you're an artist, you feel slightly on the edge of your own community. But then, because you're an artist, you're part of the artistic community too — and when the other sculptors, musicians, composers, filmmakers find out you're a Christian, that's a bit weird for them too. So you're out on the edge of both worlds — a big circle of the church with hardly any art in it, a big circle of artists who've forgotten that all art comes from God, and a tiny intersecting circle of people who are both artists and Christians. The difficulty is you feel edged out on both sides — but that same difficulty is the big opportunity, because these two worlds desperately need to talk to each other. The church is worse off for not nurturing art or learning from it; art has gotten itself into a mess because it's forgotten about order and beauty and creation and praise, and spends a lot of its energy trying to be shocking instead of remembering that the original purpose of art was to find what's beautiful and open it out in a new way, revealing deeper truths, to the praise of God. The only people who can bridge those two worlds are young creative Christians like the ones watching this. You have to be totally in with the other artists, sharing in all the artistic things they do — but never leave out that your art makes sense partly because of your Christian faith. And in the church, you have to show you're just as Christian as the next person, but that your art is part of being a Christian.

Wolfgang: Is that the idea behind the conference you're doing in Boston?

Malcolm Guite: Yes. My book is called Lifting the Veil: Theology, Imagination, and the Kingdom of God. It's about how poetry and art can lift what Coleridge called "the film of familiarity" that's settled over the world — we need a fresh astonishment, a recovery of vision, and art can give us that, partly because the artist works in and through the image of God within them. I talk about Christ in the poetic imagination, Christ in the moral imagination, Christ in the prophetic imagination — art as prophecy. What I'm hoping to give young Christian creatives is a solid theological underpinning for what they're doing, and a lot of inspiration, centered on Jesus and the way Jesus himself told parables. The conference is called Lifting the Veil, on the 23rd and 24th of October, organized by an organization called Hope — I can send you the details. I'm also writing a lot of poetry right now, and I'm going to be taking time off to write, and when I do travel beyond this conference it'll mostly be as a poet, reading poetry. Up to now I've done a lot of lecturing in churches and universities, making the case for the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty — I'm not going to do that forever, because I'm getting older, and I want to spend less time talking about art and more time actually making it, because I don't know how much time I have left. This conference is meant to be one of the last times I get up and say this to a room of young creatives and put the book in their hands — a showcase of the collaborations I've done over the years with painters and composers, who'll be there too. I don't want it to be a celebration of my own work — I want it to say, here's an example of what you could do, and more. Jesus, after telling the story of the Good Samaritan, says "go and do thou likewise" — that's what I want to say too. I'm going to finish it with an actual blessing, commissioning the people there, because pretty soon they'll be getting the rocking chair out for me on the porch, and I want to know somebody else is out there carrying the torch.

Wolfgang: I want to shift a little — I think something you're known for is your pipe, and I see you have a beer with you too. I think a lot of American Christianity would see those as incompatible with faith. What's your argument for tobacco, and drink?

Malcolm Guite: Maybe it's a cultural thing. We've been talking about C.S. Lewis — Lewis and Tolkien, huge inspirations to me, both smoked pipes and drank. Why did this become such a big deal in America specifically? There are historical reasons — you have to go back to Prohibition. There was a real social danger around spirits and addiction — though I'd argue there's a much bigger problem with opioid addiction now than with alcohol. There was a temperance movement in America, but I think it misused the word "temperance." To be temperate means to do things in a balanced way, where you're the master of the thing, not it the master of you — knowing when to abstain. Christianity has seasons of abstinence, like Lent and Advent, where you step aside from things, because anything in your life that becomes a substitute for your dependence on God is a dangerous idol. A man might not drink or smoke, but if he thinks a big flashy car and a bigger salary will prove or save him, that could be a much bigger obstacle — salvation by works, not by faith — than enjoying a pint with friends. I wrote an article called "In Defense of a Pipe and a Pint," which you can find online, if you want my fuller thinking.

There's no smoking in the Bible, because tobacco hadn't been discovered yet, but there's plenty about enjoying wine — Paul says, "take a little wine for your stomach's sake." I think total abstinence isn't really a biblical position; the biblical position is moderation in all things, with the kingdom of God first and everything else second. If I found myself preferring my pipe to my prayers, that would be a real problem, and I'd have to put the pipe down. But I'm one of many Christian pipe-smokers for whom smoking a pipe and prayer actually go together — there's plenty of scriptural imagery around burning things and fragrant smoke.

I think one of the devil's favorite tricks is distraction — he doesn't want us doing the big moral work of loving God with all our heart and soul and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. If he can get people obsessing over whether someone is smoking or drinking, while they don't notice they're underpaying the people who work for them, or ignoring the command to care for the stranger in their midst, then he's won a much bigger battle by getting us fixated on small things and forgetting the main moral law. Jesus said this to the Pharisees — "you tithe mint and dill and cumin" and neglect justice and mercy. Paul says something similar: some Jewish Christians were shocked that Gentile Christians didn't keep kosher, and Paul said you don't have to, because Christ fulfilled the law — but for the sake of a weaker brother who's upset by it, modify your behavior around them so you don't scandalize anyone. I'd never smoke in someone's house unless invited to, and if I'm a guest somewhere with no wine on the table, I'm not going to ask for a glass out of sheer courtesy and hospitality.

Wolfgang: We're almost out of time, but the last thing I wanted to ask — of course what you're most known for is poetry, and I'm not someone deeply familiar with it. Why is poetry so important to you, and what's a favorite poem — something that really changed how you thought about the form and pushed you further toward God?

Malcolm Guite: We could be here a long time. The medium of poetry is language, but it's writing that carries its own music with it — it's meant to have rhythm and rhyme and beauty. It's a bit like a film score — while you're watching a movie you're not consciously aware of the music, but if you watch a famous scene without it, it suddenly falls flat; the music was doing all the work. I think because of its sound and music, poetry opens up deeper things in you. Someone once called poetry "language slowed down" — language with music in it. A poet can put something in a way that suddenly clarifies it for you; you're given an image to think with, and it stays with you a long time.

The first poems that made me want to be a poet were by John Keats — not a Christian poet, but he wrote so beautifully that the sheer sound of it made my heart take flight and showed me there was more wonder in the world than I knew. That opening-up of wonder and awe was something that eventually opened me up to faith too. "Ode to a Nightingale" did that for me — just talking about a bird: "Thou light-winged Dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beechen green and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease." Gorgeous. I fell in love with a certain gorgeous sound first. But after that I found poets who dared to say things that appear contradictory but are true — paradox. One of my favorite poets is George Herbert, an Anglican priest and poet in the 17th century, my model in a lot of ways — four hundred years later I feel like I'm trying to pick up the baton he carried.

I'll give you an example — a very short poem of his I think is one of the most honest things a Christian can say, called "Bitter-Sweet." It's about the real struggles of life, the real struggles you have with God — times you feel like God is frowning on you, or the relationship is straining — but you're always faithful because he's always faithful. It goes:

Ah my dear angry Lord, Since thou dost love, yet strike; Cast down, yet help afford; Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve; And all my sour-sweet days I will lament, and love.

It's both — and those are the two deepest things a human being can do: lament and love. We often lament because we love. Poetry gets there in a way prose can't.

Wolfgang: That's absolutely beautiful, Malcolm. I was really happy to meet you — this has been a transformative experience.