Every week I read a story to my grandson Gerard. He is learning to read himself so I think he will be looking for other amusements soon. For the moment though he seems happy enough to hear me read from one of the children’s books I have picked up over the years. To be honest, I enjoy these stories myself - especially the less-familiar ones.
At the moment Gerard and I are working our way through Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. As well as the better-known stories, like “The Little Mermaid”, “The Ugly Duckling”, and “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, there are others I have never heard of. So, having exhausted the famous ones, we are now delving into the less familiar territory.
Usually I ask Gerard to pick whatever tale he fancies hearing. Recently he chose “The Wicked Prince”.1 Interesting title I thought as I began to read:
Once upon a time there was a prince who was terribly proud and wicked. His dream was to rule over all the countries of the world, so people everywhere would tremble at the sound of his name.
I was hooked and so was my grandson. As I went on I became slightly concerned that the story might be a little too dark for Gerard’s young mind. But I decided to trust in Hans Christian Andersen’s instincts as a story-teller, and so I carried on reading.
Then the tale of the wicked prince reached a crucial point. Having at last achieved his goal of ruling the world, there is only one power left for the prince to overcome: God.
The prince’s first attempt to defeat God ends in failure. But that failure makes the prince even more determined. As he reflects on his downfall he vows to try again.
“I will conquer God!” he murmured.
And so he spends several more years planning and preparing for his next contest with God. He puts together an even greater army than before. With this vast armada behind him, the prince launches his assault on Heaven. But once again he is foiled. The story ends with the prince’s humiliation and death, brought about by the sting of a tiny insect sent by God to stop the aggressor.
“The Wicked Prince” was more than I bargained for. What a great story! When I put down the book I thanked Gerard for choosing it. But really I could not say any more. Here was a tale for children written in 1840 that described the world of the distant past - and the world of today.
While he was fasting in the desert, hadn’t Jesus encountered someone very like the wicked prince, someone he called “the ruler of this world”, also known as Lucifer or Satan? Hadn’t this “ruler” tried to divert Jesus away from his mission through his ploys and temptations?
Indeed did the devil’s failure only make him more determined to try again, not just to defeat Jesus, but to defeat God Himself? And are the extraordinary things we have seen since early 2020 a sign that this satanic plan is now being executed?
There are several theories as to what may lie behind the huge deception now gripping our world. I have described two of them in previous articles. These show how entities as different as Pfizer and Extinction Rebellion can reap potential benefits in the “new normal”.
And there are plenty of other examples.
For instance, the use of digital transactions has rocketed as bank notes and coins are now deemed to be “unsafe”. This is great for the banks. If the trend continues, they will be able to reduce their costs by getting rid of many of their cash-handling staff. Another example is mainstream media, notably radio. Sound broadcasters have seen their audiences grow as they pursue a strategy of relentless fear-mongering and unquestioning acceptance of the pseudo-science promoted by politicians and senior officials.2 And those same politicians in government have learnt that they can achieve tighter control over civil society by undermining the rights of their fellow citizens.
Whether these developments are the result of opportunism or conspiracy is a matter for debate. What is clear, I believe, is that these players, whether they are in politics, business, media, etc., have one thing in common. Whether they realise it or not, they all ultimately serve a single master, “the ruler of this world”, whose abiding objective is, as Hans Christian Andersen so succinctly put it, to “conquer God”.
As I outlined in my last article, many people reject the image of a divine creator presented to them by man-made religions. I am one of them. But if I don’t accept the vengeful God of the Old Testament, for instance, that does not make me an atheist. Because I am not. I believe in the God that pre-existed everything, not just religion, but our very species, Homo sapiens. But who is this God? Can we ever know – in this life at any rate?
In the same article I wrote this:
Is it fanciful to think of God as a young girl smiling in the sunshine? Or as a butterfly that flits across the meadow on a spring morning? Or as the breeze that blows through the leaves in the corner of the garden? Or as all these things - and much, much more besides?
Hans Christian Andersen believed in God. But his faith, like that of his contemporary Charlotte Brontë, was not exactly orthodox. We are told that “he rarely went to church”, and that:
the only religious tenets which mattered to him were providence, grace, and immortality, which he increasingly saw as a compensation for the pain and injustices of mortal life.3
He did not believe in Hell either, or at least not as a place of eternal punishment to which God consigns the souls of the damned.4 Perhaps the best way to understand Andersen’s view of the afterlife is to read one of his later stories entitled simply, “A history”.5 He wrote it in a style similar to that of his more famous children’s tales, but this one is more for adults I think.
The story is about a Protestant minister and his wife. One day the minister’s wife is attending a church service given by her husband. He is clearly of the same fire and brimstone school as James Joyce’s notorious preacher.6 As she sits in the congregation, the wife hears her husband describe the horrors that await those impious souls deserving of eternal damnation in Hell.
Later that evening, the woman speaks to her husband about the distress she felt as she listened to his sermon. She tells him that:
I should not let even the vilest of sinners burn for ever; and how then would God Almighty, who is so infinitely good, and who can know what makes the bad so bad?
Sometime later the minister’s wife dies and he is left alone. One night her spirit visits him and asks him to accompany her on a special mission. She wants him to identify just one person whom, as she puts it, “God will condemn to everlasting misery” in the next life. Together they journey through the city, visiting mansions and hovels, prisons and saloons, all filled with examples of mankind’s propensity for greed, pride, envy, and so on. But in each case the preacher cannot bring himself to single out even one individual deserving of divine retribution. On the contrary he is moved to pity by the degradation, the living Hell, into which these unfortunates have sunk.
When she sees how her husband has been affected by what he witnessed, the spirit of his wife realises that he has overcome his “despair in humanity”. Before she departs she tells him:
Learn to know man! Even in the bad there dwells a part of God; that part which quenches and conquers the flame of Hell!
Hans Christian Andersen believed in the devil, and in his writings he acknowledged the existence of evil. But he could not reconcile two contradictory images of God: the loving God he knew from childhood, and a deity who would condemn sinners to endless torture with no possibility of escape or redemption.
This second image is, I am convinced, a grotesque caricature. It is a warning to anyone who might try to find the real God. Its main purpose is to demoralise and discourage. Andersen wisely rejected it.
If we do likewise, who knows what previously unimagined possibilities might open up? Perhaps even the prospect that, in the end, the wicked prince himself will be saved.
Were that to happen, the history books would surely record that we all lived happily ever after.
Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, compiled by Vic Parker (Thaxted, Essex, 2016), pp. 373-83.
Irish Times, 5 Nov. 2020, “A friend in a crisis – why Irish radio had a good pandemic” [https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/a-friend-in-a-crisis-why-irish-radio-had-a-good-pandemic-1.4401265], 16 Jul. 2021.
Jackie Wullschläger, Hans Christian Andersen: The life of a storyteller (New York, 2001), p. 402.
Hans Christian Andersen, Story of My Life and In Sweden (London, 1852), p. 38.
Ibid., pp. 215-20
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Ware, 1992), pp. 97-104.