Even as a lifelong reader of C.S. Lewis, it never really occurred to me to ask how Narnia works. That’s probably because Narnia’s theological orientation so obviously seemed to set the rules. Narnia’s magic—Deep and Deeper alike—is always what serves Aslan’s ends.
But not everyone agrees. Last October, a throwaway article at Screen Rant kicked off a minor online dustup by complaining that C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series lacked a clear approach to its magic. “There are undoubtedly gaps in the Chronicles of Narnia’s lore, but one of the most frustrating is the lack of explanation over the land’s magic system,” groused writer Rebecca Sargeant. “While there is one, it’s very loosely defined and is often only half established.”
The phrase magic system will ring odd to many. The notion savors of a category error: myths operate, after all, by their own inner logic. Children don’t complain that the narrative “rules” of “Jack and the Beanstalk” or “Hansel and Gretel” aren’t stipulated up front, because those rules are already implicit: courage wins out, and evil fails. Formal questions of system—how do giants walk around in the clouds, anyway?—seem to miss the point.
And yet for fans of the fantasy genre, “magic systems” are all the rage. For many readers today, they’re important selling points by which a story either succeeds or fails. Talk of magic systems pervades online messageboards and social media circles. And no single storyteller has done more to mainstream the concept of “magic systems” than the undisputed juggernaut of contemporary high fantasy: Brandon Sanderson.
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Sanderson’s prominence is entirely deserved. In an environment where other beloved fantasy projects—George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle, to name just two—have gone dormant for years on end, Sanderson is truly prolific, churning through multiple concurrent projects and routinely apprising his readers of progress. He is the author of numerous bestselling standalone novels—Elantris, Warbreaker, Steelheart, and others—and longer series like Mistborn, with over a half-dozen volumes already in print.
And this is saying nothing of the crown jewel of Sanderson’s canon—his colossal epic The Stormlight Archive, its individual volumes each nearly blowing past the word count of Tolkien’s entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. (The fifth volume, Wind and Truth, releases this month, and will likely be a major bestseller.) Most of these projects overlap in small ways, comprising a loosely interconnected world Sanderson calls the “Cosmere.” A promotional offer featuring spinoff novels proved to be the most successful Kickstarter fundraising campaign in history.[1]
Most of Sanderson’s novels follow a familiar pattern, though each has a dash of wild inventiveness to distinguish it from its predecessors: plucky young heroes and heroines, characterized by their intellect and curiosity, confront the threat of corrupt and decadent institutions on the one hand, and some alien evil on the other. In order to prevail, they must take deliberate and organized steps to methodically uncover the nature of some hidden aspect of this Cosmere. Their mere valor or virtue is not enough: success ultimately hinges on obtaining a proper conceptualization of how the world works. In other words, the rules and principles of magic and the cosmos are not intuited a priori; they are figured out a posteriori.
Examples are legion. Elantris follows a disinherited prince, wandering through a burned-out “city of the gods,” who must discover the secret of the city’s lost magic and wield it to escape. The heroes of the Mistborn series must consume tiny doses of rare metals, combining them in ever-more-creative ways, in order to categorize and corral the ancient quasi-spiritual powers of the world they inhabit. And much of the Stormlight Chronicles concentrates on discovering the rules by which “spren” (embodied abstractions, sort of like Plato’s Forms crossed with Pokémon) behave and transmit energy. In so doing, Sanderson takes Arthur C. Clarke’s famous storytelling axiom—that all sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic—and simply transposes the terms: in Sanderson’s Cosmere, all sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Almost every Sanderson novel serves as a mystery box waiting to be opened, with its narrative world’s central organizing conceit—that is, its magic system— waiting to be discovered by the protagonists. Once the big picture of cosmic order is grasped—through a discovery in hidden archives, a deathbed revelation, or a flash of sudden intuition—much of the mystery dissipates, and the magic is grasped to be wielded properly and save the day. Cognition and mastery are the path to power.
Magic is science, and vice versa. Faith has nothing to do with it.
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This scientistic storytelling bent implies a certain cynicism about organized religion. And that is exactly what one finds in Sanderson’s pages. By all accounts, Sanderson is a committed Latter-day Saint, and his stories are filled to the brim with gods and faiths—but these are rarely treated positively.
Warbreaker centers on a court of venal, self-dealing “deities” who don’t even believe in their own cults, where their “godhood” has been attained only through manipulation of the world’s metaphysical rules. In the same vein, the Stormlight Archive plays out against the historical backdrop of a violent “Hierocracy” war, a misbegotten bid for ecclesiastical supremacy. “The church back then, it clung to knowledge,” one character explains. “Men were not in command of their own religious paths; the priests controlled the doctrine, and few members of the Church were allowed to know theology. They were taught to follow the priests. Not the Almighty or the Heralds, but the priests.”[2]
Prominently figuring in the Stormlight books is the atheistic scholar Jasnah Kholin, described as “a rationalist, a woman with the audacity to deny the existence of the Almighty himself based on her own reasoning.”[3] Sanderson depicts her regularly besting her rivals in theological debates:
“I just don’t see how anything could be outside God’s decrees.” The king shook his head, bemused. “Brightness Jasnah, I don’t mean to argue, but isn’t the very definition of the Almighty that all things exist because of him?”
“If you add one and one, that makes two, does it not?”
“Well, yes.”
“No god needs declare it so for it to be true,” Jasnah said. “So, could we not say that mathematics exists outside the Almighty, independent of him?”[4]
Setting aside whether Jasnah’s argument is a good one—it is certainly not an argument against classical theism, but only against a sort of nominalistic deism—Sanderson gives her pride of place. The priests around her are fools; Jasnah is most certainly not.
To be sure, Sanderson leaves a crack open to the possibility of genuine transcendence. When the aforementioned “Almighty” turns out to merely be one more spren among others—a creature among creatures—the aging (and pious) warrior Dalinar Kholin concludes that this Almighty was never really “God” in the first place. “I have felt … something else,” Dalinar opines. Something beyond. A warmth and a light. It is not that God has died, it is that the Almighty was never God. He did his best to guide us, but he was an impostor. Or perhaps only an agent.”[5] Similarly, Warbreaker’s heroine affirms a God-beyond-the-gods, responsible for cosmic design. “We know he’s there. When I see something beautiful in nature, when I look at the mountains, with their wildflowers growing in patterns that are somehow more right than a man could have planted, I know. Beauty is real.”[6] But that hope is never allowed to be much more than a flicker. Jasnah, for instance, has little regard for Dalinar’s hopeful theism. “I think Dalinar’s beliefs sound too convenient. Now that one deity has proven faulty, he insists the Almighty must never have been God? That there must be something else? I don’t like it. So . . . maybe this simply isn’t a question we can ever answer.”[7]
How, then, should human beings live? Can anything be salvaged from the shipwreck of belief? Perhaps: in Sanderson’s novels, religion is most salutary when it basically collapses into ethical humanism. Elantris hinges on a religious conflict between the sects of “Shu-Korath” and “Shu-Dereth”—a thinly veiled allegory for Catholicism and Calvinism. The novel features as a central antagonist a stern Derethi priest who finally—and, as Sanderson paints him, heroically—abjures his own dogmatism. “I … thought I had faith. It turned out, however, that the thing I grew to believe was not Shu-Dereth after all. I don’t know what it is. . . . Belief is not simply Korathi or Derethi, one or the other.”[8] Warbreaker’s heroine must likewise learn that “when her faith had become about clothing instead of people, it had taken a wrong turn.”[9] Others concur. “Dalinar says that the Almighty is dead, but he also claims there’s another true God somewhere in a place beyond,” remarks the hero of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. “Jasnah says that a being having vast powers doesn’t make them God, and concludes—from the way the world works—that an omnipotent, loving deity cannot exist. . . . I’m not confident anyone knows the answers. . . . I figure I’ll let the people who care argue about it, and I’ll keep my head down and focus on my life right now.”[10]
The narrative structure of Sanderson’s stories—heroes discovering the metaphysical “rules of the game” beneath and beyond any dogmatic desiderata—supports that conclusion. Considered as an independent basis of knowledge, religion as such is essentially superfluous. While religious doctrines and institutions may preserve certain truths lost to time, those truths are more properly described within the grammar of science and empiricism.[11] The hero’s journey becomes purgative, a clearing-away of tradition’s deadwood. And as for any remaining questions of theology proper, those are best deferred indefinitely.
But it would be wrong to describe Sanderson’s Cosmere as desacralized or disenchanted—at least in the full sense. Sanderson’s first Mistborn trilogy ends with an apotheosis: the ascent of the longtime skeptic Sazed to actual godhood, but a materialistic godhood, a sort of dissolution into the physical substance of the cosmos which comes to constitute his “body.”
“I am simply a man. . . .” The religions in my portfolio weren’t useless after all, he thought, the power flowing from him and remaking the world. None of them were. They weren’t all true. But they all had truth….
Somebody would need to watch over the world, care for it, now that its gods were gone. It wasn’t until that moment that Sazed understood the term Hero of Ages. Not a Hero that came once in the ages. But a Hero who would span the ages. A Hero who would preserve mankind throughout all its lives and times. Neither Preservation nor Ruin, but both.
God.[12]
Sazed’s ascension is one of Sanderson’s only unambiguously positive affirmations of the divine as such. It evokes the famous dogmatic couplet of Lorenzo Snow, fifth president of the Latter-day Saints: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.”[13] And it is the key to harmonizing Sanderson’s theological musings. The animating theological spirit of Sanderson’s work is neither classical nor secular in the modern sense. Rather, at the heart of Sanderson’s Cosmere is a theological materialism that affirms an immanent divinity-within-matter.
This explains Sanderson’s emphasis on empirical magic systems and critique of established orthodoxies, alongside his stories’ openness to some sort of spirituality. On this paradigm, “right religion” and science cannot conflict in principle, because both simply describe the one immanent cosmos in different grammars. Traditional theology, with its talk of abstruse dogmas and divine interventions, is mostly nonsense. What matters is how individuals, as more-or-less themselves divine, behave in the world—or, more relevantly, how they can make the world behave for them.[14]
In Sanderson’s Spinozistic tales, fantasy becomes modern.
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It is hard to overstate the thematic difference between Sanderson’s approach to fantasy storytelling and those preceding it. That difference is not merely structural: it is metaphysical. The triumph of fantasy’s “magic systems” is the triumph of a transformed genre, a genre that finally—centuries after the Scientific Revolution—has embraced materialism over idealism.
Classical fantasy depicts worlds in which a character’s conviction, his inner faith or his character, can meaningfully transform the ways in which magic works. This is the reason, for instance, why J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter cannot cast “unforgiveable curses” despite uttering the words and performing the correct acts: as the evil Bellatrix Lestrange sneers, “you need to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain — to enjoy it.”[15] Mind shapes matter, rather than vice versa. This is why Eustace Scrubb’s greed can turn him into a dragon, or the Nine Rings can corrupt the souls of Men into Nazgûl. Contra Sargeant, here there is no need for a freestanding grid of “rules” or “magic systems” because human consciousness cannot be so systematized: if the mental—or the spiritual—is the most properly basic level of reality, then the heart of creation is not determinism, but freedom. Classical fantasy is not materialist, but metaphysically idealist to the core.
And this is the world-picture that Sanderson’s stories, for all their sophistication and narrative brilliance, fundamentally reject. His Cosmere is a world of grand machines and processes, all churning on into eternity. To ask questions of “primary causality”—what is this all for?—is mostly to miss the point. The key question his stories pose to their characters is quintessentially modern: how do we make things happen? How do we ascend within the world?
There is a stark, cold beauty, of a sort, in this reductive view. The popularity of Sanderson’s mystery boxes, and the larger fascination with magic systems, attests to that. But it strikes me as a false glamour, a failure to glimpse the real truth of creation—the fact that the world is given, never fully adequate to itself, and that there is in fact a “dearest freshness deep down things” that cannot be put to utilitarian ends.[16] The confusion of scientific method with fundamental metaphysics is a category error all its own.
Perhaps it is too much to expect to know the rules of Aslan’s country.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.
Ed Nawotka, “Brandon Sanderson Raises $16 Million, Breaking Records Again,” Publishers Weekly (Mar. 8, 2004), https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/94538-brandon-sanderson-raises-16-million-breaking-records-again.html (discussing “Sanderson’s previous record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in March 2022, which raised $41.7 million from 185,341 backers, setting a new record for the most funded Kickstarter in the platform’s history”). ↑
Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings (New York: Tor, 2020), 285. ↑
Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 120. ↑
Sanderson, The Way of Kings, 466. ↑
Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer (New York: Tor, 2017). ↑
Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker (New York: Tor, 2009), 334. ↑
Sanderson, Oathbringer. ↑
Brandon Sanderson, Elantris (New York: Tor, 2005), 471. ↑
Sanderson, Warbreaker, 501. ↑
Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War (New York: Tor, 2020). ↑
Cf. Sanderson, Warbreaker (““They need a Command to Awaken them, just like anything else. Even your religion teaches about Commands. It says that Austre is the one who Commands the Returned to come back.”). ↑
Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages (New York: Tor, 2008), 718. ↑
Gerald N. Lund, “Is President Lorenzo Snow’s Oft-Repeated Statement—‘As Man Now Is, God Once Was; As God Now Is, Man May Be’—Accepted As Official Doctrine By the Church?”, Ensign (Feb. 1982), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1982/02/i-have-a-question/is-president-snows-statement-as-man-now-is-god-once-was-as-god-now-is-man-may-be-accepted-as-official-doctrine. ↑
Cf. Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 781 et seq. ↑
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (New York: Scholastic, 2005), 810. ↑
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur. ↑