The Golden Compass

The Subtle Knife 

The Amber Spyglass

 

To Boycott or not to Boycott…
The Golden Compass caused quite a stir last December when the book-based movie hit the silver screen just before Christmas. Christians received frenzied email warnings from the Catholic League in America to boycott the film for its anti-God agenda. Children’s writer and novelist Philip Pullman was portrayed as a Church and God-hater; indeed he emerged somewhat as the modern literati’s Anti-Christ. What was the fuss about, and who is Philip Pullman? To come to a Christian understanding of the issues, we need first to grapple with Pullman’s ideas.

The Felix Culpa of (Wo-)Man
The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, 1995) is the first of Pullman’s fantasy-cum-science fiction trilogy, His Dark Materials. It is followed by The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000). The reason why many Christians, particularly Catholics, are up in arms over these books is that Philip Pullman is a self-confessed atheist. The three novels of His Dark Materials are about a young heroine, Lyra Belacqua, whose wanderings through parallel universes are depicted against the epic backdrop of a universal war against the oppressive Authority called God, Yahweh, El-Shaddai… Lyra is portrayed as the new Eve, the hope of the multiverse. Her emancipation, and indeed, the salvation of the multiverse, is found in her journey from childhood innocence into maturity and knowledge, or wisdom.

Pullman’s atheism is directed almost entirely against his own Christian heritage. The story of Lyra and her friends is told in terms of the biblical Fall of Man. Pullman draws heavily from John Milton, who ironically, was an avowed Puritan and devoted Christian. In fact, the trilogy title, His Dark Materials, is taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, Pullman’s contentious point is that Eve’s fall was no fall at all, but the reaching upwards of the human creative principle to the heights of the gods (Yahweh etc), and is therefore, good. The Fall is only interpreted as a moral fall because, precisely, of God’s jealousy. Rather than signalling the ruin of humanity, it pointed instead to the significant potential of humanity. What happened in the Garden of Eden was truly felix culpa, the happy fall, because once Eve bit into the fruit of forbidden knowledge, humankind came into his/her own. God is then described as the great oppressor, whom the religious governing body in the trilogy, the Magisterium, represents.

Humankind’s emancipation is thus seen in Promethean terms; it is against the gods because the gods have demanded unjust subservience and ignorance of humanity. To Pullman, it is liberation from uncountable years of needless suffering and suppression for Creation. The Magisterium sounds suspiciously like the Catholic Inquisition in its portrayal, although the similarity is heavily disguised in the movie. Pullman makes the point that any religious and political organisation that oppresses by compelling obedience and conformity should be rejected. Church history admits that there were ignominious moments of such oppression and injustice in the life of the Christian church. Satan’s voice in the biblical Fall, and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, emerges in Pullman’s narratives as the voice of truth, and God is pictured as the jealous liar who keeps humanity in check. Did God really say… is the resonating question of the trilogy.

Lyra, child of destiny, must as she reaches puberty, reenact the essence of Eve’s fall, by falling from innocent childhood grace into adult (sexual) maturity and knowledge. That alone will save the multiverse from collapsing because it celebrates an element that, in Pullman’s scheme of things, is critical for the survival of all species: Dust, or conscious matter. Sexual knowledge or experience is useful as the symbol-laden means to carry centuries-old perceptions of godliness and sinfulness since it is often used to contrast the temporal (matter) and the eternal (spirit). In the inverted moral order of The Amber Spyglass, ex-nun Mary Malone plays the (redeeming) Tempter who passes on invaluable wisdom to Lyra and Will Parry by prompting their initiation into adult sexuality. Mary gives Lyra some fruit, which she eats and then gives to Will. Thus, by tasting Eve’s “apple”, or the forbidden fruit of experience and knowledge, Lyra ushers in a new age for Creation (which is, after all, dust and matter), free of the draining and damning influence of the false spirit, God.

The Stuff of the Universe: “From Dust… to Dust…”
Dust is important to Pullman’s fictional scheme and philosophical convictions. Dust is Pullman’s fictional form of dark matter; it is an elementary particle that is conscious, and which thus differentiates it from ordinary matter. Dust is formed when ordinary matter becomes conscious. In The Amber Spyglass, Mary Mallone, who researches on interstellar particles (dark matter), can see flows of Dust by using a special film called the amber spyglass. Earlier, she and colleague, Dr. Oliver Payne, discovered that these particles were conscious material which they called “Shadows.” Mary tried to communicate with them using Chinese I Ching sticks.

Dust also connects the human persons in Lyra’s world to their daemons (read: souls, human unconscious). It is generally invisible to the human eye, but the mulefa, with whom Mary stays when she enters a parallel universe, are a kind of Stone Age race of animal beings which are able to see Dust with the naked eye. They recognise Mary to be sentient and intelligent too because they see Dust surrounding her. Being conscious, and conferring consciousness (wisdom, knowledge, awareness), Dust is attracted to adult humans and beings because they are intelligent and aware, and not to children. Children before twelve or thirteen are not conscious in the sense Pullman means, because they inhabit an innocent world guided by intuition (grace) rather than consciousness. Lyra, for instance, reads the alethiometer (truth meter) intuitively, but once she passes into experience, she loses that intuition. While intuitive understanding—called “grace”—is wonderful, consciousness and experience indicate adulthood and maturity. In their racial memory and history, the mulefa also have a kind of Adam and Eve tale to tell. Much like Adam and Eve’s partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the ancient mulefa interacted with wheel-pod trees 33,000 years ago. This event gave them both consciousness and knowledge, for the oil from the wheel-pod trees, “awash with Dust,” made them aware of themselves as conscious, sentient beings. 

Dust confers consciousness, wisdom and knowledge. The Magisterium wishes to destroy Dust because consciousness is what makes us sin. It is Original Sin because human consciousness came after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and their eyes were opened to the knowledge of good and evil. But the Magisterium’s intention is self-defeating because eliminating Dust would in the end destroy all the worlds which possess conscious life. The fact of matter, dark matter, Dust, consciousness, is, to Pullman, the stuff of life itself. Dust is everywhere. Hence, Lyra’s sexual awakening, even at twelve or thirteen, is critical to her understanding of the value of the material world. Pullman’s perspective is naturalistic; life begins on earth, with ordinary matter and Dust, and ends with the same. The ghosts of The Amber Spyglass discover that annihilation of individual consciousness by being reabsorbed into the greater nature is a preferable “heaven” compared to the hellish conditions of the perverted “eternal” consciousness they endured in the Underworld of traditional belief. Unfortunately, the ghosts who refuse to be set free are the Catholic Christian clergy who are locked in the religious lie of “heaven” (eternal life).

Looking Critically Through the Spyglass
His Dark Materials presents much grist for the mills of atheism because Pullman the storyteller can be very compelling and absorbing. In that sense, Pullman is an insidious writer with whom Christians must deal because his message is unabashedly atheist and materialist. He is writing fiction, but no one reading the trilogy would conclude that he wrote without an agenda. His target is Christianity, which for him stands for Religion. But for us to react and call for global boycotts is to prove his point that the Church is oppressive and dictatorial. It would be better for Christians to read the books and participate in the conversation.

Christians do have answers to give to Philip Pullman. There are legitimate areas of contention we can raise. Let me locate one or two. Pullman claims to know the Bible and Christian tradition intimately because he grew up in a Church of England setting: his grandfather was a parish priest. Yet, in none of the three books is Jesus, the central figure of the Christian faith, mentioned in any way at all (though Pullman says his next book, The Book of Dust, will do it). The closest to name-calling that Pullman comes to is his reference to Yahweh, El-Shaddai etc. His God is a Wizard of Oz, a false god called the Authority who hides behind his powerful reputation to keep his position of authority. There is no engagement with the biblical God, for Pullman’s god turns out to be just a created being, a once-mighty angel grown feeble with age. In the end, he dies, and is set free from infirmity and the misery of age and senility. His successor is an equally mighty angel called Metatron—but he dies at the hands of Lyra’s parents, the infamous Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel. The Gnosticism here is undeniable—though Pullman the arch-materialist is no Gnostic. The Authority and Metatron too are children of Dust; and are themselves created, having a beginning and an end. What Pullman dismantles and dethrones is not the biblical God, for all that he invokes the name, “Yahweh”.

The Fall of Man and Original Sin must be addressed too, because these are core ideas to Pullman. Pullman assumes that his fictionalised Fall scores points by being against the biblical narrative, and is thus contrary, radical and reactionary. However, he is mistaken in thinking that the Genesis account is anti-knowledge and anti-human. Pullman’s Authority and Magisterium keep humankind ignorant and base, but a careful reading of Genesis 1-2 makes it clear that the biblical Adam and Eve had much knowledge and power prior to the Fall. They were not ignorant or rude beasts, but were dignified humans who had been given both authority and knowledge to run and manage creation; that is, they were created sentient, intelligent, conscious beings (imago dei), and they had dominion before they ever sinned.

The biblical Fall focuses on which voice Eve should listen to: the voice of the serpent, or the voice of God. Pullman portrays the Tempter, Mary Mallone, as the maternal Sophia (wisdom) who gives her daughter the fruit of experience that Christians unjustly call Original Sin. The Genesis account is hardly so romantic. Freedom comes from experience, and experience comes from autonomous first steps—that is what Pullman plugs. But it is a mistake to think that human freedom consists of being able to do whatever one pleases. Independence and freedom cannot come at the cost of adult responsibility. Simple human experience, never mind a religious one, proves that maturity is best expressed through the exercise of responsible restraint and self-denial, as Lyra herself discovers.

What also escapes Pullman and materialists like him is that to faithfully read the Genesis account is to appreciate the premise of the narrative: in the first place, the Garden of Eden did not belong to Adam and Eve. They were tenants, not owners: the rules were not made by them, in the same way that the rules are not made by Lyra, who has to abide by Pullman’s overarching will, and separate from lover Will Parry forever. We cannot pick and choose what bits to accept and what to ignore. Eve’s choice was thus not an upward reaching, but a downward fall that affected the whole of life. Lyra, significantly, does not rebel against her author-god, and thus remains consistent within the canopy of Pullman’s fictional multiverse. In the end, we are indeed conscious beings, but only created ones.

A fair reading of the Bible would also inform us of the earthy, even sexualized language and depictions that bible writers used often, particularly in describing the love between Yahweh and his people. Whatever prudishness arose in Church history regarding human sexuality and experience has to be attributed to the influence of Gnosticism on early Christianity. The seeds of the problem were evident as early as Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, if not earlier. Christianity is not ‘matter’-denying or life-denying. If Pullman truly reads the Bible as he claims, he would have, as a writer and a student of literature, immediately registered the sexual undertones and overtones of biblical language. How far can one get into the Song of Songs before realizing this? Hence, to portray the Fall of Man in terms of Lyra’s acquiring sexual experience is hardly doing it justice. One needs to remember that Adam and Eve engaged in sexual relations before the Fall, as they did after it. In fact, this was the great difficulty Milton had in portraying the degenerating effects of the Fall on human sexual relations in Paradise Lost. His “before and after” depictions differed little. Sex was erotic from the word “Go”!

A number of other issues arise from Pullman’s faulty thinking about the Fall, the nature of man and human sexuality in Christianity. Primarily, issues surrounding the eternality or temporality of human life, Pullman’s offer of the annihilating death as “blissful”, and his lack of comprehension of the enormity of words like “salvation” and “redemption” in world culture and history, are places where Christians can soundly answer him.

Conclusion: A Christian Counter-culture
Pullman writes absorbing fiction. His tales have an atheistic and educational agenda: he wants to mould young readers to think in humanistic ways. How Christians can answer Pullman is not to act in bullish ways (boycotts and witch hunts) but to interact significantly with wider culture. Informed, intelligent, well-read Christians who participate in the world will be able to dismantle Pullman’s religious “dismantling” of God.

Once, Christians held the stage in directing cultural trends and intellectual developments. Today, we are more well-known for going with the flow and mouthing clichés. Can we ever get back to the point when our contribution will once again reflect the magnitude of Christ’s dying for humankind? Will we ever?

This article was first published in a Kairos monograph, Understanding the Modern World Through Christian Eyes, “Is God Real?”, April, 2008, pp. 18-21.