Christian thinking ... about Philip Pullman?

Philip Pullman’s epic tale His Dark Materials (comprising Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass) has enjoyed great success in recent years.

The Amber Spyglass was the first children’s book to win the Whitbread prize; the trilogy came third in the BBC’s Big Read poll. The work continues to do well. Northern Lights was number three in the children’s bestsellers list at the end of 2004. And the two-part stage production is currently enjoying a second run at the National Theatre.

There is no need to ask why it has been so successful. The story is wonderfully inventive, one in which there are parallel worlds full of extraordinary people and creatures. It depicts with brilliant clarity the lives of its two young protagonists — Lyra, a defiant girl with a penchant for lying, and Will, a restless boy who has struggled with isolation and learnt to disguise himself from the eyes of the world. Together, the trilogy explores the theme of childhood friendship and portrays the process of adolescent self-awakening in a way that is as tender as you might find.

If the work has been taken to heart by so many readers, it has also caused consternation among many Christians. This is because the larger story, in which the children become involved, is the battle to overthrow God from his pedestal and establish ‘true freedom’ for all conscious beings. It is a cosmic tale, in which Pullman replays John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where a war in heaven precedes the fall of man, but in such a way that the story is reversed: in Pullman, God loses the war and the fall becomes the rebels’ final triumph.

This theological concern has prompted Christians to be rightly wary of the work. At the same time many like to avoid seeming unnecessarily extreme. We are familiar with books that routinely cause a stir. Is this, for example, like the Harry Potter series, where talk of banning a largely traditional boarding school story seems over the top? Is there more to be worried about in Pullman and, if so, what?

His Dark Materials is indeed some way from the Harry Potter series, taking as it does a theological framework and putting forward explicit, if reductive, views about God, Christianity and the church. The first book, Northern Lights, is a genuinely gripping tale. But Pullman’s agenda emerges here, and then as the books progress, increasingly dominates all that happens.

Christians should be aware of how his trilogy has made widespread and acceptable a version of Christianity that is little more than a caricature. The first of the film adaptations, due for release next year, will undoubtedly refocus attention on the books and add to this.

This article has been prompted by a hope that Christians who do choose to read the work (especially if, for example, their children read the work at school) will do so as critically as possible, aware of exactly how the author pulls off his version of the truth. But it is not my aim to respond to Pullman in an equally reductive manner. Instead, what I think we need to do is ask some straightforward questions of the trilogy and the worldview it offers.

What sort of God does Pullman present?

The most important of Pullman’s changes is that God in His Dark Materials is not the sovereign creator of the universe. He is merely the first angelic being who took it upon himself to lay claim to the title ‘God’. This is a catastrophic demotion. God, without any rights to call himself this, is unsurprisingly cast as a usurper, a tyrant, a despot. In fact he is an ageing figure who is reaching the end of his power and who is handing everything over to Metatron, the chief of his army and a terrifying figure. God is not a figure of love or mercy or grace. He is not a God of relationship, as he is absent from human affairs, except in that he opposes any freedom and individual thought because it is a threat to his power. Since he is not our creator, the giver of life, he prefers that humans are benign automatons. Since he is not the rightful judge of the universe, he is a tyrant.

In some respects this is so far removed from the true God that one might well think that this is no God at all. But Pullman explicitly identifies him as the God of Judeo-Christianity: ‘The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty — those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator’, Will is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.33). Pullman wants to have his cake and eat it: to make God no God at all, but label him specifically as the God of the Christian church.

What about Christ?

Christ is mentioned in passing and the agents of God in the church do wear crucifixes. But there is no discursive effort to engage with Christ in the trilogy. God is not interested in saving people, largely, I presume, because they are not his beloved creation.

The absence of Christ seems a somewhat less scrupulous move of Pullman’s, since saving sacrifice is given considerable prominence in the work. As the story develops, the rebels, the heroes of the work, take on the ‘great enterprise’ of saving people from this tyrant God, and from death (which is his prison-house).

Their leader is Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father, who has often treated Lyra with indifference. Asriel is joined by Lyra’s mother, also long absent from Lyra’s life. Both come to discover Lyra’s importance in defeating the forces of God. And both come to realise that they do in fact love Lyra profoundly. This moment comes in their climactic fight with Metatron, when they further realise that defeating him and stopping him from reaching Lyra will mean sacrificing their own lives. And so that is what they do out of their love for Lyra, so that her work of saving all peoples might be achieved.

Their sacrifice of love is coupled with Lyra’s own sacrifice of separation. Lyra’s parents’ deaths enable her to complete her task of freeing souls from the land of the dead. But to do this Lyra must undergo separation from Pan, her d¾mon (in Lyra’s world humans have a living, speaking manifestation of their soul/consciousness that takes the form of an animal and is called their d¾mon). This is explained as the most terrible, costly separation for someone from Lyra’s world — a great forsaking of relationship — but it ultimately leads to her rescue of souls.

So Pullman ignores Christ, making no effort to address his sacrificial death on the cross out of his great love for us, or his suffering for our sake, paying the price to set us free. At the same time he explicitly denounces Christianity as the cause of our problems: ‘The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all’, Lyra is told (The Amber Spyglass, p.464). And yet without shame he transfers to the rebels a story of their costly sacrifice in the name of finally defeating God and claiming victory over death.

It is true of course that if you strip Christianity of a creator-God, who therefore has no right or place as our judge, then really you have no Christianity at all. For what Christ came to do in being punished for us by that righteous judge would become utterly meaningless. But to say that Pullman’s story is not anti-Christian, merely ‘anti-religious’ will not do. How many children among the general population do you know who have a reasoned grasp of what Christ achieved on the cross to set us free, that they can see an aping distortion of it when it comes along?

What is the trilogy’s theology?

The trilogy is largely based upon an old-style dualism: two forces battling it out, one good (the rebels), one bad (God). Will is told: ‘There are two great powers … and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit’ (The Subtle Knife, p.335).

Pullman presents these two choices as though they are an equal power struggle. But don’t be fooled, Pullman does know what it is to submit to a rightfully higher power. This is how he puts it when Lee, a character who sides with the rebels, has a strange dream/vision in which he is flying as part of a flock of birds doing battle with those who would try and stop them: ‘Lee felt whatever bird-nature he was sharing respond with joy to the command of the eagle queen, and whatever human-ness he had left felt the strangest of pleasures: that of offering obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right’ (The Subtle Knife, p.307).

What matters is, of course, whom you think is the ‘stronger power that was wholly right’. The righteous, for Pullman, are not the indifferent, they are the active antagonists. To put oneself in the will of the power that seeks to defeat God (however reductively he is conceived) induces a sense of righteous purpose. Again Pullman takes a Christian truth — that our true fulfilment lies in serving our creator — and gives it to the rebels’ party.

It also means that his work isn’t advancing anarchism or relativism and that, in fact, Pullman turns out to be as authoritarian in values as those he rails against.

What view of sin does the trilogy present?

After the war in heaven, the trilogy climaxes with a ‘second fall’. It draws upon the old idea of the fortunate fall — that we are better off after the fall than before it. Pullman’s chronology is that the fall of Eve/Adam symbolised, or told the story of, the moment man became conscious of choice. It is this choice or freedom of individuality that Pullman suggests God has been opposing ever since. The church is his agent in stamping out such choice/freedom.

In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra is presented with a ‘second’ temptation to fall — a second opportunity to choose — in order that she might seal the work of Eve’s first fall. If she chooses rightly (as Eve did) it will establish forever the freedom of individuals to choose.

In Pullman’s story, that second fall is Lyra’s awakening sexuality and the choice she makes to consummate (exactly what happens is left unclear) that love with Will. Equating sexual awakening and the fall is something far from new, but it has clearly found a new audience among those who have little conception of a creator who, before the fall, gave life and the gift of marriage and sexual union to his creatures (Genesis 2). Again something good of God is made to seem as though it is a victory of the rebels’.

But something else happens too. In the Bible, Adam and Eve were tempted to put themselves before God, breaking their relationship with him, and the result was death. Pullman works his story so that the temptation becomes benign. The tempter, a woman called Mary, almost unwittingly tempts Lyra by recounting her own story of sexual awakening (at the time she rejected Christianity). It is cast as an instructive life-tale; it has no consequences for Lyra regarding a relationship with a creator.

Moreover, death, rather than being a consequence of the fall and a broken relationship, is transferred to those who oppose Lyra. At the moment of temptation, the church’s assassin arrives to kill her, to prevent her from being tempted and being allowed to choose. So instead of, as in the Bible, a fall that leads to death, in Pullman the church aims to use death to prevent Lyra from being able to fall. By this point in the reader’s mind, falling and thwarting the church’s murderous aim has become the thing Lyra must do at all costs. And it is a choice emotively cast as her desire to love and be with Will, making any agent who would separate such lovers akin to those who would stop the Romeos and Juliets of this world. Even though the choice before Eve was not that this was the only way she could be with Adam — quite the reverse, she was already united with him in marriage.

The difficulty here is not that Pullman presents a relativistic worldview so different to Christianity as to be almost irrelevant, but rather that he presents a worldview so close to that of the Bible, but with some vital changes, as to make it seem as though that is exactly what the Bible has been saying all along. It is no surprise that the secular world has been so keen to take the work into the mainstream. A worldview that seems empty, implausible and devoid of meaning in life is not one that the world really wants to sign up to. No, it’s a worldview that appears very close to the truth but has the subtlest of distortions — distortions that allow it to fit that truth to its own desires — that is the worldview that will most readily grasp the world’s attention and commendation.

And we should not be amazed at this: ‘For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear’ (2 Timothy 4.3).

How does one get meaning and purpose in Pullman’s world?

Pullman imagines a world in which we could visualise, scientifically as it were, the consciousness that he imagines came to us first at the fall. These ‘particles’ of consciousness give people their sentience, individuality and freedom of thought. He calls these particles Dust. Again, God has no role here: rather than life coming from a creator-God, conscious life comes from Dust. (In a recent interview, Pullman told the BBC that he plans a further ‘Book of Dust’ to complete the series.)

Since Dust is what came to humans at the first fall, Dust is what the church calls sin. You can see the effect of the switch: what the church calls sin is in Pullman made out to be the very essence of life. As staggeringly reductive as it is, it makes the church the blind opponents of everything good in life.

There is still a place for morality, but Dust is to be embraced as the experience of life itself. And it turns out to be the great secret of the universe, to be made known through a form of evangelism: ‘Conscious beings make Dust — they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on’ (The Amber Spyglass, p.520). Passing it on is the final commission that Lyra and Will are given.

In many respects this critique is exactly what a Pullmanite would expect: attempting to say ‘this is what the Bible really says’ is merely another act of authoritarian restriction typical of a church that opposes freedom of choice. But such attempts must be made since this work has itself quickly gained the weight of an authoritative text among its readers.

My conviction is not that the book should not be read because it is anti-Christian. (How many books less obviously propound an ungodly worldview that we happily accept?) But rather that Christians who choose to read it make sure they do so with their eyes open. That they consider how much Pullman is relying upon, even raiding, the central tenets of the Christian message, transferring them to his book’s heroes, even as he damns that same Christianity. It seems to me to be vital that Christians are able to respond critically. Pullman’s work should not be exempt from the analytical thinking so beloved of the rebels in his story.

At the same time, I also suspect that the stronger work to be done is this: there is a greater story to be told than that of Pullman’s tale of rebellion — the story of a loving creator-God, who gave life to his creatures and then sacrificed himself by stepping into his own creation to live and die that he might pay the price for our rejection of him. It is a story that needs telling and telling well.

Paul Mathole

© Evangelicals Now - August 2005
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