By Carl E. OlsonThursday, December 06, 2007
The Globe and Mail reports on differing interpretations of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials:
"You have two characters who set out to kill God - it seems obvious," said Pete Vere, a canon lawyer and co-author of a forthcoming book entitled Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy.
Mr. Vere's book, which is critical of Mr. Pullman's work and his atheistic views, is being promoted on a website called http://www.atheismforchildren.com. "People say, 'You're trying to censor.' No, I'm not trying to censor, I'm trying to point out to parents what's in here."
[Print Edition - Section Front]
However, other Catholics interpret The Golden Compass and two other books that comprise a trilogy as a denunciation of organized religion dominated by a distant, imposter God, which they say does not condemn modern religion.
"That's his image of religion that he's doing away with and frankly, we can all do away with that image of church and religion because that's not the church in Christianity that we believe in today," said Sister Rose Pacatte, director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Culver City, Calif. "That God that he kills off, he's doing us a favour."
This is confusing. Or, better, confused. However well-intentioned Sister Pacatte may be, she doesn't seem to understand or appreciate Pullman's reliance on a Gnostic understanding of the "false God" and the "true God." As Sandra Miesel succinctly puts it in Pied Piper of Atheism:
Gnosticism was a bubbling brew of Christian, Jewish, and pagan ideas that flourished in the early centuries ago. From their confused teachings comes Pullman's rejection of the Biblical God. He specifically identifies his Authority as Yahweh, God's Old Testament name, in The Subtle Knife. Knowledge saves by exposing this God as a finite, created usurper. In some interviews (e.g. Sydney Morning Herald on December 13, 2003), Pullman gives an unconvincing nod to the remote possibility of some ultimate Divine Principle somewhere but has seen no evidence of it himself. In others (BBC "Breakfast with Frost" for January 27, 2002), he's indicated that if a real God somehow exists, he thinks such a Being "deserves to be put down and rebelled against."
In the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman clearly identifies the false/imposter God as the Judeo-Christian God, calling him, for example, Yahweh. However he might deviate from ancient Gnosticism, Pullman certainly draws heavily (if not consistently) upon a central mythological tenet of divergent Gnostic systems when his novels depict the God of the Old Testament (and the New Testament) as a false Demiurge-god who falsely claims to be the only true God. Describing this mythology, Yuri Stoyanov, in The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (Yale, 2000), wrote:
"However divergent, the different Gnostic cosmologies were invariably underlain by a marked anti-cosmic dualism and repeatedly identified the Gnostic Demiurge of the material universe with God the Creator of the Old Testament. In the teachings of Marcion (d.c AD 166), which were largely based on Paul's opposition between Law and Faith in the Epistle to the Galatians, the God of the Old Testament was a just but inferior Demiurge-god, who was neither good nor omniscient, who promulgated the law of vengeance and whose strict judgment is antithetic to the essence of Christ's gospel of love and mercy." (p. 90)
And, a few paragraphs later:
"In the Nag Hammadi treatise On the Origin of the World (100:3-25), the lion-like Demiurge, called Yaldabaoth (probably 'Son of Chaos') and identified with the biblical God-Creator, came into being after a descending series of emanations from the spiritual world that had already caused the emergence of matter. Yaldabaoth established the heavens and their powers and proclaimed after Deuteronomy 32:39: 'I am He and there is no god beside me', but with this 'monotheistic' proclamation he sinned against the 'immortal (imperishable) ones' (103:10-15). .. Among his manifold feats in The Apocryphon of John 24, Yaldabaoth was charged with the seduction of Eve, who begot from him two sons, Elohim and Yahweh..." (p. 91).
Pullman's reliance upon William Blake, for whom he has expressed much admiration, is especially important in this regard since Blake's embrace of this Gnostic cosmology is widely acknowledged, although he is sometimes called a "crypto-Gnostic" (see, for example, "The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism," by Richard Smith, the afterword to The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M. Robinson [HarperSanFrancisco, 1978, 1988], pp 532-549). This description of Blake's views, from a Wikipedia entry, captures well the similar ideas held by Pullman:
One of Blake's strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy. In A Vision of the Last Judgement, Blake says that Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. Blake believed that the joy of man glorified God and that the religion of this world is actually the worship of Satan. He thought of Satan as Error and the 'State of Death’. Blake believes that orthodox Christians, partly because of their denial of earthly joy, are actually worshipping Satan."
All of this to say, simply, that Pullman—true to his claim, "My books are about killing God"—believes that the God worshiped by orthodox Jews and Christians is false, evil, and deserving of death. His sometimes clear, sometimes hazy comments about being "atheist" or "agnostic" make better sense in the light of his acceptance of certain elements of the Gnostic cosmology, especially as understood through his reading of Blake. In other words, since the true God (in this system of belief), who is beyond all things, is completely Unknown and unknowable, he can say that he is an "atheist," especially since he stands in opposition—a-theistically—to the (in his mind) false God of the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Which brings us to the all-important question: how can someone such as Sister Pacatte state, "That God that he kills off, he's doing us a favour"? My hope is that she is simply ignorant of Pullman's views and the mythology he both embraces and creates (or recreates). Or perhaps she, like "Catholic" theologian Donna Freitas, thinks these neo-Gnostic ideas are actually good for modern-day people, and somehow free them from the confines of a narrow-minded, structured, authoritarian religion and Church. I, of course, cannot answer that question. Yet Freitas, for her part, openly states, "Pullman's work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox." She is partially correct: Pullman's work is definitely anti-orthodox. And, because that is so, it is also anti-Christian since true Christianity is orthodox. Thus, one can only hold to her remark if he believes that Gnosticism is true Christianity. And, if that is the case, it follows logically, again, that Pullman is advocating and presenting a form of belief that is in opposition to Catholic teaching.
Finally, to get back to the article in question. It ends with this:
Gisèle Baxter, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia who has taught the books in a children's literature course, said characterizing their position on religion is difficult and "almost a problem of vocabulary" because "saying that the books are anti-religious ... is not quite accurate." Instead, she said, the trilogy centres on an anti-authoritarian parallel universe where the characters are antagonistic to autocratic religious institutions.
Again, when the institution is give the name "Magisterium" and is described as being essentially Catholic, even though in a "parallel universe," how dense must one be to miss the obvious? Especially when Pullman, in an 2001 interview with BBC radio, has described the Catholic Church as the "villain" of his books? Especially when Pullman has made these sort of remarks in interviews:
In The Amber Spyglass, Mary Malone tells Lyra and Will that the Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake. Is that your opinion?
[Pullman:] I think I’d agree with her, yes.
What do you find powerful and convincing about it?
[Pullman:] It’s a very good story. It gives an account of the world and what we’re doing here that is intellectually coherent and explains a great deal. But then so do other stories. The Gnostic myth, for example, explains a great deal in a very different way. Very different. The Christian story gives us human beings a very important and prominent part. We are the ones who Jesus came to redeem from the consequences of sin, which our parents – you know. It is a very dramatic story and we are right at the heart of it, and a great deal depends on what we decide. This is an exciting position to be in, but unfortunately it doesn’t gel at all with the more convincing account that is given by Darwinian evolution – and the scientific account is far more persuasive intellectually. Far more persuasive. And, as I have said, there is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.
Although Philip Pullman has danced and weaved his way through interviews in recent months, his beliefs are fairly clear and obvious, even if they don't always make much sense. What is not as clear is why some Catholics are not only defending Pullman but criticizing those who are pointing out the theological errors and spiritual dangers of his beliefs. Have we now come to the point when the most sacred tenet for some is a form of "tolerance" that recoils most violently at the grave "sin" of criticizing falsehood?
• Read excerpts from Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy
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