I recently finished Philip Pullman’s ode to Milton. It was my fantasy/fiction ‘break’ from other readings that I have pursued this summer.
First things are first, and it was very well written. Northern Lights (yes I will be pompous and use the proper English name for The Golden Compass) especially did what I have seen so rarely done in fantasy: it showed me its world rather than telling me about it first. Pullman does not start off with ‘And what is a dæmon?’ though that is a perfectly legitimate way to begin a novel. No, he drops you straightaway into Lyra’s world and, rather than expositing its workings to you in detail, he shows its workings as the story permits opportunity, and he does so quite skillfully. It was refreshing. As the series went on, however, this diminished. New discoveries about the universe were handled more clumsily, or just plainly told to the reader. And the overall narrative consistency of the story faltered, as well, creating an uneven experience at times. That said, there are parts of The Subtle Knife (the second book) that far outshone Northern Lights, but again the narrative feel was inconsistent sometimes – a problem that worsened in The Amber Spyglass, where I got the feel that even with the book’s lengths there were parts that were too rushed. Nevertheless, the ending was quite perfect, and even choked me up a bit.
On to the matters of philosophy. The goal of His Dark Materials is quite clearly to kill God. And Pullman is not circumspect about this. He does use ‘Magisterium’ and ‘The Authority,’ but also ‘Church’ and ‘God’ and ‘Pope John Calvin’ (who, in Lyra’s world, moved the papacy to Geneva before abolishing it in favor of a bureaucracy). It is interesting that nearly every person in Pullman’s universe gets a three-dimensional character, who we may at sometimes love and at other times loathe, with the exception of God, and especially his zealots. The character who plays the role of Satan (I have said this is heavily inspired by Paradise Lost, no? though there is also not an insignificant amount of Homer, too) is allowed outs, heroisms, despite the odium of certain of his acts, and given character complications that God is not.
But I have been helped to understand, through Pullman and through a conversation with an ardent Calvinist (though really a nice guy), that what I have really rejected, with almost as much force as I can muster, is the God of Calvinism. Pullman’s God and Calvin’s God, despite their great differences, share this: that he is God only because he is powerful. In strict, logically coherent Calvinism (so far as I can discern it), God creates the rules and decides (arbitrarily) what is and isn’t good. God could’ve done this or that or the other, and any way he might’ve chosen would’ve been good, because he is God, the Almighty, the Sovereign. To say God is good is tantamount to saying God is God. And this is an argument I bought for quite some time. But now I think that it is extremely mistaken, for whether or not one is very powerful, and whether or not one is creator, right is still right and wrong is still wrong. Should mankind succeed in creating true artificial intelligence, we would have moral obligations in our interactions with them, though we would not be morally obligated to interact (this is actually a point my conversation partner argued against, saying we would have no moral obligations at all to sentient beings of our own creation). And there is no moral exemption for ‘holding all the cards’ so to speak – it is still a horror to willfully do injustice to another, and capricious to extend (when all circumstances on behalf of both parties are equivalent) mercy to one and not to another. Shall we say then that God, in his dealings with most of humanity, is like the priest or Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan? (In Christian theology, or at least that which I can appreciate, it is here that the freedom of the will, and the necessity for that freedom in forming what is human, permits the morality of the doctrine of hell.)
And yet it is all these moral concerns which I have heard vociferously denounced and even ridiculed, and spent a good portion of my time as a Christian, and also the time in my adolescence when my worldview was developing, in the company of those who denounced them, though some with more thought to what they were doing than others. And I find myself agreeing with Philip Pullman: I am not impressed with God’s power, and I have no desire at all to worship him because of it. He may very well damn me to hell for it, and I have no illusion of holding up under torture but I imagine that I would be absolutely torn to pieces under the weight of it. And so be it. If I am to worship God, I desire to do so only because of the far-surpassing excellence of his good character and his nature, not because of his power, though no doubt his character and nature move through and are expressed by means of his power. And I hope that in so saying, that if God were not the all-powerful God, and Satan were God instead, I would still despise Satan and love God. But I will not worship a monster.
Now that brings up the question of whether or not a human can tell what is and is not a monster. I think it is fairly obvious that finite beings, much smaller than the universe they live in, cannot fully appreciate or understand goodness, with all its various shapes in an endless sea of possible circumstance. But that does not mean that we cannot know any of it. In order for me to be able to worship God I must be able to see and perceive not only that he exists, but that he is also good, even if the entirety of that goodness passes out of the realm of my understanding. And if he is Creator, and Sustainer, and if he is good, then there should be no problem in my being sufficiently enabled to see enough of his goodness to know it.
I am wary of writing off God altogether, for two reasons best elucidated through quotes, one Scriptural and one Lewisian. The first, a parable I’ve written about before: the parable of the talents, in which Jesus judges poorly the man who expects him to be ‘hard,’ but well those who expect to see him well (and live their lives accordingly). It may seem silly at fist blush, but I have no qualms at the possibility of my inner expectation of the deity shaping my own character, and thus my response to that deity on that Day (permitted, of course, that this deity exists). It should be no surprise that thinking the foundation of goodness to be bad should warp a soul beyond its ability to savor or accept the presence of God.
And the other is the quote I shall leave you with, veering wildly from Pullman’s His Dark Materials with its (in my view, somewhat proper, if inappropriately generalized) indictments of Calvin’s God, to the end of Lewis’ The Last Battle where a circle of dwarfs sit in the open fields at the gateway of heaven. Lewis’ God inspires more affection and awe in me than Pullman’s, and so do Lewis’ heaven and hell inspire more love and fright, and here I am pondering their different concepts of the Almighty:
‘Aslan,’ said Lucy through her tears, ‘could you – will you – do something for these poor Dwarfs?’
‘Dearest,’ said Aslan, ‘I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.’ He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, ‘Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!’
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’ But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarrelling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:
‘Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.’
‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. But come, children. I have other work to do.’
