Barry's Blog

It was only a matter of time before it hit the big screen. Perhaps you've already seen the trailers for The Golden Compass, the first installment of Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, which debuts in theaters December 7th. Riding the wave of the record-breaking films of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of  the Rings and C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, New Line Cinema has gone out of its way to link the new film to Tolkien's work, which the studio also adapted. The beautifully crafted official website of the upcoming release is sure to create interest and curiosity (www.goldencompassmovie.com).

I haven't read Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, but enough has been written to let the reader and filmgoer know that this work is no Narnia. Peter Chattaway, film critic for Christianity Today, wrote a recent article that gives us insight into Pullman's work, to which this article is indebted. His Dark Materials (the title taken from John Milton's epic, Paradise Lost) presents a vastly different kind of fantasy tale than those told by the Inklings companions, Lewis and Tolkien. Yes, the story begins with a girl hiding in a wardrobe, and continues with her adventures into other worlds, encountering witches, and ultimately, to an an end times battle between supernatural powers.

But there the similarities end, or more precisely, Pullman's trilogy represents the antithesis of Lewis's and Tolkien's vision. Writing in The Guardian on the occasion of Lewis's centenary in 1998, Pullman declared the Narnia books to be "one of the most ugly and poisonous things I have ever read...with no shortage of nauseating drivel." The brother of atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator in 2003, named Pullman "the Anti-Lewis."

While Tolkien and Lewis wrote their fantasies with embedded Christian imagery, Pullman's trilogy, which has sold millions of copies and won numerous awards (including the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Prize), describes gleefully the death of God and the creation of a "Republic of Heaven," which has no need for a King. And while Tolkien and Lewis's works were subtle in their presentation of Christian elements, there is little subtlety in Pullman's trilogy. A former nun in one important scene informs two children that she left the Christian faith because "it's a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all."

Some have suggested that the latter two Dark Materials books, "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass," are even more brazen in the Death-of-God theme. In these books, Lyra discovers that Lord Asriel is mounting a war against God, and she meets a boy from our own world who acquires a knife that can cut through anything, including the barrier between universes. By the end of the trilogy, God is dead, and Will and Lyra have reenacted the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Yet here's the twist Pullman has put on his story: in their reenactment of the Temptation narrative, they save the universe rather than bring about it's ruination, as orthodox Christianity would posit. Could there possibly be a better rendition of the Human Potential Movement than Pullman's fantasy?

In Pullman's world, truth is not an authoritative written revelation from the sovereign God of the universe, but is rather discovered by the "alethiometer" (from the Greek, aletheia, meaning "truth"), an extraordinarily intricate device invented by a 16th century metaphysical scientist. The needle on the alethiometer (also known as the Golden Compass) seeks out, not true north, but Truth Itself. To Pullman, humanity, not God, is the final arbiter and discoverer of Truth. Someone, or Something, in that ancient Garden, we are told in Genesis, once said as much, and it wasn't Eve or Adam. 

While Pullman, like his fellow countrymen Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, despise the very notion of anything that hints of Christian orthodoxy, Tolkien and Lewis believed that only a Christian vision of life with a sovereign God at the very center of our existence gives meaning and significance to the way things really are. While Lewis is generally regarded as the most important defender of orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century, many forget that he also believed it to be fully rational for us to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories. He clearly penned the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia series with this intent.

On the purpose behind The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis wrote: "I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm...But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could." 

In the dedication of his book, A Preface to Paradise Lost (coming full circle to Pullman...), Lewis noted that "when the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted." As many writers have observed, it is this fusion of the moral and the imaginative, the vision of virtue itself as adorable, that makes Lewis (and Tolkien) so distinctive, and attractive, amidst our post-Christian culture. With the imaginative, Pullman has perhaps done well, but concerning the moral, he simply doesn't have a clue. 

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow

"I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."  -C.S. Lewis 

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