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I love this quote from C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism (1961), which is easily applicable to film as well as literature:

This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, ‘interest’ us more than others. The causes of this interest are naturally extremely various and differ from one man to another; it may be the typical (and we say ‘How true!’) or the abnormal (and we say ‘How strange!’); it may the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. (pp. 139-141)

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Encounter 10: Jeffrey Overstreet on the how of storytelling from International Arts Movement on Vimeo.

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A handout for the second half of the second of five sessions on the prophets in the Old Testament at Bible & Culture 2010.

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Philip Pullman CBE is the acclaimed author of around thirty books, mostly aimed at older children. He is best known for His Dark Materials, a brilliantly written, ambitious trilogy (Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (1995); The Subtle Knife (1997); The Amber Spyglass (2000)). He has received many awards, including the highly prestigious Astrid Lindgren Award.

His Dark Materials centres on two children, Lyra and Will, from different universes who get caught up in the most ambitious plan ever conceived by a human being. Lyra’s world is governed by a manipulative, totalitarian and ruthless church. One character comments that throughout the church’s history, ‘it’s tried to suppress and control every natural impulse . . . every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.’[1] But a war is indeed coming. Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel, wants to destroy God, replacing his kingdom with the Republic of Heaven. God, known as the Authority, is merely the first angel, who duped other angels into believing that he is the creator. Now he is old and worn out, and eventually he dissolves into thin air with ‘a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief . . . a mystery dissolving into mystery’.[2]

This is all within Pullman’s fiction, of course, rather than our real world. But he repeatedly says similar things in interviews. In one he remarked, ‘the God who dies is the God of the burners of heretics, the hangers of witches, the persecutors of Jews, the officials who recently flogged that poor girl in Nigeria . . . all these people claim to know with absolute certainty that their God wants them to do these things. Well, I take them at their word, and I say in response that that God deserves to die.’[3]

This atheistic stance (which is seldom explicit in his other books) has brought Pullman plenty of criticism. Peter Hitchens (Catholic brother of the outspoken atheist Christopher) described him as, ‘The most dangerous man in Britain’. Pullman took this as a compliment and sent him ‘a warm card of appreciation and thanks’.[4] He was also pleased by the Catholic Herald’s claim that his books are, ‘far more worthy of the bonfire than Harry Potter . . . and a million times more sinister,’[5]

Pullman maintains that he became an atheist for purely intellectual reasons. His grandfather, a Church of England minister, was a major influence on his life. Following the death of his father in an air crash, the young Pullman spent a great deal of time with his grandparents. He never questioned their beliefs until, as a teenager confronted with competing worldviews, he abandoned the idea that Christianity is true.

Although he is frequently outspoken as an atheist, he says:

I’m caught between the words ‘atheistic’ and ‘agnostic’. I’ve got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don’t know. So maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he hasn’t shown himself on earth.

Such comments seem to display intellectual humility, and he also maintains that he has no atheist agenda as a writer: ‘I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.’[6] This doesn’t ring true for many people, since there are times in The Amber Spyglass in particular when he becomes very preachy. Then there are his much-quoted remarks that ‘my books are about killing God’[7] and, ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief’.[8] We must be careful, however, since inferring others’ motivations is always problematic. Even statements, such as these – which apparently announce motivation – may be misleading, especially when the statements are inconsistent with other statements. Both of these notorious comments come from around the time when The Amber Spyglass, was being promoted internationally. I suspect that he chose, deliberately or subconsciously, to express himself in very provocative ways in order to create a stir and boost sales. Interestingly, he has not subsequently made quite such blunt public statements of his intent.

On the other hand, Pullman has frequently stated that he wants to explore the questions he considers to be the ‘most important of all’: Is there a God? What does it mean to be human? What is our purpose? He comes at those questions from a particular angle, and he clearly has very strong views on the answers. But Pullman is right that such questions are absolutely fundamental.

Pullman’s view of reality

The most problematic aspect of His Dark Materials for many Christians is that God is killed. However, Pullman is only able to do this because of something more fundamental: the way he defines reality. He is a materialist, rejecting belief in the supernatural (frequently insisting that there is ‘no elsewhere’). His Dark Materials is consequently a celebration of physicality. In Pullman’s world, angels (and ghosts) are made of matter like everything else, though insubstantial. They are made of Dust – particles of consciousness that permeate all reality. The Authority (God) is the first of these angels and is therefore a physical being. When Lyra and Will meet him, he is immensely old and decrepit. He is a fraud, an imposter, a delusion whose time, according to Pullman, is long since past.

Once again, Pullman says similar things in the real world. ‘God died a long time ago,’ he exclaims. What he means is, ‘It’s as if God has died. That’s the feeling I have.’[9] The idea of God is redundant: ‘the old assumptions have withered away . . . the idea of God with which I was brought up is now perfectly incredible.’ [10] He claims that ‘the most important subject I know . . . is the death of God and its consequences,’[11] but also insists that:

‘God’ is nothing more than a metaphor: ‘I don’t expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that’s what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all – savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection – for David, for example. But he’s not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won’t find them in the phone book.[12]

He also brings the idea of the ‘Republic of Heaven’ into interviews because it encapsulates both his materialism and his strong sense of morality: ‘I think it’s time we thought about a republic of heaven instead of the kingdom of heaven. The king is dead. That’s to say I believe that the king is dead. I’m an atheist. But we need heaven nonetheless, we need all the things that heaven meant, we need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things that the kingdom of heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver. And, furthermore, we need it in this world where we do exist – not elsewhere, because there ain’t no elsewhere.’[13]

Pullman’s view of morality

Pullman’s vision of a materialist republic of heaven is very moral. He stresses mutual responsibility because, ‘In the republic we’re connected in a moral way to one another, to other human beings. We have responsibilities to them, and they to us. We’re not isolated units of self-interest in a world where there is no such thing as society; we cannot live so.’[14] The moral dimension of His Dark Materials is one of its strengths. In one television interview, Pullman commented, ‘An honest reading of the story would have to admit that the qualities that the stories celebrates and praises are those of love, kindness, tolerance, courage, open-heartedness, and the qualities that the stories condemns are: cruelty, intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism . . . well, who could quarrel with that?’[15] These values are very consistent with Christian values, but Pullman vehemently rejects the suggestion that they derive from a Judeo-Christian worldview:

You think that nobody can possibly be decent unless they’ve got the idea from God or something. Absolute bloody rubbish! Isn’t it your experience that there are plenty of people in the world who don’t believe who are very good, decent people? . . . It comes from ordinary human decency. It comes from accumulated human wisdom – which includes the wisdom of such figures as Jesus Christ. Jesus, like many of the founders of great religions, was a moral genius, and he set out a number of things very clearly in the Gospels which if we all lived by them we’d all do much better. What a pity the Church doesn’t listen to him![16]

Pullman’s panpsychism

Pullman rightly sees morality as intimately related to wisdom. In both his fiction and reality he sees wisdom as something that accumulates independently of any individual beings. In His Dark Materials he expresses this as Dust, the most fundamental reality in the universe: particles of consciousness which multiply within sentient beings and which coalesces into beings like angels. But Dust also exists independently of these beings, and possesses a collective consciousness. It is a brilliant idea which provides the central narrative tension to His Dark Materials and propels the story forward by guiding Lyra through an ‘alethiometer’ (from the Greek word for truth, alethea) and in other ways.

It’s ironic that Pullman’s story features a cosmic, superhuman intelligence that communicates, guides and directs in a remarkably god-like way. It certainly reintroduces some aspects of God back into the picture (though Pullman identifies Dust as being on the side of the rebellion against God). Freitas and King argue, therefore, that Pullman is really telling a profoundly spiritual story.[17] However, Pullman rejects the idea that the word ‘spiritual’ has any meaning. He says:

As for ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, ‘spirituality’ – these are words I never use, because I can see nothing real that seems to correspond with them: they have no meaning. I would never begin to talk of a person’s spiritual life, or refer to someone’s profound spirituality, or anything of that sort, because it doesn’t make sense to me. When other people talk about spirituality I can see nothing in it, in reality, except a sense of vague uplift combined at one end with genuine goodness and modesty, and at the other with self-righteousness and pride. . . . the word ‘spiritual’, for me, has overtones that are entirely negative. It seems to me that whenever anyone uses the word, it’s a sign that either they’re deluding themselves, or they’re pulling the wool over the eyes of others. And when I hear it, or see it in print, my reaction is one of immediate scepticism.[18]

Dust is thus thoroughly physical, not spiritual. It allowed Pullman to deal with religious issues while affirming a materialist view of reality. It is his ‘metaphor for . . . human wisdom, science and art, all the accumulated and transmissible achievements of the human mind.’[19] Once again, in the real world, Pullman expresses some similar ideas. He says:

Those who are committed materialists (as I claim to be myself) have to account for the existence of consciousness . . . There are various ways of explaining consciousness, many of which seem to take the line that it’s an emergent phenomenon that only begins to exist when a sufficient degree of complexity is achieved. Another way of dealing with the question is to assume that consciousness, like mass, is a normal and universal property of matter (this is known as panpsychism), so that human beings, dogs, carrots, stones, and atoms are all conscious, though in different degrees. This is the line I take myself, in the company of poets such as Wordsworth and Blake.[20]

This comes close to suggesting that Dust is more than a metaphor. Invoking the idea of panpsychism as a materialist explanation for the problem of human consciousness seems only to intensify the sense that Pullman is stretching to find a way around the problem of where such things as consciousness come from. Faced with the need to account for attributes of human beings that have traditionally been identified, at least to an extent, with the spiritual, he is forced to reach for the assumption (he acknowledges that it is one) that all consciousness is a universal property of matter, though there is no evidential basis for it. It is a faith-based perspective on reality which introduces additional complexity to understanding reality, yet without gaining very much in terms of explanatory power, especially with respect to the moral imperatives to which Pullman is committed.

The irony remains that Philip Pullman the materialist intuitively reached for models which encapsulate features of the very worldview he denies so strongly. He rejects the kingdom of heaven but says, ‘what I’m looking for is a way of thinking of heaven that restores these senses of rightness and goodness and connectedness and meaning and gives us a place in it. But because there ain’t no elsewhere, that has got to exist in the only place we know about for sure which is this earth, and we’ve got to make our world as good as we possibly can for one another and for our descendants. That’s what I mean by a republic of heaven. And we won’t ever finally get there . . . because of entropy.’[21] My contention is that rightness, goodness, connectedness and meaning are inherently spiritual and require the existence of a God beyond the physical realm. Pullman objects to this idea and yet unwittingly, it seems, stumbles into tying them up with something that is at least reminiscent of God. Perhaps it’s harder to jettison such concepts – such realities – than Philip Pullman realises.

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Children’s author Philip Pullman says Jesus wasn’t the Son of God

by Tom Kelly

Bestselling children’s author Philip Pullman has provoked more anger from Christians with a new book denying that Jesus was the son of God.

The book, due to be published next Easter, accepts there was a holy man called Jesus but says the idea of such a divine link came from the ‘fervid imagination’ of the apostle St Paul.

Pullman has already been condemned by the Vatican for the allegorical trilogy His Dark Materials, which has been described as anti-Christian.

His new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is a retelling of the story of Jesus.

It draws on the Bible for characters, locations and events, but the author says it reads like a mix between a novel, a history and a fairy tale. Pullman said: ‘I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.

‘By the time the gospels were being written, Paul had already begun to transform the story of Jesus into something altogether new and extraordinary, and some of his version influenced what the gospel writers put in theirs.

‘Paul was a literary and imaginative genius of the first order who has probably had more influence on the history of the world than any other human being, Jesus certainly included. I believe this is a pity.’ . . .

Posted via web from Tony Watkins

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Coraline (see my article) is a deliciously creepy film, but it’s raised again the question of whether children should be watching scary films, or reading scary books. It was raised last week on The Times’ ‘School Gate’ blog. I agree with Sarah Ebner when she writes:

However, in my (limited) experience, I feel that as long as there’s a warm or positive conclusion at the end of a book or film, children love to be scared, and it can even be good for them. It’s as if they are taking a journey and some famous tales are real rites of passage. Why else would fairy tales be so successful, or a huge range of books from Where the Wild Things Are to The BFG, The Gruffalo to Harry Potter?

It reminded me of comments made by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on the subect. Here’s Lewis:

By confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happened, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime. It would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St. George, or any bright champion in armour, is a better comfort than the idea of police. (‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ in On Three Ways of Writing for Children)

In Tolkien’s famous essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ (originally given as the Lang lecture), he talked about the three functions of fairy stories being recovery, escape and consolation. He wrote about the value of the ‘eucatastrophe’, the story’s ‘sudden joyous turn’:

But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.

The writer of Tolkien-Online.com is correct when he writes:

I would argue that ‘eucatastrophe’ pertains not just to the happy ending, but to the redemption of morality in the tale. Evil falls, but because of its own greed, its hatred, its fatal character flaw.

Good triumphs, and triumphs in some way because of its inherent good.

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I neglected to inform the world that my recording of a Men’s Breakfast at King’s Community Church, Hedge End (Southampton) is now available. It didn’t seem to be the right context to talk about the sacred feminine and goddess spirituality, so instead I talked about The Da Vinci Code and conspiracy theories. I highlighted a number of features of conspiracy theories and suggested that, despite Dan Brown’s protests, The Da Vinci Code strongly fits the criteria. I compared the lack of evidence for the ideas which Brown claims he believes with the strong evidence for the historically orthodox understanding of Christianity and the gospels.

All my available recordings are at www.tonywatkins.co.uk – or follow the Read More link below.

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