Whose Dark Materials?

The Catholic Herald has condemned Philip Pullman’s trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’ as atheistic and anti-church. Pullman himself has said that his heroes, Will and Lyra’s, search for ‘the republic of heaven’ is meant as a metaphor for the search for a moral republic. Gillian Cross investigates.

Why haven’t Christians made more fuss about ‘His Dark Materials’?

Here’s a story, published for children, which kills off God and portrays the Church as totally authoritarian and evil. Wouldn’t you have expected vociferous condemnation from the Archbishop of Canterbury? Calls to remove the books from libraries and ban them from schools?

All the priests in the book are either unpleasantly sensual (like Father Semyon, who hugs and kisses Will and gives him vodka) or coldly fanatical (like Father Gomez, who is sent to kill Lyra). Nuns are repressed, inadequate creatures, tricked into denying their sexuality and ‘God’ himself (who is known as the Authority) is a pathetic, whimpering ancient in a crystal cage. When he is let out into the open air, he simply evaporates. The books are intended as a direct attack on organised religion and Christianity is described as ‘a very powerful and convincing mistake’ – yet there has been no real protest except for a few angry newspaper articles. The Church Times was happy to carry an interview with Philip Pullman and one vicar I know even gave the trilogy to her teenage god-daughter as a birthday present. What’s going on?

The big questions

To understand that, you have to understand how the books address the big questions at the centre of all spirituality: What does it mean to be human? How should we live? How can we face death? Children’s literature has traditionally dealt with such questions, but Philip Pullman goes right to the root of them. He begins with the assumption that there is (of course) no God. His ‘God’ is not the creator, but simply an imaginary external authority, a mistake made by matter (in the form of people) when it first became aware of itself. Many people might see the God-mistake as pathetic but harmless. Pullman sees it as disastrous and destructive because it underpins organised religion.

His fictional Church is a cynical, cruel bureaucracy. It kidnaps and tortures children to save them from the Dust which represents the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of human beings. The Church equates Dust with sin and uses the authority of the unreal ‘God’ to suppress curiosity and creativity. This seems to be the Church’s only purpose and all other moral considerations give way to it.

As a Christian, I am, of course, itching to pick holes in this caricature, but that would be self-indulgent. Pullman’s ‘Holy Church’ is, like any satire, not without elements of truth which the real church would do well to consider. But no one except the most prejudiced bigot would take such a grotesque Aunt Sally for a straightforward picture of reality.

It’s much more interesting to look at the books’ vision of goodness and fulfilment. Opposed to the wicked ‘Church’ is a huge and varied cast of good characters, led by Will and Lyra, the children who are the new Adam and Eve. The whole long, complex story leads up to the moment when these two meet Mary Malone, the ex-nun who delights in science and in matter. Because of Mary, Lyra finds herself facing the same choice as Eve.

A new garden of Eden

And that’s where story and theory part company in an extraordinary way. Pullman clearly intends Lyra’s choice to be seen in terms of sexual awakening. Mary Malone (the serpent in this new garden of Eden) tells the story of how she stopped believing in God. This makes Lyra aware of her own sexuality and her feelings for Will. Holding a fruit to his lips, she chooses to embrace him and to enter fully into the real world of love and delight, of matter and human experience. This crucial action saves not just her own world but all parallel worlds as well.

Only it doesn’t. It’s obviously meant to be the turning point of the whole story, but if it were, Will and Lyra would go off together, free to love each other and rejoice in the world. That doesn’t happen. Stories have their own wisdom which, ultimately, Philip Pullman is too good a storyteller to ignore. The action moves on, beyond the moment when Will and Lyra declare their love, to quite a different turning point.

They discover that there is a price to pay for living happily and fully in the real world. While people go through doors into other worlds, the Dust of human wisdom and knowledge leaks slowly away into nothingness. To stay properly human and alive, Will and Lyra must close the doors and commit to the worlds where they belong – which means that they must separate for ever.

Their agonizing separation is the true and necessary climax of the story, because that is where they are tested (which is what temptation means). They are tempted to put their own good above everything else – which is the real temptation of consciousness, and of Eve. Will nearly succumbs, but Lyra will not let him. Unlike Eve, she resists the temptation. She and Will separate, knowing that their task is to build ‘the republic of heaven’ by helping everyone in their worlds ‘to learn and understand themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious’. It’s a powerful and beautiful ending.

The irony is that it’s very close to the Christian understanding of what it means to be human. Dualists may hold that the material world is bad and that we should aspire to some purely spiritual reality, but Christians have always been clear that this is the world in which we must live and work and for which we should give thanks. As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom says, ‘It is useless to seek God somewhere else.’ Only by deep and committed involvement with the world around us can we engage with reality, with other people and with ourselves. That’s what incarnation means.

The common good

That commitment to engage with the world, as Pullman rightly sees, cannot happen without cost. Enjoying the world is good, but it’s not enough. It’s also important to let go, to be willing to give up what you want, for the sake of the common good. ‘Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies,’ Jesus said, ‘it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.’ And Lyra has the same insight: ‘No one could [build the republic of heaven] if they put themselves first.’

It isn’t easy to live like that. How can we do it?

And why should we?

Why is one of the questions which ‘His Dark Materials’ signally fails to answer. Pullman is on record as saying that ‘ordinary human decency’ is sufficient reason for doing good. So why do people do bad things? Is it because they’re innately less ‘decent’? Because they’re too stupid to work out what’s right in a given situation? Or because they aren’t listening to the Wills and Lyras who are ‘showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly’?

Within the story, Pullman escapes these questions by sleight of hand. All the evil is done by characters in the Church who have abandoned their own moral responsibility. They are cardboard villains blindly following the dictates of ‘the Authority’. Beyond that, the story has nothing to say about good and evil except Mary Malone’s description of what happened when she stopped believing in God: ‘I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.’

She must have been a strange nun if she believed that people were simply ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Does Philip Pullman really think that Christians categorise human beings like that?

The Christian explanation of evil is, at root, that ‘ordinary human decency’ is not enough on its own because, when there is a real conflict, we have a tendency to put our own interests first. That’s what ‘original sin’ means. It has no particular connection with sexuality (although sexual feelings often do lead us to harm other people). It means that we are not, naturally, predisposed to make the kind of choice that Will and Lyra make at the end of The Amber Spyglass.

So why do we believe in their sacrifice? How does Philip Pullman manage to make the end of the story deeply satisfying instead of mawkish and unreal?

It’s satisfying because it costs so much. Will and Lyra have been through hardship and death together and they understand the true significance of what they have to do. Above all, they both have the strength that comes from being deeply loved by someone who is willing to sacrifice everything.

They sustain themselves with the thought that they will, in some form, be together again after death: ‘I’ll drift about for ever, all my atoms, till I find you again,’ says Will. Lyra responds in the same way: ‘And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight …’ Until then, they promise that on Midsummer’s Day, in their own worlds, they will each come at midday to the Botanic Gardens in Oxford and sit for an hour, remembering.

If Pullman had left them free to stay together, to love each other and rejoice in the world, the story would have been immeasurably weaker. Their separation is crucial. They set out to work for the good of their worlds with energy and cheerfulness (what the New Testament calls ‘joy’), sustained by something very like prayer, and by the knowledge that they are loved by someone who has made a great sacrifice to save their world.

Each, in a sense, is the other’s Jesus.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that ‘His Dark Materials’ is Christian. It veers schizophrenically between story and satire and its heavy-handed lampooning of the Church is as dogmatic and unpleasant as C S Lewis’s attack on experimental schools in The Silver Chair. But when it is most truly a story, it is close to the central insights of Christianity. My guess is that most children will treat it as they treat The Silver Chair, ignoring the tub-thumping and enjoying the action. I hope they do. It deals with things that are important to everyone, and complex and challenging stories about spiritual issues are hard to find.

Northern Lights (0 590 66054 3), The Subtle Knife (0 590 11289 9) and The Amber Spyglass (0 439 99358 X), the titles in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, are published by Scholastic at £6.99 each.

Gillian Cross is the author of, amongst many other titles, The Demon Headmaster.