As with these elements of story, narrative, and character, there are issues of substance between Lewis and Pullman that seem more diametrical at first glance, but which, I believe, dissolve under the light of closer examination. At the heart of it, Lewis is a monarchist. Pullman is a republican, and so the monarchal Church is the enemy. The witch Rite Skadi thus sums her centuries of observation: "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." Mary Malone later calls Christianity a "well-meaning mistake."
Considering my own measured antipathy toward the "organized" part of organized religion, I can sympathize with the sentiment. The problem is, religions sprout like crabgrass even in the most desolate of landscapes. Any examination of human civilization, I believe, drives towards one or both of two conclusions: there is either an ecclesiastical god, or there is such an inclination in the human animal bred deeply in the bone. (10) The Church is the way it is because people are the way they are.
And therefore suffused with human weakness: the idea that the contemporary church would even qualify as some sort of blueprint for a Kingdom of Heaven is one Lewis rejects over and over again. "You are to imagine us," Ransom lectures Mrs. Studdock, "living on a world where the criminal classes of the [angels] have established their headquarters." It is a theme that permeates all of Lewis's writing. Facing the final showdown with evil, Ransom reminds Merlin, "We are four men, some women, and a bear (11) . . . . The Faith itself is torn to pieces . . . . The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes."
A situation not so different from that faced by the desperate heroes battling the Church in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Yet battle they must, against desperate odds. Because Lewis, while a monarchist, is a democrat, suspicious of the collective, holding out great hope in the wisdom and resources of ordinary men. Lewis may not be a deist, but his God is forced to play the role.
Consider angels. Like Pullman's, Lewis's good angels stand mostly apart from human activity. Lewis's Gods are forbidden to "send down the Powers to mend or mar in this Earth until the end of all things." In the meantime, the Oyeresu communicate through Ransom, who seeks out Merlin (as John Parry seeks out his son), while the dark forces at the Institute gather about a disembodied head, their "new man" (Lyra, like Jane Studdock, dreams of a severed head), a gateway to the gods.
It is the revolt against nature which both emboldens evil and destroys it. The means become the ends. The subtle knife looses upon the world the Specters, destroyers of souls. Yet it is the "one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant," Will's father tells him. Ransom crosses the dimensions of heaven by means of a "subtle engine," devised by his archenemy Weston to breach the wall of heaven and undo Eden. (12) Weston dead, the Institute on brink of destruction, Ransom reflects,
If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.
The same fate awaits Metatron (and Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter) in the climactic battle in The Amber Spyglass, "Deep Heaven" literally pulled down upon their shoulders, tumbling them into the same Abyss that swallows up Bracton and the Reverend Straik, who dreamed of the Kingdom of God established by "the powers of science" as its "irresistible instrument." Like Father Gomez and the Constitorial Court, men building kingdoms on Earth and rendering unto God that which is Caesar's, The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, Lewis informs us, "was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world." But its heart belonged to hell.
The Last Republic
There is no institutional solution to righteousness. Human beings build cities on a hill, but they can never found a kingdom of heaven on Earth without first building a Gulag Archipelago. So when Will's father tells him, "It's time we started again, but properly this time," he is not proposing yet another utopian dream soon to degrade into self-righteous totalitarianism. As Will remembers later,
[My father] said we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are. . . . I thought he just meant Lord Asriel and his new world, but he meant us, he meant you and me. . . . No one could [build Heaven] if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds. . . .
"We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world," says Lyra, "because where we are is always the most important place." (13)
Instructive in this regard is a comparison of Edens. In each lines can be drawn between Weston and Mary Malone, and between Ransom and Father Gomez, between those who fear truth and knowledge, and those who trust it implicitly. One hears echoes of Lewis's Malacandra and Perelandra in the land of Pullman's Mulefa, in Will and Lyra's return there from Hades and Armageddon (compare the final chapter of The Last Battle).
But a return to the Garden is not a return to paradise; it is a graduation from innocence into knowledge. In his acknowledgments, Pullman credits an essay by Heinrich von Kleist titled "The Marionette Theater." (14) The themes of this essay--drawing out the essential contrast between experience and innocence, and pointing to the deliberate labor that any return to Eden must require--play out with Lyra and her mastery of the Alethiometer, in an extension on the mustard seed allegory, delivered by the most unlikely of characters, and in a wonderful concluding discourse upon grace and works. As the angel Xaphania instructs Lyra,
You read [the Alethiometer] by grace, and you can regain it by work. But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you've gained it, it will never leave you.
This is the whole point of Eden. The problem with archetypes (and with such laden words as "grace") is that it's easy to remember the mythology and forget the original point. In the Biblical story God's greatest act is to permit Eve to be tempted, to allow the knowledge to flow to hearts and minds capable of accepting it. Again, Joseph Smith got this one right, portraying the "Fall" as a necessary step upwards in the evolution of the human race:
And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. . . . wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin. But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things. Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. (2 Nephi 2:22-25) (15)
A similar sentiment is echoed in the anime series Scrapped Princess. Finding humankind trapped inside a Rousseauan bell jar, Pacifica (the Eve character) must choose between the guaranteed safety of enforced innocence, and the perils of freedom and self-determination. She must destroy a cruelly anticeptic Eden, its gods and its church--where "Satan's rebellion had been successful"--to make humankind fit for salvation. This is the unique message of Mormonism, and one that Philip Pullman stands squarely behind.
A Tale Newly Told
"This is good doctrine," Joseph Smith boasted. "It tastes good." In other words, this is the way the story should be told. "We all need stories," Pullman points out, "but children are more frank about it." Indeed, the admonition to "become as little children" is, if anything, an admonition to treat the structure of story seriously, to recognize that even if you don't believe in Santa Clause, you should still believe in the story. Because some subjects are "too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book." Or perhaps, as Lewis prefaced That Hideous Strength, in a fairy tale.
All religious--all political, nationalistic, ideological--belief resolves to story, because the essence of faith and feeling cannot be reduced to objective fact, and story is the only way experience can be effectively transmitted from one mind to another. Mormonism (as an example) is known today for its staid, business-suited veneer, for its proscriptive moral code. A far cry from the infinite expanse of imagination that Joseph Smith suffused into a green and vibrant theology. Smith began his ministry at the age of fourteen, and began a religion with the epic story of two teenagers (Nephi and Mormon).
These are the stories that persevere, that still reach out from beneath the layers of propriety, earnestness, and bureaucracy. Said Philip Pullman at the conclusion of his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, "We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
The telling moment, for me, occurs in the third chapter of The Subtle Knife. Will finds himself in a situation where he must hide his identity. The alias he provides is "Ransom," as indicated above the eponymic name of C.S. Lewis's hero of the "Space Trilogy." What the two authors have created, then, are not parallel universes, but rather alternate worlds. The view from the one to the other is polarized; the symmetries align; light becomes brighter and contrasts turn dark. Because, regardless of what universe you are in, truth persists, in an eternal center, even when approached from opposite directions.
Even in the midst of darkness the awful, punishing Harpies recognize truth. To the Gallivespian Tialys they explain why they did not attack Lyra when they had wounded her earlier, under similar circumstances,
Because she spoke the truth. Because it was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn't help it. Because it was true. Because we had no idea that there was anything but wickedness. Because it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because it was true.
What the Harpies read as truth is the story of a life honestly told. Not lives good or bad, but recounted for what they were; the goodness is in the honesty of the telling. (Also the moral of The Great Divorce.) The stories these authors tell, in turn, are true to their characters, and true to themselves. As Daniel Moloney insightfully argues in First Things, Pullman's story "is not subversive of Christianity, it is almost Christian, even if only implicitly and imperfectly. But implicit and imperfect Christianity is often our lot in life[.]" (16)
There is ultimately more lost than won in searching for two sides of an argument buried somewhere in the rhetoric. There are three sides here, and many more beyond. And each of these authors reinforces a face of the pyramid, and braces the glittering crystal against the gathering dark.
10. "When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion out to be an enormous error conceived by priests, at least they were able to explain its persistence by the interest of the sacerdotal caste had in deceiving the masses. But if the peoples themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas, at the same time that they were the dupes, how has this extraordinary hoax been able to perpetuate itself throughout the course of history?" (Émile Durkheim, quoted in Nonzero by Robert Wright.) [return]
11. Mr. MacPhee (in That Hideous Strength) speaks of a bear that "would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except some other bear that none of us had ever heard of." He is of course referring to Mr. Bultitude, though the description apply well to Iorek Byrnison. [return]
12. Another interesting (and I'm sure coincidental) parallel between Pullman's Golden Compass and Joseph Smith's Liahona can be found in the Book of Mormon:
And it came to pass that as my father arose in the morning, and went forth to the tent door, to his great astonishment he beheld upon the ground a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness. (1 Ne. 16:10)
And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the thing which our fathers call a ball, or director--or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it. (Alma 37:38) [return]
13. Paraphrasing Seneca, "When shall we live, if not now?" [return]
14. You can reference the article at the Magellan's Log web site. [return]
15. Compare also Moses 5:10-12, and Paradise Lost, 12: 470-474. Here Adam contemplates being cast out of Eden:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! [return]
16. A review of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass by Daniel P. Moloney (May 2001). [return]
