The Golden Compass

The Bible Society's Newswatch email reports that The Golden Compass, the film version of part 1 of Philip Pullman’s bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy, is provoking very mixed reactions from church organisations.

On the eve of the film’s release (5/12) the Catholic League in the USA has condemned the movie for promoting atheism and for its tyrannical ‘God’ figure. Closer to home, however, Evangelicals Now counsels parents to ‘watch the movie with [their children] and then talk through the issues raised’. The Church of Scotland’s Mission and Discipleship Council go further, commenting that the film ‘provides a golden opportunity to stimulate discussion on a wide range of moral and spiritual issues’. It sees Lyra, the central character, as ‘one of the powerless who turns out to be a saint’ and says the film invites discussion on ‘human purpose and destiny, the abuse of power, the making of choices and the meaning of life’. The Church will distribute a resource to churches across Scotland.

It is good to see that, on balance, Church responses suggest engagement with the issues raised by the Philip Pullman's books and the film version. One thing that is often missed in the discussion of Pullman's attack on organised religion and the death of the 'god' figure in the book, is the extent to which there is a spirituality that informs the book.

That spirituality is primarily Blakean with the book's 'god' figure resembling Blake's 'Nobodaddy', the old stereotype of God as an old punishing father in the sky (which in Blake's mythology also equates to the image of reason). Against the elevation of reason as a set of universal principles Blake (in an anticipation of post-modernism) "celebrated ‘minute particulars’; the ‘lineaments’ of bodies, and his works of art favoured bounding lines and distinct forms. He privileged difference over identity, becoming over being, the body over reason, and energy over states. Blake engraved his positive images of the spirit and gave them dynamic and sexually different bodies. He did not believe in generalities (‘One law for the lion & ox is oppression), and he insisted that the tyranny of reason could only be overcome though the dynamism of conflict and contraries: ‘without contraries there is no progession’."

The god figure that dies in His Dark Materials can be understood as a Nobodaddy figure whose opens the way to the Republic of Heaven. For Pullman, this is a vision of all that is good in the world including all that is good in the Church. It involves, he says, "all the best qualities of things. We mustn’t shut anything out. If the Church has told us, for example, that forgiving our enemies is good, and if that seems to be a good thing to do, we must do it. If, on the other hand, those who struggled against the Church have shown us that free enquiry and unfettered scientific exploration is good – and I believe that they have – then we must hold this up as a good as well.
Whatever we can find that we feel to be good – and not just feel but can see with the accumulated wisdom that we have as we grow up, and read about history and learn from our own experiences and so on – wherever they come from, and whoever taught them in the first place, let’s use them and do whatever we can do to make the world a little bit better."

Pullman set out his debt to Blake in an New Statesman article from last year where he outines what is basically a humanist re-interpretation of aspects of Blake's mythology.

It should also be noted that there is no place for Jesus in the Magisterium (the Church that features in His Dark Materials). This is something that Rowan Williams notes in the public conversations he had with Pullman in 2003/04. In those interviews, and in an interview published in Margaret Barker's An Extraordinary Gathering of Angels, Pullman is fundamentally positive about the person of Jesus: "in the context of this notion of wisdom that works secretly and quietly, not in the great courts and palaces of the earth, but among ordinary people and so on." "The liberating angels," he feels, "continue to work in secret, by inspiring great human teachers like Jesus." It has also been little remarked that Lyra makes a Christ-like journey to bring those who have died from the land of the dead.

One of the reasons why Pullman is interesting as an author is that he goes where his story takes him even if this leaves him puzzled from the perspectives of his personal beliefs (which seem basically agnostic although veering towards support for several of the political positions taken by the British Humanist Association). It is this willingness to follow the story, as well as his fascination with Blake and Milton, that seems to open up space for a sense of spirituality in the trilogy. This sense emerges from the fascinating interview that he gave to Third Way when he discusses the relationship between Mary Malone, Lyra and Will. Mary Malone is the Satan figure in the trilogy who leads Lyra and Will to a fall into grace. As such, she is the closest to a representation of Pullman's views in the book and yet Pullman allows the story to involve the separation of Lyra and Will in a way that is, in effect, a renunciation of Malone's understanding. Pullman felt that this was essential for the story but is puzzled as to what it means. Clearly, though, it opens up the possibility of understanding aspects of the story in a way that differs from Pullman's own understanding and which could involve a spirituality that differs from the materiality that Pullman, as humanist rather than author, tends to invoke.

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