Living the story (4)

The final session of Living the Story last Friday got me thinking about the extent to which creating art involves, through its very nature, aspects of spirituality. This is an argument that Malcolm Guite makes in respect of poetry in his book Faith, Hope and Poetry and one which is, to some extent also borne out through the writings of Philip Pullman, whose The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ we compared and contrasted to Ann Rice's Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.

The starting point for these reflections is the commitment of the author to the story. Pullman has rightly been explicit in interviews about the importance of this commitment for novelists: "My intention is to tell a story – in the first place because the story comes to me and wants to be told."

Where this commitment is in place the stories that are written cannot simply be illustrations of the beliefs and opinions of the author. This is because once the initial scenario and characters have been described the story must develop in a way that is consistent with what has gone before:

"It's a story, not a treatise, not a sermon or a work of philosophy. I'm telling a story, I'm showing various characters whom I've invented saying things and doing things and acting out beliefs which they have, and not necessarily which I have. The tendency of the whole thing might be this or it might be that, but what I'm doing is telling a story, not preaching a sermon."

When this is combined, as in the His Dark Materials trilogy and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, with explicitly Christian sources (Paradise Lost for His Dark Materials and the Gospels for The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ) it is then not possible for the story to not explore and express a spirituality.  

Pullman views the spirituality expressed as essentially secular albeit expressed in Christian language, imagery and narrative (often inverted). He has, for example, spoken in interviews about the impact of Kleist's thinking on his work:

"Kleist says we exist on a spectrum that goes from the unconscious to the fully conscious, and once we've left unconscious grace behind we can't go back, we can only go on - through life, through education, through suffering, through experience to the thing we come to call wisdom, which is right at the other end of the spectrum."
It is this sense of movement from unconcious grace to conscious wisdom that he seeks to present in and through Christian myth in His Dark Materials:
"I try to present the idea that the Fall, like any myth, is not something that has happened once in a historical sense but happens again and again in all our lives. The Fall is something that happens to all of us when we move from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and I wanted to find a way of presenting it as something natural and good, and to be welcomed, and, you know - celebrated, rather than deplored."

However, this movement need not be understood solely as a secular spirituality. The fact that it can be expressed in and through Christian language, imagery and story should suggest that it can also be consonant with Christian theology and spirituality. This movement is one which can be equated, for example, with Radical Theology, also known as Death of God theology. Ideas found in Radical Theology such as that:

• that certain concepts of God, often in the past confused with the classical Christian doctrine of God, must be destroyed: for example, God as problem solver, absolute power, necessary being, the object of ultimate concern;
• that we do not today experience God except as hidden, absent, silent; and
• that God must die in the world so that he can be born in us as those chose to live in Christ in a world come of age; 

have real synergy with a story in which, as Donna Freitas and Jason E. King have argued, Pullman annihilates an understanding of God that is antiquated and unimaginative.

Rowan Williams has argued, in a review of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, that there are occasions when Pullman forces his stories in order to preach this message and therefore turns story into polemic: 

"The narrative is mostly Pullman at his very impressive best, limpid and economical, though one or two passages feel like easy point-scoring – the Annunciation story told as a seduction, or the mechanics of a fraudulent resurrection. At only one point does he break the flow of this narrative, in a long soliloquy by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest. Jesus's own faith, it transpires, is now on the edge of extinction. He admits to himself that there is no answer to be expected from heaven. Looking towards God, in the complete absence of any definable divine action or manifestation, is no longer possible. We may look back wistfully at a world in which this once felt possible or natural; but we have to let it go or be dishonest.


It is essentially the vision of Mary Malone in the third volume of Pullman's His Dark Materials. Here as there, it is expressed with some real emotional power. But there are problems. One is simply that nothing in the narrative has prepared us for this; the Jesus of earlier chapters has a robust conviction of the unconditional love of God as the basis for forgiveness and generous confidence, and for principled opposition to religious nonsense and tyranny. Set against the magical, power-hungry deity of "Christ", this is a liberating vision of the divine. Suddenly, it seems to have collapsed because there is no conclusive sign from heaven; and nothing in the story helps us to see how this happens.

The problem for a believer goes deeper. In the gospels, too, Jesus agonises in Gethsemane and gets no answer. But he accepts that he has – so to speak – taken on the responsibility of providing an answer in his own life and death, in a way consistent with his claim throughout the gospel to be speaking on behalf of God's liberating authority within a paralysed religious and social world. So when he cries out to God in agony from the cross "Why have you deserted me?", this is the consequence of his decision to be – in his own person – God's "answer". And there is no consoling word that can come to him from outside.

There is a clear narrative line in the Bible from Jesus's revolutionary confidence in announcing God's forgiveness, through to the terrible resolution in Gethsemane and its consequence on the cross. Simply as narrative, I think it makes better imaginative sense than Pullman's abrupt introduction of Jesus's abandonment of faith. Now Pullman would reject such a narrative line, because it claims that God's "failure" to answer doesn't decide anything. Pullman's Jesus is scathing about "smartarse priests" who talk about God's absence really being his presence. Well, yes: Christians use this kind of language. But not to let themselves off lightly; they're arguing that you only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled – so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your self-centred wish-fulfilment fantasies.

What's left, then? This is the difficult moment. Either you sense that you are confronting an energy so immense and unconditioned that there are no adequate words for it; or you give up. From Paul to Luther, George Herbert or Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hitler's prisons, there are plenty who haven't given up; and they haven't given up because they see their experience in the light of something like this understanding of Gethsemane and the crucifixion."

Equally, it is also possible to see moments in his narratives when the demands of the characters and story lead him onto ground and ideas which seems very different from that he has explicitly sought to explore. So, for example, Graham Holderness has argued that the heart of the Dark Materials trilogy lies in Pullman‟s modern version of the Christian Harrowing of Hell:

"... in my view the journey to the Land of the Dead is both the narrative climax, and the most fully realised imaginative achievement of the novels. By contrast the War in Heaven and the Second Fall represent disappointing and anti-climactic narrative resolutions. The Authority has no true power, and disintegrates at a touch, though his regent Metatron proves harder to destroy.


It is precisely at this point of the narrative, where the search for Roger is suddenly expanded into the vastly larger project of liberating all the dead, that we witness a transition from the classical journey to the underworld, to the Christian Harrowing of Hell. Lyra and Will jointly play the role of deliverer, "redeemer and redemptrix", or as Millicent Lenz describes Lyra, the "Savior of humanity". Although Pullman's Land of the Dead clearly bears many similarities to the classical underworld, this vision of Hell being emptied was beyond the scope of the pagan imagination. Only Christianity with its revaluation of death could envisage an underworld from which the dead might hope to gain release. 'Death is going to die’.

In constructing his modern version of the harrowing of Hell, Pullman may have been 'trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief‟, by attempting to fashion a new anti-religious counter-myth of death and the dead, a "secular liberation narrative" expressing an "emancipatory and 'natural' humanism". But despite his intention, as Gooderham puts it, to "bend the old myth to a new secular purpose", the old myth bites back. „In order to attack religion‟, says Rayment-Pickard, "Pullman ends up telling a religious story". "Like all artistic transgressors" he goes on, "Pullman pays homage to the sacred power that he seeks to overcome". Pullman calls himself a "Christian atheist": ultimately he remains "secretly in love with theology and the theological re-enchantment of the world". He hovers on the threshold of the church because it is the church, not the ideology of secularism, that centres both the worlds of heaven and hell. Pullman is an anti-metaphysician who has nonetheless, to adapt Nietzsche's phrase, lit his fire from the Christian flame. The reason he writes at liberty when writing of devils and Hell, and in fetters when writing of secular humanism, is that he is of God's party, without knowing it."

Rowan Williams makes essentially the same claim in relation to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:

"A very bold and deliberately outrageous fable, then, rehearsing Pullman's familiar and passionate fury at corrupt religious systems of control – but also introducing something quite different, a voice of genuine spiritual authority. Because that is what Pullman's Jesus undoubtedly is. Time and again, when Pullman offers his version of a familiar biblical saying or narrative, he achieves a pitch-perfect rendering in modern idiom, carrying something of the shock and compelling attraction of the original gospel text. Just one example. When he relates the story of Jesus healing a demon-possessed man in the synagogue, his Jesus responds to the shouts of the disturbed man with, "You can be quiet now. He's gone away" – subtly paraphrasing the "Be silent and come out of him" in the gospel. This eloquently suggests the sort of sense a modern reader might make of the story, without reducing the manifest authority of the words of Jesus. More radically, he manages to retell the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in a way that turns the biblical text completely upside down, yet creates an echo of other gospel parables in its fundamental vision – reversing moral expectations in the context of the Kingdom of God."
Their views are viable not because of Pullman's stated intent, close as this is to Radical Theology, but because being true (in the main) as author to the dynamic and flow of the story and characters he has created take him inevitably where his conscious mind would not choose to go. Pullman may even have acknowledged this reality in one of his more positive statements about religion:

"Religion is something that human beings do, and the story is on the side of humanity. The feelings of wonder and joy and awe that human beings have always felt in the face of nature and the mystery of our lives have sometimes taken religious expression, and sometimes poetic; and sometimes they've been expressed in writing about science. I think I tried to give those feelings expression in the form of a story. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. That's what the story is for."


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Rush - Xanadu.