The Heavens Open, Deep and Bright
June 03, 2002

The Guardian has a rather intersting article on Philip Pullman's criticism of C.S. Lewis' Narnia series.

Pullman, attacked by a rightwing columnist as "the most dangerous author in Britain" and "semi-satanic", is celebrated for a trilogy which deliberately takes an opposite line to CS Lewis' Christian tales. In Pullman's world, the universe is ruled by a senile, viciously sadistic deity who has to be deposed in battle so that its inhabitants can join with angels in creating a "republic of heaven"...

[Quoting Pullman: ]"...[W]hen it no longer became possible to believe, a lot of people felt despair. What was the meaning of life? It seems that our nature is so formed that we need a feeling of connectedness with the universe. If there is no longer a king, or a kingdom of heaven, it will have to be a republic in which we are free citizens. We ourselves as citizens have to build the republic of heaven...

Its been ages since I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe , and truth be told, much of the book blurs with both the cartoon I saw as a child and the live action/animatronic series I caught bits of as a teen, but I do remember the general thrust of the story and the Christian undertones present. I've also read parts of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity so I've got a fair grasp of the material. It's actually good material too, though the heavy handedness that crops up from time to time in the Narnia books can be traced to the thoughts espoused in his other writings.

I'm not that familiar with Pullman's books. I do know that there has been a lot of controversy around them in light of his comments that run counter to Christianity. He has though won quite a few awards and his series has been well received by many a teen seeking further adventure in the Harry Potter-ish world.

Pullman's general critique of Lewis is fair enough as it goes. But in defense of Lewis, he was a product of his times (as are we all). It's not just his religious views that influenced his racism and sexism. Middle-class English dons of the early to mid 20th century aren't the most progressive folks to begin with. That his writings would reflect many of the prevailing attitudes of the time, attitudes that were reinforced by culture, politics and even religion, isn't surprising.

But Pullman is correct in his assessment that its become "impossible to believe" in the old stories as written. Though many polls show that there is a continued belief in god, angels and an afterlife, lock step, rank and file unquestioning belief of various religious teachings has given way to a more generalized, cafeteria view of spirituality. Taking pieces of many different stories and rolling them into one personal one is a rather convenient way of finding meaning in the world.

That appropriating and combining of mythic ideas is an age old action. Religion has always done this. The Romans did it to the Greeks when the Greek Pantheon of Zeus became the Roman pantheon of Jupiter. The Jews, a few thousand miles away, did the same, appropriating El from some of their neighbors and rolling him into becoming Elohim their own god. Even Elohim gets combined with Yahweh, another storm god appropriated from neighbors, later on by the Jews (most likely from brining different tribes together) to form a new and revised Yahweh -- who's still a bit different than the post diaspora version in use today. By the time Christianity gets into the mix, you've got Jewish and pagan influences being mixed and matched to form a new, more nebulous God for a new and more nebulous religion. And let's not even get into Allah...

The point is that as the years change the gods change. While it's reassuring to believe that any one particular god is exactly the same now as he was 1,000 or more years ago, it never works out that way. The gods have to speak to the current time and need to exemplify the values of the particular culture at hand. Subtle changes are easy, but when a new dynasty is seeking to supplant an older one, major change is in order. Storm gods from pre-history with a narrow take on membership can't compete in a broader and more diverse culture seeking a new sense of difference and change, so the idea is changed and a new religion, one that deals with the current temporal needs, is born.

Today, the tough part is that even these "old gods," despite the tweaking, have trouble being fully relevant in not only a diverse and pluralistic society, but in one where representative democracy and personal freedom are the operating principles of the day. While the broadest ideals contained within the religions still resonate, the particular tenents become hard to reconcile with new information and understandings that are a vast improvement over the old. Religion can then either tack into the headwinds of change and become dogmatic and absolutist or they can follow the new directions and face the very real charge that, in trying to stay relevant, they've become accommodating, washed out or even heretical. Fundamentalism vs. Progressivism continues to be the tick and tock in the temporal change in religious life.

With the re-birth of Science in the 14th century (or so) and it's success in not only explaining the world but in providing a materialistic bounty from such explanations, religion has a new competitor for the hearts and minds of the faithful. While science is not a religion per se, it has pulled many of the "deeply held truths" away from the realm of religion. Cosmology, sociology, medicine and psychology are just some of the areas where the rational, testable results of the scientific method provided better answers than the Earth centered, sin based and demon haunted world put forth by other advocates.

Also, the de-coupling of the State from the sphere of religion, which gave birth to a civil society with laws that, while rooted in interpretations of ancient beliefs, were now based on years of humanistic thought, has further eroded the power of various religious churches. Civil society has in many cases been able to do what religion could not, creating a greater degree of equality, access and social justice for more people than ever before.

Which is not to say that our movement into this brave new world isn't without its perils. In a world no longer haunted by demons, watched over by angels, and battled over by gods, responsibility has been shifted out of the heavens and back down to Earth. For many, that's a tough prospect. History shows that we've done about as much harm to ourselves as we have good.

The frequent battle to co-opt science into the defense of religion, be it of the New Age-y, Depak Chopra appropriation of quantum mechanics to support a feel good materialism or the various elements of the Christian Right in trying to slave cosmology to the conflicting and erroneous claims of the Bible, the battle to co-opt for the benefit of a particular transcendent certainty returns. Indeed, even the current conflict we find now, between the Secular West and elements of a Fundamentalist Islam, is rooted in a desperate grasp at holding on to a privileged view of we humans as special and unique in Creation. With the "Biotechnology Age" arriving well before we are ready, fears about our abilities to adequately deal with our new found world abound.

Due to that fear, we are faced now with (at least) two choices. One is the return to the "old," to the reinstatement of religious ideas from "before." This is actually impossible to do. We can never return to the "old ways." There never was one old way of doing things, just the way we did something at that time or that moment. Religion has always been slowly changing, and much like trying to hold a moving river, returning to something that never was really was just isn't possible. (Heck, you can even drown in the process.)

Orthodoxy always results in a battle to be the most orthodox, to put one particular group's one particular interpretation ahead of another. It's always created more problems that it's solved and often been responsible for some of the most reprehensible behavior we humans have ever done to each other. Think Cromwell or the "response" to the Cathar heresy, for pertinent examples.

The blender beliefs common today, while not exactly a return to the old ways, is just a slightly different take on an old tact. It's still living in the past and still wishing for the sky gods to protect us from the monsters in the night, be that defense now some bastardization of chanting for prosperity or Marian Williamson healing.

With the sky gods gone and the heavens now open, deep and bright, we are faced with both our collective aloneness in the Universe and a second choice. It contains with in it a kernel of the first, but entails something much more demanding. We can choose to continue forward, with our eyes open, knowing that we now have full responsibility for our lives. We have nothing to blame for our failures, or credit for our successes, save ourselves. Far from a simple worshiping of Humanity, this choice entails a respect for ourselves that worship, by its very nature, lacks. It requires of us to combine a remembrance of all that has gone before, the hopes, dreams and struggles of ages past, with the willingness to build on that remembrance in the light of the knowledge and experience gathered today. If tomorrow is to be a better place, it will only be such when we deal with life as it is � not the mythic struggle for a particular Truth's dominion of the universe, but as the concious choosing for a better existence in a world of partial freedom, partial truth and partial knowledge. It's risky prospect but the results are most assuredly worth it.

Is such a thing possible? I don't know. Our desire to dominate each other always threatens to upend whatever progress we've made. Our seeming biological need to assign wonder and magic to a world already quite full of (naturally occurring) both is always present. Our short sightedness is legendary, and our capacity for capriciousness hasn't abated.

Yet our reason has grown as we, like the decades, have matured. Knowledge is now available to more people and in more places than ever before. Freedom is not only the buzzword of the day but the linchpin to the dreams of all. Most of all, in spite of our capriciousness and short sightedness, we've managed through effort, skill and a bit of luck to dodge the world-destroying crises that have moved towards us with apparent certainty of doom.

I do believe that the second choice isn't impossible to make happen. The recognition that the sky gods are dead and that the old ways of believing just aren't working was the first step. The open secret of this death sends some scrambling for new versions of the old certainties and others into nihilistic boughts of despair. The choice to go forward, with eyes open, still remains. Nothing can ever take that choice from us.

Posted by Jody at June 3, 2002 01:45 PM

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