Well, I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy late last night. I feel bruised.
The books are really well-written, lovely, terrible, and fascinating, but tell so many theological untruths that they cross right over the boundary line of fantasy that I usually put up when reading about other worlds. In the cosmos of these stories, God is not the creator; he is the first consciousness, but definitely had a beginning, and is the inhibitor of everything since himself, trying to keep them young and stupid enough to stay under his thumb.
Part of what made it hard to read was that Pullman wrote some really beautiful, true sentences, scattered all through the books. He knows some things. He wrote about the thrill of pleasure that we get when we submit to one who is rightly stronger than us. He wrote of love that is more certain than anything else. He wrote that our bodies, matter itself, are good things. And he got some bad things right, too, about the evil and oppression that has come into the world through the church.
But he doesn't know my God. He doesn't know that I am tied more tightly to God's spirit than the knot that binds Lyra and Pantalaimon; that I know this not only theoretically and traditionally but also experientially. Pullman doesn't know what it is for God to lift you up when you are humbled in his sight.
His "subtle knife" was supposed to be the weapon that could dismantle God, but he wrote of how the knife could break when it came up against love. If only he understood what he's saying there...
In her book Bright Evening Star, Madeleine L'Engle hammered out over and over the point that love and power are not the same thing. She isn't exactly right, though I don't have time to get into the distinction, but the true part about it is where Pullman makes his biggest mistake. Yes, God is interested in us serving him, in his own glory. But God is not oppression and rotting self-centeredness. God is love, and in him there is no darkness at all.
Posted by tuggy at 11.04.05 14:24 | TrackBack