Actually, many Christians today don’t seem to believe in Original Sin anyway. A lot of them are getting very New Agey about the whole business, tolerating all kinds of behaviour—especially in the sexual field—which their sterner Christian ancestors never would.
It’s when you use the word evil as a noun that it seems to have some external, objective existence. You reify it—you make it into a thing by giving it a name, although it isn’t really a thing at all. Evil is an adjective that we apply to deeds, or sometimes to people, and it seems to have intention attached to it. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was an evil deed, but if the same number of people were killed in an earthquake, we wouldn’t call that evil.
We can talk in a sort of flippant or exaggerated way about the evils of modern life—mobile phones, and so on; but we don’t mean evil, we mean nuisance. It’s a kind of figure of speech—there’s probably some technical term—overstatement of some kind.
AFTERNOON SESSION
I’m here because I wrote a book—His Dark Materials—and because it’s thought that I can argue about the position put forward in that book and defend it or persuade you of its merits.
But the transaction isn’t as simple as that. When someone reads a book, there are not just two people involved, the writer and the reader; there are several others hanging about.
Firstly, there is the actual reader—the person who buys the book, or borrows it from the library, who carries it home, who sits down, whose eyes actually move over the page.
Secondly, there is the figure known to literary theory as the implied reader—the person the text seems to be addressing. It can’t address the real reader, because of course no one knows who that will be; but to take an obvious example, the implied reader of the Beano is a young child, whereas the implied reader of a work of abstruse philosophy is probably someone academically and professionally interested in the subject. An academic philosopher could be the actual reader of a copy of the Beano, but the Beano doesn’t seem to expect that, somehow.
Thirdly, there is the author—the actual author—the person who thought up the sentences and wrote them down.
Fourthly, there is a figure called the implied author. He or she is the hardest of all these shadows to grasp; the difference between the real reader and the implied reader is easy to understand, but the implied author, though his or her function is real, isn’t quite so easy to get at. It might be more easily called the inferred author, because it’s the figure felt by the reader to lie behind the book—the combination of all the attitudes, experience, literary skill and so forth that seems to have gone into its production.
Fifthly, there is the narrator. This is the voice that is doing the storytelling. I used to teach English literature to students who were going to be teachers, and one of the things these young people used to find hard to grasp at first was that the third-person storytelling voice in (say) a novel like Vanity Fair wasn’t actually Thackeray’s own voice, but the narrator’s, and that the narrator was just as much an invented character as Becky Sharp or Rawdon Crawley.
So the narrator of His Dark Materials is the voice you seem to hear or see on the page; and behind that is the implied author, the imaginary me whose presence is inferred by the reader, and who seems to be manipulating the narrator and to be responsible for the attitudes and conclusions of the whole work; and behind that is the real me, who finished writing that book a long time ago and is now busy doing something else entirely.
And the implied reader, the reader the text—that particular text—seems to expect, is, I suppose, an intelligent person of either sex and any age, who is interested in many things, quick to feel sympathy, but perhaps inclined to be a little impatient with long passages of explanation or discursive material not directly related to the story; and the actual reader is—well, who knows? Perhaps you; perhaps your son or daughter, perhaps your mother or father; but someone with a life and a history and a personality and set of beliefs and attitudes entirely unknown to the real author, the implied author and the narrator.
Furthermore: the act of reading itself is not a simple thing, either. It’s far from being the simple transmission of an idea, or an image, or the narrative of a set of events, unchanged, from one mind to another. Postman Pat or Federal Express work like that—delivering something from one place to another without interfering with it en route—but the human mind doesn’t. Think for a moment of the different ways we know we read: the quick skim of the newspaper; the deep lingering involvement we have with a novel we’re enjoying; the close interrogation we make of a text we’re studying, constantly stopping to make notes, to look things up, to compare this text with others.
And think of the things that make it harder or easier to read in the way we want to, and the effect they have. To take a small example, the Guardian a few years ago changed its policy on capital letters. They no longer use capitals for things like Prime Minister, or Home Office, or even organisations like Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They write them out in full without capital letters, and it’s extremely annoying, because the capital letters are one thing that actively help you to skim. Their current policy forces you to read the paper in a way you don’t want to in order to make sense of it. Similarly with a novel that’s printed in too small a typeface with not enough leading between the lines: it’s just hard to read. These things make a difference; they affect the things that go on in our heads.
And then there are the different things we as readers bring to a text—our different expectations, our varying intellectual limitations or gifts, our experiences of previous texts, our predictions about this one. These are necessary things; without them we wouldn’t begin to make sense of any text at all; and they’re also inevitable: we can’t look at any text in a state of nature, as it were, and pretend we know nothing, and come to it as complete virgins. We have to bring something to the text, and put something into it, in order to get anything out. This is the great democracy of reading and writing—it makes the reader a true partner in the making of meaning.
But it all makes it a little more difficult to talk about than it might seem at first.
Now I’m not beginning like this in order to disclaim responsibility for what I’ve written; I’m doing it to remind all of us, myself as well as you, that my book doesn’t have a single meaning, and that my relation to it is complex, and that my interpretation of what I wrote is likely to be as partial as anybody else’s, and that anything I say about it has not much more authority than a reader’s. Maybe a little bit more, if for no other reason than that I know the text fairly closely; but no final authority.
So all I’m trying to do, to start with, is clarify some of the difficulties that stand in the way of the real author of a novel when he is talking to real readers. Which one of me is talking to which one of you?
One final thing: in talking about a novel, about what it means and what it says. Well, we can talk about what the characters are saying, what the narrator is saying, and what the implied (or inferred) author seems to be saying. We can also talk about what the book as a whole, as distinct from those parts and their sum, seems to be saying.
Now: having made that long proviso, let me talk briefly about what I think the book, as a whole, is saying.
I think it’s saying that the world is a rich and beautiful place of unimaginable complexity; that our consciousness is one of the greatest treasures we possess—perhaps the very greatest of all; that promoting understanding and knowledge is our most important task, and worth living for. It is saying that trying to stifle understanding is wrong; that knowledge comes to us not only through the rational part of our minds, but through our emotions and our bodies as well; that there is no need to invoke the supernatural either to account for the existence of the universe in the first place or to help us understand it now; that, in fact, the invocation of supernatural causes and
supernatural powers, the need to placate and obey them, has brought about a great deal of terrible cruelty and suffering, and that we would be better off without it. It is also saying that evolution might have brought us to this point entirely by chance and accident, and that there has been no purpose in it, but because we are conscious, there is a purpose now, and that purpose is to work towards bringing about a Republic of Heaven—namely, a state of affairs in this world, in this life, which is as full and free and rich and joyous as we can make it, for everyone.
Of course, the term “The Republic of Heaven” is a metaphor. People who ask, for instance, “Who’s going to be the President of the Republic of Heaven?” are asking the same sort of question as “How long is God’s beard?” One thing this book is not doing is asking you to read it literally. The Republic of Heaven is a metaphor for a state of being that’s already partly present wherever human beings are treating each other with kindness and approaching the universe with curiosity and wonder.
* * *
—
ONE THING THAT PLAYS AN IMPORTANT PART IN THE STORY IS THE mysterious entity I call Dust. It seems to be connected with human growth and understanding; it might even have a connection with Original Sin, which is why the theologians in the book are so agitated about it. It seems to be everywhere, to permeate the universe, but at the same time it gathers more thickly around adults than around children.
Dust lies behind many of the motivations of the different characters. At the end of the first part, Lyra, who has witnessed terrible things done by adults against children, reasons that if the people who do terrible things think Dust is bad, then Dust must be good. And in the course of the last book, the scientist Mary Malone, who’s been investigating Dust with the help of the amber spyglass of the title, discovers that Dust is leaving the universe in a terrible flood, as if a great catastrophe had happened. The loss of Dust would be a disaster beyond imagining, because Dust seems to be a visible analogy or picture or metaphor (not a literal description, I have to say again) of human consciousness.
Dust is everywhere, in our hearts and in between the stars; it nurtures us, and it delights in the facts of human love and understanding. In some ways it’s not unlike God. But there’s an important difference: Dust, unlike the traditional idea of God, depends on us. We depend on Dust in order to live to our full potential, but it depends on us too: if we don’t strive to promote knowledge and understanding, if we turn away from compassion and towards fanatical hatred, then Dust will wither and die.
So it sets up a new kind of relationship between us and God—mutually dependent instead of being hierarchical. He didn’t create us: we create each other. Instead of just being subordinate to a king, as we were under the old dispensation, we have an important part to play in keeping God alive. And that’s part of what I mean by the Republic of Heaven: we are responsible, we are citizens, this is a democracy; and if we give up on our responsibilities, then tyranny could easily arise again.
I’m going to read a passage from the story which I think has a bearing on this discussion. Mary Malone is observing the Dust, when she feels a sense of being pulled away from her body:
She flung a mental lifeline to that physical self, and tried to recall the feeling of being in it: all the sensations that made up being alive. The exact touch of her friend Atal’s soft-tipped trunk caressing her neck. The taste of bacon and eggs. The triumphant strain in her muscles as she pulled herself up a rock face. The delicate dancing of her fingers on a computer keyboard. The smell of roasting coffee. The warmth of her bed on a winter night.
And gradually she stopped moving; the lifeline held fast, and she felt the weight and strength of the current pushing against her as she hung there in the sky.
And then a strange thing happened. Little by little (as she reinforced those sense-memories, adding others: tasting an iced Margarita in California, sitting under the lemon trees outside a restaurant in Lisbon, scraping the frost off the windscreen of her car) she felt the Dust-wind easing. The pressure was lessening.
But only on her: all around, above and below, the great flood was streaming as fast as ever. Somehow there was a little patch of stillness around her, where the particles were resisting the flow.
They were conscious! They felt her anxiety, and responded to it. And they began to carry her back to her deserted body, and when she was close enough to see it once more, so heavy, so warm, so safe, a silent sob convulsed her heart.
And then she sank back into her body, and awoke.
She took in a deep shuddering breath. She pressed her hands and her legs against the rough planks of the platform, and having a minute ago nearly gone mad with fear, she was now suffused with a deep slow ecstasy at being one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter.
(TAS, 368)
The sense that the whole universe is alive, not just inanimate, but alive and conscious of meaning, is one that I’ve felt on two or three occasions, and they made such a deep impression on me that I shall never forget them. One happened during a stormy late afternoon on the coast of north Wales, where I grew up as a teenager. Another happened on a winter evening in London when I was in my middle twenties, just coming home to our flat in Barnes from the library in Charing Cross Road where I worked. I’ve never taken any drug stronger than alcohol or cannabis, and not much of that, so I can’t compare it to a drug-induced trance; and there was nothing trance-like about it—I was intensely and ecstatically awake, if anything. I just saw connections between things, similarities, parallels; it was like rhyme, but instead of sounds rhyming, it was meanings that rhymed, and there were endless series of them, and they went on for ever in every direction. The whole universe was connected by lines and chains and fields of meaning, and I was part of it. It lasted about half an hour in each case and then faded.
I’ve hardly ever talked about it, because it seems like something whose significance is private, but I found some of the intensity of it coming through in Mary’s experience as I described it in the passage I’ve just read. I mention it now because it seems to me that this is the sort of experience that someone might call spiritual, or even mystical; but my whole being shies away from those words like a nervous horse at a firework.
Such words seem to imply some sort of contrast between the material and the spiritual; they seem to suggest an experience in which the material world is being transcended, or penetrated, or lifted aside like a curtain to show us something different, or much better, beyond it. But that wasn’t what I felt at all. It was the physical world itself which was full of meaning—the precise grey of the clouds streaming over the sea and the white of the spray, the exact angle the wake of that barge made with the railing of Hammersmith Bridge as I walked across the Thames. There was no sense of the supernatural; I didn’t feel at one with God; I felt at one with the physical world, and I saw what it meant, and what it meant was that I belonged in it.
So: very briefly summing up.
Atheist or agnostic? The difference is one of perspective. Seen from one perspective, the total amount of things-I-know is the tiniest conceivable speck of light, so small it’s hardly there at all, against a vast and encircling and illimitable darkness which is all the things I don’t know. There well may be a God out there in the dark; but I don’t know, because I can’t see that far.
But now let’s come in closer and closer, bit by bit, to that little speck of light, and see what happens. As we come closer like a cine camera zooming in, it slowly gets bigger and bigger, and grows to fill the screen, and grows out wider still, until we’re there in the middle of the speck of light and it’s not a speck at all any more: from horizon to horizon, it’s filled with light and things to see by it. I mean not only the things I know, but also the conclusions I’ve drawn from the things I know, and the guesses I make based on them.
And in all that wide horizon, I can see
no evidence for God, not a bit. Everything I can see is perfectly well explained by purely natural things: by the way matter reacts to other matter. I see no intellectual need for the existence of God; I see no moral need for him; and I feel no emotional need. There is not a God-shaped hole in my life.
But when I look at the history and the present behaviour of the human race, I see a story of infamy, folly, cruelty and wickedness carried out in the name of a God who is not there. Steven Weinberg: “Good people have done good things, and evil people have done evil things, without the help of religion; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.”
And when the Bishop talks about human relations and human life, I applaud his good sense, I relish his wisdom, and I admire his good works; but when he speaks of God, he seems to me to be speaking a foreign language, or to be like the person who insists that the fairies are there in the garden, and the very fact that you can’t see them proves it beyond all doubt. But if we are to continue talking at all, and I think we must, because conversation is an important part of the Republic of Heaven—if, as I say, we are to continue talking at all, then those are the points at which we have to change the conversation and speak of other things.
THIS TALK WAS GIVEN AT A STUDY DAY WITH THE BISHOP OF OXFORD AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION, REWLEY HOUSE, OXFORD, ON 5 OCTOBER, 2002.
The Bishop of Oxford at the time was Richard Harries, a good and wise man, with whom I very much enjoyed debating.
The Republic of Heaven
GOD IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC!
Making a case for a “Republic of Heaven” on earth, and drawing on children’s literature for signs of what it might look like
Daemon Voices Page 41