What I’m going to say this evening is not in any way an academic examination of children’s books and religion. I’m delighted that children’s literature is at last beginning to receive the proper academic attention it deserves in this country. But I’m also glad that it’s come too late for me to feel it necessary to go and study it.
I read English at Oxford in the belief that it would help me do what I most wanted to do, which was write books. It didn’t help at all. If I were younger today, I’d probably feel that I ought to go and study children’s literature and learn what the proper approach to the subject should be, before I dared to get up and speak about it. But I’ve learned by this time that that wouldn’t work for me; it’s no good, I can’t do academic stuff, so I have to speak in the only way I can; and my approach this evening is going to be quite unacademic and highly improper. I’m not even going to mention didacticism, despite what it says in the programme.
My starting point is the question of what happens to the Kingdom of Heaven when the King dies. The idea that God is dead has been a central part of the understanding of many of us for over a century now. A. N. Wilson’s book God’s Funeral (John Murray, 1999) examines the idea in detail by looking at some representative figures in the argument, and Ludovic Kennedy’s All in the Mind: A Farewell to God (Hodder and Stoughton, 1999) shows that the matter is still very much alive, even if God isn’t.
So it’s nothing new to say that God is dead. I take it that he is, and that since there is no king any more, there is no Kingdom either; but that we need heaven none the less. I’m proposing that we look for evidence of a Republic of Heaven. I think I can see evidence for it, in books that children read among other places; I think I can catch a glimpse of it here and there.
I can also see vestiges of the Kingdom, and I’m going to point out the difference. What I’m not going to do is draw up a short and narrow list of approved republican books or writers, and condemn the rest to the flames. That would be a thoroughly Kingdom-like thing to do. I was condemned to be burnt myself recently, or my books were. An article in the Catholic Herald said that my His Dark Materials was “far more worthy of the bonfire than Harry [Potter]”; it was “a million times more sinister.” Naturally, I’m very proud of this distinction, and I asked the publishers to print it in the paperback of The Subtle Knife. But I’m even more pleased to be living in a country and at a time when no one is actually going to go out and gather wood to set me alight, though I’m well aware that in some parts of our world today, the Kingdom is alive and flourishing. This is still a battle we have to fight.
No, what I’m going to do is point out, from the books I know, some moments or some qualities that are characteristic of what I call a republican attitude to the great questions of religion, which are the great questions of life. I make no claim to have read everything; I freely acknowledge that I may not have read very much. But if I describe this republican attitude clearly enough, then others may be able to see it too in the books they know.
To begin with, though, we must take account of some of the consequences of the death of God. What happens when we realise there’s nothing there to believe in? The answer varies according to temperament, as much as anything else. G. K. Chesterton, for example, is reputed to have said something to the effect that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. This was a warning against astrology and the occult and fashionable religions, especially those from that sinister place, “the East.” A powerful aphoristic style like Chesterton’s can easily magnify a childish fear or prejudice into the appearance of a universal truth; it’s worth remembering that we don’t have to believe something just because it’s well said.
A different temperament finds a different sort of expression. The melancholy long withdrawing roar that Matthew Arnold heard near Dover Beach, the sea of Faith going out, is more affecting—at least until we realise that, as A. N. Wilson points out, the metaphor isn’t thought through: tides have a habit of coming back in again if you wait for long enough. Nevertheless, if we don’t think too clearly about it, it sort of works. But Arnold’s suggestion as to how we might put up with the loss of faith, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another,” is not a remedy: it’s a palliative. It assuages the condition without curing it. If he was anxious about the death of God, an honest lover even in his beloved’s arms would have to admit, as he looked at the universe over her shoulder, that the stars were cold and the night was empty and God was nowhere to be seen.
Chesterton’s self-induced penny dreadful shivers over the sinister horridness of foreign gods (he once wrote about seeing “evil shapes” in the pattern of a Turkish carpet, an odd idea that turns up in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia too, where the Witch kills Aslan with a knife of “a strange and evil shape”—what is an evil shape? Nonsense, that’s what it is) and Matthew Arnold’s mournful inability to read the tides are largely emotional. Altogether more thoughtful is the famous and utterly serious comment of George Eliot, talking about God, Immortality, and Duty: “How inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.” I like that earnestness. I admire it a great deal. And I think it leads to one of the most important consequences of the death of God, because something’s lacking: if Duty is peremptory and absolute, so (given our nature) is the necessity for something else, which one might call joy. George Eliot’s universe of duty is a bleak place, and human beings need more than that.
Now it’s not legitimate, I know, to argue from the want of something to the necessity that that something must exist. It’s very poor logic. But as I said a minute ago, I’m not being academic, and I’m with the young Jane Eyre on this: “You think I have no feelings,” she says to her cold-hearted guardian Mrs. Reed, “and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so.” She demands love, because of her passionate need of it, and lo and behold, in due course love appears, though not before Jane Eyre the girl has grown and suffered. If we need something, says Jane Eyre the book, we must search for it, or create it. I think that the book is right, and I think we need this thing which I’ve called joy. I might also have called it meaning. What I’m referring to is a sense that things are right and good, and we are part of everything that’s right and good.
Putting it another way, we need a sense that we’re connected to the universe. This connectedness to things is what we mean by meaning. The meaning of one thing is its connection with another; the meaning of our lives is their connection with something other than ourselves. Religion, the religion that’s now dead, did give us that, in full measure: we were part of a huge cosmic drama, involving a Creation and a Fall and a Redemption, and Heaven and Hell, and (not least) a Millennium. What we did mattered, because God saw everything, even the fall of a sparrow. And one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of God and his religion is this sense of meaninglessness or alienation that so many of us have felt in the past century or more. We’re bereft of that connection with the universe as a whole which makes suffering bearable: “Man can put up with any what as long as he has a why,” as someone said.
However, there is one religion that I want to look at briefly, because it seems to speak very directly to precisely this psychological condition. Spiritual condition, if you like. I’m talking about Gnosticism—a subject which has fascinated me for years. This has become the subject of a number of books and commentaries in the past half-century, as Gnostic texts from the beginning of the Christian era have gradually been discovered and translated, and as the peculiar and intense flavour of the religion they describe seems to meet our taste at the end of the second millennium.
The Gnostic religion, like the Christian one, tells us a story that involves ourselves. Some characters we know from Christianity appear in the Gnostic story too, but they have a very different aspect. To sum it up briefly and crudely, the Gnostic myth says that this world—t
he material universe we live in—was created not by a good God but by an evil Demiurge, who made it as a kind of prison for the sparks of divinity that had fallen, or been stolen, from the inconceivably distant true God who was their real source. These little sparks of god-ness are known as the pneuma, or soul, and each of us has a portion inside us. It’s the duty of the Gnostics, the knowing ones, to try and escape from this world, out of the clutches of the Demiurge and his angelic archons, and find a way back to that original and unknown and far-off God.
Now whatever else this is, it’s a very good story, and what’s more it has an immense explanatory power: it offers to explain why we feel, as so many of us do, exiled in this world, alienated from joy and meaningfulness and the true connection we feel we must have with the universe, as Jane Eyre feels that she must have love and kindness.
So Gnosticism fits the temper of the times. It lends itself to all kinds of contemporary variations: a feminist one, for example, partly because of the important role it assigns to the figure of the Sophia, or Wisdom, the youngest and paradoxically the rashest of the emanations of the divine being. Somehow we’re not surprised to learn that it was all her fault that the material universe came about in the first place.
And Gnosticism appeals powerfully too to the sense of being in the know, of having access to a truth not available to most people. And not least, it appeals because the story it tells is all about a massive conspiracy, and we love massive conspiracies. The X-Files, for example, is pure Gnosticism. “The truth is out there,” says Mulder: not in here, because in here is permeated by evil conspiracies that reach right to the heart of the Pentagon and the FBI and the White House and every other centre of power in the world. The Demiurge is in charge, in here. But out there somewhere is that distant unknowable God, the source of all truth, and we belong to him—not to the corrupt and dishonest and evil empire that rules this world.
So it’s a powerfully dramatic myth, and it has the great advantage of putting us human beings and our predicament right at the heart of it. No wonder it appeals. The trouble is, it’s not true. If we can’t believe the story about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men and the star and the manger and so on, then it’s even harder to believe in Demiurges and archons and emanations and so on. It certainly explains, and it certainly makes us feel important, but it isn’t true.
And it has the terrible defect of libelling—one might almost say blaspheming against, if the notion had any republican meaning—the physical universe; of saying that this world is just a clumsy copy of a perfect original which we can’t see because it’s somewhere else. In the eyes of some Christian writers, of course, this sort of Platonism is a great merit. C. S. Lewis, at the end of the last book in the Narnia series, has his character the wise old professor explaining: “Our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world…” In fact, the two things are “as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” And then he goes on to add under his breath, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them in these schools!”
This notion that the world we know with our senses is a crude and imperfect copy of something much better somewhere else is one of the most striking and powerful inventions of the human mind. It’s also one of the most perverse and pernicious. In the Gnostic world-view, it encourages a thorough-going rejection of the physical universe in favour of an unfortunately entirely imaginary world inhabited by evil powers, archons, aeons, emanations, angels and demons of every sort. Tremendously exciting stuff, but all utter nonsense. Just like The X-Files.
Why do I say it’s pernicious? It’s pernicious because it encourages us to disbelieve the evidence of our senses, and allows us to suspect everything of being false. It leads to a state of mind that’s hostile to experience. It encourages us to see a toad lurking beneath every flower, and if we can’t see one, it’s because the toads now are extra cunning and have learned to become invisible. It’s a state of mind that leads to a hatred of the physical world. The Gnostic would say that the beauty and solace and pleasure that can be found in the physical world are exactly why we should avoid it: they are the very things with which the Demiurge traps our souls.
Of course, the Puritanism that so poisoned the human mind later on said just the same sort of thing. I’d say that that position is an unhealthy and distorted one which can only be maintained at the cost of common sense, and of that love and kindness that Jane Eyre demanded, and finally of sanity itself. The Gnostic situation is a dramatic one to be in—it’s intensely exciting—but it’s the sort of paranoid excitement felt by those American militias who collect guns and hide in the hills and watch out for the black helicopters of the evil New World Order as they prepare for Armageddon. It’s nuts, basically.
So the challenge remains to be answered: to reclaim a vision of heaven from the wreck of religion; to realise that our human nature demands meaning and joy just as Jane Eyre demanded love and kindness (“You think we can live without them, but we cannot live so”); to accept that this meaning and joy will involve a passionate love of the physical world, this world, of food and drink and sex and music and laughter, and not a suspicion and hatred of it; to understand that it will both grow out of and add to the achievements of the human mind such as science and art. Finally, we must find a way of believing that we are not subservient creatures dependent on the whim of some celestial monarch, but free citizens of the Republic of Heaven.
(A brief word at this point on the teleology of evolution. Evolution has no aim, we’re told. We human beings are not in any way higher up some sort of ladder than our fellow creatures; we’re not the product of a sort of Shavian creative evolution any more than we’re the divinely created sons and daughters of God. Life has no purpose and evolution is blind and the universe is indifferent to our presence. I’ll just note that view here, because it seems to be the only honest alternative to the Kingdom, and I’ll put a marker down so I can come back to it later.)
Now then: is there anywhere we can get a glimpse of the Republic of Heaven? And is there anywhere we should look to see what the Republic of Heaven is not like?
To take the latter question first: Christian writers whose faith informs their work are not, of course, describing the republic. The most notable Christian storyteller for children has been C. S. Lewis, who in the Narnia books is so far from being a republican that you could take a line on pretty well anything in the republic by seeing what he says about it and then believing the opposite.
Take the exclusion of Susan from the stable, which represents salvation, near the end of the final Narnia book, The Last Battle. Susan is cast out because, as the prim Peter says, “My sister is no longer a friend of Narnia.” “Oh, Susan!” says Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” In other words, normal human development, which includes a growing awareness of your body and its effect on the opposite sex, is something from which Lewis’s narrative, and what he would like us to think is the Kingdom of Heaven, turns with horror.
I’m going to focus on those nylons for a moment. (Do people still call them nylons? He means stockings, of course.) Here’s a passage from William Mayne’s novel The Midnight Fair. (I must add that William Mayne’s conviction for the sexual abuse of young girls in 2004, after I gave this talk, raises a different question entirely, which I discuss in my afterword.)
Paul, a boy of twelve or so, has found his attention increasingly absorbed by Victoria, a strange and solitary girl. He’s just summoned up the courage to write a Christmas card for her. They’ve been in church, and he watches as she leaves with her mother.
The service ended for the rest of the congregation. For Paul it had not begun, and he would have liked an instant replay, but that was not in prayer books old or new.
He stood up. The girl came a
long the aisle, nearing him. He would follow her out, catch up in the porch, and present the card…The girl came past. Paul wanted to jump out and give her a hundred cards.
She did not see him. Why should she? She walked with her mother. In a brown skirt, stockings with a small white hole beside one ankle, brown leather shoes with a frilled flap on the instep, a green sweater, and a bronze coat. She was quite plain, but unearthly beautiful; there was nothing else like her, and her uniqueness was the reason for all creation.
Lewis’s nylons were not real stockings; they were Platonic stockings, if you like, and their function was simply to carry a symbolic charge. What they mean is that if you give them too much of your attention, you’re shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven. In the republic, stockings work differently. They’re real stockings, for a start; they sometimes have holes in them. That little white hole beside her ankle is one of the things that make Victoria “quite plain, but unearthly beautiful”; and of course Paul can’t give too much attention to her stockings, and her shoes, and her coat, and everything about her. She is real, and he is in love.
As a matter of fact, Lewis’s position as a whole wasn’t at all consistent. Whereas the Narnia books illustrate the very antithesis of the Republic of Heaven, his critical writing—as I have pointed out elsewhere—often shows a more generous and sensible spirit. For example, talking about this very business of growing up in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” he says: “Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two.”
There’s nothing there which a republican would have any quarrel with; but the sensible Lewis who wrote that was thrust aside in Narnia by the paranoid bigot who proclaimed that an interest in lipstick and nylons was not an addition to the pleasures of life but an absolute disqualification for the joys of heaven.
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