Pullman’s Philosophy
In the lecture given on his own concept of the Republic of Heaven, Pullman quotes G.K. Chesterton’s remark that once people stop accepting organised religion they will in future believe not so much in nothing but in anything. There are moments in the trilogy when Pullman too seems attracted to alternative belief structures, such as the I Ching form of reading the future originating from China. But at base His Dark Materials is a strongly humanist text, celebrating the abiding existence of human courage and essential goodness outside any omnipotent and omniscient supernatural context.
Pullman has said that we can remain true to ourselves and to everyone else by constantly renewing our human faith not by religious belief but with the aid of those stories that remind us of the best we should aspire to. For Pullman: ‘They are easily the most important things in the world. Within them we can find the most memorable, life-enhancing glimpses of human beings at their very best.’ These are the same types of stories that the ghosts and harpies in The Amber Spyglass need in order to renew hope in their place of suffering.
But everyone needs good stories, not just ghosts. In his lecture, quoted above, Pullman writes that: ‘A republic that’s only believed because it makes more sense or it’s more reasonable than the alternative would be a pallid place indeed, and it wouldn’t last for long. What induces that leap of commitment is an emotional thing – a story.’ And by writing a best-seller that has given pleasure and consolation to many thousands of readers of all ages and nationalities, Pullman has provided such a story himself.
But if it is human folly and greed that is responsible for what Pullman sees as the crippling religious myths that he attacks in his trilogy, what force or forces produce the ghouls, cliff-ghasts and various other apparitions that appear throughout his story? There is no answer to this question, just as there is no explanation in his books for the existence throughout history of closed, evil minds over and beyond anything that could possibly be attributed to the malign influence of organised Christianity.
It would be mistaken to blame Pullman for this. He is writing a story, not a work of philosophy or history. His own strong views form an important part of what he writes, but it is as a work of fiction that these novels should be assessed. If there are inconsistencies in his judgements or gaps in his arguments, these only matter if belief in the story itself also becomes stretched as a result. To date, there are no signs that this has ever been the case with his multitude of readers, young and old.
Nor is Pullman interested in working out a complete cosmology for the largely imaginary worlds he is describing. Unlike the sagas of J.R.R. Tolkien, there are no accompanying maps in His Dark Materials. Nor are there any notes on the language, history and geography of the different people and objects of the type included by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Although Pullman shares Tolkien’s belief in the huge importance of story in the human imagination, he has no wish to treat his own particular tales as if they were truly describing something real.
Yet as an experienced storyteller, used to entertaining first his own brother as a child and then the various pupils he later taught in schools, Pullman also knows that outsize villains help make good tales. Most of the supernatural nasties in his books simply exist in their own right without any reason or explanation. Readers are unlikely to object, since it is these same evil forces that give the trilogy some of its most memorable moments.
So while the reason for the persistence of evil in human affairs is only partially explained in the trilogy, it does seem clear that dæmons play a large part where individual health and happiness are concerned. When Spectres suck out these dæmons, or when the dæmons themselves have been cut away from their owners, individuals become mere shadows of themselves. They are also open to every enemy that might now come their way unopposed.
Dæmons therefore have much in common with the religious concept of the soul, particularly in those cases where the dæmon is internalised and can’t therefore be seen. It is always potentially at risk simply because it is so precious, and must be carefully tended and listened to at all times. Will comes to the conclusion, for example, that his mother’s madness was caused by invisible Spectres trying to get a grip on her own dæmon, spirit, soul or whatever other word is used to stand for the moral core of a human being. To lose a soul, or to live with a corrupted one, as Mrs Coulter does with her golden-monkey dæmon, is to live in a spiritual desert. The legendary Dr Faust or the apprentice Karl in Pullman’s story Clockwork, who both make a pact with the devil involving the selling of their own soul, are as doomed as any of the dæmonless zombies found in Pullman’s fiction.
As for the Spectres, old Giacomo Paradisi tells Will and Lyra that they ‘are our fault, our fault alone. They came because my predecessors, alchemists, philosophers, men of learning, were making an enquiry into the deepest nature of things. They became curious about the bonds that held the smallest particles of matter together … We undid them, and we let the Spectres in.’ He adds that where the Spectres actually came from remains a mystery, but ‘what matters is that they are here, and they have destroyed us’.
This makes Spectres symbolic of what can go wrong when humankind meddles with matters that should be left alone. An equivalent destructive curiosity found in our own world might arguably include the sort of scientific enquiry that led to the development of nuclear weapons and, later on, to controlled genetic mutations. But there is another possible explanation for Spectres which reaches into the psychological rather than into history or politics. The description of what happens to Lena the witch after a Spectre invades her body is also like reading about a bad attack of depression.
These feelings of ultimate despair also become a possibility every time an individual decides to open a window into a parallel world with the intention of taking up permanent residence there. Pullman may be making a comparison here with those who find themselves spending too long in their own imaginary worlds, suggesting that if they stay away from reality for too long they can eventually risk alienation or even madness. For once the real world comes to seem a poor, uninviting place by comparison, the incentive to return to it may increasingly diminish. Those who want to make the return journey may also discover that the beings in this imaginary world are not always as benign as they might first appear.
The classic description of this process is found in Joanne Greenberg’s autobiographical novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The mentally ill narrator, with the help of a sensitive psychotherapist, finally tries to leave the fantasy world she has been content to live in for the real one instead. She then discovers that the imaginary friends who once meant so much to her now turn into pitiless tormentors, anxious to prevent her return to reality – and therefore her cure – at all costs. As a believer in the necessity for living to the full in the world as we know it, Pullman might be hinting here that Spectres do indeed stand for the type of depressive illness that can strike against the very will to live itself. As a metaphor, this is as good as any for describing the process whereby an individual suffering from depression sometimes seems to lose touch altogether with the essential, inner spirit necessary for their personality to function normally.
The best fantasy writing has always meant quite different things to different readers, so there can never be a definitive answer as to what exactly Spectres, or indeed any other characters in Pullman’s work, are intended to symbolise. Stories have always had the power to stimulate strong, imaginative reactions in readers, even though these reactions may differ radically from one person to another. The term ‘mythopoeic’ is used to define writing powerful enough to create its own myths and in doing so give shape to readers’ various fears and fantasies. On this basis alone, Pullman’s trilogy is an outstanding mythopoeic achievement. In an age in search of new myths to replace some of the older ones from former years, His Dark Materials is a text that has already talked directly to thousands. It provides not just entertainment but also extra meaning to ma
ny readers and to their own most personal fantasies.
Is there a paradox in the way that Pullman, an anti-Christian, uses Christian symbolism throughout his writing? Angels both good and bad, Adam and Eve, prophecy and the idea of destiny, images of pilgrimage, the importance of the soul and the notion of heaven and hell all play vital parts in his narrative. Milton and Blake, both widely quoted, were Christian writers, and there are also quotations from the Bible and Christian poets such as George Herbert and Andrew Marvell.
But although the architecture and symbolism in His Dark Materials largely derive from Christian sources, the emphasis is mostly on how it all went wrong. In this sense, the trilogy is not so much an atheist text as a reworking of a Christian one towards radically different conclusions. As an intensely moral writer, Pullman seems naturally drawn towards Biblical imagery of good and evil of the type that has played such a key part in the history of the Western world. Yet he is also aware of other ways to spiritual truth found in different cultures, and there are references in His Dark Materials to Buddhism, Pantheism, Paganism and I Ching as alternative ways towards ultimate understanding.
He also refers to Gnosticism, condemned early on as a heresy by the Church, which has as its basic tenet the belief that knowledge of transcendence can only be experienced personally and intuitively. Humans in this view are of the same essence as God but as long as our spirits are trapped in physical bodies there will always be sin. Salvation, therefore, is to escape from the bondage of material existence and travel back to the home from which our souls have originally fallen. God meanwhile is far removed from the world which was in fact created by an evil, lesser God, sometimes called a demiurge. Pullman has written that this system of belief ‘seems to speak very directly’ to our psychological and spiritual condition, although he dislikes its denigration of the physical universe. But his main point here, as elsewhere, is always the same: different systems of belief may well suit different people. The mistake, and indeed crime, is to insist upon just one as the only permitted way for any individual to seek out their own personal truth.
As a humanist and freethinker himself, he hates the guilt and repression that, in his view, also lie at the basis of Christianity, particularly how it was practised in the past. The end result is a story that sets out not so much to demolish the value of the religious impulse experienced by so many human beings but to push it in a totally different direction. Believing that there is more to life than simple materialism, he creates instead an alternative vision of the world that shares a Christian notion of a divine presence somewhere and somehow, but rejects all the definitions and claimed manifestations of it of the type recorded in the Bible.
Fundamentalist Christians reject the theory of evolution, preferring to believe that God himself created all known species. Evolutionists take an opposite line, convinced that Darwin’s theory of natural selection shows how species can change without any need of divine intervention. Pullman too belongs to this particular camp, but adds that now humans are on the scene there is also the chance to direct future development rather than simply wait passively for more evolutionary change.
All the living beings on earth found in His Dark Materials are the result of evolution. One example of this is demonstrated to Mary Malone when she learns about the ways that the mulefa have developed over the centuries through constant interaction with the seed-pods that are so important to them. Pullman himself has described the process of human evolution as blind and automatic, and accepts the Darwinian notion of natural selection as the only acceptable explanation for how it all works. But because humans have consciousness, he also believes that this potentially alters the future processes of evolution. As he says in his lecture on the Republic of Heaven: ‘We might have arrived by a series of accidents, but from now on we have to take charge of our fate. Now we are here, now we are conscious, we make a difference. Our presence changes everything.’
In His Dark Materials, Will and Lyra show how two people can have a profound effect upon the future as well as the present. But their victory is hard won rather than inevitable, and if some of the evil characters had prevailed instead, the outcome would have been disastrous. So although Pullman believes that human beings can make all the difference in the way that their own species continues to adapt to the world, he also makes it clear that such change always has the potential to be either good or bad.
Developments Since Publication of His Dark Materials
Much has been written and argued over about Pullman’s trilogy since it was first published. The release of the filmed version of the first instalment, The Golden Compass, in 2007 led to denunciations from some American Roman Catholic and evangelical sources along with a plea for a general boycott. This was despite a general playing down in the film of Pullman’s original questioning of religion. With only moderate box office returns, particularly in America, plans for a further two films were abandoned. Critical reaction was mixed. It was generally agreed that Nicole Kidman made a compelling Mrs Coulter and Daniel Craig a suitably Byronic Lord Asriel. Visual effects were also held to be excellent, winning their own Oscar. But despite scene cuts and some altered chronology, character development remained insufficient in an increasingly confused story where too much happened too quickly, until the arrival of a final battle sequence that this time lasted too long.
There was little corresponding Christian backlash in Britain, either about the film or the trilogy. This may be because Pullman himself was never any sort of militant atheist. Instead, as he said at the time in an interview: ‘I’ve got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don’t know. So maybe there is a God out there.’ Still believing that Bible stories are an essential part of children’s education, he came over more as an agnostic with an instinctively religious outlook.
As Hugh Rayment-Pickard puts it in his book, The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman and Christianity: Pullman offers a humanistic religion of life and love in place of the Christian myth of fall and redemption.’
Other radical theologians, meanwhile, share a position not far from Pullman’s. In his book Original Blessing: a Primer in Creation Spirituality, published in 1983, Matthew Fox argues that the essential good of creation should always have been seen as far more significant than any accompanying idea of original sin. Original sin replaced by the notion of original blessing is utterly in sympathy with Pullman’s own system of beliefs.
In two well-tempered debates held between Pullman and the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in 2004, both sides were often in close agreement, particularly when discussing the vital importance of mythology in the human imagination. For Pullman, in one such discussion, mythology is something ‘whose truth is not historical truth only but has a truth that also sort of lives on’. Hence his passionate belief in the power of story, however hard this may be to define or even articulate. Elsewhere, he has frequently been quoted in his support for the poet John Keats, who in a letter to a friend wrote about the virtues of what he termed negative capability, defined in his own words as the state of mind when ‘man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Those who try and have tried questioning Pullman over the years on the exact meanings of passages in His Dark Materials should not be surprised when he falls back on a similar defence of ultimate uncertainty rather than coming up with any over-specific answers.
In 2010 Pullman’s novel of ideas, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was published. Its title proved more provocative than its text. Jesus here remains the preacher and miracle-worker of the New Testament who was eventually crucified. But towards the end of his life he loses faith in God. He also starts dreading what might happen should his own beliefs become part of an established religion, open to abuse from those intent on controlling it in order to further their own power. But after his death this is exactly what happens, with his twin b
rother Christ posing as Jesus and developing a doctrine that his dead brother never taught, while deceiving others with lies about his Resurrection. Pullman suggests, by the end, that we should return to what the original Jesus said while rejecting church doctrines that both spread and subsequently distorted his essential gospel message. Some of Pullman’s Christian critics since have found this notion not unsympathetic.
In 2012 Pullman brought out his version of Grimm Tales: favourite stories collected by the brothers Grimm. He claims in his introduction only to be interested in getting these tales across in the best way he can as working and effective stories for all time. Much as he has always loved them he has elsewhere denied the existence of any obvious fairy tale influence on His Dark Materials. The qualities he finds in these stories, such as pace rather than characterisation, and arbitrary happenings rather than psychological realism, are indeed not associated with his own writing. But Pullman loves them for the special quality that has enabled them to last for so long. What this final quality is never becomes clear and may well be, in his own words, something that is ‘too easy for children and too difficult for adults’. This is another reminder that for Pullman, stories need only justify themselves by their own excellence as fiction, leaving each reader to draw from them the memories, lessons, hopes and fears that exist most urgently in their own imagination.
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