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<\/a>However much I might disagree with Philip Pullman\u2019s beliefs and his characterization of Christianity in the His Dark Materials<\/a><\/i> trilogy, it must be said that Pullman very graciously agreed to exchange several e-mails with me back in September, for my article<\/a> on The Golden Compass<\/i> that appears in the current issue of Christianity Today<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n
Only a fraction of this \u201cinterview\u201d ended up in the article itself, but a lot of what he said was quite interesting, so I figured I\u2019d post a longer, and slightly edited, version of it here. (\u201cSlightly edited\u201d here means that I have moved a few bits around, and inserted one or two follow-up questions and answers into the middle of a previous answer; plus I have deleted the usual \u201chi how are you\u201d sort of pleasantries.)<\/p>\n
As you can see, I had no idea how quickly he would respond, or how much opportunity there would be for follow-up questions, so I tended to bunch the questions up somewhat \u2014 and there wasn\u2019t time for some of the follow-up questions that I might have wanted to ask. Maybe one day we\u2019ll have a voice-to-voice conversation, but for now, this will do!<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n
PTC:<\/b> First, the obvious hook for this story is the upcoming movie version of <\/i>The Golden Compass, and there has been some talk in the entertainment media of late about the movie \u201ctoning down\u201d the perceived anti-religious elements. Nicole Kidman, for example, was quoted as saying<\/a> that she would never have signed on to the trilogy if she had thought there was anything \u201canti-Catholic\u201d about the movies; and Chris Weitz has said<\/a> the focus of the trilogy will be on \u201cAuthority\u201d rather than \u201cGod\u201d, per se. From your perspective, is this an acceptable adjustment? Or has an important element of the book been lost? How do you anticipate the sequels, which in book form were more explicit about the religious-mythical elements than the first part of the trilogy, will deal with this? Can they be purged in a way that keeps the story\u2019s narrative and thematic integrity? And how would you respond to, say, Kidman\u2019s characterization of the trilogy?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> There are two ways to make a film: one is to spend several hundred million dollars, and the other is to spend about twenty thousand. Each imposes its own constraints. In the case of an expensive film, the people who put up the money obviously deserve to have their concerns taken into consideration. So do the stars. I know that Nicole Kidman, for example, was persuaded to take the part because she knew that the whole arc of the story of her character Mrs Coulter (and I hope I\u2019m not giving away anything for people who haven\u2019t read the story, but I can\u2019t make this point without doing so) included not only great wickedness but also a great redemption, brought about by the growing love she helplessly feels for her daughter. That is only one of the moral turns and complexities that make this story very far from the simple \u201cPullman says that evil is good\u201d nonsense put about by some stupid and tendentious journalism. As for the \u201cAuthority\u201d business, I\u2019ve always made it clear that theocracy \u2013 the political exercise of religious authority, which is what the Magisterium in the story embodies \u2013 is a special example of the regrettable tendency of humankind to believe in \u201cone size fits all\u201d answers: to cling to the extreme of dogmatic fundamentalism whether religious or not. In fact (and I\u2019ve pointed this out too many times to go through it all again) the purest example of theocracy in the twentieth century was Soviet Russia. So I have no problem with the way the film has put the emphasis; it could hardly have done otherwise. Finally, as for the second and third films, no decision has yet been made to go ahead with them. It will depend on the box office returns, as everyone always knew.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> How would you characterize your own beliefs? Atheistic, agnostic, materialist, etc.? A friend of mine<\/a> who is both an atheist and a committed materialist told me she didn\u2019t understand why <\/i>His Dark Materials was being touted as an \u201catheist\u201d trilogy, because the Dust seemed very \u201cspiritual\u201d and \u201cmystical\u201d and unnecessary to her. Tony Watkins<\/a> has also written that the Dust makes the books more \u201cdualist\u201d than materialist. Do you think there is something \u201cspiritual\u201d about your books, and does this coincide with anything \u201cspiritual\u201d in your own outlook, or are people perhaps reading too much into a handy and very effective plot device? If your own views are more at the materialistic end of things, why do you think your books have pointed in a seemingly opposite direction?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> Deep waters here. Those who are committed materialists (as I claim to be myself) have to account for the existence of consciousness, or else, like the behaviourists such as Watson and Skinner, deny that it exists at all. There are various ways of explaining consciousness, many of which seem to take the line that it\u2019s an emergent phenomenon that only begins to exist when a sufficient degree of complexity is achieved. Another way of dealing with the question is to assume that consciousness, like mass, is a normal and universal property of matter (this is known as panpsychism), so that human beings, dogs, carrots, stones, and atoms are all conscious, though in different degrees. This is the line I take myself, in the company of poets such as Wordsworth and Blake.<\/p>\n As for \u2018spirit\u2019, \u2018spiritual\u2019, \u2018spirituality\u2019 \u2013 these are words I never use, because I can see nothing real that seems to correspond with them: they have no meaning. I would never begin to talk of a person\u2019s spiritual life, or refer to someone\u2019s profound spirituality, or anything of that sort, because it doesn\u2019t make sense to me. When other people talk about spirituality I can see nothing in it, in reality, except a sense of vague uplift combined at one end with genuine goodness and modesty, and at the other with self-righteousness and pride. That\u2019s what they\u2019re displaying. That\u2019s what seems to be on offer when they interact with the world. And to my mind it\u2019s easier, clearer, and more truthful just to talk about the goodness and modesty, or about the self-righteousness and pride, without going into the other stuff at all. So the good qualities that the word \u2018spiritual\u2019 implies can be perfectly well covered, and more honestly covered, it seems to me, by other positive words, and we don\u2019t need \u2018spiritual\u2019 at all.<\/p>\n But in fact my reaction to the word \u2018spiritual\u2019 is even a little more strongly felt than that; I even feel a slight revulsion. I\u2019m thinking of those portraits of saints and martyrs by painters of the Baroque period and the Counter-Reformation: horrible grubby-looking old men with rotten teeth wearing dark dusty robes and gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour, or beautiful young women in sumptuous clothes with wide eyes and parted lips gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour, or martyrs having the flesh ripped from their bones as they gaze upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour \u2013 gazing at the Virgin Mary, or a vision of the Cross, or something else that\u2019s hovering in the air just above them. And you know that what they\u2019re seeing isn\u2019t really there; that if you were there in front of them, you wouldn\u2019t see the Virgin sitting on a little cloud six feet above the floor; all you\u2019d see would be the rotten teeth or the sumptuous clothes or the torn flesh and the expression of fanatical fervour. They\u2019re seeing things. They\u2019re deluded, in fact.<\/p>\n So the word \u2018spiritual\u2019, for me, has overtones that are entirely negative. It seems to me that whenever anyone uses the word, it\u2019s a sign that either they\u2019re deluding themselves, or they\u2019re pulling the wool over the eyes of others. And when I hear it, or see it in print, my reaction is one of immediate scepticism.<\/p>\n Finally, back to Dust. And again I\u2019m giving things away that might spoil the story, but Dust is my metaphor for all the things that your atheist materialist friend no doubt believes in as firmly as I do: human wisdom, science and art, all the accumulated and transmissible achievements of the human mind. This is both material (located in books, etc, and in living people who can talk about it) and, like consciousness, seemingly non-material. But without matter, it wouldn\u2019t be there at all. Everything that is Dust is the result of the amorous inclinations of matter (Blake: \u201cEternity is in love with the productions of Time\u201d).<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Your trilogy does an amazing job of interpreting certain aspects of the Old Testament (and the legends surrounding it) quite literally (e.g. Enoch<\/a>), and it touches on Church history too \u2014 but if memory serves, there is no mention of Jesus as a character in this cosmology. To some readers, this has been a curious gap. Where does he fit into your mythos? Given that the depiction of everything that came before and after Jesus \u2014 God, Enoch, the Church, etc. \u2014 is pretty negative, would Jesus himself have been \u201cbad\u201d somehow? Or, as a \u201cgood\u201d person, did he not fit in?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> His omission from HDM was deliberate; I\u2019m going to get around to Jesus in the next book. I have plenty to say about him.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> I look forward to reading this. Any word on when it might be out?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> No, but not yet, I\u2019m afraid. I spend too much time answering questions and doing that sort of thing.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> What sort of response to your books have you been perceiving from Christians? Compared to, say, the Harry Potter<\/a> ruckus. Have you been surprised by any criticisms? Surprised by a <\/i>lack of criticism? Have Christian responses to your books been thoughtful, reactionary, etc.? Have you perceived any differences between England and North America in terms of the reception your books have had among Christian readers?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> The Christians at the fundamentalist or evangelical end of the spectrum have been so preoccupied with denouncing the wickedness of Harry Potter that they\u2019ve hardly noticed me at all. There are one or two exceptions \u2013 a couple of Christian journalists have made it their business to attack me, but their readings of the book have been so comically inadequate that no-one has taken any notice of them; and at a public meeting I was once denounced by a Christian headmistress for advocating under-age sex, and it took no more than a couple of questions from me to establish that she had never actually read the passage she was complaining about. So if that\u2019s the best \u2013 or the worst \u2013 that that sort of Christian can do, I have little to worry about.<\/p>\n Christians at the other end, what you might call the thoughtful liberal end of the spectrum, have on the contrary been very welcoming. Many of my most interesting letters have been from, many of my most interesting conversations have been with Christians both Protestant and Catholic. They can see that I take these big questions seriously, and that the morality \u2013 the values that the book as a whole upholds and champions \u2013 is something on which we can all fully agree.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> There has been a lot of attention lately given to atheist books by the likes of Christopher Hitchens<\/a> and Richard Dawkins<\/a> (both of whom are British like yourself \u2014 coincidence? something in the culture?). Do you think the broader cultural discussion raised by these books might help pave the way, in a sense, for <\/i>The Golden Compass and its sequels? Is there a sense in which maybe <\/i>His Dark Materials was ahead of the curve?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> The success of Dawkins and Hitchens \u2013 and Daniel Dennett for that matter \u2013 is a sign, to me, that the broad culture is much more questioning and open-minded than many people assume. But the things those three write are different from a novel like HDM, and HDM is different from polemic and argument like \u2018The God Delusion\u2019. I am a storyteller. I revel in the ambiguities and shadows and suggestions of metaphor. Dawkins too, in his science books, is a storyteller \u2013 a great one \u2013 and his use of metaphor there is masterly. If I have a criticism of \u2018The God Delusion\u2019, it is that he seems to over-simplify, to insist on one single literal meaning for the word \u2018faith\u2019, and that he doesn\u2019t acknowledge that God is a metaphor \u2013 just as Dust is.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Hmmm, could you tease this out a bit more? I can understand Dust as a metaphor within a work of literature, but in what sense is God a metaphor? (I assume both you and Dawkins are referring to God as he is perceived in the real world and not in a work of fiction \u2014 and certainly the people Dawkins takes issue with would see God as more than metaphorical.)<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> I don\u2019t expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that\u2019s what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all \u2013 savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection \u2013 for David, for example. But he\u2019s not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won\u2019t find them in the phone book.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Your trilogy is frequently compared to the writings of Lewis and Tolkien<\/a>, and it coincided with the rise of Harry Potter. Were you consciously \u201cresponding\u201d in some way to, say, the Narnia books when you wrote <\/i>His Dark Materials, or were you writing out of a more general desire to express a viewpoint that happens to disagree with Lewis\u2019s in some profound ways? I am also curious as to what you make of J.K. Rowling\u2019s series, now that it is finished; <\/i>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows quotes the New Testament approvingly, and is very much concerned with the continuation and integrity of the soul after death; indeed, one sign of Voldemort\u2019s evil is that he has divided his soul in the horcruxes. This seems at odds with the thrust of your own trilogy, where the continuation of the soul or personality beyond the grave is something to be escaped, and the spirits of the dead are happy to be dis-integrated. What is your take on the Harry Potter books and movies? Are they too \u201cChristian\u201d? Or, perhaps, do they share with your books a distrust of \u201cAuthority\u201d and a decentralized, \u201cRepublican\u201d view of Heaven? (As some people have noted, there is an afterlife in Rowling\u2019s books but no direct role for God.)<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> I have only read the second of the Harry Potter books, and I can\u2019t say very much about them.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> The second but not the first? Interesting! Any particular reason?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> Simply that I was asked to judge the Guardian Children\u2019s Fiction Award, and it was on the shortlist.<\/p>\n As for Narnia \u2013 I\u2019ve expressed my detestation for that series on several occasions and at length, so I won\u2019t say very much about it here, except to note something that some commentators miss when lumping Lewis and Tolkien together, which is this: that Tolkien was a Catholic, for whom the basic issues of life were not in question, because the Church had all the answers. So nowhere in \u2018The Lord of the Rings\u2019 is there a moment\u2019s doubt about those big questions. No-one is in any doubt about what\u2019s good or bad; everyone knows where the good is, and what to do about the bad. Enormous as it is, TLOTR is consequently trivial. Narnia, on the other hand, is the work of a Protestant \u2013 and an Ulster Protestant at that, for whom the individual interaction with the Bible and with God was a matter of daily struggle and endless moral questioning. That\u2019s the Protestant tradition. So in Narnia the big questions are urgent and compelling and vital: is there a God? Who is it? How can I recognise him? What must I do to be good? I profoundly disagree with the answers that Lewis offers \u2013 in fact, as I say, I detest them \u2013 but Narnia is a work of serious religious engagement in a way that TLOTR could never be.<\/p>\n I leave it to others to say whether, or in what ways, HDM resembles or doesn\u2019t resemble HP or Narnia or TLOTR.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> A number of commentators have argued that, while your books are critical of Christianity etc., they nevertheless reflect Christian virtues such as love and self-sacrifice. Six years ago, Daniel Moloney<\/a> wrote in <\/i>First Things magazine that, \u201cif the Christian myth actually is true, you would expect a gifted storyteller trying to tell a true story to arrive at many Christian conclusions about the nature of the world we see.\u201d How do you respond to this sort of analysis \u2014 both as an evaluation of your work (does it carry within itself a latent Christianity?) and for what it says about Christian critics who have tried to engage with your books?<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> My answer to that would be that I was brought up in the Church of England, and whereas I\u2019m an atheist, I\u2019m certainly a Church of England atheist, and for the matter of that a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. The Church of England is so deeply embedded in my personality and my way of thinking that to remove it would take a surgical operation so radical that I would probably not survive it.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t prevent me from pointing out the arrogance that deforms some Christian commentary, and makes it a pleasure to beat it about the head. What on earth gives Christians to right to assume that love and self-sacrifice have to be called Christian virtues? They are virtues, full stop. If there is an exclusively religious sin (not exclusively Christian, but certainly clearly visible among some Christians) it is the claim that all virtue belongs to their sect, all vice to others. It is so clearly wrong, so clearly stupid, so clearly counter-productive, that it leads the unbiased observer to assume that you\u2019re not allowed in the religious club unless you leave your intelligence at the door.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> If I can move from the personal to the communal or societal, would you say that substituting a God-less \u201cRepublic of Heaven\u201d for the \u201cKingdom of Heaven\u201d might be a form of \u201cradical surgery\u201d? Does atheism benefit from the Christian heritage, and how can a society that turns to atheism survive without it? (As you noted, one of the worst regimes we have ever known was Soviet Russia \u2014 a system that, while theocratic in form perhaps, was certainly <\/i>officially atheistic.)<\/i><\/p>\n PP:<\/b> But the problem with Soviet Russia wasn\u2019t the atheism, it was the totalitarianism. The totalitarianism is also the problem with Saudi Arabia, as it was with the Taliban\u2019s Afghanistan, with Calvin\u2019s Geneva, with the Inquisition\u2019s Spain \u2026<\/p>\n Does atheism benefit from the Christian heritage? Of course it can benefit from the best of it. I would hate to live in a world where all the Christian art, philosophy, literature, music, and architecture, not to mention the best of the ethical teaching, had been obliterated and forgotten. My own background, as I\u2019ve said many times, is Christian to the core. Christianity has made me what I am, for better or worse. I just don\u2019t believe in God.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Perhaps what made the virtues seem \u201cChristian\u201d in this case was the narrative form in which they were expressed; Moloney alludes to a parallel between your mythos and the Christian mythos in which the world is held hostage by an evil supernatural entity, and a messiah is needed to conquer the spirits of lust and domination with innocence and humility at great personal cost, etc. \u201cSuch a story is not subversive of Christianity, it is almost Christian, even if only implicitly and imperfectly,\u201d he writes.<\/i><\/p>\n But moving beyond that, Tony Watkins, for one, has raised the point that true virtue doesn\u2019t seem possible in a materialist world, because no one truly acts freely; instead, our actions are the end results of various deterministic (and, following quantum physics, random) forces \u2014 our genes and memes, basically. (My phrasing, not Tony\u2019s.) It may be wrong to say that virtues belong to a particular religious sect \u2014 and I would agree \u2014 but without some<\/i> sort of religious basis, there seems to be no particular motivation<\/i> to be virtuous, nor does it seem possible<\/i>.<\/p>\n Does looking at it from that angle make any more sense?<\/p>\n PP:<\/b> Well, I think that\u2019s a very bleak and limited view of human possibility. No motivation for virtue if you don\u2019t believe in God? What about the joy you feel when a good action of yours brings a happy result for someone else? What about the basic empathy we feel even for creatures who aren\u2019t human \u2013 a rabbit caught in a trap, a little bird inside the house trying to get out through a closed window, a polar bear drowning in a world where the ice is melting? That\u2019s not due to religion: it\u2019s due to the fact that we\u2019re alive and conscious and able to imagine another\u2019s suffering.<\/p>\n As for the existence or otherwise of free will, that is so profound a question that philosophers and scientists have been plumbing it for centuries if not millennia and the answer is still as far off as ever. But the only way we can live, it seems to me, is to believe that our will is free. A sort of psychological confirmation of this (though, like everything else, it may be deceptive) is that good things, or the right things to do, involve more effort than bad things, or the wrong things. We have to struggle against ourselves sometimes, and thus we can \u2018feel\u2019 the existence of free will, even if we can\u2019t demonstrate it logically or scientifically.<\/p>\n It\u2019s always interesting to see things from another angle, and it\u2019s important to be able to. But (a short lesson from film) there may be two or three good angles to shoot from, but there are dozens of bad ones: i.e. camera angles that are \u2018expressive\u2019 of nothing but the director\u2019s wish to draw attention to himself rather than the story. The \u2018best\u2019 camera angles are those that show the subject most clearly so that the audience is not distracted from the story. Students and young directors, and bad directors, love the eccentric angles; great directors most of the time go for the plainest and simplest. The plainest and simplest description of the world, for me, and the truest, is that there is no God, but that human beings are capable of great goodness and great wickedness, and we don\u2019t need priests or Popes or imams or rabbis to tell us which is which.<\/p>\n