Posted on 12/04/2007 8:49:42 AM PST by NYer
When parents look at the beautiful covers adorning the gift-boxed sets of Philip Pullman's fantasy series, His Dark Materials, they might be forgiven for believing that these books follow in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. In fact, the publishers are counting on it. The display tables have arrived just in time for Christmas and the release of the screen adaptation of the first volume: The Golden Compass.
What Pullman's promoters desperately hope is that parents will not get beyond the colorful covers, which appear to depict nothing more than an action/fantasy series filled with talking animals, exciting battles, and a child protagonist. What they desperately fear is that parents will discover the dark and sinister philosophy that unfolds within the pages of Pullman's work — a philosophy that condones the killing of children to advance knowledge; disparages virtue and glorifies cunning; and which poses the idea that the solution to humanity's problems is the killing of God. In short, the philosophy that underlies much of Pullman's fiction is Friedrich Nietzsche's — a German philosopher whose work was influential with the Third Reich.
Nietzsche's major philosophical ideas include the Will to Power, the Superman, and the myth of the Eternal Return. While the third idea is hinted at in the last book in the series, it is the first two ideas that fill the pages of His Dark Materials. It is important for pastors and parents to understand these concepts so that they can be prepared to talk about their impact. Briefly, then, I will sketch these ideas, then show how they appear in The Golden Compass and throughout His Dark Materials, and finally demonstrate how these books — aimed at children — attempt to inculcate Nietzsche's worldview.
Nietzsche's View of the Way the World Works
The Will to Power
The main theme running throughout the writings of Nietzsche, gaining full force in his work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is that life is a demonstration of a will to power. Nietzsche rejected external authority, arguing that since all morality is subjective — a mere expression of the will of others — there is no reason why any one morality should be preferred. What marks humanity, Nietzsche argued, is a desire to assert one's own will, or, in other words, to do that which is right in one's own eyes.
Dana Villa, the Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, explains that Nietzsche's belief in the lack of absolute values — a lack of an objectively "true world" — leads to the destruction of "shared appearances" (291). As a result, to the extent that there are any values in the world, they ultimately find their grounding only in the perspective of the person doing the valuing, and in no other. Nietzsche advocated absolute moral autonomy. To illustrate, Nietzsche, in The Antichrist, defines "the good" as:
All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man...Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency...The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity. And they ought even to be helped to perish. (128)
Nietzsche scholar George Allen Morgan identifies four key "sins" — lust, thirst for mastery, self-seeking, and cruelty — that, under Nietzsche, are revalued as "goods:" lust is the good which draws toward the future; thirst for mastery drives the powerful to exercise their power over lower people; self-seeking is the source of discriminating taste and causes refinement; and cruelty leads to a lusty vitality (180-181). The masterful types will exert their will to power over lower types, and the extent of their mastery will be measured in their ability to do so. Morgan declares for Nietzsche that "True advance is measured by the mass of humanity sacrificed to 'the growth of a single stronger species of man'"(81). Ultimately, this planned evolution is designed to breed the superman.
The Superman
In order for Nietzsche's ultimate expression of the will to power to arise — the superman — it is first necessary to kill God. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche portrays the murder of God at the hands of The Ugliest Man, who chokes God to death on His own pity.
Theologian Norbert Schiffers explains Nietzsche's position:
With his own instinct for the good, man is strong enough to be ashamed of his belief in the God who alone is good. Even before The Will to Power Nietzsche makes his man with the instinct for the good, his Zarathustra, say that to his eyes and ears God goes against his taste. It is in the power of this instinct and with this taste that Nietzsche says in full awareness: the God of metaphysics, the God of the Moralists, the God, too, of a Christian philosophy — they are dead. (71)
The superman is the embodiment of the will to power and makes up an aristocratic class that rules over Nietzsche's other two types of people: the higher men and the herd classes (Fowler 157). According to University of Warwick philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson, such a person, freed from any cultural or theological moral restraints, "is master of a free will, and which gives him mastery over himself, over nature, over less fortunate creatures who have not succeeded in achieving sovereignty" (278-279).
With the "repressive" moral power of the dead god removed, the superman is free to express and develop his will to power. The superman stands atop the hierarchy of humanity. To those not yet among his peers, even to those of the "higher men" he would be a being fearful to behold. "Since man must become 'better and worse,' a superman will possess the 'evil' urges to maximum intensity; his kindness would be terrible; the best of us would call him a devil" (Morgan 175). It is Nietzsche's supermen — filled with will to power — that seek the death of God in His Dark Materials.
Bringing Nietzsche to Narnia
His Dark Materials are fantasy novels aimed at the youth market. They tell the story of Lyra and Will, two twelve-year-old children who are major actors in a titanic struggle between God and humanity. The first book, The Golden Compass, seems to deliberately borrow from C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. In both books, the action begins when a little girl hides in a wardrobe. Both books contain magic and talking animals. When we are introduced to Lyra, she is living at Oxford University — where Lewis went to school and, later, taught Medieval Literature while composing the bulk of his books. It is also the university from which Pullman received his bachelor's degree. Lucy, in The Lion The Witch, and the Wardrobe, rides on the back of Aslan, the Great Lion. Lyra, in The Golden Compass, rides on the back of Iorek, a great armored bear.
But when it comes to morality and redemption, the worlds created by Lewis and Pullman could not be farther apart. Lewis' world is infused with Christian imagery. Within The Chronicles of Narnia, a reader would encounter everything from Creation and Fall, to the death, burial and resurrection of Aslan (the Christ figure), to discipleship, and even The Second Coming and the End of the World. The central idea of Narnia is that there the children can learn to know and love Aslan, so that later, when they have grown up, they might more easily recognize Him (as Jesus) here.
In His Dark Materials, Pullman has crafted a world in which the most natural thing would be to desire the death of God. Pullman stated, in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, that "My books are about killing God." Like Nietzsche, Pullman needs God to be dead in order to liberate humanity from what Pullman deems a repressive, absolutist morality so that people will be free to be themselves — by which he means to follow their human nature, to be what nature intended them to be without supernatural interference or restraint.
The human embodiment of this oppression is The Church. Pullman cleverly constructs his ecclesiastical universe so that Catholicism and Protestantism can be derided together. He accomplishes this by having John Calvin, in this alternative universe, elected Pope (GC 30). Calvin moves the papacy to Geneva, and then the office is dissolved upon his death, though the institutional structures — such as the Magisterium and the General Oblation Board — are maintained.
The Church is filled with power-hungy zealots. Its leaders are greedy abusers of the poor. As an institution, it is to be feared. The archbishop is described as a "hateful old snob" (GC 84). The Church operates the General Oblation Board which lures children from the streets, and then spirits them away to a place where they become the subjects of a frightening blend of medical and theological experimentation in which their externalized souls are separated from their bodies. Pullman's world is populated by Christians who are inquisitors and witch burners. When the reader reaches the third book, The Amber Spyglass, Pullman introduces a priest, Semyon Borisovitch, who is described as fat, with dirty fingernails, a soiled cassock, and a long, unkempt beard. He is a drunk, his place reeks of tobacco. Pullman stops just shy of revealing Semyon as a pedophile when twelve-year-old Will comes knocking at his door: "The priest kept leaning forward to look closely at him, and felt his hands to see whether he was cold, and stroked his knee" (AS 98). Later, after plying the boy with vodka, the priest hugs Will "tightly" while apparently praying for him. The scene is written to appear creepy, and to build mistrust. And if there is any lingering doubt, Pullman has Mary, an attractive character, tell the children that "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all" (AS 441). If these are God's representatives, then God must be a fraud, unworthy of our allegiance.
Will to Power and the Supermen
The Nietzschean heroes of His Dark Materials who are tasked with toppling God include Lyra and Will, and by the end of the series, even Lyra's parent, Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel shed what at first appears to be "bad guy" status to become the first martyrs in the battle to destroy the Kingdom of Heaven to replace it with the Republic of Heaven. Other heroes include Iorek Byrnison — an armored bear whose kingdom has been usurped, and Serafina Pekkala, the queen of a clan of witches. As Pullman draws out each character, it is clear what he finds compelling about them: their rejection of God and the absolute morality God represents, and their will to power. Here is a brief sketch:
Lyra, as her name suggests, is a notorious liar — and she benefits by it. Ma Costas, a Gyptian boat wife, tells Lyra that it is a compliment in their culture to be considered effectively deceptive (GC 112). Lyra maneuvers through the adult world, getting what she wants by manipulation, pretense, and cunning. She occasionally speaks frankly about killing her enemies, or making others do the killing for her (SK 163). She is an apple that has not fallen far from the tree.
Will does not appear until the second book in the series: The Subtle Knife. He is aptly named. Will gets what he wants by determination or force. Will kills people, and threatens to kill Lyra if she gets in his way (SK 61). To get the titular knife, Will must fight the current possessor for it. To the victor goes the spoils or, in other words, might makes right. Learning to use the knife to cut a hole between worlds is Will's epiphany. Lyra describes the scene as seeing an authority descend upon Will — but that it is Will's authority; he is creating it. In a confrontation with angels (who turn out to be weaker than humans), Will says, "If I'm stronger, you have to obey me. Besides, I have the knife. So I can command you: help me find Lyra" (AS 11).
Mrs. Coulter, Lyra's mother, does not ascend to superman status (though she is very close), but from her introduction in The Golden Compass she fits into Nietzsche's "higher man" category. She runs the General Oblation Board for the Church, uses her charm to snatch children, mercilessly experiments on them, uses sex as a weapon, brutally tortures prisoners, and treats others in the Church as inferiors. She is admired by Lyra for her style, grace, power and passion. Readers are encouraged to applaud Mrs. Coulter's defection from the Church, and are expected to overlook her many atrocities (Mrs. Coulter never repents of them) once her love for Lyra is revealed.
Lord Asriel, Lyra's father, is described as an explorer, easily angered and passionate, with "a hatred of priors and monks and nuns" (GC 123). He is a man who is not to be defied. He murders Lyra's friend, Roger, to pull energy from him as part of a successful experiment to build a bridge to another world. Despite that, his raw power excites in Lyra grudging admiration. By the final book, Lord Asriel has assembled a large army that he intends to lead into battle to defeat God — an army favorably compared to the one commanded by Lucifer when there was a war in heaven, eons past. One character notes Lord Asriel's limitless ambition, "He dares to do what other men and women don't even dare to think" (SK 47). Loved and feared, Lord Asriel is a Superman.
Iorek and Serafina represent states of nature. Each wants to be left alone to live life as nature intended. The Church has polluted bear culture; the new king of the bears wants to be baptized as a Christian, and wishes to model his kingdom after the humans. Iorek rejects this move with disgust, ultimately fighting and defeating the weaker bear king. Serafina chronicles centuries of abuse by the Church. She explains that Christianity has always suppressed nature and has been against every good feeling. She declares that if a war breaks out, the witches only need to align themselves against the Church and they will be on the right side.
These are Role Models?
All of these characters embody, to varying degrees, Nietzsche's idea of Will to Power. They reject any morality as having authority over them. They are people of command. Whether the issue is sexual license, lying, torture, or killing — they all feel justified in doing as they will to obtain their desired results. They serve themselves, and they revel in power. These are the role models that Pullman has served up to impressionable children looking for vacation reading. They don't even know it yet, but once Pullman hooks them with the sanitized version represented by the screen adaptation of The Golden Compass — a move that will likely lull many parents into complacency about the books — then he will have the freedom to use his fantasy series to pour into their hearts Nietzsche's terrible lessons.
There is, however, a potential silver lining. Christians can explain that the desire to transcend our own humanity is not, in itself, evil. Nietzsche tried to accomplish that transcendence from below — a weak creature willing itself to power. God, however, can provide it from above. God promises to everyone who comes to Him in faith not some bland sameness, as if we were nothing more than members of the herd, but real true individuality. As Bernhard Welte points out, the Lord has promised to inscribe His name on our foreheads (Rev. 22:4). Welte explains the significance of that promise for believers:
That means that God's name, that is, the superhuman and divine radiance is inscribed on the human forehead as, therefore, the radiance of man himself. It indicates the authentic superhumanity of man. It does not arise from the self-intensification of the finite will, but much more as a pure gift from above, in the setting of the City of which it is written that it descends from heaven, from God, and therefore cannot be constructed from below (57).
[Watch for the Next Article The Golden Compass: Sexualizing Children in the World of His Dark Materials]
Works Cited:
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Nietzsche on Autonomy and Morality: The Challenge to Political
Theory.” Political Studies 39.2 (1991): 270-286.
Fowler, Mark. “Nietzschean Perspectivism: ‘How Could Such a Philosophy Dominate?’"
Social Theory and Practice 16.2 (1990): 119-162.
Meacham, Steve. “The Shed where God Died.” Sydney Morning Herald, December 13,
2003, online:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/12/1071125644900.html?from=storyrhs.
Morgan, George Allen, Jr. What Nietzsche Means. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. vol.16. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. ed. Oscar Levy. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.
---. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. trans. Walter Kaufman. New
York: Modern Library, 1995.
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1995.
---. The Subtle Knife. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1997.
---. The Amber Spyglass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2000.
Schiffers, Norbert. “Analyzing Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead.’” trans. Robert Nowell.
Nietzsche and Christianity. eds. Claude Geffre and Jean-Pierre Jossua. New York:
The Seabury Press, 1981. 65-77.
Villa, Dana R. “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of
Political Action” Political Theory 20.2 (1992): 274-308.
Welte, Bernhard. “The Ambiguity of Nietzsche’s Superman.” trans. John Cumming.
Nietzsche and Christianity. eds. Claude Geffre and Jean-Pierre Jossua. New York:
The Seabury Press, 1981. 53-57.
True, however it should be remembered that Islam was viewed very differently in the West when the Dune nooks were written. Kind of a cute religion or primitive peoples. No kind of a threat. Their religion has also incorporated Buddhist and other elements.
ping
Neither view is supported by history.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
– Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr.
“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions.
...
Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, “All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth.” Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”
- G.K. Chesteron, “Orthodoxy”
Don't parents look up information about books before giving them to their kids? Our daughter got these from the library, but I did read about them, and discussed them with her. She was a teenager at the time, and reading them didn't harm her religious beliefs, but again, that could be because we discussed the stories as she read them, and compared them directly to the Narnia series, which she'd read earlier.
And . . . the sales of the books will go up because of the movie (essentially cross-marketing no ironic pun intended). That’s a big chunk of the evil of this even if the film is less aggressive in its athiesm and its attacks on Christ.
My priest encouraged us to read all of the philosophers, Nietzsche wouldn't be excluded. He’d sit down and explain it to you. Let’s just say Father Hart and Bishop Sullivan had no fear of any earthly writings and stories of men. It just really grinds me wrong when Catholics start to find themselves amongst the ‘book burning’, ‘snake handling’, ‘witchcraft’ paranoid types. One thing I treasure about the Catholic faith is the open-mindedness of free-inquiry, yet maintence of moral objectivity.
BTW, I recommend the trailer. The movie simply looks abysmal. I think it’ll flop.
How's that for irony.
Sounds like the mid 1990s...
In the Dune books, Herbert drew on a number of themes from Islam, Judaism and Zen Buddism. The term “Kwisatz Haderach” to describe a messiah figure is a transliteration of a Hebrew phrase. The history of the Fremen in the books seems to mirror the ancient Hebrews/Israelites somewhat. Although their religion is rather Islam-like with some Zen elements. They do use the term “Jihad” a lot, but the books were written well before the term took on the more threatening context of recent times.
The Church abandoned the Index of Prohibited Books because it was seen to be counterproductive.
The problem is not well informed readers who read Nietzsche, or Pullman, to discover what their arguments are first hand. the problem is innocents who are drawn in and abused.
His Dark Materials is deliberately written in a subtle and incremental way, so kids will be drawn in first and only exposed to the vile message after they are hooked.
Note that the next installment of this analysis of the books will treat the sexualization of children. That is a major part of Pullman’s purpose. Basically, the lesson children get from the books is that God is an interfering busybody who must be rejected and killed, so they can have good sex with each other. Yet I’m sure Hollywood will give it a PG rating. And it will pretend to be Narnia by opening in the Christmas holidays.
I have rules on what movies I will see. It has to have 2 of my 3 requirements. Nudity, adult language, and violence.
Does it meet my requirements?
You need to also look longer down the road. If your kids are readers, they will likely be intrigued by this movie and want to look into Pullman’s books. By the time they get to the third book in the series, where God is killed, the parents have lost the ability to but the genie back into the bottle. Frankly, most parents will be clueless, because parents rarely read children’s novels.
Many parents will just be thrilled their children are reading. But children shouldn’t read just anything for the sake of reading. No decent parent would allow their child to read pornographic novels, but they let their kids read atheism or paganism disguised as fantasy. Some ideas endanger children’s souls.
This is exactly like Satan works. He tempts with something beautiful and delightful, and then draws you gradually into deep evil. The Bible tells us Satan was created a beautiful magnificent angel. He’s a master at making things seem appealing and innocent.
Sorry, splash damage. Not meant to you, per se, more a general posting.
Here’s another review of this moive, from the “Focus on the Family” people.
http://www.pluggedinonline.com/thisweekonly/a0003516.cfm
I find this not the least bit ironic. Atheism is a mental illness, so it's not surprising at all that it's most forward proponent was a raving loony-tune.
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