Bound by reality

Nov. 22 marked the 62nd anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s death, a day that in 1963 passed without much fanfare, due to the fact that two other well-known figures also passed the same day: Aldous Huxley and President John F. Kennedy. Sixty-two years after his death, writers still aspire to be like Lewis, and his works are treated as achievement metrics: Who will be “the next C.S. Lewis”? Who is writing “the next Chronicles of Narnia”? Who, today, can speak with as much clarity about Christianity in a world gone mad as Lewis did in his day?

On the other end of the spectrum, however, there are writers who aspire to be as unlike Lewis as possible. Philip Pullman, the Oxford-educated children’s writer, is most popularly known among Christians as the anti-C.S. Lewis, described as “doing for atheism what C.S. Lewis did for God.” According to some, His Dark Materials is the anti-Narnia, an attempt to indoctrinate children into atheism or agnosticism. It’s no surprise, then, that when the Hollywood movie adaptation of The Golden Compass debuted in 2007, many Christians boycotted the film. After all—spoiler alert!—“god the father” dies at the end of the trilogy.

But when I read the His Dark Materials trilogy as a child, long before many Christians boycotted The Golden Compass movie-adaptation, I saw only a deeply Christian story. Pullman’s trilogy is a story in which death is defeated and the kingdom of heaven is brought to earth. It’s a story in which “life confronts death” and “light shines through the darkness.” It’s a story in which evil is defeated and “death is no longer an ending but instead a journey back into life.” These quotes are not from sermons or Scripture, but from the recent HBO miniseries of Pullman’s trilogy. (Narnia lovers will recognize a familiar face in His Dark Materials’ Lord Asriel, played by James McAvoy, who also played Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.)

Pullman’s world is complex and beautifully constructed. Pullman is a masterful writer, capturing the imaginations of children and adults alike—a trait that C.S. Lewis himself said any children’s book worth its chops should possess. The problem with Pullman’s book, however, is not necessarily in its content, but in its aim. If Pullman set out to write an anti-Christian story, he utterly failed, because Pullman’s god is no God at all.

In Pullman’s famous essay against C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, his main critique of Lewis is that he’s too Platonic, his characters (and by proxy, Pullman seems to assume, the man himself) disdain reality for a hidden, better one. It’s unclear whether Pullman’s critique is valid; Lewis himself said that God likes matter because He created it, which would seem to contradict the claim that Lewis is just a mere Platonist.

Whatever Pullman’s problems with Lewis, valid or not, Lewis is but a man, an imperfect image of Christ. Pullman’s real fight is not with Lewis, but with Christ Himself. And Pullman misses the beauty of the Incarnation—the particularity of Christ taking on flesh in a particular body in a particular time and in a particular place. Christ is not a shadow of God, but the real God, in our own human flesh in our own real world. Christ affirms the reality of the world by becoming part of it. Pullman may not think that Lewis recognized this or portrayed it well in his books—but Pullman’s, ultimately, did.

Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of the trilogy, descends to the dead and liberates the souls of the captives, defeating death and the enemy, and securing for all eternal life in peace. She does so at great cost to herself, suffering a kind of death in the process. Lyra is a Christ figure, the true savior of Pullman’s trilogy. The Magisterium (the religious and governmental entity in His Dark Materials, and a thinly veiled analogy to the Catholic Church) and the so-called god it serves are evil, conniving, and power-hungry. And as such, this god is unrecognizable as God. Even as a child, I did not come away from the books thinking, “God, Christianity, and organized religion are bad,” as Pullman perhaps hopes that children do. Instead, the message I discovered was, “Lyra is like Christ.”

C.S. Lewis once described Christianity as the “true myth.” He believed that pagan myths and stories are but retellings of the Christian story, “God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there.” Philip Pullman’s expression of goodness in His Dark Materials, contra to his aim, is yet another means by which God has expressed Himself, even if unwittingly to Pullman. In the truest sense, Pullman’s work itself is a shadow of the reality he tries so hard to deny—that of a savior that harrowed hell and defeated death once and for all. And in this way, Pullman is a lot more like Lewis than he himself intended to be.