MetaCatholic

On Wednesday Kevin P Edgecomb posted on both Harry Potter and The Golden Compass. This post was nicely categorised as an “unhinged rant” – a classification I will say no more about. He then, at Justin’s instigation in the comments, left this comment on an earlier post of mine about the Golden Compass.

Readers of this blog will be in no doubt that I completely disagree about the Harry Potter series. Kevin says this:

The appropriation of Christian themes of sacrifice and redemption, very, very real things to a Christian, are appropriated by an author as devices to be utilized in a plot narrative in an entirely fictional world. This in itself is a cheapening, a gutter-slumming of the great work of God for the world, which appropriates rather blatantly those themes. Yet there is a greater wretchedness at work in this.

What happens when your children no longer are able to recognize that sacrifice, redemption, and selfless love belong outside the pages of fiction? When they open their Bibles, and read of the work of God throughout the ages in history, real work in the lives of many real people of real nations, will they not be subconsciously reading fiction?

I think this seriously mistakes the nature both of fiction and the Harry Potter series. First, I have no idea why developing a fictional world in which the narrative slowly builds up to themes of self-sacrifice as the means of defeating evil, courage in the face of death as something not to be feared and conquered, but embraced in the hope of life, and the struggle to be selfless and self-denying in the use of gifts of power, in any way is a cheapening of these themes.

Secondly, far from coarsening people’s ability to respond to these themes when encountered elsewhere and in the real world, the imaginative portrayal of them should enlarge the mind, and sensitise it to these concepts. By imagining oneself in the heroic narrative world, one is challenged, child or adult, to respond to such themes and vocations in the real world. Having imagined oneself in identification with the hero, perhaps one is better equipped to imitate such behaviour in real life.

The case of Pullman and the His Dark Materials trilogy raises some of the same points, and because it increasingly overtly offers an atheist critique, also poses different questions. In fact, it is less successful as fiction the more overt it becomes in the promotion of Pullman’s world-view. But Pullman’s view is rather more nuanced than Christians like to see when critiquing “godless atheism”. Not least because aspects of Christian morality and mythos inform both what he expresses positively as well as what he attacks. See these two very interesting interviews, the first an email interview with Peter Chattaway, the second a transcript of a public conversation with Rowan Williams, for a sense of Pullman’s nuances. The following excerpt is interesting, precisely because it is about story (RB is the chair, PP is Pullman and RW is ++Rowan):

RB: Question from a fellow atheist who is appalled by the materialism of this society - how would PP recommend children develop spiritual life?

PP: I don’t use the word spiritual myself, because I don’t have a clear sense of what it means. But I think it depends on your view of education: whether you think that the true end and purpose of education is to help children grow up, compete and face the economic challenges of a global environment that we’re going to face in the 21st century, or whether you think it’s to do with helping them see that they are the true heirs and inheritors of the riches - the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, the literary riches - of the whole world. If you believe in setting children’s minds alive and ablaze with excitement and passion or whether it’s a matter of filling them with facts and testing on them. It depends on your vision of education - and I know which one I’d go for.

RW: I think we’re entirely at one on that, I must say.

RB: The questioner is asking whether perhaps the relationship between Christianity and fiction is that Christianity itself is a story, and is about incarnation.

RW: Yes, I think there’s a lot of truth in that, that you can’t communicate Christianity simply as a set of ideas. At some point you’re going to have to sit down and tell a story. And tell a story which, because it’s a story, is bound to have some loose ends, some awkwardnesses. As it is we have four versions of the story of Jesus in the New Testament, because of that sense that a story can always be retold. And that introduces a bit of this irony in the narrative, which is very important in reinforcing the sense that this is something mysterious. I think there is something in that fundamental characteristic of Christianity which helps to enable a particular kind of storytelling.

PP: Story is fundamental. We began with Jesus. We might as well end by reminding ourselves that Jesus was one of the greatest storytellers there’s ever been. Whether or not he was the Son of God, he was a great storyteller.

About Pullman’s work Kevin, in the comment on my post says:

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the sweetness of good art in the hands of those with evil intent leads children only to destruction.

I first note that actually this is not about the use to which people put art (which is a different matter), but the creation of it. And that should lead us to reflection on the relation between beauty and truth. Can something be good art if it does not is some sense help us perceive an aspect of reality more deeply? There can be a facade of beauty, but if that facade covers over reality, is it good art? And in the end, is it actually beautiful?

Art to some extent escapes and transcends its creator, not least because a huge amount of subconscious thought and feeling is also poured into the work, as well as those ideas which the artist is seeking to express. The “reader” too brings much hinterland to the experience. Thus, I do not think we can simply judge any work of art purely on the articulated views of the artist. So, for example, I have a fairly strong dislike for Paradise Lost as a whole: irrespective of Milton’s articulated faith, Jesus is appallingly dull and insipid, and Satan ruggedly heroic and poetic. In much the same vein I can appreciate not only Pullman’s often finely wrought prose, and narrative verve, but also a great deal of the book’s promotion of human love and virtue, and critique of a stultifying and aggressively totalitarian Church. And I can do so while profoundly disagreeing with Pullman’s philosophy. Paradise Lost contains a great deal of falsehood despite its author’s intentions, and similarly in spite of the author’s overt attack on Christianity, His Dark Materials contains a great deal that is beautiful and true. My biggest critique remains that the overt views Pullman expresses are in the end destructive of the narrative, and vitiate the books artistic merit.

Art is as complicated as life, and beauty and truth are only fully reconciled in the final vision of God, not the gazing on created artifacts, which like our world and life itself is often deeply ambiguous about the good. In the end, what I object to most in Kevin’s post is the Manichaean tendency to divide the world up into such stark categories, a tendency that sits at odds with his Orthodoxy.