Modern Day Manichaeism

I work part-time in a library, and bits of news items regarding books float around all the time.

This morning, I received one regarding The Golden Compass.

If you've been to the movies in the U.S. recently, you've seen the trailers for this film, probably: polar bears in armor, a little girl with a, er, golden compass (actually, an alethiometer), Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. It looks like a good film, Lord of the Rings style; what the Narnia film could have been if they had strung out the whole sequence of Narnia books into a film franchise.

Which is why I read the children's book.

Actually, that's not entirely why I read it. I read it because, while working in the children's room, I happened across some reviews of the book(s), which discuss the background of the story as a loose re-telling of Milton's Paradise Lost, and discuss some of the metaphysics and such in the book. After reading these, I got the sense that there was a complex of ideas underlying the story which sounded, quite frankly, fascinating, in the same way that the film Spirited Away's child-like story belied a complex of mono-mythic, ecological, and Shinto-based archetypes and tropes.

I wasn't disappointed, either. The author, Philip Pullman, does a wonderful job of blending a complex of different ideas and themes together in the book behind a rather simplistic-seeming facade of a children's literature. Complex theological issues, such as theodicy, dualism, the interaction of science and faith, issues of identity in the adolescent maturation process etc. are all blended together in a lively way.

I'm now curious to see how these things play out in the film.

I was a bit shocked to discover, then, that Bill Donahue and the Catholic League has set out to boycott and protest the film. Not terribly shocked, mind, just a little: the surface of the books/films contains a rejection of, and attack upon, organized religion and most specifically the 'Catholic Church'. When Protestants joined the fray, however, that's when I began to wonder what the hell was going on.

I know I shouldn't be surprised; religious whack-jobs love themselves a protest almost as much as atheist whack-jobs love to wear that smug expression of self-satisfaction or left-wingers love to make papier-mache heads of George W. Bush and dance around to 'We Shall Overcome' and such.

But the more I thought about it, the more their ire made sense - historical sense.

Because the idea advanced in the books, actually, is simply a version Gnostic heresy recast. In the Gnostic worldview, the personal god of the Church is actually a 'demiurge', the creator God, who rules this world and is responsible for pain and suffering. Through gnosis, however, human beings can reunite with the True God, who is wholly transcendent and somewhat impersonal. Gnostic Christianity was based upon the idea that Christ Jesus was a representative of this transcendent deity who descended into this world in order to teach liberation from it.

Gnosticism, and its attendant faith based upon the teachings of Perso-Iranian prophet Mani ('alayhi salaam?), Manichaeism (from the early Persian Mani Khayy, or 'Mani lives') were of course serious contenders for the hearts and minds of Roman Empire roughly in the same time-frame as [now-considered-Orthodox] Christianity's growing popularity. St Augustine, for example, was originally of Manichaean bent, until (interestingly enough) conflicts between rational and scientific understandings of nature conflicted with the faith, turning him towards Christianity (in his Confessions, Augustine specifically relates that it was the Manichaean faith in astrology, which did not jive with his experience, that turned him, especially in light of the inability of Manichaean preachers to explain this disparity to him accurately).

One can trace this idea of dualism in religious thought back to Prophet Zarathushtra ('alayhi salaam), the Central-Asian/Proto-Persian who began the collapse of many deities into a single One (Ahura Mazda), and introduced to the world (as best we can tell) the concepts of good-and-evil, eschatology, angelology and demonology, and possibly theistic dualism etc.

This strain of thought has always had latent, indirect influence upon Western/Christian thinking (as indeed upon all thinking in all Aryan-based cultural thought), and to some degree is reflected in Milton. It isn't for nothing that Satan is the most interesting (and perhaps most human) character in Paradise Lost, while God is more indirect, impersonal and transcendent. Although himself Puritan-Protestant, as evidenced by his support for the English Commonwealth, his religious views place him at the far end of a spectrum from John Calvin, and Calvinist views of hard predestination, total depravity, and the authoritarian, patriarchal, arbitrarily cruel anthropomorphic deity, and in a way one could view Paradise Lost as descriptive of the competing strains of Protestant theology which existed during Milton's time (the 17th Century, by Christian reckoning).

Pullman's stories in the His Dark Materials trilogy, from the Miltonian verse:

…Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mix't
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage...

... are thus a rather complex discourse on Christian theology.

The Catholic League, and Focus on the Family (through their monthly magazine Plugged In), however, appear to miss all this entirely. To wit, from Focus on the Family's website:

"... messages woven into this story exalt witchcraft, evolution, divination, homosexuality and premarital sex. Accompanying them are smoking, drinking, occasional mild profanity and moments of visceral violence.

That Pullman's message is blasphemous and heretical goes without saying."

While the Catholic League has it that:

"While Roman Catholicism is the evil force in Pullman's writings, his real goal is to put a positive face on atheism, getting children to buy his message."

I know, I know; I shouldn't be surprised. Metaphor, allegory and parable are lost on these people: I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they took Jesus ('alayhi salaam) literally when he said that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard (Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18-19; Matthew 13:31-32. See also - funnily enough - the gnostic Thomas 20).

I also shouldn't be surprised, because the ideas of God proposed by the gnostics - and Milton, who appears to have espoused Arianism, Socianism (Unitarianism), and mortalism - are all outside of the scope of modern mainstream Christianity, both Catholic and majority Protestant views.

It's more the fact, though, that this is what religious discourse seems to have been reduced to, these days; or more properly, the fact that protest against His Dark Materials lies at such a simplistic, reductionist, absurd level. Like the books themselves, protest against them would have the potential to educate individuals regarding early Christian history, including the multiform and various doctrines, why they arose and how they came about and why such-and-such is now considered orthodox and favored while others are considered heterodox and heretical.

Because the gnostic theories do have some major faults: dualism, and especially the radical rejection of 'this world' leads to thorny moral and ethical issues, such the responsibility for ecological stewardship, social justice and interpersonal compassionate action (not that these are well catered by either mainstream Catholic dogma or evangelical dispensationalism, but still).

Of course, I base this supposition upon the theory that individuals who espouse certain doctrines understand them, believe them, and are willing to defend them.

Maybe that is where my disconnect lies.

In the mean-time, though: the film looks good, and I recommend you see it; more fully, I recommend you read the books, enjoy the story, and perhaps ponder the theologies.