Pullman, Lewis, and miscellaneous theology

[Amy Z]

Vendea wrote:

> Jesus' life and teachings do in my opinion show a better way of 
living
> your life then the rituals and rules of the catholic church. 

One of the things that interests me about Pullman's parallel universe 
is that the Church-with-a-capital-C is not RC, but Calvinist.  It's 
as if he's teasing anti-Catholic Protestants:  "What, you think you'd 
have come up with something better if Calvin had had his way?"

BTW, when I read Narnia as a child (8? 9?), I got the religious 
significance in some vague ways.  E.g., I got that Aslan was God, and 
when I said so to my dad, he said, "Well, Jesus," which made me feel 
a bit disillusioned.  I was Jewish and thought that was rather sneaky 
of Lewis.  <g>  It wasn't until later that I got the specific 
significance of the Stone Table and such, but I think children absorb 
the gist of a lesson long before they know what it means 
specifically.  So, yes, without any thoughts of hell and so forth, I 
got that Susan is BAD and what she did was therefore BAD.

David wrote:

> My understanding of the term is that for us today the 
word 'kingdom' 
> tends to imply a specific type of political government, as in the 
UK 
> or Siam.  This is not necessarily implied by the Jesus' words, 
which 
> may refer rather to God acting in the role of king among his 
people, 
> who are to 'reign' with him.  So one interpretation would be that 
> where the Kingdom of Heaven is effective, there is freedom from and 
> power over fear, want, disease, and sin (I won't try to define this 
> last term here!).
> 
> I believe though that the phrase is not one which the disciples 
> could have looked up in a dictionary when Jesus first used it: as 
> with so many early Christian terms, Jesus (and later the apostles) 
> used existing ideas and re-shaped them into new forms which really 
> meant that words were being redefined.

Yes, and I take the play of "Republic of Heaven" with "Kingdom of 
Heaven" as a sort of midrash--a playful-yet-serious use of language 
to dig into deeper questions of theological significance.  You don't 
have to believe that Jesus actually imagined God as an autocrat in 
order to criticize the church for promoting that idea, explicitly and 
implicitly.  

> One of the puzzles to me of HDM is whether the Authority is 
supposed 
> to be a creator God.  In many ways he fits right in to the 
Christian 
> idea of Satan as the 'God of this world' - that is, the spirit 
being 
> (fallen angel, if you like) who exercises dominion over the world, 
> dominion which was originally delegated by God for good but 
> arrogated before or at the time of the fall.  

It has often seemed to me that what some people worship as God sounds 
an awful lot like my idea of Satan, so his switcheroo was very 
familiar.

>Pullman IIRC never 
> really explains how the worlds came to be in the first place.

No, he leaves it explicitly open.  He does say that the Authority was 
*not* the Creator.

Balthamos said quietly, "The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, 
Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty--those were 
all names he gave himself.  He was never the creator.  He was an 
angel like ourselves--the first angel, true, the most powerful, but 
he was formed of Dust as we are . . . . The forst angels condensed 
out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all.  He told those 
who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie."  (The 
Amber Spyglass, 31-32 [US hardcover]; ch. 2)

and

[this is Ogunwe speaking:]  " . . . the Authority is not the 
creator.  There may have been a creator, or there may not: we don't 
know.  All we know is that at some point the Authority took 
charge . . . " (The Amber Spyglass, 210 [US hardcover]; ch. 16)

Incidentally, re: Gnosticism, I don't think Pullman or his heroes are 
Gnostics, because the Gnostics put spirit high above matter in the 
old hierarchy, and saw humans as spirits trapped in the hated 
physical world.  But one figure who is very important in Gnosticism 
is Sophia, Wisdom (also personified in the Bible, but given short 
shrift by most Jewish and Christian tradition), and I suspect she 
appears in HDM as Xaphania--note the similarity of the names 
(Xaphania="Sophania").  I also suspect Xaphania is the wise angel who 
discovers the truth and leads the rebellion against the Authority, as 
explained by Balthamos in the continuation of the passage above.

Amy Z