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All Saints Sunday
Today I share the second half of the Sunday Forum talk I gave last week on “Literary Depictions of the Afterlife.” (You can read the first half here.) I concluded my presentation by looking at Lyra and Will descending into the world of the dead in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spy Glass, the last book in the Golden Compass trilogy (a.ka. the His Dark Materials trilogy).
Pullman is known for his sharp criticisms of institutional Christianity, especially its obsession (as he sees it) with sin and punishment. Indeed, The Golden Compass (book and movie) was somewhat famously attacked by the Vatican for its depiction of the church. In Pullman’s books, the church is a cross between the Catholic Church of the Inquisition and John Calvin’s Geneva church, which notably burned Michael Servetus at the stake in the 16th century.
In his depiction, Pullman may be reacting to the Anglican church he grew up in, where his grandfather was the clergyman. Having grown up in the American version of the Anglican church in the early 1960s (the Episcopalian Church), I am familiar with the self-flagellating, crucifixion-centered message Pullman may have encountered. I remember being terrified by the confessional prayer we recited every Sunday:
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults.
Why, I remember wondering, was God mad at us all the time. What would not sparing look like?
Pullman either recited this confessional, from the 1928 prayer book, or the equally grim 1662 version. I’m not surprised that he describes himself as a “1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist.”
In Pullman’s Golden Compass books, I believe he is trying to shake free of this version of Christianity, including its vision of the afterlife. To do so, he turns to Dante, Virgil and, to a lesser extent, Homer.
In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra and Will enter into the land of the dead so that they can free Lyra’s friend Roger, whom she has unwittingly led to his death. The world is presided over by Virgilian and Dante-esque harpies whose role is to remind the dead of all the things they did wrong in life. (To cite again from the confessional, “There is no health in us.”) As a result of immersing themselves in human self-loathing, they have become repellant creatures. The afterworld, meanwhile, is just a never-ending cave in which the dead exist in perpetuity.
Lyra in many ways functions as a Christ figure—a flawed Christ figure to be sure—who is destined (so the oracles declare) to save the world. This world includes the world of the dead, and in her descent into the afterlife resembles the harrowing of hell, which was Jesus descending “into hell” following the crucifixion and leading many of the Old Testament figures out. Dante talks about this in Inferno.
Leading the dead out is also Lyra’s mission, although there are no restrictions on who can exit. Unlike in Dante, however, she does not lead the dead to Paradiso but back to the physical world. This means, she warns them, that they will lose their separate identities.
As I read her words, let me add that this depiction of what happens to us after we die is the one that speaks the most deeply to me. The daemons she mentions, by the way, are our souls or alter-egos, which in Pullman’s novels take the form of guardian animals:
“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”
Pullman contrasts this vision of the afterlife with orthodox depictions. A figure who was a Christian martyr but who is now turning her back on church doctrine describes the orthodox version as follows:
When we were alive, they told us that when we died we’d go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That’s what they said. And that’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.
This particular saint embraces Lyra’s alternative:
But now this child has come offering us a way out and I’m going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
Perhaps passages like this are why the Vatican condemned Pullman. I’ll add that the condemnation occurred under the rightwing pope Benedict, and I wonder if the same would have happened with Pope Francis given that there’s something Franciscan in Pullman’s vision. I think of the recent Sunday Forum talk that Rev. Jim Pappas gave on St. Francis’s vision of being connected with all of creation (here). Instead of denying the earthly realm and hoping for angels with harps (or whatever), Francis found heaven in nature and in people.
Along these lines, I’ve been reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire (2008), which I think might resonate with Pullman. According to authors Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, the Christian church didn’t become sin-obsessed and crucifixion-obsessed until around the year 1000. (They say it began changing with the First Crusade.)
Brock and Parker realized this when, while studying early Christian imagery, they discovered no depictions of Christ on the cross or of life as a vale of tears from which people long to be released. Instead, Christians at this time saw Earth itself as a potential paradise:
To our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than “heaven” or the afterlife. Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death. However, in the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. It was on the earth.
Works of the time bear this out:
[The Spirit of God] was on the earth. Images of it in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies, and teeming waters of the Mediterranean world, as if they were lit by a power from within. Sparkling mosaics in vivid colors captured the world’s luminosity. The images filled the walls of spaces in which liturgies fostered aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual experiences of life in the present, in a world created as good and delightful.
And one more passage:
Like the breathing of a human body, the images said that God blessed the earth with the breath of Spirit. It permeated the entire cosmos and made paradise the salvation that baptism in the Spirit offered. As the most blessed place imaginable, paradise was also where the departed saints rested from their earthly labors and returned to visit those who loved them. In early Christian understandings, even heaven was a dimension of this life; it was the mysterious abode of God from which blessings flowed upon the earth. Nearby to heaven, the dead rested in their own neighborhood of paradise.
While some Christians in Pullman’s book come around to this vision, others do not. Pullman describes these latter as people who are so fixed on orthodox versions of heaven that they insist that the dark cave is, in fact, an orthodox paradise. Like Dante’s damned souls, they choose their own hell. Here, for instance, is how a thin and pale monk “with dark, zealous eyes” characterizes Lyra’s promise:
This is a bitter message, a sad and cruel joke. Can’t you see the truth? This is not a child. This is an agent of the Evil One himself! The world we lived in was a vale of corruption and tears. Nothing there could satisfy us. But the Almighty has granted us this blessed place for all eternity, this paradise, which to the fallen soul seems bleak and barren, but which the eys of faith see as it is, overflowing with milk and honey and resounding with the sweet hymns of the angelos. This is Heaven, truly! What this evil girl promises is nothing but lies. She wants to lead you to Hell! Go with her at your peril. My companions and I of the true faith will remain here in our blessed paradise, and spend eternity singing the praises of the Almighty, who has given us the judgment to tell the false from the true.
I can imagine Lyra responding to him in the words of the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, only she would do in in a less self-righteous tone:
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
The other figures in the underworld, however, ignore the monk and follow the children, with Will cutting a window into the world of the living with a magic knife. Roger, Lyra’s particular friend, is the first to step out:
The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air. . .and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness.
The harpies, meanwhile–which in addition to Virgil’s and Dante’s harpies are also modeled on the Furies in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy —transform from tormenters into angelic guides. In the final play (The Eumenides) the Furies undergo their own transformation. Originally directed to torment humans for their sins, including Orestes for having killed him mother, they turn into the Eumenides or “gracious ones.” Their new job is to serve as humanity’s protectors.
Similarly, Lyra bestows the name “Gracious Wings” on the harpy leader in Amber Spyglass. From henceforth, the harpies will listen to the stories of the dead and lead them—if they choose to be so led—to mingle with the elements.
But like Dante’s dead, who must choose to open themselves to God’s love, those who have died in Pullman’s afterlife must choose to mingle with God’s creation. If they refuse this vision, the former harpies will not lead them out. Or as the harpy now known as Gracious Wings puts it,
[W]e have a right to refuse to guide them if they lie, or if they hold anything back, or if they have nothing to tell us. If they live in the world, they should see and touch and hear and learn things. We shall make an exception for infants who have not had time to learn anything, but otherwise, if they come down here bringing nothing, we shall not guide them out.
Or put another way, if the dead choose to reside in hell, like the lost souls in Dante’s Inferno they will reside in hell.
One finds versions of Pullman’s afterlife in other moving poems about death, such as Mary Elizabeth’s Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
The vision can also be found in the inscription that Julia and I put on the gravestone of our eldest son Justin, who died in a freak drowning accident 23 years ago. The passage is from Adonais, Percy Shelley’s elegy to John Keats:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
Ever since Justin died, I have envisioned him as part of a celestial dance such as is described in Dante’s Paradiso, a dance that is directed by “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” And if he and my parents and all who I have loved and lost are dancing there, then maybe Julia and I will rejoin them when we die. It is a vision that Will and Lyra articulate when they are forced to separate forever at the end of the trilogy:
I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…
Now that (to borrow a line from Hamlet) is a consummation devoutly to be wished.