Imagine There's No Heaven

Philip Pullman says the spiritual impulse – the feeling of awe, of wonder and delight – is part of what makes us human. Yet he has found himself under scathing attack from some religious writers.

One major area of disagreement between Pullman and those writers might be expected to lie in the portrayal of the divine. Pullman describes himself as finding belief in ‘a personal God and a Saviour… impossible,’ but the image of God that he seeks to destroy is one that is equally uncongenial to many Christians.

Portrayal of The Authority’s decay into nothingness is the way in which Pullman deals with the decline of belief in an omnipotent and omniscient deity: ‘Demented and powerless, the aged being could only weep and mumble… he was as light as paper… in the open air there was nothing to stop the wind from damaging him, and to their dismay his form began to loosen and dissolve…’ (The Amber Spyglass, pp 431-2). The idea of God that Pullman is seeking to destroy here is that of a distant, arrogant, rigorous and often negative force – arguably a different figure from the loving God to be found in the teachings of Christ.

In contrast to traditional Christian theology, Pullman presents the story of the Fall not as a disaster but as a coming of age for the human race, with his protagonist Lyra becoming the new Eve. In few churches today, however, except those of the neo-conservative evangelical persuasion, is there much emphasis on original sin and the disastrous results of the Fall, and some theologians have even seen this myth in positive terms similar to Pullman’s, holding that the development in self-knowledge which the myth figuratively describes is a necessary stage in human evolution.

Fundamental to Pullman’s position is the conviction that there is no eternity in heaven to be looked towards as a reward for denying oneself in this world. Instead of the traditional view of heaven, Pullman’s mythology involves the imprisonment of the dead in an underworld, to be released by Lyra and Will, not so that they can go to heaven but rather to allow them to be dissolved into the elements of their being and be united with nature.

While it would be wrong to suggest that this kind of vision of eternity resembles life with God in heaven, its emphasis on faithful love enduring forever is in no way alien to a religious vision of life.