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starladyPullman, Philip. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. New York: Canongate, 2010.
This is an entry in the publisher's "Myths" series, which invites popular authors to present their own takes on famous myths. It should surprise no one, methinks, that noted atheist and anti-Church author Pullman chose the myth of Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ.
So, yeah. I have to admit that when I read The Amber Spyglass at the age of seventeen I felt like Pullman had written all the things about organized religion that I, raised sort of Catholic but not really, felt passionately but had never articulated. I'm even more of an atheist now than I was then, and I'm still quite sympathetic to Pullman's ideas about the Church (hierarchy) and his indictment of its crimes, but on the other hand I do think his conflation of his atheism with his anti-monarchical anti-organized religion sentiments damages his argument in some ways. In others, too, he sets up a straw man; the Church hierarchy, after all, is not the way that most people in the world experience religious faith. Even Catholics tend to have a complicated relationship with their church's organization, and with the Vatican, but Pullman ignores or flattens most of these important differences.
So with all that being said, I enjoyed this rather slight book, but I suspect that it's very much not for everyone. In Pullman's version Mary bore twin sons in the stable in Bethlehem: the older she called Jesus, while the younger was known as Christ. Jesus grows up to become Jesus of Nazareth, the radical religious reformer who can be glimpsed through the Gospels (particularly Q, Mark, and the apocryphal Gospels) if you read them looking for him. Christ grows up to write down his brother's story for a mysterious stranger, who urges him to "let truth irradiate history" and who is a member of those forces of ignorance, oppression and control to which Christ himself urged his brother in the wilderness, using other words, to accommodate his radical vision. In Christ's hands and with his intervention Jesus's story becomes that not of a man with a holy passion but of a man who was born divine, who had a divinely appointed mission to die and to live again and to found a Church on earth, a Church that, the stranger claims, is the closest humanity can ever come to seeing the Kingdom of Heaven. In the meantime, through his preaching, Jesus has realized the great lie, that God exists in the silence or cares about human beings on Earth; his vision finally, the night before his arrest and execution, is not for the Kingdom of Heaven but for heaven on Earth: "we'll tell stories about you in the old days," he says to God in the silence, God who is not there, but in the end we'll move on without you, "and we'll let the silence speak to itself."
"Republic" is a word that no one in the story knows, but of course in the end that's Jesus's vision, a Republic of Heaven which insists not only that humans can be perfect, or at least better, but that they can do so here on Earth. I still believe in Pullman's vision of that Republic; though I won't live to see it, I think that or something very like it has to be our ultimate goal as human beings in this world. Like Lyra tells Pan at the end of TAS, it's hard. But Christ's story shows that not doing the right thing, surrendering to voices of tyranny and authority and fear, even within our selves, rather than opposing them, is easier to do but in the end infinitely harder to bear, no matter what your views (or lack thereof) on religion and on God.
This is an entry in the publisher's "Myths" series, which invites popular authors to present their own takes on famous myths. It should surprise no one, methinks, that noted atheist and anti-Church author Pullman chose the myth of Jesus of Nazareth, called the Christ.
So, yeah. I have to admit that when I read The Amber Spyglass at the age of seventeen I felt like Pullman had written all the things about organized religion that I, raised sort of Catholic but not really, felt passionately but had never articulated. I'm even more of an atheist now than I was then, and I'm still quite sympathetic to Pullman's ideas about the Church (hierarchy) and his indictment of its crimes, but on the other hand I do think his conflation of his atheism with his anti-monarchical anti-organized religion sentiments damages his argument in some ways. In others, too, he sets up a straw man; the Church hierarchy, after all, is not the way that most people in the world experience religious faith. Even Catholics tend to have a complicated relationship with their church's organization, and with the Vatican, but Pullman ignores or flattens most of these important differences.
So with all that being said, I enjoyed this rather slight book, but I suspect that it's very much not for everyone. In Pullman's version Mary bore twin sons in the stable in Bethlehem: the older she called Jesus, while the younger was known as Christ. Jesus grows up to become Jesus of Nazareth, the radical religious reformer who can be glimpsed through the Gospels (particularly Q, Mark, and the apocryphal Gospels) if you read them looking for him. Christ grows up to write down his brother's story for a mysterious stranger, who urges him to "let truth irradiate history" and who is a member of those forces of ignorance, oppression and control to which Christ himself urged his brother in the wilderness, using other words, to accommodate his radical vision. In Christ's hands and with his intervention Jesus's story becomes that not of a man with a holy passion but of a man who was born divine, who had a divinely appointed mission to die and to live again and to found a Church on earth, a Church that, the stranger claims, is the closest humanity can ever come to seeing the Kingdom of Heaven. In the meantime, through his preaching, Jesus has realized the great lie, that God exists in the silence or cares about human beings on Earth; his vision finally, the night before his arrest and execution, is not for the Kingdom of Heaven but for heaven on Earth: "we'll tell stories about you in the old days," he says to God in the silence, God who is not there, but in the end we'll move on without you, "and we'll let the silence speak to itself."
"Republic" is a word that no one in the story knows, but of course in the end that's Jesus's vision, a Republic of Heaven which insists not only that humans can be perfect, or at least better, but that they can do so here on Earth. I still believe in Pullman's vision of that Republic; though I won't live to see it, I think that or something very like it has to be our ultimate goal as human beings in this world. Like Lyra tells Pan at the end of TAS, it's hard. But Christ's story shows that not doing the right thing, surrendering to voices of tyranny and authority and fear, even within our selves, rather than opposing them, is easier to do but in the end infinitely harder to bear, no matter what your views (or lack thereof) on religion and on God.