Severed Children
Some years ago (at least ten) I read the The Golden Compass, the first volume of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I had seen a review praising it in terms that made it sound promising, and thought it might be something to recommend to my children. (I think we were no longer reading books aloud at that point.) It soon became clear that it was a work of anti-Christian and particularly anti-Catholic propaganda, so between that and the fact that I didn’t find it a really compelling story I never read any more of the trilogy. I’m told by several people who have, not all of them Christians, that it eventually collapses under the burden of preaching its atheistic doctrine, which I can well believe.
But there were some things I liked about it. I liked the young heroine, Lyra. And I liked the intelligent polar bears; the bears were my favorite part of the book, actually. And I liked the daemons.
I’m a little hazy now as to exactly what the daemons are, but I think the general idea is this: they have the form of animals, and every person has one. They aren’t pets, though, but rather a sort of external manifestation of the person’s soul, of his or her deepest self, and accordingly are literally part of the person in some spiritual way. They are of different species depending on what sort of animal best expresses the essential nature of the person. If I remember correctly, they function both as companion and counselor.
The villains in the story are all affiliated with a sinister totalitarian institution which is Pullman’s paranoid fantasy version of Christianity and the agent of most of the evil in the world. Although I don’t remember enough of the plot at this point to remember why, I do recall that one of the most wicked things this “Church” does is to separate children from their daemons, which more or less destroys the children psychologically.
This is a very vivid, very effective part of the narrative. And what sticks most in my mind about it is the phrase used to describe the result of the separation: “a severed child.”
The phrase came to mind recently when I read the following passage from then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity:
[credo (I believe)] signifies the deliberate view that what cannot be seen, what can in no wise move into the field of vision, is not unreal; that, on the contrary, what cannot be seen in fact represents true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality. And it signifies the view that this element that makes reality as a whole possible is also what grants man a truly human existence, what makes him possible as a human being existing in a human way. In other words, belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point that cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, that encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.
It is a necessity. One of the things I love about Ratzinger/Benedict’s writing is the way he uses complex, precise, and subtle analysis and expression to arrive at very simple, very important truths. It is a necessity for the human person to accept the reality of, and to encounter, the world of the spirit, if he wishes to be fully and truly human. To deny it is to cut oneself off from the core of one’s humanity.
In a sense we are all severed children, cut off from God. The Incarnation has made it possible for us to begin to re-establish the connection. The choice is there, for everyone and for all time. The mere knowledge that this is possible, and the faith to embark on the process, is enough to undo many of the effects of the severing; it accounts for the serenity which is one of the things we always sense in someone who seems to be far advanced along the path.
The truly severed, those who most resemble Pullman’s severed children—lost, empty, half-dead creatures—are those who deny the very possibility of what they need to be whole. Or, in other words, those who believe what Pullman preaches. Because it is a necessity for us to accept the reality of the spirit in order to be whole human beings, Pullman and his fellow atheists are like miners trapped in a cave-in, breathing stale air which will soon be exhausted of oxygen, and in delirium denying that there is or could be such a thing as fresh and wholesome air.
***
William Blake famously said that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”
Blake was wrong. If Milton’s writing is stronger when he deals with Satan it’s because, as Simone Weil said, it is inherently more difficult to depict good effectively in art than to depict evil. Phillip Pullman is terribly wrong about many things, including the nature and origin of good and evil. Some of the things he calls good are evil, but some are indeed good, and he is very mistaken in thinking that Christianity is hostile to them. At times he represents the reverse of Blake’s view of Milton: his intellectual sympathy may lie with Satan, but when he favors what is genuinely good he is a true Poet, and of God’s party without knowing it.
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