The lady doth protest too much. And so poorly.

Donna Freitas, feminist "Catholic" theologian and avid Philip Pullman fan, is at it again. By "it" I mean her attempts at lame sarcasm, indulging in self pity, and repeatedly labeling as "angry" those Catholics who disagree with her reading and assessment of Pullman, as well as her theological beliefs. Her December 7th piece for Salon.com is titled, "The Accidental Heretic," which may, in fact, be an appropriate description. It begins:

Dec.  7, 2007 |    Warning: the movie you are about to watch may challenge any faith you have in God. Do not, under any circumstances, allow your kids anywhere near "The Golden Compass," or its trailers. Be sure to quarantine them from Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the fantasy novels on which this movie is based. After all, your job is to protect your children, and your friends' children, from anything that might taint their notions of a Gandalf-like, gray-bearded old man of a God sitting on a throne in the sky, occasionally throwing down lightning bolts or raining shafts of light through the clouds.

And while you're at it, perhaps you should stop reading this piece too.

Yawn, yawn, yawn. Really now, this type of language ("Gandalf-like", etc.) is becoming so tiring. At some point, the straw man belief that traditional Catholics all believe in some detached, magical, white/grey-haired "Gandalf-like old man of a God" must go away, if only so the real God and the real beliefs of said Catholics can be discussed. But it doesn't appear as though it's going to happen anytime soon, not when it's far easier to argue like a bench player on a third-rate high school debating teams. (Sure, that sounds harsh, but believe me when I say I have nothing against poor high school debating teams.) For example, Freitas takes the ol' "I'm going to label my foes as 'hysterical' and 'angry" while trying, without success, to reveal my own hysteria and anger" technique:

Talk about Philip Pullman has reached a fever pitch over the last few weeks in anticipation of the release of "The Golden Compass." Many Catholics and evangelicals across the country are frantic that the movie might inspire parents to march off and buy Pullman's novels for delivery and unwrapping on, of all days, the day of Jesus' birth. Some people are acting as if Pullman's award-winning books are anti-Christian stealth missiles aimed at children's souls and set to explode on impact.

But what started as a few angry press releases and a flurry of mass e-mails warning people to beware of, boycott and ban all things Philip Pullman has turned into a frightening reality in which Catholic principals, librarians and teachers all across the United States and Canada are being told by their diocese to remove "His Dark Materials" from their shelves and classroom curricula.

But who is really endangered by all this Pullman hysteria?

My first guess: adjectives! Adjectives such as "angry" and "frantic" and "frightening". And just in case those get tiring, try these angry adjectives (thank you, Thesaurus.com!):

affronted, annoyed, antagonized, bitter, chafed, choleric, convulsed, cross, displeased, enraged, exacerbated, exasperated, ferocious, fierce, fiery, fuming, furious, galled, hateful, heated, hot, huffy, ill-tempered, impassioned, incensed, indignant, inflamed, infuriated, irascible, irate, ireful, irritable, irritated, maddened, nettled, offended, outraged, passionate, piqued, provoked, raging, resentful, riled, sore, splenetic, storming, sulky, sullen, tumultuous, turbulent, uptight, vexed, wrathful

Next up: an attempt to create a false dilemma. Or is it to bake a red herring? Or maybe make a combo meal with red herring and poisoned well water?

I worry that the species actually at risk of losing their faith as a result of all the mud being slung about Pullman's exquisite rereading of the biblical book of Genesis are those Catholics who have read the trilogy and adored it, or (God forbid) had already given it to their kids. I worry that these lovers of great literature now feel like they sit on a dirty little secret that, if revealed, might make them persona non grata in the Catholic world they call home. But, since when are believers supposed to choose between their faith and their imagination? Between the joy of reading and the joy of sects?

Believers, of course, are not supposed to "choose between their faith and their imagination," but are to have their faith—including the objective, doctrinal truths of the Catholic Faith—inform their imagination and help guide them in making decisions about what is spiritually healthy, as well as intellectually nutritional and emotionally sound. Frankly, I have far more sympathy for Frietas's attempt to defend Pullman if she would actually defend basic, orthodox Catholic teachings about God. (After all, at least one intelligent, orthodox Catholic has argued, in the pages of First Things magazine, that Pullman's trilogy is "almost Christian".) But, alas, she has shown her true colors again and again, and her charade of being "Catholic" while either misrepresenting Catholic doctrine or simply acting as though it is a thing of the narrow-minded past is both thin and tired.

I recently published (with Jason King) a book called "Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman's Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials." I wrote this book, which portrays Pullman as a theologian rather than an atheist, and a rather Christian theologian at that, because I love "His Dark Materials." And because I am a Catholic. I don't see any contradiction between the two.

I can't help wondering, though: Somewhere in my love and interpretation of this trilogy, did I accidentally become a heretic?

A few weeks ago I was only half-kidding when I told friends I was worried that my own open approval of this story -- one in which I see an exquisite and Christian vision of the soul, virtue, salvation and (shudder) the feminine divine, aka Wisdom-Sophia, or the Holy Spirit (yeah, Her) -- might lead angry mobs to my doorstep. But now the idea seems less funny and more, well, possible.

As I've noted before (and the above quote indicates), Freitas talks about God using language that is both feminist (of the more radical persuasion) and unorthodox: "woman’s body-as-God", "new possible 'divinities'", "God/dess", "God-as-she", "Divine-She", and "the feminine divine." Again, the problem isn't that Freitas approaches this as a Catholic who loves the Pullman trilogy; rather, the problem is that the Pullman trilogy informs her theology—far more than traditional and formal Catholic doctrine does. Or, as seems to be the case, her "Catholic" beliefs were already so unorthodox they (surprise!) naturally meshed very well with Pullman's equally unorthodox beliefs. After all, as she wrote in The Boston Globe recently, "Pullman's work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox." In the same piece she expressed admiration for liberation theology and radical feminist theology, along with disdain for "the power structure of the church" (uh, the Magisterium, perhaps?). And yet Freitas's "accidental heresy" of disdaining official Church teaching is—oddly and unfortunately enough—beside the point because she thinks the real issue is that she likes His Dark Materials, as though this is somehow all about censorship and not about a Catholic theologian correctly teaching Catholic theology:

Can those of us who are fans of Pullman still call ourselves Catholic, or will we have church doors slammed in our faces, our voices silenced at Catholic events? Is there something deeply wrong with our souls, which have found wonder and joy, and perhaps even God, in a series of books that are now being removed from library shelves at Catholic schools across the country? Are we lovers of the imagination a poison coursing through the veins of the Roman Catholic Church, or is the Church large enough to open itself up -- or at least to tolerate -- those of us who cannot in good conscience toe a party line intent on denouncing a movie the boycotters have not yet seen and books most of the banners have likely not yet read?

For the record, Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel, co-authors of Pied Piper of Atheism, have both read His Dark Materials and already published reviews or articles about it. Sandra, who has had a long and distinguished career in the realm of fantasy and science fiction, has probably edited, reviewed, and researched more "heretical" books than Freitas has even heard about. And perhaps I should mention (to give just two of many possible examples) that as a twelve-year-old I was enthralled by Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series and that one of my favorite novels, to this day, is The Stranger, by Albert Camus, neither of which is Catholic by any stretch of the imagination—quite the contrary. In other words, this is not a witch hunt. It is a truth hunt.

Finally, Freitas writes:

By the time I embarked on reading "The Amber Spyglass" (and rereading the preceding volumes), I was steeped in the work of feminist and liberation theologians, in particular their new visions of God and their creative reimaginings of God's relationship to us. I'd pored over the writings of medieval women mystics who spoke in new (to me) and thrilling ways of the soul, the divine and the intimacy possible between humans and God. I'd been enthralled by the sixth-century thinker Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite, whose via negativa speaks of a "negative path" to God that involves a process of conjuring up and then leaving behind every scrap of God, because these words and these images do nothing other than stand between us and God, barring the door that might otherwise give us access to the divine.

This, I suppose, explains to some degree why Freitas thinks that the pop star named "Madonna" actually "images" the "feminine divine" when she carries out a mock crucifixion at concerts. In his excellent essay, "Why God Is Father and Not Mother," Mark Brumley addresses the sort of feminist mysticism embraced by Freitas:

Undergirding Jesus’ teaching about God as Father is the idea that God has revealed Himself as to be such and that His revelation should be normative for us. God, in other words, calls the theological shots. If He wants to be understood primarily in masculine terms, then that is how we should speak of Him. To do otherwise, is tantamount to idolatry–fashioning God in our image, rather than receiving from Him His self-disclosure as the Father.

Many Feminist theologians seek to fashion God in their image, because they think God is fashionable (in both senses of the word). Many feminists hold that God is in Himself (they would say "Herself" or "Godself") utterly unintelligible. We can, therefore, speak only of God in metaphors, understood as convenient, imaginative ways to describe our experience of God, rather than God Himself. In such a view, there is no room for revelation, understood as God telling us about Himself; we have only our own colorful, creative yet merely human descriptions of what we purport to be our experiences of the divine. ...

Cardinal Ratzinger made a similar point in The Ratzinger Report: "Christianity is not a philosophical speculation; it is not a construction of our mind. Christianity is not ‘our’ work; it is a Revelation; it is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose. Consequently, we are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother: the symbolism employed by Jesus is irreversible; it is based on the same Man-God relationship he came to reveal to us."

Now people are certainly free to reject Christianity. But they should be honest enough to admit that this is what they are doing, instead of surreptitiously replacing Christianity with the milk of the Goddess, in the name of putting new wine into old wineskins.

(Read the entire article.) In that final paragraph Mark hits upon the issue that is so vexing to me in all of the various controversies regarding Pullman, his books, and "The Golden Compass" movie: the lack of honesty. If Freitas wishes to indulge in worshiping goddesses or "The Goddess", or embracing a form of theology formally denounced by the Magisterium, or singing the praises of Pope Philip Pullman, that is her right. But, please, have the integrity to acknowledge that what you believe and teach is contrary to Catholic doctrine and that you publicly reject certain key tenets of Catholicism. And, that being the case, recognize that, yes, you do indeed appear to be embracing heresy—accidental or not: "Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same..." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 2089; see Code of Canon Law, par 750-751).

And, again, enough about "Gandalf-like old man of a God." Yawn.

Recent and related posts:

• "L.A. Times: Christians, not filmmakers, ruined 'The Golden Compass'" | Dec. 9, 2007
• "Pullman fans talk trash and pull back the curtain" | Dec. 7, 2007
• "Excerpts from Pied Piper of Atheism..." | Dec. 6, 2007
• "Philip Pullman's neo-Gnostic faith" | Dec. 6, 2007

Comments

[Ed Peters]

Yes, more screaming in impotent fury, basically.

[Mike Rapkoch]

Well, this is an age where screaming is easier than reason, the outageous sells--books, television, magazines (stood in a grocery checkout line lately) "Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance"...its easier to stamp your feet, ridicule without bothering to offer reasoned argument for your position, and adopt your own set of beliefs or pseudo-beliefs than to actually go through the pain of finding or having revealed that which is true.

[Cristina A. Montes]

"But what started as a few angry press releases and a flurry of mass e-mails warning people to beware of, boycott and ban all things Philip Pullman has turned into a frightening reality in which Catholic principals, librarians and teachers all across the United States and Canada are being told by their diocese to remove "His Dark Materials" from their shelves and classroom curricula."

=> This raises the question of why should HDM be included in school libraries and in school curricula. Freitas' complaint about HDM being pulled out from school libraries and school curricula implies that she thinks we SHOULD read it, as if no person's education is complete without a reading of Pullman. The Pullman fans insist that we shouldn't tell people they shouldn't read it. But have they articulated on any they think we SHOULD read it?

[Carl Sommer]

Fantastic work, Carl! In my experience, what Pullman and the feminist theologians have in common is a kind of neo-gnosticism, where the masculine creator God represents gross matter, and the feminine principal represents spirituality and enlightenment. The most important religious story (except for the resurgence of militant Islam) of the twentieth century is the rebirth of gnosticism both within and without the Church. Someone should write a book about it!

[Mark Brumley]

This just confirms what traditional Christians have been saying for years--that radical feminist theology is another religion and that it is a religion that, objectively speaking, moves people closer to unbelief and atheism.

[Mary]

I don't know about y'all, but it seems to me that if someone names their own books "Dark Material" it is not appropriate for children. And the sanity of the author should be questioned.

[Rose Jones]

Honey, don't worry about us saying you are not Catholic. You are a mess!

[Rose Jones]

Honey, don't worry about us saying you are not Catholic. You are a mess!