Childhood’s End and Gnosticism

Let me follow up my previous post by arguing that CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C. Clarke has a Gnostic attitude toward God, and I mean one God in particular. Gnostics are not heretics of Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Shinto or Hinduism, after all, but of Christianity.

That the good guys in CHILDHOODS END look like cartoon Devils has already been mentioned in my previous post. Gnostics love the idea that good guys are bad guys, and bad are good: one Gnostic sect, for example, are Cainites, who think Cain was right to kill Abel. That the good Devils lead mankind out of their false world into the Pleroma, where we are all gods, has already been mentioned, albeit in Clarke’s book, the godhead is called ‘The Galactic Overmind’ — as if that change in terminology would fool anyone. The earth is not remade into a new world, as St. John of Patmos holds, but is destroyed by hidden fire, the arson of an abandoned prison, as Valintinus holds.

Gnostics take as their prime dogma the idea that the world as we know it is a deception, and that God is the Deceiver, that matter is evil, the human body a trap. In a science fiction setting, God cannot come onstage as a supernatural being and shown to be a liar, since science fiction properly so called stays within the bounds of the natural setting. (Any supernatural events, telepathy or reincarnation, are explained away as being psionic or superhightech in an SFF background, phenomena as subject to natural laws as biology or ballistics, not noumenal reality.) In a supernatural setting you can kill God, and throw Him into Tartarus. In a natural setting you can destroy His lies, but there is no Him.

Hence, in a natural setting the religion of the Magisterium can be shown to be false, and their evil attempts to destroy our daemons of free will by incision can be condemned. If an alethiometer is not ready to hand, maybe an alien gizmo provided by space devils will do instead.

Here is the crucial passage:

The smugness and dishonesty of the passage is breathtaking, not to mention the naive optimism (if you are an atheist) or blockheaded arrogance (if you are a theist).

Let us pause for a moment to admire four of the more amusing shortfalls, shall we?

First, there is only one religion under attack here, and it is misleading to pretend any religion but one is in the crosshairs. Like far too many an atheist writings, this passage is not atheist, merely antichristian. There is only one religion that has a messiah who claims divinity. It is twice a thousand years old, which just so happening to be the age mentioned in the passage.

Note that it is the religious writings of “the world” that “any rational mind” can see cannot all simultaneously be true. Obviously the author means the sacred ideas and dogmas, and is using the word ‘writings’ as a synodoche. Why the emphasis on writings, that is to say, on Bible(s)? There is only one God whose word has been written into officially recognized sacred books: and that is the God of Abraham. The Buddhists have no central authority, no Magisterium, to decide which books are in and out of an official canon. I am not saying pagans do not have holy books: I am saying it is a metaphor particular to the religions of Abraham to refer to holy doctrines by referring to holy books, because we emphasize our books as testament. Clarke is not referring to the Kojiki nor to the Shahnameh nor to the Mahabharata.

Second, there is only one (or two, depending on whether you think Christianity is a religion in its own right, or merely a heresy of the Jews) religion whose holy book makes disprovable historical claims about observable events in history.

Turning the Wayback machine onto the image of the Prophet (peace be on him) would show a man seated on a mountain and writing the Koran, and this would prove or disprove nothing, unless you think the divine inspiration he claimed dictated to him was something the Wayback machine could see. Can the instrument pick up thought-waves sent by Archangel Gabriel? Turning the Wayback Machine to the events in the Bhagavad Ghita, we see the supreme hero Arjuna in his chariot, listening to the teachings of his charioteer, Krishna. Turning the Wayback machine to the Awakened One, the Buddha, would show a man seated in a deer park, teaching his disciples. Turning the Wayback Machine to Confucius or Lao Tzu would also show you a man writing a book.

Hmmm. What is the one religion which is centered, not solely on a teaching, but on an event, not on a man writing a book, but on a man hanging on a tree on Golgotha at Passover, emerging from a Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher at the Feast of Firstfruits, ascending from Mount Olivet the Sabbath before the Feast of Weeks, all this not in a mythic otherworld, but at a specific spot you can find on a map, and at a specific date you can find on a calendar? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?

And you do not need the Wayback Machine to look atop Mount Olympus or Mount Meru, and yet, somehow, the absence of visible gods on those peaks has not caused Hindus to dismiss their many-armed pantheons, nor neopagans to cease offering wine to Diana the Moon Goddess.

What about Shinto, the beautiful ceremonial and spiritual practices native to Japan? Is there even a single practitioner of that ancient religion whose faith would be not merely shaken, but annihilated as suddenly as dew in dawnlight, if he could not find (at exactly 620 AD in Nara Province) Amaterasu hiding in a celestial cave while Uzume performed a lewd dance outside?

What about people who believe in astrology? We all know that the planets are not ancient Babylonian gods whose passing overhead presages the destinies of a new born babe, and showers him with unseen, occult influences. Did that belief also evaporate like dew at dawn when the single alien telly in the basement of the Smithsonian shows a picture of the Moon, and proved it was made of rock?

Third, who are the inhabitants of whatever world Mr. Clarke dwells in? Vulcans? Houyhnhnms? No doubt it is one where the more iron-willed skeptics are instantly and suddenly and totally convinced by unbuttressed empirical testimony from a single unverified source, and people who have no capacity for philosophical reasoning, doubts, hesitations, or suspicions.

It is with a sensation of unutterable disbelief that I read a passage saying one or two days of looking at a picture on a screen provided by the “magic” produced by creatures who look like devils (whose mission, remember, is to facilitate the extinction of mankind) would be believed without reservation or complaint by everyone, from Moscow to Bombay to Lhasa to Rome to Mecca. In the world I live in, people are stubborn and cantankerous, some have faith that will not be swayed, and some of us are nuts.

How is this for a thought experiment: you show a group of True Believers the events surrounding the fall of the Twin Towers 9/11 2001 on your alien Wayback Machine. Explain that the gizmo has odd gaps in its record, either due to Overlord censorship or a natural limitation of the unknown science. The True Believers see no evidence of George Bush dynamiting the towers, and the Wayback Machine shows them that steel does indeed melt when doused with aviation fuel and placed in the middle of a firestorm. How many True Believers would you convince?

Or you show a group of True Believers a perfectly human man trampling crops in a large circle using technology no more complex than a rope and a plywood board. How many True Believers stop believing crop circles are messages from UFO people? (Let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that the Devil-shaped Overlords keep a straight face and do not snicker through their nostrils when they testify that none of their beer-soused UFO joyriders did it.) This thought experiment is one which actually has been performed in real life, for a True Believer in Crop Circle did indeed start making Crop Circles of his own in secret, convinced his fellow believers would detect the counterfeit. He became a skeptic when they did not.

You show the True Believers the Venona Cables, proving beyond doubt that Senator McCarthy was right, and that the people he accused of being Soviet spies, were, in fact, spies in the pay of the Soviets. How many True Believers start believing that McCarthy was an honorable man and stop believing that he was a Witchhunter?

You show the True Believers Sandy Berger stuffing documents (proving Vince Foster was “femecuted” by the Clinton Political Machine’s Honey-Ninjas known only as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) from the National Archives down his trousers as he smuggles them out, waddling like a penguin and giggling. How many Democrats instantly and without argument overthrow their entire superstructure of rationalizations and emotional fixations, sober up, and vote for Sarah Palin next election? All of them, without a single exception? Riiiight.

You show a True Believer whose dearly beloved son died as a martyr for his beliefs, who refused to recant when so commanded by Communists or Islamists: and her mother’s tears and neverending heart-wound can only find balm with the thought that her loved child, her perfectly little baby, died for a reason, and now carries the palm leaf in heaven.

Or suppose it is a Mohammedan mother, whose beloved child committed filthy suicide spraying a busload of innocent schoolgirls with a nail bomb, killing others for their beliefs, which she, with blankminded Orwellian disregard for truth and logic, also calls martyrdom. With vile contempt for the teachings of the Koran and natural reason (The Prophet damns suicide in no uncertain terms, and murder), she tells herself her son is in the paradise of Mahound, coupling with seventy-two ever-virgin houri, treating these virgins with a love more earthy and (ahem) priapic than the loved offered by Catholics to the ever-virgin Mary, Queen of Angels and Star of the Sea.

With either of these True Believers simply glance at the Wayback Machine, watching the 90 minute film showing Jesus or Isa at Cana making water into wine by means of stage-magician slight-of-hand (he had a bucket of fine wine tucked in his sleeve), and shrug and say, “Gee, my dumbass kid died for nothing. That’s a bummer. Well, he is carrion meat now! No use crying over spilled milk! Time to move on! Maybe I will take up aerobics to get my mind off it!”—does that sound like any sane person? Does anyone outside of a book written by a partisan act that way?

You show the Pope, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta the “magic” television produced by Aliens who look like cartoon devils, not to mention The Bible Answer Man Hank Hanegraaff. You also show the flick to Sadhu Sundar Singh, who converted from Hinduism after he saw a vision of the risen Christ.

For the purpose of this thought experiment, we are assuming here that the Overlords came when these men were still alive, or we can assume the Ethicals of the Riverworld have resurrected them.

Just for fun, you also show the images of the bones of Jesus to Elmer Gantry from Sinclair Upton, the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky, Tartuffe from Molière, the one-eyed Bible salesman from the movie O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? Do the crooks stop practicing their hypocrisy on the gullible?

And, why not, to Tiny Tim from Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Does the crippled boy give up his hope?

Ah, but then Tiny Tim watches a ninety minute television presentation provided by horned devils whose mission is to destroy mankind and rob humanity of its children.

You also show the film clip to Prince Hamlet, who swears by the Holy Rood that he beheld the unquiet ghost of his father, foully murdered and crying for vengeance, his eyes weeping tears and wounds weeping blood. Do people who say they saw a ghost with their own eyes suddenly stop believing? All of them, as suddenly as dew evaporating?

For the purpose of this thought-experiment, we are assuming we can find real people with the personality characteristics described by these fictional people. You show the Wayback Machine to Christians both honest and dishonest, to saints and Pharisees, to high and low, snake-handlers and theologians, literate and illiterate, Cardinals in Rome and persecuted peasants in Korea, lukewarm churchgoers, missionaries of lifelong dedication, doubting Thomases, and red-hot revivalists who claim they see the Holy Spirit every day.

Now, ignore whether you are a theist or atheist. Let us not argue about whether the subject matter of religion is innately believable or not. Pay attention to your view of human beings. How do they act?

How many of these people, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Nehemiah Scudder, do you think would be convinced in a matter of one or two days to hang up their miters, give up their ministries, foreswear their hope of an afterworld, ignore their inner spiritual life, forget the miracles they have seen and prayers they have had answered, and go out and get an honest job, or become Environmentalists or GLBT Activists or hard-drinking socialist commentators for Vanity Fair, instead—merely on the strength of one machine showing one image one afternoon of the bones of Jesus being dragged away by dogs or medical students one Saturday midnight in Palestine in AD 33 ½ ?

To man they would change their minds like dewdrops vanishing at dawn. Are you kidding me? I know of people who think the moon landings were faked.

(Heck, I know of people who think the atomic destruction of New York was not caused by an outraged Doctor Manhattan or a teleporting giant space-squid, but by some sinister scheme concocted by Ozymandias! We all know and love Ozymandias! I’ve studied body-building using the Veidt Method! I don’t care what the alien vision machine shows!)

Clarke’s conceit that religion would simply vanish is a ridiculous idea, handled with ham-handed clumsiness that breaks suspension of disbelief. I am reminded of similar scenes in books by Olaf Stapledon, where he casually asserts that, in the future, everyone will fall out of bed one day, be jarred awake, and become Socialist Fabians without any more debate, quarrel, suspicions, war or rude questions. Their truth is so obvious to True Believers. Their truth says that if only you had a Subtle Knife you could kill Almighty God by scratching open his oxygen tent, and watching the healthy spring wind simply blow Him into powder.

No, this scene is just a masturbatory fantasy by an atheist, wishing he had the power to eliminate God, and chuckling to himself about how easy it would be. Back when I was an atheist, I was not so naïve. Religion answers basic and deeply-rooted human emotional and psychological and intellectual needs. At that time, I thought the answer was false, but I did not think it was trivial, a matter of mere lightly-held opinion. I thought it was a lie, but I thought it was a cunning lie, a beartrap impossible to disarm, and only to be approached with courage and caution. I thought religion would always be among us, and never pass away, any more than racism or warfare would ever pass away. I now believe religion will always be among us and never pass away, any more than true love or times of peace will ever pass away.

Forth and finally, the condescension is odious and contemptible.

Every rational man knows and has always known that not all religious writings can be true, does he? Well, what do you make of those who hold that one of them is a true report of a messiah who claimed to be God, and the others are inventions of men, who claimed only that they were inspired or wise or insightful? What do you make of the Deist or Universalist who holds the one is true, but all contain some reflection or adumbration of the Light? What do you make of Henotheism and Polytheism, whose followers hold only that their gods are true, not that their neighbor’s gods are false? Indeed, what do you make of those mystics who say that all sacred writings of any source are all metaphorical and poetical, not meant to be taken literally, but an attempt to find human words for something no human words can embrace?

Any man who so says any of these self-consistant things is not just wrong but irrational? What, merely because you disagree with him?

So the men on the world ruled by Overlords have no need of Gods because they are too old? But what is the evidence that religion is not a development of intellectual effort away from a more primitive state, rather than the opposite? The Christians claim to be a development and fulfillment of Judaism, and the Mohammedans claim a similar thing. Buddhism is built upon and developed from Hinduism in the same way Aristotelianism is developed from Platonism, or Taoism developed as a reaction to Confucianism. In real life, every regime that has attempted to eliminate religion for something more modern (The Revolutionaries of France, the bloody gangsters of Russia, China, and Indochina) always ushered in a rapid decivilization, a new barbarism. It is almost as if—heretical thought alert—atheism is a regression to a more primitive state, not an improvement. Hmmm.

I would have had more respect for the story if the Overlords had turned on the Wayback machine, and discovered that the events described in the folk tales of the Ainu of Japan, or, better yet, the Aztecs were literally true, and every other religion merely self-deception. The Overlords then reveal that they are Hierodules of the Aztec Gods Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuntl, who have announced the End of the Fifth Age and the opening of Mictlan, the Land of the Dead, and commanded all mankind to rebuild the great pyramids and march the countless thousands of slaves captured in flower wars into the steaming obsidian knifes! The great Galactic Overmind, instead of being a cheap knock-off of Christian notions of the Communion of Saints, would be the dread and dreaded OMETEOTL "God of the Near and Close," "He Who Is at the Center," the hermaphroditic demon-god of Omeyocan, the highest of the Aztecs’ thirteen heavens! That would have been worthy of H.P. Lovecraft. That would have taken some balls for a writer to pull that off!

Instead we get the same old boring Gnostic crap. It is always the Judo-Christian tradition they plagiarize for ideas. No one bothers to blaspheme the Aztec Gods.

I mean, if you are going to pretend the UFO people are going to land and conquer us, why assume that our racial childhood ends with us being made the Princes of the Kingdom, as Christianity has it, rather than assume that, our racial childhood ends with us as the fattened-up turkey invited to dinner on whatever Thanksgiving Day the Martians or Morlocks celebrate? (So the Overlords came To Serve Man? You fools! It’s a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!!)

Let us be fair and look on the other hand. I admit that having the Space Aztecs land is a lot more like an H.P. Lovecraft story than an Arthur C. Clarke story; it is not the tale Clarke wants to tell, and maybe it’s a dumb idea. Fine. The story ‘To Serve Man’ has been done. Fine.

More importantly, if Clarke had written any other book aside from CHILDHOOD’S END it would not have been an answer to the question posed by the Space Trilogy of C.S. Lewis.

Let me emphasize that there is a dialog going on among the great books of speculative fiction. H.G. Wells posed the speculative question in WAR OF THE WORLDS, “What if Darwin is right, and evolution brought forth on an older planet a race as superior to us as we are to Tasmanians? What if that race treated England as the English have treated the Tasmanians, with genocide? Is there anything in Darwinianism to save us? Are we not fit for this planet—have not our ancestors died for it?”

C.S. Lewis answers this in OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET with a question of his own from a Christian rather than a Darwinian coign of vantage. “What if the Creator brought forth other races, including a race that is not fallen? Would we even recognize what prelapsarian life was like? What if the things mythical on our world are reality on other worlds? What if we tried to treat those superior beings as ruthlessly as the English have treated the Tasmanians? Is there anything the angels would do to save them from us, and more importantly save us from us? What if the magnitude of space is a good and proper quarantine for a race as quarrelsome and wicked as Homo Sapiens? What if it is good for us not to venture into space?”

Arthur C. Clarke answers C.S. Lewis with speculation of his own. “What if science can take the place of religion? What if evolution, the striving ever upward, can replace these primitive superstitions, and offer a transcendence that is real? What if it is not only good, but necessary, for us to venture into space? What if that venture is the source of our salvation, the very thing that will overcome our quarrelsomeness and wickedness? Why must C.S. Lewis and H.G. Wells assume the meeting between man and alien will be warlike? Why assume the creatures of space are devils? Well, even if they look like devils, what if the meeting were …. Wondrous!”

By itself, the condescension betrayed by the paragraph with the Wayback Machine looks like atheism, but combined with the other spiritual and magical ideas in the book such as poltergeists, telepathy, precognition, and such as the transcendence of mankind into the galactic Overmind, aka the Pleroma, CHILDHOOD’ S END takes on a Gnostic mood and theme.

I say CHILDHOOD’ S END is ‘Gnostic’ a heresy of the Christians, because I do not see the attitude or mind-set of any other religion represented. Why is that? I speculate there are two reasons:

First, Arthur C. Clarke, whether he likes it or not, whether he admits it or not, is culturally from a Christian background, and, whether he questions them or not, shares the assumptions and axioms of that background.

His readers, by and large, likewise. They might not enjoy the story or understand it if it mental background were too different from our shared cultural assumptions. (Albeit, later on in the history of science fiction, we do see authors trying to incorporate the cultural assumptions of Oriental religions into their fiction, at times with great success. No; I do not mean Zelazny’s LORD OF LIGHT, which has more to do with the American Revolution than it has to do with the clash of Buddhism and Hinduism in the wars of King Ashoka. I mean WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, which are Taoist in mood and theme, and NEVERNESS by David Zindell, which incorporates elements of Tibetanism.)

Second, Arthur C. Clarke’s answer to C.S. Lewis would not have been an answer unless it shared the framework of the question. I do not mean the Christian framework, I mean the general topic of human destiny, the role of evolution and transcendence.

Clarke could not help but give a Gnostic answer to the Christian challenge because, within the framework of Western assumptions about man and life and afterlife, there is no other answer. There is nothing new under the sun (so says Solomon in Ecclesiastes). Logic allows only for minor variations on certain themes and ideas in human thinking. So if you ask a question about man’s relation with God and the ultimate destiny of the race, there are really only three answers Western philosophy will give: (1) There is no God, and the ultimate destiny of the race is extinction (the answer of H.G. Wells—and of every pessimist who ever trod the planet) (2) There is a God, and the ultimate destiny of the race is salvation or damnation as the grace of God shall provide (the answer of C.S. Lewis—and of every Christian who ever ate bread) (3) Man shall be God, and the ultimate destiny of the race is transcendence or extinction, salvation or damnation, as the power of Man shall provide (the answer of Arthur C. Clarke—and of every Gnostic since the Second Century).

By sticking with the Christian assumptions about ultimate destiny, but rejecting the Christian answer, Arthur C. Clarke has no choice but to pen a naturalistic and science-fictional version of an old Gnostic myth. In the Western mind, if heaven is not in heaven, then heaven is on Earth. In the Western mind, if you cannot find the long lost Golden Age of Eden by crossing the Jordon of baptism, then you must find it by building the Tower of Babel. The Assumption of the Slans at the finale of CHILDHOOD’S END would not make the reader’s breath catch with wonder if Communion with the Overmind were not an image of Eden, a cure for the pain of the world as promised by the Holy Grail.

These are Western assumptions. I submit that an answer from a student of Confucius or Lao Tzu would be different. Confucius would be more concerned with good government and right action than with questions of ultimate destiny, and a Taoist might remark that the Way of Heaven is not to broken, not even that breaking we do when we analyze something, and is not a road that leads to a destination. Certainly a Buddhist, who believes the world is an eternal torture-wheel of pain, would not share the assumption that life is a story with a beginning, middle and an end, and so he would merely smile at the question of what Fate or Dharma has in store at the end of the world. Likewise, for the Hindu, after the age of Kali Yuga, destruction, the age of Brahma, renewal. The finale of a Oriental version of CHILDHOOD’S END would have had the Overlords reducing mankind back into primitive Cro-Magnon ape-men, and brought in the Monolith from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY to reset the process.

It is not merely Oriental assumptions about eschatology that are not addressed in this book, but also Occidental pagan ones. The mood and theme, had CHILDHOOD’S END been written to the taste of a Norse pagan, would differ.

In the shocking ending of the wondrous book THE WORM OROBOROS, E.R. Eddison, who perfectly captures the Norse spirit, has the gods reward the heroic virtues of his grand and warlike heroes, not with a paradise of endless life and endless peace, but with a Valhalla of endless life and endless war. If Arthur C. Clarke had been writing for a Viking audience, the finale of his book would have been that the Children of Men, the Supermen, would be drawn up into heaven as Einhenjar, and the Overmind would have been the One-Eyed One, the Hanged God, the Lord of Ravens. Accompanied by the horrifying and beautiful singing of the Valkyries, the spirit beings of the supermen, having put away all of the fears and scruples of the under-men, the Nithlings, would have stormed away across the heaven, while trumpets roared, streaming like warrior angels toward the doomed home stars of the Kzinti and the Klingon and the brutal Eddorian, conquering and to conquer, setting whole galaxies afire, to fight the wars of the star-gods forever!

Now, THAT would have been a way cool ending. But it would not have answered C. S. Lewis, it would not have been within our shared cultural framework of thinking.

Clarke is clearly not a Gnostic. For one thing, he scorns religion, orthodox and heretical alike. But his famous book CHILDHOOD’S END clearly is Gnostic, for the same reason Robert Heinlein’s famous book STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is clearly Gnostic. Both heed and repeat the lie of Satan, that old serpent, that red dragon who deceiveth the whole world: and his lie is that by eating of the forbidden fruit we shall become as Gods, or, as Michael Valentine (or Valenitus?) Smith might say, Thou Art God.

Western humanist transcendentalism always reflects a Gnostic theme, because there is no other rebuttal to Christian thought available to any man who accepts non-Oriental and non-pagan assumptions about destiny, eschatology and transcendence; there is no other, aside from Gnosticism. Either you glorify Man with the Gnostic and call God a liar, or you glorify God with the Christian and call Man to repent.

About John C Wright

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

April 22, 2009 @ 1:52 pm

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