Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

With the rise of secularization, New Atheist literature has become increasingly recognizable through the works of Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Philip Pullman, who consistently doubt Christianity from the very core within. Doctrines such as original sin, predestination, and aspects of the soul have been challenged and debated with religious and scientific anxieties in the cultural flux since two world wars and the 9/11 terrorist attack. The word Soul is never scientific; rather, it conveys various interpretations of what we humans really are in different cultures, and hence is known philosophically, theologically, and as a literary construct. By structuring the unique literary setting of the human soul, namely, Philip Pullman’s deamonology in His Dark Materials Trilogy, this paper aims to argue that the owning of deamons, an outside manifestation of souls in animal forms, overtly violates both theological and philosophical understanding of soul or ousia (οὐσία in Greek, meaning essence or substance since Aristotle and Plato). In the fictional dystopia, Pullman has created this type of human soul to exhibit his Christian tyranny, and it became an exclusive symbol for humans to “equip” rather than “to have” a soul, while another imaginary species, armored bears, are desperately longing for a soul. Ample textual evidence, however, reveals that the ontological existence of the human soul is impossible, as materiality was exclusively the qua being of souls. It raises an interesting question of whether Pullman can, if anything, fulfill his anti-Christian agenda with this already problematic setting?