Science Fiction Theology

Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime

Alan P. R. Gregory

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781481304382
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Science fiction imagines a universe teeming with life and thrilling possibility, but also hidden and hideous dangers. Christian theology, often a polemical target for science fiction, reflects on the plenitude out of which and for which the universe exists. In Science Fiction Theology, Alan Gregory investigates the troubled relationship between science fiction and Christianity and, in particular, how both have laid claim to the modern idea of sublimity.

To the extent that science fiction has appropriated—and reveled—in the sublime, it has persisted in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, relationship with Christian theology. From its seventeenth-century beginnings, the sublime, with its representations of immensity, has informed the imagining of God. When science fiction critiques or reinvents religion, its writers have engaged in a literary guerrilla war with Christianity over what is truly sublime and divine.

Gregory examines the sublime and its implicit theologies as they appear in early American pulp science fiction, the horror writing of H. P. Lovecraft, science fiction narratives of evolution and apocalypse, and the work of Philip K. Dick. Ironically, science fiction's tussle with Christianity hides the extent to which the sublime, especially in popular culture, serves to distort the classical Christian understanding of God, secularizing that God and rendering God's transcendence finite. But by turning from the sublime to a consideration of the beautiful, Gregory shows that both Christian and science-fictional imaginations may discover a new and surprising conversation.

1

SUBLIME FICTION?

Logan: Time to make nice with the public, eh, Summers?

Summers: We have to do more than that, Logan.

We have to astonish them.

—Whedon and Cassaday, Astonishing X-Men, 13

Nothing but what astonishes is true.

—Edward Young, Young’s Night Thoughts, 246

GETTING CAUGHT UP

Visitors to England’s Salisbury Cathedral may climb the series of narrow spiral staircases within the tiers of the tower to a point, some 225 feet above the ground, from which they can peer vertiginously up into the spire and over the Wiltshire countryside. A student from Salisbury and Wells seminary organized an outing, going, as he put it with some exaggeration, “where no one has gone before.” He did not say “boldly,” in the vein of Captain Kirk, but, quite appropriately, he might have done so. Explaining the glories to come, he was irrepressible. “It’s, well,” he said, “absolutely crushing, marvelous-great-fantastic, you look up and you think you’re going to vomit it’s so amazing. Amazing, you come out and look down and it takes you somewhere else. Really scary, it’s terrific! It’s an experience. It’s a real experience.” That his listeners readily understood and identified with these effusions is rather remarkable. They readily accepted that nausea, vertigo, and the chance, albeit slight, of a terminal plummet to a stone floor were a natural accompaniment to being thrilled; that great drops, heights, and vistas were properly described as “amazing,” “fantastic,” “astonishing,” and not just marvelous but “absolutely” marvelous; and that being scared might be splendid, exalting, fun, and, indeed, “terrific”! Perhaps, most curious of all, his audience had no trouble acknowledging that he had had, and they might have, not just an experience with all this, but a peak experience, an experience worthy of the name, one exalted above the normalities of the regular day.

Given this ready understanding of such enthusiastic reactions, no one is surprised to learn that Immanuel Kant found awe in “the starry sky above me,” nor that Norman Mailer, watching the fiery and thunderous launch of Apollo XI, should shout, “My God, Oh my God!” over and over again.¹ No vacation brochure for the Rockies or Alps lacks its appeal to “amazing” scenery, in which tourists shall “marvel” or even recognize the “true magnificence of God’s creation.”² These examples suggest a cluster of varied but familiar experiences described in a distinctive array of terms identifying them as diverse in their particularity but similar in their significance. Since the late seventeenth century, these experiences—known through certain elements of the natural environment or by way of literature, painting, architecture, photography, film, music, and technology—have been named “sublime.”³ “Sublime” refers to a certain range of imaginative and affective responses to vastness and extreme power, to the fearful and threatening, the grand and imposing, the vertiginous and appalling, to that which strains imagination and stumps reason.

Richard Rigg’s artwork, A Clearing, exhibited in 2012, consists of a mountain hut that contains its mountain or, more accurately, part of its mountain.⁴ The visitor opens the door onto a slope of earth, stones, rocks, and plants that rises up to well over half the height of the opposite wall. In about five moderately strenuous steps, the visitor can touch the roof from the top of the slope. The clearing within which the hut sits is the severe white glare of the gallery itself. Does this make something clear, or is something cleared away as, perhaps, the viewer is disabused? Huts—along with carriages, horses, travellers, broken towers, ruins, monuments, cottages, and cattle—provide the props for many sublime landscape paintings.⁵ In a hut, among the “abrupt sides of vast mountains” providing “sublime and magnificent scenes,” the monster tells his tale to Frankenstein. Hut, cow, or ruin—the mountain encloses and dwarfs these tokens of humanity. A Clearing, though, has the hut frame the mountain. The sublime is thus denaturalized, unmasked as a human construct. Within the hut, the mountain is “unremarkable and has no discerning features.”⁶ It is dwarfed beside human imaginative capacity. In itself, the mountain is undistinguished; its sublime distinction comes from the viewer.⁷ The sublime is a cultural construct, a formation in and of the cultural imaginary. As such, it has a history.

Put a sixteenth-century Elizabethan gentleman and a nineteenth-century Romantic in the middle of England’s Lake District, among the mountains, cliffs, and rills, and the latter will resonate and enthuse, while the other recoils, turns up the nose, and mutters over the fallen world. To give a specific instance, Joshua Poole’s handbook for poets, published in 1657, lists a surprising collection of adjectives suitable for describing mountains: “insolent, surly, ambitious, barren, sky-threatening, supercilious, desert, uncouth, inhospitable, freezing, infruitful, crump-shouldered, unfrequented, forsaken, melancholy, pathless.” None of these is likely to peak an expectation of wonder and awe. Nor are “Earth’s Dugs, Risings, Tumors, Blisters,” or “Earth’s Warts.”⁸ Mountains memorialize the fall. By 1739, though, the poet Thomas Gray was drawing a quite different theological lesson. He could not go “ten paces without exclaiming,” finding it all so “solemn,” “romantic,” and, of course, “astonishing.” Gray needed but to look on a cliff, torrent, or precipice, and he found it “pregnant with religion.” “Certain scenes,” he insisted, “would awe an atheist into belief.”⁹ This latter claim is decisive.

During the eighteenth century, the “sublime” became a catchword for the way in which civilized people should take in such vistas of immensity as plunging cataracts or the blur of galaxies, or be roused by descriptions of storms at sea or poems invoking the inexhaustible multiplicity of life, here and on other worlds. The sublime was variously expounded but, throughout, identifies an invigorating combination of pleasure and pain, named as a delightful horror, a thrilling discomfiture, a seductive terror, an unknown that repels and draws, with the attraction finally uppermost. Sublime natural phenomena and sublime paintings, architecture, and writing stir a movement, more or less intense, of disruption and recovery, where intellectual and affective energies are brought up short, and, through the checking, invigorated. Among all the “objects,” however, that aroused this dreadful awe, God was “by far the most sublime.”¹⁰ That God is the gold standard of sublimity was almost universally acknowledged in the eighteenth century, even though not always developed as a particular theme. The sublime entered the culture as both theologically informed and theologically influential, and certainly not just through explicitly religious works.

Along with other eighteenth-century celebrants of the sublime, Thomas Gray belonged to a social elite. A sensibility for the sublime was a mark of taste and firmly in the province of the cultivated. Nobody expected the lady’s maid to wax rapturous, and, if tradesmen were transported, it was generally to New England. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though, sublimity was democratized and its delights and benefits extended via Gothic novels, ghost stories, the traveling shows of sublime painters, tourism, mechanical wonders, railway stations, public museums and art galleries, the popular press, urban photography, movies, skyscrapers—and science fiction.¹¹ The titles of early American pulp magazines provide at least a prima facie case for considering the pretensions of science fiction to sublimity: Astounding; Astonishing Stories; Amazing Stories; Thrilling Wonder Stories; Cosmic; Marvel; Startling Stories; Fantastic Stories Quarterly; Unknown; Weird Tales. More profoundly telling, perhaps, are the aspirations of science fiction readers. In 1926 a young enthusiast wrote to the magazine Amazing Stories, explaining the particular appeal of its fiction. Science fiction, he claimed, is “designed to reach those qualities of the mind which are aroused only by things vast, things cataclysmic, and things unfathomably strange.”¹² As a description of the sublime, this would be recognizable all the way back to John Dennis’ early treatise on sublimity, published in 1704.¹³

To the extent that science fiction embraced the sublime, it became theologically haunted. Space, for instance, which is the stage for so much science fiction, is imagined not only as a theater for the astonishing but as, in itself, a medium of ultimacy. In The Centauri Device, M. John Harrison invests the emptiness between the planets with a thickness, a mysteriously substantial quality, at once fearful and attractive. Space is the “Impossible Medium” that connects with travellers in “slow luminous ecstasies”: it is the sublime symbol and promise of transcendence, of freedom from the cultural and political dungeons in which the planet-bound suffer.¹⁴ As Edward Young wrote over two hundred years earlier, “the Soul of Man was made to walk the skies” since “a boundless mind affects a boundless space” and, like the Almighty, lives in “disdain of limit.”¹⁵ Push into the realms of intergalactic travel, and the ecstasies are exponential. The ship “shivers with an intense white light,” and “all solid forms vanished in amazing twists and contortions.” Space thickens to an oceanic density and “somehow entered the ship.” Harrison’s language blurs inside and outside, above and below, and confounds substance in a properly sublime disorientation. “Space . . . was crawling through us in slow luminous waves. We were steeped in it: we were birds of paradise, we wore the masks of gilded deep-sea fishes . . . we were glass effigies with infinitely thin, attenuated limbs.” This “third level of space” fulfills the essential drivenness of our kind.¹⁶ Humanity appears in this sublime wrenching and release because sublimity is the experiential medium of human freedom understood as boundless expansion, a distinctively modern rendering of our relationship to the infinite.

Down in the old miasmal mist, though, Christianity shuffles on. The science-fictional sublime is a polemical business. Harrison caricatures Christianity in the faith of the “Openers.” Headquartered at Golgotha, the cult members praise God by exposing their bodily organs to the outside world through plastic windows set into their torsos.¹⁷ Digestion on display, the Openers are a grotesque parody of Christian inwardness, of concern with the processes of the soul, to which, the Openers declare, bodily functions are analogous. Motions trapped behind plastic, their lack of mystery exposed, reveal religion as the opposite of that outward drive of genuine sublimity. This contrast, though, exposes something else, too, perhaps more disquieting even than the Opener’s dinner theater. Harrison’s imagery often betrays a disgust with the body itself. There is an accentuated unpleasantness about physicality: hands are “meaty,” or “pudgy,” and fingers “blunt”; bellies are “slack”; faces “gray”; and thighs are vast and varicose-veined, while “pouches of slack, slightly discolored skin” hang under eyes. The sublimity of space, on the other hand, climaxes in “senselessness” and the dissolution of matter. Freedom seems to grow in inverse proportion to bodiliness, which is a troubling idea.¹⁸

NATURE SUBLIMED AND HUMANITY EXALTED

The sublime, as a category of experience and a quality of nature and art, did not pop up in the eighteenth century with an entire novelty. The age, after all, was still obliged to demonstrate classical precedent in matters of the arts. Early advocates of the sublime appealed to the first-century treatise, Peri Hupsous or On the Sublime., attributed to Longinus.¹⁹ Though known for centuries, Longinus’ little work on how to achieve sublime effects in writing was consigned firmly to history’s minor leagues. Rarely printed earlier and almost never quoted, editions of On the Sublime rushed into publication after 1710, some fourteen being on the streets before 1790. Now, though, Longinus was put to work for a cause far beyond the letter of his text, his treatise made to expound a new, modern sensibility. Eighteenth-century authors pounced on Longinus’ description of the high, lofty—that is, sublime—style as revealing our special destiny above all other animals. Sublimity is violent; it thrusts reasoned persuasion aside and “prevails” over us by “superior force.” The outcome, though, is for our good; we are astounded, dazzled, overcome, and uplifted. Dislocated from the bounded, we are relocated as spectators of the “mighty whole,” as our imaginations pass “beyond the reaches of space.”²⁰ In a flourish taken to heart by almost the entire modern tradition of the sublime, Longinus proclaimed, “All other qualities prove their possessors to be men, but sublimity raises them near the majesty of God.”²¹ Sublime experience registers our birth right among the abyssal and infinite.²²

According to its most vigorous advocates, then, capacity for the sublime revealed the dignity of humanity and its distinctive calling.²³ John Dennis discovered religious poetry as the proper home of the sublime and the acme of human culture.²⁴ The poet Edward Young makes sublimity the engine of moral and religious conversion, while John Baillie urges it as passion’s royal path to virtue and “noble Pride.”²⁵ In its openness to the sublime, James Ussher tells his “young Lady,” the soul “assumes an unknown grandeur.”²⁶ More influential than most, though, Joseph Addison published, during the summer of 1712, a series of essays in the Spectator collectively known as “The Pleasures of the Imagination.”²⁷ Addison wanted to explain and form “good taste.” The prose is seductively charming and addresses the reader as a fellow member of a thoughtful, sensitive, intellectually astute class. Addison found his audience among these new readers of journals and papers and in coffee houses, where fashions in life, art, and literature were bred and contested, where politics was thrashed out, the new science applauded, and gossip passed on.²⁸ A class was formed in these places, including England’s gentry but extending well into the bourgeoi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sublime Fiction?
• 2 Pulp Fiction, or the Sublime Subversion of the Boy-Engineer
• 3 Wells and Stapledon: The Evolutionary Sublime
• 4 Philip Dick versus the Sublime
• 5 The Apocalyptic Sublime
• 6 From the Sublime to the Beautiful
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index