A Postmodern Orthodoxy

“Nature cannot satisfy the desires that she arouses,” as C.S. Lewis has pointed out, but on planet of Pandora – the setting of Avatar, James Cameron’s latest film – it certainly seems as if she can.

The worship of nature isn’t a particularly original movie idea, but Avatar goes beyond something like the normal fare of Star Wars to which most theatergoers are accustomed.  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all the main characters believe in the force (if not take it for granted) and the presence of pantheism is primarily a plot device, or an excuse for interesting special effects.  The storyline in Avatar, on the other hand, draws most of its conflict from whether or not the pantheism of the Na’vi is true.  The climactic battle is about more than just which characters will triumph – it’s also a question of which theological system will be vindicated.  Because of this, Cameron’s portrayal of pantheism has a more evangelistic fervor than it would be if it just happened to be set in a world where – like Star Wars – practically all the characters take it to be true.

Avatar makes for powerful storytelling, and its apologetic for pantheism is a powerful one for multiple reasons.  For anyone that’s even remotely concerned about the environment, for anyone that has a tendency to root for the individual over a large corporation, or for anyone that has a gut reaction to see even an economic empire as being intrinsically evil, will easily find themselves hoping that the Na’vi will triumph even before we’re introduced to any of them.  Cameron introduces us to ideals that many of us share with the Na’vi before a discussion of their pantheism ever enters the scene, so by the time we hear discussions referencing Eywa – the mother goddess of the Na’vi – it seems like a harmless belief of a backward culture.

By the time we realize – through the discussions of the human scientists – that the Na’vi have a factual basis for their belief in Eywa, we’ve come to be emotionally invested enough in their point of view that most of us in the audience were probably hoping that they were right, anyway.

Quite a bit of the appeal of the Na’vi is the degree to which their life is seen as being beautiful and peaceful.  Not only is the natural state of Pandora beautiful, but it’s the only thing there that is – by contrast, all the human “civilization” that we’re shown there is nothing but ugliness and destruction.  Overall, the natural state of Pandora bears little resemblance to Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw.”  The death of even the animals (at least by the hands of the Na’vi) is largely avoidable, although this takes Jake Sully some time to learn. The Na’vi kill only what they need, and their lives in the state of nature are anything but – as Hobbes famously put it – “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Even death, to an extent, is held at bay:  when one of the Na’vi die, their soul is absorbed back into Eywa in a way that suggests that even if their lives cannot continue, their consciousness still does.

This view of nature, alas, doesn’t bear much resemblance to what any of us who have spent any time camping, for example, know to be true.  In our society, it’s those that have the closest connection to nature, perhaps, that are the least anxious to reunite with it.  The reason for this, I suspect, is that the degree of harmony with nature that the Na’vi have attained, on some level, doesn’t resemble nature as we know it now nearly as much as it resembles nature as it must have appeared in the Garden of Eden.  At the very least, this helps to explain some of the appeal:  if being in Eden without God isn’t enough to make someone a pantheist, probably nothing is.

Another reason for the appeal of the pantheism of the Na’vi is that it’s a belief system that’s constructed to appeal to those of us that are watching the movie:  there are no creeds; there is no liturgy, and the actions that Eywa would have her adherents take look suspiciously like what they would probably want to do anyway.  In addition, it’s a it’s a belief system that can be empirically verified, and Eywa is, under the right circumstances, willing to intervene on behalf of her followers.

It’s not like pantheism is a tough sell in modern American culture, anyway:  judging from movies like Star Wars and Dances with Wolves, to the writings of Deepak Chopra, to the “Love Your Mother” and “May the Forest Be With You” bumper stickers, it’s a belief that’s quite a few filmgoers, apparently, are comfortable with already.

Still, to dismiss the pantheism of Avatar as wholly without merit, or as being a symptom of what’s wrong with the theological beliefs of the average filmgoer, is something of an exercise in missing the point.  C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography, describes how his eventual conversion to Christianity came was more complex than just a conversion from atheism to Christianity – it involved several belief systems that he later realized were steps on the way.  In The Four Loves, he explains how pantheism was – for him – a necessary step:

“There is an easy transition from Theism to Pantheism; but there is also a blessed transition in the other direction.  For some souls I believe, for my own I remember, Wordsworthian contemplation can be the first and lowest form of recognition that there is something outside ourselves which demands reverence.  To return to Pantheistic errors about the nature of this something would, for a Christian, be very bad.  But once again, for “the main coming up from below” the Wordsworthian experience is an advance.  Even if he goes no further he has escaped the worst arrogance of materialism:  if he goes on he will be converted.”

It may be that most productive part of the portrayal of religion in Avatar is that those who had no interest in any sort of religion previously may now be open to discussing it.  Indeed, even for those for whom pantheism may not have been a necessary step, the religious overtones of Avatar have a potential to draw them into discussions about religion that they may not be comfortable with otherwise.

Pantheism, as Cameron presents it here, may ultimately not be that satisfactory in the long run:  those of us that do not have avatars of our own, it seems, will have to look salvation somewhere else.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 12:42 am and is filed under Worldview::Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.