The author on writing fantasy, hating Tolkien, and the journey from innocence to experience.
...You’re quite famous as an atheist; the word “militant” is often used to describe your atheism. But your grandfather was a clergyman.
Yes.
I was wondering what your religious education was like growing up.
I am seventy-two years old, so I grew up before the changes in the language of the liturgy of the Church of England. My grandfather was a Victorian. He was born in 1890 something, a very old-fashioned man in many ways. I loved him dearly. And the Bible he knew was the King James. That’s the Bible I grew up with. Then the church services I went to—and I did go to church every Sunday when I was a boy, sometimes in my grandfather’s church, sometimes elsewhere—were conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, which was the 1662 book where the liturgy of the English Church was kind of fixed and formalized.
So it’s that language, the language of the seventeenth century, that surrounded me. And I’ve always relished the sounds of it. The hymns, too—although they were not seventeenth-century, necessarily, some of them are full of the most marvellous language. “His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, and dark is His path on the wings of the storm.” What wonderful language that is. I was responding to that more in an aesthetic, sensuous way than I was to what the words meant. But if Grandpa told me that God was in Heaven, and that I’d go to Heaven, too, if I was a good boy, well, I saw no reason to doubt it.
What changed?
It was when I became a teen-ager and started reading for myself that the faith fell away. But that didn’t mean that I sprang into the world as a militant atheist. What I’m against is what William Blake called single vision—being possessed by one single idea and seeing everything in terms of this one idea, whether it’s a religious idea or a scientific idea or a political idea. It’s a very bad thing. We need a multiplicity of viewpoints. So I’m perfectly willing to entertain the prospect of “The Secret Commonwealth”—this world of fairies, ghosts, witches, and so on—side by side with the world of reason. I wouldn’t want to be governed by one or the other... (continues)
Yes.
I was wondering what your religious education was like growing up.
I am seventy-two years old, so I grew up before the changes in the language of the liturgy of the Church of England. My grandfather was a Victorian. He was born in 1890 something, a very old-fashioned man in many ways. I loved him dearly. And the Bible he knew was the King James. That’s the Bible I grew up with. Then the church services I went to—and I did go to church every Sunday when I was a boy, sometimes in my grandfather’s church, sometimes elsewhere—were conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, which was the 1662 book where the liturgy of the English Church was kind of fixed and formalized.
So it’s that language, the language of the seventeenth century, that surrounded me. And I’ve always relished the sounds of it. The hymns, too—although they were not seventeenth-century, necessarily, some of them are full of the most marvellous language. “His chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, and dark is His path on the wings of the storm.” What wonderful language that is. I was responding to that more in an aesthetic, sensuous way than I was to what the words meant. But if Grandpa told me that God was in Heaven, and that I’d go to Heaven, too, if I was a good boy, well, I saw no reason to doubt it.
What changed?
It was when I became a teen-ager and started reading for myself that the faith fell away. But that didn’t mean that I sprang into the world as a militant atheist. What I’m against is what William Blake called single vision—being possessed by one single idea and seeing everything in terms of this one idea, whether it’s a religious idea or a scientific idea or a political idea. It’s a very bad thing. We need a multiplicity of viewpoints. So I’m perfectly willing to entertain the prospect of “The Secret Commonwealth”—this world of fairies, ghosts, witches, and so on—side by side with the world of reason. I wouldn’t want to be governed by one or the other... (continues)
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