Theology from Dune, Part I

I recently posted on a topic inspired by my re-reading of the sci-fi classic Dune, by Frank Herbert.  (All references are to the 1984 Berkeley Books edition.)  As I near the end, I find that there is more grist for the blog, hence the first in what will be a series of posts.

Let me begin by saying that I carefully avoided the title "Theology of Dune."  The novel and its successors, not unlike the Matrix movies, employ a syncretism of actual faiths along with Herbert's fertile imagination in the creation of cultures in the universe he describes.  Good work could undoubtedly be done on the actual theology of Dune (and apparently needs to be done, as a quick Google search turns up the almost unheard of nothing.)  Nevertheless, these posts are not about that.  They are about aspects of Christian theology and life illuminated or explicated by certain scenes in this novel.

Near the beginning of the third part of the novel, the protragonist, Paul-Muad'Dib Atreides wonders whether he is perceiving reality as it is, or as it is presented to him when his awareness is enhanced by the spice melange.  "Still, there was about him a feeling of abandonment.  He wondered if it might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence -- into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed.  And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference.  In the landscape of a myth he could not orient himself and say: 'I am I because I am here.'" (p. 382)

There is a brilliant post at the Bad Catholic blog in which arguing that Descartes did serious damage to how we understand the world, particularly sexual intercourse, when he declared that the mind and body were two different entities, each capable of existing independently from the other.  The post is very much worth reading and discussing in its own right, but the point I am making is that he says the same thing as Herbert in the passage above.  Paul Atreides sensed fear at the prospect of a world without limitations, a world of pure spirit and no physicality.  Marc, the author of the blog post, points out a similar apprehension we all feel for ghosts (all spirit, no body) and corpses (all body, no soul).

Even in the Christian world, we have a tendency toward this dualism, embracing the spiritual as distinct from and superior to the physical.  Of course, we have some reasons for that.  Consider the words of Jesus in John 4:21-24, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."  (NIV)  This leads many to support this dualism and superiority of the spirit.  Among the unfortunate consequences of this thinking is an untethering of the truth from authority.  Truth becomes whatever the Holy Spirit speaks to me, independent from the tradition and authority of the Church.

Yet if we look carefully, Jesus says we must worship in truth.  Pilate incorrectly asked the question, "What is truth?"  He asked it in the only way he knew how, but since the Incarnation, the only proper way of phrasing the question is "Who is truth?"  Christ has shown that truth is personal, that God Himself is personal, three persons eternally existing in one being.  When He tells us to worship in spirit and truth, He is not lifting one up above and separate from the other.  As He is in His very being, He unites the two.  To worship in truth means to worship in the One Who is Truth, and that One is most certainly a physical being.

The character Paul Atreides is right to feel fear at the thought of a world loosened from all points of reference.  We are right to feel the creepy-crawlies about ghosts and corpses and any religion that speaks purely of the spiritual.  Jesus was a man.  He was a Judean man in the first century of a certain height and a particular weight.  His hair needed cutting periodically and one of his ears was lower than the other.  He was also God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of being with the Father.  As always with the truth that has been revealed most fully in Him, we see that the real nature of things is both/and, not either/or.