Is 2001 Poetry?


The best extant commentary on 2001: A Space Odyssey from an intentionally theological perspective hails from the conclusion of C.S. Lewis’ essay “Is Theology Poetry” in the seldom read Weight of Glory collection. The essay is just a reprint of a lecture given at Oxford in 1944 (no doubt in a mahogany cased room with crumpled carpets smelling of rain and tea), a full 25 years before Kubrick’s 2001. I am not the biggest fan of Lewis’ science fiction literature, finding it somewhat too overt in its allegorical self-awareness to match the sheer readability of L’Engle, Chesterton, or other “Christian” sci-fi provocateurs, but apparently his grasp of how science fiction relates to theology (and specifically Lewis’ conception of theology as mythmaking) was well developed:

"Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its [Christian theology] chief contemporary rival - what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook...Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance - what tragic irony - the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama - just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself: from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies' bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I could never quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the terrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next Act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last Act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet - and perhaps more than the planet - for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Hence forward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little pathetic (sic). It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool - all suns will cool - the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and "universal darkness covers all." The pattern of myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive. It is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist's career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV. You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin.


Such a world-drama appeals to every part of us. The early struggles of the hero (a theme delightfully doubled, played first by life, and then by man) appeals to our generosity. His future exaltation gives scope to a reasonable optimism; for the tragic close is so very distant that you need not often think of it--we work with millions of years. And the tragic close it self just gives that irony, that grandeur, which calls forth our defiance, and without which all the rest might cloy. There is a beauty in this myth which well deserves better poetic handling than it has yet received: I hope some great genius will yet crystallise it before the incessant stream of philosophic change carries it all away. I am speaking, of course, of the beauty it has whether you believe it or not. There I can speak from experience: for I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it."

Kubrick's reliance on various images in Greek mythology implies that 2001, as the sort of odyssey described above, is a major artifact of Western rational spirituality. It is a perfect example of the storytelling that interests Lewis. The rest of the essay goes on to argue that while the “science” myth is beautiful when rendered similar to Kubrick’s later revelation, the myth offered by theology is arguably prettier. Sidestepping all the traditional science vs. theology questions, Lewis cuts to the quick of what would come to occupy the cultural critics of a few generations later, that being the question of how these different myths are represented and what makes them more or less effective. Though such thinking may not appeal to typical Christian thought at an ideological level, it certainly appeals to the continual need for Christian art and practice to meta-narrate - to re-describe, or even better put, to re-mythologize what Christian theology exposes. And this is where 2001 ultimately succeeds as well. It trades the technical distractions of all these apologetic questions of evolutionary thought for a focus on the literary/mythical history of its core ideology, it turns this history into a stream of fascinating science fictions that ultimately dissolve in a final moment of potent abstraction, and “I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it.”


The Passion of the Christ is a film that has been misunderstood as often as 2001, and I think Lewis helps us to understand why. The connection between these films is that they are very visually intensive exercises in the imagination of their respective ideologies. The difference, of course, is that one has a sense of historical reference and the other doesn’t. But the relative lack of dialogue and narration in both permit each to be experienced more as iconography than anything else. They are both myths in Lewis' sense of the term that push their respective traditions to their narrative and visual limits. 2001 certainly achieves an abstraction that The Passion of the Christ does not (as that would have been… really weird), but as the best representations of the opposition posed by Lewis in his essay between narrating the myth of science and the myth of theology, parallel reflection on these two films may generate a fruitful ecumenicity in thinking about myth, religion, and beauty in film. At the very least it still startles me that Lewis described my feelings about 2001 many years before it was produced, which may actually make “Is Theology Poetry” his best work of science fiction.