Legion: Merrin, Jung, Teilhard, Gnosticism

Just some comments on Blatty’s construction of the Merrin character.

By profession, Merrin’s career echoes that of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Although Teilhard was a paleontologist, making Merrin an archeologist is still a close parallel. Just as Teilhard’s blending of science and mysticism brought on church censure, so too does Merrin’s.

The main similarity between the two is that both propose a cosmic fulfilment of evolution “in Christ”. While this is implicit in Merrin, for Teilhard it carried the name “The Omega Point”. But after this, the two diverge.

Teilhard was not an exorcist, and did not believe in demons or in a personal Devil. Of course, Merrin is famous as an exorcist with direct experience of demons and a belief in some kind of personal satanic being.

Merrin believes that reality is not completely definable by normal sense impressions or by normative experience, science, and philosophy. Instead he thinks that the “really real” is not exactly matter or exactly spirit, but a “fundamental third”, some “Other” factor entirely.

Here Merrin is in agreement not with Teilhard, but with C.G. Jung, who thought that the universe was a mysterious “gestalt” in which spirit and matter co-exist and interact, but which as a whole cannot be grasped. We can observe matter and/or spirit as sides of a coin, but the coin itself is too vast and supra-intellectual to grasp rationally.

“Legion” develops Merrin’s thinking from the first novel. In The Exorcist, Merrin is said to have once thought that matter/evolution was Lucifer upward-groping back to his God. Blatty develops and modifies this concept with the “Angel” figure in Legion.

The Angel is a somewhat less Satanic figure in Legion. Rather, it is a split-off part of God which wishes to live out its own life and seek its own destiny outside of God. The Big Bang and all subsequent creation is the arena in which God’s split-off part seeks itself.

At the end of Legion, Blatty reveals that the Angel is not Satan, but us – we are all parts of the Angel. He touchingly illustrates the “Angel as split-off from God” via the Gemini twins. James Venamun has “split off” from his other “good half”, but in the end they are re-united.

The Angel resembles Merrin or Teilhard’s thinking less than it resembles a sort of parallel Gnostic myth. Throughout Gnosticism the issue appears of a split-off element seeking itself and its divine origins, for example, the “Fall of Sophia” in which a female divine element falls through material realms, yet ever seeks her true nature and divine Source. In Gnosticism, the soul or spirit is frequently said to be imprisoned as a “spark” in matter and, in seeking its true self, also finds God. We ourselves in our spiritual nature constitute the “sparks” (a similar view is found in some Kabbalistic schools as well).

Therefore, it would seem that Blatty’s Merrin character contains a blend of Jung, Teilhard, and Gnosticism – and, of course, much more.