Where is God in Dune?
This spring, I watched Denis Villeneuve’s excellent, awe-inspiring Dune: Part II in my local theatre. It was originally a Valentine’s Day date, but my wife got sick. I ended up watching it twice on the big screen, and happily would have gone more. Beyond the grandeur of the movie itself—and there is no shortage of speculation that it has changed cinema forever—there is also the happy reality that the philosophy of Frank Herbert has now made its way to millions more people. Dune has gone mainstream.
It’s sometimes fun to have some esoteric media in your back pocket, but ultimately, it’s best for good stories to make their way to everyone. The world of Dune is vast and complex, and it touches on issues of colonialism, ecology, economics, politics, religion and war. Some great articles and video essays have emerged in recent months covering the historical lore and context for the world of the Atreides. So my focus is more narrow: where is Deity in the Duniverse?
Religion is not far to find. It is not a major issues on the original fief of Caladan, but it is central to the lives of the hardy Fremen who inhabit the remote stretches of Arrakis. The Fremen are looking for a Messiah, who in their religious argot is the Lisan al-Gaib, or voice from the outer world. As we learn over the course of the book/movie, Paul checks all the right boxes; he learns the language, rides a sandworm, and is an elite fighter thanks to his militaristic mentors Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho. Paul furthermore has abilities which edge toward the metaphysical: he has prescience (although struggling to control it at times) and the Other memory: access to the experiences of all of his ancestors, both male and female.
Spoiler alert, Paul’s son Leto II becomes ‘God Emperor’ later on. But where is God proper in the world of Dune? It is to Paul’s benefit that the secretive female guild to which his mother belongs, the Bene Gesserit, long ago seeded Arrakis with messianic prophecies that heralded his arrival and chosenness. So we learn that in Herbert’s worldview and this extended parable, that religion is at least usually a force to be cynically manipulated to particular psychological and political ends. The objective, extra-mental reality of deity doesn't receive a lot of attention.
Of course, the other answer to this is that, like Star Trek and unlike Star Wars, the world of Dune fully integrates the existence and history of Earth as we know it. This does not bring us any closer to establishing a divine Creator as an objective reality, but it does suggest that the same infrastructure of metaphysics, philosophy, and religious traditions exist in Dune’s distant past (on ‘Old Earth’).
J.R.R. Tolkien is known to have strongly disliked Dune. We know this because he expressed his distaste in a letter to John Bush (1966):
'Thank you for sending me a copy of Dune. I received one last year from Lanier and so already know something about the book. It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines. At least I find it so. In fact I dislike Dune with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment. Would you like me to return the book as I already have one, or to hand it on?'
Among a host of dissimilarities, God is very much present in the Lord of the Rings series. Eru Iluvatar has an objective, unquestionably solid existence. Dune gives us only God-adjacent ideas, refracted through the needs, wants, and schemes of very fallible men and women. Ultimately, this is what interested Herbert: not theism as a philosophical quantity, but subjective belief (and especially zealotry) as a historical and political weapon. As a warning against this kind of cynical weaponization of belief, Dune remains timely as ever and maybe a bit prescient.