Philip K. Dick’s Search for God through Fantasy

Philip K. Dick, born 1928, was an American science fiction writer. Active from 1951 to 1982, PKD produced 44 novels, 121 short stories, and 14 short story collections.  While he was best known for writing in the science fiction genre, PKD wrote several literary novels, only one of which was published while he was alive.  Philip died in 1982 from complications from a stroke, just as his novels were receiving wider recognition and acclaim from a global audience. Since then, eight films have been made from his works (including Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner) and at least two television series.

Shortly after his birth in Chicago to Dorothy and Joseph Dick, the family moved to California. Philip’s parents divorced in the 1930s. He grew up in his mother’s house in the Berkeley area surrounded by artists and academics. According to his family, Philip began talking at an early age and was frequently described as intelligent by school administrators and teachers. PKD began writing in high school. He self-published several newspapers and sold his first short story, “Roog”, to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1951.

Philip married five times. His first marriage in 1948 lasted less than a year. His last marriage in 1973 lasted for four years. Philip was also involved in many extra-marital affairs. Philip had three children: Laura (b. 1960), Isolde (b. 1967), and Christopher (b. 1973).  

Philip died from a stroke in 1982 at the age of 54. His early death is most certainly due to the fact that he was a life-long amphetamine addict who experienced substantial mental health problems. Today, fans and scholars alike study his works, and his non-science literary fiction has been published widely. In death, Philip has received the recognition he craved.

Themes in PKD’s Works

Growing up in Berkeley in the 40s and then coming of age in the early 50s, Philip was thoroughly immersed in the American counter-culture of that era. The central theme of his writings was that of suspicion: is the world really what it seems? What if reality is a lie? What’s *really* going on? Philip did not trust the government or his fellow man. Everyone, including his own family, was under suspicion.

Philip’s third wife, Anne, wrote:

Dorothy [Philip’s mother] and Phil, when he was growing up, weren’t part of any large family group and didn’t belong to any community groups or church. Lynne [Philip’s stepsister] thought Phil never learned to adjust to certain aspects of life. (Anne Dick 217)

Philip had no formal religious upbringing. Throughout his life, he read large quantities of psychology, philosophy (both classic and modern), science, and religion of all types. He incorporated all of these into his fiction.  

According to Anne, the family began attending an Episcopal Church in 1963. The entire family was baptized, and Anne and Philip were confirmed. 

Phil said, “If I could invent a church, I’d invent one just like this.” He became quite excited when he found a hymn that was dated A.D. 496. He was fascinated with the High Mass, and became friendly with the vicar, Fr. Reade. Phil would visit him and they’d talk theology for hours. (Anne Dick 97)

Philip’s fiction became more explicitly religious. His 1964 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch added references to transubstantiation (the Roman Catholic teaching that bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus during Catholic worship) to his usual theme of skepticism, as well as deep dives into early Christianity and Gnosticism (a group that diverged from the Christian faith).

Philip’s religious themes reached their apex in his three final novels: VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Of these three, VALIS presents the best example.

VALIS and the Search for God

VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System from an American film): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterized by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence. (from the foreword of VALIS)

VALIS (published in 1981) is a fictionalized autobiography of Philip’s search for God. The plot follows Philip’s dissociated avatar, Horselover Fat (Philip= Horselover, Dick= Fat) as he recovers from a mental breakdown following a friend’s suicide. “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity,” he writes. (Dick 177)

The novel features excerpts from Horselover’s exegesis:

The term “journal” is mine, not Fat’s. His term was “exegesis,” a theological term meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat believed that the information fired at him and progressively crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and hence should be regarded as a form of scripture, even if it just applied to his son’s undiagnosed right inguinal hernia… (Dick 188)

As presented in the novel, Horselover’s exegesis contains extended discussions of early Christianity, classic philosophy, language interpretation/ translation, and stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy. Also, the excerpt above contains a reference to a real-life event from 1974. On 2/3/1974 PKD reported that he experienced a dissociative event where God beamed information directly into his mind. He tells a fictionalized version in VALIS:

All these events took place in March 1974. The month before that, Fat had an impacted wisdom tooth removed. (…) Fat experienced a flashback. He remembered- just for a half-second. Remembered ancient Rome and himself: as an early Christian; the entire ancient world and his furtive frightened life as a secret Christian hunted by the Roman authorities burst over his mind… and then he was back in California 1974…” (Dick 270-271)

Within the narrative of VALIS and in real life, Philip reported that he continued to have moments where two realities overlapped: the ancient, early-Christian world over his present time. Philip believed he received divine knowledge during these overlapping moments, and that he was one of those specially chosen by God. Philip blurred the line between fiction and reality in his later years. He actually wrote an Exegesis. It was finally published in 2011.

VALIS builds to a confrontation where Horselover/Philip visits some people who believe they have brought the ancient world into the present day. Philip realizes they are insane, his dissociation ends, and Horselover disappears.

Personal Reflection

I first encountered PKD’s writings in my early twenties. I was pleasantly surprised to find a science fiction writer who took religion seriously. Up to that point, the sci-fi authors I’d read such as Asimov, Clarke, Niven, and Brunner, were all staunch atheists. Religion was always negative when it appeared in their works. According to them, religion was a primitive, maladaptive belief system for the uneducated and weak-minded.

I was majoring in English Literature and minoring in Anthropology at the time. Like the authors above, I’d come to see religion as a man-made system devised to regulate wealth, property rights, and reproduction. PKD showed me that a person could be intelligent and religious. Back then, C.S. Lewis was too didactic and too doctrinal. Tolkien bored me. PKD’s imaginative approach to Christianity caught my attention and introduced me to the fundamentals of theology.  

I began the ordination process in the Episcopal Church in late 2001 and entered seminary at Nashotah House in Wisconsin in August of 2002.  PKD’s connections with the Episcopal Church inspired me to see the process through. If Philip K. Dick could be a faithful Episcopalian, then so could I.  

The problem was that Philip K. Dick was a very sick man, and his vision of the Christian faith was not healthy. Over time, I distanced myself from his views, and then in the end, left him and the Episcopal Church in favor of authentic Catholicism.  I now work at a thirty-day substance abuse rehabilitation facility. I see profound mental illness and addiction when I look at his fiction.

PKD’s works continue to resonate within our culture. For example, The Skull, a film based on one of his short stories from the 50s, is scheduled to be released in 2023.  Christian audiences can derive value from his works, but they’d do well to consider his illnesses when engaging his religious themes. Philip K. Dick is an example of an imperfect man questing after God. As such, his life can be an example and inspiration for all Christians as they struggle. God loved Philip K. Dick and was present to him throughout his life. Just so, God is present and active to all of us, despite our flaws.

Works Cited

Dick, Anne R. The Search for Philip K. Dick, Tachyon, 2010.

Dick, Philip K. VALIS. 1981. Philip K. Dick: VALIS And Later Novels. Edited by Jonathan Lethem, The 

Library of America, 2009.