Literary Theology • Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson and the Theology of Persistence

Johanna Blanding-Koskinen • The Literary Apologetic

Matheson shrank a man to the threshold of perception and found him still capable of wonder — the one answer to Wells that materialism cannot produce.

The Man Who Wrote From the Cellar

Richard Burton Matheson (1926–2013) was born in Allendale, New Jersey, the son of Norwegian immigrants, and grew up in Brooklyn before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1944. He graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism in 1949 and began publishing science fiction almost immediately, breaking through in 1950 with the short story “Born of Man and Woman.”

His two most significant novels — I Am Legend (1954) and The Shrinking Man (1956) — established him as a central figure of postwar American science fiction, though he resisted the label. He saw himself as a writer of human stories set against impossible premises. When he sold the film rights to The Shrinking Man, he insisted on writing the screenplay himself — a condition he made non-negotiable — and the resulting film, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), won the Hugo Award for best motion picture.

Stephen King has cited Matheson as one of the most important influences on his own work. Matheson also wrote extensively for television, including multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone and the teleplay for Steven Spielberg’s first feature, Duel (1971). He died in Calabasas, California, in 2013.

A Religion He Built Himself

Matheson was raised in Christian Science, a tradition that shaped his conviction that the physical world is not the whole of reality and that consciousness persists beyond what the material senses can register. As an adult he moved toward a syncretic personal religion drawn from parapsychology, the writings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and the near-death experience research of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody.

His novel What Dreams May Come (1978) is the most direct expression of these beliefs — a sustained imaginative account of life after death drawn largely from Swedenborgian sources, in which consciousness continues and love persists beyond physical dissolution. But the theological conviction underlying that novel was present from the beginning, most visibly in the final pages of The Shrinking Man.

To God There Is No Zero

The closing pages of The Shrinking Man are unlike anything else in postwar American science fiction. Scott Carey has been reduced to subatomic scale. Every framework through which human beings ordinarily establish significance has been stripped from him. The novel has methodically exhausted the available answers to the question of what remains.

What remains is a recognition rather than an argument. The novel’s original formulation — “In nature there is no zero” — reaches for a naturalistic grounding. But when Matheson adapted the novel into his own screenplay, working alone under a contractual provision he personally secured, he changed the line. The film reads: “To God there is no zero. I still exist.”

The substitution of God for nature is not a concession to studio sentiment. Working through the same material a second time with complete freedom, Matheson found the naturalistic formulation inadequate to what the story was actually saying, and corrected it. The correction is the testimony: what the genre’s conventions could not hold, his own beliefs could.

“To God there is no zero. I still exist.” — Matheson, The Incredible Shrinking Man, screenplay, 1957

Why Matheson Matters for TLA

Matheson sits in an unusual position on TLA’s spectrum of borrowed moral capital. Wells maintained his materialist framework even as his narrative produced a moral judgment that framework could not sustain. Matheson’s situation is different: his personal beliefs had already moved him toward a conviction that persons persist beyond every physical threshold. He was not a materialist straining against his own premises. He was a man whose genre could not contain what he believed.

The screenplay correction is therefore not what it appears to be. It is a man correcting a genre convention that had never accurately expressed his actual convictions. He corrected it when he had the chance, and the correction was also a confession. TLA reads Matheson alongside Wells and Ellison as one of three cases in which the attempt to stage a controlled experiment in human reduction produces a moral remainder the author’s stated framework cannot explain.

Principal Works

  • I Am Legend – 1954
  • The Shrinking Man – 1956
  • A Stir of Echoes – 1958
  • Hell House – 1971
  • What Dreams May Come – 1978
  • Screenplay: The Incredible Shrinking Man – 1957
  • Teleplay: Duel – 1971
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