Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

by Irwin, William, Gracia, Jorge J. E.

  The book as a whole takes no sides in the controversies surrounding The Passion. It is intended as a work of philosophy, even if much of its content is rooted in, and deals with, religion; and the task of philosophy is to deepen and broaden our understanding of topics that are often dealt with superficially and summarily. It is neither an apology nor an attack on any particular point of view, although it poses problems and issues that go well beyond the boundaries of an academic exercise, prompting the authors to take sides. It is up to those who read these essays to make up their minds about them; we are merely providing a point of departure.

  Acknowledgments

  Full credit for this collection goes to the authors. Apart from their willingness to participate in the project and the hard work of preparing essays under extremely tight time constraints, their patience and good nature were exemplary. They put up with many inconveniences, and were willing to consider many suggestions for revision. Dealing with them has been a true pleasure and I only hope that I did not tire them out with my repeated pestering.

  I am particularly grateful to William Irwin, who edits the Open Court Series on Philosophy and Popular Culture. Without his interest in the project, his constant support and expert advice, and his willingness to work with me throughout the editing process, the collection would never have seen the light of day. He has effectively functioned as an overseer and I have learned much in the process. In addition, I am indebted to Gregory Bassham, who like Irwin, read all the essays and offered many suggestions for enhancing their value. His help has been indispensable. Abigail Myers and Mitu Pandya read many of the essays in draft form and offered keen insights to improve them. Finally, I should express appreciation to Sandro D’Onofrio, who compiled the index, to Free Inquiry for permission to reprint Paul Kurtz’s essay with a few modifications, and to David Ramsay Steele of Open Court for his support and help.

  1

  Who Do You Say that I Am? Mel Gibson’s Christ

  RALPH MCINERNY

  When Dorothy Sayers wrote a radio play about Christ many believers professed to be shocked that a human actor should play the role of Jesus. Perhaps this said more about the secularization of the stage than anything else. In the history of drama that Graham Greene wrote on a slow boat to Africa during World War II, he of course located the origins of European drama in the medieval mystery plays, in which the great events of the faith were portrayed as a kind of complement to the liturgy. It is a long way from Quem Quaeritis to Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, no doubt, but I suppose that Greek drama would be more suggestive of the former than the latter.

  When the Word becomes flesh in Jesus, the great mystery is that a particular man in a given time should by his actions reveal the divine. Or perhaps conceal the divine, as the great Protestant philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) suggests through Johannes Climacus. How could the historical and contingent express the eternal? That great mystery can be domesticated for the believer, even its culmination in the passion of Christ. In Catholic churches the walls are lined with depictions of the stations or stages of Christ’s passion, often quite stylized, just as many crucifixes give us a dying Christ whose suffering is tamed. To this The Passion of the Christ is an almost shocking antidote. Surely the cruelty of the via crucis, or way of the cross, and the crucifixion have never before been so graphically put before the eyes.

  The reaction of some Jews to the movie must puzzle the Christian. Surely it cannot be the portrayal of the priests and Sanhedrin that provoked, as if a little editing could take the sting out of the fact that the Jewish people were divided by the events shown in the film. The first Christians were of course Jews and those Jews who refused Christ could be taken to define themselves thereby. The reaction is not confined to them however. After all, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) announced himself as the Antichrist. If there is any either/or in human history it is defined by one’s acceptance or rejection of Jesus’s claim to be the Messiah. For the believer, the charge of anti-Semitism must seem a distraction. Like Uncle Sam in the recruiting poster, Jesus looks into the eye of every viewer as if to say, “I want you.” In a long life I have never heard the passion story invoked as a means of criticizing Jews. The message taught was that this is being done for me, I am somehow responsible for this, but by his stripes I will be healed.

  In the Ignatian method of meditation, the first stage is to imagine as graphically as one can some scene in the life of Christ whose meaning for oneself one will seek to discern. Of course it would be bizarre to think of a Jesuit devoting half an hour of his morning reminding himself how awful the Jews who condemned Christ were.

  The Mass is being said somewhere in the world right now. It always is. This continuous memorial of Christ’s passion is the heart of the Catholic liturgy. The institution of the Eucharist the night before Christ died established the connection between the bread and wine and his body and blood. “Do this in memory of me.” As Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274) put it in a hymn, Christ’s divinity was cloaked by his humanity but in the Eucharist he is as it were twice hidden, there under the appearance of bread and wine.

  One reads that a great number of Catholics, perhaps most, no longer know what the real presence means. To be then told that they do not know if they accept it goes without saying. Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century saw his task as the introduction of Christianity into Christendom. He saw all around him a domesticated Christianity that seemed light years distant from the Gospels. How to get a nominal Christian to realize that his life was being lived in non-Christian categories, as Kiekregaard would put it? What was needed was a form of indirect communication, a rhetoric that would in many ways mimic the Socratic method to bring the reader to the point where he put the question to himself, in the privacy of his own soul. In the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard provides the means for his reader to remember that the Incarnation is not something that can be assimilated into our ordinary modes of thinking. Rather, it goes against them, contradicts them. All efforts to keep religion within the bounds of reason alone are bound to be a distortion of Christianity.

  It would doubtless be fanciful to think of Mel Gibson as a latter day Kierkegaard, but not perhaps fantastic. There is no way the passion story can be divorced from its meaning. Hollywood biblical epics of the past prettied up the scene and did not quite suggest that the persecutions of Diocletian were occasions for pagan boys and Christian girls hooking up in the Coliseum. (As a boy, I read Quo Vadis?, envying the pagans who disported themselves as I thought with moral impunity.) What surprises in Gibson’s film is the involvement it suggests, not simply of actors in their roles, but of the whole film in the significance of these events of so long ago. Of late, there have been films that have depicted Christ in a way that seemed meant to infuriate believers. For all that, the reactions were fairly tame. Demythologizing may work for jaded theologians, but it is absurd to portray Jesus as hankering for Mary Magdalene. Nonetheless, such leveling efforts seem more in tune with our post-Christian time. Any residual faith that engenders a shocked reaction is all too easily assuaged. By contrast, Gibson’s film has all the directness of St. Francis de Sales. It is a cinematic way of inviting the viewer to the Amen Corner. No wonder it got the reactions it did.

  Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) was a German nun displaced from her convent by the political events of the day. She was a visionary for whom the events of the Gospels were forever being shown on the private screen of her imagination, the familiar scenes made more concrete by a flood of details. Clemens Brentano was so enthralled by her accounts of what she saw that he devoted himself to being her amanuensis, writing it all down as she talked. The written version is a subject of controversy. How much of it is due to the literary gifts of Brentano, how much of it is Anne Catherine Emmerich? An insoluble problem, of course, and one of little interest to the reader of the volumes that emerged from Brentano’s dedication to his task. These visions have no interest apart from the Gospels they embroider with det
ails. Much the same must be said of Gibson’s film.

  Were one to appraise the film in purely aesthetic terms, if its story were to be examined as self-standing, it would I think disappoint. It would be like, I beg your pardon, the movie A Bridge Too Far, the story of a failed military operation where the failure never achieves any significance above its individual details. The last days of Christ are gruesome events whose meaning arises from a recognition of their transcendence. They involve a transvaluation of values, standing human, and aesthetic, expectations on their head. One responds by rejecting or accepting that transcendent meaning.

  It is the nominal Christian, l’homme moyen sensuel, who is the chief addressee of the film. Like Kierkegaard’s reader, the viewer of this film is meant to be disturbed, to be made uneasy, to realize how distant he is from his alleged beliefs. Kierkegaard did not claim to be an official spokesman for Christianity, quite the opposite, and Gibson too has produced a film that overwhelms the heart. To embrace it too immediately, in the Kierkegaardian sense, would be not wholly unlike the impassioned rejection of it. Like its protagonist, it is a sign of contradiction. That the movie screen should provide the means of this contemporary thumb in the eye of our complacency is only as it should be. How many trivial images have flickered forth to our imaginations, titillating, diverting, sometimes more. Gibson’s film is one of a kind. To thank him for it must seem inappropriate. He provided the medium, but the message is the old one we are forever forgetting.

  SOURCES

  Anne Catherine Emmerich. 2003. The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Translated by Klemens Maria Brentano. El Sobrante: North Bay Books.

  Soren Kierkegaard. 1985. Philosophical Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What is unique about Christ?

  2. How does Gibson’s portrayal of Christ differ from yours?

  3. Do the conceptions of Christ’s identity of Catholics and Protestants differ? Why?

  4. How does dwelling on Christ’s suffering in the passion affect our view of him?

  5. What is the place of mystical visions in understanding Christ?

  I

  Did Christ Have to Suffer Violently?

  2

  Seeing the World Made New: Depictions of the Passion and Christian Life

  MARK A. WRATHALL

  Fra Angelico’s Santa Trinita Altarpiece depicts the scene as Christ’s body is removed from the cross. On Christ’s right hand side, a group of women mourn while Mary kneels and kisses his feet. To his left hand side, a column of men stands apart. Unlike the women, these standing men, with one notable exception, seem outwardly serene. In the front of the column, one man, in the dress of a scholar, holds the implements of Christ’s torture–the crown of thorns, and three spikes used to nail him to the cross. His face is turned away from Christ and the scene unfolding behind him as he converses with the man to his left. One man alone among this group betrays any signs of sorrow. Largely hidden by those in front of him, he turns his face away and covers his hands, evidently trying to disguise his weeping.

  In its graphic intensity, Gibson’s depiction of Christ’s suffering in The Passion of the Christ has more in common with Lovis Corinth’s Red Christ than the serenity and beauty of a Fra Angelico. This is one of the strengths of his movie. Unlike Gibson and Corinth, Angelico depicts a remarkably dispassionate passion. One sees few visible signs of the trauma that a tortured and crucified man’s body would in fact manifest. In works like The Mocking of Christ, Angelico’s Christ endures suffering with the equanimity of a Socrates drinking the hemlock, precisely as one might expect of one who knows both the worthlessness of this transient world and the good to be won by enduring his momentary suffering. Angelico shows us outwardly on Christ’s body the tranquil state of mind of an all-knowing God.

  Yet, even if God himself can be unmoved by Christ’s suffering, and even if he can comprehend it, it doesn’t follow that we can or should be unmoved by it–a point Gibson’s movie makes in the opening scenes in the Garden of Gethsemane. Finding his Apostles asleep, Christ notes disapprovingly: “You could not watch even one hour with me.” Gibson intends the same rebuke, I take it, for those members of the Christian public at large who might also be tempted to turn away in order to avoid confronting the intensity of Jesus’s suffering.

  One of the central lessons of the Santa Trinita Altarpiece is likewise that the true followers of Christ must remain true to his suffering by refusing to turn away from it or reason it away. The figures on Christ’s left-hand side are worthy of criticism for being too dispassionate, too scholarly and rational in their response, as the inscription under their feet indicates (“Behold how the just man dies, and no one takes it to heart”). Too reflective a response prevents some from being moved by or “taking to heart” the event. Thus, the small space between Christ’s body and the scholar on Fra Angelico’s canvas shows us the infinite space between theology and faith. Angelico, too, sees the passion as something that ought to move us, to produce in us a certain response to the world.

  But the way Angelico conceives of the ideal emotional response is quite different from Gibson’s way. For Angelico, the passionate response to Christ’s suffering is restrained, and not permitted to destroy our attachment to the world. The wounds his Christ bears elicit our pity, but don’t confront us with horror. And the world surrounding his Christ is a bright, luminous, spring day, that reminds us of the rebirth of creation itself. Gibson, by contrast, situates his depiction in a dark, gloomy, nearly barren world, and has presented us with a vision that doesn’t allow us to avoid the horror and irrationality of Christ’s torment. As Gibson noted in an interview:

  I think we have gotten too used to seeing pretty crosses on the wall, and we forget what really happened. . . . But when you finally see it and understand what he went through, it makes you feel not only compassion, but also a debt. You want to repay him for the enormity of his sacrifice. You want to love him in return. (Lazzeri 2004)

  Fra Angelico’s dispassionate passion. Angelico shows us outwardly on Christ’s body the tranquil state of mind of an all-knowing God. It arouses pity, not horror. We see a world made new. Fra Angelico, Descent from the Cross, Santa Trinita Altarpiece (ca. 1430), illustration used by permission of Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

  Like all good depictions of Christ’s suffering, the intended result of Gibson’s film is, then, to produce a passionate response in us, the viewers. But we need to be mindful of the kind of response it provokes.

  On Christ’s Suffering

  A commonly voiced objection to Gibson’s film has focused on the level and graphic intensity of the violence and suffering it depicts. The often unstated assumption behind the objection is that such a depiction at best does nothing to advance the Christian message, and at worst actually obscures or distorts it. A.O. Scott’s review of the film is a clear example. “The Passion of the Christ,” he writes, “is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’s final hours that it seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it. . . . It is disheartening to see a film made with evident and abundant religious conviction that is at the same time so utterly lacking in grace.” Scott infers from the violence of the film that it must be intended “to terrify or inflame” the audience: “The desired response of the audience to this spectacle is, of course, not revulsion but something like . . . cowering, quivering awe.” He concludes that a Christian viewer is forced into a “sadomasochistic paradox” in which her faith in the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice compels her to squelch “the ordinary human response”—namely, “wish[ing] for the carnage to stop” (Scott 2004). Others assume that the violence of the depiction is attributable to Gibson mindlessly plugged Jesus into formulaic action or horror genres.

  A more charitable response would be to ask: what purpose might be served by such a vivid and disturbing depiction? This question can’t be answered wit
hout an inquiry into the nature of Christian faith, something that, perhaps understandably, most critics neglect. One simply cannot assess whether the graphic depiction of Jesus’s suffering will obscure the message of his death without some sense for the role played by his suffering and death in the life of the believer.

  Before analyzing Gibson’s film in these terms, it’s useful to contrast his depiction with two other visual depictions–the two we’ve already mentioned. The body of Fra Angelico’s Christ is largely unmarked by the suffering he has endured. His face, in death, looks peaceful. Rather than a barren and stony Golgotha, Angelico’s crucifixion occurs in a flowery garden on a bright spring day. The viewer of this scene can discern neither horror nor violence in Christ’s death. Instead, the viewer is shown how to look beyond the pain of this world, and see the world as an admittedly imperfect realization of God’s ideal of it. While Angelico’s depiction takes a number of liberties with the literal facts of the crucifixion—another criticism, incidentally, that is often leveled at Gibson’s film—it does so to better focus our attention on what it takes to be the true significance of the event. It thus goes out of its way to minimize the horror which, after all, rarely produces a rational and measured response, and is almost certain to obscure our ability to see the world as instantiating God’s idea of things.

  Lovis Corinth focuses on the horror and absurdity of Christ’s suffering. We see the world as brightly lit, yet bewildering and meaningless. Lovis Corinth, The Red Christ (1922), illustration used by permission of Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, New York.