Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

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

  Corinth, too, takes liberties with the facts. In his Red Christ, a soldier on Christ’s left hand side offers him a sponge full of vinegar to quench his thirst (Matthew 27:48), while a soldier on his right hand side thrusts a spear into his side (John 19:35)—an event that was supposed to occur after Christ had died. But Christ in Corinth’s painting is still very much alive, and he looks out at the viewer apparently confused and bewildered at the violence he is suffering. Unlike Angelico’s Christ (but very much like Gibson’s) Jesus’s body is battered and bloody. His skin has obviously been flayed, and his flesh is discolored by the trauma it has suffered; blood explodes from the wound as the spear is thrust into his side, and streams of blood run down from the wounds in his hands. Unlike Gibson’s world, the world of Corinth’s crucifixion is brightly lit by the sun. But Corinth’s sun doesn’t bathe the world in the bright, cheerful colors of Angelico’s crucifixion; instead, its bright blood-tinged rays color the whole world in shades of red and pink. The overall effect is therefore unlike either the lustrous, springtime depiction of Angelico’s or Gibson’s dark and brooding film. But before explaining how this contrast ought to be understood, let’s return to the question with which we began, namely, What purpose is served by the graphic depiction of Christ’s suffering?

  We have to assume that for Gibson, as for Corinth, the absurdity and horror of Christ’s suffering is itself an important feature to which the believer is supposed to respond. One might argue that if we make sense of it, if we rationalize it, we at the same time undermine our ability to experience it as an evil. At the same time, and for exactly the same reason, we will be tempted to dismiss the suffering of others. The problem is this: we think that if suffering is the price of sin, and if Christ has suffered for the repentant, then the human suffering we witness is either deserved (the result of unrepented sin), or will be compensated for through the atonement and the reward that Christ purchased for all those who believe in him. Either way, there is no need for the faithful to worry over the suffering of others. It is only the unfaithful who would feel any need to try to alleviate suffering, for in so doing they are presuming to act to correct what God himself has already taken care of.

  The existentialist philosopher-novelist Albert Camus (1913–1960), himself an atheist, explored these arguments brilliantly through the character of Father Paneloux in his novel The Plague. Camus puts into Paneloux’s mind the following thoughts: “For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering? He who asserted that would not be a true Christian, a follower of the Master who knew all the pangs of suffering in his body and soul” (Camus 1991, p. 224). Obviously, Father Paneloux realized that being faithful to Christ requires that one “keep faith with that great symbol of all suffering, the tortured body on the Cross” (ibid.), and acknowledge the absolute injustice and incompensable nature of Christ’s suffering. This acknowledgment, in turn, would force the follower of Christ to face up to all the other suffering she encounters in the world, to allow herself to be moved by it, and to devote her life to alleviating it.

  If this is true, then it would be a strength of any depiction of Christ’s crucifixion that it resist placing his suffering into a rational economy of exchange, that is, as a payment for the debt incurred by our sins. On this view, the intensity of Gibson’s depiction of Christ’s torment is a virtue. At some point, every rational viewer must be shocked by it, and should be willing to concede that it is excessive, unnecessary, and that it doesn’t make any sense. Monica Bellucci, who plays the role of Mary Magdalene in the film, put the point most concisely: The Passion of the Christ, she noted, is “a reflection on the horror and absurdity of violence” (Donn 2004, p. 29). In recognizing this horror and absurdity, one is ready to be moved by Christ’s suffering and, consequently, the suffering of all men.

  But Gibson’s absurd world is unlike the existentialist’s absurd world in one very important respect–a respect illustrated by the difference between Gibson’s and Corinth’s depiction. Remember that in Angelico’s world, Christ’s suffering shows us the presence of God in the world. In Corinth’s painting, divinity is neither instantiated in, nor withdrawn from, the world. Corinth shows us, instead, a world wholly unmarked by divinity—it does not even appear as the place from which God has withdrawn. The sun shines brightly in Corinth’s depiction, but it doesn’t infuse the world with meaning. This world is the only world, and it is a bewildering and absurd one. In Gibson’s world, by contrast, Christ’s suffering ultimately shows us how God’s presence is withdrawn from the world. The absurdity of this world ought, for Gibson, to lead us to look beyond it toward another world. But in this way the absurd is incorporated into a more profound meaning, and the point of Christ’s suffering is to make us despair of this earthly existence so we can set our hearts on the transcendent world.

  Christ’s Passion as World Disclosure

  Gibson’s depiction makes perfect sense if the point is precisely to show that Christ’s suffering is not rationalizable, and that one’s response to the absurdity of his suffering must be put at the center of one’s faith. Indeed, if philosophers like Camus are right, then there could be a very powerful ethical impact of such a depiction. But the contrast with Corinth should help us to reject the idea that all depictions are equally acceptable as long as they force us to face the horror and absurdity of Christ’s suffering. There can be important differences in what we learn from the absurdity.

  But now we have a new paradox: what standards can we use to critique these different depictions if we give up the idea that Christ’s Passion is ultimately rationalizable? We need to be able to critique something rationally without rationalizing it. Is this possible? Philosophers in the tradition of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), at any rate, have thought that we can. Pascal argued that, in matters of faith, the purpose of reason is a merely instrumental one—it can clear away obstacles to belief (Wrathall 2005). Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both philosophized descriptively. The point was to describe the world in such a way that we can see more clearly the phenomena without pretending to have either a logical account or a scientific reduction of the phenomena to causal structures. Such descriptions have critical “bite,” because they show us what is wrong with rationalist or cognitivist accounts of the phenomena. But, for such thinkers, the point of a philosophical account or explanation is not to produce a new theory, but rather to lead one to a direct apprehension of the phenomena in question. Having achieved such an apprehension, the philosophical account is given no further weight, for it is the apprehension which produces understanding.

  If we are going to philosophize about religion, or any other field where the goal is not to learn to think properly, but rather to be moved in the right way, some such approach must be the correct one. Religious theories, by the same token, ought to avoid philosophical disputes about matters that lie beyond our experience. Christianity does, of course, make claims that can’t be verified by worldly means. Accepting such claims as true is a necessary condition for our being Christians, and thus there is what one might call a cognitive dimension to Christianity. But such cognitive states are not sufficient for Christianity because belief doesn’t automatically effect a change in the way one experiences and acts in the world (recall in the film how Peter’s mere belief that he would never betray the Christ was worthless without the action to back it up). In general, Christianity values the cognitive state of belief, not as an end in itself, but as a means for producing a Christian life. And a Christian life, on the view I’m suggesting, aims at disclosing the world in a new way.

  The Passion recognizes the disclosive dimension of religious faith through a pervasive emphasis on perception. In what is, to me, the pivotal scene of the whole movie, Christ looks up to Mary and says: “See, mother, I make all things new,” which is a line drawn, not from the Gospels, but from the Book of Revelation (Revelation 21: 5-6). The challenge for
the Christian is precisely to learn to see all things new, to see how Christ’s suffering must change our experience of the world. Christian “knowledge” consists in this changed experience, it is a knowing how to see the world, and to respond to people and events in the world, in the light of God.

  Gibson’s film thus shares with philosophers like Pascal a sense that the function of Christian faith is not exhausted in adopting a certain mental attitude toward an unseen reality, but rather in attuning us to the world we see in such a way that we can see it for what it is. Jesus’ passion produces this attunement when we learn of it, are moved by it, and respond to it passionately. I call this approach to faith the world-disclosive approach.

  It is on the basis of the world-disclosive view that we can address the paradox discussed above. We can think through and assess different depictions of Christ’s suffering, not in terms of whether they adequately rationalize his suffering, but rather in terms of how they show us the world. If the world-disclosive approach to religious faith is right, then an introduction into the faith consists in an introduction to the practices that will let us see the world in the right way, for it is our practices that train our passions and thus allow us to see the world in the way that we do (Pascal 1995, pp. 156–57).

  Our ability to see the world as meaningfully structured—and this means, our ability to see the world at all—depends on our having the skills to respond to the meaning in the world. Gibson depicts this idea nicely in the scene where the young Jesus and Mary playfully discuss a tall, modern-style table that he has been crafting for a rich client. “Does he like to eat standing up?,” she asks. “No,” Jesus responds as he takes up the bodily stance of one sitting at a table, “he prefers to eat so. Tall table, tall chairs.” Mary tries to adopt a sitting posture at the table for a moment, and then concludes “This will never catch on.” Mary, lacking the practices and bodily skills involved in sitting on chairs at a table, is unable to even imagine how the table could work until Jesus pretends to sit at it. Just as Jesus needs to show her the practices for chair sitting to enable her to see the table in a new light, so he needs to show us new practices of submission and love to let us see the world in a new way. The new revelation of the world will only really take hold, however, when we master the skills and practices that let us see the world.

  This same thought is the key to understanding the relative advantages and disadvantages of a visual depiction. A written description cannot directly show us how to act or how something feels. It can at best refer to bodily actions and experiences with which we might already be independently familiar. Linguistic representation is, compared to a visual depiction, remarkably pallid and weak when it comes to capturing passionate bodily experiences, because when we experience something or do something, our experience or action is primarily a bodily rather than a mental experience or action. If we don’t already have the skills or experiences to draw on, the written description can’t tell us much. A picture, by contrast, can let us directly experience how something feels, how something looks, how something is to be done. It can also show us the bodily attitudes which constitute the feeling and the appropriate bodily stance to adopt for a practice. A film, in addition, can show us the actual bodily movements. It can thus move us directly to grasp the scene, free of the mediation of language.

  The difference is, to put it simply, the difference between, for example, reading in John 19:1 that “Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him,” on the one hand, and seeing a man scourged on the other. A description of a scourging, no matter how detailed and precise, can’t communicate the quivering that our muscles feel, the tension that builds in our limbs, and the beating of our hearts, as the pain another’s body feels speaks directly to our bodies. When we see another person in pain or in the throes of any emotion, we see it through our own bodily experience, not through mentally projecting ourselves into the other’s state of mind. This gives a pictorial depiction an advantage over written description. The written description could try to go inside the mind, to describe the “inner” content, of another’s experience (something, interestingly enough, that the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s suffering never do). But this cannot live up to the power of a visual depiction which can, itself, speak to our bodily sense for the world. As Merleau-Ponty put it:

  A movie is not thought; it is perceived. This is why the movies can be so gripping in their presentation of man: they do not give us his thoughts, as novels have done for so long, but his conduct or behavior. They directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people, which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze and which clearly defines each person we know. (1964, p. 58)

  This is not to say that we are not moved by a written depiction. The written account of Christ’s suffering and death have long been experienced themselves in a passionate, bodily way. But in order to produce such an effect, the words need to be translated into a bodily experience, whereas a visual depiction shows us the experience itself. No matter what and how much one says, there is something that the description can’t capture—namely, what the thing looks like, and how it feels to perceive it. And the linguistic description can only represent the look and the feel of a thing provided that we already have an experiential sense for it.

  Another way to recognize the important difference between linguistic and pictorial depictions is to reflect on the incommensurability between the linguistic order and the pictorial order. This incommensurability is manifest in that linguistic description is always compatible with an indefinite number of different, mutually incompatible pictorial depictions, a fact we’ve already illustrated with the different depictions of the crucifixion. And this point, in turn, puts us on the track of the danger of a visual depiction. The strength is that it communicates immediately to our bodies and can show us directly how to experience the world. The danger is that, being moved by a depiction, we will uncritically accept it as true.

  Movies assume a passive audience, and encourage us to lazily accept an interpretation of the world as it is fed to us. Indeed, one might prefer books to films precisely because they demand more of their audiences. But we should always be alert to the fact that a film is artificially constructed, and if it comes closer to replicating the direct experience of the world than language, it also falls short in important ways. For example, the world offers direct feedback as we respond to what we see; a film cannot. In real life, we can explore on our own the scene as it is unfolding, and we reap the rewards of acting correctly, as well as the consequences of acting incorrectly. The picture doesn’t allow us to explore the scene, but shows us only what it wants us to see. In addition, a film can manipulate appearances and the interactions between things in a way not possible in the real world. For all these reasons, if one had to choose between a true written account of an event and a illusory pictorial depiction of the same event, it is obvious what one should choose—at least if the goal is to achieve a correct orientation to the world.

  We should always be ready to ask of a depiction: Is it a true depiction, one that makes us feel as we ought to feel and respond as we ought to respond to the world around us? Being true to the written account isn’t enough, because there are an indefinite number of different ways to be true to the written account. One way is to orient us to the world, to disclose the world to us in the way that the written account strives to do. So, what of Gibson’s Christ? How does he show us the world anew?

  Gibson’s Version of the Passion

  So far, I’ve argued for the importance on the Christian account of being moved by Christ’s suffering, and I’ve suggested that to be so moved, we need to be confronted by the horror of that suffering. But the particular way that the suffering is portrayed, the way that it shows us the world, will disclose the world differently for us, and move us to respond in quite particular ways. I want briefly now to describe how Gibson’s movie does this.

  One who is moved by the absurdity of Christ’
s torment cannot appeal to an intellectual belief in the ultimate rationality of the world as an excuse for tolerating the existence of human suffering. In addition to believing that Christ is innocent and completely undeserving of any suffering, Christians also believe that we are all responsible for the fact that he does suffer. Gibson’s film forces us to confront the fact that the world contains undeserved and unjustifiable suffering for which we are responsible. In this sense, the movie is inaccessible to non-Christians, who will have no reason to accept that Christ’s suffering is connected in any way to us. But Christians, once we are brought to recognize our responsibility for undeserved suffering in the world, should, first of all, feel compelled to try as much as possible to avoid being the cause of any more undeserved suffering. We do this by freeing ourselves of the desires that produce suffering.

  Gibson tries hard to show us how pride, and the lust for power or wealth, produce suffering. “My kingdom,” Christ explains to Pilate, “is not of this world.” In the following scene, we discover that Pilate, by contrast, will subject Christ to torment and ultimately death because of his efforts to hold onto power and satisfy Caesar. The film illustrates the same point in a number of ways—one visually quite compelling instance shows how Christ, during a debate between Pilate and the High Priest, adopts an attitude of complete indifference to the competing parties, and looks instead at the dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, flying above the courtyard.

  Through the use of such motifs, Gibson points to a central focus of the Christian experience of Christ’s suffering: If we are moved by it, then we learn to see certain desires as producing misery and unhappiness for others. Beyond this passive response of trying not to cause more suffering, Christians hold faith with Christ by actively trying to alleviate the suffering that we encounter. The recognition that suffering can be unjustified and unrecompensable, together with a realization that we are implicated in producing suffering in unintended ways, ought to call us to actively seek to help others, which is a central message of Christ’s sermons.