Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

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

  Immanuel Kant. 1968. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper.

  Philip Quinn. 1993. Abelard on Atonement: Nothing Unintelligible, Arbitrary, Illogical, or Immoral about It. In Eleanore Stump, ed., Reasoned Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press.)

  Eleanore Stump. 1992. Atonement and Justification. In Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., eds., Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press).

  Richard Swinburne. 1989. Responsibility and Atonement. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Charles Tarliaferro. 1988. A Narnian Theory of the Atonement. Scottish Journal of Theology 41, pp. 75–92.

  Jerry L. Walls. 2002. Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy. New York: Oxford University Press. See especially Chapter 2.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Can one believe in the atonement of Jesus and also believe there are other ways to be united with God?

  2. Why is the resurrection important for the atonement?

  3. Do you believe Christ’s atonement can save us even if we are not morally transformed by it?

  4. Which theory of atonement makes the most sense to you? Why?

  5. How does the atonement relate to other central teachings of the Christian religion, such as Incarnation and Trinity?

  4

  The Focus of The Passion Puts the Person of Jesus Out of Focus

  CHARLES TALIAFERRO

  It hardly seems fair to complain that a movie entitled The Passion of the Christ gives too much attention to the passion of the Christ. This is particularly true because Mel Gibson’s movie takes on board more than the passion; there are some flashbacks to a charming, humorous scene of Jesus jesting with his mother and to a scene in which Jesus forgives and protects a woman charged with adultery, and the movie ends with the resurrection. Even so, Gibson’s giving center stage to the intense, relentless violence of the passion does raise a philosophical worry about whether the passion ultimately threatens to eclipse the nature and value of the person Christ who underwent the passion. Many (though not all) Christian theologians see Christ’s whole life as redemptive: Christ’s birth, youth, coming of age, baptism, nonviolent teaching, healing, and resurrection as well as the passion and death by crucifixion. By focusing almost exclusively on the trauma of the passion, has Gibson given us a portrait of suffering that is so riveting and absorbing that we naturally lose sight of the broader context of the life of Christ?

  There is also the following related worry: Does Gibson’s portrayal of Christ’s submission to unjustified torture wind up giving excessive pre-eminence to the value of redemptive suffering? In the film, it appears that the principal work of redemption is accomplished in the passion itself, whereas other theological treatments see the resurrection as just as vital as the passion.

  In this chapter I explore these questions and consider the positive contribution of theologies that give greater priority to the resurrection, but I must add at the outset that my chief goal is not to unleash a series of objections to the movie itself. My intent is more to raise questions and then to suggest ways in which experiencing this significant movie may be put in a helpful, expanded setting.

  A Prelude on the Philosophy of Persons

  Many ethicists and political philosophers in the twentieth century have lamented the way in which enormous harms have been brought about for the sake of impersonal, abstract ideals. Losing sight of, or just simply denying, the goodness of concrete individual persons has been at the core of the worst atrocities in recent history, as documented in Jonathan Glover’s superb book, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. This has led a number of philosophers who have come to be known as personalists to adopt a view which recognizes the fundamental value of persons themselves. For personalists, persons are valuable in themselves and not because persons can be happy or flourish, exercise reason, have desires and so on. By their lights, to value a person because a person can be happy (or to experience or do something in particular) is to elevate the value of something that is less than a person as a whole. Persons are more than any one state of mind or activity; they are capable of an inexhaustible array of feelings, thoughts, and actions, and are not to be valued only because they are good for some overriding purpose.

  These philosophers believe that locating the value of persons in some specific, singular aspect of their nature involves a failure to recognize the transcendent overflowing worth of persons themselves. By elevating some aspect of personal life like happiness as a basic value, one winds up relegating the concept of a person to some kind of vehicle or container that is worthy of regard because it can include happiness. Personalists see the person as a fundamental, irreducible good.

  Personalism may seem odd with its insistence on valuing persons rather than the state or activity of persons, but you may gain sympathy for it when you take seriously the enormity of harm done to persons in light of impersonal ideals and values. In Humanity, Glover writes convincingly about the dangerous consequences of a dehumanized, abstract ethic that fails to take seriously the reality of other persons who are as real and valuable as oneself. Even the best ideals, like justice and charity, have been distorted and used to great harm. Personalists have sought to combat such harm by keeping before us a robust, concrete concept of the good of persons.

  An example of harm that results from not seeing the good of concrete individual persons is the persecution of Jews carried out at different times by so-called Christians. This example is particularly fitting here because some religious leaders have worried that the release of Gibson’s movie might be a catalyst to anti-Semitic violence, much in the way that in the High Middle Ages in Europe Jewish communities would be subject to great violence during the Easter season when the passion of Christ was re-enacted.

  The modern movement of personalism grew out of a concern that if persons are valued for some other “greater” reason than being a person—whether it be religious, political or economic—then individual persons would inevitably be sacrificed in light of these “greater,” impersonal values. Although a wide range of philosophers have been classified as personalists from Martin Buber (1878–1965) to Max Scheler (1874–1928), there was a distinctive, important school of personalism that flourished at Boston University in the twentieth century and included B.P. Bowne (1847–1910), E.S. Brightman (1844–1932) and P. Bertocci (1910–1989). This movement influenced the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Focussing More on the Passion than the Person?

  Why should anyone think that Gibson’s movie risks a subordination of the person of Christ to the passion he underwent? The worry lies, in part, in the very nature of torture itself. Victims of torture report that one of the most grave injuries that one may experience is a complete collapse of one’s personal identity. A principal aim of a great deal of torture, whether the torture is physical or principally psychological is to destroy a person’s ability to think coherently about him or herself as a whole, integrated, healthy individual. Now, in the movie, Christ is not annihilated through the torment. He retains his identity and, when you get to the resurrection, one may even see him more as a survivor than only as a victim. In fact, his endurance of the sustained whipping, laceration, and immense loss of blood, testifies to an almost supernatural endurance of the person. Still, the brutality of the beating and the haunting ripping apart of his flesh, inevitably (at least for me) shatters my grasp of the breadth and redeeming scope of Christ’s life as a whole, including the resurrection.

  In a sense, there is so much violent bloodshed that the movie becomes about violent bloodshed. Rather than think of Christ as a whole, integrated life of healing, teaching and so on, it is the focused, mesmerizing torment that so consumes our attention that all else seems peripheral and decentralized. The cosmic, all absorbing point of view of the movie is Christ’s innocent endurance of the unjustified infliction of inhumane violence. The result is what
many studies of violence have recorded in victims of traumatic violence: a loss or obscuring of peripheral vision. Under severe threat, a human (and many animals) will lose his or her broader visual capacities, sometimes seeing things as though through a tunnel. My worry here is not that The Passion of the Christ somehow discredits the person Christ, but that the intense focus of the film displaces a regard for Christ’s life as a whole. The combined graphic torment, bloodshed, and grueling punishment is so gigantic and shocking that it edges to one side an appreciation of Christ’s whole life, teaching, and resurrection.

  In defense of the movie, it should be pointed out that any good, cinematic portrayal of intense agony is likely to focus its audience on the horror at hand. Would the movie be better if it were re-worked to show the birth and life of Christ as a preface or, like The Lord of the Rings, there was a sequence of three movies? This seems too much to expect. It seems unavoidable that in witnessing a re-enactment of the passion, one see the person Christ as shattered and brutalized. It would be odd if, for example, there was immense, endless bloodshed in a movie about the life of Gandhi, but it seems that a movie about Jesus cannot avoid taking seriously the violence that was unleashed in his torture and crucifixion.

  Fair enough. Perhaps it is enough of a reply to my worry that the film still makes good sense when accompanied with the suggestion that shell-shocked viewers might like to know something more about Jesus’s nonviolent love, healing, and so on. But even if the movie comes with a warning label, it still poses a danger I want to highlight.

  Let me shift gears at this point and outline a positive reason for seeing the passion in the context of the full life and resurrection of Christ. Then I make the case that the movie, with its singular focus, does indeed have some troubling implications.

  Resurrection and Reconciliation

  Consider a case where there has been some wrong and there is need for reconciliation. Imagine Patricia and Kris are friends but Patricia betrays Kris. Reconciliation between the two might include the following steps: Patricia realizes she did wrong, feels and expresses profound remorse, intends not to do this wrong again, renounces her past error, and perhaps even does something uncalled for in presenting Kris with some gift. We might further picture Patricia suffering immensely with regret for her wrong, perhaps even undergoing punishment. The problem of restitution still remains, however. Given that we can’t change the past, Patricia can never undo the fact that she committed some wrong.

  This would be most dramatically obvious in a case where she was involved in some great crime, like killing Kris’ child. No matter how much suffering Patricia undergoes or how many times she rescues other children, there will be no earthly way to restore the lost child. There will always be, on a merely human level, an inability to make full restoration of the good that has been destroyed. (This is true both in catastrophic cases like murder and in grievous but serious wrong-doing. Imagine I betray the confidence of my friend. Even there, I cannot reverse the wrong or somehow give her back the time she may feel she has wasted in our “friendship.”)

  The way the story of Patricia and Kris might intersect the Christian narrative is if we expand the context from the merely human to include the supernatural. Imagine Patricia does all that is within her power to reform and restore all past harm, albeit she cannot restore the child. But now imagine there is a person, a God-man, who is able and in fact does bring the child back from the dead, resurrecting the child in a transformed, good state. Imagine further that such a resurrection is also willed or sincerely hoped for by the wrong-doer so that Patricia, in a sense, wills along with the God-man that, indeed, the child be restored. This, I think, would be a decisive act, providing the element that will always go missing in reconciliation without the supernatural.

  On this view, the resurrection of the child would be part of the atonement (at-onement) between Patricia and Kris. And it would also be part of the atonement between God and creation if we expand the story even further to see the resurrection as restoring what Patricia wrongly did against God, given that such a killing or any wrong doing may be seen as violating a life in harmony with God. Obviously, a great deal more would need to be said to fill out an account of just how the resurrection of Christ is linked with the promise of the resurrection to new life of others. My point here is simply that early Christian theology, including Biblical teaching, saw the resurrection as well as the passion as central, defining features of Christ’s redeeming work (John 11:25).

  When the portrait of atonement includes the resurrection, there is a natural place for joy (even laughter, as I suggest later), as the resurrection is about the making whole and transfiguration of persons. You can’t rise from the dead without dying, and so the joy in the resurrection presupposes sorrow in dying and death. But there is a substantial Christian tradition that also sees the dying and death as inextricably bound up with, and leading to, the resurrection. The New Testament describes Christ as enduring the shame of the cross for “the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:2). Christian joy was and is best seen as not in the cross but before and after the cross or, if you will, through it; God’s loving power is stronger than death (Romans 8:35-39). Early Christian teaching in the Book of Acts emphasizes the profundity of Christ’s dying as the Messiah, but the preaching of the primitive Church makes no sense without the resurrection.

  In a sense, the teaching of the resurrection would probably carry even more wonder than the teaching of the crucifixion as that form of execution was commonplace in the ancient world. It was sometimes even regarded an entertainment. At the coliseum in Rome, criminals were often crucified during the lunch hour, which marked an intermission between the morning show of people being killed by “exposure” to wild beasts and the afternoon gladiatorial games. Christ’s torture and barbaric death may have been more brutal than others, but early Christians chiefly celebrated the overcoming of this form of murder and, even more importantly, death itself. While the ancients may not have found the violence of the cross unusual, what they did find unusual and deeply attractive was the nonviolence of Christ’s life and teaching, and visions of the resurrected Christ (I Peter 1:3).

  Gibson’s portrayal of Christ, however, with its focus on the horrors of the passion seems to place one more squarely in the suffering than in the resurrection as the key to the atonement. In another chapter in this volume, Jerry Walls outlines three different accounts of the atonement. I will not re-address each of those theories, though I will comment briefly on how Gibson’s theology of the atonement can encourage an unduly pre-eminent view of the good of redemptive suffering while subordinating the indispensable value of the resurrection.

  As Walls notes, my own preference is for what he calls “The Christ as Victor model” of the atonement. I think Mel Gibson’s film speaks more to the Satisfaction Theory and the challenges facing that theory are at work in the movie. In the Satisfaction theory, the sacrifice that Christ makes is itself a good thing. The movie begins with a passage from Isaiah 53 in which, as many Christians have held, the prophet is referring to Christ who will be wounded and crushed for our transgressions. On many versions of the Satisfaction model, the wounding and crushing is something deserved or fitting. The suffering of Jesus is seen as a sign of love; Jesus loves the world so much that he undergoes that soul-destroying degree of degradation and defilement as a payment of the penalty or debt that we sinners owe to God.

  This can lead one to value or take pleasure in the crucifixion or passion itself. This is dangerous, for what is pivotal to most Christian theology is that the cross, as an instrument of torture, and death itself are defeated by and through the love of God. Indeed, apart from the occasional Christian cult, the central Christian tradition holds that there is no pleasure, or relish, in the torment. Some Christian practices, especially for the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, include kissing the cross and this may be a symbolic or sacramental way of kissing Christ or enacting a ritual reversal of the kiss of Judas who betrayed Christ. But th
is is not kissing torment. If it were a veneration of torment, it would constitute theological sadism and a dangerous accommodation of violence. In a world where people have been persecuted in the name of Christ, such an accommodation must be avoided at all costs.

  In an account of the atonement in an essay on C.S. Lewis’s work, I suggest that Christ’s work is best seen not in terms of the surrogate bearing of a penalty that we deserve, but in terms of it breaking in and rescuing persons from an entangling, evil captivity. In this model, there is a sense in which Christ takes the place of human hostages who have bound themselves to oppression, but this is to break everyone free, or to make such freedom possible, by dying and then by resurrection (Taliaferro 1988).

  The personalist tradition has an important bearing on the way violence and suffering are portrayed, both in film and philosophy. Max Scheler (1874–1928) has brought to light the profound difference between those who are motivated to oppose violence because it is hateful and those who oppose it because of their love of health and wholeness. He thought of the latter as positive and life-affirming, whereas the former risks a dangerous development in which persons may become shaped and defined by the very thing they despise. Gibson certainly does not glamorize violence in The Passion, but its disproportionate, grievous intensity makes it hard to concentrate on positive, life-affirming values. Consider Scheler’s portrait of St. Francis of Assisi’s embracing poverty and his assistance of others through sickness:

  He does not love sickness and poverty, but what is behind them, and his help is directed against these evils. When Francis of Assisi kisses festering wounds and does not even kill the bugs that bite him, but leaves his body to them as a hospitable home, these acts (if seen from the outside) could be signs of perverted instincts and of a perverted valuation. But that is not actually the case. It is not a lack of nausea or a delight in the pus which makes St. Francis act in this way. He has overcome his nausea through a deeper feeling of life and vigor! This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery . . . the wallowing in the morbid . . . Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in the bug. (Scheler 1976, pp. 91, 92)