Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

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

  The second feature—greatness, power, vastness, and an overwhelming quality—is familiar in film. Think of The Matrix and Neo’s awakening in a gooey pink pod to see himself one among countless others in the field of human batteries. The truth is almost too much to take. Think of Troy and the “thousand ships” gradually revealed as the camera pans to wider and wider shots. While The Matrix and Troy have sublime scenes, The Passion is powerful and overwhelming practically throughout. The mistreatment of the God-man is too much to take, with the indignities of being slapped, shackled, and spit upon. But even those who do not believe Jesus is God find the flogging, scourging, and fall-ridden way of the cross too much to bear. In a surreal scene one Roman soldier gives a lesson to another in “how it’s done,” oblivious to the suffering of the man whose flesh he impales with nine-inch nails. We just cringe.

  Consider too the grotesque in The Passion: powerful, overwhelming, tough to stomach. Taking license with scriptural narrative, Gibson shows us the devil incarnate as an androgynous hooded figure and slithering serpent. We have no sympathy for this devil. Rather, the figure’s sinister voice and appearance arouse disgust and fear, so close to Christ as it comes. As if the gore of the flogging were not enough, we see Satan as spectator, hideous child in his arms, wicked words from his forked tongue. Judas too is treated to the grotesque as madness descends on him. Children lose their innocence for virulence and chase him like the furies to his suicidal end. Too much, it is all too much to bear.

  The third feature, that the sublime “evokes ineffable and painful feelings through which a transformation occurs into pleasure and cognition,” links us to the suffering of Jesus. The sublime is related to the mystical via the ineffable, that to which we cannot give words. As Eric Bronson discusses in Chapter 10 of this volume, mystics often journey through great pain to reach a higher truth that the rational mind cannot comprehend and language cannot express. The experience of the mystic is ineffable, and likewise the portrayal of the suffering of Jesus engenders an ineffable response in the viewer. Sharing vicariously in the pain of Jesus, the viewer is led to the pleasure of realizing that all is not lost. Quite the contrary, everything is gained.

  Thought itself is pleasurable. “All people by nature desire to know,” is the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. We seek through thought the satisfaction of knowledge, true-justified-belief. Exercise of the mind, no less than the body, though sometimes painful in the process is pleasurable in its product. There are films that are not sublime though they keep us wondering and reward us with knowledge in the end, such as The Usual Suspects and Snatch. Not all knowledge is of the kind that comes at the cost of transformative suffering.

  The fourth feature—the prompting of moral reflection—is the most important of all. According to Freeland, a gap or disruption in the very medium of representation evokes a deep moral response from the viewer (2004, p. 27). Whereas we rest contentedly in contemplating beauty in art, the disquiet characteristic of contemplating the cinematic sublime makes us aware it is a movie we’re watching. We are pushed from sympathetic emotional reactions to deep reflective cognitions, from feelings to thoughts. Our very will to shatter the illusion of the fiction of the film becomes Gibson’s tool for directing our thought. According to Kant, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the object, not in our subjective belief that the Pietà is beautiful but in the Pietà itself. By contrast, Kant holds, the sublime is in us, it is our experience, but this makes the sublime no less objective. What we judge as sublime we implicitly believe others too should judge as sublime. Lots of movies, even cartoons like The Lion King, prompt moral reflections, sometimes even by disrupting the medium. But the disruption in The Passion purposefully engenders the sublime.

  Consider the movie’s use of Aramaic and Latin. Whatever else may be said, these languages heighten our sense of the sublime by adding to the strange and foreign quality of our experience, making us intellectually aware that this is not the familiar version of the story from memory or imagination. The subtitles engage us cognitively in a way we would not otherwise be engaged. All viewers, aside from the scarce few who know both Latin and Aramaic, get the film with subtitles and need them to follow the dialogue. The subtitles rupture the film and lead us from the emotional to the cognitive, from feeling to thought.

  The visceral emotional reaction to the violence, pain, suffering, gore, and grotesque overwhelms us in such a way as to compel moral reflection. And although the film may guide us toward certain moral conclusions, we need not accept them.

  It Wasn’t Sublime for Me

  Surely not everyone who has seen The Passion has found it sublime. Some will even agree that the film has all four of Freeland’s features and yet insist that they did not experience The Passion as sublime. Fair enough. Does that mean that Freeland’s account is mistaken? Not necessarily. Does that mean that sublimity is relative, that The Passion can be sublime for you but not for me? Not necessarily.

  Watching a film safely in the theater, like watching a stormy sea safely on land, allows for an experience of the sublime. The awful and terrible sight we would run from hiding our eyes becomes the object of fascination, as pain mysteriously mingles with pleasure. Kant believed the sublime put us in touch with a truth about ourselves, that our rational nature and free will make us superior to the sublime objects of nature, like tornadoes and tidal waves, which have the power to crush us. As he puts it:

  And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence. (Kant 1987, p. 120)

  Still, not everyone likes to watch tornadoes and tidal waves, feeling fearful even at an objectively safe distance. Such a person misses out on the experience of the sublime. The tornado is perfectly capable of affording the experience of the sublime but fear stands in the way. As Kant notes, “Just as we cannot pass judgment on the beautiful if we are seized by inclination and appetite, so we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid” (ibid.). I suspect something similar occurs in the case of some devout Christians viewing The Passion. Despite the objective safety, despite knowing “it’s just a movie,” fear stands in the way of experiencing the sublime of The Passion. We can no more insist that such people watch the film again to experience the sublime than we can insist that someone watch the thunderstorm approaching. But in both cases the experience of the sublime awaits those who leave fear at the gates.

  The Violence Defended

  The expectations and desires we bring to a work of art shape our reactions to it. A movie director must make choices concerning how to film and tell a story, and when the story is already well known the director’s choices will inevitably disappoint some. A beautiful movie would have been an ill-suited form of expression for the passion of Jesus. To be true to the subject matter Gibson was forced to make a movie that would be difficult to watch. Thus we considered the perennial philosophical question: Why do we willingly watch works of art that bring pain with pleasure? In the case of tragedies it may be that Aristotle is right, that we experience a cleansing, a catharsis. But as we saw, the story of the passion cannot be told as a tragedy. So are the controversial blood and violence of The Passion simply gratuitous? No, they are justified by Gibson’s attempt to deliver an experience of the sublime.

  SOURCES

  Aristotle. 1986. Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. London: Duckworth.

  Edmund Burke. 1998. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. Edited by David Womersley. London: Penguin.

  Peg Zeglin Brand, ed. 2000. Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  Arthur C. Danto. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago: Open Court.

  Cynthia Freelan
d. 1999. The Sublime in Cinema. In Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds., Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 65–83.

  ———. 2004. Piercing Our Inaccessible, Inmost Parts. In Chris Townsend, ed., The Art of Bill Viola (London: Thames and Hudson), pp. 24–45.

  Immanuel Kant. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett.

  Longinus. 1985. On the Sublime. Translated by James A. Arieti and John M. Crossett. New York: Mellen.

  Plato. 1992. Republic. Translated by G.M.S. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett. Especially Books II, III, and X.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Do you agree with Freeland’s list of key features of the sublime?

  2. What other films or scenes from films might be considered sublime according to Freeland’s features?

  3. Are religious subjects particularly suited to sublime treatment?

  4. Why would we willingly watch horror movies? What pleasure justifies the pain?

  5. Consider disgust. Why are we sometimes attracted to sights that disgust us?

  6

  God and Man Separated No More: Hegel Overcomes the Unhappy Consciousness of Gibson’s Christianity

  JAMES LAWLER

  According to the theology of atonement, God the Father sent his only begotten Son into the world to atone for the sins of mankind. For God is a just God, and justice demands punishment for sin. But God is also merciful, loving. So instead of punishing humanity for its sinfulness, as we deserve, He sent a substitute, an innocent sinless being, His own Son, to be punished on our behalf. Thus the demand for justice is satisfied, and God’s loving mercy for humanity is simultaneously expressed.

  For this logic of atonement, the more innocent the victim, the greater is the sacrifice, and so the more sins are expiated. It follows that the harsher, the more barbaric and brutal the punishment actually inflicted, the greater is the benefit in terms of the economics of salvation, where sin is bought back and redeemed at the price it demands. How appropriate then, as the religious imagination soars on the wings of this blood-thirsty rationality, to suppose the most sadistic forms of violent torture inflicted by the most degraded specimens of human sinfulness!

  And so in The Passion of the Christ Mel Gibson does not spare his audience one drop of blood, one sliver of flesh, in the unflinching portrait of God’s love for humanity. As if the punishment described in the Gospels were not enough, we see Jesus brutalized from the moment of his arrest and then plummeting over a bridge until his chains violently break his fall. As if the scourging of Jesus with ordinary whips were not enough, Mel Gibson adds razor blades to the humanly impossible torture. Not only is Jesus nailed to the cross, but the heavy cross falls so that now flesh-rending nails instead of gentler chains break his fall.

  In exemplifying this theology, The Passion of the Christ draws a stunning portrait of the darkest side of the human soul. It depicts all the depravity, the malice, and the meaninglessness of what the religious imagination of a certain cast understands by sin. So we see a sinister Satan lurking behind scenes in which Goodness Himself is systematically, unequivocally, thoroughly, and completely desecrated and destroyed. As the sun is covered by black storm clouds at the moment of Christ’s death, evil triumphs over good, darkness shuts out the light. Or so it seems.

  And yet it was all for nothing. Satan’s efforts were counterproductive, so that in the end we see him screaming uncontrollably in a fit of fury and frustration. The insane frenzy of punishment produces the opposite of what was intended. Jesus rises from the dead, whole in the flesh once again, except for a stigmatized body to remind his followers that what took place was not a dream. If the film, in its exhaustive depiction of the passion of the Christ, leaves little to the imagination, its final scene is a brilliant stroke of understatement. The risen Christ sets out from his tomb with an uncanny expression of purposeful endeavor. The propitiation has been accomplished. He must now announce the achievement to his followers, so that they can bring the Good News to humankind: The sinner is no longer mired in his sin as long as he recognizes the means of his salvation, the terrible price that has been paid as his ransom from the maggoty stench of Satan’s maw. Each drop of blood that was shed, which seemed only to deepen the pit of wickedness which humanity digs for itself, fills the chalice of communion with the Savior for whomever will drink of it. Although wholly sunk in unworthiness, the sinner who washes his sins in the blood of the lamb is raised to the highest heaven.

  Hegel on the Death of God

  In 1789, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) entered the Protestant Seminary at Tübingen University in the German state of Württemberg with the goal of becoming a pastor or perhaps a theologian of the Lutheran Church. Under the powerful influence of the French Revolution, he and his friends and fellow seminarians, Johann Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), became deeply involved in the revolutionary movements for liberating Germany from despotic government in alliance with a corrupt Church interested primarily in wealth and power. Although Hegel abandoned his initial plan of becoming a pastor for the career of a university professor, he continued throughout his life to deepen his goal of reconciling Christianity with French Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and rationality.

  Central to this goal was the critique of feudal and medieval ideas of hierarchical political systems and their alliance with hierarchically organized religion. Hegel understood the theological revolution of Martin Luther (1483–1546) to be a radical critique of the Church as an indispensable mediator between God and a fallen, sinful humanity. The fundamental theological justification of this order is the notion of the radical separation of Creator and creature, of God and humanity. To overcome this separation, a Savior is required to mediate between God and fallen humanity. And when that Savior returns to Heaven, the Church takes his place on earth as the indispensable means of salvation from the threat of eternal damnation. The theology of atonement thus underpins the hierarchical power of the priesthood over the laity, with all the potentiality for abuse that this implies. The greatest abuse, for Hegel, is that directed to human intelligence itself (Hegel 1974, pp. 389, 390).

  It is not the degradation, but the exaltation of the human spirit, expressed in Luther’s conception of the priesthood of the laity, that is in fact the deep meaning of Christianity itself. Christianity rejects the ancient notion of an unattainable deity in its astounding portrait of God becoming a human being and dying the wretched death of a criminal on the cross. In his Lectures on The Philosophy of Religion (1827), Hegel reflects on the Christian doctrine of “the death of God”:

  “God himself is dead,” it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves moments of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. (Hegel 1985, p. 326)

  Hegel calls the Christian vision of the death of God “a monstrous, fearful picture [Vorstellung], which brings before the imagination the deepest abyss of cleavage” (Hegel 1985, p. 125). The cleavage or separation of God and humanity culminates in Jesus’s cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). While suggesting the monstrous, fearful picture presented by The Passion of the Christ, Hegel develops an alternative interpretation to that of the theology of the atonement.

  According to Hegel, the central teaching of Christianity is that Jesus is both God and man, both human and divine (Hegel 1985, p. 121). He emphasizes Jesus’s statement in the Gospel: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). The death of Jesus must therefore be the death of God. But instead of separating Jesus as the divine God-Man from the rest of humanity, as the theology of atonement does, this doctrine serves instead to elevate humanity as a whole from its false conception of separation from God to the same oneness proclaimed
by Jesus. Accused of blasphemy in asserting his oneness with God, Jesus replied: “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods?’” (John 10:34; see Psalm 82:6). He who believes in Jesus, that is, he who understands and puts into practice what Jesus teaches, knows that he too is one with the Father. And so the human being with all her weakness, all his abysmal negativity, is a “moment of the divine.”

  Hegel on the Relation between Reason and Faith

  In an interview for Hollywood Jesus News, Mel Gibson affirms both the theology of atonement and the death of God:

  There is no greater hero story than this one, about the greatest love one can have, which is to lay down one’s life for someone. The Passion is the biggest adventure story of all time. I think it’s the biggest love-story of all time; God becoming man and men killing God. If that’s not action, nothing is. . . . Christ paid the price for all our sins. (Gibson 2003)

  But what does it mean to say that God died on the cross? We have two radically opposed conceptions of the death of Jesus, that of the theology of atonement which separates God and humanity, the innocent Savior and a sinful humanity, and Hegel’s quite different conception that the death of Jesus is the death of God, that God too dies and so even in its abysmal sinfulness, humanity is one with God. Which conception is right? Which one offers a more philosophically intelligible conception of Christianity?

  Traditionally, the problem of the relation between faith and reason has been solved by drawing a line somewhere and saying, up to this point we have the sphere of reason, and beyond this we have truths that are made accessible to us only by revelation. But if you can’t make any sense of these teachings of revelation, what does it mean to believe in them? If you don’t really know what it means to say that God has become human and dies the death of a criminal, how can you accept this idea on faith? If someone whom you regard as reliable tells you that he has seen flying saucers, you understand what he means by this and so you can accept what he says as a revelation for you. But if the revelation involves a logical contradiction, that A and not-A are one and the same, what can it mean to accept this on faith? This is what Christian doctrine appears to be saying in affirming the oneness of God and humanity, of the divine and the non-divine, in the person of Jesus.