Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

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

  The violence and cruelty that Christ suffers in The Passion is a good example of an area where Gibson elaborated well beyond what the Scriptures say. The pertinent Scriptural passages merely point to the fact that Jesus was flogged and abused (Matthew 27:26; Luke 23:16; Mark 15:15; John 19:1–2). But the movie dwells in excruciating detail on these abuses, including their effect on Jesus. After his arrest, one of Christ’s eyes is swollen shut, and the flogging leaves his ribs exposed. These images have prompted accusations that The Passion is a religious version of Lethal Weapon.

  Films also have a powerful way of affecting the understanding and the mood of viewers through the sound track. The text of the Gospels has no sound. There is no music, no background noise, and most often readers do not utter the sounds of the words they read. Written texts are silent in this sense. The understanding and mood these texts produce on readers is generally the product of an understanding of their context. But films can create a mood through the use of music, and the music in Gibson’s film has a powerful impact on the audience. From the very beginning, it is both eerie and foreboding, creating a sense of doom and the momentous importance of the events taking place. Its Middle Eastern allusions and the echoes of Chant suggest authenticity and spirituality.

  There is another interesting sound factor in Gibson’s film that is missing in texts: the languages spoken in the film. We hear Jesus and his Apostles speaking Aramaic and Pontius Pilate and the Romans speaking Latin. The differences between the two languages are substantial and they are perceived differently by different audiences. To someone whose native tongue is a Romance language, Aramaic sounds rough, confusing, and uncouth, whereas Latin sounds smooth, clear, and sophisticated.

  In short, Gibson faced a serious challenge in the making of The Passion: To provide a film account of Christ’s ordeal based on the Gospels that is accurate and effective. Yet, as we have seen, for much that he had to do, he had little guidance, or no guidance at all, from the Biblical text. Still, he tried to meet the challenge. The question is: On what basis?

  Different Ways of Knowing What God Truly Means

  There are several common ways of interpreting the Scriptures. They break down into two groups. Some assume that the Scriptures are the Word of God and, therefore, that an interpreter’s function is to find out what God means. What is it that God wishes to communicate through the text he has given to humanity? A second way looks at the Scriptures as just another historical record without any religious significance except for those who believe in them. The Christian Scriptures are the texts that Christians believe to be the Word of God. The task of interpreters, then, is to try to figure out what the texts mean either to their historical audiences or to Christians in general, rather than what God means through them.

  If one takes the second approach, sociological, historical, and linguistic data should be the means to understand the Scriptures. However, if one takes the first approach and assumes that the Scriptures reveal God’s wishes for humanity, then the question of how to understand them becomes something more than a matter of scholarly inquiry. Why? Because an element of faith, a supernatural factor absent from the other accounts, plays a decisive role in interpretation.

  The Passion is an interpretation that assumes the Biblical text is the Word of God. We know this not only because Gibson is on record as being a believer, but also because the film takes the Scriptures at their face value. The film does not put the story in the context of what Christians believe now or believed then. It is not a report on the beliefs of a group of persons, as for example, we might report concerning ancient Greeks. The film presents the story narrated in the Gospels as what it claims to be, the story of the Messiah. As an interpretation, the task of the film is to make plain to us what God wished to say through the Scriptures. But how can it accomplish this? Several ways recur in the history of Scriptural interpretation: personal intuition, authority, the Scriptural text alone, historical scholarship, or tradition.

  Personal intuition determines what God wishes for us to know based on the interpreters’ own understanding of the text or on a personal revelation they have from God. A good example of this is found in the famous scene in the garden described in the Confessions, when Augustine (354–430), in torment over his spiritual life, hears a child say, “Take and read.” In response he opens the Scriptures on Romans 13:13, which he interprets as a divine message for his personal situation. Many Christians regularly use this method to cope with their daily lives and find answers to personal problems, but some seek to extend the applicability of the message to others.

  This method has the advantage of immediacy for interpreters. Those who use it are convinced that they are right because it is directly present to them. But there are also disadvantages, for this approach assumes that an individual person has some privileged connection with God and it fails to provide confirmation except at a personal level. How can we know that someone’s particular understanding of the Scriptures reflects what God truly means? And how can we settle disagreements between two conflicting individual views of it? In our context, this would entail Gibson’s take on the Scriptures based on his own intuition of what God has said. And indeed, he plugs into the film some things for which there is no evidence beyond his own perspective. An example is the introduction of the devil in the flogging scene, another is the demon like children that haunt Judas before he hangs himself.

  Authority is another source of claims of interpretative legitimacy. It consists in the acceptance of the legitimacy of a person or group of persons to provide interpretations of the Scriptures. The validity of the interpretation is, therefore, unquestionable. This position has been frequently asserted in Christianity, although different Christian denominations identify different sources of authority. Among those most frequently cited are church councils, particular congregations, groups of elders, individual leaders, and those who hold determinate offices.

  The main advantage of this view is that the interpretations provided or sanctioned by the authority do not come into question, although questions do arise concerning the legitimacy of a particular authority. Gibson is a Catholic and it is evident in The Passion that he accepts certain interpretations of the Scriptures that are based on the authority claimed by the Catholic Church. For example, he gives a very prominent role to Jesus’s mother in the film, whereas she only appears briefly at the foot of the cross in one of the Gospels. Moreover, he accepts that Christ did not have any brothers, something that comes through clearly when the film provides glimpses of the child Jesus. (The New Testament does refer to Jesus’s brothers, but the Catholic Church, unlike Protestants, maintains that Mary remained a virgin her entire life.) Under normal circumstances, domestic scenes would present the child playing with his brothers, as a part of a larger family. But the film’s shots of the child Jesus are always of him and Mary alone. Indeed, even his father Joseph is absent.

  Gibson also appears to rely heavily on the visions of two nuns, the German Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) and the Spanish María de Agreda (1602–1665). From one or the other of the accounts of Christ’s passion by the first or of Mary’s life by the second, he borrows the view that Jesus’s arm was dislodged in order to line it up with pre-drilled holes in the cross, the scene in which Christ is thrown over a bridge, the turning over of the cross, and many other details. Indeed, Philip A. Cunningham argues that the film is “so dependent on her [Emmerich] that it could have been titled The Passion According to Emmerich.”

  Another way used to interpret the Scriptures emphasizes the texts themselves as the source for their interpretation. The Scriptures speak for themselves, and in cases in which a particular text is not clear, other Scriptural texts can be used to enlighten us about its meaning. Some take the view that only the Scriptures are authoritative and only the Scriptures can tell us what God truly means through them. But others accept the authority of the Scriptures while allowing other sources in their interpretation. For both, Scriptural interpretations have
to be as faithful to the text of the Scriptures as possible.

  The problems with this approach arise particularly when the Scriptures themselves are regarded as the only source of Scriptural understanding. The interpretive method that Martin Luther (1483–1546) called sola Scriptura (only the Scriptures) is fraught with difficulties. Perhaps the most vexing is that the Scriptures are silent on many key points of doctrine. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Bible. Its formulation by the early Christian community was an attempt to make sense of various Scriptural statements about God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The Passion illustrates well some of the inadequacies of this approach. For instance, although Gibson tried to be faithful to the languages spoken at the time of Christ, he made choices for which there is no Scriptural support. In the film, Pontius Pilate speaks Latin with various people, including Christ, but did he actually do so? Latin was not a commonly spoken language at the time in Palestine. Moreover, the Gospels are written in Greek, not Latin. So this is a reconstruction based on what Gibson and his advisers think makes sense, considering that Pilate was a Roman. Something similar can be said about the use of Aramaic rather than Greek in the film.

  Historical scholarship characterizes another approach: perhaps we can figure out God’s message by putting the words of the Scriptures in their historical context, and using the tools supplied by sociology, history, textual criticism, linguistic studies, and other related disciplines. After all, it seems essential that before we determine what a Biblical text says, we understand the language in which it is written and the meaning of the words it uses in their historical context. This information is available to us only through scholarship. Indeed, for philosophers such as Martin Kusch and Volker Peckhaus, the key to the interpretation of texts, including religious ones, lies in their social context–whence the name “sociologism” or “contextualism” often given to their approach.

  It’s quite clear that Gibson helped himself to this source. He dressed his characters, including Christ, in historically accurate clothing; the buildings that appear on the film, again, seem to be historically accurate; and the actors were taught to speak the ancient languages correctly. Much that the film adds in order to complete the picture presented in the Scriptures can be traced to information provided by various disciplines of learning about the period. Yet, this information is neutral when it comes to God and religious belief. Scholarship cannot tell us what God means, but only what the people who were writing the Gospels believed he meant. This way of interpreting the Scriptures, then, also fails when used exclusively to try to understand what God truly means.

  The last position I wish to consider identifies tradition as the context in which the Scriptures should be interpreted. At the outset, tradition makes considerable sense, for the Scriptures speak in a framework of beliefs and practices, outside of which they would be silent. This framework provides the key to meaning, filling in the gaps that the Scriptures have. Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas (1224/6–1274) and Francis Suárez (1548–1617), emphasize tradition in the proper understanding of the Scriptures. Outside these circles, however, tradition is also used, even if often disparaged.

  Consider the important matter of Christ’s appearance. How tall was he, and what kind of face did he have? The tradition in certain Christian circles is to take the image reputed to have been imprinted on Veronica’s veil or on the Shroud of Turin as accurate representations of his appearance. The first—which is reported to have been kept in Rome until the fifteenth century, and of which there are pictorial renditions—is taken by many pious believers to have been the cloth with which Veronica cleaned Christ’s face during his walk to Golgotha. The second—currently in existence—is considered to be by some the shroud in which Christ’s body was wrapped after he died. The face portrayed in both is rather long, with features that have been reproduced in most movies about Christ. Gibson’s Christ fits this image.

  Another traditional view that Gibson accepts is the portrayal of Barabbas. In the Christian tradition this man is a terrible murderer, whose exchange for Jesus dramatizes the latter’s plight. In the film, Barabbas is presented as horrible and wild. Christian art traditions also inspired Gibson. For example, it is common for art to depict the crucifixion in certain ways: Jesus carries a complete cross; the nails are driven through the palms of the hands, not the wrists; and a foot rest is added to the cross.

  But traditions can be mistaken, as is the case with the ones mentioned derived from art. Moreover, why pick one tradition rather than another, and how do we decide which one is right? Some have argued that Barabbas was not a murderer, but rather a freedom fighter. And some Protestant churches dispute many of the traditions generally accepted by Roman Catholics.

  Clearly, none of the approaches commonly used for the interpretation of the Scriptures is unassailable when taken by itself. It is also clear that the various ways of interpreting the Scriptures are themselves dependent on something else. Whether one holds that personal intuition, a certain authority, the Scriptures themselves, scholarship, tradition, or a combination of these, should be the determining factor in Scriptural interpretation, the choice depends on something more basic: the understanding of one’s faith, that is, theology.

  Theology presupposes belief, but goes beyond it to articulate doctrines that are entailed by, and necessary for, its understanding. Theology not only provides doctrines but also a context in which to place the Scriptures and a method for interpreting them. This means that theology ultimately determines the way Scriptures are understood. Particular theologies establish the proper place for personal intuition, authority, scholarship, the text, and tradition in the interpretation of the Scriptures. Arguments about the correct interpretation of the Scriptures, then, make sense only within a theological context, that is, they should consider the theological framework within which interpretations are developed. Otherwise, there is little hope of settling disagreements about the Scriptural message.

  Let me summarize what I have said in three points. First, each of the ways to interpret Scriptures we have considered is inadequate by itself; all of them depend on certain beliefs that are part of a certain understanding of a faith, that is, on a theology. Second, from this it follows that theology is essential for the determination of the correct way of interpreting the Scriptures; only within a theological context can one judge whether an interpretation is legitimate, for theology provides both the rules of interpretation and the criteria of evaluation. Third, it is at the level of theology that most disagreements about interpretation take place, rather than at the level of the interpretation itself. This entails that it is at the theological level that these disagreements should be addressed. But what does this tell us about Gibson’s film?

  Gibson’s Take on Scripture

  I began by noting that The Passion of the Christ is very controversial and that there are serious disagreements about whether it is a good film. Judgments about the film’s value usually concern issues of Scriptural interpretation. Did the film picture the Jews correctly? Did it present Christ accurately? Was Gibson right in casting the devil as a woman or androgynous being? Is the violence in the film warranted? And so on. These questions cannot be answered unless one first determines the criteria Gibson used in his interpretation, and it appears that he used a variety of criteria. There is evidence of personal intuition, authority, attention to the text, historical scholarship, and tradition. But this is not enough for us to judge whether the use of these approaches and their corresponding criteria are justified. We need to go one step further, to the theological principles that Gibson was emphasizing in order to find any justification for the interpretation given in the film.

  The issue breaks down into two questions: Did Gibson have a theology? And what is that theology? The first question can be answered easily. The presentation of the verse of Isaiah 53 at the opening of the film makes clear that Gibson takes a theological standpoint: H
e views Jesus as the Messiah. This textual connection is eminently theological–the product of the attempt by Christians to understand Christ in light of Old Testament prophesies. Another attempt at visually tying the New Testament to the Old occurs when Jesus crushes a snake released by the devil in the Garden of Gethsemane. The reference is to Genesis 3:15, in which we are told that “the woman” (Jesus’s mother) will “bruise the head” of the serpent (through Christ). But there are many other instances of a theological background to the film, such as the assumption that the four Gospels are reliable accounts of the passion and that they tell only one story.

  The second question, concerned with the particular theology that inspires the film, is more complicated. It could be answered on the basis of external evidence, based on what Gibson has said he had in mind. However, this is too facile an answer, for he may have intended to do something that he failed to accomplish. The real task is to figure out the kind of theology the film actually reveals. And there are some obvious indications of this. One piece of evidence of the particular Catholic theology that inspires the film is the prominence of Mary and her special connection to Christ—think of the moment in the movie in which she enters a place and senses the presence of Jesus above her. Another is the mentioned absence of brothers of Jesus in the flashback to his childhood. And still another is the connection between the sacrifice of the cross and the Last Supper through a flashback, which reminds us of the mystery of the Eucharist.

  But this is not enough to settle the issue: the task is beyond the bounds of my present aim. This has been to show how a philosophical analysis of the problems of interpretation raised by Gibson’s film can be helpful in evaluating the film. And in fact, philosophy has proven helpful in clarifying one aspect of the controversy concerning The Passion of the Christ: it has helped us see that evaluative questions about the film, when this is presented as an interpretation of a segment of the Christian Scriptures, cannot be effectively settled without considering the theology that inspired it.