Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

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

  4. Let’s suppose that Jesus responded to the taunts to come down from the cross by doing just that. How would the story go from that point up to the present?

  5. Must God hide? How obvious would you like him to be?

  15

  The Death of Socrates and the Death of Christ

  GARETH B. MATTHEWS

  For a devout Christian the story of the death of Christ must be, in important respects, utterly unique and without parallel. Yet even the most devout Christian can still reflect on the similarities and differences between that story, as recounted in the Gospel narratives, and accounts of the deaths of other great figures in history. For a philosopher one obvious choice for comparison and contrast might be Plato’s account of the death of Socrates in his dialogue, Phaedo.

  On the surface at least, the stories of how these two figures died could hardly be more different. Mel Gibson’s retelling of the Gospel stories in The Passion of the Christ makes the death of Jesus on the cross torturously painful. The relentless scourging and extended abuse Jesus suffers beforehand appear in the film as nothing less than a prolonged horror. By contrast, the end of the life of Socrates, as Plato portrays it in the Phaedo, is serene, rational, and remarkably civilized. According to Plato, Socrates spent the last day of his life in prison conducting a lively seminar on the immortality of the soul. Having, as he thought, defended his position successfully against the best counter-arguments the disciples gathered around him could come up with, Socrates then went into an adjoining room of the prison to have a bath. When he returned, he said goodbye to his wife and children. When they had left, the executioner entered and said this to him:

  I shall not reproach you as I do the others, Socrates. They are angry with me and curse me when, obeying the orders of my superiors, I tell them to drink the poison. During the time you have been here I have come to know you in other ways as the noblest, the gentlest and the best man who has ever come here. So now too I know that you will not make trouble for me; you know who is responsible and you will direct your anger at them. You know what message I bring. Fare you well, and try to endure what you must as easily as possible. (Phaedo 116cd)

  A little later, when the man who was to administer the poison appeared with a cup of hemlock juice, Socrates said to him, “Well, my good man, you are an expert in this, what must one do?”

  The poison bearer replied, “Just drink it and walk around until your legs feel heavy, and then lie down and it will act of itself” (Phaedo 117ab).

  Socrates complied with the instructions. As he lay on his pallet, waiting for the poison to take effect, he turned to his disciple, Crito, and said: “We owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget” (Phaedo 118a). A scholarly footnote to the text explains that a cock was sacrificed to Asclepius by sick people hoping for a cure and that Socrates meant by his final remark that death is a cure for the ills of life. Soon after Socrates made that remark, his eyes glazed over and he died.

  One can hardly imagine an account of the last hours of a human life that stands in greater contrast to Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. According to Plato, Socrates died calmly and quietly, after having conducted a lengthy and philosophically complex discussion of life, death, and immortality. According to Gibson, Christ died in a gruesome, even barbaric way, after suffering almost unbearable physical abuse and sadistic brutality. So far then, the comparison is all contrast.

  Yet there are also important similarities between the deaths of Socrates and Christ, even as these deaths are portrayed by Plato and Gibson. By reflecting on the similarities, as well as the differences, we can come to understand Socrates and Jesus better. We might also hope to understand death better, including especially our own death.

  Both Socrates and Jesus were condemned to death by a court. In the case of Socrates, the jury was a very large assembly of Athenian citizens, perhaps as many as 500 (or maybe 501, to prevent there being a tie vote!). Socrates’s accusers brought their charges against him. And Socrates was given ample time and opportunity to defend himself against the charges. To judge from Plato’s transcription of the trial in his Apology (‘apology’ in this context means ‘defense’) Socrates took the opportunity to explain his philosophical mission in life and to lecture the jury on their mistaken attitudes toward death.

  Jesus was condemned by the Jewish Supreme Court, the Sanhedrin, and later put to death, somewhat reluctantly, to judge from Gibson’s film, by the Roman governor of the province, Pontius Pilate. Instead of 501 members, the Sanhedrin had seventy-one, or, if it was the “Little Sanhedrin,” only twenty-three. All the members of that court were themselves priests.

  Both Socrates and Jesus were apparently tried for, and convicted of, religious offenses. Socrates, at his trial, seems to have faced two sets of charges. According to the second set, he was “guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new divinities” (Apology 24b). Jesus was charged with the “blasphemy” of declaring himself to be Christ, the Son of God (Matthew 26:63–65)

  Behind the charge of impiety against Socrates and the charge of blasphemy against Jesus there were no doubt political, as well as purely theological motives. To Pilate Jesus must have seemed to be a potential insurrectionist. To the Council of Priests Jesus was most probably a heretic who promoted his heresy. So behind the religious charges against Jesus there were, in all likelihood, concerns among the Romans for the stability of the empire and, among the priests, for the authority of the priestly establishment in Judea.

  With Socrates the political enmities seem to have been even more complicated. According to Plato, Socrates had made leading figures of Athens look foolish by showing through extended questioning that they could not explain in any philosophically satisfactory way what justice requires or what virtue is. He also seems to have infuriated leading figures of Athens by his acts of conscientious objection. For example, he had apparently refused what he considered to be illegal orders to help arrest someone the authorities wanted to hold in custody. Instead of obeying the order, he had simply gone home (Apology 32cd). Finally, some of Socrates’s followers had been thought to have acted dishonorably, and Socrates seems to have been held responsible for their dishonorable behavior.

  Are the death of Socrates and the death of Christ also similar in being a model for us to emulate when we have to face our own death? Certainly Plato has as one of his aims in the Phaedo to help us learn how to die. Early on in the dialogue Socrates says that “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (64a). No doubt Plato has Socrates say this because, in Plato’s own view, death is a liberation of the soul from the encumbrances of mortal life, including the lower pleasures of food and sex. On this view we should welcome death, though not hasten it by suicide (61e–62c). We should welcome death, since it will free us to enjoy the pure pleasures of the mind, including, especially, philosophy.

  The attitude toward death that Plato ascribes to Socrates in the Apology is somewhat different from his attitude in the Phaedo. To be sure, Socrates in the Apology is equally serene about the prospect of his own death. But there he takes a more agnostic position on our prospects for an afterlife. At no point in the trial, according to Plato, does Socrates offer any proofs for the immortality of the soul. Still, in his first speech to the jury Socrates castigates his fellow Athenians for fearing death:

  To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. (29a)

  Later on in the trial, in his final speech before the court, Socrates offers a more extended line of argument. He begins with the annunciation of these possibilities:

  . . . either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocating for the s
oul from here to another place. (40c)

  Concerning the first possibility he says this:

  . . . all eternity would seem to be no more than a single night. (40e)

  Concerning the second he has this to say:

  I could spend my time testing and examining people there, as I do here, as to who among them is wise, and who thinks he is, but is not. (41b)

  Put another way, Socrates in the Apology supposes that either death will be pure nothingness for him, and so can in no way harm him, or else it will offer him a further chance to do philosophy, which is the activity he most cherishes in life.

  These are the thoughts of a man who has had, by his own lights, a good life. If death brings further opportunity to do what he has found most satisfying in this life, then it is to be welcomed. If it brings his extinction, at least it cannot harm him. Thus Socrates ends his defense with these words to the jury:

  Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god. (42a)

  Thus although the picture we get of Socrates’s attitude toward death in the Apology differs significantly from the one we get in the Phaedo, each work gives us a philosopher’s picture of how to die.

  What now about the accounts we have of the death of Christ, and especially the re-enactment given us in The Passion of the Christ? Do they help us think about how to take up an appropriate attitude toward death?

  Christians sometimes take the life of Christ to be a model for their own lives. Yet, for a Christian, there are obvious ways in which the death of Christ has to be different, much different, from our own deaths. These two items of Christian belief clearly stand in the way of any effort to draw conclusions about how we ought to die from the way Christ died:

  (1) Christ was God in human form.

  (2) Christ died for the sins of the whole world.

  According to orthodox Christian belief, we are each of us made in the image of God. Yet none of us can literally be God in human form, as Jesus Christ was. So death for us cannot be what it was for Christ. In particular, we cannot have quite the same knowledge of God, or of an afterlife, that Christ had. We may, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” But we cannot have the same assurance of the world to come that Christ had. And so our death will have to be somewhat different from the death of Christ, no matter how fervently we believe in the world to come.

  Second, we cannot possibly die for the sins of the whole world. We may die, when we do, and in the way in which we do, as a result of the sins of certain other people. But atonement for the sins of others, let alone for the sins of the whole world, is not something within the range of our life possibilities. And so the significance of our death cannot be anything like the significance Christian doctrine assigns to the death of Christ. Is there then nothing at all in The Passion of the Christ that could help us think about and meet our own deaths?

  There are two sayings of Christ, both included in the Gibson film, that have been traditionally thought to help each of us face our own death. First, there is this saying of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane:

  My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt. (Matthew 26:39)

  This saying may be particularly helpful to people who face a prolonged and painful death. It may be comforting and inspiring to such a person to think that even the Son of God, facing the horrors of scourging and crucifixion, wishes he did not have to go through with it all. It may also be helpful to think that there may be some Divine purpose, or some act of Divine will, behind what seems otherwise to be only needless suffering. Gibson’s film does not give any special prominence to this saying of Jesus; but faithful Christians, seeing the film, may need only a bare reminder of these words to have them in mind through the grueling scenes to follow.

  The other words of Christ that have traditionally been thought to help us face our own death are the words he is said to have spoken from the cross, echoing Psalm 22:1:

  My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46)

  This saying of Jesus may come to the Christian believer as something of a shock. How could Jesus Christ, the Son of God, even entertain the thought that God had forsaken him? The New Testament scholar, Oscar Cullmann has offered the following interpretation of this striking cry of despair:

  Because [death] is God’s enemy, it separates us from God, who is life and the creator of all life. Jesus, who is so closely tied to God, tied as no other man has ever been, for precisely this reason must experience death much more terribly than any other man. To be in the hands of the great enemy of God means to be forsaken by God. In a way quite different from others, Jesus must suffer this abandonment, this separation from God, the only condition really to be feared. Therefore he cries to God: “Why has thou forsaken me?” He is now actually in the hands of God’s great enemy. (Cullmann 1965, p. 17)

  On Cullmann’s interpretation this second saying of Christ can also be important to us as we face death. We, too, can expect to be abandoned to death, even if we have an abiding faith in God and a fervent hope for the world to come. No argument for the immortality of the soul can be counted on to give us protection against that sense of forsakenness and abandonment we can expect to have as we die. No reports from patients with “near-death” experiences that tell of a life “on the other side” can be guaranteed to save us from the threat of abandonment. Even the most steadfast faith in what we take to be God’s promise of a life to come cannot be guaranteed to shield us against the feeling of forsakenness that Christ also experienced on the cross.

  As I have said, both of these last sayings of Christ are included in the Gibson movie, although they are not given any special prominence. Anyone already familiar with the Gospel accounts of the passion of Christ will know to expect them, but they are not underlined or highlighted in the movie. So they are evidently not part of the movie’s central message.

  By contrast the suffering of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ is elongated and magnified, seemingly to the point of excess. Consider how much of the film is devoted to amplifying and drawing out what is stated so succinctly in these verses of St. Matthew’s Gospel:

  And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him. As they were marching out, they came upon a man of Cyrene, Simon by name; this man they compelled to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull), they offered him wine to drink, mingled with gall: but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. (Matthew 27:31–35)

  So why did Mel Gibson draw out the sadism of the soldiers and the agonizing suffering of Christ to the point that many viewers need to turn their eyes away from the screen? He must have wanted to show Christ as bearing the unbearable and suffering the insufferable. And that, in turn, means that Gibson was not focusing on the suffering and death of Christ as a model for how you and I might face our own suffering and death. Rather, he wanted to present Christ as doing something that we cannot possibly do for ourselves.

  Of course, there is a way in which Plato also presents Socrates as doing something that, in all likelihood, none of us will be able to do ourselves. The philosophical argumentation Plato has Socrates present in the Phaedo includes a presentation of Plato’s Theory of Forms, in some ways the most audacious and enduring metaphysical doctrine in the history of Western philosophy. It strains credibility to the breaking point to think that anyone, even Plato himself, could patiently set forth his most ambitious metaphysical theory on the very day of his own expected execution.

  Still, developing a philosophical theory, even one as audacious as Plato’s, is a human accomplishment. It is the accomplishment of an extraordinarily brilliant human being; but it is still the work of a human mind. Atoning for the sin
s of the whole world is not a purely human task, not even the task of a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Mother Teresa, or a Martin Luther King. I conjecture that Mel Gibson had Jesus Christ in his film suffer so inordinately to make the point that what he was doing on that first Good Friday was nothing less than atoning for the sins of absolutely everybody, even the most evil and cruel persons our sad and broken world has ever known.

  One obvious point in emphasizing the inordinate suffering of Christ is certainly to inspire religious devotion. Among many Christians, Gibson’s film seems, in fact, to have succeeded in inspiring devotion. But inspiring devotion to Christ may also have the effect of distancing Christ from us and so making His example less relevant to the way we think about our own death.

  There is another way in which The Passion of the Christ makes the life and death of Christ more of an icon, and less of an example for us to reflect on in considering our own mortality and the end of our own lives. Consider this passage from the New Testament scholar and theologian, Rudolf Bultmann:

  I do not actually know what death and life are, for that could be truly known only when life is at its end—the end, when death is there, also belongs to it. Yet we have a peculiar preknowledge that death is not a mere natural event, not simply the cessation of life, but that it is the test of our life; that it is something unnatural, enigmatic, against which we struggle and in the shadow of which our whole life stands. (Bultmann 1966, p. 157)

  Except in rare cases, for example, when patients have “near-death experiences,” we cannot literally practice dying. Yet we can realize that our death may be, as Bultmann puts it, “the test of our life.” Plato presents Socrates as clearly passing this test. In his trial, according to the Apology, he chides his fellow Athenians for thinking they know what justice and virtue are, when they don’t. But, in a similar way, he also chides them for thinking they know that death is bad, when they don’t. And in the Phaedo he carries on a complex and intricate philosophical discussion right up to the time of his execution.