Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy
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Finally, if Christ were either a liar or a madman, then he could have freely laid down his life—as he says he does in the quote at the beginning of this chapter—but he could not take it up again, as he does in the very last sequence of the film. God cannot die, but a man can. A man can’t raise himself from the dead, but a God-man can.
So, who is this Christ? The Passion of the Christ makes it plain that he is the Son of the living God, who calls God his “Abba”, his daddy; a man, who suffers and dies; and God, who encourages his friends around the table at the Last Supper to have faith in him: “You know that I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He is one person, who in his humanity suffers terribly, and who in his divinity is capable of elevating the rest of humanity to perfect communion with himself, because he has joined humanity to himself in himself. As a man who has been completely unified with God in his own person, Christ exercises both his human and divine wills to execute single choices that accomplish singular ends, and in this case to accomplish the end of redeeming humanity through offering himself as sacrifice.
Christ’s Struggle
But wait a minute, if Christ is such a perfect unity of man and God, why does he struggle so much in the Garden of Gethsemane? In that first scene he is doubled over in agony, and beads of sweat and blood pour down his face and drip from his beard. Doesn’t this indicate that at least some element in Christ is working against the purpose of offering himself as sacrifice? Sure, as a man Christ is inclined to those things that are good for human beings, and against those things that are bad for human beings. In the Garden Christ is anticipating what the movie unfolds, that he is to be betrayed, falsely accused, convicted, abandoned, spat on, hit, dragged about, scourged, mocked, and crucified. These are all certainly natural evils for a human being. It would be truly perverse of Christ to be inclined to any of these things. He doesn’t want these things, his human nature is repulsed by them, and yet his human nature in its higher faculties is capable of recognizing that these things are necessary to accomplish the end which he wants more than he doesn’t want the means to that end: The end of redeeming humanity. And so he struggles, he must struggle, to quiet his natural repugnance to torture and death in order to conquer death. What we see in Christ’s struggle to conform the whole of his self to the will of the Father in the Gethsemane scene, and then later in the scourging scene when Satan appears with a demon child to mock the strength that Christ draws from his mother, is not a lack of perfect union between his humanity and divinity, but rather the difficulty of maintaining this unity. There is drama in the execution of Christ’s choice. It doesn’t come easily, but it does come, and necessarily so.
What is the alternative to Christ’s choice? There are, I suppose a myriad of other possible actions we could imagine. All of them would involve, however, the essential aspect of not doing what he knew to be right. Nonetheless, in refusing to drink the cup poured him, he might have done many things that are good in some respect. It is good to preserve one’s life, for instance. But Christ tells his disciples in one of the Last Supper flashbacks of the movie that “there is no greater love for a man than to lay down his life for his friends,” and he knows that this is the time to put aside the good of preserving his own life in order to die for others. It is good to stop people from doing evil things. He knew not just that one of his disciples would betray him, but who and when and how. He could have stopped Judas from betraying him, though he might have only stopped Judas from trying to betray him through force. If he wasn’t imprisoned, he could have prevented Peter’s denials of him, at least those three. Maybe if Christ chose to speak eloquently at his trial before Caiaphas and like a good politician avoided answering the question of whether he was the Messiah, or if he had not met Herod with perfect silence and instead performed some minor miracle as requested, or if before Pilate he would have convinced him that it was far worse to allow this innocent man to be crucified than it would be to satiate the crowds calling for his death, he could have then prevented them from condemning him, and so saved them the offense of having done just that.
But it was the better choice for Christ to allow these people, and so many others, to contribute to his passion. For Christ, just like his Father, has a way of taking us seriously—which means respecting our freedom to choose good or evil. Judas was permitted to betray Christ, but he could have fully repented his deed instead of killing himself, and been the better for it. Peter did repent of his denials, and certainly became better for it. Who knows what might have happened later in the hearts of Caiaphas, Herod, or Pilate? For just as they were free to condemn Christ, they were free to repent of their deeds.
The deepest problem with any other choice than the one made by Christ is that none of them would have been in accord with the will of the Father, none of them would have been in accord with Christ’s own divine will. None of them, no matter what good might have come from them, could ever be wholly good because Christ would have failed in obedience, and at the same time failed to effect the immeasurable and total good of conquering death and redeeming humanity.
Still, in this chapter we are not so much asking whether Christ’s choice should have been different, as whether it could have been different. Much of what I’ve argued already has been to show that, far from being the choice of a madman or liar, there is a deep reason why Christ had to suffer, die, and rise again. This helps us answer whether Christ’s choice could have been different, by suggesting that it should have been just what it was. The two questions are intimately related. And yet, there is still the lingering possibility that Christ’s choice could have been different, even if in being different it would not have been the best. He is tempted in the Garden by Satan, just as he was in the desert. He struggles interiorly at different stages of his passion, as in those moments in the scourging scene before he rises to receive the second and even more severe round of scourging. So often in Gibson’s film Christ looks to his mother for support and inspiration, mirroring with his actions the words she utters when Christ is first brought before the Sanhedrin and by which she has lived since first learning of her special role in God’s plan: “So it has begun, Lord. So be it.” Why don’t all of these examples, and more besides, suggest that Christ’s choice to go through with his passion, and each of his successive choices to keep going through with it, hangs delicately upon Christ’s perpetual choice to sacrifice himself?
I want to suggest that they do: Christ’s choice really is precarious, as precarious as every genuine choice, but also it could not have been different. Perhaps this answer sounds contradictory. After all, how can one claim that something necessarily happens the way it happened, and that what happens is through the execution of a genuinely free choice? Seeing how these two claims are not in opposition to each other requires that we reflect further on the person of Christ, a person who is a unity of two natures.
Christ is the perfect God-man. This implies that not only does the unity of God and man achieve perfect personal unity in the one Christ, but that this person, the Christ, is perfect in his humanity as well as in his divinity. Christ is wholly without the stain of sin, original or otherwise. He has the perfection of every human virtue, one of which is practical wisdom–or what philosophers used to call “prudence.” Practical wisdom is a perfection of the human intellect which is concerned with directing actions toward what has been determined to be the morally best course of action. This best course of action is accomplished with the help of additional virtues, such as courage and temperance, that have as important aspects of their function keeping all of our various desires and appetites in proper order. Those moral virtues are tested when Christ struggles to maintain the course of action he already knows in his wisdom to be the best. But it is crucial to see that Christ, considered in his humanity, is already of such a character that for him to do something that is not in accord with what he knows to be the best action would be so wholly out of character as to be nearly unimaginable. His character was so noble and good that
it had become, as Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) would call it, a second nature: His human nature was not just that of any human nature, but that of an individual human nature that is fully flourishing. There were no apparent flaws in this character whatsoever, and so no apparent underlying currents of disordered appetites that might prompt an act of disobedience.
Nevertheless, ‘nearly unimaginable’ does not yet take on the force of ‘impossible’. If only a perfect man, it indeed would only be nearly unimaginable for him to overtly disobey what he knew to be the will of God. But perhaps if we throw into our considerations here the fact that Christ would have foreseen exactly the toll to be leveled against him in his passion—every curse hurled at him, every lash of the scourge, every thorn shoved into his head—it is much less unimaginable that he would have made a choice out of character. But even if an alternative choice for Christ were nearly unimaginable, we are still a long way from it being impossible. It is always possible for a human being to fail, but is it ever possible for God? We have to say “no,” if in fact God is truly all-powerful and so always effective in bringing to fruition his goals. When we consider Christ’s situation as he reflected on his soon to occur passion, we need to keep in mind that he is more than a man, he is a man-God. And it is, I suggest, Christ’s divinity that keeps Christ’s humanity on course, so to speak, in its perfection. If only a man, Christ may well have made a different choice, but as a man in perfect union with God in his very person, Christ could not have but made the choice he did.
But someone might ask, what happens to the supposed freedom of Christ’s choice? If he could not but choose to submit himself to the will of God the Father, how is it that he had any choice in the matter whatsoever? To answer this, we must first recognize that there is not that sort of necessity involved in his choice which is by its very nature wholly incompatible with freedom, namely the necessity of compulsion. There is nothing, so to speak, behind Christ forcing his choice in the way that one billiard ball forces another to move. There is no exterior fate acting upon Christ in the way that Greek dramatists imagined the workings of necessity. There is no overwhelming urge within Christ blindly compelling him to do what he did in the way that Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), for instance, would describe his will to power, or the way that Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) might describe his will to annihilation. Christ’s choice was entirely contingent, it follows upon an act of his intellect and will. And yet, his intellect and will being his, informed as they were with the plan of the Father and emboldened as they were with the grace of union with God himself, this contingent act could not but be what it was. Christ, in his humanity, enjoyed that very subjection to the Truth in his very person which is the goal of human life. He enjoyed perfect freedom in each of his actions, and necessarily brought to fruition the plan of God—and does so in perpetuity.
Through Christ’s divine nature he necessarily accomplished the will of his Father, a will he shared as his very own. Christ as God shared everything with the Father, knew the Father’s plan for salvation, and had the common purpose of effecting it. It is in the necessity of the nature of Christ, insofar as he is the Divine One, that he made the choice he made. But Christ in his humanity is a different matter. Humans have rebelled, and continue to rebel, against God’s will. But in Christ, there is not just a human nature and then a divine nature; here is a human nature that is perfectly wed to the divine nature in the same person. In Christ, humanity is elevated and made not just as good as it can be, but as good as it can be insofar as it is joined to the living God—and that’s pretty good, indeed! So, although in human nature considered in itself we don’t find the sort of necessity of nature to accomplish what we know to be right, we do find that sort of necessity in a human nature conjoined to the divine nature in the second person of the Trinity.
The Two Necessities in Christ’s Choice
Recall that we talked about three different sorts of necessity. Two of them apply to Christ’s situation, whereas one does not. The necessity of the end plays a large role in his choice insofar as God really does, in his great mercy and love, want not just to restore the former harmony that humans enjoyed with him, but to make this union incomparably greater. But justice, being what it is, requires that a sufficient atonement be made to repair the relation: There is an order to all that has been made, which reflects the order of the Creator, and that order cannot simply be laid aside out of convenience because without it there is nothing but chaos. Christ’s passion does not sate a bloodthirsty God, it rather restores a right order between God and humanity. More than that, it opens the door to complete union with God; a union modeled on the union of God and man in Christ himself. If this is to be accomplished, Christ must suffer, die, and live again—just as we see him go through this sequence of events in Gibson’s film. Christ knows this at the moment of making and continuing to make his choice to sacrifice himself for our sake: he does it for us. He wants us to continue to be in union with his Father, even as he is himself a union of a human nature and the divine nature, and so he chooses the means to the end; he accepts the necessity of the end.
There is also the necessity of Christ’s nature which is found in Christ’s choice. Christ, in both his human and divine natures, already desires the redemption of humanity. Through his divinity he elevates his humanity to perfection. In his own person there is as intimate a relationship between his human and divine wills as possible. The weaknesses of humankind, which he did indeed feel, made it a struggle to keep his humanity in unanimity with his divinity; but this is a struggle that necessarily would lead to success. Christ’s choice was, and is, free, perfectly so, but it could not, cannot, but be what it was and is.
There is nothing interior or exterior that forces him to do what he did. He makes his choice freely. But, making a free choice does not mean following a whim, or chasing a passion, or acting randomly. It means deliberating about what is the best thing to do, and then doing it. Freedom is by no means incompatible with reason. We are free to follow the dictates of our intellect, or not to, but we are more free when we follow the dictate of our intellect. This is so because if we do not, we are instead in some manner compelled by something like a lower desire. It is also true because more often than not our intellect is going to hit upon what really is the better course of action. In the case of Christ, rather than saying “more often than not” we say “always.” His human intellect was in perfect union with the divine intellect, and so was informed with the knowledge of what really was the best course of action. To be informed is not to be forced.
The Passion of the Christ presents a Christ who not only struggles physically and mentally in enduring his passion, but a Christ who permits his passion to occur in the first place. He permits himself to be subjected to others, tortured, and crucified. He allows himself to be so bound because he is necessarily bound to himself. This self, as the movie also reveals, is not just a man, but a man who is God. He, in freely planning the redemption of humanity, freely submits himself to the means necessary to accomplish it. This was his choice from the beginning, knowing as he did as the second person of the Trinity that human beings would abuse their freedom and that he would have to repair the fault preventing their good which is full union with him–and this choice could not have been different at the time appointed for his passion.
SOURCES
Aristotle. 1980. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W.D. Ross, revised by J.L. Ackrill and J.O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato. 1981. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett.
St. Anselm of Canterbury. 1988. On Free Choice (De libero abitrio) and Why God became Man (Cur deus homo?). In St. Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, translated and edited by Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Augustine. 1993. On Free Choice of the Will. Translated by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Thomas Aquinas. n.d. Summa theologi
ae, III, qq. 46–47. In The Summa theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Available at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What is justice? Can it be just that one person suffer and die on behalf of all other humans?
2. What does it mean to say that you are, in your very nature, free?
3. How can one argue that Christ’s inability to make a different choice is a sign of freedom and power rather than of weakness?
4. Can you think of any situations in which it would be right for you to choose to die for others?
5. What are the different senses of necessity explained in this paper? Can you think of others?
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Forgiving Judas: Extenuating Circumstances in the Ultimate Betrayal
ANNA LÄNNSTRÖM
I have felt sorry for Judas ever since I heard the Easter story for the first time. Even though I was told repeatedly that pity was not the appropriate reaction to the worst traitor in history, the sentiment still lingered. It returned stronger than ever as I watched Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
This film begins with Jesus praying in the garden. In the next scene, Judas goes to the High Priest and tells him where to find Jesus. The high priest throws him thirty silver coins for his services. The guards soon arrive in the garden, and Judas helps them to identify Jesus, betraying him with a kiss on the cheek. Soon after, Judas experiences deep remorse. In Gibson’s version, Judas is present when Jesus is brought before the High Priest. Overcome with guilt, he rubs his lips against the rough stone pillar, trying to remove the kiss of betrayal still lingering upon them. He then returns to the high priest and tries to undo the deal—“I have sinned by betraying innocent blood”—and throws the money at the priest’s feet. He is turned away.