Tag: atheist

Probably the best movie about Jesus

Il vangelo

Franco Zefirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth”? No. (Phew!)

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”? No, not that one either. (Phew, again!)

No, “probably the best movie about Jesus” is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew.”

“Says who?,” you ask.

Well, none other than the Vatican’s own newspaper, l’Osservatore Romano, which in a review on the 50th anniversary of the movie’s premiere had the following to say (in the words of Emilio Ranzato):

“Whether it be a movie about a crisis in progress or about its overcoming, The Gospel according to Matthew remains a masterpiece, and probably the best movie about Jesus ever made. It is certainly the one in which his words ring out most fluidly, in the most elevated and the most powerful way. Hewn out of bare rock, like the best moments of Pasolinian cinema.”

But, what makes this movie the pinnacle of depicting Jesus’ life? The l’Osservatore Romano review elaborates:

“The director follows the Gospel pages to the letter and doesn’t shy away even from talking about miracles, which he presents with an inspiration worthy of a believer. In this way, on the one hand confirming the validity and power of the Christian word, but, on the other hand, giving it a more down-to-earth context in which to spread, the director clearly intends to give a thrust both towards the marxist and ecclesial worlds. At the same time, however, and maybe unexpectedly, he finds peace in a place that is equidistant from these two poles. Surely there have been few other times in the history of cinema where a representation that plays on sacred strings, or even only mythical and epic ones, has been built on such a sincere realism.”

So, what drove this marxist (and atheist and gay) director to making a movie about Jesus? He explains this himself – during the year before the movie’s release – in a letter to Lucio Caruso of the Pro Civitate Christiana of Assisi (a Christian volunteer organization):

“The first time I visited all of you in Assisi, I found the Gospels at my bedside: your diabolical calculation!

That day, in your place, I read them from beginning to end, like a novel.

And in the exaltation of reading – as you know, it’s the most exalting thing one can read! – there came to me among other things, the idea of making a film… as the days and later the weeks went by, the idea kept getting more overwhelming and exclusive. It threw in the shade all the other ideas for work I had in my head, it weakened and devitalised them.

And it alone remained, alive and thriving within me… my idea is this: to follow the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, point by point, without making a script or adaptation of it. To translate it faithfully into images, following its story exactly without any omissions or additions.

The dialogue too should be strictly that of Saint Matthew, without even a single explanatory or connecting sentence, because no image or inserted word could ever attain the poetic heights of the text… to put it very simply and frankly, I don’t believe that Christ is the son of God, because I am not a believer – at least not consciously. But I believe that Christ is divine. I believe that is, that in him humanity is so kind and ideal as to exceed the common terms of humanity. For this reason I say “poetry” – an irrational instrument to express this irrational feeling of mine for Christ.”

His answer to the question of why he, a non-believer, had made a film which dealt with religious themes, at a press conference in 1966, is also illuminating:

“If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

But, how does one who is not a Christian create a piece of art that is recognized by Christians as their own, and not only that, but a masterpiece? Here Pasolini’s answer is very telling:

“[T]he rule that dominated the making of the film was the rule of analogy. That is, I found settings that were not reconstructions but that were analogous to ancient Palestine. The characters, too—I didn’t reconstruct characters but tried to find individuals who were analogous. I was obliged to scour southern Italy, because I realized that the pre-industrial agricultural world, the still feudal area of southern Italy, was the historical setting analogous to ancient Palestine. One by one I found the settings that I needed for The Gospel. I took these Italian settings and used them to represent the originals. I took the city of Matera, and without changing it in any way, I used it to represent the ancient city of Jerusalem. Or the little caverns of the village between Lucania and Puglia are used exactly as they were, without any modifications, to represent Bethlehem. And I did the same thing for the characters. The chorus of background characters I chose from the faces of the peasants of Lucania and Puglia and Calabria. […]

In reality, my method consists simply of being sincere, honest, penetrating, precise in choosing men who psychological essence is real and genuine. Once I’ve chosen them, then my work is immensely simplified. I don’t have to do with them what I have to do with professional actors: tell them what they have to do and what they haven’t to do and the sort of people they are supposed to represent and so forth. I simply tell them to say these words in a certain frame of mind and that’s all. And they say them.”

Whether intentionally or not, this way of analogy is precisely Jesus’ own method. The employment of parables, and his teaching in its entirety rely fundamentally on analogy. Here is God – the infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, wholly transcendent and other – speaking to his creatures, who are addled with limitations, and the only possible way is that of analogy, since the listeners have no direct access to the ultimate realities that the speaker is trying to convey. At the heart of this method is in fact the very life of the Trinity, where each Person empties itself so as to receive the other and fully gives itself to the other that is ready to receive them. This self-othering1 nature of God is the basis of analogy, which Pasolini applied masterfully and I would like to argue that his work resonates with Christians not only because of the subject matter, but because of the method that begot it. And I have to say that I am a great fan of it too!

To conclude, I’d just like to share a fragment of the dialogue between the Franciscan Fr. Ugolino Vagnuzzi and Pier Paolo Pasolini that took place in June ’68 and that Fr. Vagnuzzi published a couple of days ago. It starts with Pasolini’s words:

““I saw Christ with two “eyes,” one being mine – of a rational man, modern and a lay person; the other being the look of a simple person with great faith. These two visions complement each other, I’ll explain: I saw him as the Son of God, mystically, religiously, but at the same time I saw him as a revolutionary.”

I asked him [writes Fr. Ugolino] whether before or after that Christ was so successful in the cinema, he had said something to him.

“Religious convictions or non-belief are like blocks of quartz. The reasons that make these blocks dissolve is always mysterious, so I can say neither yes nor no to you.”

I was deeply moved when he then turned to me with these words:

“You see, dear Brother, you and I are one on one and the other on the other bank of a river. A bridge unites us where we can meet. Both of us must travel some distance. I am certain that you will not say no to taking these steps, which are precious to me.””

1 A term coined by my überbestie CS.

Humanist transcendence in religious art

Algebraicszoom s

A couple of weeks ago I read an excellent article in the Guardian, by the philosopher and Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, Kenan Malik. While it is an article that clearly positions religion as deprecated, inferior and outmoded (sentiments I certainly don’t share), it nonetheless makes some very positive moves.

Malik starts out by recognizing a piece of Christian writing as “wonderful, luminous,” able to “discover the poetic even in the most mundane,” and proceeds to argue that the awe that inspires religious artists and the spiritual force that drives them to create are “a celebration of our ability to find the poetic and the transcendent,” which is “something very human.” It is this attitude of recognizing value in the work of another, whose beliefs the author of the article does not share and even opposes, that made me like Malik’s approach from the start.

Having established an openness towards religious art, Malik asks whether “non-believers can truly comprehend the meaning of religiously inspired art.” The answer he provides not only addresses this interesting question, but serves as a basis for even broader dialogue between religion and atheism:

“[W]e can think about the sacred in art [… n]ot so much as an expression of the divine but, paradoxically perhaps, more an exploration of what it means to be human; what it is to be human not in the here and now, not in our immediacy, nor merely in our physicality, but in a more transcendental sense. It is a sense that is often difficult to capture in a purely propositional form, but one that we seek to grasp through art or music or poetry. Transcendence does not, however, necessarily have to be understood in a religious fashion, solely in relation to some concept of the divine. It is rather a recognition that our humanness is invested not simply in our existence as individuals or as physical beings but also in our collective existence as social beings and in our ability, as social beings, to rise above our individual physical selves and to see ourselves as part of a larger project […].”

Malik then proceeds to sketch out a brief history of transcendence in philosophy and art, noting its roots in religious belief and proceeding to present attempts made to transplant it into humanist soil in the 15th century, e.g., by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy and by Dirk Bouts, whose “The Entombment” (shown next) Malik analyzes to great effect, arguing that it is an example of a “changing conception of the sacred” that reveals a “humanising impulse.”

Bouts the entombment s

Malik is quick though to point out a “growing suspicion of the very idea of transcendence” in the post-Enlightenment period when “the very rootedness of the idea of transcendence in religious belief made it an uncomfortable concept.” These were accompanied by a gradual ebbing away of the “optimism about human capacities that had originally suffused the humanist impulse,” leading – through the horrors of 20th century history – to a “darkening perceptions of humans.” At the same time, that century also witnessed a “revolution in the way that artists were able to conceive of the human.” Here Malik points to “Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time to Mark Rothko’s paintings, from Barbara Hepworth’s figures to Pablo Neruda’s odes” as “astonishing works of art,” but proceeds to declare that “[i]t makes little sense to call such works of art “sacred”.”

What is curious though is that Malik next quotes Mark Rothko as saying: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them,” but decides to consider Rhothko’s being religious merely a being “religious”:

“What Rothko calls “religious experience” is not what would traditionally be seen as such. It is rather an attempt to grasp the meaning of our humanness not in its immediacy, nor merely in its physicality, but, to borrow a religious term, in a more apophatic sense.”

If anything, saying that something is apophatic is to align it with the most traditional and deep-seated of religious intuitions about God’s otherness, put particularly starkly by Blessed Duns Scotus: “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” or by St. Cyril of Alexandria: “For we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him. For in what concerns God to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge.” To Christians, God is – to borrow Malik’s words from a different context – “difficult to capture in a purely propositional form.” And this is not just the opinion of fringe elements or of eccentrics from a distant past – it is clearly stated in the Catholic Church’s current Catechism: “God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God — “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable” — with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.” (§42). If that’s not apophatic, then I don’t know what is …

The above is not an attempt at an “aha!” or a “gotcha” though – instead it is meant just to suggest that what Malik sees as an areligious or a meta-religious transcendence – a “break[ing of] the shackles of the sacred while maintaining the sense of the transcendent”, in fact has the hallmarks of what I would wholeheartedly label as religious.

What I’d like to take away from Malik’s thought is a very positive point though, which is that the transcendence understood very differently by Malik and myself nonetheless seems like the one transcendence to me that we both appreciate and relate to. In spite of Malik’s efforts to distance contemporary expressions of transcendence in art from any and all religious associations, that exact same art is to me deeply religious and connects to the scared when I view, hear or read it.

Ultimately Malik’s moves can also be seen as a mirror to Pope Benedict XVI’s quoting Simone Weil saying that “all art of the first order is, by its nature, religious.” I have to say I like this picture: atheists claiming religious art is not really religious but humanist, and religious people claiming that secular art is religious after all. To my mind these are both profound compliments and a source of joy :).