It may go without saying that no artistic representation of Christ's Passion could do justice to the reality or to everyone's imaginal understanding of it. Yet I must say that I am very impressed with this film. The allusive symbolism throughout is both lavish and subtle, and much of it will be lost on philistines unversed in Scripture and Catholic tradition--from the wordless depiction of the scene described in John 8:8-11 to the clutched veil of Veronica bearing the impression of the Savior's blood-stained face. This may be regarded as a shortcoming of the film. Yet not only is this inevitable and unavoidable, but it points up a distinctive fact about such an undertaking as this: it cannot possibly be viewed and understood by all audiences as intended by its director and producer. The interior spiritual meaning intended in such a film--what Gerard Manley Hopkins might have called, had he lived to be a modern film critic, its "inscape"--is something that will remain inaccessible to any viewer unqualified in specific ways to see it as canonically intended. As Nicholas Wolderstorff says in his study of Art in Action, in order for a work of art to be presented "canonically," that is, in the way intended by its author, it must be presented "under conditions appropriate to the work" and to an audience that is "qualified in ways appropriate to that work." In the present case, this means that this film cannot be canonically presented under conditions where viewers are blind to the internal significance of the depicted Passion for them. It is not that the message is not objectively presented in the artistic depiction itself, but that viewers not qualified in appropriate ways will be unable to discern it.
Pascal was sensitive to the epistemological importance of certain dispositional prerequisites for certain kinds of knowledge. Thomas V. Morris writes, in Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life (p. 101), says that Pascal believed "that there are moral, dispositional, and attitudinal requirements" for acquiring religious knowledge. As Pascal himself noted: "Truth is so obscured nowadays and lies so well established, that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it." (Pensees #739) Max Scheler, in another vein, says that hate shuts down our ability to perceive positive qualities and values in other persons, just as love opens our eyes to see them in ways that others are incapable. Far from being the case that love is "blind," as it is commonly supposed, it is love that opens the eyes to see the qualities and values to which others are blind. What are the moral and dispositional prerequisits for spiritual insight? Things like loving the truth, and seeking it with all one's heart, caring about honesty and morality, and purity of heart and mind.
In similar ways, many viewers of this film will be unable to see the interior meaning that is intended in any canonical presentation of this film because they lack the spiritual and intellectual prerequisites to understand it. The point is not that those who come away from the film expressing incomprehension of it or hating and despising it necessarily do not care about truth and morality and purity, although I suspect this sometimes may be the case. (Psalm 1) The point, rather, is that regardless of how much one may have read about the meaning of Christianity for Christians, one cannot possibly know what it means to be a Christian unless one is a Christian--unless one understands himself as guilty of having betrayed God by sinning against Him and having been forgiven by Him through the atonment of Christ's Passion. Without this knowledge, one simply cannot begin to appreciate the significance of this artistic depiction of Christ's Passion as it was intended. I am not referring here to cavils that anyone may raise about the relative artistic and technical merits or defects of this film. I am referring to the fundamentally polarized division of viewers into two camps: those who understand and assent to the interior message of the film and those who do not. The split is as simple and fundamental as that elicited by Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous drawing of a "duck-rabbit," which may be interpreted either as a duck with an open beak or as a rabbit with its ears erect behind its head, depending on how you decide to look at it. Two people will look at the identical data: and one will see a duck, and the other will see a rabbit. The difference in what they're able to see will be determined by what they're prepared to see. One person will call it prejudice and bias; another may well call it discerning what's really there and what was intended all along by the author for us to see. Does your answer make a difference? If you believe in a divine Author, then reality itself has an intended canonical presentation; for, as St. Thomas Aquinas says (Summa Theolgiae, I, Q. 1, art. 10), it is in God's power "to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do [and here we might add, cinema]), but also by things themselves."
Beyond these remarks, for the moment, however, I can do no better than refer interested readers to the thoughful reflections of Christopher Blosser. For I am called from the sublime to the . . . necessity of attending a faculty meeting.
P.S. An illuminating group discussion by members of the St. Aloysius Catholic Church parish in Hickory, NC, which addresses much of the symbolism of the film, can be found on a link from the parish homepage.
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