The Apocalypse

In the film, The Apocalypse (2002), the Apostle John is a prisoner at an island-prison because he is a Christian. He is having visions of heaven in the last of days and Valerio, another prisoner is dutifully writing what John dictates so various church congregations can know of John’s revelations. He is esteemed so much by other Christians that he feels pressure to steer them to God’s truth. Too much esteem, I submit, is being directed to John, as he is, as he admits, only a human being, though he does get caught up in his own direct access to God, as in being able to know the will of God. This is a temptation for any religionist, especially religious leaders. Although subtly, the film conveys John’s over-reaches though without having another character explicitly refer to them as such.

In one of his visions, John hears the question, who is worthy to open the scroll of the meaning of mankind to God. That is, why did God create our species? What does God intend for us in creating us? The answer that John receives is that God wants people to turn back to God to praise God and feel God’s love. Who is worthy to break the seven seals on the scroll? Only the innocent lamb who gave himself to be sacrificed for humanity. “Look,” an angel tells John during a vision, “the Messiah has triumphed, and so he will open the scroll.” Indeed, as John points out, the core of the Christian faith is that God will be victorious over evil at the end of time. In the meantime, John believes God is calling him to lead people to God’s kingdom.

Other Christians in the movie think John’s significance is more than merely preaching on how God’s truth can lead people to God’s kingdom. Gaius, the leader of a congregation, says, “We must wait until his letters show us God’s will.” This implies that John has a special access to God in virtue of having visions and being the last person alive who witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Irene implores John to come with her to escape from the prison. “We need you so badly. You’re the only witness to the resurrection of our Lord. They will listen to you. You will save us.” It is highly significant that in praying, John says, “I am only human,” and he replies to Irene, “Only the Lord can save us. But now he wants me here to deny my own name and testify to his.” John believes that Jesus is keeping John at the prison. It is God’s will. But is it? Even John finally admits to Irene that he could be wrong. After all, John feels that he should help Christians who are lost. So, after John tells her, “I have to stay. The Lord has spoken to me,” and Irene begs John in the name of Jesus to escape to save her and the other Christians, he suddenly realizes that he, a mere mortal, could be mistaken, so he joins her. As it turns out, the Lord has not spoken to John; his place is with the struggling Christians rather than in prison. In fact, John is very mistaken.

John’s sudden realization should be a wake-up call for any Christians who are so utterly convinced that they know the will of God in their lives. It is not as if everything that happens is God’s will; such a belief ignores the impact of free-will, which in turn is necessary to avoid the conclusion that God is responsible for evil. Historically, the Jansenists, for whom Augustine’s later works rather than the early book of free will are important, believed that the Fall damaged free-will rather severely such that no good whatsoever can come from us. In the film, John voices this theology in stating, “my strength is not from me; it comes from the Lord. But to stave off the self-love that manifests as selfishness, is it necessary to deny having any strength of one’s own? Augustine holds that self-love of that of oneself that is in the image of God has positive religious value. Must even such self-love be denied in order for the sin of selfish self-love to be expunged from a person’s nature? Augustine clearly thought that self-love is not necessarily a sin. Even Jonathan Edwards argues that self-esteem is a neutral self-love in religious terms.

Therefore, John deserves some credit for giving food and drink to an old man and Valerius, respectively, when they are mistreated by Roman guards in the prison. Acting thusly in line with Jesus’s preachments and example, John does not risk incurring the sin of self-love. Ironically, in believing that he knows God’s will for him, that sin can find enough pride to grow on. John’s compassionate acts matter in a religious sense, in terms of him entering the kingdom of God. So, John is mistaken again when he states, “He who believes shall have eternal life.” Without love put in action, even faith that moves mountains is for naught. John is correct, therefore, in stating as a Christian that “God is love, and whosoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” John is hit by the Roman head of the prison and put in a cage for days for having wiped the back of a violent, nasty prisoner whom a guard has just whipped.  John uses his free will in compassion to an undesirable and thus not only believes that God is love, but actively chooses to participate in loving acts that are inconvenient. It is subtle, but very important, that the other prisoners and Roman guards are taken back as if in awe when John is compassionate in actions to the weak, old, and even nasty. This awe is not owning to John’s salvific personhood, as though he has direct access to knowing God’s will and can save Christians who feel lost.

In short, John’s strength is not wholly due to God; free-will was not so warped in the Fall that Christians do not deserve some credit for choosing to act in line with Jesus’s teachings on how to enter the kingdom of God that is within, rather than just at the end of time. The film could do more to emphasize that John’s compassionate acts instantiate the presence of the kingdom of God within him, and this would not be the case were John not able to exercise enough of his free-will in choosing to act rather than just believe consistent with the type of inconvenient love preached by Jesus in the Gospels.

The Count of Monte Cristo

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.

Edmund Dantes is a fervent believer of the religious significance of vengeance. It is, he says, a “holy remedy . . . an eye for an eye.” He also insists, “Revenge is a sweet thing to live for, or die for.” So Abbé Faria tells Dantes while both are in prison, “Vengeance belongs to the Lord, Edmund. Turn away from such unholy thoughts before they destroy you.” Nietzsche points out that ascribing vengeance to God carries with it the collateral damage of a contradiction being in a deity that incorporates a vice while still being omnibenevolent. That conception of God is discredited, and thus tot, or “dead,” precisely because of the contradiction, but could it not be argued that God is being benevolent to the victims of unjust harm by subjecting the culprits to harm? Even so, inflicting any harm, even if ethically deserved, can be said to exclude the peace that come with forgiveness even and especially enemies.

The distinctly religious question in the film is whether exacting revenge is a “holy remedy” justified by the committing of an injustice in the first place, or an unholy thought because revenge involves the intentional infliction of harm. The first claim is belied by the obfuscation of “holy,” a distinctly religious idea, with “injustice,” a distinctly ethical idea. Whereas inflicting harm can be justified ethically as deserved given the harm from an injustice, holiness itself can be said to exclude any infliction of harm. Instead, forgiveness goes with the holy. In fact, Jesus Christ’s conception of the Father’s kingdom can be said to be filled with compassion in the face of the pain of the human needs of a person’s enemies and even detractors. That revenge could ruin the life of an avenger may factor into a utilitarian-based cost-benefit analysis of whether to exact revenge, but any such negative consequence is not why a person seeking a taste of the holy via the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus in the Gospels would not engage in vengeance.

In the film while Abbé Faria and Dantes are digging a tunnel so they could escape, Faria gives Dantes the map to a treasure so Edmond could do good deeds rather than seek revenge. Faria’s strategy fails because although Edmund finds the treasure and promises himself that he would do good things with it, he actually uses his wealth and self-donned title of the Count of Monte-Crisco to take revenge on “four unjust, selfish men.” In fact, after the dual with the son of Mercedes, his former fiancée, Dantes says, “Providence again! I am the emissary of God. I’ve been spared to carry out his will.” In addition to engaging in the vice of vengeance, Edmund is guilty of the sin of presuming to know the will of God with the pride of claiming to be God’s emissary. It is interesting, therefore, that Edmund does not find peace after he has exquisitely vanquished the four men. This point is apparent in the final scene, when Edmund is trying to convince Mercedes to return to him rather than to move to Africa to be near her son. The religious existential toll that the series of vengeful strategies have taken on Edmund Dantes is finally revealed; the Abbé was right all along.

In trying to justify to Mercedes the vengeance taken on her husband, General Mondego, Edmund lies, “That was simple justice. Believe me, it gave me no joy.” It did in fact give him a feeling of satisfaction, which, by the way, if different than peace. Mercedes does not take the bait; instead, she replies, “Avenging angels may not ask forgiveness of their victims.” Even if the unjust deserve ethically to suffer, avengers would find asking for such forgiveness to be humiliating because of the suffering that they have undergone unjustly. Edmund replies, “I am no longer an instrument of God. I’ve been plunged back into nothingness. I’m searching for something lost. My soul; my self.” Unfortunately, she does not point out that he has been no such instrument and it is impious for him to hold onto that belief. Making this point would develop the distinctively religious element of the film. She could even say that even if her husband and the three other unjust men deserved to be punished for having inflicted severe suffering—ten years in prison!—on Edmund even though he was innocent, he should have transcended the ethical domain to act in a pious distinctively religious manner by forgiving the four culprits. That films shirk back from developing such theological and philosophical dialogue does not mean that the medium is not capable of doing so to get viewers thinking (but not to indoctrinate them).  Teasing out tension between the ethical and religious domains is a worthy task of the medium of film. In this film, however, Mercedes simply replies that he would never find the man he had been before being imprisoned. “That person died,” she laments. She tells him that she hopes he will find peace, but she does point out to him that he will not find peace because he has engaged himself so fully in exacting revenge, for satisfaction is not the same as peace.

I submit that presuming to know God’s will as if any human being could be omniscient (all-knowing), which is a divine attribute, and to being an instrument of God as if on a holy mission are sins, whereas vengeance is an ethical vice. That God demands that human beings leave the vice to God does not mean that the vice itself is thereby religious rather than ethical in nature. Moreover, that religion and ethics are related does not mean that the former reduces to the latter, or that the latter is itself religious. I contend that it is because vengeance involves the infliction of harm and that is exogenous to being in the presence of holiness that God urges us not to seek revenge. Put another way, that vice is antithetical to the humane compassion to an enemy in trouble and thus to Jesus’s conception in the Gospels of the Kingdom of God. An eye for an eye carried on and on, and the whole world would be blind because none of us act completely in line with what is just; only God is just from the standpoint of omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence. It is from this standpoint, that we should all give each other some leeway at least, that the Creator-Creature distinction is vital to keep in mind instead of merely applying the ethical principle of justice by which avengers legitimately claim that the unjust deserve to be punished. Religion and ethics are distinct domains even though they interrelate. Edmund Dantes may have a point that the four men deserve to suffer for having inflicted suffering on him, but he himself is left empty ironically from having presumed to have been on a holy mission even though inflicting harm is antithetical to forgiveness. Interestingly the name Dantes is very close to Dante, a philosopher and poet who wrote in the Renaissance on the rings of hell. Being plunged back into nothingness, in search of one’s self, and even one’s very soul, seems like a good description of what being in the state of hell must be like.

The Reader

The film, The Reader (2008), captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain, let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.

The plot centers around a sexual-relationship between Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg during a summer more than a decade after the end of Nazi Germany. Because Michael is only 15 years old when Hanna, a middle-aged adult, seduces him sexually and gets him to read stories to her, she starts off the film as being culpable criminally, assuming that sexual intercourse with a minor is illegal in the film. To be sure, not even astute viewers would predict that her seduction of a minor means that she had worked as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp from 1943 until the death-march from Hungary in 1944, especially because Michael willingly returned to her apartment several times to read to her and have sex with her. As the film goes on, viewers quickly realize that her sexual crime is dwarfed by her crimes as a guard in Nazi Germany.

A portion of professor Rohl’s lecture in his law-school class in which Michael is enrolled as a law student years after his summer of sex is a useful way to contextualize Hanna’s Nazi crimes. Rohl begins by noting that out of the 9,000 people who worked at Auschwitz, only 19 have been convicted, and they were convicted according to law rather than morality. “The question was not, was it wrong, but was it legal, and not by our laws, no, by the laws at the time” and “intent must be proved.” One student observes that the law is narrower than is holding people to the dictates of morality. Professor Rohl readily agrees. To be convicted, Hanna and the other five guards with whom she worked must be found to have violated the relevant laws of Nazi Germany. So just following orders, which count as laws, is a viable defense.

In his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was convicted precisely because he had violated Himmer’s order not to march Hungarian “enemies of the state” to Auschwitz. Eichmann violated the laws of Nazi Germany knowing that people would die as a result, so he could be convicted and even sentenced to death.  The film, The Reader, refutes Israel’s claim that former Nazis could not get an unbiased trial in West Germany. Both the Israelis and the Germans could be expected to hold biases regarding the Germans who were, or worked for, the Nazis, yet in the film as well as in Eichmann’s historical trial in 1961, jurisprudence passes the test in maintaining its narrow, and thus rigorous standards even against biases one way or the other.

In the trial in the film, Hanna admits to having been one of six female guards who selected 60 prisoners each month to be sent from their camp to Auschwitz even though the guards (and the prisoners) knew that the 60 people sent would be killed. Unlike the other women on trial, Hanna is honest in her testimony. Answering the chief judge’s question on why she selected 10 prisoners each month to be killed at Auschwitz, she answered, “but there were new arrivals arriving all the time, so the old ones had to make room for the new ones. We couldn’t keep everyone. There wasn’t room.” In Hanna having been oriented to the flow of prisoners being optimal, Hanna Arendt’s description of the Eichmann trial as showcasing the “banality of evil” in the bureaucracy of the Nazis applies here too. In the film, the chief judge is astonished at Hanna’s lapse concerning the obvious ethical problem: “But you knew you were selecting people to be killed.” Hanna replies, “What would you have done? Should I have never signed up at Siemens?” meaning to be hired by the SS. Hanna’s answers are themselves worthy of reflection, for they evince an absolute indifference to the plight of the chosen prisoners. In fact, she puts space-limitations at her camp above, as if justifying, the (necessary) plight. It is not as if she seems to have been wallowing in the power she had at the camp; she seems to have viewed herself as a manager working as if a hotel manager oriented to managing vacancies so no one arriving would be turned away, as if that were ethically more objectionable than sending prisoners to their death at the death camp in Poland.

Any such managerial excuse is belied when the judge turns to Hanna’s role in the march of all of the prisoners to Auschwitz when the camp in Hungary was closed. Hanna and the five other SS guards with whom she worked locked the doors of a church where prisoners were sleeping one night on the journey even though the guards knew that that church was on fire from a bombing raid. The chief judge asks Hanna, “Why did you not open the doors? In the written report, which you all signed, you claim you didn’t know about the fire until after it had happened. But that isn’t true, is it? . . . Why did you not open the doors?” Hanna quickly responds in a way that suggests that she thinks the judge has just asked a stupid question. “Obviously,” she says defiantly. “For the obvious reason. We couldn’t. We were guards. Our job was to guard the prisoners. We couldn’t just let them escape.” Her judgment that keeping the 300 people in the church, in which case they would all, except for one girl, die, was better than letting them out even if they would try to escape evinces something more than a warped moral compass. To be sure, letting prisoners escape is ethically preferrable to keeping them from evading death, but her reasoning too is flawed. The job of guarding prisoners does not in itself include playing a role in their respective deaths.

The judge next wants to assess whether Hanna and the other five guards feared for their lives should the prisoners have escaped from the burning building. “And if they escaped,” he asked Hanna, “you’d be charged? You’d be executed?” Hanna, hardly a defense attorney, answers emphatically, “No! If we’d opened the doors there would have been chaos. How could we have restored order? . . . and if they had all come out, we couldn’t just let them escape! We couldn’t! We were responsible for them!” That being responsible for prisoners could include deciding to let them die when they could be saved is, I submit, not just a moral lapse as if contributing to the death of 300 were morally better than letting them escape. Perhaps equally of concern, her reasoning—her cognition—was infected as if with computer malware. This can be more easily grasped from following statement, which is similar to what Hanna answers: We let the prisoners die because we were responsible for them! Her premise that the guards’ responsibility as guards is only to forestall escape—meaning that the responsibility of the guards was to the Nazi regime rather for the prisoners—even if that responsibility meant forcing the prisoners to be burnt alive is unsound and narrow; hence it may be the product of brain-washing.

It is not that being willingly enveloped by a political ideology spares a person from culpability. So, the judge tells Hanna, “So you did know what was happening. You did know, you made a choice. You let them die, rather than risk letting them escape.” She was neither forced nor insane; she knew what she was doing in keeping 300 people in a burning church. Hanna’s problematic mentality goes beyond the ethically problematic hierarchy of escape as being worse than being burned live. Even though she had obviously been “supercharged” into focusing narrowly in her job on escape being the worst thing possible, she was once again indifferent to the severity of the plight of other people. Both the narrowness and the sociopathic indifference were part of Nazi culture. In fact, the strong preference for order and aversion to chaos has arguably remained a salient part of German culture even though the Nazis’ ideology has been refuted. In the film, the judge does not question Hanna on her aversion to chaos or the high value she puts on order. This lapse is odd, considering that the judge may be guilty of scapegoating Hanna with a life sentence while giving the other five guards only four and a half years in prison. The other five guards contributed to the scapegoating, but the judge seemed not to realize this point.

Even though Hanna has answered the judge’s questions with an amazing forthrightness, the judge does not believe her when she denies that she wrote the report on the church fire. He even ignores her valid point that it doesn’t matter who wrote the report because all six women signed it. None of the six opened the church doors as the building burned, and there was no evidence that Hanna was in charge of the other guards. He should have relied more on Hanna’s testimony regarding the other defendants rather than say that it is easy to spread the crime to include other culprits. Furthermore, that Hanna does not give the convenient answer that she feared that the SS would execute her for letting the prisoners escape and that she answers honestly goes to her integrity, when supports my claim that she had been indoctrinated by the Nazis when she was hired to believe that the lives of the prisoners do not matter, especially as against them being able to escape (even from a burning building).

Lest it be concluded that only Nazi ideology could be so severely warping in terms of morality and reasoning, the claim of the Israeli army late in 2025 that a 3 year-old Gaza resident had to be shot because the child walking from a tent to an Israeli tank nearby was a security threat. So too, the claim by officials in the Israeli government, including Israel’s president, that all residents of Gaza were culpable of the attack inside Israel proper by Hamas is warped, both morally and cognitively. Israeli soldiers playing the game of who can shoot the most kids in Gaza, soldiers raping 6 year-old boys (and doubtlessly numerous Gaza women) in the name of security, and the Israeli government’s presumptuous and erroneous accusation of collective responsibility of everyone in Gaza for the attack carried out by a political group such that more than a million people were intentionally subjected to starvation, no medical care, and even homelessness all evince the toxic mental imprint of a sordid ideology of hatred every bit as sordid as the Nazi ideology had been. Shooting babies who had not even been born in 2024 demonstrates the utter irrationality in the statements of some senior government officials that all of the residents of Gaza deserve to suffer—that not even death is good enough for them. I contend that this last part renders the mass atrocities a holocaust rather than just a genocide. Subjecting over a million people to severe deprivation and thus horrid suffering, and killing over 60,000-75,000 residents outright through 2025 mean that the statements were not merely rhetoric. That the deaths of less than 1,500 Israelis in the attack in Israel in 2023—an attack of utter frustration contextualized by decades of being subjugated and occupied by an enemy state—could justify so many more deaths and the starvation of many, many more people in Gaza demonstrates not just severely flawed ethical judgment, but also corrupted reasoning as if such an imbalance could possibly be justified even in terms of state security. Were the Israeli officials intellectually honest, they would simply admit that they were simply unleashing their hatred of a “subhuman” people who are like dogs. Similarly, Nazi propaganda films portrayed Jews as rats infecting Europe. It is perhaps out of a global sense of guilt about the first holocaust that the unbalanced Israeli application of collective “justice” did not trigger a coalition of the willing among nations to rid Gaza military of the Israeli army, and that the equivalence of the Netanyahu and Hitler administrations has not been recognized and acknowledged. Ideology can indeed warp moral judgment and even cognition/reasoning as well as perception of world events.

That susceptibility of the human mind can operate “beneath the radar,” especially in regard to the severity of the depravity. The judge in the film tells the court that Hanna is in another class of criminality even from the five other guards. I submit that he is wrong about the five other guards, for they are just as culpable criminally because none of them were willing to open the church doors and thus were fine with 300 people being burned to death. Nevertheless, the judge aptly perceives Hanna’s “reasoning” as partial at best and her values as deeply problematic morally. They were our responsibility; we couldn’t just let them escape, so we decided that they would have to die. The 300 prisoners in the church did not have to die; they died because the six SS guards chose not to open the doors. It is conceivable that those guards could have opened the doors and maintained order while minimizing escapes by surrounding an open space and shooting the first person trying to flee.

Contemporary implications of the film include the point that the recognition of the subjectivity-based warping of the human mind by ideology means that the world needs more than the impotent UN and International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold back aggressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and the Israelis. Although not so ideological, the foray into Ukraine by President Putin of Russia based in part on a vision of a resurrected Russian empire (not the USSR) also deserved to be turned back by more than an imagined coalition of the willing in Europe. To the extent that the Russian officials viewed the Ukrainians as subhuman, thus justifying women being raped by Russian soldiers and children being sent deep into Russia, the ideological culprit at work in the Nazi government in the twentieth century and the Israeli government in the 2020s can be detected yet again. The vulnerability of the human mind is thus no accident, but is intrinsic. Therefore, the admixture of human hatred with political (and religious) ideology comes with a such steep toll that the ongoing system of international relations based on absolute national sovereignty can be deemed to be wholly inadequate. International means with military-enforcement power have been needed at least since the 1930s to restrain toxic regimes from inflicting severe harm on people presumed ideologically to be subhuman. 

The underlying problem is not merely humans being drunk with power; even though absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus institutional checks and balances are advisable both within a government and between every government and the international community institutionalized in an organization or government with real enforcement power, the subjective human mind is too vulnerable to being brain-washed by ideology and this itself is a problem especially because the warped mind is typically impervious to correction both morally and in regard to its own faulty reasoning. In the film, there is no indication whatsoever when Hanna is imprisoned for 20 years that she comes to grips with how wrong she has been ethically and how flawed her reasoning was in her choice not to open the church door. During the trial, the limits of her ideologically-constrained reason are clear when she draws a blank and asks the judge, “What would you have done? Should I not have signed up at Siemens?” The significant imprint of a flawed ideology can readily be inferred. The system of international relations can and should be informed by just this inference that the film astutely provides.