Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was
released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is
capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes
the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a
poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent
by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell
with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s
narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains,
rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water”
in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive,
rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.
Robert Thorn remembers and
repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the
poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return
to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then
you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either
shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist,
Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in
hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from
religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a
political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively
different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like
treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as
interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious
myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable,
such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That
which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths
did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s
criteria.
In what follows, I subject the
first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis.
By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to
convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve
written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter of Godliness
and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in
relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by
incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s
Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be
distinguished from opinion pieces.
The phrase, “when the Jews return
to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or
political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that
a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the
political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli
settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the
houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the
Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler
removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West
Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the
refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in
Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political
domain can be. Life can give art added
significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted
and situated paradigmatically.
The association of the return
of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as
ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically
the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the
International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that
state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had
determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the
International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these
determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the
theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in
religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on
political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.
Turning to the poem’s second
phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus
science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity
Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as
a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet
being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the
genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather
in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star
could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract
from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined
empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town
from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is
construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet
fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the
religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as
well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally
acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain
historical accounts.
In the film, the next phrase, “when
the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected
when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman
Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious
organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy
Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is
arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy
can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has
arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the
debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U.
states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention
holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the
conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a
new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the
religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition,
prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over
scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with
Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children,
and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women,
and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and
practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient
(e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude,
arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very
least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the
religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual
worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to
transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond,
whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.
Self-idolatry on a collective
scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire
such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness
at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist
personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars,
the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do
much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the
nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses
to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor
in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no
positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature
itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects
our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.
In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.
