Decades before dying while
doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973),
Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in
Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion:
The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad
enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The
Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no
means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that
domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a
corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its
aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural.
Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on
supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.
In the old church during at
the film’s climatic event, Merrin incessantly repeats the identity of the
Trinity to repulse and repel the demon from the young African man. Of itself,
the very existence of the triune deity is abhorrent to the demon, likely
because it, like Satan, is jealous of God’s pre-eminence and superiority. Even
so, is repeating “Christ compels you” over and over sufficient for the demon to
give up the possessed body? It seems realistic to assume that such an approach
would reduce to a “No he doesn’t, yes he does, no he doesn’t” back-and-forth
without a resolution. Adding potency, Merrin could preach the teachings
of Jesus in the Gospels to the demon, which could be expected to
reject in utter disgust the value of compassion as benevolentia universalis and
especially to one’s detractors and even enemies. In addition to presenting the
way into the kingdom of God to the demon, Merrin could try to convert the demon
as a way of repulsing it enough to stop possessing the young man. Merrin could
also point out that God is love, and what that means from a distinctly
theological standpoint. For example, Merrin’s dialogue could include, “God
is love—the sort that is self-emptying (i.e., agape) and this is superior to
your puffed-up ego-pride by which you put yourself above Jesus’s voluntary
sacrifice for us.” Besides being more distasteful than merely “Christ compels you”
to the demon, the enhanced theological dialogue voiced by the priest
would present the audience with a more substantive understanding of Jesus’s
message in the Gospels than merely that he is the Son of God. Furthermore,
that “Christ compels you” is coming from a “weak vessel” rather than from
Christ himself means that the priest’s reliance on that line is not the best
strategy for convincing the demon to give up the body. This is especially the
case because Merrin had lost his faith and only recovered it because Rev.
Francis had strongly asserted, “Satan is real.” If the basis of Francis’s
declaration is not based in the religious domain—that is, is actually exogenous—then
to the extent that Merrin follows suit, it is no surprise that the demon
eventually—in The Exorcist—kills him.
Rev. Francis takes a long time
to believe that the young African man is actually possessed. It is only when
Francis sees the burn marks on the man’s forehead just after Francis has pressed
a small crucifix on the man’s skin that that young priest believes that Satan
is real. The religious faith of Rev. Merrin in God is in turn stimulated to
return by Francis’s loud declaration, “Satan is real!” Whereas God as the
Creator is like the condition for all that exists, and thus not an entity as we
think of entities, Satan, and his demons are entities more easily recognized by
the human mind. So it makes sense that faith in God could be derived from a
declaration that Satan is real. The problem is that it is a supernatural empirical
effect on young possessed man’s forehead that signifies and, even more troubling,
validates the underlying religious phenomenon.
Even though such supernatural special-effects,
including the fires that spontaneously start in the old church to provide
lighting for Merrin and the demon, make for good cinema, the distinction
between scientifically-valid empirical yet not-understood (and thus supernatural)
happenings and religious phenomena is important. The supernatural is a subtype
of natural science because the realm is empirical. Put another way, the
supernatural can be thought of as being on the turf of science—just not (yet)
explained. For the criteria and content of natural science to over-reach onto the
domain of religion, even overriding the criteria innate to that domain, is to
incur a category mistake. Basing the claim that Satan is real on burn-marks on
a forehead treats empirical verification as determinative of the existence of a
theological entity whose existence and basis transcends the empirical world rather
than is based in it. This essence of religion renders it qualitatively
different, and thus unique, from other, even closely related domains. Especially
in a religion of the heart, such as Christianity, the validity of religious
truth cannot rightfully come from seeing burn marks on someone’s forehead.
Taking the latter as decisive gives a free hand to superstition.
Therefore, both Francis and Merrin depend on a non-religious marker to prove the existential reality of Satan, and, by extension, God. The meaning that God represents, which is theological love, which in turn is that which Satan rejects, is by implication not self-validating. This is deeply problematic from a religious standpoint. Depending on supernatural events or signs not only slights the distinctly theological meaning, but also remakes the theological into something else: the unexplained in natural science. The value of compassion being extending to rude people, for example, and even to detractors who disvalue rather than respect does not depend on unexplained observable phenomena. Either a person values agape love or not. Either such love is appreciated in one’s heart as being of great value, or as weakness. This judgment, rather than lines like, “Christ compels you,” captures what it means to internalize Jesus’s example and preachments in the Gospels. To a demon, those preachments may be more distasteful than demands by a priest of Christ compelling obedience if the substance and essence of God is indeed love rather than domination to be served.
