Conclave

In the film, The Godfather, Part III (1990),  Cardinal Lamberto laments that Christianity, like water surrounding a stone that is in a water fountain, has not seeped into European culture even after centuries of being in Europe.  Watching the movie, Conclave (2024), a person could say the same thing about the Roman Catholic Church, though the ending does provide some hope that internecine fighting and pettiness for power, even aside from the sexual-abuse epidemic by clergy, need not win the day.

Concerning the dead pope, we are told at the beginning of the movie that he never had any doubts about God; what he had lost faith in was the Church. Through the movie, the reason is obvious. At one point, the new Cardinal Benitez from Kabul, Afghanistan aptly characterizes his fellow cardinals as “small petty men” concerned with power. Even thusly characterized, the cardinals elect Cardinal Benitez as pope, and it is only fitting that he chooses the name, Innocent. It is in the innocence of a person who has no ambition to be pope and is genuinely surprised to be elected that the Church has hope.

The outcome of the election is subtly anticipated early on by the notably unique sincerity in the blessing of the food that Cardinal Benitez gives at the beginning of the conclave, and is implicitly guaranteed by the rebuttal that he later makes in front of the other cardinals to Cardinal Tedesco’s claim that the Church is at war with Muslims. After the second bomb, Tedesco declares, “We need a leader who fights these animals,” who are the Muslims in Europe. Cardinal Benitz disagrees: Inside each of us is what we are fighting. This is exactly what Mary Magdalene tells Peter and the other disciples in the upper room after the resurrection in the film, Mary Magdalene (2018); rather than waiting for Jesus to come on clouds to vanquish the evil Roman soldiers, the change starts within, “in the transformation of our own hearts.” Accordingly, the kingdom of God is already here even as it is not yet—pending us vanquishing the enemy within, which is done in part by being compassionate to people who are suffering.

In the conclave, “the men who are dangerous are the men who do want it.”  Cardinal Bellini says he doesn’t want it, but he does. He has progressive views (e.g., more of a role for women in the Curia), which he refuses to hide in his campaign, and this strategy makes him appear to have integrity, but he doesn’t. Even though he is a Christian, and even a cleric, he angerly rebukes Cardinal Lawrence’s claim, “This is a conclave, not a war,” by saying of Cardinal Tedesco and the conservatism which that cardinal represents, “This is a war!” This is the first of two mentions of being at war—Tedesco’s war with Muslims being the second.

Even Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, who laudably seeks the truth concerning Cardinal Tremblay and even Cardinal Benitez, is a partisan. The homily that he gives on the first day of the conclave subtly favors the progressive platform of Cardinal Bellini, whom Lawrence was still supporting to become pope. Cardinal Lawrence lauds the Church’s diversity in being comprised of people in different countries, whereas Cardinal Tedesco wants an Italian pope. “Certainty is great enemy of unity,” Lawrence tells his brothers. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. . . . Faith walks hand and hand with doubt. Otherwise, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” This message is in line with Cardinal Bellini’s liberal platform because the presumption of certainly saturates Cardinal Tedesco’s ideology. As the Cardinals sitting at tables at the first dinner, Cardinal Tedesco observes that the tables are “divided by language.” He suggests to Lawrence that the next pope be Italian so it is not Cardinal Adeyeme, a black African. Cardinal Lawrence is rightly disgusted and leaves the table. Lawrence even prays with Adeyine as he cries, and puts his hand on Adeyine’s hands even though Lawrence knows that Adeyine had impregnated a teenage woman when he was 30.

Furthermore, at some point in his search for the truth concerning whether the dead pope had fired Cardinal Tremblay, Cardinal Lawrence tells a bishop, “No more secrets; no more investigations; let God’s will be done.” That Lawrence himself later investigates by entering the sealed-off papal apartment is justified by what he uncovers not only concerning the dead pope, but also Cardinal Tremblay. Finally, Lawrence is justified in keeping Cardinal Benitez’s medical secret after that Cardinal's election. Even though Benitez’s rather unique medical situation technically violates church law, Lawrence earlier said to Cardinal Bellini, “I thought we were here to serve God, not the Curia.” 

As truth-oriented as Cardinal Lawrence is, faith without love is for naught in Christian terms. In this regard, Cardinal Benitez steals the show; he is the true protagonist in the end. Just as Mary Magdalene’s rebuttal to Peter on the nature of the kingdom of God gives the film, Mary Magdalene, so much theological value for audiences, it is Cardinal Benitez’s rebuttal to Cardinal Tedesco that the Church is at war with Islam that not only gets that cardinal elected, but also provides the theological value, and thus hope, of Conclave. Take on the enemy within—one’s own hatred of Muslims—rather than fight them, Benitez tells his brothers. He could have gone further by preaching to the petty, power-seeking men: feel and exercise kindness and compassion to Muslims; go out of your way to serve them, especially those who dislike you, for something more is involved spiritually than the much easier, "love thy neighbor as thyself." Then you will find that you have conquered the enemy within and entered the kingdom of God.

La Dolce Vita

Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts run away from the LORD. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream." Jeremiah 17:5-7

Levi Strauss theorized that the function of a myth lies in reconciling basic contradictions, whether they are felt within a person or at the societal level. Such contradictions, and even dichotomies, can be used to energize a story’s dramatic tension and for comic effect, such as through misunderstandings. Typically, contradictions are reconciled in the denouement of a narrative; if so, the audience gets a psychic payoff. Otherwise, the audience is left with the uneasy feeling that the world is somehow not in order. I don’t believe that Fellini reconciles the contradictions in his film, La Dolce Vita (1960). The last scene, in which the film’s protagonist, Marcello, a young and handsome single man who is a tabloid columnist, turns back to follow his high-society drinking friends, who are leaving the beach. He makes the choice to return to his life of late night parties with empty socialites rather than to walk over to the only sane, available woman in the film.  Marcello does not find or establish an equilibrium, but goes on as a lost soul. Although religion is not much discussed by the characters in the dialogue, the film’s structure can be described in terms of going back and forth between two contradictory basic principles—one represented by the Roman Catholic Church and the other by the Devil. In spite of the back-and-forth, which even includes the visually high (overlooking Vatican Square) and low (in the basement-apartment of a prostitute), the main characters remain as if in a state of suspended animation between the dichotomous and contradictory relation between God and the devil. If commentators on the film haven’t highlighted this axis, the verdict could be that film as a medium could go further in highlighting religious tensions and contradictions than it does—not that going beyond religious superficialities to engage the minds of viewers more abstractly necessarily means that the contradictions must always be resolved or sublimated in a higher Hegelian synthesis and the dichotomies transcended.

In La Dolce Vita, Marcello parties the nights away for seven days while contending with an emotionally needy and suicidal fiancée. His hero of sorts, Steiner, seems like a pious man but ends up shooting his kids and committing suicide. Marcello realizes that he has barely known his father, but is not able to turn that around. The utter lack of emotional intimacy in his life is clear, and he goes on as a lost soul, with God being suggested as very distant—the Virgin Mary’s appearance to some kids amid lots of hype being dubious at best. Steiner’s piety turns out to be dubious as well. So too, Jesus, or at least the statue, is literally distant as it is up in the sky being taken to the Vatican by a helicopter in the film’s first scene.

A prostitute and a crept are much closer to Marcello, though he does not succumb to either. Although he hits on beautiful young women, including a movie star from America, he does not have enough sex to label him as a male slut. That he returns in his sports car at dawn to pick up his fiancée, whom he had stranded during an argument, distinguishes him from the empty, promiscuous women at the parties. Yet he is interested enough in other women that he realizes that at least for now, he is not the marrying sort. I submit that this, and even Fellini’s comedic satire on Rome’s contemporary party scene, can be situated within two polarities in which religion is salient in the film.

The lack of resolution or higher synthesis in the film’s narrative is epitomized by the continued back-and-forth between religious and devilish themes through the film. In the first scene, the flying statue of Jesus sets the tone for the film in the sense that religion will have a role. The scene picturing the idyllic Jesus is followed by one in which Marcello and a woman he has met at a party go to a prostitute’s flooded basement apartment to have sex. This is followed by a visual overview of Vatican Square, after a climb up a staircase, vicariously from the dark basement. This scene is followed by a night-time party outside, with large mounted torches in the background—whose fires connote hell. Then Sylvia, the movie star whom Marcello is after for sex, goes into one of Rome’s huge fountains. Both that she is wearing white and water connotes purity and even baptism brings the viewers back from hell. The purity doesn’t last, for in the next scene a jealous boyfriend slaps his girlfriend who has been hanging out with Marcello and beats him up. Then Marcello is in a church, where Steiner makes the film’s main dichotomy explicit in saying, “Priests aren’t afraid of the devil.” Then, just in case the audience has missed this point, Marcello says, “Where the devil is this place?”

Not only do the devil and Jesus have roles in this film, the Virgin Mary ostensibly puts in an appearance for two children (and their father, who takes tips). The people at the site are so desperate to see or be healed by Mary that that the viewer is able to take stock of the mob itself as if it consists of rabid wild animals. Why would the Virgin deign to make an appearance among a pack of hungry wolves? Marcello, and a priest who is there too, are skeptical as to the veracity of the two kids, especially when they whip up the crowd into a frenzy by saying, “She’s over there,” then, after sprinting to another area of the field, exclaiming, “She’s over there!” It is significant that there are no supernatural visuals in the film’s story-world. Ironically, if the reports of the “Sun miracle” associated with the Virgin’s appearance to three children in Europe in the twentieth century are empirically valid, then the non-supernatural, secular story-world that Fellini constructed may be regarded as partial, and even biased. Even in the seance in which a woman is seemingly possessed by the soul of a dead person, Marcello is not convinced that ghosts do in fact exist. The dichotomy between the Virgin Mary and the possessed woman is yet another instance of the back-and-forth structure of the film. If there is a metaphysical realm of the sacred, it is not in Fellini’s story-world. Marcello and the rest of the main characters are on their own, and there is scant any character arc in the film, even after Steiner’s suicide and murder of his kids, which would be enough of a shock emotionally to motivate Marcello to find peace and meaning.

The audience is left on its own too, assuming resolution and synthesis are naturally sought by the human mind when faced with contradictions and dichotomies, as exist in the case of the realms of the devil and that of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In terms of religion and what is typically associated with the devil (e.g., suicide, orgy-like parties, prostitution, sex), the film shows first one then the other, und so weiter. The utter futility in transcending the dichotomy and resolving the contradiction between God and evil while in the secular world of socialites and fame may have been Fellini’s (at least unconscious) point in making the film. It is no Rosemary’s Baby, in which, by the way, the contradiction in having sweet Rosemary give birth to a creature fathered by the devil is finally resolved when she finds that she can love the baby without becoming a Satanist because her mother’s instinct is healthy.

Fellini’s protagonist does not “find” religion; nor does he leave his party-circuit socialite friends and the world of hollow fame. Presumably Marcello goes on, after the last scene, with alternating views that can connote religion and hell, respectively, while he is a static entity wandering somewhere in between. The interior settings are hard, with bland walls that do not exactly connote warmth or emotional intimacy. Perhaps that world is none other than modern secularity, wherein meaning is futilely sought in drinking, sex, and our careers. Were Marcello to say, for example, "I am a tabloid journalist," would that capture the essence of his self? An affirmative answer wherein functionality is definitive would, I submit, be worse than chasing the gossip of the famous. Therefore, Fellini's masterpiece can be understood as going well beyond a critique of the debauchery of the socialite Roman society of his day.

Religion in Film: Resisting the Formulaic

Historically, meaning in the history of cinema, perhaps too much effort or attention initially went into fidelity to doctrine, especially in Christianity. Heavily stylistic, unrealistic epics could be said to merely illustrate doctrines. Then as filmmakers began to think in an open-ended way concerning how to depict the transcendent both visually and ideationally (i.e., as an idea), the dominance of the earlier control-orientation slipped away to be replaced by innovative ways of understanding how the transcendent may relate to the realm of our daily mundane existence in the world. The extraordinary potential of filmmaking to tap into the human imagination without necessarily providing definitive answerers could be seen. I submit that this historical trajectory is a positive development. This does not mean that heterodox belief has or should win out; in fact, religious practitioners, including the clergy, can help filmmakers to depict the transcendent and its relationship to our existence in novel ways that do not seem so formulaic as to be easily brushed aside as less than credible. Old wine can indeed go into new jugs, and even new wine may be tasted without the world collapsing as a result.

Let’s begin with the old approach. “In his 1936 encyclical Vigilanti Cura, Pope Pius XI argues that, insofar as ‘the motion picture has become the most popular form of diversion which is offered for the leisure hours . . . ,’ it is crucial that Catholics pressure ‘the industry  [to] produce motion pictures which conform entirely to our standards.’ Only in this way can ‘the motion picture be no longer a school of corruption’ but ‘be transformed into an effectual instrument for the education and the elevation of mankind.’”[1] But what standards?  Are they moral or theological in nature, or both? Are the standards moral only that can be derived from theological doctrines? If not, on what basis are the extrinsic moral standards legitimate for the Church to enforce on Hollywood? The very notion of standards, moreover, connotes the negativity of prohibition, whereas teachings instead would imply that films are made proactively to illustrate through narrative principles and values found in Christianity. Rather than fixate on Hollywood as being corrupt, the pope could have pictured it as an opportunity full of potential, ignoring the decadent films. For beyond educating people, films can elevate us, as the pope admits. In short, rather than viewing the glass as half empty; it can be viewed as half full. Rather than concentrating on emptying out the stale brew, the focus can be on that which is added that is salubrious from a distinctly religious standpoint. What does it take to do so?

Going from the mentality of slapping a ruler on a wrist to helping filmmakers to render the transcendent through narrative using visuals and sound entails eclipsing the subjectivity of the filmmakers as well as “’the immanent frame’ of technological modernity,”[2] which includes not only the techniques but also the business of filmmaking.

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for instance, eclipses Polanski’s own subjectivity (or secular bias) in leaving it to the viewer whether Rosemary is dreaming or really is raped by Satan, although the short cut-away later briefly showing the baby’s face in the crib provides an answer that the supernatural realm that is transcendent of our world is indeed real. Furthermore, showing the animal raping Rosemary hardly fits with modernity, including the business interests of Hollywood. In short, Polanski took a risk, and he was not out to superimpose his own views of the supernatural onto his audience. That is, Polanski resisted what Heidegger calls the “culture-industry,” wherein, according to Barnett, “cinema merely discloses the rich subjectivity of the artist rather than any truth conveyed by the work itself.”[3] Instead, Polanski allows Heidegger’s “letting be” to occur by not trying, as Barnett puts it, “to wrest determinate meaning” from the work.[4] Polanski creates the openness in which viewers can be open to transcendence in a metaphysical sense.

Barnett points to The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) as being an example of what to avoid in this regard, as “the thematization of Christian doctrine or dramatization of Christian conversion” in the film “is most likely to elicit eye rolls and snickers.”[5] The characters are so stylized and idealized as to please not only the camera, but the financially-inclined producers as well. Nothing offensive. Nothing challenging. To be sure, at the time, as the first film to show Jesus’ face, the film could have been reckoned by some people as controversial. Even so, merely illustrating a Biblical narrative visually and with sound goes only so far.  The Ten Commandments (1956) too, goes only so far. Both films are “safe” in that they follow well-established doctrines exquisitely and present the Bible in the modern medium.

To be sure, over-stylized, non-realistic illustrations of Biblical narrative can contain allusions to the holy that seem genuine or real. In the television miniseries, Jesus of Nazareth (1977), for example, an eerie scene takes place in which other-worldly instrumental music plays as Jesus silently walks, with bright back-light behind him highlighting his meager, weak (yet paradoxically strong!) form, toward Pontius Pilate, whose facial expression intimates that something wholly other is going on in the case of Jesus. We see something similar in the realistic reactions of the disciples witnessing Jesus recusitate Lazarus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Both scenes resonate with the qualities of the holy described by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy. So the phenomenon of the holy can be depicted in a catching way even in heavy-stylized (i.e., unrealistic) films whose primary orientation is to present established Biblical narratives in an orthodox way. 

It would take perhaps until The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) for the transcendent itself to again be raised as a question rather than an established fact with respect to Christology, or Christian dogma. The Exorcist (1973) explicitly raises the question of whether the supernatural demon really exists, though the psychological bias of modernity is eviscerated by supernatural feats that cannot possibly be explained as mental phenomena.

Of course, the very existence of the transcendent need not flagged and left up in the air for a film to represent religion in a way that resists the easy and convenient stylization of modernity.  The Others (2001) resists simple movie technique by turning the tables on the viewers without questioning the reality of the transcendent. Ghost (1990) also provides an innovative way into there being another realm, though with the familiar bipolar trappings of heaven and hell that ironically give the film the veneer of established doctrine—such easy formulaic being used by the modern industry of film to sell.

To draw out the transcendent in a way that does not seem trite or already well-groved, “Filmmakers must uncover the tensity between beings and Being, between the systematized habits of the human world and the raw primitivity of non-technical existence. Thereby, the mystery of being-in-the-world is manifested, and with it, the possibility of a truly poetic encounter with Being itself.”[6] Overstylized, too-conventional depictions of Biblical narrative can fall short in terms of showing the human “struggle to discern the divine presence.”[7] To manifest “the ineffable and invisible” beyond “normal sense experience,” “a fundamental incongruity between human everydayness and the transcendent world is expressed” even as both are contained within a oneness.[8] This incongruity must burst through preconceived notions, as are in heavily stylized Biblical epics, or the depicted transcendent will not seem real to viewers. Put another way, raw Being should challenge the viewer, yet not be so different or new that it is not believed to possibly represent something real beyond the movie theater or living room.

The subtle, almost-invisible cascade of ghosts going down the stairs in Poltergeist (1982) and the human’s facial expressions of simple wonder are much more suggestive of another realm than is the over-fabricated, almost sensationalistic hole in the bedroom closet heading to the other realm. The liminality of the numen, which lies between realms in at least the human imagination, is difficult to capture visually, and is thus too susceptible to being done up in a meretricious or gaudy way by filmmakers in line with modern sensationalism and cinematic technique.

There are of course new ways of telling old stories. The Chosen, a television series made in Texas of Jesus and his disciples, is a case in point. They are all presented in a realistic way, as are the Romans. Matthew is mildly autistic. Jesus has some very human reactions to everyday situations. Yet the world depicted is one in which miracles take place. The transcendent is real even as the characters are portrayed realistically. So while some stories, such as The Others, may do away with conventional notions of a heaven and hell, other stories are quite conventional yet they resist easy formulation repeating oft seen epics. There is indeed so much potential in filmmaking to depict transcendence in a myriad of ways that the old way of controlling the medium so that it conforms with doctrine in a conventional way has thankfully been defeated.  Nevertheless, the danger of an over-reaching subjectivity of a filmmaker imposed through the medium is still with us, given human nature, and it may still be too tempting for filmmakers to turn to heavily stylized Hollywood props and well-trodden plots instead of thinking outside the proverbial box. I am convinced that the human imagination applied to religion in film has not come close to having been exhausted.  

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1. Christopher B. Barnett, “Can Cinema Be ‘Religious’? Heidegger, Technology, and the Transcendent,” Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary, 139, No. 2 (Spring, 2024): 19-23.
2. Ibid. Barnett is quoting Charles Tayler, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-93.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Bird, “Film as Hierophany,” in Religion in Film, John R. May and Michael Bird, eds (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982), p. 4.
8. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1972), pp. 3-13.

True Confessions

The film True Confessions (1981) centers around a priest who is the heir-apparent and assistant of the cardinal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, California. Even though the priest is a precise bureaucrat and liturgist, I contend that he lapses in what can be said to be the true mission of a Christian priest, and thus in the essence of Christianity. Moreover, the film is deficient in not making this point explicit.

The priest, Des Spellacy, enjoys a cordial yet emotionally distant relationship with is brother Tom, who is a homicide detective. Tom is working on the murder of a prostitute who was sent to a porn-maker by Jack Amsterdam, who has profited from several commercial real-estate deals with the archdiocese. Although Tom knows that Jack did not kill the prostitute, the homicide detective hates Jack and wants to pin the crime on him anyway. That Jack has profited in his dealings with the Church even while engaging with prostitutes offends Tom, given the hypocrisy. Indeed, the Cardinal and Des are in the midst of cancelling an upcoming deal with Jack. But Des does not go after his brother for intending to arrest Jack even though Tom admits in the confessional to Des that Jack may be innocent of the crime. Using the confessional to talk with his brother, Tom says that he is about to arrest Jack. “Did he do it,” Des asks repeatedly. “I don’t care if he did it or not,” Tom replies. Des says nothing.

I contend that Des, a monsieur in the Roman Catholic Church, misses an opportunity to hold his brother to Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies. At the very least, Des could go after Tom’s abuse of police power as being antipodal to Jesus’ example and teaching. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. Des does not even mention the word vengeance to his brother. As a priest, Des is called to resist even brotherly attachment to proclaim Jesus’ commands; being a priest is not merely knowing how to perform rituals.

At the end of the movie, when Tom and Des are old men, Des tells his brother that he has finally come to understand the mission of a priest. I demure. Being a quiet, peaceful person is not the mission. In fact, just as Jesus goes after the Jewish hypocrites, including the money-changers in the Temple, priests should stand up to seemingly pious hypocrites. No priest should be a punching-bag in the face of hypocrisy. I submit that Tom’s hypocrisy is much more egregious than is Des’ own ‘worldly ambition” to become a bishop and ultimately a cardinal.

I contend that the film would evince the Christian message were Des to urge Tom to let go of his hatred of Jack, for we are all flawed, as well as the urge to abuse police power, and to go even further in helping Jack by befriending him while not shying away from calling Jack on his hypocrisy (while Tom admits his own to Jack). Two struggling men both in touch with their respective depravities in the context of Tom the Christian helping Jack as a friend (without enabling the hypocrisy) is what the filmmaker could have shown were the film to esteem the specifically (and uniquely) Christian ideal. Having Des relegated to a parish in the desert for a silly reason pales in comparison to depicted why he falls short of the mission of a priest.

The Exorcist

One of the most iconic films of the horror-film genre, The Exorcist (1973) focuses on the duality of good and evil that the film’s director, William Friedkin, maintained is in a constant struggle in all of us. The dialogue between the two priests performing the exorcism on the one side and the Devil possessing Regan on the other not only reveal the duality, but also the essence of evil itself. Once this essence is grasped, interesting questions can be asked that are distinctly theological, as distinct from modernity’s trope of evil portrayed in terms of, and even reduced to, supernatural movements of physical objects. The decadent materialist version of the theological domain stems from modernity’s bias in favor of materialism and empiricism. In other words, highlighting supernatural physics as being foremost in representing the religious realm is how secularity sidelines religion, rather than how religion itself is. The bias of modern society is very clear in the film as the “professionals” go through alternative explanations first from the field of medicine, privileging the somatic (physical) and then the psychological domains of medicine. In other words, the narrative establishes (or reflects) a hierarchy of three qualitatively different levels of descending validity: the somatic is primary, and only then the psychological, and, if the first two do not furnish an explanation, then, and only then, are we to turn to the theological as metaphysically (i.e., supernaturally) real primarily shown by physical objects defying the laws of physics. Science, rather than religion, is thus still in the driver’s seat. The bias in favor of materialism is in the assumption that only after feasible hypotheses from modern medicine are nullified can theological explanations be considered (as credible). In this way, the film reflects the hegemony of materialism that has taken hold since the Enlightenment, and the relegation of the theological as “magical” supernaturalism, as in a bed levitating of objects flying around Regan’s bedroom. The essence of evil is instead interior. If religion is a matter of the heart, then how could evil be otherwise?

In the film, the physicians searching for the cause of Regan’s bizarre behavior initially believe that a lesion in the girl’s frontal lobe is the cause. The two physicians are so preoccupied with a somatic (i.e., physical) cause that they ignore the mother’s account of the supernatural shaking of Regan’s bed. One of the physicians insists, “I don’t care about the bed!” The monopolization of the physical medically is here being ridiculed by the filmmaker, for it is ridiculous to ignore a bed whose jumping around so obviously surpasses the physical strength of a child. Secular modernity is being portrayed as defiant, even ideological in the very least in being narrow-minded and petulant and obstinate like a spoiled child.

When no lesion is found, the physicians recommend that a psychiatrist be consulted. Even then, the obvious indications of the involvement of a supernatural entity or force are dismissed. Implicitly, religion is reduced to psychology. It is as if Rudolf Otto’s text, The Idea of the Holy, could be reduced to Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo. In the film, the priest Karras is a pastoral counselor, and he is brought in precisely for his knowledge of psychology. So when the possibility of psychosis can be excluded and the psychiatrists recommend that a priest be consulted to perform an exorcism, Regan’s mother Chris brings in Karras. Bridging both worlds, he confronts his own lack of faith by admitting to himself that Regen really is possessed by a demon. The elder priest, Merrin, is firmly in the theological domain, and so he has no doubt that he is battling a supernatural being of pure evil.

We have finally reached the theological level, having dispelled medicine in its two major categories. Karras’ loss of faith is no more. Significantly, what ultimately convinces the guilt-ridden priest of the distinctly religious basis of Regan’s problem are not the shaking or levitating bed. Rather, Regan’s impossible interior knowledge is what convinces Karras that a being other than Regan exists in the possession. Only an entity other than Regan could know of Karras’ guilt regarding his recently deceased mother and be able to speak English in reverse as well as in Latin. These interior signs are more important to the theological domain than are the physical (i.e., materialism) manifestations of the bed levitating and objects flying around Regan’s bedroom. The latter titillating optical displays make good movie-viewing but are hardly in themselves evil, whereas tormenting a priest about his guilt is because evil is the opposite of love.

Nonetheless, Hollywood has focused on how and whether to depict the Devil empirically—as yet another object that can be seen. In the film, The Ninth Gate (1999), the presence of the Devil is shrouded in bright light, contradicting the commonly held notion that evil lies in darkness because it is absent from the light of God’s truth. The viewers never get to see the Devil. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the Devil is only visible in one scene, when the beast rapes Rosemary. As in The Ninth Gate, the essence of evil is not depicted; the interior life of the supernatural being is not revealed even though it is much closer to the essence of evil. Likewise, in Poltergeist (1982), the characters’ astonishment is at how the souls and the supernatural entity appear visually.

The Exorcist is an improvement on those films in that even though the Devil itself is not shown (except in an archeological sculpture), its mentality is clear from how it relates to the priests through the dialogue. The blinding white light depicted in The Ninth Gate, the animalistic look of the Devil in the rape scene in Rosemary’s Baby, and the levitating bed and flying objects in The Exorcist do not do justice to the theological realm; in fact, they are distractions. They reveal modernity’s warped caricature of religion in reducing it to carnival tricks. The science of medicine can easily be viewed as superior. The emphasis on the empirical is itself in line with the materialist orientation of modernity. In simpler terms, depicting the theological in terms of physical objects is in service to the preference for modern (empirical) science. I submit that the nature or essence of religion is not material or physical; rather, the essence can be found in sentiments like love and hate.

It is in the dialogue between the Devil and the priests that The Exorcist goes beyond the other films in depicting the nature of evil, and thus of the Devil. That the entity possessing Regan enjoys tormenting the two priests is much more important than what the Devil looks like, or that it makes Regan’s bed levitate.

Once presented with the Devil’s nature, movie-goers can come away from the movie thinking theologically on theology’s own terms rather than on those belonging and pertaining to a qualitatively different domain (e.g., the natural sciences). For example, viewers might consider whether the Devil’s mentality, as depicted in the film, could be loved. Here, a crucial distinction must be made to avoid a Satanist (i.e., pro-evil) misinterpretation.  For the two exorcist priests to love the entity possessing Regan, they would be ministering to the entity with the intention of saving the mentality from itself or else riding the entity of the sordid mentality. Support for the claim that evil can be ministered to exists in  the Christian Bible.

In the Gospels, Jesus says of the evil men responsible for having him crucified, Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Rather than approving or loving their evil mentality, he is forgiving them for having it. In publicly pronouncing his forgiveness, he is ministering even to them, and as a result it is possible, given free will, that even they could be saved from themselves (i.e., the evil mentality). What if Jesus were to minister to the Devil tempting him in the desert? Can an entity whose very essence is the mentality be the recipient of a loving, unconditional heart?

On the ministering side, agape, or selfless love, is unconditional, and for this to hold, an entity that is evil cannot be excluded even if it excludes itself. Even caritas, Augustine’s interpretation of Christian love (derived from Plato’s love of the eternal moral verities) that includes self-love albeit sublimated to having God as its object, is universal benevolence. Caritas seu benevolentia universalis, according to Augustine. A good will (benevolentia) is not universal (universalis) if even the most squalid entity is excluded as an object of the love qua benevolence.

On the Devil’s side, can such an entity be rid of its mentality? I submit that it can, and thus the evil mentality is not the essence of the entity. Because Lucifer falls from grace, the fallen angel (i.e. the Devil) was once without the cold mentality. Therefore, that mentality cannot be the Devil’s essence. The entity can be distinguished from, and thus rid of, its current mentality.  

In The Exorcist, imagine if the two priests were to pray for the Devil’s soul even as the entity enjoys tormenting the two men. Forgive it, for it knows not the love of God. This is the perspective that enables a ministering to rather than an acceptance or approval of the mentality. What if the priests were willing to sacrifice their lives to save the Devil and not just Regan? It seems that the battle against evil would be won by unconditional love, but would the battle metaphor even fit were the priests ministering to the Devil rather than merely getting it to leave by shouting at it?  This would not be to love the mentality as if it were something to be praised; rather, it would be to state that love can not only survive death for the faithful, but also reach into the cold darkness of deep space devoid of God’s presence.

A young Satanist once told me that he loves Satan. “Then God is present in you after all,” I replied, “because God is love.” Love can reach into places that are presumably beyond God, where hatred reigns. Of course, it is one thing for a Satanist to feel love, even though misdirected to an entity with an evil mentality, and quite another for that entity to let go of its all-consuming hatred, ultimately, of God. In the Gospels, not even the Crucifixion dislodges the entity’s mentality from Jesus’ antagonists.

In the television mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth (1977), several members of the Jewish hierarchy in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin, show no remorse even while hearing Jesus quoting from the Hebrew scripture while suffocating on a cross. One of the members says, “Even now, while nailed to a cross, he quotes from scriptures. Even now.” What would it take for the official’s astonishment at the sincerity of Jesus’ selfless piety to trigger a recognition of the wrong that he had just committed against an innocent person whose piety is evinced even under such extreme duress? After the Crucifixion, a Roman centurion who tortured Jesus rebukes Zerah, a scribe of the Sanhedrin who had instigated Jesus’ arrest, for continuing his obsession against Jesus. Not even having Hebrew guards stationed at the tomb are enough, Zerah insists, because Jesus’ disciples could lie that Jesus has risen, so Roman guards are necessary. After listening to Zerah’s relentless conspiracy theory, the centurion remarks, “What sort of person are you, if I may ask? His death is not enough for you.” Theologically, the message is that intractable stubbornness can continue to hold up complicity in the suffering and death of Jesus. By implication, the Devil surely is not touched by Jesus’ vicarious sacrifice on behalf of others. However, if enough people use the Crucifixion in the narrative as a model and instantiate it in their own confrontations with evil in other people, perhaps it will lose its force even where it is strongest. In other words, perhaps if instead of fighting against evil, we minister to those whose mentality is evil, the very notion of battle will dissolve, and with it, evil too.

In the film Mary Magdalene (2018), Mary Magdalene refutes Peter’s conception of the Kingdom of God as awaiting the Second Coming for the people to rise and Jesus be crowned king so Roman rule would finally be vanquished. “Jesus never said he would be crowned king,” she tells the disciples. “The kingdom is here, now,” she explains in dispelling the disciples’ misinterpretation of Jesus’ preaching on the Kingdom. The disciples see no kingdom because the Roman occupation has not ended, but she insists that “it’s not something we can see with our eyes; it’s here, within us. All we need to do is let go of our anguish and resentment and we become like children, just as he said. The Kingdom cannot be built by conflict, not by opposition, not by destruction; [rather] it grows with us, with very act of love and care, with our forgiveness.” Apply this rendering of the Kingdom of God to Jesus’ commandment to love one’s enemies and we have a kingdom ultimately built by ministering to one’s enemies, including coming to their aid, and, in so doing, vanquish our own hatred. Our foremost enemy is the mentality of evil. A person letting go of one’s own anguish and resentment first means letting go of that interior mentality, which is a prerequisite to changing the world by loving one’s enemies. In actuality, coming to the aid of one’s enemies can dissipate one’s own interior mentality of evil and thus bring inner peace, so the causal relationship goes in both directions. A person does not have to be at peace in order to extend love to one’s external enemies by ministering to them and thus dissipating external conflict, but having let go of one’s own hatred certainly helps.

In the Exorcist, the Devil tortures the priest Karras by reminding him of his guilt about having consigned his mother to a nursing home. Karras resists the Devil’s manipulation rather than views it as an opportunity to let go of the anguish. He could say, You know, you’re right. I screwed up, but I’m only human and I’m sorry. I do love my mother. He could then let the anguish go. Furthermore, he could pivot to ministering to his enemy’s anguish in feeling rejected by God. That would surely unleash fury. How dare you minister to me! It is pertinent to ask, what if one (or both) of the priests were to sacrifice his life while ministering as loving the enemy? That would be to instantiate the model of the Crucifixion. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” extends that model even to the benefit of enemies. Could even the Devil’s cold heart ignore that model being applied for the Devil itself? The answer, it seems to me, hinges on whether the Devil’s evil mentality is the Devil’s essence or merely an attribute; of the two, only the latter can be changed. I have in mind here Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident. I submit that an entity of the sort that can have a mentality can be distinguished from a mentality because of free-will, which pertains to such an entity rather than to a mentality. If this is so pertaining to the Devil, then surely people who have an evil mentality can be ministered to from the standpoint of unconditional love as benevolentia universalis applies to one’s enemies.

The preceding thought experiment on whether the Devil can be saved from itself is distinctly theological. We aren’t thinking about Regan’s possession in terms of her bed violently jumping and levitating. In being valid in its own right and on its own terms, thinking distinctively theologically relegates and perhaps even defeats the secular primacy of the world of physical objects, and thus materialism. The audacious and derisive encroachment on religion even to the point of rendering it as something primarily physical, empirical, and material, rather than as interior to the human condition, is accordingly pushed back. The essence of religion can be investigated and discovered on its own terms and thus rendered more accurate and complete.

Fatima

The film, Fatima (2020), tells the story of the three Roman Catholic children in Fatima, Portugal, who in 2017 claimed to see and hear the Virgin Mary periodically over a period of 6 months. The film centers around Lucia, the oldest of the three children, and, moreover, the question of whether the children really encounter the Virgin, or are lying, hypnotic, or even psychotic. In the film, as well as in “real life,” a miracle is associated with the last visitation. In the story world of the film, the visitation really happens, and the multitudes watching the children come to believe this when the Virgin delivers on a miracle as promised. Historically, believers as well as nonbelievers who were present at the event have testified that the Sun moved around in the sky and even came closer. If this really happened as witnesses have described, then the empirical “proof” in the story world of the film is not the whole story, and the religious truth therein is not limited to the faith narrative, but holds in an empirical, supernatural sense. An implication is that Jesus not only resurrects in the Gospel stories, but also as an empirical event in history. But, then, why have such supernatural events been so rare since the “time” of Jesus?  And, yet, witnesses as far as 40 km away from the visitation of the Virgin reported seeing the miracle of the Sun.

Catholicism is not portrayed in the film without blemish. Lucia’s mother, Maria, which is ironic, believes that if she and Lucia suffer, then Manuel, Maria’s son, will return alive from fighting in World War I. Maria’s assumption that God wants believers to suffer ignores the point of Jesus’ suffering as a vicarious sacrifice to atone for others’ sins and thus close the gap between God and humanity, or at least the House of Israel. Neither the voluntary suffering of Lucia or her mother Maria save souls. Furthermore, Maria’s flawed sense of causation—that if she suffers, then her son will not be killed—demonstrates how superstition can take hold when the human mind enters the religious domain of thought. So in the film, Catholicism is hardly whitewashed. Moreover, the vulnerabilities of the human mind in contemplating religious ideas are not dismissed.

So the need for psychological testing of Lucia and the two other children is presented in the film as reasonable, and indeed it is. The children pass the test, but they could still be lying. So Lucia asks the Virgin to perform a miracle so the bystanders would know that the visitation is real even though only the three children can see the Virgin. The dramatic tension rises as the mayor goes so far as imprison the three children so they would miss a monthly visitation by the Virgin. Lucia’s mother, Maria, goes so far as to repeatedly hit Lucia for lying about the visitations. That a person who presumes to know how to keep her son alive at war—and indeed seems so “religious” in general—would then show her
true colors” in hitting her daughter for having a religious belief (i.e., in the visitations) is not lost on the film’s viewers. And the child shall lead them—not the bishop or the observable “devout.”

The esoteric messages of the Virgin to the children, rather than to the judgmental multitude ruining the family’s crop, the bishop, the mayor, and Lucia’s mother, is justified. “Some people will never believe," the Virgin tells the children. The mayor in particular is a good example. God is like the breeze passing by the mountain, rather than a great fire or earthquake, and it takes a religious sensibility—a sense of presence—to notice the passing of a breeze, metaphorically speaking. It is because of the hostility of the detractors, those to whom Jesus’ message and example of love and mercy has fallen like on hard stone, or hardness of heart, that Lucia asks the Virgin for a miracle.

Like a quiet breeze, the message of the Virgin, that people should stop insulting God by sinning without repentance, should not be lost as the more sensationalistic miracle gains the headlines, both in the film and after the historical event. The miracle is merely a means by which to aid in the quiet message by giving confidence to believers and convert others to not insulting God, which I contend is more important than the Virgin’s admonition to pray more as that is merely a means to the end, which is love. Even so, the miracle of the Sun, both in the film and as a historical event, arguably has momentous significance. In the film, the miracle means that the visitation was real, so Lucia and the two other children are vindicated. Even Maria comes around, though tellingly the mayor still does not. As a historical event, the movements of the Sun while the last visitation was occurring means that religious truth, or meaning, in faith narratives is not the whole story; those truths in faith narratives refer to spiritual things outside of the story world, in the empirical, historical world. It is thus extremely significant that believers and nonbelievers both testified as witnesses in 1917 to the movements of the Sun. Mass hypnosis can thus be eliminated as a possible explanation. The only alternative left is that of coincidence, or else that the reports are erroneous—that the changed colors and movements of the Sun were optical illusions after the heavy rain. The veracity of religious truth in a faith narrative is not affected either way, so I contend that such truth, like a light breeze, should be the object of faith without raising questions of historicity one way or the other.

That is to say, the veracity of religious truth in a faith narrative can be distinguished from, or even more radically does not depend on, historical events or persons. Even so, the matter of empirical events (e.g., the Resurrection) and persons (e.g., Moses, Jesus, and the Buddha) is not inconsequential, and, if answered even more definitively than either the film or the historical event of the Sun moving in the sky, then the modern conception of religion, which disavows any faith narrative correspondence with empirical or historical events and even persons, would be even more severely uprooted. It may be that the miracle of the Sun has already done that, and the film merely reminds or informs people of that, as well as the possibility that, as the Virgin says in the film, some people will never believe, even in the face of a miraculous empirical (i.e., supernatural) event.

Even so, many spurious miracles have been claimed in the history of Christianity, and so perhaps a miracle less subject to being reckoned as an optical illusion is needed before the question of whether the events and characters in the Christian faith narratives correspond to historical events and actual persons. Nothing in such narratives can confirm such correspondences because a faith narrative is not a historical account even if historical events are used (and modified to serve theological points). Fortunately, the ways to enter the Kingdom of God as described and exemplified in the Gospel faith-narratives do not depend on the question of historical correspondences of events and even characters in those narratives.

The value of helping detractors, such as Lucia tries to help her mother in the film, does not depend on whether Jesus was a historical man or merely a character in the Gospels; the truth wherein human nature is expanded, or turned on its head, does not so depend. Whether or not the correspondence holds, a person applying the example and preaching in the narratives will experience the spiritual dynamic. Faith is ultimately in the value of that dynamic. In the Gospels, Jesus says that he came to preach the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The astute viewer of the film, Fatima, transcends the sensationalistic leitmotifs of whether the visitations have a reality outside of the children and whether the Sun really moves in the sky and comes closer to discern the innocent faith of Lucia from the dogmatic, hypocritical “faith” of her mother, who ironically has the name, Maria. Entering the Kingdom of God in humility is like the innocent faith of a child. This esoteric message of the film is, I submit, the most important thing about the film, and yet even a believer could be excused for having a burning urge to know whether the miracle (i.e., not of the laws of physics) of the Sun really happened. We are merely human, after all, and so we have an instinctual urge for finality or certainty even though the human mind can transcend the limits of cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). One thing is certain; the religious sphere is not an easy one for the human brain to inhabit.

On transcending even the ethical, see: Spiritual Leadership

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word

The documentary, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) chiefly lays out the pope’s critique of economic Man. The film begins with references to climate change too loosely linked to the global population figure of 8 million humans, 1 billion of whom are unnecessarily living in poverty. The viewer is left to fill in the gaps, such as that because as biological organisms we must consume and use energy, the hyperextended overpopulation of the species is the root cause of climate- and ecosystem-changing CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Arguably, the salvific Son of God or the means into the Kingdom of God enjoy pride of place in the gospels, but compassion for the poor as well as outcasts and the sick is indeed a message that Jesus stresses in the faith narratives. Rather than being a sign of sin, poverty, especially if voluntary,  can permit the sort of humility that is much superior to the pride of the Pharisees. In the documentary, Jorge Bergoglio, who took the name Francis in becoming pope of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, is a practical man who points to the sickness or temptation of greed that keeps humanity from riding itself of poverty, unnecessarily. Moreover, the hegemony of the market, with its culture of consumerism and commoditization, comes at the cost of the common good, which to Francis has a spiritual basis. Abstractly speaking, harmony, which inherently respects its own limitations, should have priority over greed and markets. Both of these can go to excess without enough built-in constraints as occurred before and during the financial crisis of 2008, with poverty plaguing humanity even more rather than less as a result. 

   

Such poverty as exists in the world (in 2017) is a scandal, the pope says, because we could solve the problem. “We have such riches, so many resources for giving food to everybody,” yet so many children are hungry. If we become a little bit poorer—having not so many things—we can help the poor. The pope even wants “a poor church for the poor.” Unfortunately, men can be found even in the Church who have yielded to—rather than resisted—the temptation to have more things. More things owned by fewer people means that more people get less.

Organizational theorists speak of dysfunctional organizations; the pope refers to the Curia, the government of the Church, as dysfunctional. Sins are malfunctioning diseases that weaken our service to God. In men of God, the result is tremendous hypocrisy. According to the pope, a sick organization can suffer from people who think they are immortal in the sense that they deem themselves immune from temptation. Other spiritual diseases include rivalry and vaingloriousness (boastfulness), closed circles (cliques), and lugubrious (sad looking) faces. Existential schizophrenia[1] and spiritual Alzheimer’s disease[2] are two others. Last but certainly not the least, given Francis’ preoccupation, is hoarding. A person seeks to fill an existential void in one’s heart by accumulating material goods not out of need, but, rather, to feel secure. Twice the pope states, “As long as there’s a church that places its hope on wealth, Jesus is not there.” This alone doesn’t exclude a church from having wealth, though Francis clearly wants a poor church for the poor. To be sure, a church that is itself poor has limited funds to lift the poor out of poverty, let alone help them momentarily, but in the spending of vast wealth a large church can made a dent in the problem and the remaining lower cash-flow can make use of fund-raising.

We need only look at Wall Street bankers to see that wealth can be accumulated much beyond even the most risk-averse need for security, financial and otherwise. Pope Francis does not discuss Wall Street in the documentary. No doubt he would have expressed disgust at the many traders for whom maximizing a yearly bonus is a game even during a financial downturn such as that of 2008-2009 even though many sub-prime mortgage producers and mortgage-based bond traders were culpable both ethically and in terms of competence. Making unnecessary hoarding into a game when ending poverty lies within our species’ grasp and poor people are suffering surely involves an immature, selfish dysfunction. What is for one person a game is for another hunger and even homelessness. No brotherly love exists in such a deprived culture of consumption.

In such a culture, money can apply value anything that can be commoditized. Goods, services, jobs, and even people are valued monetarily. A Hollywood movie star (i.e., a popular actor), for example can make millions of dollars on just one film, while dollars can be scarce for organizations that attempt to reduce poverty. This is a reflection of how much movies and reducing poverty are valued in a society. As Pope Francis makes clear in the documentary, enough wealth exists that poverty could be eliminated, but people with a surplus of money want to go to the movies more than they want to pitch in together to end poverty.

St. Francis rejected the distended hoarding disease that springs from the sin of greed. He likened money to animal dung and lauded poverty, especially of the voluntary sort.[3] So he viewed money itself, rather than just the culture that forms from it, as problematic. In the context of ordinary Christians first being able to accumulate coin from trade during the Commercial Revolution in the High Middle Age, St. Francis eschewed his inheritance to undergo voluntary poverty in solidarity with the poor, the sick, and the outcasts like Jesus.

The saint felt a calling to restore God’s house on Earth, for which a complete transformation of attitude would be needed. Such a transformation, while not impossible with human nature, would surely go against its grain and thus could not be based in it. Like Kant’s notion of perpetual peace protected by a world federation, the transformation is possible but not probable.[4] Being very difficult to accomplish in human nature, we can conclude that the transformation is sourced either in the higher faculties of human nature or a source that is wholly other to our artifacts and nature. Both St. Francis and the pope who took that name would say that the transformation is so foreign to our nature (and thus ways) that the source must be divine, transcending Creation, hence wholly other.

To St. Francis, the transformation of attitude, which I submit applies not only to greed, but also pride,  can result in “a new brotherhood of man dedicated to the common good.” The documentary uses that rather secular language—the common good. In political theory, the common or public good stands for what is in the public welfare—the good of the whole (e.g., a city). The aggregation of private uses can fall short of that which is in a community’s interest. Hence, in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith advocates a role for government in regulating markets. Relatedly, public goods like air and water are for common use because either they cannot be privatized (e.g., contained in packages) or the cost of exclusion is too high. Air and water, respectively, apply. This is why Polanyi argues in his book, The Great Transformation, that social norms should hold sway over markets, rather than vice versa, and thus governments should not be controlled by the financial sector. Even though markets can efficiently allocate goods and services, even a financial system, if left to itself especially in times of great volatility, can go beyond equilibrium and collapse without the overarching public good being enforced by a government, such as in the United States in 2008.

In St. Francis’ usage, the term common good is not just secular, for the transformation needed has a divine rather than an earthly source. The transformation runs against the human nature to economize even for a person’s own self-preservation. Godric of Finchale, a trader during the Commercial Revolution more than a century before St. Francis, gave his accumulated wealth to the poor in order to live as a hermit close to Nature. Godric put even his own life at risk because he, like St. Francis, believed that having any wealth would castrate his salvation. That is, salvation does not allow for making an income and accumulating wealth. The underlying assumption is that wealth is tightly coupled with the stain of underlying greed. Elsewhere, I call this stance the anti-wealth paradigm.[5]

That paradigm was dominant in Christian thought for centuries; the pro-wealth paradigm, in which greed is not necessarily behind profit-seeking and wealth, only began to take hold during the Commercial Revolution in the High Middle Age. Interestingly, just as capitalism arrived on the world stage two centuries before Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations during the eighteenth century, so too did the pro-wealth paradigm come to dominate among theologians two centuries before Max Weber wrote his Protestant Work Ethic. Ricardo’s world capitalism began during the sixteenth century, and the pro-wealth paradigm had begun in the Italian Renaissance during the fifteenth century. Renaissance theologians emphasized the Christian virtues of liberality and munificence as “good uses” of wealth, and thus as justifying the fortunes of even the usurer Cosimo De Medici.[6] He made a deal with Pope Eugene IV: In return for financing the renovations of a Florentine monastery (at which Cosimo got a cell for prayer), the international banker could keep his fortune of usurious interest and secure his salvation. St. Francis must have been spinning in his grave.

As shown in the documentary, Pope Francis is also an adherent of the anti-wealth paradigm. “Jesus in the Gospels says no one can serve two masters. We either serve God or we serve money,” the pope says. He is assuming that serving money means that greed and money are present. In other words, greed and wealth are linked. Unlike Godric and St. Francis, however, Pope Francis was at the time the head of a very wealthy organization, the Roman Catholic Church. Although he says in the documentary that he wants a poor church serving the poor, he, like the pro-wealth paradigm adherents, had to confront, by which I mean legitimate, the extant wealth of his Church. He emphasizes good uses, namely to the poor, in the documentary. In contrast, St. Francis “attacked the subtle temptation of pious Christians to pile up wealth under the pretext of using it to beautify churches or serve God.”[7] Had he been alive in Cosimo De Medici’s day, St. Francis might have preached that Pope Eugene should pick up one of De Medici’s usurious coins by the teeth and deposit the coin on top of a pile of animal dung. Moreover, by contrasting St. Francis and Pope Eugene IV, we can see that the zenith of the anti-wealth paradigm had been replaced by that of the pro-wealth paradigm by fifteenth century—two centuries before Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic.[8]

As if channeling St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope Francis says in the film that the big temptation for mankind is greed. Even though Francis mentions St. Francis’ notion of an attitudinal transformation, the pope could have said more concerning how the dysfunctional attitude of pride fits in. This would be a nod to Augustine, who had written of pride as the chief sin. In the twenty-first century, the term sin can seem vague and even antiquated; hence the pope uses the terms, temptation and disease. Perhaps these, while workable in reaching a secular world, do not go far enough.

Beyond the temptation of greed issuing out in diseases, St. Francis’ transformation of attitude could be contemplated beyond the immaturity, selfishness, and lack of compassion for others. When Wall Street traders turned maximizing their bonuses into some kind of a game, something more than greed was at work, even during the mortgage-bond fiasco that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Not only did it not matter that subprime mortgage borrowers were going homeless; traders actually blamed the scheme on those borrowers (for being stupid) instead of themselves. During a flood, arrogance has no place above water, let alone on stilts.

A dysfunctional socio-economy can be viewed as an encrusted artifact of the attitude borne of the temptation of greed and its diseases. In the film, the pope bemoans an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules, as having resulted in a plundered planet; we have abused rather than cultivated it, and climate change may be our reckoning. Work is sacred, the pope says, because creating something is a version of doing the Creator’s work. “The way to escape consumerism, this corruption, this competitiveness, this being enslaved to money, is the concreteness of day-to-day work”—a “tangible reality.” Similarly, Heidegger wrote that in concrete work, such as nailing with a hammer, a person comes to realize oneself as an entity that exists (dasein). God sent our species to cultivate, through work, not only the land, but also science, art, technology, and culture. “But when someone feels that he owns this culture and feels all-powerful,” the pope says, “the temptation arises to go further, and destroy the culture.” This feeling of “all-powerful,” as if self-appointed as a god, is otherwise known as pride. Here we see the pope link it to the temptation of greed. Perhaps the common denominator is a refusal to recognize limits upon oneself. As Gordon Gekko says in the film, Wall Street, the wealth that he desires as a trader is unlimited. How much is enough?  "It’s not a question of enough.”

Exploiting the planet’s resources, including coal for energy, plays into more for its own sake. Increasing the CO2 concentration in the oceans and atmosphere does so as well. Even being fruitful and multiplying without limit—as if the divine command holds even after sufficient multiplying has enabled our species to cultivate the Earth—plays into more. Indeed, as the overpopulation is behind the CO2 increases because biological organisms, including of our species, must use up energy, our species may go extinct because of the refusal to rationally curb the more even to the extent that it is instinctual and woven into the fabric of our economic, social, and political systems. In the film, neither the narrator nor the pope go this far in connecting the major themes. Essentially, the pope argues that if people live as Jesus in the gospels, then exclusion, poverty, and the cult of more, including its destruction of the planet at least in terms of human habitation, and thus the overall good of humanity, could be expunged. Instead, a harmony could exist in line with the principles of ecosystems. It is a “law of nature,” the pope says for lack of a better expression that “all things should be in harmony.” Plato’s notion of justice, by the way, is when a musical-mathematical harmony exists within a reason-directed psyche (mind) and polis (city and even country).

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1. Efforts to stabilize one’s existence, in this case by having more wealth.

2. Remembering God no longer. In this void, a person can engage in self-idolatry, which can include worshipping one’s own wealth as an extension of oneself.

3. Skip Worden, God’s Gold.

4. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace.

5. Skip Worden, God’s Gold.

6. Ibid.

7. Dan Runyon, “St. Francis of Assisi on the Joy of Poverty and the Value of Dung,” Church History 14 (1987).

8. Skip Worden, God’s Gold.