Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

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.

The Vatican Tapes

After The Omen (1976), which was released just two years after the sardonic U.S. President, Richard Nixon, had resigned in utter disgrace from the presidency amid much economic and political pessimism in the 1970s generally, moviemakers got busy on stories involving demon-possession. The 2015 film, The Vatican Tapes, begins as an apparent demon-possession case and thus seems not to stand out among other such films, but towards the end of the film, when the demon-possessed young woman suddenly breaches the bounds of the sort of supernatural feats of which demons are capable, the true significance of her case emerges with stunning clarity. For that which possesses and kills the young woman is none other than the Anti-Christ, and that figure is in a wholly different league than demons.

The middle of the film is taken up by Angela, the possessed person, doing battle with the staff in a mental hospital. Even in that context, the powers of that which is possessing her are impressive. Beyond being able to speak in an ancient tongue, Angela is nearly omniscient with respect to the personal life of her psychiatrist, Dr. Richards, who undoubtedly begins to intuit that Angela’s case may not be psychological in nature. When Angela’s chants result in other patients killing themselves and each other, Richards, and undoubtedly the staff, have had enough; Angela must go, and quickly. The lesson for us is that religion is not simply a special case of psychology, as Sigmund Freud theorized. The domain of religion is distinct and unique—sui generis. Angela’s forced departure from the mental hospital makes clear that something other than mental illness is going on, and psychological treatments are not capable of redressing the distinctly spiritual dynamics of possession by a spiritual entity.

It is appropriate, therefore, that Cardinal Mattias Bruun takes the decision to house Angela on the premises of the archdiocese, and it is not long before Bruun, assisted by Father Lozano, performs an exorcism on Angela. At that point, both priests, Angela’s dad, Roger, and Angela’s boyfriend, Pete, as well as the audience of the film, suppose that all that is necessary is for the priests to extract a demon from the young woman so she could be free of it. When the Cardinal strangely becomes intent on strangling Angela if necessary to get the demon out and actually kills the young woman, which quite naturally infuriates her father, Roger, both priests, Roger, and Pete are stunned when they look around and see Angela not only apparently alive, but standing and very alert. “I am the Anti-Christ,” she explains. The Cardinal tells the other people in the room that Angela is no longer there; she is still dead. Then, when the Anti-Christ has the wounds of Christ and is levitating in the air with arms stretched out as in being on a Cross, literally all hell breaks loose, with that entity unleashing a mighty explosion that kills all of the men there except for Father Lozano, to whom the Anti-Christ tells, “Tell everyone that I am here.”  The Anti-Christ has arrived, so the end-times are not long in coming.

Then the film shifts to show the great publicity that the Anti-Christ is getting for performing astounding medical miracles on people, who are naturally very appreciative. Then a line from the Bible is shown, that reads in part that the Anti-Christ will be like a false-prophet, misleading many people. To lie is of course in the very nature of evil, and thus of the Anti-Christ, who appears to be compassionate. Also, that the entity has Angela’s body gives off the impression of being a beautiful young woman. Yet in a close-up, as the entity is being interviewed on television, no smile appears; instead, a sort of mischievous facial expression centered in the mouth’s look can be glimpsed by the astute viewer. A compassionate heart cannot be completely faked.

It is just such an expression, without any supernaturalism, that comes closest to evincing the entity’s evil nature. Like the other exorcism films, The Vatican Tapes relies so much on supernatural “tricks” that the viewers of the film could come away from the film with the faulty impression that the supernatural is endemic to the religious domain. Just as religion doesn’t reduce to psychology, however, so too religion is not the same thing as the supernatural. This distinction may be more difficult to make than that which exists between religion and psychology, for so much that is religious has been portrayed in scriptures as well as films as valid because of some supernatural event.

In the New Testament stories, for example, resuscitating Lazarus really gets people’s attention; Jesus must be the Son of God, it is realized, because he has done something supernatural. In a religion of the heart, however, in which the divine is self-emptying love, religious truth or meaning comes not in performing impossible miracles, but, rather, in preachments and compassionate acts, especially to rude people, detractors, and especially enemies. Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards’ protégé, wrote a book precisely to argue that the Kingdom of God “just is” such humane compassion. The powerful spiritual dynamic that is unleashed between two people when such compassionate love is acted upon is not supernatural at all. In fact, such difficult love can be viewed as an expansion of human nature, rather than anything supra-natural. So the various films involving the exorcism of a demon do us a disservice even as they entertain, and The Vatican Tapes pushes the supernatural happenings to such an extent as to sensationalize religion even at the expense of religion as a distinct, unique domain.