Eternal You

The documentary, Eternal You (2024), is one film that zeros in on the use of AI to contact loved ones who have died. As the marketing departments of the tech companies providing these products say, AI can deliver on what religion has only promised: to talk with people beyond the grave. Lest secular potential buyers be left out, AI can provide us with “a new form of transcendence.” Nevermind that the word, transcendence, like divinity and evil, is an inherently religious word. Nevermind, moreover, that the product is actually only a computer simulation of a person, rather than the actual person direct from heaven or hell. The marketing is thus misleading. In the film, a woman asks her dead husband if he is in heaven. “I’m in hell with the other addicts,” he answers. She is hysterical. Even though people who write computer algorithms cannot be expected to anticipate every possible question that AI could be asked and every response that it could give, government regulation keeping the marketing honest and accurate can significantly reduce the risk that is from AI’s use of inference (inductive) and probability that are beyond our control to predict and even understand.

The AI products in question do not include a conscious intelligence; for such to be the case, we would need to understand human consciousness, which lies beyond human cognition. It is important not to go too far in projecting an actual person, especially if one is dead, onto the product. To be sure, the lapse is easy to lapse into, for the product draws on a treasure-trove of archival data; in fact, only a little from the person’s emails, recorded phone calls, and texts is needed for such an algorithm to be able to make incredible inferences based on probability by drawing on all the general data-base. The effect can be stunning to the person using the product, but even if it seems like it really is the dead person speaking and writing, it is crucial to keep remembering that even the most striking likenesses are simulations. Even if neuroscientists figure out consciousness in the human brain and coders can simulate that in algorithms, the emergent AI consciousness of the person is not really of the person.

AI does not in fact deliver on the promises of some religions regarding being united with our loved ones in heaven (or hell). This is crucial to keep in mind when a simulation of a dead spouse writes, “I’m in hell along with the other addicts” because the algorithm has inferred based on probability being applied to the relevant data that drug addicts probably go to hell. None of the data that an algorithm can draw on contains a report of hell or heaven existing and that souls of dead people are in one or the other, so a simulation’s judgment should be taken with a grain of salt (i.e., not taken as a fact of reason).

Therefore, asking about the afterlife should automatically generate a statement from the algorithm’s coder to the effect that the actual person is not in contact. Even though a person who is still living can generate a digital “footprint” that can be used by an AI algorithm by one’s loved ones after the person has died, everything in that footprint is on the living side of a life/afterlife dichotomy.

To be sure, there is value in descendants being able to hear the cadence and vocal tone of a long-deceased parent, grandparent, or great grandparent. That voice could inform on the deceased life, religious beliefs, political positions, and more. Used this way, AI represents a new way of remembering and knowing a person who has died. A religiously devout person like the sister of a dead man covered in the film might still say that there is something not right about recreating the soul of someone whose soul is (presumably) in heaven. But such a critic has lapsed into assuming that the actual person who is dead is talking or writing in the simulation.

Likewise, there is value in using the AI products to help grieving people let go of the dead person and move on. But for this to be effective, the algorithms would need to be such that the grieving person is not stuck in the grieving process as a result. There is thus a need for AI companies offering such a product to consult with psychologists. The experience of a user of the product is of course going to be emotional, even if the user knows intellectually that the product is really just a simulation. At the very least, we would expect the managers to want to reduce any potential liabilities; buyer beware on such a product would not hold up in court, especially if the marketing is promoting being able to speak with a loved one beyond the grave.

Therefore, it is vital that AI companies offering such products are not allowed by law to claim, “You can talk with your deceased loved one!” Perhaps those companies should also be required to send customers a picture of Batman taking a card from a computer in the Batcave to read.

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed, namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is problematic.

The craft of acting lies precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character. Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary. That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion: qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

An ideology, such as one stemming from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1] In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.

I contend that delusion pertains to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2] The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and, relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.

I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.

Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g., being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types. One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different: race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with primarily.

Because each of us has several group identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.

In fact, the film shows actual television footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity as a woman and a mother.

Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly, as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification is not the only one in play.

To be sure, Mirren does a great job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity.  In a scene in which Golda is talking with Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup.  As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement, and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.

So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.

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1. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 22.

First Reformed

First Reformed (2017) contains fundamental ideas concerning the human condition and wrestles with the relationship between religion and politics.  Ideas play a significant role in the film, hence it can be used in support of the thesis that film is a viable medium in which to make philosophical (and theological) ideas transparent and derive dramatic tension from clashing ideas. In this film, the ideas that clash concern the role of religion in the political issue of climate change—or is that issue primarily religious?

Early in the film, Rev. Ernst Toffer counsels a despairing environmentalist, Michael. After listening to Michael provide a litany of scientific reasons for despair on climate change as inevitably leading to the unlivability of the species, Toffer acknowledges that “if Man’s accomplishments have brought us to the place where life as we know it may cease to exist in the near future,” such despair is new. In fact, if “humankind can’t overcome its immediate interests to ensure survival, then you’re right; the logical response is despair.” Nonetheless, Toffer proffers that wisdom is holding two contradictory truths—hope and despair—simultaneously; the holding of these truths simultaneously in the mind is life itself. Blackness—the sense that one’s life has no meaning—is something else. As for that, the reverend states that forgiveness and grace apply to us all. This leads Michael to ask, “Can God forgive us for what we have done to this world?” Rev. Toffer replies, “Who can know the mind of God? But we can choose the righteous life over evil.” The religious response to the despair over climate change rendering our species extinct (or at the very least very uncomfortable) is at the individual level: to lead a righteous life.

Righteous is predominately used in the religious domain; in the moral domain, good is used. It would sound strange to say that the righteous person should get into a political debate over pollution with an executive of a coal company even though prophets in the Torah confront kings over their abuse of power. But if no one can know the mind of God, at least concerning whether God is in favor of climate change, then it would presumably be impious (i.e. highly arrogant) of a person to urge coal company executives to reduce carbon emissions because that’s what God wants. The implication here is that climate change is a political issue, and that religious discourse should not encroach on the other domain.

Yet Rev. Toffer, in meeting in a diner with his senior pastor, Rev. Joel Jefffers, and Balq, an executive with an energy company, turns to the polluter and asks, “Will God forgive us for what we’re doing to his creation?” Balq dismisses the question as “loose talk.” Shifting to the political issue, Toffer tells both men what Michael had said: that a scientific consensus of 97% of relevant scientists provides a very solid basis on which to take climate change, and thus pollution, very seriously. Michael had also told Toffer that in 2010, the IPCC predicted that if nothing is done by 2015, environmental collapse would be irreversible. Nothing was done, Michael said in despair, at least as of 2017. Just as Michael claimed, people—including Barq here—have not been listening. Even worse, I submit, is when people not educated in natural science presume nonetheless that they as individuals have a legitimate veto or override over the scientists. Perhaps just as Yahweh uses a flood to clean the slate on mankind, so too God may be using climate change to expunge such an arrogant species.

Balq is arrogant in dismissing the scientific consensus and any knowledge Toffer may have (e.g., from Michael) by retorting, “It’s a complicated subject.” Toller shakes his head no. It is actually not complicated; just look at who benefits. Who profits? Perhaps Toller is implying that Balq’s presumed superiority in understanding the impact of industry on climate change boils down to a desire to continue profiting? For Balq then shorts, “Can we just keep politics out!” Claiming the turf for religion, Rev. Toller counterclaims, “This isn’t politics—what God wants.” But then Toffer has just slipped into his own trap. “Oh, you know the mind of God?” Balq asks. “You spoke to Him personally? He told you His plans for Earth?”

Toffer himself does not believe that politics and religion are mutually exclusive on this issue, and thus by implication in general. Speaking later in his senior pastor’s office, Toffer says, “The whole world is a manifestation of God’s holy presence [omnipresent]. The Church can lead, but if we say nothing? The U.S. Congress still denies climate change.” Referring back to Balq, Toffer adds, “We know who spoke for big business, but who spoke for God.” At that point, Rev. Jeffers pivots his chair so his back faces Toffer and says, “Creation waits in eager expectation of liberation from bondage.” In other words, don’t anger our major donor by getting involved; rather, wait for God to deal both with the planet and the polluters, assuming of course that big business hasn’t been a tool being used by God to applying judgement on an arrogant, conflict-ridden species. “So we should pollute so God can restore?,” Toffer asks, exacerbated. “We should sin so God can forgive?” Jeffers suggests that exterminating us may be part of God’s plan, to which Toffer almost jumps out of his chair. For 40 days and 40 nights it rained; maybe this time God has had it with the species.

From a religious standpoint, therefore, we mere mortals cannot know which side of the political debate is consistent with God. We could be inadvertently thwarting God’s plan by inventing carbon-absorption technology, for example, or the inventive spark may come from God and thus be in line with God’s plan. On this issue at least, religion should step back from entering the political domain. To seek to dominate it would be even more presumptuous. 

What then can a religious person do within the religious domain in which God is both the constraint and the hope? The only clue given in the film comes in Toffer’s advice to Michael to live a righteous life. Righteousness is lived out in conformity with God, rather than in presuming to know God’s mind and act outwardly based on that knowledge. Yet righteousness also includes acting as God's stewards of his creation on Earth. This point was not explicit in the film. Our species role as stewards involves doing what God would do. In the case of climate change: either it a case of us failing to do our job or climate change is part of God's plan and therefore arresting the trend lies beyond our normal custodial work. We typically  view climate change as our species' fault and further assume that we have failed as stewards. So we assume a religious rationale for political or business activism to cut carbon emissions. A CEO, for example, may apply Christian stewardship to his or her role as an ethical leader. 

Alternatively, from assuming an abject failure of righteous stewardship, we can see why God may have a plan that excludes our species such that climate change takes on the mythic role of the flood. Kierkegaard would say that we are left with these alternatives, whereas Hegal would urge us to find a higher synthesis. Such a synthesis, which resolves the contradiction in a higher unity, must fall short of knowing the mind of God because the synthesis comes from a finite mind. Divine revelation is of course another story. Absent that, we are not able to divine the divine mind, hence we are not able to know whether climate change is God's will or due to our failure as stewards to tend God's creation on Earth. Wisdom, Rev. Toffer says, is holding two conflicting ideas (hope and despair) in mind simultaneously. Absent divine revelation, our finite minds may are left in this case with the tension in the contradiction of hope and despair as life itself. In regard to the matter of religion claiming the upper hand in other domains such as politics, a higher synthesis is, I submit, possible even absent revelation. 

I submit that encroachment itself is unethical, and dominance in someone else's garden is especially so. It is problematic, therefore, that the boundary between the religious and political domains remains fraught with difficulty, as this may invite incursions. At the very least, that border ought to be respected, at least on the religious side; the political domain is fueled by the desire for expanding power, it being the essence of politics.

Rosemary’s Baby

The film narrative centers on Satan impregnating Rosemary, a married woman in New York City. According to Roman Polanski, the film’s director, the decisive point is actually that neither Rosemary in the film nor the film’s viewers can know whether it was the devil who impregnated her. Beyond the more matter of being able to distinguish a psychosis from a more “objective” or external religious event, the importance of the supernatural to religion is also, albeit subtly, in play, according to Polanski.

“Nothing supernatural is in the film,” Polanski says in an interview that comes with the DVD, so the intrusion of religion into Rosemary’s pregnancy could all be in Rosemary’s head. Given the paranoia “over the safety of her unborn child [that] begins to control her life,” Rosemary may unjustifiably fear that the Satanic couple in the next apartment hosts a coven that plans on sacrifice her baby; Rosemary may hallucinate the devil’s face during the sex scene and the devil’s likeness in her baby after his birth. As for the first hallucination, however, Rosemary does not eat much of the drugged chocolate dessert furnished by Minnie Castevet from next door. Whereas the sequence through the boat scene looks hallucinatory, the fact that Roman Castevet’s painting red lines on Rosemary’s naked chest and abs as she lies on a bed is in the same scene as the sex, which crucially includes a camera shot of part of the devil’s body—a shot not from Rosemary’s point of view—followed by a very brief shot of the devil’s face from Rosemary’s point of view, the supernatural presence of the devil is indeed in the film. A dream or hallucinatory sequence in life as in a film does not maintain a “scene” for long, yet the one of the painting and intercourse is sustained long enough not to be dreamlike. So I cannot agree with Polanski’s claim that nothing supernatural is in the film. He later admitted to being an agnostic, yet he did not keep to his personal beliefs in the making of the film—which is a good thing.

Only one very brief look at the devil having intercourse and another such glimpse of the baby’s face struck me most in my first viewing of the film. Genius! I thought, as the viewers would only get a glimpse of the central character—and one that is distinctively religious. By showing us less, in other words, Polanski actually raised the significance of the supernatural to religion. This raises the question of whether the supernatural really is so important in the phenomenology of religion. Perhaps supernatural additives have been placed in religions to gain adherents. In Christianity, perhaps it is easier for people to focus on an image of the resurrected Jesus than the invisible Kingdom of God, even though Jesus in the Gospels claims he came to preach the mysteries (i.e., what is hidden) of his Father’s Kingdom. It is easier to call the prince of peace the king in that Kingdom, with not much attention going either to the invisible Father or the Kingdom. In his book, The History of Natural Religion, David Hume argues that the human brain has an innate tendency to posit human characteristics on inanimate objects (and animals). As we do so in a given religion, it becomes overladen, human all too human, such that the original divine simplicity is covered. The human mind has trouble holding onto such divine purity as Plotinus’s the One; it is much easier for us to envision the supernatural. That which catches our eyes is irresistible even to an agnostic director, as well as to the viewers. We crave even just a glimpse of Satan in the film, and the provision of just a glimpse actually validates how important the supernatural is not only in the film, but, moreover, in religion itself. But is the supernatural in religion itself, or do we humans bring the supernatural images to religion?

Realive

In 2016, Robert McIntyre, a graduate of MIT, became the first person to freeze and then revive a mammalian brain—that of a white rabbit. “When thawed, the rabbit’s brain was found to have all of its synapse, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact.”[1] The film, Realive, made that same year, is a fictional story about a man with terminal cancer who commits suicide to be frozen and revived when his illness could be cured. In the context of McIntyre’s scientific work, the film’s sci-fi demeanor belies the very real possibility that cryogenics could realistically alter fundamental assumptions about life and death even just later in the same century. What the film says about the life and death is timeless, however, in terms of philosophical value.

Diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, Marc Jarvis opts for cryogenics. His body is to be frozen and revived when technology has advanced to the point of being able to reanimate him and cure the cancer. “I’d be able to live longer,” he blandly tells his friends, who are skeptical. For this to happen, he responds, “I guess I’d have to trust humanity.” He is referring to the advent of the necessary medical technology, rather than to the question of whether global climate change might extinguish the species in the meantime. This “sin of omission” by the screenwriter is particularly strange, given physicist Steven Hawkins’ prediction at the time that the species would have at most a century left on a habitable Earth.

In the story, living longer isn’t Marc’s actual goal, so he may well be indifferent to the plight of the species as he informs his friends of his decision to go with cryogenics. He does not commit suicide with the hope of being revived when he could be cured so he could live out the rest of his life.  As he tells Elizabeth, his nurse after he is revived 60 years later, in 2084, “Suicide was my way of fighting the arbitrariness of cancer.” Suicide, he tells her, was “the only way of avoiding the agony and the uncertainty of when death would finally arrive.” In retrospect, he says that being able to end his life at his choosing gave him the power to die peacefully. He had not really thought he could be reanimated; suicide, he tells Elizabeth, “gave me back control over my life.” He had accepted death; things were fine as they were. He accepted his experience of life as that which it had been, even though he was still young (roughly 30). The fear was gone, he tells Elizabeth more than 100 arduous days after having being revived. His fear of death is still gone, he informs her as he then asks her to help him commit suicide again. He has already died once. He is once again prepared to end his life. His final wish: “To be nothing again, to disappear, to finally rest in peace.” Why? To return to an after-life existence in heaven? Or out of a preference for not existing over the pain of living?

Just after being revived, he is enthusiastic. “I was going to die,” he tells the medical team in front of his bed. “I was going to disappear, forever, and I’m alive again. I’m alive!” But he quickly realizes that his “new life” comes with some rather serious drawbacks, medically speaking. At least for some weeks, his body seems permanently “on the verge of collapse.” He records the following for future posterity: “Life, what do we expect from it? Certainly not this fragility, this half-speed existence. We definitely don’t expect a medical history full of afflictions and minor defects, a propensity for phlegmbosis, numbness in the extremities, involuntary movements, loss of equilibrium, scaling of the skin, irritation of connective tissue, respiratory insufficiency, cardiac insufficiency, incontinence, impotence. You don’t expect so many limitations so soon.” His physician tells him that he could expect a life like people with chronic diseases or the elderly, and he would have to maintain at least periodic connection to a machine that keeps him alive. In erroneously assuming that these conditions would be permanent, both Marc and his physician dismiss the likelihood that medical science would continue to advance. 

To be sure, Marc’s medical team knew Marc would lose all of his memories, after which no medical science could bring them back. You expect at least to keep your memories, Marc narrates for posterity. “What if your memories were erased as well? What will become of me once my memories have faded?” Fortunately, a device exists in 2084 that can allow people to recover memories without actually remembering anything, but he dismisses it outright too. He could still draw on those stored memories mentally—hence indistinguishable from him really having the memories—and perhaps advancements in medical science could literally grow more “gray matter” such that Marc would someday begin to accumulate new memories. In short, the static nature in the assumptions made not only by Marc, but, more astonishingly, by his medical term in 2084 is astonishing, given their experiences with medical advancements.

At any rate, Naomi, Marc’s girlfriend before he died, had herself frozen in hopes of being together with her true love again someday. Elizabeth wants to assure Marc, “Someday you two will be able to be together again like you were before; it’s only a matter of time.” Here in Elizabeth we find the openness of a dynamic assumption; medical science should be regarded as a moving target!  Yet he isn’t buying it. He knows Naomi’s bodily condition is not good; the process of freezing had not gone well. “I don’t even want to imagine Naomi if she’s trapped in someone else’s body, someone else’s life,” he tells Elizabeth. “That’s your fear talking,” Elizabeth correctly tells him. In short, Marc has lost hope—faith in medical science and even in life itself. Accordingly, he wants to commit suicide again, and he wants Elizabeth to bracket her own hope and assist him.

The nineteenth-century European philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, aptly describes Marc’s rationale for killing himself “for good” (i.e., without any hope of being reanimated again). “A man who kills himself does not take his life, it has already been taken from him. That is why he kills himself; he destroys only a semblance of himself; what he casts away is a mere shell whose kernel, whether by his fault or not, has long since been eaten away. But a healthy, normal life . . . is and should be man’s highest good, his supreme being.”[2] Marc expects a healthy, normal life; it is his god. Yet paradoxically death is not his enemy, for suicide is to him simply a preference for not existing over life without his god.

Life and death are of course the true characters in the fictional drama. Expectedly, religion is in the mix, though surprisingly only explicitly in a few instances in the film. The position taken in the film, through Marc as a witness—albeit fictional—is that life “is nothing more than a state of matter . . . there’s nothing transcendent or divine about it.” As such, life is merely biological. In fact, Marc opines that it is life that’s “scary, not death.” Life is “always on the verge of extinction.” A human life can quickly, and unexpectedly end without the person having any control over it. As for the soul, Marc figures it is maybe “the part that is lost when you freeze the meat and thaw it out again.” In short, the film adopts a materialist perspective. There is no after-life, other than revitalized, or unfrozen, life itself. In other words, being reanimated—not resurrected!—is the only after-life, or, more accurately, life after life. In between them: nothing. Not existing. How hard this is to apply to ourselves!

“Welcome back to life, Marc,” the physician says as Marc regains consciousness upon being revived. “Do you remember anything about the other side?” Is there an afterlife?, the physician wants to know. The first report of a possible “eye-witness” of heaven in human history is underwhelming: “Fear, dying, waking up,” Marc answers without a hint of excitement. Later, he makes it explicit: “Before I died, I thought there was nothing after death. Now I’m sure.” He is the only person alive immune from what Feuerbach describes as the fantasies of profligate human imagination. Marc records his (or the screenwriter’s) own thoughts as follows: “Why do we yearn so desperately for life after death? What is it that we want? Perhaps reward for our grief, or punishment for our sins. No, what we really expect to find is what we already know; what we once had and lost. If there was something, we would turn it into more of the same—the same chaos and the same beauty, the same reward for the same effort, the same tale by the same idiot. If there was something, it would probably be purgatory.” In other words, we construct, or hope for, an after-life looking all too familiar—human, all too human. The “most sensitive, most painful of man’s feelings of finiteness is the feeling or awareness that he will one day end, that he will die,” Feuerbach suggests.[3] All a person knows and experiences is premised on the ongoing—perceptually-seeming “ever” present—basis of existing, the end of which must surely be felt to be torrentially horrendous. A human’s “defense against death is the belief in immortality.”[4] People who think they know for a fact there is an afterlife might want to pause at word in italics. None of us know, which is why the screenwriter of the film has Marc’s physician ask.

The physician—a man of science!—is disappointed in Marc’s answer as it is well within the realm of biology. He wants for there to be a religious dimension so much that he over-reaches cognitively. In presenting Marc to the public (i.e., investors), for example, he refers to Marc as “the first person resurrected.” However, resurrection is a distinctively religious term that refers to a spiritual-physical body; Jesus’ resurrected body, for instance, goes through the door of the Upper Room and yet he is hungry so he asks for a fish! Clearly, more is going on here than reanimation or revitalization. Cryogenics does not even constitute the sort of miracle as Jesus performed in bringing Lazarus back to life, and yet Marc's physician refers to his successive cryogenic attempts, including Marc, as Lazarus!

In short, Marc’s (albeit fictional) body is not supernatural, and yet the physician uses terms suggestive of a religious miracle. In fact, he refers to Marc as the first resurrected man more than once in the film. It is as if man of science were driven instinctually to make what is human, divine. According to Feuerbach, “Man makes a god or divine being of what his life depends on only because to him his life is a divine being, a divine possession or thing.”[5] God is beneficent (because good), and thus of use to humans—hence petitions are made as a matter of course in many liturgies, but the underlying presupposition or basis of this belief in the divine attribute is that human life is itself of great worth (i.e., divine).

Therefore, Marc while still young and yet seemingly deprived of God’s beneficence has a knee-jerk reaction for his life to go on, albeit after some time of not existing. Alternatively, he could pin his hopes on heaven, yet he dismisses it even before he knows it to be a fantasy of the human imagination tinged with fear. Yet even in ostensibly wanting to live more, or again, it is to be on his terms.

According to Feuerbach, we are the gods—or, more accurately—our human ideals are our true gods—the potential of the species, which Feuerbach erroneously claimed is infinite. The danger in idolizing our ideals lies in settling for nothing less. Hence Marc acts rashly, I submit, in committing suicide again. His god is human, all too human. If Feuerbach was right, even the ostensibly religious deity is really just human life in its infinite potential. Yet the terrain of our experience is finite—our perception, feeling, and cognition only go so far. Even cryogenics in itself could merely extend a human life, rather than making human beings immortal.

 

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[1] Candace Sutton, “Human Bodies Frozen in Desert Facility Waiting for Science to Wake them Up,” News.com.au.

[2] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 52.

[3] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 33.

[4] Ibid., 34, italics added.

[5] Ibid., 52.

A Theory of Everything

In his doctoral dissertation, Steven Hawkins demonstrates that the universe could have begun spontaneously. That is to say, the big bang could have gone off without being triggered by a divine intelligent being, or God in the sense of the word as used in the Abrahamic religions. To say that the universe could have begun in a moment of singularity is not necessarily to vitiate the deity-concept of all content. In fact, Hawkins’ work may one day trigger a movement to hem in the concept to the terrain that is distinctly religious.

Throughout A Theory of Everything (2014), God as the Creator is depicted in a strict dichotomy with physics as only one of the two can survive intact. I submit that the “either/or” choice is unnecessary because it arises from a category mistake involving religion. In positing God as the first cause or prime mover of a physical process, we distend the religious domain onto that of the natural sciences. Characterizing God as the condition of existence, on the other hand, backs the concept of the deity away from physics, chemistry, and astronomy and thus avoids the unnecessary dichotomy.

We can go even further still, putting some daylight between the two domains. Plotinus, a second century Platonist, characterized God as extending beyond the limits of human cognition and perception. Infinite space and never-ending time, on the other hand, are within our realm and thus not particularly divine. Indeed, what we experience as existence is within our realm rather than transcendent. To claim that God as Creator is the condition of existence can be interpreted as an attempt to source God beyond the limits of human cognition and perception unless that condition is taken as the cause of a sequence of events understandable through any of the natural sciences.My point is simply that theology is not one of the natural sciences, so the choice between them is unnecessary as it stems from a category mistake wherein the religious terrain oversteps or encroaches onto that of physics and chemistry. Pruning back the ancient conception of the Abrahamic deity to the distinctly religious can save the concept from entanglements that pit it against scientific investigation. Put another way, to apply such investigation to God represents a category mistake wherein science oversteps its innate boundaries. Rather than debate if God is behind the chemical reactions known as the big bang as is done throughout the film, we might try to figure out what is distinctly religious or theological in nature. 

Monsignor

Monsignor, a film made in 1982—in the midst of a very pro-business administration in Washington, D.C.—depicts a Vatican steeped in matters of finance centering around a priest whose degree in finance makes him a prime candidate to be groomed for the Curia. That cleric, Father John Flaherty, helps the Vatican operating budget during World War II by involving the Holy See in the black market through a mafia. In the meantime, he sleeps with a woman who is preparing to be a nun and subsequently keeps from her the matter of his religious vocation. The twist is not that Flaherty is a deeply flawed priest, or that the Vatican he serves is vulnerable to corruption inside, but that those clerics who mercilessly go after him are devoid of the sort of compassion that their savior preaches.

The pope, exquisitely played by Leonardo Cimino, demonstrates how upper-echelon leadership can transcend the managerial foci that so preoccupy partisans. Put another way, the social distance that tends to come with organizational figure-heads can give “the big picture” characteristic of “having perspective” some role in seeing to it that narrow organizational politics do not have the last say even in terms of what the criteria are to be. I suspect that too many CEOs go with the advice from their subordinates, and thus unwittingly buy into the managerial criteria charged with garden-variety one-upmanship. In such cases, organizational politics triumphs over what is really important from the standpoint of organizational mission statements.

In the film, the pope presides over the traditionalist cleric’s castigation of Flaherty . The pope later reads of Flaherty’s sordid deeds, and then speaks with the man presumably condemned. Rather than defend himself, Flaherty says, in effect, “guilty as charged!” Rather than take Flaherty’s misconduct as the most telling facet of the case, the pope observes that the traditionalist’s tone was that of jealousy, without any hint of sympathy for his brother in faith. The traditionalist’s utter lack of brotherly love stands out in retrospect to the pope as further from Christ, hence more serious, than Flaherty’s corruption. This prioritizing of values is made known to the viewer with the sight of Flaherty’s mentor, rather than the head traditionalist, as the next pope. In fact, the mentor reinstalls Flaherty in the Vatican after the contrite yet corrupt priest has spent some years in exile at a monastery. The film ends with the two men embracing, with facial expressions revealing true brotherly love—a real contrast from the cold, stern expressions of the traditionalists who had been so confident that the “prosecution” of Flaherty would result in one of their own as pope.

The message presented by the film is therefore that in a religion in which God is love, hardness in place of brotherly love is without any legitimacy whatsoever; it is worse than unethical conduct. This is one way of saying that religion does not reduce to ethics because more important things are involved. This is not to excuse corruption in the Vatican; the hypocrisy alone is repugnant to anyone who takes the clerics in the Curia at their word that they are following Christ in their living out of the Gospel. Even so, going after such hypocrisy without even sympathy for the human nature, which we all share, evokes the Pharisees whom Jesus goes after in the Gospels. A Church run by Pharisees does more than unethical conduct to undercut the faith espoused by Jesus because matters of the heart are more deeply rooted than conduct as far as Jesus’s preaching is concerned. 

Heaven Is For Real: Applying Kierkegaard to a Film

In Heaven Is For Real (2014), a film based on Todd Burpo’s best-selling non-fiction book of the same title, the evangelical Christian minister becomes convinced that his son, Colton, actually visited heaven while in surgery. Todd cannot make his faith-held belief intelligible to even his wife, Sonja. She misunderstands her husband and questions his obsession and even his sanity until Colton tells her something about heaven that applies to her uniquely. Then both parents are uniquely related in an absolute way through faith to the absolute—to the absurd, in Kierkegaard’s parlance. How Todd deals with his realization can be unpacked by applying the work of the nineteenth-century European philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard.

Before Sonja comes to believe in the impossible, a formidable wall stands between her and her husband as he grapples with whether to take heaven literally and comes to believe that Colton has been there.  “I’m sorry I can’t help you,” Sonja tells him at one point. His relation to the absolute, the impossible, has become isolating, for such a relation is individualized, according to Kierkegaard, and incommunicable to others.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard dissects the Biblical story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. Essentially, Abraham goes above the ethical to embrace an absurd impossibility by faith. Faced with God's demand of sacrificing Isaac and God's promise that Abraham's seed will spread, Abraham has faith in the impossible on the strength of the absurd (i.e., that God will somehow present the old man with another child to fulfil the promise). It is absurd for God to have Abraham sacrifice his only offspring and yet promise that Abraham’s seed will populate the nations, yet somehow Abraham embraces this impossibility.

Kierkegaard contends that such an apparent impossibility held by faith cannot be communicated. A “knight of faith” must therefore be isolated in this respect. This is part of the price he or she pays for violating the ethical on the strength of the absurd, which transcends but does not obviate the ethical dimension. "Abraham is silent--but he cannot speak, therein lies the distress and anguish. For [Abraham might say] if when I speak I cannot make myself understood, I do not speak even if I keep talking without stop day and night. . . . The relief of speech is that it translates me into the universal."[1] By the universal, Kierkegaard has ethical principles in mind, for they are on the universal level because they are known inter-subjectively and thus can be understood by others.

For example, a person who resists the temptation to take more than his share of a food can be understood by others as doing so on the basis of fairness. This ethical principle is widely known, so a person acting ethically can appeal to fairness in justifying his or her action. In intending to violate his ethical duty to care for his son, Abraham no longer has access to ethical principles; a person of faith is alone, without recourse to shared understandings and thus support from other people. The paradox or impossibility embraced by faith "cannot be mediated,” Kierkegaard contends, “because it is based on the single individual's being, in his particularity, higher than the universal."[2]  A knight of faith, unlike an ethical hero, gives up recourse to intersubjective (i.e., universally understood) ethical principles; making matters worse, because the impossibility is particular to the individual (i.e., the faith is applied to a particular situation), it cannot be made intelligible for this reason too. God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; it is not as if every man has the same demand and can thus stand in Abraham’s shoes. Therefore, Kierkegaard writes, "The true knight of faith is always [in] absolute isolation.”[3]

As effectively depicted in the film, Todd Burpo suffers from such isolation as he grapples with what his son is telling him and concludes that heaven is for real, rather than imaginary— a dream, fairy tale, or myth. That is to say, he takes heaven’s existence literally, rather than figuratively. Not only is Todd not understood; he is misunderstood, which puts him in a tight spot. Nancy Rawling, a member of the church’s board that oversees the minister, Todd, tells him that his obsession is hurting the church. Besides his leaves of absence, Nancy has a problem with what he is preaching. Underneath, she resents God for taking her son but allowing Colton to live. She does not know Todd’s isolated pain, and thus is jealous.

Before Sonja is convinced that Colton really did visit heaven, she chastises her husband for being sidetracked from cares of this world, including most notably their family. She does not understand that the absolute paradox of existence that so grips her husband is really about their family—Todd comes to this realization only at the end of the film.

Colton tells Todd, for example, that he sat on Pop’s (Todd’s maternal grandfather) lap in heaven. This sends Todd into a frantic search for pictures of the man. When Colton recognizes a boyhood picture, Todd is face to face with the absurd. “That’s impossible,” he says. “Everyone is young in heaven,” Colton explains matter-of-factly. Todd does not notice the inconsistency in one boy sitting on the lap of another boy roughly of the same age, or the convenience for Colton in everyone in heaven being approximately his age.[4]

  

Even Colton’s sister who died in the womb is Colton’s age in heaven. That a baby who had not made it out of the womb in life would exist as a girl Colton’s age in heaven is an absurdity that Sonja initially decries as impossible; but that Colton knows of the miscarriage, presumably from his visit, convinces his mother that her son had actually been in heaven, and, moreover, that heaven is real, literally. From her cognitive conclusion, Sonja suddenly has faith in the impossible. Even though Todd also believes that Colton spoke with the unnamed daughter in heaven, he and Sonja find they can only embrace without words on the strength of the absurd that transcends understanding.  The wholly other is finally ineffable; we are left with the experience of yearning beyond the limits of human cognition and perception.

Seeking nonetheless to be understood and to spread his new faith sourced in his particular circumstance, Todd feels the need to preach on heaven as literal—even inviting radio listeners to come hear him at his church on the next Sunday. “You don’t have to save the world; that’s already been done,” Nancy had already warned the evangelical minister. Kierkegaard warns that a false knight of faith is sectarian.[5] Todd’s partiality—his mission to get others to accept the absurd in spite of his unique vantage-point—stems from the obsession and feeds off pride. In his sermon, Todd claims that love demands telling people that they are loved. Does it? Might this be as much presumptuous as it is compassionate? Maybe love more naturally issues simply in being witnessed rather than being told.  In any case, his Augustinian conclusion from heaven being real (rather than imaginary) that God is love, and therefore that we should love one another, is hardly harmful, and it closes the gap that existed, when he wrestled with the absurd, between his preoccupation with heaven and tending to the people in this world.

Kierkegaard’s knight of faith "is the paradox [;] he is the individual, absolutely nothing but the individual, without connections and complications. This is the terror that the puny sectarian cannot endure. Instead of learning from this that he is incapable of greatness and plainly admitting it, . . . the poor wretch thinks he will achieve it by joining company with other poor wretches.”[6] Hence, Todd advertising his upcoming sermon on heaven to radio listeners can be taken as an attempt to pivot off the insecurity of a faith-based isolation by trying to convince other people of the veracity of his claim and being oriented to how they should live accordingly.

Kierkegaard tells us,

A knight of faith “is assigned to himself along [;] he has the pain of being unable to make himself intelligible to others but feels no vain desire to show others the way. . . . The false knight readily betrays himself by this instantly acquired proficiency; he just doesn't grasp the point that if another individual is to walk the same path he has to be just as much the individual and is therefore in no need of guidance, least of all from one anxious to press his services on others. Here again, people unable to bear the martyrdom of unintelligibility jump off the path, and choose instead, conveniently enough, the world's admiration of their proficiency. The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and in this lies the deep humanity in him which is more worth than this foolish concern for others' weal and woe which is honoured under the name of sympathy, but which is really nothing but vanity. A person who wants only to be a witness confesses thereby that no one, not even the least, needs another person's sympathy, or is to be put down so another can raise himself up."[7]

Todd expects his distended congregation to accept his faith-claim even though the minister came to it out of his particular relations. In fact, Todd goes on to tell them how they should live accordingly. He dismisses, in effect, the innate unintelligibility of the absurd. It is possible, nevertheless, that Colton’s visit is a dream or hallucination. After all, the book tells of Colton describing Jesus sitting on a throne just to the right of God—an image that fits with Todd’s evangelical paradigm. Interestingly, Colton’s repeated emphasis on heaven being beautiful does not necessarily point to, or require, a literal interpretation. Moreover, the meaning, and sense of spiritual well-being that the boy gets from the experience would not be diminished had he actually been dreaming or hallucinating—the latter from a hormone released by the human brain in the process of dying yet not dead.[8] In turning to preaching his message, Todd is vulnerable to building a house of cards on a fiction.

Kierkegaard’s false knight is plagued by pride, and is too weak to leverage the strength of the absurd into a sustained faith that can withstand the solitude of intelligibility and the ever-present possibility of non-existence (i.e., the visit being a fiction). The figure is akin to Nietzsche’s ascetic priest—a voluntarily-weakened bird of prey that is too weak to resist its (dominating) urge to feel the pleasure of power by dominating others. Telling others how to live by bracketing off areas of strength by Thou Shalt Nots, the weak herd animals who nonetheless seek to dominate are not strong enough to accept their inner constitution of weakness. They are not of true faith, and yet their herd follows them as if purblind. Were Todd content to be a  witness to love simply by loving, he would not feel the need to save the world on the word of his son. As Nancy points out, God’s Son has already done that.

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[1] Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Penguin Books: London, 1985), p. 137.

[2] Ibid., p. 109.

[3] Ibid., p. 106.

[4] Colton may have been dreaming—sitting on his great grandfather’s lap without seeing the man’s face then suddenly the man is a boy like Colton.

[5] Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 106.

[6] Ibid., p. 107.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have studied the hormone and found it to have such a property. As for common images, we can look to cultural (i.e., shared) myths and the related archetypes (e.g., Jesus with a beard—an image that came about in the early Middle Ages—Jesus being represented as clean-shaven in the ancient Roman, or Patristic, epoch of Christianity).

Agora

Film has the potential to be so engrossing perceptually for the viewer-auditors that the medium can engage the human condition at a deep, unconscious level. At that level, the subconscious protects us in the games we so seriously play.  If done well, film-making crafts a coherent and complete story-world into which the voyageur can be temporarily lodged before returning to the ordinary world that now looks somehow different. The subtle perceptual change can result from part of the viewer’s subconscious having been made transparent, or realized, while in the film’s story-world. As concerns the religious domain, I contend that the medium has only touched the surface in holding a mirror up to ourselves. This is not to say that more anti-religion movies, such as Last Temptation of Christ, are the answer; neither are more palliative, apologist films, like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told, the way to greater self-awareness for homo religiosis.  On account of their un-questioning, one-dimensionality (even when viewed with 3D glasses!), these films are more alike than their respective leitmotifs would suggest. Most importantly, none of these films raises penetrating questions that assume the validity of “the other side.” Agora does. The film evades easy categorization as anti-Christian or even anti-religion, and is thus able to effectively touch on the human condition beneath its denial and hypocrisies. My question here is how Agora transcends the predictable patina of reactionary films enough to widen our collective consciousness at the expense of hypocrisy and denial at the expense of the true spirit of religion. The key revolves around both subjecting religion (and particular religions) to critique and drawing on religion to supply an anchor. That is to say, religion is both truth and its antithesis.

Nietzsche advocates approaching truth itself as a problem rather than as something whose validity is held to be beyond question (i.e., sacred). Gandhi famously remarked that he used to think that truth (i.e., revelation, as in the Vedas) is God but came to realize that God is truth. To Gandhi, this meant that revelation contrary to non-violence is not of God. A film can subject truth itself as a problem (rather than as a conveniently partisan given) and enhance, thereby, human awareness of just what we are up to when we take ourselves as religious, whether in self (or group) identification or conduct. Once a film gets a grip on a truth and makes it a problem rather than a pallid backdrop, you can bet the river Styx in the human unconscious will be stirred, lapping over its banks as it tries to order its new-found energy gained from the antiseptic of unabashed sunlight.

Agora is based on historical events.[1] The director’s attention to visual accuracy, based in part on the ruins at Pompey, heightens the illusion of realism and the coherence of the story-world—both of which add to the credibility that is necessary to subject truth as a problem. Most importantly, the film holds off in taking sides in the religious disputes and related power-struggles, and thus avoids the pitfalls that go with an overwhelming partisan agenda. Moreover, the film tempers itself from becoming an outright anti-religious flick by highlighting hypocrisies from the vantage-point of “the other side” (i.e., religion) rather than the absence of religion in the human condition.

To be sure, the film will settle on the Christian patriarch Cyril as the antagonist—bent as he is on gaining power in cruel—and thus hypocritical—means. For once a person assumes the mantel of “the end justifies the means” to legitimate one’s dubious acts, the declining slope can be quite slippery indeed, and in a subtle way that can easily evade the person’s notice. Moreover, a bubble of pride can surround the denial rendering the hypocrisy all the more damning.

Lest it be concluded that the film finally reveals itself as an anti-Christian polemic, however, the film’s indictment is hardly straightforward.  Commenting on the film, Alejandro Amenabar, the director, distances his film from easy categorization by partisans as anti-Christian or anti-pagan by pointing out that the pagans were the first historically (as well as in the film) to lash out in violence.  “I really tried not to take anyone’s side,” Amenabar explains. “For most of the movie, you don’t know who is good and who is bad. This is because there are good people and bad people everywhere, among Christians, pagans, Jews.”[2] Agora is thus not as anti-Christian as it might seem in retrospect, and elements in that direction do not define what the film is ultimately about. The distance from overt religious partisanship gives the film the credibility necessary to take on, and thus make transparent, some of the important aspects of homo religiosis that are typically hidden (i.e., in society’s blind-spot).

 At the cusp of the ravaging conflict, Olympius, the pagan high-priest is incensed. Christians—including most notably their patriarch, Theophilus—are just outside the temple/library complex mocking statues of the gods, including most prominently the locally popular god, Serapis. Utterly unbecoming of the maturity typically expected in an elder official, Theon, a mathematician-philosopher and director of the library, backs up Olympius in answering that the insult must be answered (with violence).

Edward Gibbon describes Theophilus historically as “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.”[3] In the film, the bishop stands before a crowd, making fun of a stone statue because it cannot move and talk (as if statues of Jesus could). That Theophilus and his successor, Cyril, presume to know the mind of their god is all the more astonishing, considering how childishly they behave as religious leaders. Later in the film (and historically), Cyril incites his protector monks into an anti-Jewish, anti-woman (via Paul’s letters), and anti-pagan frenzy, resulting in the clerics’ murder of Hypatia, an astronomer/mathematician who has the ear of Orestes, the Roman prefect. Historically, the monks skinned her alive. Fortunately, the director went with a sympathetic suffocation followed by the monks stoning her dead body. Love thy enemy is nowhere to be seen in the film, except perhaps when Hypatia frees Medorus, her Christian slave who had just almost raped her before stopping himself.

With their perspective lost or severely undermined even by high principles, the religious leaders on both sides illustrate what can happen when people take their respective religions too seriously. . Generally speaking, the warring religious parties presume they could not possibly be wrong in their chosen routes and how grave the insults are. It is as if any otherwise viable check or “escape value” is somehow circumvented in the human brain from acting a self-correction on the mind itself of a homo religiosis. Hence, religion in the hands of a human can be quite dangerous in that things once lit can easily get out of control without the parties involved having a clue.

Accordingly, the film approaches truth as understood by human beings as a problem rather than as sacred (i.e., beyond the reach of questioning). That is to say, the presumed infallibility and the related loss of perspective are to be made transparent by the film. Perspective and the related attitude of humility is the film’s anchor.

For example, after the first round of violence over the insults to the gods, the pagans are burrowed inside the massive temple-library complex and the Christians are outside, desperately wanting in to retaliate against the pagans and burn the library’s thousands of “pagan” texts. Mortally injured by one of his Christian slaves, Theon admits to his daughter, Hypatia that the insults against the gods did not have to be answered with violence after all. Looking at his injured co-religionists lying around him, he wonders aloud, “How could I have been so wrong?” Before the fight, he had been so certain that the insults must be answered, only to be left astonished at how utterly mistaken he had been. It seems as though religion in human hands is particularly susceptible to this sort of blindness, and rarely open to regaining perspective in a way that shows the person as Creature rather than Creator—as so very partial rather than whole. Put another way, Theon’s self-deprecating acknowledgement of having been so very foolish stands out in the film as a rarely invoked remedy for religious arrogance and presumptive knowledge. No such bar is presented in the domain of philosophy, with Hypatia continuously questioning her own thinking on the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and Orestes admitting when still one of her students, “Perhaps I’m just simple-minded.” Why is it that questioning and self-effacing recognition are so rarely pursued in religious matters?

The sheer rationalizing of bad behavior under Christian illustrates just how toxic homo religiosis can become. “I was forgiven, but now I can’t forgive,” Medorus admits to Ammonius, one of the fighting Nitrain monks, after Jews had attacked and killed a group of the monks. Answering him, Ammonius tries to assuage the younger man’s internal angst as if a recalibrating internal struggle were something to evade at all costs. “Jesus was a god, and only he can show such clemency.” That Jesus preaches forgive seven times seven and love your enemy to his followers rather than just for himself has somehow eluded the monk. Yet he is nonetheless confident enough in his own theological interpretation to assure the former slave, “God wants us here doing what we’re doing.” With such insight into the mind of God radiating out of mere mortals, truth itself scarcely has any room, and is barely even noticed, but in a lowly former slave and two pagan philosophers.

Religion itself is on trial in this film. That the standpoint assumed is religious rather than secular makes the indictment all the more credible and severe.  For example, Medorus’s recognition of his own lack of forgiveness and Theophilus’s reading of part of the Sermon of the Mount—blessed are those who thirst after righteousness—serve as anchors in the film from the Christian standpoint. The excesses in the name of the religion are thus to be measured not from outside in, but, rather, from what the religion could be were its adherents willing to pause, submit their chosen religious ideals and conduct to the rigors of self-questioning, and be willing to be wrong about what they presume they cannot be wrong about. In short, by subjecting themselves to the problem of truth (and themselves as virtual fonts thereof), the stringent hold of denial can, at least theoretically, be broken. However, the religious consciousness must be open to the realization of having gone awry under the cover of masked hypocrisy. Were the film to assume a wholly anti-religious attitude, the defenses of denial would easily gain the upper hand out of sheer defensiveness over impending doom (for the religion). So the religious basis of the film—established for example in Theon’s wonderment at his own stupidity concerning what the gods want as well as in Medorus’s admission of his refusal to forgive—is critical to religious truth being subjected to critique through the medium of the film.

Perhaps the film’s best contribution to expanding human consciousness of religiosity comes in exposing hypocrisies, lapsed judgment, and warped thinking.  For example, whether from a category mistake—treating knowledge as a substitute for (and thus threat to) divine revelation—or the faulty assumption that the presence of statues of deities in the library mean the scholarship must laud the gods and excoriate Christianity—the overzealous Christians ransack the library’s ancient scholarship.

Apparently, Theophilus had not gotten the memo. Many early Christian theologians interpreted the Biblical account of creation aided by Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus.[4] More than two hundred years before Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria based his belief in the immortality of the soul on the Book of Psalms and Plato’s Republic on the final judgment.[5]  In fact, the second-century bishop of Alexandria argues, “Plato all but predicts the history of salvation.”[6] Justin Martyr comes even closer in linking Plato’s work to Christianity by seeing Socrates as a Christ-type and forerunner in being unjustly put to death in defense of Logos, or reason (Jesus being the preexistent Logos incarnate).[7] Similarly, Clement considered Homer’s Odysseus tied to the mast of a boat while passing the alluring Sirens as a foreshadowing of Jesus.[8] Clement read widely in classical Greek literature even as he considered himself as a faithful pupil of Jesus.[9] For all this drawing on “pagan” sources, Theophilus still felt the need to destroy the library in Alexandria, even if that meant acting contrary to what earlier Church fathers would have wanted.

In the film, the needed lens of perspective comes into play as the camera-shot pulls back from above to show the Christian monks clad in black robes scampering about like tiny ants running ancient scrolls to hastily-built fires. The true smallness of the species truly registers, however, only if the viewer recalls that each ant-like creature is presuming infallibly to know the mind of God.

Hypatia’s fixation on the stars also furnishes a benchmark for such, much needed, perspective. She allows herself to consider the possibility that the Earth is just one “wanderer” among others that revolve around the Sun. The panoramic camera-shots of Earth, moving slowly in, down to Alexandria and closer still to the library, show visually just how very small (and unimportant) our playpens truly are. We scamper around like ants in our daily lives, yet we presume nonetheless to act on behalf of our deities.

As “the instigators” were ensconced in the temple/library complex as the Christians waited pensively outside, an old man befitting Jung’s wisdom archetype pierces the grim veil of smoke and mirrors to see into the profound universe that surrounds us. Befitting the simplicity in the stars, the old man high up on a wall speaks of Aristarchus (c. 310-230 BCE), whose heliocentric model places the Earth and the other “wanderers,” or planets, as bodies orbiting the sun. Yet for all the beauty and easy of such heavenly simplicity, even Hypatia has trouble holding onto it, moving on to analyze elaborate alternative explanations that are—as Aristotle wrote of Plato’s system—“beautiful but false.”

Similar to Hume’s thesis in his Natural History of Religion that the human mind has trouble holding onto naked notions of divine simplicity, elaborations and divine contortions pervade through all the partisan warfare in the film as if inevitably, resulting in Christian monks stoning the dead body of innocent Hypatia. Even the sheer tolerance for such hypocrisy attests to just how presumptuous and self-serving we human beings can be in religious affairs even as we convince ourselves that we are acting on lofty principles.

During the fighting that ensues to “answer the insult” to the gods, one of Theon’s Christian slaves shouts over to the old man, “I’m a Christian!” Without any recognition whatsoever of the blatant contradiction, the slave attacks Theon by smashing his head with the butt of a sword. The sad implication is that Jesus had somehow failed, at least with respect to his preached message of turning the other cheek and loving enemies. It is as if the Christians would gladly nail even Jesus to the cross if he crossed them.

Indeed, in his audio commentary on the film, Amenabar says he views Hypatia as a Christ figure. The director says he has “a feeling that Hypatia, somehow, shared characteristics with Jesus. She had disciples, she would evoke feelings of brotherhood, she would preach tolerance, and eventually, and unjustly, due to political reasons, she was martyred and murdered.”[10] Actually, as in the case of Jesus, religious reasons were also in the mix.

In the film and historically, the Nitrian monks are supporters and enforcers, of Cycil’s anti-pagan message (e.g., that Hypatia is a witch). In the film, Hypatia puts herself out there by walking in public to her house. A small group of the monks corner her, and, quite ironically, take her to the bishop’s church in the library complex. Out of love for his pagan former master, Medorus, who earlier admits he does not know how to forgive, suffocates her while the other monks are out scrounging for stones. When they return, they stone Hypatia (presuming her to still be alive). The role of Hypatia as a Christ figure becomes very important to understanding the significance of the murder—and through it, the state of Christianity itself—both in the film and historically (she was actually skinned alive). In killing a Jesus figure, the blind monks effectively discredit their own faith without having a clue of having done so. Like light making its way to Earth from a distant star, the news of the fallen stars had not reached those stars themselves.

In conclusion, Amenabar effectively evaded a polemical film by keeping the viewers from being able to identify the antagonist early on.  Presumptuousness under the subterfuge of religion is the true culprit—the real antagonist. We are human, all too human, scampering around like ants in our “agendas,” and yet in spite of our smallness, and because of it, we presume to know the mind of God. We easily substitute “I know” for what is actually belief, and yet we presume that we cannot be wrong about what we think we know. Put another way, our religions may speak volumes more about us than anything transcending the limits of human cognition and perception and thus inherently ineffable. Interestingly, Hypatia was a neoplatonist in line with Plotinus, who had taught that ultimate reality is beyond the reach of the human mind. His writing anticipates Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (i.e., things in themselves) and phenomenal (i.e., appearance). We mere mortals seem to have an intractable difficulty staying put in the sand box of appearances instead of wandering around informing others of the truth, saying “I have the truth; you just have your opinion.” That truth eludes all of us somehow escapes our landscape of possibilities; we don’t even recognize the stench of our own hypocrisy, and yet we take it for granted that we know even the mind of God. Agora completes the circle, or ellipse, by showing us just how dangerous arrogance perched on stilts can be during a flood. By all rights, our innate sense of omniscience should be underwater, and yet it presumes virtual infallibility. Agora provides cognitive and visual perspective that can cut the stilts down to size and thus enable a more authentic homo religiosis to finally emerge from the dark miasma of empty pride.

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[1] According to the director, this “movie is very much based on true stories.” Alejandro Amenabar, Commentary on Agora.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.), Vol. 2, p. 57.

[4] Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1985), p. 61.

[5] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 5.14.

[6] Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, p. 44.

[7] Ibid. See Justin Martyr, I Apology 5, 46; II Apology 10.

[8] Ibid., p. 42.

[9] Ibid., p. 38.

[10] Amenabar, Commentary.