Silence

I think perhaps the title of the film, Silence (2016) ought to have been “The last Priest” because the main character, Rodrigues, is the last remaining Roman Catholic priest in Japan. His inner struggle is the core of the narrative, and of the theological/ethical dilemma to be resolved. The movie is set in Japan in 1640-1641. A Buddhist inquisitor, Mokichi, is torturing and killing Christians, who must step on a stove carving of Jesus as proof of committing apostasy (i.e., renouncing their faith). Taking it as proof, Father Rodrigues torments over whether to apostasy in order to save the Japanese Christians whom Mokichi is having killed serially until the priest renounces his faith. I submit that the assumption of proof rests on dubious grounds, so Rodrigues is actually faced with a false dichotomy.

When Fathers Garupe and Rodrigues arrive in Japan, Mokichi is already torturing and killing priests as well as lay Christians. As a Buddhist priest, he is a hyprocrite, for Buddha’s main object was to end suffering. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are geared to the cessation of suffering. To be sure, Mokichi assumes that the peaceful ends justify his hypocritical means, but the amount of the film devoted to the suffering tells the audience that Mokichi is fine with inflicting suffering on an ongoing basis. The Buddha would have hardly recognized his follower. Jesus’ line to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” would likely apply.

By the time Rodrigues is captured, the inquisitor has decided that his old strategy of killing priests had not worked. So the last priest in Japan is spared, though not of undergoing the agony of severe suffering. Mokichi tells Rodrigues that the suffering of the Japanese Christians will end only when the last priest puts a foot on the stone carving of Jesus. The Buddhist priest is misleading in telling the Catholic priest, “You are responsible for their suffering.”

I fault Rodrigues for uncritically believing that he is not only causing the deaths, but also would lose his faith by being disloyal to Jesus merely by stepping on a stone carving. Mokichi is responsible for the torture and deaths because he orders it. Furthermore, stepping on a stone that has a carving that looks vaguely like Jesus does not count as the renounciation of a faith, unless, perhaps, that stone is treated as an idol, which is apostacy. All of the Christians in the film erroneously treat the carved engraving as an idol because they assume that by touching it in a culturally-derogatorily way, their own faiths will somehow be lost. A person can step on a stone and still retain beliefs and values, especially if they are valued as intensely as Rodrigues does in the film.

Rodrigues places a very high value on imitating Christ, especially in regard to the Passion story in the New Testament. It is almost as if the young priest wants to die because then he would be imitating Jesus. In watching the film, I had the sense that Rodrigues is even prodding Mokichi to resort back to killing priests so the last priest would feel the satisfaction of following Christ, going even as far as assuming an identity with Jesus. While drinking at a stream, Rodrigues’s reflection, which are through the priest's point of view, goes quickly back and forth between a picture of Jesus’ face to his own. It is then that Rodrigues is captured. It is also from about that point that he looks like Jesus (i.e., long hair and a beard). 

The identity does not hold, even in how Rodrigues would want to die if murdered. Jesus chose to die to redeem humanity from its distance from the Father due to prior sins. Humanity would not be redeemed from Rodrigues voluntarily or involuntarily being a martyr. The assumed for identity would thus constitute self-idolatry.

Furthermore, Rodrigues seems to reduce following Christ to dying as he does in the New Testament. Baptizing, preaching, hearing confessions are other ways, as are valuing and practicing self-giving love (i.e., agape). This sort of love can be practiced by universal benevolence, or neighbor love, rather than only or even primarily in being willing to give up one’s life for one’s faith.

Rodrigues does not have to give up his life; the Buddhist priest tells him as much. I would add, however, that Rodrigues does not have to give up his faith by stepping on a stone. The faith is in his heart, not on his foot or in the stone. That is to say, the stone does not have to be, and should not be, treated as if it were an idol having a religious significance. Rodrigues need not go through his internal turmoil as Mokichi continues to torture and kill Christians until Rodrigues relents and steps on the stone. In fact, common sense as well as Jesus’ teaching and example in preempting the suffering of others (e.g., the prostitute) should easily occur to a priest or any disciple for that matter. Step on the stone and people won’t suffer and die—doesn’t seem like a difficult choice as long as the Christian values Jesus’ teachings and lived-out (rather than dying) example. It is not necessary that Christians suffer; it is not something that Jesus demands, for he willingly suffers to take away the taint of sin.

Therefore, in being all too willing to die for his faith, Rodrigues overstates his own value in that regard, and is too willing to end his life too early. This is a criticism that Nietzsche makes of Jesus, but in that case the question of Jesus’ young age at death is relevant in the extent to which Christ vicariously sacrifices himself on the Cross—a sufficient sacrifice being necessary to appease the Father, who is offended by sin. Nietzsche seems to deemphasize this vicarious satisfaction in favor of the good Jesus does while alive on Earth. Ironically, in putting such an emphasis in faith with identifying with Jesus in dying, Rodrigues misses the opportunity to pay more attention to what Jesus preaches and does in his ministry as a basis for faith. In other words, valuing and attempting to practice universal benevolence, including to one’s detractors and enemies, can be a solid basis—more so than a stone—of faith. Not even the last priest can save humanity from its sins by dying in imitation of Christ.     

The Seminarian

A closeted gay student at an evangelical seminary is a contrast with a rather obvious clashing point, with the predicted ending being that the student is kicked out and must find or come into his own identity free of exterior constraints. Yet The Seminarian (2010) smartly avoids that road well-traveled. Instead, the screenwriter risks giving theology a prominent, and perhaps even central place in the film. The venture is at odds with the bottom-feeder mentality of Hollywood represented in the film, De-Lovely (2004), in which Cole Porter’s bisexuality occupies center-stage. Comparing these two films, irony drips off the screen as De-Lovely, which is patterned after a theatrical musical, looks down on Hollywood and yet has a common theme, while The Seminarian is a film through and through and yet takes the high road by supposing that the viewers can and will stay through some substantive theology, which transcends social issues and even the dramatic.

Theologically, The Seminarian, through its protagonist Ryan, wrestles with the relation of God as love and the love that is in human relationships. Specifically, if God made us capable of feeling love for another person so to demonstrate that God is love, then why do we suffer in relationships in which there is love? Ryan, who is suffering because he is falling for a guy he met online but keeps postponing a second date, runs the risk of using theological analysis to work out a personal problem. He supposes that we suffer in matters of love here below because God suffers for want of love from us. The unmentioned implication is that Jesus suffers on the Cross because we have fallen short from loving God. We have hurt God and so stand in need of being redeemed in order to be able to love God such that it will not suffer from want of our love. The suffering servant on the Cross is not just a human suffering, but also the divine suffering. Yet doesn’t this imply that God is incomplete in some way? God may have created humans so to be loved by us—hence the hurt from having love denied—but God itself is the fullness of love. As Augustine and Calvin emphasize in their respective writings, God is love. This is the subtitle of the film!

So, as in most theological problems worth their salt, an internal problem can be found and begs to be solved. Although Ryan attempts a solution in his thesis, the problem of God being complete unto itself is not addressed in the film. Perhaps God voluntarily created a vulnerability within the divine when he created humans to love, and thus glorify, it. The second person of the trinity, the Logos, is a part or manifestation of God since before the beginning, and we can perhaps find the vulnerability—even if still when the suffering of God is potential—meaning before the Incarnation of Jesus as a god-man, fully human and fully divine, and even so fully able to suffer. In other words, the divine in Jesus suffers too; it is not just his human nature that suffers. Interestingly, the Gnostic text, The Gospel of Philip, has the divine leave, or abandon, Jesus on the cross just before he dies, and thus after he suffers. The question is perhaps whether love that is by its very divine-nature complete or whole yet suffer. If so, the pain would be from humans not loving God as we were meant (by God) to; the pain suffered by God would not be from a want of divine love.

It is significant, I submit, that a Hollywood film would give viewers such ideas to ponder rather than focus on the gay-guy-meets-conservative-religionists element of the narrative—a theme which had already enjoyed pride of place in many films that tease the tension that is in a society in motion. To be sure, Hollywood is indeed still capable of dishing out banal sugar to a superficial public, but this makes the choice made in the screenwriting of The Seminarian all the more noteworthy and deserving of emulation.

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).

Gandhi

Film is indeed an art form, but the medium can also function as a teacher in how it conveys values and wisdom. Both of these features of film are salient in Gandhi (1982), whose director, Richard Attenborough, says in his audio commentary that the film has done much keep Gandhi’s philosophy alive in the world. In using the film’s star protagonist to explain what is behind his approach, viewers become, in effect, students. The strength of film here lies in its use of both audio and visual means to engrave the lessons in memories. In Gandhi, the main concept to be explained and illustrated is nonviolent active non-cooperation or defiance of unjust laws or regimes.

In a speech to his fellow Indians, Gandhi declares, “We must defy the British.” The crowd erupts. “Not with violence,” he explains, that will inflame their will, but with a firmness that will open their eyes.” He then advocates burning clothes manufactured in Britain. “If you are left with one piece of homespun, then wear it with dignity!” Active, nonviolent defiance strengthens self-esteem. The strategy also has a strength that counters the force of the unjust.

For example, guards at the Salt Works hit the Indians protesting the British monopoly on salt. As the unarmed Indians walk row by row into the guards, wood swiftly comes down on heads, shoulders, and backs. “Women carried the wounded and broken bodies from the road, an American reporter reads into a phone, “until they dropped from exhaustion. But still, it went on and on.” Then, crucially, he reaches the essential point. “Whatever moral ascendancy the West held was lost here today. India is free, for she has taken all that steel and cruelty can give and she has neither cringed nor retreated.” In the voluntary taking on of suffering is a kind of invisible force that confronts the aggressors with their sense of being good rather than evil. In other words, the suffering is like a mirror making the dark side of the human psyche inexorably transparent. Not even a tyrant can put down such a squalid self-image. The image is also likely broadcasted to third parties and even the world at large, likely resulting in the very human sentiment of disapprobation, which Hume calls the moral sense. The culprits may find themselves cornered, psychologically and perhaps even politically and economically.

“I think our resistance must be active and provocative,” Gandhi tells the Congress Party leaders meeting in Jinah’s living room to strategize. “Where there’s injustice, I always believed in fighting,” Gandhi states at another point in the film. “The question is, do you fight to change things or to punish? For myself, I’ve found we’re all such sinners, we should leave punishment to God. And, if we really want to change things, there are better ways of doing things than derailing trains or slashing someone with a sword.” Nonviolent non-cooperation is geared to changing the unjust by forcing them to confront themselves.

“I wish to embarrass all those who wish to treat us as slaves. All of them,” Gandhi tells the Congress Party leaders at Jinah’s house. He then illustrates his point. Specifically, he asks the servant for the tray of tea and starts to serve “I want to change their minds, not kill them for weaknesses we all possess.” He then suggests a day of prayer and fasting, which of course would have the same impact as a general strike. The prayer and fasting are oriented to confronting a person’s own demons, while the societal discomfort draws attention to the demons plaguing the oppressors who are living comfortably while exploiting the Indians. Awareness is the first step on the road to change.

“What about very powerful tyrants like Hitler? Do you really believe you could use nonviolence against Hitler?” a photographer from Life magazine asks Gandhi in a later scene. “Not without defeats and great pain,” he replies. “But are there no defeats in [World War II]? No pain? What you cannot do is accept injustice from Hitler or from anyone. You must make the injustice visible; be prepared to die like a soldier to do so.” The strength in active nonviolent defiance is subtle, unlike that of a club or gun; the impact on the oppressor psyche is reflected in the excessive measures that it takes in reaction.

For example, Gandhi remarks at one point that “Marshal law [in Bengal] only shows how desperate the British are.” Surely some kind of force had provoked the desperation that the British rulers could not shake. The strength of Gandhi is essentially the innate ability of any human being to make force a confrontation within another person between a self-image, which can be so convenient to the self, and the demons that inhabit every person.

More broadly than in nonviolent civil disobedience, the demons plaguing another person’s soul can both be made more transparent and exculpated by means of restorative suffering. While Gandhi is on a hunger-strike to end Muslim-Hindu violence in the newly independent India, a violent Hindu man approaches Gandhi and tosses some bread on the old man’s chest.

“Here! Eat! I’m going to hell, but not with your death on my soul.” Unlike the typical oppressor, the man is already aware of his demons.

“Only God decides who goes to hell,” Gandhi retorts.

“I killed a child,” the man explains. “I smashed his head against a wall.”

“Why?”

“The Muslims killed my son! My boy.”

“I know a way out of hell,” Gandhi offers. “Find a child—a child whose mother and father have been killed . . . and raise him as your own. Only be sure he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.”

The hardened murderer is stunned, and collapses at the foot of Gandhi’s slender bed. The great soul has given the angry sufferer a way to reintegrate his soul that is plagued with pain; in coming to see the Muslim side by raising a Muslim child, the man would come to see the other side in the societal strife and therein create space in his own soul for the otherness of the other in place of the seemingly intractable demons. For being a man of peace, Gandhi does an awful lot of fighting.

Just before Gandhi is assassinated by a fellow Hindu, he tells the photographer from Life that “(t)he only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts, that that’s where all our battles ought to be fought.” Civic clashes are essentially projections of those which take place in the human mind between contending urges, and ought to be viewed and attacked as such by opening eyes.