The Passion's severe mercy.

NOW THAT MEL GIBSON'S The Passion of the Christ has left the theaters, we may ask what, if any, lasting impact it will have on our culture. I am not, here, addressing the film's strictly religious effects. Important as those effects will be, I want to bracket them in order to address The Passion's potential importance in changing the artistic and the cultural assumptions that shape our society and, not coincidentally, can make it more or less friendly toward religion.

Were The Passion "merely" religious--that is, were it too unartful, weak, or poorly done to affect the broader culture--secularists almost certainly would consider it beneath notice. Instead, however, they have made wild charges of anti-Semitism against The Passion and renewed efforts to undermine Christianity itself as an important source of public meaning. Thus Peter Jennings was given three hours on network prime time to "contextualize" faith like Gibson's out of public existence. Jennings rehearsed the all-too common calumny that the Catholic Church is illegitimate because grounded in Saint Paul's egoistic subversion of an offbeat Jewish cult rooted in the teachings of an obscure aesthete (Christ) and his "brothers." The New Republic not only blasted Gibson's film, but also devoted the better part of an issue to praising atheism as an answer to the supposed intolerance of religiousity.

The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier unwittingly pointed to a deeper problem, one secularists seek to obscure but which must be addressed by anyone attempting to understand the probable impact of The Passion. In decrying the (assuredly nonsensical) debate in the Supreme Court over whether the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance has religious or merely moral content, Wieseltier dismissed as ignorant and hypocritical any defense of religious expression for its moral and cultural benefits. To claim that religion is good because it makes us better people or produces great art, he wrote, is to reduce spirituality to just another tool to be used in building the material life we desire.

And so it is, in part, if taken to its extreme. But it is, to say the least, disingenuous for secularists to insist that religious believers eschew the cultural benefits of religion. Christopher Dawson famously pointed out that culture comes from the cult. As we cultivate our intellect and seek to develop in ourselves and those around us habits of refinement and appreciation for what is beautiful and revealing of the truths of our existence, so our religious understandings and practices form in our communities habits of thought and action that shape our lives. Our religious beliefs and practices shape the ways in which we understand artistic and intellectual endeavors, and these endeavors--culture, broadly understood--help shape our religious life.

Can Caravaggio, or El Greco, or Michelangelo be appreciated or understood apart from their religious content? Certainly not in their full complexity and emotional power. The art created by these men is inherently religious; to understand it intellectually one must know quite a bit about the Bible, religious history and even theology. To experience them fully one must believe, at the least in the possibility of human experience of the Divine, and ideally in Christianity itself--the font from which this art flows. Likewise, one can understand Andre Serrano's Piss Christ only as a manifestation of anti-Christian hatred. Deep or shallow, high, low, or wholly debased, art springs from religious concerns--concerns deeply ingrained in our traditions and public practices, by which we seek to order our lives in ways corresponding to the meaning and the purpose of existence. Culture is rooted in religion, and by the same token influences our religious life, for good or ill, as it is well or ill formed.

For Christians our proper end or goal is communion with God. Thus our highest art portrays the struggle for that communion, thereby shaping our culture in terms of this struggle. This is not hypocrisy, but the nature of social life.

The kind of culture in which we live can make communion with God easier or more difficult to attain. Each of us is blessed with free will but, human nature being frail, more of those living in a religiously grounded community will choose God than will those living in a truly secularized society. This is, after all, why secularists want to empty the public square--to lessen the "social pressure" to recognize the call of faith.

Secularists clearly fear the cultural impact of The Passion. The rampant, too-facile dismissals of that film's popular success as the result of media savvy or extremist politics bespeak a desire to cabin its influence, reducing it to a mere popular phenomenon, bereft of lasting impact.

Key to this strategy is another facile assumption: that Gibson's film lacks any real artistic merit. Clearly, Gibson's film is not to everyone's taste. Even some on the political right have disparaged it; William F. Buckley, Jr., has dismissed its artistic character, comparing it unfavorably to Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion on account of its bloody imagery.

Buckley is wrong. Indeed, very wrong. For, while Gibson's Passion clearly is no masterpiece of the high baroque, it is something even more important to our contemporary culture. Gibson's Passion constitutes the long-delayed full flowering of the most important artistic movement of the last century: high modernism.

In many ways viewing The Passion is like watching one of T.S. Eliot's poems: it is cold, discomfiting, and utterly true. Like Eliot's sparse imagery, Gibson's use of ancient languages and dim lighting empties our experience of his art of any easy familiarity, concentrating our attention on the central message, rather than any self-aggrandizing artistic device; even the soundtrack aims less at moving us radically by itself than at emphasizing what is on-screen.

Like Eliot, Gibson forces us to confront the stark reality of our existence, of our limits, our sinfulness, and our inability to save ourselves from despair. Eliot evokes images of waste, emptiness, and the dehumanization brought by the modern commitment to rational calculation and individual autonomy. He leaves Prufrock "sprawling on a pin" and shows how each of us sees only in twilight. The stark simplicity of Gibson's twilit portrayal of Christ's passion renders excruciatingly forthright the tactile, concrete reality of the torture and the death of the God-man. There is no reveling in the evil of the persons involved. We see the scourger and the scourging, but we are not invited to revel in their mastery over their victim as we are in television programs like "The Sopranos." Instead we are pulled into a full experience of the existential fact of sacrifice.

Comparison with the critically acclaimed "Sopranos" brings us to the reasons for so many critics' rejection of The Passion. These reasons have little to do with Gibson's portrayal of violence. The critics like violence--of the right kind. Thus a far more violent film, like Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (either volume will do, though the second is less gory than the first) finds a warm reception for its scenes of spurting blood, mass dismemberment, and beheading. Why? Because it is "clever" and "funny." Tarantino has so dehumanized his characters that critics see portrayals of their grisly demise as satiric commentary on other bloody films.

A more intentionally sinister film, like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover also won critical acclaim, with its scenes of brutality, cannibalism, and ghastly decomposition; it was praised for "realistically" showing the underside of human nature and existence. It was not dark comedy, but it was sufficiently dark to win accolades.

The first Matrix film received some criticism for its scenes of mass murder--from former Education Secretary William Bennett and from a number of conservative groups. The Matrix series eventually met with critical, and popular, disappointment, not on account of its violence, but because it sought to propound a positive message--a predictable Hollywood paean to the absolute moral status of individual choice. In the event, the series descended into banal incoherence, punctuated by mass killings.

So how did The Passion manage to earn critical contempt for its "bloodlust," and even signs in movie theaters warning of its graphic nature? Not by showing violence, but by showing the redemptive capacity of suffering. One is allowed, today, to show any form of human depravity one wishes. Suffering, too, is welcome. But the portrayal of suffering as a sanctifying experience is taboo, because it might cause us to examine our lives and character and is thus too subversive of contemporary, individualist pieties to be tolerated.

The Passion is dangerous because it refuses to go along with the William James view that religion's sole utility is the provision of moral vacations. It refuses to present Jesus as a nice fellow who tells us to love one another, then has the courtesy to fade from view. Because the job of religion is to make us all feel that we are loved, no matter what we do, Gibson's presentation of the Christ as Himself a sacrifice--a hated, tortured victim of inhumanity and injustice--is intolerable.

That we clearly are to see Jesus as the victor, not in spite of, but because of, his suffering, pushes his story (and whatever quibbles one may have, this clearly is the Gospel story) over the edge, making it a ripe target for ridicule. Garry Wills, a particularly disingenuous arbiter of taste and truth, claims to have laughed out loud at the film. The "smart," "sophisticated" intellectual "knows" that suffering is to be avoided at all costs; suffering is pointless and dangerous to our pride because it demands that we look for meaning beyond our own desires and conceits. Sanctifying suffering, then, can be only a vulgar spectacle for the superstitious rabble.

Here we return to the Bach comparison. Like Buckley, Edward Rothstein, in The New York Times, compares Gibson's film unfavorably to Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion. Gibson's film, on this view, is too drab and painful to be good art or good religion, whereas Bach's Passion, with its subtle emotional moods and aesthetic sophistication, shows that even religion can be made into great art.

And that, of course, is the point. Bach, whose genius was to sum up the art form of the Baroque, sought to deepen the faith and the spirit of his listeners by subtly evoking the moods and the atmosphere of Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection as much as conveying the action of the event. Bach could, after all, assume that his audience knew something about the realities of suffering, and was willing to enter into the story of Christ. He could concentrate on deepening his audience's faith and understanding because he was confident that his audience had at least some of each already.

Rothstein likes Bach because his music is emotionally moving, and pretty. He likes its aesthetics, and he likes the fact that those aesthetics allow him to ignore the central, indeed essential message Bach sought to convey: that Christ died for our sins, and that we, through our sin, killed him.

Like all art of the high modern style, Gibson's film is not pretty. It does not aim to please the senses, or the emotions. Its aesthetic is tied to its purpose, to drive a central message into our consciousness as Gibson's hand drives the nail into Christ's hand. And many people do not want to hear that message, for it means that they must look to their own lives and character, and their own rejection of God.

Gibson's Passion has less in common with a Bach mass than with a short story from another master of the high modern: Flannery O'Connor. Gibson's "story" certainly is no more violent than, for example, O'Connor's story of a disaffected religious cynic whose rabid insistence on his own independence from everything around him caused him to blind himself with lye. And Gibson shares O'Connor's goal of reminding us of the inevitability of suffering and death--not from the point of view of the jaded spectator (as in Kill Bill), let alone of the killer (as in "The Sopranos"), but of us--of overly comfortable, self-satisfied hedonists who need to be reminded of the inevitability of the suffering they flee, and of the reality of the sacrifice made for the sake of the souls whose existence they ignore or deny.

Most of us know of Christ's teachings, but have participated in the modern process of reducing them to mere niceness, safely ignored or given mere lip-service as we work hard to keep from stopping to reflect on our sins. Thus, had Gibson presented us with Christ's words, we would have ignored them, yet again. Instead, however, Gibson immerses us in the reality of Christ's sacrifice, he makes real to us the suffering our sinfulness inflicted on our savior, and the suffering he willingly undertook to save us. Rather than dispute the relevance and meaning of his teachings in light of specific circumstances--an endeavor proper to those who are wise in faith--we are forced to take the very first step in faith, to confront the reality of our sinfulness and of what Christ suffered for us.

True to its modernist assumptions and sensibilities, The Passion eschews pleasantries in order to jar us out of our spiritual malaise. Even in its depiction of the resurrection, Gibson's film remains focused on the reality and the sanctifying power of suffering. We are allowed to see the resurrection that gives meaning to all the suffering we have witnessed. We are not, however, allowed to revel in it. There is no outpouring of joy in Gibson's film. As exemplified by Jesus' simple intake of breath and striding outward, there is too much work left to be done for simple rejoicing. As to the rest of us, joy is something we must strive to earn, each of us, by fully accepting the suffering we have witnessed, and recognizing it for the gift that it is. Perhaps nothing in Gibson's film captures its aesthetic more succinctly than the frame at the end, wherein we literally see the world through Christ's wound, as the camera peers through the hole in his hand.

Gibson's sparse aesthetic vision has its precursors in cinema as well as in literature. The classic minimalist film is My Dinner with Andre, which is almost totally taken up with a dinner conversation between a struggling actor and a theater director. But that film is fascinating, and at times quite humorous, precisely for the self-indulgent emptiness of its central figure's upper-crust bohemian life. Andre presents its audience with a stream-of-consciousness conversation in which Andre himself recounts tales of over-intellectualized death rituals and other meaningless pursuits. The Passion, meanwhile, focuses relentlessly on the source of all meaning.

Contemporary critics cannot accept The Passion as art, not because its art is naturalistic, in some ways minimalist, but because it is the naturalistic, in some ways minimalist portrayal of religious sanctification through suffering. Religion, you see, is supposed to be all about love, not suffering. And love today generally is seen as a tender thing, wrapped up in poetic declarations and an almost subservient concern to make the beloved happy. But, as any parent can tell you, love has a more severe side, a side rooted in the desire to help the beloved become a better person, a side that involves rulemaking and even punishment.

The Old Testament is full of parental "tough love." God loved his Chosen People, and often acted on that love by chastising them. Apparently many of us have forgotten that the New Testament, the new covenant and indeed our very civilization, remains rooted in the same, severe mercy. God's son died for our sins. He died at our hands--Christians no less than Jews--on account of our sinfulness. Each and every one of us is condemned by the very nature of our existence to suffering and death. And it is only by accepting and embracing this fact of our existence as a severe mercy, as the road to salvation, that we can make sense of our lives.

This is a tough message to sell, particularly to the typical critic, who does not take kindly to being informed that he needs God's mercy, and that that mercy may be severe in nature. But this is an age when mercy must be severe if it (like the God who is its source) is to be noticed, let alone accepted.

Modern man is so distracted by his own ideas and appetites that he has little time for God. Indeed, many of us come to think we have no need of Him, and thereby descend into pride, self-absorption, and existential meaninglessness. Such beings think themselves sophisticated and selfcontained. The lucky ones are reminded by tragedy of their reliance on God as the source of meaning. In A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken writes of losing his young wife to a terminal illness and the spiritual and intellectual struggles this brought about. Ultimately, with the help of thought, prayer, and a moving correspondence with C.S. Lewis, he came to see his wife's death as a severe mercy. He recognized his and his wife's suffering as a necessary means to spiritual growth, bringing them closer to God.

Like many people, Vanauken found God, not in a beam of light from on-high, but by walking through the shadowlands of misery and doubt, where He is most needed. Contemporary intellectuals do not mind the darkness, but they think only fools or charlatans would claim to see God therein.

When it first came on the scene, modernism struck the intellectuals' fancy. Filled with obscure allusions, contempt for the masses, and spiritual despair, poetry like Eliot's fascinated those who sought to revel in their "special" knowledge of life's emptiness. But today everyone knows that contemporary life lacks meaning, and Eliot is seen as nothing more than a reactionary; his allusions are too elitist, his vision too evocative of a lost spirituality, his critique of modernity too much a call for a return to tradition and transcendent meaning.

Like modernists generally, Gibson's emphasis is on the reality of existence, "warts and all," and in particular on the emptiness of existence without any transcendent purpose. But Gibson brings to the fore what Eliot only hinted at even in his most spiritual poems, and even in his late play, The Cocktail Party: our need for, and the reality of, the transcendent meaning embodied in Christ.

I must confess that for years I wondered whether Eliot's artistic project (one shared by O'Connor, with her macabre portraits of violence and self-destruction), of piercing through to the dark truth of our hollowed-out reality, was fundamentally misguided. I feared that Eliot, in his drive to make us consider our failings, to recall us to our sinfulness, and to ponder its meaning, had produced undoubted masterpieces, but spawned little by way of a worthy tradition, instead adding fire to the already overheated modern artistic drive to shock and to disgust one's audience.

I was wrong.

Eliot's high modernism (as opposed to the various modernisms that sought, from their inception, merely to discard the past and all forms of piety in favor of one form or another of self-indulgence) sought to reformulate artistic language and method to confront the disjointed, spiritually emptied, character of our age. Its purpose, however, was not to make peace with that age, let alone revel in its meaninglessness, but rather to force us to reevaluate ourselves, and the choices that have done so much to make us and our society what they are.

The high modernist sees it as his task to confront the reality of modern life. He seeks to show us our true selves--to strip off the drapery that hides our naked, shivering nature. As Burke pointed out, this generally is not a good idea. But then, the cloth of tradition and natural attachment has long since been torn from us. And so it falls to the artist, in child-like fashion, to point out that our drapery of pride and self-made "autonomy" leaves us would-be emperors without clothes.

Ultimately, of course, Eliot sought to point us back toward God, the source of all meaning. But with Eliot one must "fill in" such hope of meaning as there might be. In The Cocktail Party, for example, we hear of a missionary eaten by cannibals; the point is that we should be happy for the person who died a worthy death, leaving behind the idiocy of bourgeois selfinvolvement. But the conclusion is one we must draw for ourselves. Modernism, even in its high form, generally leaves us waiting for Godot, hoping that he will show up. Few of us recognize that it is up to us to find in ourselves the ability, and the desire, to go out and to find the source of meaning, the transcendent God who alone can fill us up.

In his choice of subject, and in his choice of medium, Gibson has made possible our movement to the next step in self-awareness. More accurately, he has made it possible for us to witness the full extent of God's attempt to find us. His rather minimalist rendering of the story of the Passion focuses our attention on what the God-man did for us, on what was necessary to make possible our salvation. The soundtrack, the use of ancient languages, and the tight, focused style of both the writing and the filming, all aim at a single end: to confront us with the reality of Christ's suffering. And Gibson brilliantly uses the medium of film to affect our senses, rendering his story more powerful than the printed page or the minimal staging of a play, even while maintaining his focus on the relatively simple story at hand.

The Passion is not, of course, utterly straightforward, let alone artless. It does not focus solely on the violence done to Jesus Christ. Even during the scourging scene we see the soldiers, the spectators, even Mary, mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene reacting to the brutality.

And the people in this film are no mere stick-figures. A major part of the story consists of the reactions of those participating in and observing Christ's passion. The Roman guards react with important variations, ranging from almost subhuman sadism to a resigned openness to the reality of Christ's divinity. Pilate in many ways is the least sympathetic figure, with his self-pitying, almost modern cynicism, which leads him to justify acts he knows are evil on the grounds that those around him are really to blame, whereas he merely wants to survive. Caiaphas presents a difficult paradox for conservatives in particular. In some ways he may be seen as a defender of traditional piety, yet he becomes so zealous in his reaction that he ignores his duty to his own laws (violating Jewish procedures in prosecuting Jesus) and loses his capacity for sympathy and mercy, spitting on the ravaged Christ. Even the Apostles too often run away from their master and savior out of fear. Yet there are clear models of virtuous behavior--including, of course, the Marys, but also John, and especially Simon, who helps Christ, first out of necessity, then out of sympathy, and, finally, out of faith.

But the film in its entirety aims to, and succeeds in, emphasizing the central, orthodox message of Christianity--our murder of the Christ and his redemption of us through suffering. And it is the simple, focused nature of the story that disturbs many critics. William Safire, for example, has charged that the film insists too much on a single interpretation of only the most painful part of Jesus's ministry. So, by focusing on the pain of the Passion does Gibson misrepresent Christianity? As Gibson said to an interviewer when told a viewer from Mars would think Christianity was all about violence, "sure, if you're from Mars." The Passion assumes we have heard at least something about Christianity; that we know this is an important person who is suffering and dying, before finally showing us that person's divinity in his resurrection. We are in the process of losing this basic knowledge, but The Passion may make it possible again for artists to remind us of the source of meaning, and the meaning of life's inevitable suffering.

One often hears that we are living in a post-modern world. It is more correct to say that we are living in the twilight of modernity. The individualism and the opposition to authority so integral to modernity have succeeded in tearing down our institutions, reducing our social relations to mere questions of power. The goal was freedom, but the reality is the freedom of the least scrupulous among us to do as they please, leaving our most powerless fellows--the unborn, the old and the infirm in particular--at the mercy of those with little if any mercy.

Under such conditions one cannot expect the arbiters of public taste to be friendly toward anything affirming the importance of transcendence and the power of suffering. Any meaning beyond appetite will render the powerful less able to order our lives according to their own wills. But this power is waning, even as it succeeds. The mainstream media have done much to undermine religious authority, and have sought to minimize the exposure and the impact of The Passion (thus, even with its wild success in theaters, the movie has had extreme difficulty finding a television distributor). But the very success of the media has splintered their own authority, producing the Internet and other means of cultural subversion. If television will not have The Passion, the video stores will, and it will be seen, over and over again.

Our modern leaders have reduced us almost to the proverbial state of nature, without common authority, with few ties beyond the jungle-like drive for survival. But in the jungle anything is possible, even faith. And success like The Passion's may cause more people to take hold of the severe mercy of toiling in inhospitable fields of culture; to learn to tell the truth in ways that will gain adherents; to build a culture of life, ready to take over when the culture of death has completed its suicide. As "post-modernism" finally dies in modern pretension, we can work on seeing and showing the world through Christ's wound, and rejoicing that that wound has made possible our salvation.

BRUCE FROHNEN is an Associate Professor at the Ave Maria School of Law. He is the editor, most recently, of The American Republic: Primary Sources (2002).