Irrational Man, the 45^th film from the prolific Woody Allen, starts Joaquin Phoenix as Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor in a small town undergoing an “existential crisis.” You suffer from despair,” Emma Stone (who plays one of his students) tells him – and it appears she’s right. The professor has a drinking problem, suffers from “dizziness and anxiety,” and is tormented by a quest to commit a “meaningful act.”

Early reviews suggest that Irrational Man will go the way of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point: Lucas’ meaningful act will be the perfect murder. The trailer’s lighthearted tone notwithstanding, a crazed Phoenix wandering through a park portends the kind of downward spiral we saw in Blue Jasmine.
 

 
All of this is familiar territory for Woody Allen fans – not only because of the murder plot, but also because of the emphasis on “the question of the meaning of being” that runs throughout his films. There was the neurotic character Mickey (Hannah and Her Sisters) who becomes convinced that he has a brain tumor, only to find out that he has something much worse: meaninglessness. Then there was that scene (one of my personal favorites) in Play It Again Sam, which – with sophisticated New Yorkers, an art museum, romantic attraction, and talk of suicide punctuated with a joke – is as good a minute-long summation of Allen’s movies as you could ever hope to find. In a word, Woody Allen has always been an existentialist.

In fact, Irrational Man takes its title verbatim from a 1958 book by existential philosopher William Barrett. As the Guardian notes, Barrett’s book – which was responsible for introducing existentialism to the English speaking world – “no doubt formed part of Allen’s self-taught intellectual life in the late 50s and early 60s.”

Barrett (following Matthew Arnold) argues that the West is divided into two competing impulses: Hebraism and Hellenism. The first, which we receive from the Jewish religious tradition, is a philosophy of action, moral law, and ontological finitude – in a word, the vital. The second, which we receive from the Greek philosophical tradition, is a philosophy of knowledge, theoretical science, and epistemological certitude – in a word, the rational. The first is earthy: it looks “down” on the concrete and particular, focusing on individual people and what they stake their lives on. The second is ethereal: it looks “up” to the abstract and timeless, focusing on universal ideas and what they demonstrate. The first gives us saints, mystics, and artists; the second gives us philosophers, scientists, and industrialists.

Barrett links the second impulse, Hellenism, with the modern philosophical tradition inaugurated by Descartes in the seventeenth century. With its removal of the spirit from nature, its method of detached observation, and its quest for mathematical certainty and industrial conquest, Cartesianism embedded a new Platonism in the heart of the West, one which severed its last connections to the vital by sloughing off the religious and ethical precepts that structured man’s intellectual life. (Barrett would wrestle with the history of modern philosophy right up until his last book, Death of the Soul.)

On the other hand, Barrett links the first impulse, Hebraism, with existentialism. “The features of Hebraic man,” he writes, “are those which existential philosophy has attempted to exhume and bring to the reflective consciousness of our time.” The philosophical figures that have haunted all of Woody Allen’s works – e.g., Nietzsche in Hannah and Her Sisters and Dostoevsky in Love and Death – are presented as exemplars of the concrete. Though widely divergent in their religious and moral outlooks, the existentialists countered the Enlightenment ideal of reason and science with matters that struck to the core of “the whole man” – matters like alienation, anxiety,freedom, suffering, finitude, and death.

This analysis is striking for three reasons. First, it presents itself as a comprehensive account of the history of ideas. Barrett obliterates the notion that existentialism was a mid-century French fashion or literary movement, and instead situates it at the heart of the West’s struggle to understand itself.

Second, unlike “subtraction” histories that divide the West “laterally” into a bygone age of faith and the present age of unbelief, Barrett’s “vertical” division accounts for the variety of religious beliefs across the philosophical spectrum. It’s true that he sees both Judaism and Christianity (especially the bloodline of Paul, Augustine, and Pascal) as basically existential. “Though strongly colored by Greek and Neo-Platonic influences,” Barrett writes, “Christianity belongs to the Hebraist rather than to the Hellenist side of man’s nature because Christianity bases itself above all on faith and sets the man of faith above the man of reason.” Still, Hellenists and Hebraists each have their figures of faith (Kant v. Kierkegaard) and unbelief (Hume v. Nietzsche), which is still very much the case today.

Third, Barrett doesn’t frame this division as inevitable. From the beginning, he admits that there is an innate disposition in Hebraism toward the rational:

“We have to insist on a noetic content in Hebraism: Biblical man too had his knowledge, though it is not the intellectual knowledge of the Greek. It is not the kind of knowledge that man can heave through reason alone, or perhaps not through reason at all; he has it rather through body and blood, bones and bowels, through trust and anger and confusion and love and fear; through his passionate adhesion in faith to the Being whom he can never intellectually know.”

He also sees an innate disposition in Hellenism toward the vital:

“While existential philosophy is a radical effort to break with this Platonic tradition, yet paradoxically there is an existential aspect to Plato’s thought…we have to see Plato’s rationalism, not as a cool scientific project such as a later century of the European Enlightenment might set for itself, but as a kind of passionately religious doctrine – a theory that promised man salvation from the things he had feared most from the earliest days, from death and time.”

The Hellenistic and Hebraic impulses then forged an “uneasy alliance” in Augustine, later cultivated by the “unbounded rationalism” of medieval thinkers for whom faith was “beyond reason, but never against, or in spite of it.” In short, Christendom gave us peacetime in the great battle of the vital and rational:

“St. Augustine saw faith and reason – the vital and the rational – as coming together in eventual harmony; and in this too he set the pattern of Christian thought for the thousand years of the Middle Ages that were to follow…dogmas were experienced as the vital psychic fluid in which reason itself moved and operated and were thus its secret wellspring and support…The moment of synthesis, when it came in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, produced a civilization perhaps as beautiful as any man has ever forged, but like all mortal beauty a creature of time and insecurity…”

For Barrett, the medieval synthesis was shattered by a battle between intellectualism (the entrenchment of the rational) and voluntarism (a resurgence of the vital), part of a broader disagreement between Thomists and Scotists that helped launch both Protestantism and Rationalism. Protestantism “placed all the weight of its emphasis upon the irrational datum of faith, as against the imposing rational structures of medieval theology”. Rationalism, on the other hand, removed reason from the “psychic fluid” of the vital, leading us to the “bitter end of the century of Enlightenment” where “the limits of human reason had very radically shrunk”.

In the end, Barrett would take the fideism of a Kierkegaard over the rationalism of a Hume any day, and to understand Barrett’s rallying cry is to understand Woody Allen: “We have to establish a working pact between that segment [reason] and the whole of us; but a pact requires compromise, in which both sides concede something, and in this case particularly the rationalism of the Enlightenment will have to recognize that at the very heart of its light there is also a darkness.”

Still, if Barret is right – and I think he is – it goes both ways: a vitalism without reason is as blind as a rationalism without vitality is volatile. The existentialists are right that there’s more to life than rationality; but if pure reason leaves us cold, pure vitality burns us up. Both sides of our being long not just for a compromise but an integration. We long to be both fully vital and fully rational. For that reason I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Catholicism haunts so many of Woody Allen’s films. Following the logic of the Incarnation, Catholic Christianity has always striven to achieve a “both/and” with regard to the rational and suprarational, a kind of hypostatic union of the mind that – so long as we’re committed to defending it – will make us whole again.
 
 
(Image credit: Konbini)

Who would have thought that Woody Allen, who twenty years ago was separating from his longtime girlfriend to notoriously marry her adopted daughter, would emerge as a defender of what can only be called traditional morality? And yet, I find that conclusion unavoidable after viewing the writer-director’s recent offering, “To Rome With Love.” This film is the latest in a series of Woody Allen movies—“Match Point,” "Vicky Christina Barcelona,” “Midnight in Paris”—celebrating great European cities, and it shares with the last of those three a certain whimsical surrealism.

“To Rome With Love” presents a number of story lines, none of which interweave at the narrative level, but all of which share a thematic motif, namely, the need to resist those things that would tempt us away from real love. The funniest and most bizarre of Allen’s tales has to do with a very ordinary man, Leopoldo, played by the wonderful Italian character actor Roberto Benigni, who one day inexplicably finds himself the center of intense media attention. As he makes his way to his car, Leopoldo is mobbed by photographers and reporters peppering him with questions about his breakfast preferences and his favorite shaving cream. Everywhere he goes, he is recognized and lionized. Women suddenly appear, offering themselves for his sexual gratification. When he asks one of his colleagues why this is happening, the answer comes: “You’re famous for being famous.” Now at one level, of course, this is a parody of our “breaking news,” celebrity-obsessed, Kardashian culture. But Allen uses this little fantasy to make another, deeper observation. Though put off by many aspects of his “fame,” Leopoldo also becomes addicted to it. When another very ordinary figure suddenly attracts the media spotlight, Leopoldo, lamenting his lost fame, dances on one foot in the middle of a busy intersection just to get people to notice him once more. At this point, the poor man’s wife intervenes, and Leopoldo realizes that his notoriety, superficial and evanescent, is no match for the affection of his wife and children.

Another farcical tale has to do with Milly and Antonio, a newlywed couple from the Italian countryside who have ventured into Rome for their honeymoon. Looking for a hairdresser, Milly gets hopelessly lost and finds herself on the set of a movie starring one of her favorite actors. In short order, the leading man charms her, romances her and leads her back to his hotel room. But before he can complete his seduction, they are held up at gunpoint by a thief who manages to chase the frightened actor away. Dazzled by his looks and by the “excitement” he represents, Milly then gives in and makes love to the thief. Meanwhile, in a case of mistaken identity, the abandoned Antonio meets Anna, a voluptuous prostitute played by Allen favorite Penelope Cruz. Despite his embarrassment and protestations, Antonio gives in to Anna’s charms and allows himself to be seduced. Covered in shame, Milly and Antonio eventually make their way back to their honeymoon hotel suite and admit to one another that they would like to return to their home in the country and raise a family.

In some ways the most conventional of the stories is the one that features Woody Allen himself as a retired opera producer who has come with his wife to Rome to meet the parents of the young man to whom their daughter is engaged. Allen’s character is utterly bored by his future son-in-law’s parents until he hears the father, Giancarlo, singing—like a combination of Caruso and Pavarotti—in the shower. When he presses the man to share his gift with the wider world, he is met with complete resistance. When Giancarlo gives in and agrees to audition, he fails to impress. Finally, it dawns on the opera impresario that the man can sing well only in the shower. That light bulb having gone off, Allen’s character arranges for him to sing publicly, but in a makeshift shower! Giancarlo gives a triumphant performance in Pagliacci, and it appears as though fame and fortune await. But upon reading the reviews with pleasure, the man refuses to tour and eagerly returns to his ordinary employment as an undertaker and to the embrace of his family.

These various characters confront, in all of their vivid and seductive power, fame, sex, pleasure, and material success. In each case, moreover, the embrace of these things would involve the compromising of some unglamorous but stable and life-giving relationship. Thomas Aquinas said that the happy life is the one that remains centered on love, for love is what God is. Furthermore, he argued that the unhappy life is one that becomes centered on the great substitutes for love, which are wealth, pleasure, power and honor. What I found utterly remarkable about “To Rome With Love” is how its writer and director consistently and energetically insisted that simple love should triumph over glitz, glamor and ephemeral pleasure. I’m entirely aware that Woody Allen’s private life leaves quite a bit to be desired from a moral standpoint, but in regard to the fundamental message of “To Rome With Love,” Aquinas couldn’t have said it better.

The great 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke of three stages that one passes through on the way to spiritual maturity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. During the aesthetic stage, a person is preoccupied with sensual pleasure, with the satisfaction of bodily desire. Food, drink, sex, comfort, and artistic beauty are the dominating concerns of this stage of life. The ordinary fellow drinking beer at the baseball game and the effete aristocrat sipping wine in this box at the opera are both fundamentally enjoying the aesthetic life in Kierkegaard’s sense. The pleasures of this stage are pure and intense, and this is why it is often difficult to move to the next level, the ethical.

At this second stage, one transcends the preoccupation with satisfying one’s own sensual desire and accepts the moral obligation which ties one in love to another person or institution. The young man who finally abandons his bachelor’s life and enters into marriage with all of its practical and moral responsibilities is passing from stage one to stage two, as is the soldier who lets go of superficial self-interest and dedicates himself to the service of his country.

But finally, says Kierkegaard, there is a dimension of spiritual attainment which lies beyond even the ethical. This is the religious. At this stage of life, a person falls in love with God, and this means that she falls unconditionally in love, since she has found the infinite object which alone corresponds to the infinite longing of her heart.

For the religious person, even the objects of deepest ethical commitment—family, country, business, etc.—fall into a secondary position. When Thomas More said on the scaffold, “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” he gave evidence that he had passed from the ethical to the religious stage of life.

This famous account of the stages on life’s way came to my mind as I was watching Woody Allen’s recent film “Vicky, Christina, Barcelona”. Like most of Allen’s movies, this one concentrates on the mores and behaviors of the cultural elite: wealthy business executives, artists, poets, and writers. Vicky and Christina are two young New Yorkers who have resolved to spend a couple of summer months in Barcelona. While enjoying a late meal at an elegant restaurant, they are propositioned by Juan Antonio, an infinitely charming painter, who invites the women to join him for a romantic weekend. Despite Vicky’s initial hesitation, they accept. Juan Antonio is a consummate bon vivant, and he introduces Vicky and Christina to the pleasures of the Spanish good life: the best restaurants, vistas, art galleries, music, etc. And then, of course, he seduces both of them. In order not to spoil the movie for you (and to keep a PG rating for this column), suffice it to say that they become involved in a love triangle—and eventually quadrangle. None of the lovers is capable of a stable commitment, and all make appeal continually to the shortness of life, the importance of enjoying the moment, and the restrictions of conventional morality.

What they all do—to varying degrees—is to reduce sexual relationship to the level of good food and music and art, something that satisfies at the aesthetic level. And what makes this reduction possible is precisely the disappearance of religion. All of the players in this film move in the world of the sophisticated European high culture, an arena from which God has been rather summarily ejected. Kierkegaard thought that the three stages are ordered to one another in such a way that the highest gives stability and purpose to the other two. When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

This film is a vivid presentation of precisely this declension. And the end result of this collapse is deep unhappiness. What struck me throughout Woody Allen’s film was just this: how unhappy, restless, and bored every single character is. So it goes when souls that are ordered to God are bereft of God. There is, however, a sign of hope. As in so many of Allen’s movies—“Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” come to mind—religion, especially Catholicism, haunts the scene.

At the very commencement of their weekend together, Juan Antonio showed the two young women the sculpture that, in his own words, “inspired him the most.” It was a medieval depiction of the crucified Jesus. It’s as though even this postmodern bohemian, this thoroughly secularized sophisticate, realizes in his bones that his life will not hold together unless and until he can fall in love unconditionally. The joy that none of them finds can be had only when they order their aesthetic and ethical lives to the divine love made manifest in that cross of Jesus.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Hiper Cultural)

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
— Epicurus

 
Gruesome and tragic headlines from the past few months have thousands of people of faith scratching their heads, asking: why does God allow this evil to happen? Isn't he supposed to be all-loving and all-powerful? The question is even more pressing for people who are directly involved and suffering enormously.

This problem - known to philosophers as "the problem of evil" - is as old as the book of Job. Many theologians and artists, from Augustine and Aquinas to Dostoevsky and Thornton Wilder, have grappled with this fundamental question. In fact, we can survey the theological problem, its emotional gravity, and its strongest resolutions by looking at a handful of excellent films.

Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox has often emphasized two very important things about this classical problem from the outset. I'll follow his lead here.

First, we have to first acknowledge that there is both an intellectual and emotional component to the problem. Secondly, both components amount to one of the best (if not the best) arguments against God that there is - and believers need to be humble enough to admit it.

With those preliminaries in mind, let's take a look at six films that wrestle with this problem: The Virgin Spring, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Seventh Seal, Signs, The Tree of Life, and Shadowlands:

These two Woody Allen films sum up the intellectual side of the problem of evil (also neatly summed up in the Epicurus quote at the top of the article). In Hannah and Her Sisters, his character - who is in the middle of a profound existential crisis - asks: "If there's a God, why is there so much evil in the world? Just on a simplistic level, why were there Nazis?" In Crimes and Misdemeanors, a jaded humanist at a family Seder says that Hitler "got away with" the slaughter of 6 million Jews. Where was God in the Holocaust? Why didn't he stop it? Or at least punish the wicked after it happened?

Countless theologians and Christian thinkers have wrestled with the problem of evil on this intellectual level, as Woody Allen often does. For example, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky made the suffering of innocent children the sturdy basis of his character Ivan's atheism in The Brothers Karamazov. Theologian David Bentley Hart calls this argument against God "far and away the best argument" (nota bene all you atheists), and the one that occasions his own periodic loss of faith.

In Allen's films, the solution is often just comic diffusion: "How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works." But there have been noble attempts at solving the problem of evil intellectually, which include emphasizing the notions of free will, the fall of man, and the permission of evil to bring about greater goods. In the movie Shadowlands, Christian intellectual, apologist, and former atheist C.S. Lewis - played by Anthony Hopkins - says that confidently that God allows suffering because "we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. Blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect."

But to the soul of someone whose child was just kidnapped, or who has just been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer, such legalistic answers mean little - especially when the suffering looks so senseless, and so preventable. These answers may address why God permits evil in the abstract; but why is he permitting it right now, in this way, to me, to my child? At this point, no amount of intellectual maneuvering will do - the problem is, as philosopher Peter Kreeft calls it, "not just an intellectual experiment," but a "rebellion of tears." This is the emotional side of the problem of evil.

We see this side very clearly in that same movie, Shadowlands. CS Lewis, who was able to speak eloquently about the problem in the abstract, is personally devastated when he has to confront suffering in his own life: the loss of his first and great love, Joy Gresham, to cancer.

"Don't tell me it's all for the best," he says to his colleagues, who are fellow intellectuals and theologians. He anticipates their best answers and doesn't want them. A kindly priest tries anyway: "Only God knows why these things have to happen." But Lewis is totally unsatisfied with this response. "It won't do. It's a bloody awful mess and that's all there is to it."

The power and pain of the emotional side of this problem is also masterfully portrayed in two Ingmar Bergman movies: The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring.

The Seventh Seal, which has the famous scene of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) playing a game of chess with Death, meditates over and over on the silence of God in the midst of great despair, and even questions his existence - a motif that is obviously very relevant for those going through great suffering.

But The Virgin Spring, which is about a young girl who is unexpectedly raped and murdered, gets right to the heart of the matter. After the horrible act of violence, the girl's father collapses and prays: "The death of an innocent child...you allowed it to happen. I don't understand you." Remembering when he watched this movie for the first time, director Ang Lee said: "I'd never in my 18 years of life seen anything so quiet, so serene, and yet so violent, and so fundamentally questioning God."

To my mind, though, the two films that deal most brilliantly with the problem of evil are Signs and The Tree of Life, for this reason: they provide the hope of a resolution, one which engages both the heart and mind.

Signs, on the face of it, doesn't seem like it's about this philosophical problem at all; the M. Night Shyamalan sci-fi thriller follows a family in a small rural town dealing with crop circles and an imminent alien invasion.

But underlying the film is a profound meditation on the problem of evil. The protagonist Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) is a former Episcopalian priest who renounces God after his wife is killed in a random, horrible traffic accident. For Hess - as for C.S. Lewis and countless others who have wrestled with the problem - theological explanations seem to fall short. Something is missing; it's God's voice, offering some reassurance, where instead there's only silence and what seems like indifference.

The key scene in the film comes in a discussion between Hess and his younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) about the arrival of the aliens. Hess explains that there are two groups of people looking at the alien lights in the sky in two different ways: one group feels that they are on their own, and sees everything, including these lights, as evidence of blind luck, coincidence, even chaos; the other feels that "there'll be someone there to help them," and sees signs and miracles where the first group sees coincidences.

When Merrill asks his brother which group he falls into, Hess describes his dying wife's last moments: her innocent body pressed against a tree by a totaled car, her eyes glazed, and her lips saying" See. Swing away." What sign could that be? It was only the random firing of neurons, electrifying the memory of some baseball game right before his wife's unexpected death. From that moment on, he decides: "There is no one watching out for us. We are all on our own."

This is a glimpse into the darkness and despair wrought by the experience of suffering. It's not that God doesn't love us - it's that he was never there at all.

The Tree of Life presents a similar pain and loss. We watch Jack (Sean Penn) wander in a state of spiritual desolation, contemplating the loss of his younger brother at the age of nineteen. In a flashback, their mourning mother is comforted by a well-meaning neighbor, who says: "Time heals...the Lord gives and takes away." But these platitudes are like band aids on a festering wound; they do nothing, heal nothing. "Why?" the mother whispers in a voice over, calling out to God. "Where were you?"

In both of these films, we see that the mind wants explanations about God's ways. But the suffering heart needs to hear his voice, to know that he cares, or that he's even there at all. And both films, in their way, reveal that voice.

In Signs, a bundle of seemingly unconnected and random threads - including Hess' wife's last words - suddenly weave into a big and beautiful tapestry that makes sense of everything. This restores Hess' faith that someone has been watching out for him; that his profound loss and his wife's painful death are ugly threads that will, in some way, end up a necessary part of a perfect whole. As we saw in Shadowlands, this isn't a message Hess could hear from a friend or neighbor - instead, he had to "hear" it from God, and see it in his own life.

Sean Penn's character Jack in The Tree of Life also "hears" God's voice toward the end of the film, through a transcendental vision that points to the "why" of suffering:

This glimpse of the ultimate reality of eternity stirs hope in Jack's heart that "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" - not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering. Suffering is the groundwork laid in order to build shared, everlasting love.

Neither Signs nor The Tree of Life denies the problem of evil, or tries to explain it away. There are grim portrayals in both movies of random illness, evil acts, and tragic death - lived realities that hurt like hell.

But when Hess put his clerical collar back on, and when "Agnus Dei" ("Lamb of God") is sung during Jack's vision of eternity, a very particular picture of God is brought to mind: not God as puppet master pulling the strings, or a judicial authority punishing us for our own good, or (as Christopher Hitchens called him) a celestial Kim Jong-il. Instead, we glimpse a "suffering God"; one who, as atheist Slavoj Zizek brilliantly put it, "is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery."

The image of God himself beaten, stripped naked, humiliated with thorns, and nailed to a cross to die contains one of the most powerful "words" - the Logos - that suffering people looking for God's voice can see and understand. Why is it such a powerful response to the problem of evil? Because the cross literally connects suffering and weakness and pain with divine life, with God's love. (This doesn't mean that pain ceases to be pain - or that suffering should be idealized for its own sake. As trappist Thomas Merton put it, Christianity faces suffering and death "not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.")

Even for those with this essential faith, intellectual problems still linger. For example: Why do certain people suffer so much more than others? How could eternity ever "undo" or "excuse" the horrible damage that has been done, especially to innocent children? And what about the suffering of animals - does that go unredeemed?

I think Hess and Jack would continue to wrestle with these questions beyond the final frames, just as we all do in our lives. But we see a fundamental hope taking root in both characters, grounded in a distinct understanding of who God is. This understanding, if we share it, matters; it means that when confronted with atrocious human evils like the Holocaust and asked "where was God," we're compelled to say: right there in the gas chambers, lifting up the suffering.
 

What other films exhibit the problem of evil?

 
 
Originally posted at By Way of Beauty. Used with author's permission.