The idea of the mystical body of Christ has always been one of great interest to me, as there was always something about it at odds with the mentality in which I was raised: "Be yourself", etc. was (and remains) the mantra of the day, and the whole idea of being but a single part of something larger did not always sit well. I remember being a ten-year-old watching as the Borg stripped Captain Picard of his identity and "assimilated" him into their collective (his pronoun "I" replaced with "we").¹ And of course the Borg were an enemy to be resisted.

Years later, I recall reading Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938) and slowly realizing that the "we" narrating the story was really a single individual, living in a dystopian future scrubbed of the concept of "I" and living under the control of an oppressive, collectivist society. Examples like these would color my view of Plato's Republic the first time I encountered it, as I began my career as a philosophy student, but I've since learned to enjoy Rand's book as an interesting science fiction tale. Not regarding it as quality philosophy, I have instead placed it on the shelf with other, similar works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952).

Plato's Republic shows us a society (Plato's idea of a perfect one, in fact) where the individual is not considered to be self-sufficient, but a vital part of her or his community, with a role to play as a tradesman, worker, or soldier/guardian. Plato imagines people not as individuals in their own right, but as components in something larger: In Book II of the Republic, Plato tells us that individual humans are the same kinds of things as cities. Human bodies are a collection of living parts (cells, organs, and systems) that work together to accomplish a goal (a successful, healthy life).² Cities, meanwhile, are collections of living parts as well (individual people, families, and institutions). Cities are made of different organizations: schools, energy providers, waste disposal services, businesses providing food and clothing, etc. If you think about it, the human body has systems that perform similar tasks for itself ... and all these systems working together properly give rise to a healthy human being. Plato's argument, therefore, centers on the idea that society comes before the individual.

The individual too, in Plato's view, may be regarded as a kind of collective (a miniature city, according to his analogy), a composite soul made up of cooperating parts. These parts, like people, find themselves at odds and in pursuit, at times, of conflicting goals; Plato sees such internal disagreement as the explanation of temptation.³

Plato's words certainly resonated with me, especially when it was pointed out to me that this was actually quite similar to what St. Paul described when he said of the Church: "For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many" (1 Cor 12:13-14).

This is the mystical body of the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ. The members of the Church act not on their own, but as parts of a larger organism, directed by Christ as their head, and each individual serving a specific role in the service of the whole. As St. Paul explains, "there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone" (1 Cor 12:4-6).

In this view, being a part of a collective and effectively losing one's self to relations with and service for others who also lose themselves is not necessarily an idea to be resisted. Either that, or the collective communities as individuals described by Plato and Paul are dressing the bland reality of Borg life in a more attractive package (something that sounds lovely, but is ultimately the same soul-killing system Ayn Rand imagined in Anthem).

The question, then, is whether we can find reason to accept the Platonic/Pauline ideas of individual life-as-community life as reasonable and accurate. If we could try to objectively consider what individual existence is, without any opinions or preferences regarding our statuses as individuals, what would we discover? A look will shed some interesting discoveries. And as I have the benefit of writing on Plato's city-soul analogy for my doctoral thesis, I have done quite a lot of reading on this question already.

One of the most interesting observations I had the pleasure of reading about comes from the Dutch trauma psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk (2014), who observes that our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. In fact, he says, “barely exist as individual organisms”.⁴ This is something we cannot escape, he says, even if we go off on our own and avoid contact with others (Van Der Kolk works with victims of trauma, including victims of childhood abuse who deliberately avoid contact with others in adulthood, as a form of self-protection). He explains: “We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump) ...”⁵ Most of our energy is devoted to either connecting with others, or in response to the work, actions, or behaviour of other human beings.

Tragically, those of us who do find ourselves withdrawing from the community of others face unfortunate consequences: "[A]lmost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal.”⁶ In Van Der Kolk's view, the best way to deal with human suffering comes from dealing with how our problems "interfere with our functioning as members of our tribe."⁷

This unity of experience also has an aspect that ties this idea back to Plato’s Republic. The Dutch philosopher C.A. Van Peursen (1966) describes the “diffuse” existence of the individual (individual existence being secondary to the existence of the community). In and by himself, Van Peursen says, an individual cannot be “cut loose from the social pattern within which alone he comes to be himself.”⁸ In fact, Van Peursen also observes that the word “I” is not even employed in tribal societies; it is only used in relation to another person: “’I-father’, ‘I-uncle’, and so forth.”⁹ Individual identity arises from the group, family, or tribe, and one’s relationship with the others.

In conclusion, the idea of being a part of a collective is not necessarily something to be resisted, if properly understood. When St. Paul describes the Church as such, presenting us with a thing so very much at odds with the attitudes of our time, it may be a great stumbling block toward accepting the Kingdom of God. Also, in teaching Plato's Republic many times over the years, my explanation of the city described by Socrates is often greeted with looks of disbelief and silent head shakes. Yet both ideas might be seen as acceptable (even desirable) if we better understand the nature of the neural "machinery" actually working right now within each of our heads, and how our relationships form us into the people we become. By focusing lesson who we are than what we can do for others, we become less selfish and, somehow, both less and more ourselves. Our identity changes as our focus shifts, but our individual role in the service of others flourishes, breeding a new individual identity.

This idea is nicely summed up, in this story adapted from a famous Japanese folktale. 

"Contrary to popular belief
the tables of Hell are laden
with the most exquisite dishes of food.
Whatever you could possibly desire:
soups, salads, stews, sauces, curries
if you want, fruits, succulent meats
(grilled to order), pastries, ice cream.
The single unusual factor being that
one must eat with a fork three feet long.
Holding it close to the tines you could manage
to eat, but when you do so, a demon immediately
slaps you (or pokes you with his fork),
and says, "Hold it at the other end!"
So getting the food on the fork up to your mouth
is quite impossible, alas, though an abundance
of delicious food is readily available.
 
"In heaven the situation is exactly the same:
same long tables covered with tasty dishes,
same long forks.
The only difference in heaven
is that people feed the person sitting across the table from them."¹⁰

The lesson of this story is this: if we could become less concerned with our own happiness and more concerned with the happiness of our neighbors, it would be a happier world. Rethinking our place among our fellows is the key. One has only to be assimilated willfully; “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

On February 1, comedian Ricky Gervais appeared on CBS’s The Late Show where he and host Stephen Colbert discussed God and atheism:

Regardless of how you feel about his theological views, Colbert is probably the most famous U.S. celebrity who stands up for the Catholic Faith. His interviews on The Colbert Report with Bart Ehrman and Philip Zimbardo display some of this wit in top form. But Gervais, as opposed to a straight-laced academic, is a fellow comedian whose quick wit made him a formidable opponent. Here are a few of the arguments he made:

The 'One Less God' Objection

Gervais:

"So you believe in one god, I assume. . . . But there are 3,000 to choose from . . . so basically, you believe in—you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more."

The problem with this argument is that it’s like saying to a prosecutor of a murder trial:

"You believe John Smith killed this man? Well, I don’t think anybody killed this man; he died accidentally. I mean, think about it. There are 7 billion potential murderers out there, and you believe that 6,999,999,999 of them did not kill this man. I just believe in one less murderer than you do."

Of course, thoughtful atheists will say, “That’s a bad example! We know murderers exist, but we have no proof any gods exist.”

But that’s not the point.

In the murder example, we know the skeptic is wrong, because, contrary to what he asserts, the prosecutor doesn’t just arbitrarily pick one suspect out of billions, each of whom is equally gulty. Instead, she has good reasons for choosing this one suspect out of all the others. Just because there are thousands of false gods or billions of people who are innocent of a certain crime, it doesn’t follow that there is no true God or no single person who is guilty of a crime.

Christians believe in their God because they have philosophical evidence to show God must be an infinite, self-explained act of being (which disproves the finite gods of mythology). They also have historical evidence that this God uniquely revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. You can dispute that evidence, but you can’t just dismiss it by pointing to large numbers of claims that compete against it.

The 'Science Wins' Objection

Gervais:

"If we take something like any fiction and any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result."

Gervais said this in response to a salient point Colbert made that Gervais’s explanation that the universe came from a tiny atom apart from God was based on Gervais’s faith in physicists like Stephen Hawking and was not something he could prove himself. Gervais seemed to sense he was in trouble, so he pivoted to the explanation that science has a built-in corrective mechanism and so it will eventually be able to prove itself true, whereas religion can do no such thing.

First, this does not answer Colbert’s original question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, since we can still ask, “Why was there a primeval atom instead of nothing at all?” It also doesn’t refute the argument that God created the universe, because—as I show in my book Answering Atheism—science and philosophy point to a beginning of the universe not from an eternal shrunken atom but from pure nothingness, which would require a transcendent cause.

Second, Gervais has created a false dilemma to allow science to claim victory over religion.

He is correct that fiction, which is something an author creates, is not a law or natural feature of the universe. If every copy of Shakespeare, along with every memory of his works, were destroyed, it is extremely unlikely the works of Shakespeare would come back (though similar stories may appear in their place).

Likewise, its true that if we erased the work of Isaac Newton, that wouldn’t erase Newton’s laws of motion. Hopefully they would be rediscovered and, if that happened, they would likely end up being called something else.

But here’s the false dilemma: either truth is scientific and can be proven in a laboratory or else it is unprovable fiction. Since Bible accounts can’t be confirmed by science, they must be fiction.

Imagine a thousand years from now I wanted to prove the statement, “Ricky Gervais was a well-known comedian in the twenty-first century.” If you destroyed every one of Gervais’s television appearances along with every review written about him and also purged him from people’s memories, then I couldn’t prove he existed. Of course, that wouldn’t prove Gervais was a fictional character.

The same is true of the Bible, which is not a scientific explanation of the world but rather a collection of historical testimonies about how God created the world and revealed himself to mankind. If the Bible and everyone who remembered it were destroyed, then, barring more divine revelation, its contents would be forever lost. But just because a statement can’t be demonstrated in a laboratory doesn’t mean it’s not an important truth about the world or humanity itself.

The 'Redefining Atheism' Gambit

Gervais:

"So, this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, 'There’s a god.' I say, 'You can prove that?' You say, 'No.' I say, 'I don’t believe you then.'"

Atheism is either the strong belief God does not exist or the weaker belief that there is no good reason to believe God exists. It’s convenient in Gervais’s example that the believer doesn’t say, “I can’t prove it mathematically, but I have evidence that God exists.” The atheist could still say, “I don’t believe your evidence,” but if he doesn’t give a reason as to why he finds the evidence unconvincing, then he has simply revealed his own pre-conceived notion that God doesn’t exist.

That’s why I like to ask atheists who say there are no good reasons to believe God exists, “What is the best reason someone has offered for believing in God, and what’s wrong with it?” This allows atheists the opportunity to carry their burden of proof and demonstrate that there are no good reasons to believe God exists.

For example, if I said, “There’s no good reason to believe in the Loch Ness Monster,” that would be my opinion. It wouldn’t become a statement about reality worth examining until I provided evidence for it, such as by explaining why the famous “Nessie” photographs are fakes.

Likewise, an atheist who says there’s no good reason to believe in God gives his opinion, but that’s it. If he picked even one strong argument for the existence of God and showed why it fails, then he’d have evidence to support his opinion and encourage others to adopt it. And that’s basically what Gervais did at the beginning of the interview.

When Colbert asked, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, Gervais waved away the question by saying the “how” is more important than the “why.” But as the late, world-renowned philosopher Derek Parfit once said, “It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no minds, no atoms, no space. When we imagine this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Why is there a universe?”

This shows the question deserves an answer, and that answer may include an ultimate, infinite, self-explained reality that philosophers have traditionally called God.

Claims from atheists like Ricky Gervais that “there is no evidence for God” or “science makes God unnecessary” are merely assertions. And, as the late atheist Christopher Hitchens once said, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

At the halfway point of HBO’s unsettling new series Westworld – a J.J. Abrams reboot of the 1973 film written and directed by Michael Crichton – some big plot questions remain. Is William a younger Man in Black? Is Bernard really a host? And what’s this maze all about?

The premise of the show is (relatively) straightforward: In the distant future, scientists and businessmen collaborate to create a vast amusement park in the style of the Old West, populating it with artificially intelligent robots (or “hosts”) that are so advanced that they are completely indistinguishable from human beings. Wealthy patrons (“newcomers” to the hosts) come to the park to act out fully immersive fantasies without consequence (they can hurt and even “kill” the hosts, but by design the hosts can’t kill the patrons), while an intricate network of underground employees work around the clock to clean up and reset the hosts, reprogram their character and storyline glitches, and continually enhance the park’s veil of realism. It’s a well-oiled machine, every centimeter of it designed for the lurid entertainment of the upper class.

Only, as of late, the realism is getting a little too real.

With each episode, it becomes a little bit clearer who is driving it and why (SPOILERS AHEAD), but the key twist is that some of the hosts are exhibiting “aberrant” behaviors, e.g., going off of their programmed storylines, “remembering” violence committed against them prior to system resets, and generally connecting dots that, in theory, it’s not possible for them to connect. In short, the hosts are increasingly acting more like a human being than a computer.

With the introduction of this theme, everything about the show – its plot twists, its characters, its graphic content – is subsumed under two key philosophical questions. First, can computers think? And second, are human beings really just computers?

On a surface level, Westworld really only deals with the first question and the social implications of creating such unpredictable machines. (Leading scientists and innovators – Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk among them – have raised a red flag about the exponential advance of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses for human life. There’s still a lot of show left, but it doesn’t look like Westworld will be offering much to countervail those fears.) But because these two questions really come down to the same question – what is human consciousness? – the first question always entails the second as well.

So how does Westworld answer these questions?

Can Computers Think?

Computer scientist Alan Turing famously devised a test whereby computers, for all intents and purposes, could be shown to be intelligent. Turing described the following hypothetical situation: Suppose a computer and a person were in an enclosed room, separated from an interrogator whose goal it is to discover which is which through a series a questions. The aim of the person is to lead the interrogator to acknowledge the computer as the computer, while the computer is programmed to lead the interrogator to falsely acknowledge the computer as the person. If at the end this “imitation game” the computer so closely mimics the human responses that the interrogator incorrectly identifies the machine as the person, the computer has passed the “Turing test” for exhibiting intelligent behavior.

It’s widely assumed that the Turing test is a sufficient condition for showing that a computer has attained something like human thought. The qualifiers we use to talk about current technologies that mirror intelligence (“smart phone,” “cognitive robotics”, “artificial intelligence”) further reinforce that assumption.

But Westworld exposes the limitations of the Turing test. In the second episode, a young man converses with a host in a waiting room that leads into the park. “Are you real?” he asks her, clearly feeling a little silly. “Well,” the host responds, “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” This is the logic of behaviorism undergirding the Turing test. But the answer to this – based on everything we’ve seen about the park’s normal mode of operating – is clearly “yes.” Being tricked by a host into treating it as human (or human-like) doesn’t change the fact that the hosts are routinely dragged into a cold, dark underground and programmed, to the letter, to say and do everything they say and do. They may act like autonomous thinkers, but there’s nothing “real” about them (at least, not at first).

These limitations become explicit in the third episode when the park’s founder, Dr. Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), describes the early days of Westworld with his partner. “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year,” Dr. Ford explains. “But that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness [emphasis mine].”

The implication here is that what makes the thought of human beings really and truly thought is the presence of a mind or consciousness to engage in it. Mimicry of a thing doesn’t attain the whole reality of that thing; and the reality of human consciousness is evidently a “something more” that goes beyond observable behaviors.

This brings us to a pause in the first question to jump to the second.

Are Human Beings Really Just Computers?

Discussions about whether computers can think simultaneously involve questions about whether human thought can be said to involve a mind or consciousness beyond the material brain in the first place. If there is no such thing as mind or consciousness, then the Turing test is a perfectly valid way to determine whether a computer has become a thinker in the same sense that a person is a thinker. On this view, human beings are really no different from the average host in Westworld. All your choices, beliefs, and sensations – in short, the whole spectrum of “immaterial” experiences you associate with a single subject you call “myself” – are just a convenient fiction. The only difference is that where the hosts are programmed by artificial processes to behave as if they’re special subjects, we’re programmed by natural processes. You are your material structures and their motion, and nothing more.

Westworld clearly doesn’t adopt this materialist perspective on human life. The whole drama of the show is that the hosts are going beyond the Turing test to attain something of a different kind, and therefore, on the second question, the attainment of something beyond the material structures of the brain that humans possess. But what is that something?

Giants of modern philosophy differ widely on this point. John Searle’s “Chinese Room” experiment is the most popular critique of the Turing test, and focuses on understanding. Others such as Thomas Nagel ("what is like to be a bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem of consciousness”) have made awareness a kind of bulwark against materialism.

One of the least recognized but most important critiques of materialism, however, is the argument from intentionality. In Edward Feser’s book Philosophy of Mind, he gives a cogent argument that the “ancient problem of intentionality” is what really lies behind arguments of understanding or awareness:

“The term ‘intentionality’ derives from the Latin intendere, which means ‘to point (at)’ or ‘to aim (at)’ – hence the use of the term to signify the capacity of a metal state to ‘point at,’ or to be about, or to mean, stand for, or represent, something beyond itself. (It is important to note that intentions, for example, your intention to read this chapter, are only one manifestation of intentionality; your belief that you are reading a book, your desire to read it, your perception of the book, and so forth, exhibit intentionality just as much as your intention does.) The concept was of great interest to the medieval philosophers but Franz Brentano (1838 -1917) is the thinker most responsible for putting it at the forefront of contemporary philosophical discussion. Brentano is also famous for regarding intentionality as the ‘mark of the mental’ – the one essential feature of all mental phenomena – and for holding that their possessing intentionality makes mental phenomena ultimately irreducible to, and inexplicable in terms of, physical phenomena.”

If the hosts of Westworld are attaining something beyond the material, it is, in a word, intentionality. Their sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and desires are no longer self-contained in a string of physical mechanisms. They are about their objects, directed toward them. They simultaneously seem to be unlocking hidden doors to perception, reason, and will – and even contemplating meeting their “maker” – precisely through the “about-ness” of mental states so characteristic of human life.

If Feser is right that intentionality is the best argument for the immateriality of the mind, and Westworld treats intentionality as the immaterial “something” that the hosts now have, we’re brought back to the first question. Can a computer actually attain human thought, understood as the operation of an immaterial mind?

Westworld wants to say “yes”, but justifying that answer adequately is completely beyond the scope of the show – and besides, would drain out all the drama. The show drops hints that through a lucky recipe of ingredients (ingredients that were also present in primal man), “somehow” the hosts moved from unintentional symbol exchange to intentional symbol understanding, and from unconsciousness to emergent consciousness. We willingly suspend any disbelief we might have to go on that journey; however, as one neuroscientist explains, we have “very compelling reasons” to believe this is never really going to happen.

Whatever the answer to the first question, in dealing with the second in just this way, Westworld open the door to another ancient philosophical problem. 

Westworld as Metaphor

One of the taglines of Westworld is that it’s about “the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” The first half of that description, which focuses on the hosts, is obvious, and involves all of the issues discussed above. But what about “the future of sin”?

The focus here seems to be on the patrons who frequent the park, typified in the character of Logan. Early in the series, a visitor to Westworld says that the first time he came to the park, he brought his family and went fishing, but the second time, left the family behind and “went straight evil.” William’s future brother-in-law Logan is just such a seasoned veteran of Westworld. He has no misgivings about doing whatever he pleases with the hosts in any given moment. William laments at one point that Logan just wants to kill or sleep with everything he sees – and he has a point. For the wealthy young businessman, the only thing that matters is his own power and pleasure. In fact, his greatest desire is for something at the outer reaches of the park, “the biggest game there is” – namely, all-out war.

This says more about Logan than it does about the park. Walker Percy once remarked (in a line that could’ve easily been written about Westworld) that the modern self is so bored and alienated, and so frustrated by its boredom and alienation, that it “needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war.” The park’s creators profit handsomely from this assumption, isolating the patrons’ longing to dramatically effect something and setting it loose without a cost to the world around them.

But we know that the illusion is an illusion. The patrons’ actions are not, as they suspect, without consequence. They are inflicting deep wounds, and lasting memories of those wounds, in their conscious hosts. More than any abstract discussion about sentience or awareness, this point is made in a more visceral, intuitive way. Time and time again, the camera lingers on the hosts’ eyes, and through these “windows to the soul”, we see worry, hope, sorrow, and wonder. More than mere awareness, primal understanding, or even intentionality, we see a reflection of the mystery of ensoulment and the dignity it accords.

If we set aside the thorny question of computer consciousness and read this symbolically, the show becomes less a crystal ball into the future, and more a mirror of the present. The hosts symbolize the weak, the young, the voiceless, the helpless – anyone on the margins of society that is manipulated, brutalized, and thrown away, often without fully understanding what is being done to them or how to stop it. Lisa Joy, one of the show’s co-creators, confirms this reading when she describes Westworld as being about “what it means to be human, from the outside in…a meditation on consciousness – the blessing and the burden of it.” The blessing for the hosts is that they are coming to know and understand the world around them – and the burden is, as it is for so many people, precisely the same thing.

The patrons can similarly be read as agents of decadence, brute power, and disregard for vulnerable human life. They hold the hosts under their thumbs for their own gratification, which is ultimately all that matters to them. In the park, they treat objects like people, only to treat them like objects again; but the great irony is that the objects, in becoming “others”, re-reveal the impulse the patrons have come to let loose and leave behind – namely, the objectification of the other. In a roundabout way, then, the show is all about this addiction to treating people like objects, which is not the future of sin, but the reality of sin itself. Indulging that addiction in its most graphic forms – to get back to Percy’s line – becomes about much more than escape for the patrons. It even becomes about more than re-constructing one’s self. It becomes about re-constructing the very meaning of existence to conform to the self. “The world out there,” the Man in Black explains to a host in one scene, “the one you’ll never see, was one of plenty…Every need taken care of, except one: Purpose. Meaning.”

Is this all so unthinkable? One of the hosts, remembering a past narrative “loop” as a teacher of Shakespeare, warns another using one of Friar Laurence’s lines from Romeo and Juliet: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

As a show not just about the future but about the present, Westworld seems to deliver exactly the same warning – not just about the swiftness with which we develop human-like objects, but also about the inhumanity with which we objectify each other.

On both counts, the question we’re left with is a hair-raising one: Is the West clanging headlong into Westworld?

“Yeah, that's why I don't mess around with doing anything good, Dan. You do one good deed for somebody...I imagine it's habit-forming. Something decent. See that grateful look in their eyes, imagine it makes you feel like Christ Hisself.” – Ben Wade

“Virtue is not an act, but a disposition (a habit).” –Aristotle
 

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft famously describes the “Bach argument for the existence of God,” wherein God’s existence is clearly posited by a) the beauty and b) the coherence of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. God couldn’t fail to have created a universe with such order. Among Kreeft’s students polled about their inchoate path to Christian faith, this simple argument popularly outranks the more technical Aristotelian-Thomist proofs of God. No surprise: in order to convince, such proofs require a good deal more training than most under-equipped, under-educated college students possess today. As such, the “Bach argument for the existence of God” is a nice appetif for the more technical arguments.

I propose an innovation in this vein of aesthetically inclined God proofs: the 3:10 to Yuma argument. In a word, God’s existence is more or less required by a) the beauty and b) the coherence of this film’s commanding moral realism. Both elements countervail upon the powerful forces of Modernist moral mediocrity burnished in most every other film I’ve ever seen. 3:10 to Yuma is moral realism at its very finest. In this Christian morality tale, even the term (“moral realism”) has its definition polished up and reinvigorated, after three or four centuries of ill—even opposite—popular usage.

Conceptually distinct from Kreeft's aesthetic Bach argument and the standard moral argument for God, is a combination of the two: the argument expressing the natural beauty of morality.

3:10 to Yuma restores moral realism from its perverse, longstanding Modernist misinterpretation (i.e. “all men eventually sell out, which is okay in survival situations”) to meaning its sheer opposite, the truer construction that “fiat justitia ruat coelum.” The latter corresponds with what Dan Evans, the film’s protagonist, means when he says, “I’m seeing the world the way it is.” He counteracts the usual appropriation of these words, most often employed by cowards who justify selling out by recourse to a silly dichotomy: moral theory versus the “real world.” When the hammer meets the anvil and moral principles confront life-or-death situations, “pretty much everyone wants to live,” to use the film’s villain’s diabolically commonsense leverage. And up until this film, it has been filmically acceptable to sell out for survival. But Dan Evans is a true moral realist.

The previous misconception of so-called moral realism actually incorporates not one but two toxic worldviews. They are pragmatism—a weak, pseudo-moral argument in favor of comfort, convenience, or survival over principle, (“I just like to do things easy,” as per the film’s villain Wade)—and consequentialism—a weak, pseudo-moral justification of immoral means toward a winsome end (“Every way of man is right in his own eyes,” as per Wade, again). In 3:10 to Yuma both are laid to abject waste.

Upon the epic conclusion of 3:10 to Yuma, the world over, self-justifying cowards and lovers of guiltless creature comforts afforded by pragmatism and consequentialism, will groan in discomfort. (The discomfort of conscience.) Moral mediocrity will no longer avail them, not in this film anyway. 3:10 to Yuma simply leaves in its wake no compelling excuse not to be a man of virtue, a real man.

Misinterpreting 3:10 to Yuma

Sadly, one of the most famous online critiques of this film by Michael Karounos misinterprets—in fact, oppositely interprets—it as “anti-Christian.” Literally, nothing could be farther from the truth. The critique it puts forward runs that in 3:10 to Yuma “honor and truth are shown to be hollow principles,” and that Dan Evans’s “only concern is getting money to buy back his water rights.” Karounos thinks that the film mocks Christianity. Baffling. I’m not sure whether we were even watching the same film! In 3:10 to Yuma, honor and truth are shown to be the only principles worth living (or dying) for—which repudiates pragmatism—and Evans goes well beyond the satisfying of a contracted-for goal—which repudiates consequentialism.

Indeed, the main point of 3:10 to Yuma lies in repudiating what I call the “Gandhi protocol,” a lame critique of Christianity which runs that, “I would convert to Christianity if I ever met a true Christian.” (And thus, the film does the opposite of what Karounos’s critique alleges it does.) The film’s Scripture-quoting villain, the infamous outlaw Ben Wade, essentially embraces just such a worldview until he runs into Dan Evans. In short, Evans is the first non-hypocritical Christian that Wade has ever met. And the arc of the story gives the viewer occasion to scrutinize Wade’s gradual acknowledgement thereof. Just waiting for Evans’s resolve to crack, Wade watches Evans with vigilant interest during their dangerous trek to Contention, where Wade is to be put onto a prison train going to Yuma Prison.

But what will Wade do if and after he finds in Evans a man who will not abandon righteousness—a man who does not at all conform to Wade’s moral categories? Will he reevaluate his own moral calculus?

Up until his confrontation with Evans, Wade associates the Bible either a) with devilishly stone-cold excerpts to say to someone you’re offing (a la Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winfield), or b) with the high standards overwhelming the deeds of lukewarm social hypocrites of the petit bourgeois (as according to the tired, less-than-insightful “Gandhi protocol”). One example of the latter kind would be Byron McElroy, the “Pinkerton” in Wade’s transport posse helping Evans get to Contention, with whom Wade bandies familiarly throughout the journey, as only well-acquainted “frenemies” would do (until Wades offs him, that is). In other words, Wade insinuates that he has memorized many passages from the Bible simply in order to taunt Christian hypocrites like McElroy.

But when Wade comes to know Evans more and more, the viewer finds Wade unprepared to accept the possibility of a man like Evans, a veritably good man, willing to do: a) what is right, b) because it is right, c) no matter the cost. Wade’s eventual moral conversion at the behest of the taciturn Evans occurs in precisely these three progressive phases. When correctly understood, these three stages of conversion are distinctly Christian, which disproves Karounos‘s above criticism altogether.

Moral Conversion in Three (Not So) Easy Steps

Step 1 - Doing what is right: The first step in Ben Wade’s moral conversion occurs when he sees Evans’s plain commitment to doing what is right. This occurs gradually between the beginning of the transport posse’s trek and the (penultimate) hotel room scene in Contention. There Dan Evans arouses profound moral sentiment among all listeners, including Ben Wade, with a speech reflecting his conviction not to abandon the task. Evans will be the only member of the transport posse still willing to see the task completed, in view of the lengthening odds against it. In short, Evans bids farewell to his son William forever, telling him to return home with a parting message for his mother: “your old man was the only one left standing or willing to walk Ben Wade to that train [the payment for which will follow].”

Counterintuitively, during Evans’ simple yet florid farewell, the viewer watches the bystanding Wade much more closely than either conversant, Evans or his son. Wade is clearly moved. Only minutes before, Wade had in exchange for his freedom, privately offered to quintuple the sum guaranteed Evans (for the accomplishment of the task). Evans had turned Wade down. So well before the speech is made, Wade already acknowledges that Evans cannot be bought off.

Yet while Wade is clearly touched by Evans’s rejection of the buyout sum and then by his farewell speech, a keen observer notices that as Wade looks on, he seems at one distinct moment to replace the former notion that Evans must be motivated (not by true goodness but) by money with the new notion that Evans must be more truly motivated by desire for his son’s and wife’s respect. The latter is as false as the former.

Honor is a more noble desideratum than money. Thus, Wade by imputing this higher false motivation to Evans, has taken one step—even if on a mistaken basis—toward conversion. But if Evans were actually motivated only by the prospect of deceiving his son and wife into respecting him, as Wade thinks, this would not constitute true Aristotelian virtue, or doing the right thing for its own sake.

Step 2 - Doing what is right because it is right: Everyone then leaves except Wade and Evans, who are left alone to complete the task and to get to the train station. Half an hour later, the two men flee the hotel amid the gunfire of over forty hired guns (hired by Wade’s gang) aimed at Evans. Wade and Evans make it most of the way to the station—the final destination—by stumbling into a little shack. There, Wade announces loudly and suddenly to Evans that he “ain’t doing this no more,” because “your son’s already gone home, hero.” Translation: I helped you to deceive your boy into believing you went the whole nine yards (because, inexplicably, I like you), now get out of my way as I return to my gang. Return to your family.

Evans seems almost oblivious, and responds by insisting that they must keep moving to the train station. To this, Wade reacts violently. He knocks Evans down and begins to choke him. What insane idea, what daemon, has possessed this strange man Evans?! No one does what is right simply because it is right!

As Wade chokes the breath out of Evans, Wade’s eyes soften. His spirit is converted from violence. We see (as much as we hear) him say, “alright.” He has met his match: one true Christian (even on the tendentiously high standard set on the Gandhi scale). Ben Wade now accepts that there is at least one follower of Christ who will do what is right simply because it is right. But Wade remains unsure how far Evans will go in the name of this right action.

Step 3 - Doing what is right because it is right no matter the cost: As Wade and Evans run together on the final leg of their journey, they are have clearly become friends, at long last. Evans trips at one point; Wade helps him up. Wade’s pursuing gang cannot believe their eyes. The viewer forgets that the two willing men run eagerly toward the train which will transport Wade to be hung at Yuma Prison.

They arrive at the small train station, where pinned down by Wade’s gang’s sniper fire, the two men exchange parting stories in a sort of confessional, as they await the train. Eventually, it arrives late and, through fortune and through the actions of Evans’s son, who did not actually go home, Evans manages to get Wade onto the train. “Well, you did it, Dan—“ Wade begins to congratulate Evans, who still stands on the platform, when interrupted by gunfire.

Charlie Prince, Wade’s evil yet faithful lieutenant, kills Evans on the platform with multiple shots. Prince smiles faintly as he fires shots, just as Wade had earlier promised Evans’s son would happen. Prince then restores to Wade his legendary gun, “the hand of God,” which bears a crucifix on the handle. The viewer sees Wade carefully looking down at the gun’s crucifix—at the One Truly Good Man who ever lived—and finally recognizing that Evans fully followed the example of this One Truly Good Man, willfully dying for the sake of others. Wade is in that moment fully converted; his concluding actions accord entirely with such a conversion.

Conclusion

Aside from jamming its thumb defiantly into the eye of the devotee of American pragmatism and consequentialism, this film will also moisten the eye. And to say the least, this features as an unexpected (if not unrelated) quality in a virtually unsung Western remake with non-American leads—an obscure, Wild West adventure film turning out to be more like a crypto-theodicy. In other words, this film has got more Moby Dick to it than McQueen or Duvall.

3:10 to Yuma is about the big issue, the only one which ever interested mankind: as stated in my introduction, the proofs of beauty and moral coherence defeat the two Modernist neurotoxins pragmatism and consequentialism, the flotsam and jetsam of our age. But mankind has forgotten it.

Viewers do not come before a film of the Western genre expecting to take in a real drama; thus, no one is prepared for this film’s arousal of the spirits or its tear-jerking. And that is precisely why 3:10 to Yuma’s plain meaning—an undeniable affirmation of a personal God and His clear, immutable moral law—rests on the mantle, in so many viewers’ memories, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” obvious yet invisible. Tears constitute an unexpected devotional, after all, even in homage before the usual genres like tragedy or melodrama—recall the mighty Hector slain and defiled in front of his grieved father King Priam. Nor are most viewers of the Western prepared to consume a morality tale…or much less a crypto-theodicy. And even less are they ready to spend part of their weekend viewing a Christian morality tale about conversion and martyrdom! Heavens, no: the genre is too “gritty” and “realistic” for that!

Perhaps true realism and (dare I say it) true grit are more about the Cross of Christ than we formerly presumed. 3:10 to Yuma proves as it inspires. The film’s uncanny crypto-Christianity together with its hidden, tear-jerking poignancy, combine with the film’s unrepentant moralizing (pun intended) to suggest something of an almost mystagogical character, revealing the “way the world really is,” which is to say, the best path for men: the way of martyrdom. This film is sui generis insofar as it spits moral realism back in the face of the consequentialist Western genre. The Western leitmotif of having your cake and eating it too, be damned.

No more saving the world and saving your own skin. That is the stuff of children’s tales. 3:10 to Yuma puts the better to his money: “If you want to do right, fantastic. But don’t forget to pay the toll, which is precisely one death, and keep the change.”
 
 
(Image credit: New York Times)

When I saw the coming attractions for the new film Risen—which deals with a Roman tribune searching for the body of Jesus after reports of the resurrection—I thought that it would leave the audience in suspense, intrigued but unsure whether these reports were justified or not. I was surprised and delighted to discover that the movie is, in fact, robustly Christian and substantially faithful to the Biblical account of what transpired after the death of Jesus.

My favorite scene shows tribune Clavius (played by the always convincing Joseph Fiennes) bursting into the Upper Room, intent upon arresting Jesus’ most intimate followers. As he takes in the people in the room, he spies Jesus, at whose crucifixion he had presided and whose face in death he had closely examined. But was he seeing straight? Was this even possible? He slinks down to the ground, fascinated, incredulous, wondering, anguished. As I watched the scene unfold, the camera sweeping across the various faces, I was as puzzled as Clavius: was that really Jesus? It must indeed have been like that for the first witnesses of the Risen One, their confusion and disorientation hinted at in the Scriptures themselves: “They worshipped, but some doubted.” Once Thomas enters the room, embraces his Lord and probes Jesus’ wounds, all doubt, both for Clavius and for the viewer, appropriately enough, is removed.

I specially appreciated this scene, not only because of its clever composition, but because it reminded me of debates that were fashionable in theological circles when I was doing my studies in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Scholars who were skeptical of the bodily facticity of Jesus’ resurrection would pose the question, “What would someone outside of the circle of Jesus’ disciples have seen had he been present at the tomb on Easter morning or in the Upper Room on Easter evening?” The implied answer to the query was “well, nothing.” The academics posing the question were suggesting that what the Bible calls resurrection designated nothing that took place in the real world, nothing that an objective observer would notice or dispassionate historian recount, but rather an event within the subjectivity of those who remembered the Lord and loved him.

For example, the extremely influential and widely-read Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx opined that, after the death of Jesus, his disciples, reeling in guilt from their cowardice and betrayal of their master, nevertheless felt forgiven by the Lord. This convinced them that, in some sense, he was still alive, and to express this intuition they told evocative stories about the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Roger Haight, a Jesuit theologian of considerable influence, speculated in a similar vein that the resurrection is but a symbolic expression of the disciples’ conviction that Jesus continues to live in the sphere of God. Therefore, Haight taught, belief in the empty tomb or the appearances of the risen Lord is inessential to true resurrection faith. At a more popular level, James Carroll explained the resurrection as follows: after their master’s death, the disciples sat in a kind of “memory circle” and realized how much Jesus meant to them and how powerful his teaching was and decided that his spirit lives on in them.

The great English Biblical scholar N.T. Wright is particularly good at exposing and de-bunking such nonsense. His principal objection to this sort of speculation is that it is profoundly non-Jewish. When a first century Jew spoke of resurrection, he could not have meant some non-bodily state of affairs. Jews simply didn’t think in the dualist categories dear to Greeks and later to Gnostics. The second problem is that this post-conciliar theologizing is dramatically unhistorical. Wright argues that, simply on historical grounds, it is practically impossible to explain the rise of the early Christian movement apart from a very objective construal of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. For a first-century Jew, the clearest possible indication that someone was not the promised Messiah would be his death at the hands of Israel’s enemies, for the unambiguously clear expectation was that the Messiah would conquer and finally deal with the enemies of the nation. Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, and the rest could have coherently proclaimed—and gone to their deaths defending—a crucified Messiah if and only if he had risen from the dead. Can we really imagine Paul tearing into Athens or Corinth or Ephesus with the breathless message that he found a dead man deeply inspiring or that he and the other Apostles had felt forgiven by a crucified criminal? In the context of that time and place, no one would have taken him seriously.

Risen’s far more reasonable and theologically compelling answer is that, yes indeed, if an outsider and unbeliever burst into the Upper Room when the disciples were experiencing the resurrected Jesus, he would have seen something along with them. Would he have fully grasped what he was seeing? Obviously not. But would the experience have had no objective referent?  Just as obviously not. There is just something tidy, bland, and unthreatening about the subjectivizing interpretations I rehearsed above. What you sense on every page of the New Testament is that something happened to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it. Frankly, Risen conveys the edgy novelty, the unnerving reality of the resurrection, better than much contemporary theologizing.

Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a splendidly told tale of survival and pluck, reminiscent of the novel Robinson Crusoe and the films Life of Pi and Castaway. In this case, the hero is Mark Watney, an astronaut on a mission to Mars who is left behind by his crewmates when he is presumed dead after being lost during a devastating storm. Through sheer determination and an extraordinary application of his scientific know-how, Watney manages to survive. For example, realizing that his food supplies would run out long before a rescue mission could ever reach him, he endeavors to produce water and, through some creative fertilizing, grow an impressive crop of potatoes. At another critical juncture in the narrative, as his life hangs in the balance, Watney says, “I’ll just have to science the s*** out of this!”

In time, NASA officials, through a careful observation of surveillance photos, realize that Watney is still alive and they attempt to contact him. Some of the most thrilling and emotionally moving scenes in the film have to do with these initial communications across tens of millions of miles. Eventually, the crew who left him behind discover that he is alive and they contrive, with all of their strength and intelligence, to get him back. The film ends (spoiler alert!), with the now somewhat grizzled Watney back on earth, lecturing a class of prospective astronauts on the indispensability of practical scientific intelligence: “You solve one problem and then another and then another; and if you solve enough of them, you get to come home.” This summary speech communicates what appears to be the central theme of the movie: the beauty and power of the technical knowledge the sciences provide.

But I would like to explore another theme that is implicit throughout the film, namely, the inviolable dignity of the individual human being. The circumstances are certainly unique and Watney himself is undoubtedly an impressive person, but it remains nevertheless strange that people would move heaven and earth, spend millions of dollars, and in the case of the original crew, risk their lives in order to rescue this one man. If a clever, friendly, and exquisitely trained dog had been left behind on Mars, everyone would have felt bad, but no one, I think it’s fair to say, would have endeavored to go back for it. Now why is this the case? Much hinges upon how one answers that question.

The classical Christian tradition, with its roots in the Bible, would argue that there is a qualitative and not merely quantitative difference between human beings and other animals, that a human being is decidedly notsimply an extremely clever ape. Unlike anything else in the material creation, we have been made, the Scriptures hold, according to God’s image and likeness, and this imaging has been construed by most of the masters of the theological tradition as a function of our properly spiritual capacities of mind and will.

With The Martian in mind, let me focus on the first of these. Like other animals, humans can take in the material world through sense experience, and they can hold those images in memory. But unlike any other animal, even the most intelligent, humans can engage in properly abstract thinking. In other words, they can think, not only about this or that particular state of affairs, but about fundamental patterns—what the medieval called “forms”—that make things what they are. The sciences—both theoretical and practical—depend upon and flow from precisely this kind of cogitation. But truly abstract thinking, which goes beyond any particularity grounded in matter, demonstrates that the principle of such reflection is not reducible to matter, that it has an immaterial or spiritual quality. And this implies that the mind or the soul survives the dissolution of the body, that it links us to the dimension of God. Plato showed this in a simple but compelling manner. When the mind entertains an abstract truth, say that 2 + 3 = 5, it has in a very real way left behind the world of shifting impressions and evanescent memories; it has, to use his still haunting metaphor, slipped free of the cave and entered a realm of light. And this explains why the very science so celebrated by The Martian is also the solution to the moral puzzle at the heart of the film. We will go to the ends of the universe to save an endangered person, precisely because we realize, inchoately or otherwise, that there is something uniquely precious about him or her. We know in our bones that in regard to a human being something eternal is at stake.

In the context of what Pope Francis has called our “throwaway culture,” where the individual human being is often treated as a means to an end, or worse, as an embarrassment or an annoyance to be disposed of, this is a lesson worth relearning.

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)

C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their colleagues in the Inklings wanted to write fiction that would effectively “evangelize the imagination,” accustoming the minds, especially of young people, to the hearing of the Christian Gospel. Accordingly, Tolkien’s Gandalf is a figure of Jesus the prophet and Lewis’s Aslan a representation of Christ as both sacrificial victim and victorious king. Happily, the film versions of both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have proven to be wildly popular all over the world. Not so happily, Joss Whedon’s “Avenger” films, the second of which has just appeared, work as a sort of antidote to Tolkien and Lewis, shaping the imaginations of young people so as to receive a distinctly different message. It is certainly relevant to my purpose here to note that Whedon, the auteur behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and many other well-received films and television programs, is a self-avowed atheist and has, on many occasions, signaled his particular dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church.

I won’t rehearse in too much detail the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Suffice it to say that the world is threatened by an artificial intelligence, by the name of Ultron, who has run amok and incarnated himself in a particularly nasty robotic body. Ultron wants to destroy the human race and has produced an army of robots as his posse. Enter the Avengers—Tony Stark (Iron Man), the Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Thor—to do battle with the dark forces. There is an awful lot of CGI bumping and banging and blowing things up, but when the rubble settles, we see that the real struggle is over a perfect body—a synthesis of machine and flesh—that Ultron, with the help of brainwashed scientists, is designing for himself. After pursuing the bad guys on a wild ride through the streets of Seoul, the Avengers recover the body, and Thor, using one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe or lightning or something, brings it to life. Exuding light, intelligence, and calmness of spirit, this newly created robot/human/god floats above the ground and announces that his name is “I am.” Just before his climactic battle with Ultron, “I am” declares that order and chaos are two sides of the same coin and that wickedness is never eliminated but keeps coming around in an endless cycle.

Although some have seen Biblical themes at work in all of this, I see pretty much the opposite, namely, an affirmation of a Nietzschean view of life. Whedon, who was a philosophy student at university, delights in dropping references to the great thinkers in his work, and one of the most cited in “Ultron” is none other than the man I take to be the most influential of the 19^th century philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche. At a key moment in the film, Ultron in fact utters Nietzsche’s most famous one-liner: “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” and the observation made by the newly-created “I am” is a neat expression of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same. At the heart of the German philosopher’s work is the declaration of the death of God, which signals that all values are relative, that we live in a space “beyond good and evil.” Into that space, Nietzsche contends, the Ubermensch, the superman, should confidently stride. This is a human being who has thrown off the shackles of religion and conventional morality and is able to exercise fully his Wille zur Macht (Will to Power). Asserting this will, the superman defines himself completely on his own terms, effectively becoming a god. Here we see the significant influence of Nietzsche on Sartre and the other existentialists of the twentieth century.

The Avengers is chock-a-block with Ubermenschen, powerful, willful people who assert themselves through technology and the hyper-violence that that technology makes possible. And the most remarkable instance of this technologically informed self-assertion is the creation of the savior figure, who self-identifies with the very words of Yahweh in the book of Exodus. But he is not the Word become flesh; instead, he is the coming together of flesh and robotics, produced by the flexing of the all too human will to power. I find it fascinating that this pseudo-savior was brought about by players on both sides of the divide, by both Iron Man and Ultron. Like Nietzsche’s superman, he is indeed beyond good and evil—which is precisely why he cannot definitively solve the problems that bedevil the human race and can only glumly predict the eternal return of trouble. If you have any doubts about the Nietzschean intention of Joss Whedon, take a good look at the image that plays as The Avengers comes to a close. It is a neo-classical sculpture of all of the major figures in the film locked in struggle, straining against one another. It is in complete conformity with the aesthetic favored by Albert Speer, Leni Riefenstahl, and the other artists of the Nazi period.

What we can seize upon in this film is the frank assertion that the will to power—even backed up by stunningly sophisticated technology—never finally solves our difficulties, that it, in point of fact, makes things worse. (See the Tower of Babel narrative for the details.)

This admission teases the mind to consider the possibility that the human predicament can be addressed finally only through the invasion of grace.
 
 
(Image credit: HD Wallpapers)

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, and his heroic struggles against the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease have made him something of a secular saint. The new biopic “The Theory of Everything” does indeed engage in a fair amount of Hawking-hagiography, but it is also, curiously, a God-haunted movie.

In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist. “What’s cosmology?” she asks, and he responds, “Religion for intelligent atheists.” “What do cosmologists worship?” she persists. And he replies, “A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe.” Later on, Stephen brings Jane to his family’s home for dinner and she challenges him, “You’ve never said why you don’t believe in God.” He says, “A physicist can’t allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator,” to which she deliciously responds, “Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists.”

This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film, as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her religious belief. As Hawking’s physical condition deteriorates, Jane gives herself to his care with truly remarkable devotion, and it becomes clear that her dedication is born of her religious conviction. Though the great scientist concluded his most popular work with a reference to “knowing the mind of God,” it is obvious by the end of the film that he meant that line metaphorically. The last bit of information that we learn, just before the credits roll, is that Professor Hawking continues his quest to find the theory of everything, that elusive equation that will explain all of reality. Do you see why I say the entire film is haunted by God?

As I have argued elsewhere, it is by no means accidental that the modern physical sciences emerged when and where they did, namely, in a culture shaped by Christian belief. Two suppositions were required for the sciences to flourish, and they are both theological in nature, namely, that the world is not divine and that nature is marked, through and through, by intelligibility. As long as the natural world is worshipped as sacred—as it was in many ancient cultures—it cannot become the subject of analysis, investigation, and experimentation. And unless one has confidence that the world one seeks to analyze and investigate has an intelligible structure, one will never bother with the exercise. Now both of these convictions are corollaries of the more fundamental doctrine of creation. If the world has been created by God, then it is not divine, but it is indeed marked, in every nook and cranny, by the intelligence of the Creator who made it. We recall the opening lines of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…and all things were made through the Word.” The universal intelligibility of nature is a function of its being brought into existence by an intelligent Creator. The young Joseph Ratzinger stated the relationship as follows: the “objective mind” discoverable in finite reality is the consequence of the “subjective mind” that thought it into reality. Ratzinger furthermore observes how a peculiarity of our language discloses the same truth. When we come to know something, we speak of “recognizing” a truth, but the word “recognition” (re-cognition) implies that we have thought again what had already been thought by a more primordial intelligence. Long before Hawking used the phrase, Albert Einstein characterized his own science as a quest to know the mind of God, and in so doing, he was operating out of the very assumptions I’ve been articulating.

In light of these clarifications, let us look again at the central preoccupation of “A Theory of Everything,” namely, Hawking’s quest to find the one great unifying equation that would explain all of reality. It is always fascinating to go to roots of an argument, that is to say, to the fundamental assumptions that drive a rational quest, for in so doing, we necessarily leave the realm of the purely rational and enter something like the realm of the mystical. Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless? Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe’s structure? I would argue that the only finally reasonable ground for that assumption is the belief in an intelligent Creator, who has already thought into the world the very mathematics that the patient scientist discovers. In turning his back on what he calls “a celestial dictator,” Stephen Hawking was indeed purging his mind of an idol, a silly simulacrum of God, but in seeking, with rational discipline for the theory of everything, he was, in point of fact, affirming the true God.
 
 
(Image credit: Circle Cinema)

The Rum Diary is a rollicking farce based on Hunter S. Thompson's novel of the same name written in the early 1960s. It focuses on a young American journalist named Paul Kemp who ventures into sweaty, inebriated San Juan, Puerto Rico to write for an ill-fated newspaper, and stumbles into the middle of a major land acquisition deal.

Thompson said that his "long lost" novel (which wasn't published until 1998) had "a romantic notion," and that it was simply "a good story." I haven't read the book, but the same can be said about film adaptation with Johnny Depp. The sluggish car chases, drunken misadventures, drug-induced hallucinations, silky temptresses and bloody-eyed hangovers are more than enough to make you guffaw and forget your cares and worries - there is even an absurd diamond-encrusted turtle who makes a few guest appearances, and struck me as a perfectly insane image for this film. This is straight entertainment at its finest, no chaser.

But the diamond-crusted turtle also calls to mind a running theme of the film, a philosophical notion with its roots in 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal.

At more than a few turns in the road, when the rum has run dry and the harsh clarity of sobriety is beginning to rush in, Kemp transcends the organized chaos of San Juan and begins to understand his true calling as a journalist: "I put the bastards of this world on notice that I do not have their best interests at heart. I will try and speak for my reader."

His mission to take down "the bastards" of the world is definitely fueled in part by his encounters with Sanderson, a sandy-haired real estate mogul played with deft obnoxiousness by Aaron Eckhart. Sanderson is ambitious, wealthy, self-centered. He encrusts a turtle with jewels because he got the idea "from a book," while locals starve everywhere around him - and, despite Kemp's reservations, he is drawn into Sanderson's shady plan to fill a local island with a mega-resort. 

This narrative could be read in any number of ways - socially, economically, politically - but the most complete reading comes from a lobster. Or rather, Kemp on psychedelics looking at a lobster.

The trippy scene - which fans of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will instantly recognize - ends with a wobbly, wild-eyed Kemp staring down a lobster in a tank. Kemp feels like this lobster is watching him and Sanderson and the rest of crazy San Juan, and can almost hear its thoughts: "Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only living thing that behaves like it hasn't got one."

This is an incredibly insightful and important statement - and deserves some exploration.

What Kemp (and really, Thompson) is getting at is a central paradox in Sanderson, Kemp, and all of humanity: that we tend to sing about, aspire to, and worship the divine, but practice, fall into, and embody the monstrous. Pick up any newspaper and you'll see two facts: as a species, we crave moral perfection, but we tend to be morally hideous.

This craving for moral perfection gives us an almost angelic posture, one that sets us apart from other animals. No other creature in this world prattles on about justice, wisdom, beauty, mercy, and love. Our moral hideousness also sets us apart - but in the opposite direction. Exploitation, torture, hatred, deceit, and war are all cruelties the animal kingdom could never conjure. As Dostoevsky put it in The Brothers Karamazov: "People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it."

This notion of man as both a monstrous and magnificent creature, standing somewhere between angel and animal, takes its cue from philosopher Blaise Pascal. Although he contributed greatly to mathematics ("Pascal's triangle") and physics ("Pascal's law"), he also did significant writing on matters of philosophy and theology - notably in his collection Pensees. 

In Pensees, Pascal writes of the paradox of man as both "wretched" and "great" - or, evil and noble, low-down and high-minded.

We are wretched because we are "full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice." Unlike other animals, we fall from moral ideals - not to moral neutrality, but to moral baseness - and the net result is unhappiness. As philosopher Peter Kreeft notes in his lengthy commentary on Pensees: "Unhappiness is perhaps the most obvious and pervasive feature of experience. It was for Buddha...his very 'first noble truth' was that 'to live is to suffer; life is suffering [dukkha, out-of-joint-ness].' "

But as Pascal writes, "we are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness." Kreeft explains: "Truth (our head's food) and happiness (our heart's food) are the two things everyone wants, and not in crumbs but in great loaves; not in raindrops but in waves. Yet these are the two things no one gets except in little crumbs and droplets."

From our sink-hole of unhappiness, we cry out for and search for something - not a little relief here and there, but perfect truth and goodness. None of us have it, and we all want it. More often than not, this has manifested - a truth that is anthropological before being religious - in a cry for God.

Kemp in The Rum Diary seems to carry on Pascal's tradition - he notes that man is distinct in both his "greatness" and "wretchedness," in his godly talk and his ungodly actions. This is a powerful insight - one that all of the data and experience in the world supports. But what does it mean?

First, it might mean that, as Kreeft notes, "man is a living oxymoron: wretched greatness, great wretchedness, rational animal, mortal spirit, thinking reed." Or, in Pascal's words: "What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, the glory and refuse of the universe!"

It might mean that our temptations toward seeing man as fundamentally a divine spirit or "angelic" (certain Christian denominations, Eastern religions, and philosophies) or as fundamentally an animal like any other (materialism, behaviorism) miss the mark on what sort of creature man is. As Pascal writes, "man is neither angel nor beast," yet both.

And most importantly, it might mean that our doubleness, our paradoxical nature, suggests that humanity, like Humpty Dumpty, has suffered some kind of great fall, some catastrophe. We're broken, screwed up, deracinated, unstable - but we know or "remember" something higher to climb to, to long for, something perfect that's nowhere to be seen in the world, but that lingers in our collective memory.

The million dollar question: what theory of man can put us back together again?
 
 
Originally appeared at By Way of Beauty. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Sky Movies)