Let this Aletheiometer Pass From Me: Meditations on The Last Temptation of Christ and The Golden Compass
My freshman year at college was perhaps one of the most formative years of my life so far, if not the most formative. I had chosen to go to a Catholic college to study philosophy that wasn’t particularly close to home. The transcendence of learning of the great philosophers alongside Benedictine pre-theological candidates had great appeal to me and I immediately learned a great deal about myself and my faith—and their limitations. It was a time to grow, explore, question, test, fail, and discern my call. College can be a truly holy time; I had this privilege.I soaked up as much 19th and 20th century philosophy I could get my hands on. Something about existentialism spoke deeply to me: existentialism offered an incredible new way of reading the Bible and thinking about the human predicament in the world. I wish to share a short series of events that happened to me as a 19-year-old student that today stand as a significant moments for me in my ministerial development that occurred around the Easter of that freshman year. In winters such as this, I am particularly drawn to these memories.
I excitedly took Professor William Stubbs’ “20th Century European Literature” course. Stubbs, a beat poetry scholar, was a fantastic professor and was very good at explaining difficult philosophical concepts and their relevancies to literature; I had never been so excited about reading fictional books that weren’t comic books before. When we got to Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, some of the students just didn’t get it and were quite frightened by the length and sophistication of the text—most of the other readings for the course were fairly short. As soon as Prof. Stubbs mentioned that the book had been banned by the Catholic Church, a few students’ response was ‘you can’t require us to read this, this is a Catholic college.’ Prof. Stubbs brushed off the comments and went on to announce that we would watch the film while reading the book.
The students went to Prof. Stubbs’ superior and made him change his mind. Mr. Stubbs announced that since students had a problem reading classics of literature considered blasphemous by those who had not bothered to read the books, he would gladly offer an alternative assignment.
“First,” he said, “if you don’t want to, you don’t have to attend class for the next three sessions while we watch the film.” A sigh came over the room as a handful of students began to pack their bags.
Interrupting their departure, Prof. Stubbs explained. “Here’s your alternative assignment. Go down to see Brother Mark”—Br. Mark“-up” ran the college bookstore—because he ordered what you’ll read instead. It’s called War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.”
A few of us snickered, knowing just how long War and Peace is.
“And before you protest that,” Stubbs added, “because War and Peace was written in the nineteenth century, your writing assignment is to compare Tolstoy’s understanding of freedom with Jean-Paul Sartre. Eight to ten pages. See you next week.”
The students left, mostly having no idea what they were walking in to.
The Last Temptation of Christ was the most shocking reading experience I had until that point. I had recently worked through a bit of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Kazantzakis’ Nietzschean Christology made sense to me while reading. The film was pretty good too. Stubbs had us read some polemic material about the book and film, too, and we had some great conversations about exactly what had happened in our class, great ideas being challenged by those who hadn’t taken the time to read or even think about them.
Stubbs also presented both the book and film as genuine Christian attempts at making sense of Christianity in a modern world. For him, The Last Temptation was a pious work of literature that took two seemingly contradictory ideas—Christianity and existentialism—and re-created them as coincidentia oppositorum, coincidental opposites that are not necessarily exclusively of each other. I agreed, for the most part: the last thirty seconds of the film exhibits Christ’s crucifixion as at once a tremendous triumph of the will and a triumph for God. I still get chills watching it.
Then I went home for our Easter break. The college had a great Catholic tradition of a full week off for Holy Week; I looked forward to coming home and worshiping with my family at the United Methodist Church. Since I didn’t have a car, I would only occasionally get off campus to go to a Protestant church with a local friend.
My dad nudged me as we sat in the pew. He noticed that the sermon title was “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Interesting, I thought. Probably for the first time, I couldn’t wait for the sermon in church. The pastor talked about how he finally got around to renting the movie after hearing so much about it—this was in 1996, years after the movie had been released. The pastor described the end of the movie as “Jesus wandering off into the desert, alone and without a cross,” and then he went into a rote polemic against the film and about the truth of the Biblical account.
I was shocked. My Dad said to me on the way out of church, “that’s not what you said happened in the movie.” “I know,” I said, “because that’s not what happens in the movie.” On the way out I made an appointment to chat with the pastor about college.
As it happens, when I met with him a few days later, he admitted that he hadn’t seen the movie or even knew that it was a book before, and showed me some glossy teaching guide pages about The Last Temptation of Christ that someone had given him. Nonetheless, he had concluded, I was being forced to read dangerous books at school. “I thought that was a Christian school,” he said.
And now some similar things have happened with the recent film, “The Golden Compass.” The film is based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s fantastic fantasy series, His Dark Materials. The books can be described as a Nietzschean reversal of C. S. Lewis. They’re particularly critical of Catholicism and they present an interesting allegorical take on Milton’s Paradise Lost.
I noticed that a year before “The Golden Compass” was to be released, evangelicals were already gearing up for a media blitz, but were holding back as to not give the film too much credibility. At the 2006 American Academy of Religion meeting’s book exhibits, several publishers advertised having religious responses to Pullman’s fantasy series, but the details were sparse. Predictably, The Catholic League launched a media campaign shortly thereafter; and, having gained little attention among their own, changed their complaint from ‘the movie is anti-Catholic’ to ‘the movie is anti-Christian.’
Then the media picked up on the word that The Golden Compass was an anti-Christian Christmas movie. The Catholic League issued a book “unmasking” the book as anti-Christian and placed a webcast urging everyone to get the word out that if kids see the movie, they might read the book and become atheists. The Onion parodied some of the hysteria with the following reasons why Catholics were protesting the film:
+ Compasses inherently promote travel and broadened horizons
+ The most sympathetic character is not killed in a prolonged and bloody torture sequence
+ Breaks unbroken rule that talking CGI animals must be allegorical to Catholicism
+ Would have enjoyed some broader anti-Semitic themes
While it is true that the author of The Golden Compass wrote the book as a work of atheist literature, and there are certainly anti-Catholic themes throughout the first book, it is far more sophisticated than a trick to “sell atheism to kids.”
We as a Christian community should know better. One of the things that strikes me about Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation is the fact that Jesus doubts himself until he finally chooses the cross. This points to a fundamental truth that doubt is a prerequisite to faith. Paul Tillich wrote that faith without doubt has no risk; to believe in the unbelievable is a courageous faith.
The atheism that is pervasive in our situation, whether it is from books like The God Delusion or The Golden Compass, offers those of us with faith the opportunity to learn and grow. The church described in both the film and book of The Golden Compass is a hierarchal, secretive, repressive social apparatus which exists to hide the truth of the world. You, reader, and I both know religions that are like this. Their power and reality is generated by the fear of the unknown—the unknown of the present and the future. Many exist as little more than “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and might be characterized even as manipulative of its followers. Again, you know what I am talking about: these are religions steeped in the gospel of numbers, popularity, and money, rather than the ultimate. They’ll use the ultimate to give good face.
The Golden Compass is squarely rooted in the modern religious literature of Milton and Blake that the modern prophet and heretic Thomas Altizer has interpreted to be scriptural accounts of an authentic, contemporary Christian faith. In Blake’s “The Everlasting Gospel,” the Christ of the church is unmasked as Satan, and what was regarded as Satan is Christ. Christianity is the radical reversal of everything that is Christian. It is out of a sense of ecumenism that many of us have held our breath. No more. Gods that can be killed should be.
I experience the resistance against sacramental theology indicative of an inherent of a lack of risk. Baptism requires us to acknowledge the danger of life and to grasp onto a risky faith where the only faith worth having is the faith of promises kept and that our stories our found in the stories of God’s people. The Eucharist forces us away from the pretentiousness of me-centered worship to a Christ-centered worship where we graft ourselves onto the spirit of the savior. They are messy ideas for a messy world. Avoiding them constructs the reality that we can make sense of the world.
The Onion’s flippant (and funny) reason given why religious groups protested The Golden Compass, that “compasses promote travel and broadened horizons,” is an apt observation. The Golden Cup is our Golden Compass, it points us to doubt, suffering, death, intimacy, life, birth, union, danger—and all in-between. It leads us to discernment, just as Lyra in The Golden Compass must learn to read the compass (called the “Aletheiometer,” or truth-meter), and sometimes to the apocalyptic exposure of false Christs. Through our humble sacrament we navigate the certainty and the doubt, the evil and the good, and interpret our realities. And sometimes our faith leads us to more of a shock, rather than a surprise.
Christopher Rodkey, OSL, is completing his Ph.D. in philosophical theology at Drew University and is teaching at Lebanon Valley College.