An attempt to map some of the features of the cultural landscape while challenging the current orthodoxy that culture and faith inevitably exist in opposition. The Invisible Province seeks to show that modern culture cannot sever itself from questions of transcendence and faith and nor can faith distance itself from culture. In surveying the fault lines between culture and faith, The Invisible Province reimagines this relationship and suggests avenues for mature dialogue.
I have a film review of the new exorcism horror film, The Rite, in this week's edition of The Tablet. Below is a taster of the review. For the full review go to The Tablet.
The Rite is a horror film that wants to be taken seriously. Opening with a quotation from Pope John Paul II signals this ambition: “The battle against the Devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the Devil is still alive and active in the world.”
Inspired by Matt Baglio’s non-fiction book The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, the screenwriter, Michael Petroni, claims to anchor his fictional narrative in these documented accounts of demonic possession. Petroni treats the existence of the supernatural realm without any hint of irony. From the outset, The Rite promises real theological intelligence and to be more than a sub genre remake of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, The Exorcist.
The film’s opening sequence introduces Michael Novak (Colin O’Donoghue), a mortician’s son, who decides to enter seminary instead of becoming a partner in the family firm. As a deacon, Michael comes to believe that his vocation was an escape from his morose father and the fact that he could not afford a college education. He also begins to doubt his own faith and decides to leave. However, the seminary Rector witnesses Michael ministering to a woman fatally wounded in a car accident and impressed by this, persuades him to join a course in Rome that is training a crack team of exorcists.
Here Michael is introduced to a curmudgeonly Welsh Jesuit, Father Lucas Trevant played by Anthony Hopkins. This veteran exorcist may use unconventional methods but his record of success is almost unblemished and his fame has spread across the city. Lucas invites the sceptical deacon to attend the exorcism of a young pregnant woman. As she tears at her scalp and her eyes roll back, Lucas’s mobile phone rings. “I can’t talk now. I’m in the middle of something,” the Jesuit whispers. And when the session comes to an anticlimactic conclusion, Lucas asks Michael, “What did you expect? Spinning heads? Pea soup?” At this point, Michael’s conviction that these phenomena have a psychological explanation remains intact. “Choosing not to believe in the Devil won’t protect you from him,” Lucas warns his novice.
Neither O’Donoghue or Hopkins are able to find convincing priestly identities for their characters. There is never any sense that these priests have an interior spiritual life. The doubts they articulate feel like manufactured add-ons with none of the ambivalence associated with true spiritual struggle. No number of prayers mumbled in Latin can convince us that these men are anything more than clerical caricatures.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 Booker prize nominated novel, Never Let Me Go, has just been made into a film. The book is a subtle meditation on what it means to be a person. The film adaptation, while not able to match the philosophical nuances of the book, approaches the complex subject matter with visual and narrative restraint. The book is a classic. The film is worth catching.
Never Let Me Go is the story of a love-triangle between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth (played in the film by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Kiera Knightley) which goes back to their school days at Hailsham. On the surface, the students of Hailsham are well groomed, well behaved and appear to have a charmed public school life. Yet, there are tell-tale signs that this institution has more disturbing intentions. There is a neurotic emphasis on the health of the children. Smoking behind the bike sheds is a mortal sin. There are apocryphal tales of the violent things that have happened to students who escaped beyond the school boundaries. The natural, unaffected joy that children bring to a school is absent here and replaced with an atmosphere of impending despair. Play is manufactured. Creativity is a social experiment. Hailsham is an educational limbo.
It transpires that the children at Hailsham are clones and are waiting to be used as adult organ donors. This is their sole purpose in life. The functional purpose that society has decided for them. They have been created to act as nothing more than biological spare part machines. Yet, of course, these clones are not robots, they have souls and they can love. These are the distinguishing features of a person. We are present to ourselves in self-conscious autonomy, yet we only possess ourselves fully when we give ourselves to the dynamism of love. This is not a passing pleasure or emotion, but the very meaning of our being alive, an awakening of our sense of being. All love is self-surrender and self-fulfillment.
Kathy, Tommy and Ruth have heard a rumour that love can defer their fate. Couples who can prove they are in love will be given some extra years before they must start donating their organs. But the threesome also realise themselves as persons when they fall in and out of love with each other. This is the primal and first of all impulses in the heart of being. Love is the intuitive sense that we are not to be instrumentalised but that each person has an obscure, living depth that must not be manipulated or destroyed.
Never Let Me Go never succumbs to sci-fi sensationalism. Both the novel and film are beautifully understated and this adds to the moral chill factor and sense of tragedy. It is the passive acceptance of cloning – both by those cloned and those involved in the process – and the lack of ethical debate that gives Never Let Me Go an authentic tone. The medical police state is unquestioningly accepted(except by one brave teacher who is quickly removed from Hailsham and branded a “subversive”). There is a passive resignation that this is how it is meant to be and that the proposed medical benefits outweigh the invasive manipulation and destruction of human life.
All this feels real and possible because we recognise (consciously or unconsciously) that the abuse of the person is happening in our own time. In 2000, Pope John Paul II addressed the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society where he highlighted the dangers of creating human life as though it were a medical product:
...methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipluation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when the proposed end is good in itself.
Since that warning, the destruction of persons who are intrinsically valuable in themselves has become a routine part of contemporary culture. This has happened without us barely noticing. Not science fiction but reality. Now that is really frightening.
My previous blog was about friendship and it seems that I’m not the only one thinking about this at present. In a recent article (The Times February 7), Cosmo Landesman reflects on the fragility of friendship. Is this due to our friendships becoming more and more “virtual” due to social networking sites and less “real”? Is it the pressures and pace of contemporary living that make giving time to friends increasingly difficult? Landesman writes:
The sad truth is that my friends and I are seeing less of each other than ever before. I wonder: do my friends notice this change? Do they care? Do I?
Much has been written about the shallow and ephemeral nature of online friendships found through social network sites such as Facebook. But back in the real, offline world friendships – at least mine – are changing for the worse. Once, there was a clear division between on and offline friendships. Not now.
The great paradox of our time is that today we’ve never had so much technology – the Internet, e-mails, tweets, texts – to bring us closer to our friends. And yet we have been so distant from them. We can all stay in touch all the time – but we never seem to have the time to actually see each other.
...I believe that friendship has an etiquette of its own, and it has cost me dearly. I once had a beautiful, super-smart, sexy girlfriend – but she would never return my phone calls. It drove me nuts and so I had to end our relationship.
Friends like to tell you: I’ll be there for you. But I don’t want them to be there for me, I want them to return my phone calls and respond to invites to dinner! In other words, I want to feel that our friendship is important, and that it is shown in small acts of thoughtfulness.
I sometimes wonder, if I didn’t make the effort to see certain friends, would they make the effort to see me? So I called one of my oldest and dearest friends to ask him that question for this piece. He hasn’t returned my call – that was two days ago – so I don’t know the answer.
Friends! Who needs them?
Unfortunately, I do.
Is all this just the whimpering cry of some middle-aged neurotic? Or, the rose tinted longing for some golden age of friendship that may or may not have existed? Is friendship possible in our crooked times?
Landesman’s anxieties have been shared by everyone who takes friendship seriously. Friendships are fragile and complex ways of relating. This is, in part, because the desire “to become one instead of two” in friendship is not the same as the unity that lovers seek. Whereas lovers strive to obliterate the distance that separates them by fusing themselves one to another, friendship cherishes the distance that exists between two individuals. What unifies friends is the discipline and effort of maintaining their mutual distance in love. If that distance is threatened by desire, domination or possessiveness then the friendship will begin to corrode and disintegrate.
“The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, “ writes the French thinker, Simone Weill, “attacks the purity of friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. But at the same time pure friendship is rare.”
Friendship delights in the fact that there are two distinct persons involved in a loving relationship. The two friends consent to remain two and to celebrate not only the things they share in common, but above all their differences. Friendships are possibly the only relationships where individuals do not have to disguise or compromise their differences. They have the rare liberty of being themselves. It is the difference and space that exists between them that gives them the freedom to hide nothing and fear nothing. Friendship is, in the words of St Augustine, "sweet beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced." That is why they are important, precious and very rare.
I have just had an article published in The Irish Post on Friendship. It is a reworked version of an earlier blog post inspired by the film, The King’s Speech, but now with a Christian emphasis and consideration of how the dominance of erotic love has “done dirt on friendship”. I have even included a Toy Story video as an act of reparation! I think it is an improved piece of work.
With five star reviews and predictions of Oscars, The King’s Speech is the film of the moment. Interestingly, it has been described by some critics as the first “bromance” of 2011. “Bromance” is street patois for the friendship between two men. In cultural terms this is a recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. These friendships give men the permission to reveal or articulate things about themselves in a way that is different to how they would do so with their wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. Yet, the central relationship between Bertie, the future King George VI and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations. Their friendship was a not trivial affair and part of the film’s success, is that it is treated in a sincere and profound manner.
Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other healing and life-affirming qualities. Through their friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship
is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.
So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within the noblest friendships incubates the germ of goodness. “It is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends,” wrote Aristotle, “because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.”
Christian thinkers took such ideas and married them to the fact that human beings are created in the image of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A God of relationships of love. They believed it was possible to glimpse (albeit through a glass darkly) in the highest forms of human experience something of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.
It was in the twelfth century Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire that Abbot Aelred synthesised these ideas and wrote On Spiritual Friendship. Aelred saw in friendship the possibility of human beings concretising their faith. The Christian life could not just be an abstract assent to the love of God but rather love of others, for example, through friendship, made real in some manner God’s love for us.
For Aelred, friendship is a vehicle by which we can approach the Divine and, at the same time, a conduit through which Divine love can pass. Friendship, according to Aelred, should never be a convenient alliance of interests. For him there was a clear separation between superficial, fair-weather friends and a profoundly spiritual friendship. He writes: “Is it not a foretaste of blessedness thus to love and thus to be loved; thus to help and be helped; and in this way from the sweetness of fraternal charity to wing one’s flight aloft to that more sublime splendour of divine love..?”
In recent times, the idea of friendship has been vandalised by the ubiquitous belief that all relationships are, at base, erotic and sexual. This insidious notion has done dirt on friendship and, sadly, deep friendships between people of the same sex are often viewed with suspicion. The King’s Speech refutes this modern idea and unashamedly places friendship centre stage. Friendship, it suggests, give people the space to breathe, to be themselves, to not be narrowly defined in a sexual way. Good, healthy friendships provide us with intimacy as well as the security and freedom of distance. They are to be celebrated.
Aristotle believed that without friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”
The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their respective voices and did learn to speak that essential language very well.
Dean: I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married we marry, like, one girl, 'cause we're resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think I'd be an idiot if I didn't marry this girl she's so great. But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option... 'Oh he's got a good job.' I mean they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is gonna stick around.
From the outset we sense some bleeding toxicity in Dean and Cindy’s marriage and yet, we cannot locate where the bleed is coming from. They communicate in staccato, accusatory outbursts or silences, thick with loathing and blame. While they live in close proximity to each other, they are emotionally strangers. Husband and wife relate to each other as tenants who cannot remember what brought them together in the first place. They look like two people worn down and defeated by their increasingly futile attempts to keep the fragility of love from shattering in their hands.
Yet, the director, Derek Cianfrance, intercuts historical flashbacks to remind the audience of the times in Dean and Cindy’s relationship when love seemed possible. Dean wooing Cindy by singing you always hurt the one you love in a “goofy voice” as she tap dances in front of a wedding outfitters. The choice of a doo-wop, soul classic that becomes “their song”, the musical glue of their affections. The hushed intimacies, the physical tenderness, the belief that in each other they have found something protecting and ennobling. These glimpses into Dean and Cindy’s past are not just romantic excursions but evidence that, in the words of the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, “love means to learn to look at yourself/The way one looks at distant things/For you are only one thing among many./And whoever sees that way heals his heart...”
Ryan Gosling’s Dean is all bloke-ish charm but with a sense of the real responsibilities that come with trying to be a husband that loves. He is not the stereotypical man who abandons the girl when things get tough. He is not the commitment phobe but is determined to stand by his woman. It is Dean who tries to claw back the relationship from the precipice of destruction and is not frightened to say “I love you” repeatedly in order to do so. Gosling’s blistering performance has a physical rawness that manages to combine coiled-up ferocity and masculine tenderness.
Michelle Williams played one of the wives in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. In that film, the slow realisation that her husband was living a double life and the grief that came with this knowledge was handled with a pitch-perfect sensitivity and honesty. I doubted that I would see another performance of this quality from Michelle Williams. I was wrong. In Blue Valentine, she manages to convey the sunny passion of love and the desperate hurt when that superficial love begins to burn away leaving the cinders of a failed marriage. Her every look is an autopsy on a dying relationship.
In narrative terms, Cianfrance’s film looks slight but its ability to consider the death of love from within the lives of the characters themselves is powerful and convincing. Who or what is to blame for the failure of this marriage remains a mystery and it this mystery that makes Blue Valentine so believable. This remarkable film lays bare the secret movements of love and shows how falling out of love can, for many of us, be as heart-achingly bewildering as falling in love.
Some critics have described The King’s Speech as the first “bromance” of 2011. They are right and they are wrong in equal measures. The hybrid term “bromance” indicates the friendship between two men. In cultural terms it is a street recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. This is the secure environment where a man can reveal or articulate things about himself in a way that is different to the way he would do so to his wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. The central relationship in The King’s Speech between Bertie, the future King George VI, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations and thus makes for a more profound and moving depiction of their friendship.
Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other something that has a healing quality and is life-affirming. In this friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.
Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship
is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.
So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within it incubates the germ of goodness. The highest form of friendship will involve the reciprocal recognition of goodness, its nurture and unhindered growth.
Aristotle hewed three broad categories of friendship. The first two he considered inferior to the third; nonetheless all had some claim to be properly described as “friendship”. The categories were:
(i) Friendship based on utility. This would include the friends we intermittently call upon to fill vacant evenings and help keep at bay the bruised clouds of loneliness – friends who will amuse us, flatter us and distract us from ourselves.
(ii) Friendship based on pleasure. This type of friendship often comes as a powerful twister of looks, feelings and passion which eventually blows itself out, leaving varying degrees of emotional destruction. Once the feelings have been stripped bare and the passion exhausted, so this friendship lacking real foundations, subsides and eventually collapses.
(iii) Friendship based on goodness. These friendships are stable, possess athletic stamina and can weather the fickleness of human emotions and motives because they are based on goodness. Aristotle writes that
Only the friendship of those who are good, and similar in their goodness, is perfect. For these people each alike wish good for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.
Aristotle suggests that without this pure form of friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”
The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their voices and learnt to speak the language of friendship well.
Followers of The Invisible Province will know that I greatly admire The Times newspaper’s chief sports journalist, Simon Barnes. The oceanic breadth of his sporting knowledge is married to incisive, intelligent analysis and expressed with prose of crystalline clarity. Today, Simon Barnes, considers the sacrifice of the Liverpool manager, Roy Hodgson, and the resurrection of Kenny Dalglish (although a weekend loss to Manchester United makes this resurrection look precarious). There are not many sports writers who can reference The Golden Bough (a text that is more often associated with T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land) with such ease and lack of pretentiousness. Simon Barnes can:
Football is always making comparisons between itself and religion, with messiahs coming to save football clubs – I have just read that Kenny Dalglish is regarded as a “saint” on Merseyside – and every ground, especially Anfield, is a cathedral. But football is not to be compared with the organised religions of the present day.
No. Football goes straight to the atavistic roots of religion. To understand the cult of the football manager, don’t linger by the sports shelves, go across to anthropology and read The Golden Bough, the great work by Sir James George Frazer.
Frazer told us all about the temporary king, the person who has total command, along with everything – and everyone – he could possibly want. But his real function is not to rule. His function is to die. When the crops fail, the king must be killed and a new king found. Only that way can a new start be made, only that way will the future glitter and flow with promise, only that way will the followers have their faith reignited.
This ancient cycle of despair and hope is repeated in football clubs across the country and the world: appointment, success, decline, failure and then the immolation of the leader. So bring in the new leader and everything will be all right, the cycle can continue. It is an absurd way to run a football club...but running a football club is not the real purpose of this ritual.
The real purpose is to satisfy our souls, to reconcile us to life’s unfairness, an unfairness brutally exaggerated in the distorting mirror of football. Long live the new king. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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