Next Year in Jerusalem Saturday, May 07, 2005

Two reviews of Kingdom of Heaven, similar points. First, James Bowman (link at right):

Sir Ridley Scott’s Crusades movie, Kingdom of Heaven, though visually impressive as we might expect, is shockingly unhistorical. ... But because most of the anachronisms he deals in are moral rather than material they will probably pass unnoticed. ...

The most hilariously idiotic of the film’s many historically stupid moments comes at the climax of the battle for Jerusalem in 1187 when Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), the commander of the city’s Christian defenders, has a parley with the leader of its Muslim besiegers, Saladin, here invariably given his more authentic moniker, Salah al-Din (Ghassan Massoud). Nice that they insist on accuracy in something. Balian tells his adversary that he will surrender the city if the Muslim army will give its Christian inhabitants a safe-conduct to the sea, where they may take ship to return to Europe. The terrible alternative, Balian tells him, is that he will give the order for all the religious sites in the city to be destroyed: "Your holy places, ours — everything that drives men mad." It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of Hollywood’s view of religion — or of a thought that would have been more unthinkable to the person supposedly uttering it.

Such words would have been sheer gibberish — evidence of madness themselves — in an age in which "religion" was inseparable from the culture. Another character says "I put no stock in religion" and generally speaking we are to understand that neither does anyone else who is in the least sympathetic here. The only true religious believers, at least on the Christian side, are thugs and murderers. But at the time of the Crusades "religion" wasn’t the optional Sunday-morning pastime it has since become. It was a matter of identity. For someone to say "I put no stock in religion" would have been as nonsensical as saying "I put no stock in being my father’s son." People’s religion wasn’t just what they believed, it was what they were. In other words, like so many movie-makers before them, Scott and Monahan have looked into the past and seen nothing but their own silly faces looking back at them.


And then John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard (link at right):

Kingdom of Heaven attributes to its heroic Christian and Muslim characters a cosmopolitan skepticism about faith, and a healthy tolerance for other cultures, that would have been literally unthinkable in the 12th century--an era in which there was absolutely no frame of intellectual, historical, hermeneutical, or philosophical reference for cultural relativism or agnosticism. God was an almost literal presence in the lives of the real people we see fictionalized on screen here. But rather than acting as though their duty in life is to do God's work, or to subjugate themselves to God's will, the good folk of Kingdom of Heaven tell each other that all they need do is keep an open mind and follow their hearts.

Our hero, young Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), is taught this lesson twice in the course of the movie, once by his Crusader father, and
once by Baldwin IV, the saintly leper who is the ruler of Jerusalem. There was an actual Balian of Ibelin. He was a remarkable man who was forced by the dictates of his chivalric code to lead the defense of Jerusalem against the conquering army of the great Arab general Saladin in the late 12th century, even though he had personally guaranteed Saladin he would not do so. Rather than tell Balian's stunning story--which included writing a chivalrous letter to Saladin begging the Muslim's forgiveness, an apology that Saladin accepted from a fellow man of honor--Scott and Monahan have thrown out most of the real details of his life in favor of a misbegotten plotline that turns Balian into a lowly French village blacksmith.


I hadn't planned to see this one anyway; these reviews seal the deal. The Crusades are a topic I come back to, morbidly, every few years. Nobody comes out looking out good, except for Sts. Francis and Louis, and Marco Polo. The best face you can put on things, from a Catholic or European perspective, is that the wars were a comprehensible response to a long series of provocations. But the conduct of them--not just the atrocities on both sides but the broken treaties, back-stabbing and missed opportunities--makes me want to crawl under a rock. If I were in the Eastern Church, I wouldn't forgive the sack of Constantinople either.

Enough of that. A nice day; I made Mrs. WTJ a pre-Mother's Day banana cream pie (a mock one, anyway, with Cool Whip and Fluff) and we took the morning off: a long laze, then some Loony Tunes on DVD ("I Wanna Singa!"). In the afternoon, we headed over to the next-to-last Homely Louse in Jersey City for some low-key gaming and general raucousness. Good to see everyone; still trying to find a vibe for gaming with babies in tow; still trying to find a vibe for friendship, actually. With Wrong Turn Jr., our little world is getting larger every day--but the world outside is getting smaller.

To put that another way, Mrs. WTJ and I are growing to fill our responsibilities, and Wrong Turn Jr. is, well, just plain growing. That means a lot of external constants are getting crowded out of our lives: regular visits with friends, movies, even just reading books. Spending an afternoon with old pals, I almost feel like I'm gorging on the good feelings in the room, and I come away reeling. I haven't found a way to adapt (or at least juggle). Working on it.

Oh, one more thing: The quotes above remind me of one of the songs at our wedding, a Jacques Brel number translated (I think) by the late great Mort Shuman:

If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn

If we only have love
To embrace without fears
We will kiss with our eyes
We will sleep without tears

If we only have love
With our arms open wide
Then the young and the old
Will stand at our side

If we only have love
Love that's falling like rain
Then the parched desert earth
Will grow green again

If we only have love
For the hymn that we shout
For the song that we sing
Then we'll have a way out

If we only have love
We can reach those in pain
We can heal all our wounds
We can use our own names

If we only have love
We can melt all the guns
And then give the new world
To our daughters and sons

If we only have love
Then Jerusalem stands
And then death has no shadow
There are no foreign lands

If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns

If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again

Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.

(To sidetrack for a moment: One of the few clangy notes in Shuman's translations is "The hymn that we shout"--wrong verb by a wide margin. But that's nitpicking.)

A friend of mine, who has no blog to link to, lent me the soundtrack to the movie of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris many years ago, and I played it till the tape wore through. This tune is somewhere between Marlene Dietrich and Hair: an art song for hippies. On record, it's just fabulous: Elly Stone (I think) keeps raising the bar with every verse, until she just blows the roof of with the last line: She honest to God reaches the stars.

Anyway, the line about Jerusalem always chokes me up: five thousand years of blood and dust in my throat. What a gorgeous image, especially with the Grail hot on its heels. Brel was about as religious as Hercule Poirot, but he was an immensely wise and evocative lyricist. He knew that, at the end of the day, everyone's heart, and everyone's hopes, are buried in that old desert fortress.

Thinking about it closely, of course, the message doesn't work: "If we only have love" is an excellent starting point. I can almost believe that he's prepared to share his big Belgian heart with everyone in the world. But he doesn't save anything for the Man Upstairs. And you can't leave out that part of the equation.

Actually (to turn this into a tremendously long p.s.), an atheist friend commented recently, after reading some Chesterton, that he didn't buy the argument that you need God to have morals. He argued that Chesterton (and religious commentators who followed him) have looked at Darwinists and other extreme types and tarred all atheists with that brush.

I know my correspondent is a decent guy, and most people I know have the same spiritual trajectory: atheist or seriously agnostic, but willing to give you the shirt off their back. So who am I to say something is lacking in their moral vision without God? Would I, Mr. Nicea himself, give everyone I know the shirt off my back?

To sum up nicely, a favorite quote from Dr. Percy:

Ellen, though a strict churchgoer and a moral girl, does not believe in God. Rather does she believe in the Golden Rule and in doing right. On the whole she is embarrassed by the whole God business. But she does right. She doesn't need God. What does God have to do with being honest, hard-working, chaste, upright, unselfish, etcetera. I on the other hand believe in God, the Jews, Christ, the whole business. Yet I don't do right. I am a Renaissance pope, an immoral believer. Between the two of us we might have saved Christianity. Instead we lost it.


At any rate, here's my best attempt at squaring the circle. I would argue that to the extent that any of us do right, it is because we are hearing the distant echoes of God's voice--whatever tradition we come from. We may not recognize it as such, we may think we're just following good Ethical Culture mandates or common sense or what have you. But our best instincts are the whispers of God.

It's late, and I'm fading. Any of my religious correspondents--and you know who you are--have a better handle on this than I do?

Pax as ever.

@ 10:12:00 PM,

5 Comments:

At 11:06 PM, Anonymous Tim said...

Not sure I can add anything to it, except that religion can act as a brace against major life temptations. When God is not watching, and one can be absolutely sure to get away with some vile secret act that could garner great gain, why would you not give in to the temptation but for the presence of God?

 
At 11:31 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

Because the vile temptation is wrong a priori. If a person doesn't know that the various vile acts we're all imagining are wrong, doesn't know it in their bones, without having to imagine God looking over their shoulder, then they have lost their humanity.

Morally, my atheism is indistinguishable in many respects from theism. I believe there is a right and a wrong. I believe we exist to be good to each other and we are wasting our lives when we are not. But I don't believe these things are true because God made them so. I believe they are true because they are obviously true -- as obvious as gravity (though far easier to violate -- for now. When space tourism is common in the near future, gravity won't seem so inviolable). We are horrified by evil and cruelty, gratified by kindness and benevolence. Those of us who are not are sociopaths. I believe all this passionately, and I do so without God manifest in my life.

I could be like Ellen in the story and pretend that I believe in God, go to church, etc. because, increasingly, only the religious and academic philosophers bother to talk about morality and ethics, but I just don't believe in God. My understanding of religion is that God is present in your daily life in some way -- it just ain't so for me.

Now, when I say this to some, they conclude I'm an agnostic or a closet Jew -- for how can you have moral absolutes without God -- but I'm not, I swear, and I refuse to cede the territory of morality to religion.

 
At 8:31 AM, Anonymous Tim said...

The flip side to "lonely" acts (those done in the service of God rather than vile acts against Him) is equally telling. Even if an atheist is by definition moral on his own terms or a philosophical school roughly akin to theism or perhaps by the terms of a shifting and fickle society, it is simply not good enough. We are called by God not just to merely lead moral lives, but lives of beauty.

There are philosophical arguments to employ, but I'm late for work and not an apologetics expert, so instead, I'll give you an example. This past weekend, I watched an amazing PBS documentary on Chiune Sugihara, a World War II Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who was preparing to close up the Japanese consulate as Operation Barbarosa was being prepared (see http://www.sushiandtofu.com/sushi_and_tofu/features_visaForLife_0305.htm for more information). This guy had a wife, kids, and an elite position in the Japanese Diplomatic Corps. Despite orders from his own government and personal safety concerns, Sugihara issued over 2,000 visas to Jews fleeing Nazis prior to Lithuania being overrun.
When he was later asked why he did it, he said that it was a choice of disobeying his government or disobeying God.

Why would Sugihara do this but for God? Jews and Jewish culture were alien to him, he put his wife and children in greater danger through his actions, and he effectively ended his own career and doomed himself to a life of menial and hard jobs away from his family. No one would have been the wiser if he had packed up and left Lithuania immediately. Few, if any, would have considered him to be a sociopath. And yet he stayed, to no tangible future life benefit for either himself or his family.

Now, Sugihara is an extreme example, but with an eye towards pleasing God, Sugihara was inspired to a life of beauty that would otherwise make little sense. I know the counter: 9/11, Mohammad Atta, the Crusades (a bad rap for Christians, in my opinion), yada yada yada. While all true to an extent, these actions could easily have been done for belief in a political system rather than a love for God. Their actions - in part or in full - were also performed out of hatred or nihilism. Sugihara performed his act out of love for God, period. Likewise, many people in less dramatic ways lead lives of beauty but for a promise to be with God after death.

The flip side - the light side - is actually the stronger side to my argument. God can inspire great sacrifice out of love for Him, and I would challenge those who disagree to find me true atheists who would act similarly. To the extent that they do, I would submit, is the extent to which God speaks to them and they're just not willing to admit to it.

 
At 11:36 AM, Blogger BeK said...

A true atheist who acted similarly? How about an obvious choice: Oskar Schindler?

 
At 3:47 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

We could flip through Google to find the Schindlers and the atheist abolitionists and the atheist, socialist Ghetto fighters in Warsaw and list them all here. But that's a waste of time. Let's address the core point: If there are atheists who have done beautiful things that elevate humanity, they did it because God inspired them to because only God could inspire a person to see past self-interest.

For sake of argument, I'll grant you that. The Holy Spirit is the only explanation for such acts from a religious framework. Sadly, I can no more explain to you the utter absence of God in my life (or any atheist's) than you can explain the feeling of God's presence to me.

But the problem with this point of view is that it obviates the existence of atheism and, in so doing, obviates the need for faith in God. If any good thing we do, we do because of God (whether we know it or not), and any bad thing we do, we do because we are fallen (whether we believe God told us to or not), then really atheism is meaningless -- God's there anyway. So when I tell you God is not in my life, I'm uttering a sentence that has no meaning for you. (Side note: By flipping this around, you can understand atheism. Telling me God is inspiring me to a beautiful life is equally meaningless for me -- I have literally no way of understanding God other than as an intellectual construct, "that happy warm feeling I get when I do good -- that's God!" I certainly hope there's more to faith in God than the warm fuzzies.)

The problem I have with that is a religious one. I thought God, according to what I've read about Him, gave me free will to make a choice about whether I'll embrace Him or not. Not only have I never really had that opportunity (I'm not an apostate -- I've never really been religious, never "felt" God in my life, never understood what God even really means, so I'm not rejecting God; He's just not there), but even if I were rejecting God out of an ill-fated choice, if I turned around and did something beautiful, by your reasoning, it would be because God was with me the whole time, whether I wanted Him there or not. Where's my choice?

At the very least, your argument topples religious institutions. The Indians who allowed themselves and their families to be tortured and killed by the Spanish rather than leading the Conquistadors to their peoples' cities where the Spanish could rape and kill more people -- they were inspired by God to commit those beautiful acts. But they were not Christian and didn't even believe in one God as we now understand God. If they were just as "right" with God, able to lead beautiful lives -- more so -- as the baptized Catholics who were raping and killing them, then the idea of The Church being God's way of reaching us seems pretty empty to me.

Anyhoo... The reason all this started, and why it's important to me, is because I was questioning Mssrs. Chesterton and Toth's assertion that there is no moral system without God. If we really embrace that, and all the ramifactions of that, then we're in big trouble as a civil society. We must be able to agree on Moral and Ethical codes by which we should (we MUST!) live without having to accept each others' religious framework. If the religious tell the irreligious there is no Morality without God, then we can't even start the conversation. We're doomed to calling each other immoral, or, really doomed to having the religious telling the non-religious that their morals are unfounded and hollow. No wonder the irreligious flock to the execrable beliefs of moral relativism. Of course, the whole country, religious or not, has gone morally relative (torture is okay sometimes; murder is okay sometimes; it's okay to start wars if you think you have a good reason, even if you aren't sure), but that's another argument.

You and I can agree that if I were to get up from my desk and cut off my co-worker's hand, that would be evil. You and I can agree that if I were to quit my job and go feed orphans in Brazil, that would be good. To agree with you on this, I don't need you to be an atheist. You don't need me to be religious, either.

 

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