Mel Gibson has laid a
cuckoo's egg in the nest of American Christianity. What
he has hatched in US cinemas is a quasi-pagan throwback
to the sepulchral old-world cult that the United States
was set up to oppose. The US is a by-product of the
Protestant Reformation's purge of pagan elements in
Christianity, and the enthusiasm for The Passion of
the Christ among Protestant evangelicals suggests
that they have forgotten more than they have learned.
Rubbing the filmgoer's nose into Jesus' gore,
Gibson's defenders contend, follows established
traditions of Christian art. In the March 6 London
Spectator, Bruce Anderson compares The Passion of the
Christ to Matthias Gruenewald's 1515 altarpiece at
Isenheim. The conservative Christian magazine First
Things cites "Niccolo dell'Arca's Lamentation of the
Dead Christ with its terra-cotta figures circling in
wild grief over the dead Christ ... Mel Gibson adds a
work of cinematic art worthy to be mentioned with
classics of Christian culture." Gibson's Passion
is less narrative than pictorial. The high sacred art of
the West could be just as lurid, and that is the
problem. The road to America was paved with the ashes of
religious art, and it could not have been otherwise.
Why does the US remain a Christian nation while
Europe has abandoned the faith, along with its will to
live? It is not only because Americans are different,
but also because American Christianity is different. It
derives from rejectionist English Protestantism, whose
two defining acts were to translate the Bible and to
destroy sacred images. England's reformation began with
John Wycliffe's 1382 Bible translation. His followers
baked their bread on fires fed by portraits of saints.
The 16th-century Protestant mobs that ripped sacred
images down from church walls in the Bildersturm did
more to bring about the American Revolution than the
bullyboys who dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1775.
It is a commonplace that Bible translation was a
cornerstone of modern democracy, which sprang from the
premise that every man must read and interpret Scripture
for himself (Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the
world, October 28, 2003). But iconoclasm, the
destruction of sacred images, was no less essential.
Wycliffe and his spiritual heirs, the
Separatists who landed at Plymouth in 1620, set out to
create a New Israel. Before the new Israel could arise,
the ecclesia called out from amongst all nations,
Christians first had to tear down the images of a Savior
made in the image of a particular ethnicity.
Every religion addresses death-anxiety in its
own way. Christians share the suffering of their
incarnate God, Jesus of Nazareth, and vicariously die
and then are reborn with him. So did the devotees of
Dionysus, Tammuz, Osiris, Mithra, Adonis, and scores of
other pre-Christian death-and-resurrection cults around
the Mediterranean. Scoffers point to the undeniable
resemblance between the pagan and Christian versions of
the dead-and-risen god. During the 2nd century the
Christian apologist St Justin felt compelled to retort
that centuries before Christ, "demons" had invented such
pagan practices as drinking the "blood" of Dionysus in
the form of wine in order to discredit what those demons
knew eventually would become Christian practice.
But Christianity offered something greater than
the innumerable death-and-resurrection cults of tiny
peoples each worshipping a tribal god, as apologist
Rodney Stark observes: "In uniting its empire, Rome
created economic and political unity at the cost of
cultural chaos ... Greco-Roman cities were microcosms of
this cultural diversity. People of many cultures,
speaking many languages, worshipping all manner of gods,
had been dumped together helter-skelter ... A major way
in which Christianity served as a revitalization
movement within the empire was in offering a coherent
culture that was entirely stripped of ethnicity. All
were welcome without need to dispense with ethnic ties."
By its nature, pagan religion springs from
ethnicity; the individual's concept of life beyond his
physical existence cannot be separated from the
propagation of his race and culture. But Christianity
offered a different sort of immortality. I wrote
previously (Why Europe chooses extinction, April
8, 2003):
Its original heartland in the Near East,
Asia Minor and Greece fell to Islam, but even while
Arabs rode victorious over St Paul's missionary trail,
the Church converted the barbarians of Europe.
Christianity made possible the assimilation of
thousands of doomed tribes into what became European
nations. Something similar is at work in Africa, the
only place in the world where Christianity enjoys
rapid growth. Yet Christianity's weakness ... lay in
the devil's bargain it made with the old paganism.
Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the
wispy ether of heavenly reward. Humans require
something to hang on to this side of the grave. By
providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a
humanized mother of God and a host of saints),
Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship
their own image. Germans worship a blond Jesus,
Spaniards worship a dark-haired Jesus, Mexicans
worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe, and so forth.
The result, wrote Franz Rosenzweig, is that Christians
"are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval
pagan hero] Siegfried".
Out of the Roman
Empire's tribal chaos Christianity proposed to form a
single people of Christ, an all-embracing "New Israel".
As a Roman state religion and later as a missionary
movement in barbarian Europe, however, Christendom
merely replicated the Roman welter of contending
ethnicities. The Catholic empire failed as a political
model for the new people, as I have argued elsewhere (The sacred heart of darkness,
February 11, 2003). In Catholic Europe, the anguished
soul of the sinner shriveled before the imposing edifice
of the Church, and the sinners sought refuge in a
quasi-pagan religion in which Jesus and his saints bore
the visage of each tribe. Through syncretism, that is,
adoption of pagan customs as an aid to conversion, the
Church encouraged the practice.
The Protestant
reformers - Wycliffe in England, Jan Hus in Bohemia,
then Martin Luther in Germany, Huldreich Zwingli in
Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva - set out to rid
Christianity of the pagan baggage it had carried since
the time of Constantine. They banished the worship of
saints, the adopted tribal gods in Christian garb; the
adoration of the ancient Queen of Heaven in the guise of
the Virgin Mary; and the consumption of the blood and
body of the sacrificed god taken from the cult of
Dionysus. They took to heart the Jewish critique of
medieval Christianity, notably Rabbi Moses ben Nachman's
13th-century argument that Free Will could not be
reconciled with Original Sin. The more radical of them,
notably Zwingli, fired up mobs to rip down from church
walls the representations of God, including his Son.
That helps explain why Switzerland is the world's oldest
surviving republic.
Good, bad or indifferent,
the bloodied Jesuses and weeping Virgins had to go. The
sine qua non of the New Israel is that it must be
beyond ethnicity. Christians secure their sense of
immortality from the death and rebirth of Jesus Christ.
But eternal life is never one's own, rather, it is the
life of one's people and the culture of that people.
However strongly we believe that we shall sit beside
Jesus singing psalms for eternity, we assume that the
psalms will be written in a language we know and that
our fellow singers will be able to communicate with us.
That is why the flimsiest of barriers separates
the Christian's rebirth into the People of Christ, the
New Israel, from a crypto-pagan revival of the pagan
death-and-resurrection cults, with Jesus, Mary and the
saints recast as tribal gods. At the extreme of such
backsliding, we encounter the "Aryan Christianity" of
the 20th century through Hitlerian Christians who denied
that Jesus was a Jew to begin with. That is why the
Reformers insisted that it is no more possible to depict
the Son of God than God the Father, the incorporeal
author of Creation whose existence lies outside the
physical universe.
The Reformers failed on their
home ground; the national constituents of European
Christianity came to worship its own ethnicity under the
guise of a Savior recast in its own ethnic image.
America became the New Israel, the only approximation of
a Christian nation, because it called individuals out of
the cultures of the Old World, and from them formed a
new people. Rather than the atomized, anguished rabble
of sinners cringing before the Seat of St Peter,
Americans from the outset elected their own pastors and
read their own Scripture. That, as I observed
previously, explains why New England farmers would fall
into line against British regulars at Lexington in 1775.
Radical Protestants came to America to create a New
Jerusalem. It should surprise no one that they feel a
profound sympathy for the Old Jerusalem.
One
cannot blame Mel Gibson, the Catholic traditionalist,
for dwelling obsessively upon the physical torture of
Jesus. Traditionalists like Gibson feel that the
American Catholic Church has forsaken Christianity's
spiritual mission, and seek ways to shock their
co-religionists. Gibson has explained his intentions
with frankness and humility. In the dark night of his
soul, he tells interviewers, the Australian actor really
is the suicidal detective of the Lethal Weapon
films. In his despair, he reached back into the dank
places of European convent life and encountered the gory
visions of the 18th-century German nun Sister Anne
Emmerich. What he places upon the altar is the craft of
his hands, namely Hollywood's full suite of manipulative
visual techniques. Lovingly he has given the world
"Lethal Religion". Why wince at the scourging of Jim
Caviezel, Gibson's blue-eyed hunk of a Jesus? In 1987,
Gibson did the scene himself in the original Lethal
Weapon, with electroshock in place of whips.
Today's American evangelicals strain at the
gnats of popular culture, but have swallowed Gibson's
camel: a throwback to the crypto-pagan Christianity that
poisoned Europe. The Passion of the Christ may
turn out to be the cultural disaster of the decade.
After writing the above lines I listened to the
whole of Johann Sebastian Bach's "St Matthew Passion",
that crown jewel of Christian art. I heartily recommend
it as an antidote for allergic reactions to The
Passion of the Christ.
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