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You seem like an athiest like Joyce was an athiest. It's not just the guilt - once you know about the church you can't unknow it just by not believing or not going. POTA/Ulysses is about as concrete evidence of that as one can find.
I tried to talk about the anti-semitism stuff down below. I've deliberately avoided the movie in the time since I saw it first, but my impression at the time was that it actually struck me as something Luther would have appreciated. There's obviously a loooooong tradition of perfectly orthodox Catholics dealing with the Passion narrative in art, but when you isolate the story the emphasis on the Cross tends to kind of beat away anything else. If there's *anything* Gibson cannot be criticized for, it's understating the magnitude of Christ's sacrifice. It's not like there was anything theologically Lutheran about the whole thing, but I came away from it more sympathetic than I'd ever been to Luther's notion that it was thoroughly insulting to think I could ever hope to "add" anything to this sacrifice.
It's difficult for a work of art to adhere to a theological position in this way, particularly one as nuanced as Luther's beef with Rome in the 16th century but there's a pretty long history of debate as to whether (this is obviously a huge simplification) Luther was the first modern or the last medieval, and it's pretty easy to chunk him in the latter category after seeing the Passion. For centuries prior to Luther, people as important as St. Francis and St. Bernard and as unimportant as Margery Kempe were wandering around Europe and meditating with astounding concentration on the most minute detail of Christ's wounds and his suffering, often adding generously to the account. It's not hard to imagine, then, that people were willing to buy into Luther's line of thought, that we should be thoroughly crushed by the magnitude of what happened on Calvary.
By contrast, it makes Gibson's attempts to work The Church into the story seem kind of lame. The flashback where Christ builds the table that's actually an altar felt tacked on in a way that the other flashbacks didn't. The fact that the last hours of Christ's life so dominated the piece is why I questioned Longo on the storytelling requirement, because the best analogues for this movie are actually paintings and sculptures. It's entirely likely that this makes the movie a bad one in the sense that a movie *can* be so much more than a painting or a sculpture, but it's kind of taking your eye off the ball to criticize something that I doubt was really Gibson's intention.
Anyhow, it's more a historical thought than a theological one but any movie that can actually make me think about Heiko Oberman deserves a lot of attention. ______________________________
"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"
--Walleye's Dad
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