The Most Beautiful Word

L'innocence by W. A. Bouguereau

The angels, whispering to one another,

Can find, among their burning terms of love,

None so devotional as that of “Mother”

The most beautiful word in the English language is mother.

Happy Easter!

"Our age habitually thinks low. Easter bids us to think high: very high. For Christ is risen, and so shall his faithful people be."

Easter with Flannery O'Connor

George Wiegel

This coming Aug. 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life. In the 50 years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age 39, O’Connor’s literary genius has been widely celebrated. Then, with the 1979 publication of The Habit of Being, her collected letters, another facet of Miss O’Connor’s genius came into focus: Mary Flannery O’Connor was an exceptionally gifted apologist, an explicator of Catholic faith who combined remarkable insight into the mysteries of the Creed with deep and unsentimental piety, unblinking realism about the Church in its human aspect, puckish humor—and a mordant appreciation of the soul-withering acids of modern secularism.

Insofar as I’m aware, there’s never been an effort to initiate a beatification cause for Flannery O’Connor. If such a cause should ever be introduced, The Habit of Being (and the lectures found in the Library of America edition of her collected works) should be the principal documentary evidence for considering her an exemplar of heroic virtue, worthy to be commended to the whole Church.

Miss O’Connor’s sense that ours is an age of nihilism—an age suffering from by a crabbed sourness about the mystery of being itself—makes her an especially apt apologist for today: not least because she also understood the evangelical sterility of the smiley-face, cheap-grace, balloons-and-banners Catholicism that would become rampant shortly after her death. In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, Flannery O’Connor looked straight into the dark mystery of Good Friday and, in four sentences explained why the late modern world often finds it hard to believe:

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”

That darkness is rendered darker still by late modernity’s refusal to recognize its own deepest need. For as Miss O’Connor put it in a 1957 lecture, “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.”

A world indifferent to its need for redemption is not indifferent to the possibility of redemption; it’s a world hostile to that possibility. Down the centuries, the mockery endured by Christ on the cross may stand as the paradigmatic expression of that hostility.

The Church meets this hostility by doubling down on its conviction that the truths it professes are really true, and in fact reveal the deepest truth of the human condition. Flannery O’Connor again:

“…the virgin birth, the incarnation, the resurrection…are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of those laws….[It] would never have occurred to human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.”

You can’t get much more countercultural than that. Yet what Miss O’Connor wrote speculatively in 1955 what was the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council solemnly affirmed a decade later, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: “…in the mystery of the word made flesh…the mystery of man truly becomes clear…Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam…fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

Our age habitually thinks low. Easter bids us to think high: very high. For Christ is risen, and so shall his faithful people be.

A Suspicion of Faith

Living in a time where scientism, empiricism, and the economy take precedence (and not to mention, more popularly appealing) over the wonderful and the mysterious, it is perhaps good advice to take a step back from the overly stereotyped atheists-versus-Christians debate and look at faith not for its definition du jour of simply being "belief in the existence of God," but faith that employs reason in explaining the meaning of our experiences and faith that isn't afraid of looking face-to-face at our human desire to find answers to life's questions. 

So whatever your beliefs are or lack thereof, don't think that the following essay is intended to attack you and convince you to believe in a being whose existence eludes proof via the scientific method. Just keep your mind open; it doesn't really hurt.

An Unbelieving Age

Nietzsche's Challenge and the Christian Response

Terry Eagleton

Friedrich Nietzsche has a strong claim to being the first real atheist. Of course there had been unbelievers in abundance before him, but it is Nietzsche above all who confronts the terrifying, exhilarating consequences of “the death of God.” As long as God’s shoes have been filled by Reason, art, culture, Geist, imagination, the nation, humanity, the state, the People, society, morality, or some other such specious surrogate, the Supreme Being is not quite dead. He may be mortally sick, but he has delegated his affairs to one envoy or another, part of whose task is to convince men and women that there is no cause for alarm, that business will be conducted as usual despite the absence of the proprietor.

What Nietzsche recognizes is that you can get rid of God only if you also do away with innate meaning. The Almighty can survive tragedy, but not absurdity. As long as there appears to be some immanent sense to things, one can always inquire after the source from which it springs. Abolishing given meanings involves destroying the idea of depth, which in turn means rooting out beings like God who take shelter there. Like Oscar Wilde in his wake, Nietzsche is out to replace what he sees as a vacuous depth with a profundity of the surface.

Max Weber comments in his essay “Science as a Vocation” that every theology presupposes that the world has meaning, and that only a plucky few can acknowledge that it does not. The true Übermensch (or Overman) in his view is the social scientist, who can confront the blankness of the universe and live without religious consolation. For those who cannot attain this dangerous truth, Weber remarks, “the doors of the old churches are open widely and compassionately.” It is a modern-day version of the double-truth thesis: the average citizen may be allowed to live in salutary illusion, while the intelligentsia gaze unflinchingly into the void. One might add that in Weber’s view the epitome of life’s senselessness is death, which for Christianity is where it is most charged with meaning.

Nietzsche sees that civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values, and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundations and expect the building still to stand. The death of God, he argues in The Gay Science, is the most momentous event of human history, yet men and women are behaving as though it were no more than a minor readjustment. Of the various artificial respirators on which God has been kept alive, one of the most effective is morality. “It does not follow,” Feuerbach anxiously insists, “that goodness, justice and wisdom are chimeras because the existence of God is a chimera.” Perhaps not; but in Nietzsche’s view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain intact. Morality must therefore either rethink itself from the ground up, or live on in the chronic bad faith of appealing to sources it knows to be spurious. In the wake of the death of God, there are those who continue to hold that morality is about duty, conscience, and obligation, but who now find themselves bemused about the source of such beliefs. This is not a problem for Christianity—not only because it has faith in such a source, but because it does not believe that morality is primarily about duty, conscience, or obligation in the first place.

Nietzsche speaks scornfully of French freethinkers from Voltaire to Comte as trying to “out-Christian” Christianity with a craven cult of altruism and philanthropy, virtues that are as distasteful to him as pity, compassion, benevolence, and suchlike humanitarian claptrap. He can find nothing in such values but weakness cunningly tricked out as power. These, too, are ways of disavowing God’s disappearance. God is indeed dead, and it is we who are his assassins, yet our true crime is less deicide than hypocrisy. Having murdered the Creator in the most spectacular of all Oedipal revolts, we have hidden the body, repressed all memory of the traumatic event, tidied up the scene of the crime and, like Norman Bates in Psycho, behave as though we are innocent of the act. Modern secular societies, in other words, have effectively disposed of God but find it morally and politically convenient—even imperative—to behave as though they have not. They do not actually believe in him, but it is still necessary for them to imagine that they do. God is too vital a piece of ideology to be written off, even if it is one that their own profane activities render less and less plausible. To look at the beliefs embodied in their behavior, rather than at what they piously profess, is to recognize that they have no faith in God at all, but it is as though the fact has not yet been brought to their attention. One of Nietzsche’s self-appointed tasks is to do precisely that.

If God really has expired, however, this is by no means unqualified good news. If he is dead, then, as Jacques Lacan claims contra Dostoevsky, nothing is permitted, since for one thing there is no one to grant permission. We now have nobody to assume the burden of responsibility but ourselves, whereas having a signed and certified warranty to act as we do is a great assuager of guilt. We may expect, then, that our moral unease will intensify in the wake of God’s demise, as angst and mauvaise foi tighten their hold on humanity.

Nietzsche’s struggle, as Andrew Wernick notes, was not just one of Dionysus against the Crucified, to adopt his own words, but one against Christianity’s “enlightened afterlife.” The Overman is he who has freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man, and morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian faith, the only place to begin is with a confession that our hands are steeped in the blood of divinity. Man, too, must be dismantled, insofar as he is modelled on the unity and infinity of the godhead. He is defined so completely by his dependence on his Creator that the two must fall together. There can be no obsequies for the Almighty without a funeral ceremony for humanity as well. The death of God must herald the death of Man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self-dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him.

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self-emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the Crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. Only through a confession of loss and failure can the very meaning of power be transfigured in the miracle of resurrection. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus, who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.

The absence of God may be occluded by the fetish of Man, but the God who has been disposed of would seem little more than a fetish in the first place. As with William Blake’s Urizen or Nobodaddy, he was a convenient way of shielding a humanity eager to be chastised from the intolerable truth that the God of Christianity is friend, lover, and fellow accused, not judge, patriarch, and superego. He is counsel for the defense, not for the prosecution. Moreover, his apparent absence is part of his meaning. The superstitious would see a sign, but the sign of the Father that counts is a crucified body. For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where he is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.

POSTMODERNISM IS IN many ways a postscript to Nietzsche, though a Nietzsche shorn of the quasi- metaphysical baggage—of the Will to Power, the Übermensch and the quasi-teleological tale of how humanity might pass from savagery to moral splendor. It also abandons his tragic vision. It is a post-tragic form of culture—though post-tragic in the sense that Morrissey is post-Mozart. It is not as if it has been hauled through tragedy in order to emerge, suitably transfigured, on the other side. In its eyes, a lack of inherent meaning in reality is not a scandal to be confronted but a fact to be accepted. Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism does not experience it at all. There is no God-shaped hole at the center of its universe, as there is at the center of Kafka, Beckett, or even Philip Larkin. Indeed, there is no gap in its universe at all.

If postmodern culture is depthless, antitragic, nonlinear, antinuminous, nonfoundational and anti-universalist, suspicious of absolutes and averse to interiority, one might claim that it is genuinely postreligious, as modernism most certainly is not. Most religious thought, for example, posits a universal humanity, since a God who concerned himself with only a particular section of the species, say Bosnians or people over five foot eight inches tall, would appear lacking in the impartial benevolence appropriate to a Supreme Being. There must also be some common ground between ourselves and Abraham for the Hebrew Scriptures to make sense. Postmodernism, however, is notoriously nervous of universals, despite its claim that grand narratives have everywhere disappeared from the earth, or that there are no stable identities to be found, wherever one looks. As a current of thought, it inherits most of those aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that make for atheism; but since in its streetwise style it rejects the notion of the Übermensch, it refuses to smuggle in a new form of divinity to replace the old. Skeptical of the whole concept of a universal humanity, it repudiates Man as well as God, and in doing so refuses the quasi-religious consolations of humanism. In this sense, Nietzsche’s warning that the Almighty will rest quiet in his grave only when Man lies alongside him is finally taken seriously.

Nietzsche himself salvages a vision of the active human subject from the ruins of classical humanism. The Overman stamps his image on a world which in itself is mere flux and difference. He also brings his own desires under his dominion in much the same fashion. In this sense, Michel Foucault’s doctrine of self-fashioning in his History of Sexuality strikes an authentically Nietzschean note. Yet it is one untypical of poststructuralism and postmodernism as a whole. For them, the flux of reality has now infiltrated the subject to the point where its unity dissolves and its agency is undermined. The postmodern subject, like the Übermensch, is clay in its own hands, able to change shape at its own behest; but by the same token it lacks the indomitable will with which Nietzsche’s Overman bends reality to his demands. It is aesthetic not in the Nietzschean or Wildean sense of turning oneself into a work of art, but in the Kierkegaardian sense of lacking all unity and principle. Since Man is no longer to be seen primarily as agent or creator, he is no longer in danger of being mistaken for the Supreme Being. He has finally attained maturity, but only at the cost of relinquishing his identity. He is not to be seen as self-determining. The self is no longer coherent enough to be so. This is one way in which postmodernism is post-theological, since it is God above all who is One, and who is the ground of his own being. It follows that if you want to get rid of him, you need to refashion the concept of subjectivity itself, which is just what postmodernism seeks to do.

Perhaps, then, the latter decades of the twentieth century will be seen as the time when the deity was finally put to death. With the advent of postmodern culture, a nostalgia for the numinous is finally banished. It is not so much that there is no redemption as that there is nothing to be redeemed. Religion, to be sure, lives on, since there is more to late modern civilization than postmodernism. Even so, it would not be too much to claim that with the emergence of postmodernism, human history arrives for the first time at an authentic atheism.

ONE REASON WHY reason why postmodern thought is atheistic is its suspicion of faith. Not just religious faith, but faith as such. It makes the mistake of supposing that all passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic. Begin with a robust belief in goblins and you end up with the Gulag. Nietzsche had a similar aversion to conviction. It was passion, not belief, that governed the greatest minds. Fixed doctrines spell the death of the transient, provisional, unique, and sensuously specific.

In Nietzsche’s eyes, truly noble spirits refuse to be the prisoners of their own principles. Instead, they treat their own most cherished opinions with a certain cavalier detachment, adopting and discarding them at will. It is what Yeats, who like many a modernist felt the influence of Nietzsche, and for whom opinions were fit meat for bank clerks and shopkeepers, called sprezzatura. One’s beliefs are more like one’s manservants, to be hired and fired as the fancy takes you, than like one’s bodily organs. They are not to be regarded as constitutive of personal identity, but rather as costumes one can don or doff at will. For the most part, as with kilts and cravats, it is aesthetic considerations that govern the donning and doffing. The left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor once informed an Oxford Fellowship election committee that he had extreme political views, but held them moderately. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche scorns what he calls the “longing for certainty” of science and rationalism, an itch for epistemological assurance behind which it is not hard to detect a deep-seated anxiety of spirit. In his view, the compulsion to believe is for those who are too timid to exist in the midst of ambiguities without anxiously reaching out for some copper-bottomed truth. The desire for religion is the craving for an authority whose emphatic “thou shalt” will relieve us of our moral and cognitive insecurity. The free spirit, by contrast, is one that has the courage to dispense with “every wish for certainty,” supporting itself only by “slender cords and possibilities,” yet dancing even so on the verge of the abyss.

In an age in which the concept of certainty smacks of the tyrant and technocrat, a certain agnosticism becomes a virtue. Indeterminacy and undecidability are accounted goods in themselves. Conviction suggests a consistency of self that does not sit easily with the volatile, adaptive subject of advanced capitalism. Besides, too much doctrine is bad for consumption. Beliefs are potentially contentious affairs, which is good neither for business nor for political stability. They are also commercially superfluous. The fervent ideological rhetoric needed to found the system thus fades as it unfolds. As long as its citizens roll into work, pay their taxes, and refrain from assaulting police officers, they can believe pretty much what they like.

The faithlessness of advanced capitalism is built into its routine practices. It is not primarily a question of the piety or skepticism of its citizens. The marketplace would continue to behave atheistically even if every one of its actors was a born-again Evangelical. Yet God has of course by no means vanished. Consumer capitalism may have scant use for him in practice, but it is still mortgaged to some extent to its own metaphysical heritage. By and large, advanced capitalism remains caught in the state of denial that -Nietzsche denounces. The economy may be a rank atheist, but the state that stands guard over it still feels the need to be a true believer. Not, to be sure, necessarily a religious believer, but to subscribe to certain imperishable moral and political truths that cannot simply be derived from the size of the deficit or the unemployment statistics.

In his Faith of the Faithless, a title that might be used to characterize a whole current of recent leftist thought, Simon Critchley acknowledges what he sees as the limits of any entirely secularist worldview, and records his doubt that radical politics can be effective without a religious dimension. It is now some on the left, not the right, who look to a religious “supplement” to the political—partly, no doubt, in response to the spiritual vacuity of late capitalism, but also because there are indeed some important affinities between religious and secular notions of faith, hope, justice, community, liberation, and the like. A range of prominent left thinkers, from Badiou, Agamben, and Debray to Derrida, Habermas, and Žižek, have thus turned to questions of theology, to the chagrin or bemusement of some of their acolytes.

There is a dash of pathos, not to speak of a mildly comic touch, in the spectacle of a group of devout materialists speaking in strenuously Protestant terms of the “claims of infinity,” “heeding the call,” “infinite responsibility,” and the like. If Graham Greene’s fiction is thronged with reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of the Almighty but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction, there are also reluctant atheists—thinkers who can sometimes be distinguished from the Archbishop of Canterbury only by the fact that they do not believe in God.

Alongside the leftist fellow travelers, there are also those defenders of capitalism who, troubled by its crassly materialist climate, are out to hijack the religious spirit in order to lend this way of life some sweetness and light. Religious faith, suitably cleansed of its primitive propositions, may figure as a kind of aesthetic supplement to an uncouth social order. Alain de Botton’s unwittingly entertaining Religion for Atheists is symptomatic of this trend. There are, de Botton argues, “aspects of religious life that could fruitfully be applied to the problems of secular society.” One and a half centuries in the wake of Matthew Arnold, de Botton is still wistfully hoping that culture may wrest the baton from religion. “We are unwilling,” he writes, “to consider secular culture religiously enough, in other words, as a source of guidance.” Religion “teaches us to be polite, to honor one another, to be faithful and sober,” as well as instructing us in “the charms of community.” Intellectually speaking, religion is pure nonsense; but this is hardly to the point as long as it makes for some much-needed civility, aesthetic charm, social order, and moral edification. A committed atheist like himself, de Botton argues, can therefore still find religion “sporadically interesting, useful, and consoling.” Since Christianity requires that one lay down one’s life if need be for a stranger, de Botton must have a strange idea of consolation. His notion of faith is not quite that of a prophet who was tortured and executed by the imperial powers for speaking up for justice, and whose followers must be prepared to meet the same fate.

Reluctant atheism has a long history. Machiavelli thought that religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful means of terrorizing and pacifying the mob. Voltaire feared infecting his own domestic servants with his impiety. Gibbon, one of the most notorious skeptics of all time, considered that the religious doctrines he despised could nonetheless prove socially useful. There is something unpleasantly disingenuous about this entire legacy. “I don’t happen to believe myself, but it is politically expedient that you should” is the catchphrase of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. One can imagine how they might react to being informed that their own most cherished convictions—civil rights, freedom of speech, democratic government and the like—were of course all nonsense, but politically convenient nonsense, and so not to be scrapped. It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that the problem was less the death of God than the bad faith of Man, who in an astonishing act of cognitive dissonance had murdered his Maker but continued to protest that he was still alive. It was thus that men and women failed to see in the divine obsequies an opportunity to remake themselves.

If religious faith were to be released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for their existence, it might be free to rediscover its true purpose as a critique of all such politics. In this sense, its superfluity might prove its salvation. The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. It is not a “civilized” document at all. It shows no enthusiasm for social consensus. Since it holds that such values are imminently to pass away, it is not greatly taken with standards of civic excellence or codes of good conduct. What it adds to common morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is a solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born.

This essay is adopted from portions of the author's new book, Culture and the Death of God (Yale, 2014).

Source:

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/unbelieving-age

March 10, 2014

Phenomenal Woman

Men themselves have wondered   

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can’t touch

My inner mystery.

When I try to show them,   

They say they still can’t see.  

---

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

—Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman

Flaming June, Sir Frederick Leighton

Woman has always been a mystery, to men and even to herself. Throughout history, she has been a servant, a wife, a mother, a lover, a prostitute, a queen, a sister, a child, a friend—a confused mixture of flesh and consciousness struggling to take form. Woman, who are you? Minds have tried to define you. Brushes have attempted to paint your beauty. Pens have told stories of your sufferings and smiles. And yet, you are still a question mark that eludes a finality, you go on and on with a grace and love that enchants the world. 

Woman, you are beautiful. 

In light of the International Women's Day celebrated today, here is Pope John Paul II's Letter to Women written in 1995.

Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women

I greet you all most cordially,
women throughout the world!

1. I am writing this letter to each one of you as a sign of solidarity and gratitude on the eve of the Fourth World Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing this coming September.

Before all else, I wish to express my deep appreciation to the United Nations Organization for having sponsored this very significant event. The Church desires for her part to contribute to upholding the dignity, role and rights of women, not only by the specific work of the Holy See's official Delegation to the Conference in Beijing, but also by speaking directly to the heart and mind of every woman. Recently, when Mrs Gertrude Mongella, the Secretary General of the Conference, visited me in connection with the Peking meeting, I gave her a written Message which stated some basic points of the Church's teaching with regard to women's issues. That message, apart from the specific circumstances of its origin, was concerned with a broader vision of the situation and problems of women in general, in an attempt to promote the cause of women in the Church and in today's world. For this reason, I arranged to have it forwarded to every Conference of Bishops, so that it could be circulated as widely as possible.

Taking up the themes I addressed in that document, I would now like to speak directly to every woman, to reflect with her on the problems and the prospects of what it means to be a woman in our time. In particular I wish to consider the essential issue of the dignity and rights of women, as seen in the light of the word of God.

This "dialogue" really needs to begin with a word of thanks. As I wrote in my Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, the Church "desires to give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for the 'mystery of woman' and for every woman-for all that constitutes the eternal measure of her feminine dignity, for the 'great works of God', which throughout human history have been accomplished in and through her" (No. 31).

2. This word of thanks to the Lord for his mysterious plan regarding the vocation and mission of women in the world is at the same time a concrete and direct word of thanks to women, to every woman, for all that they represent in the life of humanity.

Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. This experience makes you become God's own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child's first steps, who helps it to grow, and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life.

Thank you, women who are wives! You irrevocably join your future to that of your husbands, in a relationship of mutual giving, at the service of love and life.

Thank you, women who are daughters and women who are sisters! Into the heart of the family, and then of all society, you bring the richness of your sensitivity, your intuitiveness, your generosity and fidelity.

Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life-social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of "mystery", to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.

Thank you, consecrated women! Following the example of the greatest of women, the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, you open yourselves with obedience and fidelity to the gift of God's love. You help the Church and all mankind to experience a "spousal" relationship to God, one which magnificently expresses the fellowship which God wishes to establish with his creatures.

Thank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being a woman! Through the insight which is so much a part of your womanhood you enrich the world's understanding and help to make human relations more honest and authentic.

3. I know of course that simply saying thank you is not enough. Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women's dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity. Certainly it is no easy task to assign the blame for this, considering the many kinds of cultural conditioning which down the centuries have shaped ways of thinking and acting. And if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry. May this regret be transformed, on the part of the whole Church, into a renewed commitment of fidelity to the Gospel vision. When it comes to setting women free from every kind of exploitation and domination, the Gospel contains an ever relevant message which goes back to the attitude of Jesus Christ himself. Transcending the established norms of his own culture, Jesus treated women with openness, respect, acceptance and tenderness. In this way he honoured the dignity which women have always possessed according to God's plan and in his love. As we look to Christ at the end of this Second Millennium, it is natural to ask ourselves: how much of his message has been heard and acted upon?

Yes, it is time to examine the past with courage, to assign responsibility where it is due in a review of the long history of humanity. Women have contributed to that history as much as men and, more often than not, they did so in much more difficult conditions. I think particularly of those women who loved culture and art, and devoted their lives to them in spite of the fact that they were frequently at a disadvantage from the start, excluded from equal educational opportunities, underestimated, ignored and not given credit for their intellectual contributions. Sadly, very little of women's achievements in history can be registered by the science of history. But even though time may have buried the documentary evidence of those achievements, their beneficent influence can be felt as a force which has shaped the lives of successive generations, right up to our own. To this great, immense feminine "tradition" humanity owes a debt which can never be repaid. Yet how many women have been and continue to be valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity; in a word, the very dignity of their being!

4. And what shall we say of the obstacles which in so many parts of the world still keep women from being fully integrated into social, political and economic life? We need only think of how the gift of motherhood is often penalized rather than rewarded, even though humanity owes its very survival to this gift. Certainly, much remains to be done to prevent discrimination against those who have chosen to be wives and mothers. As far as personal rights are concerned, there is an urgent need to achievereal equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic State.

This is a matter of justice but also of necessity. Women will increasingly play a part in the solution of the serious problems of the future: leisure time, the quality of life, migration, social services, euthanasia, drugs, health care, the ecology, etc. In all these areas a greater presence of women in society will prove most valuable, for it will help to manifest the contradictions present when society is organized solely according to the criteria of efficiency and productivity, and it will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favours the pro- cesses of humanization which mark the "civilization of love".

5. Then too, when we look at one of the most sensitive aspects of the situation of women in the world, how can we not mention the long and degrading history, albeit often an "underground" history, of violence against women in the area of sexuality? At the threshold of the Third Millennium we cannot remain indifferent and resigned before this phenomenon. The time has come to condemn vigorously the types of sexual violence which frequently have women for their object and to pass laws which effectively defend them from such violence. Nor can we fail, in the name of the respect due to the human person, to condemn the widespread hedonistic and commercial culture which encourages the systematic exploitation of sexuality and corrupts even very young girls into letting their bodies be used for profit.

In contrast to these sorts of perversion, what great appreciation must be shown to those women who, with a heroic love for the child they have conceived, proceed with a pregnancy resulting from the injustice of rape. Here we are thinking of atrocities perpetrated not only in situations of war, still so common in the world, but also in societies which are blessed by prosperity and peace and yet are often corrupted by a culture of hedonistic permissiveness which aggravates tendencies to aggressive male behaviour. In these cases the choice to have an abortion always remains a grave sin. But before being something to blame on the woman, it is a crime for which guilt needs to be attributed to men and to the complicity of the general social environment.

6. My word of thanks to women thus becomes a heartfelt appeal that everyone, and in a special way States and international institutions, should make every effort to ensure that women regain full respect for their dignity and role. Here I cannot fail to express my admiration for those women of good will who have devoted their lives to defending the dignity of womanhood by fighting for their basic social, economic and political rights, demonstrating courageous initiative at a time when this was considered extremely inappropriate, the sign of a lack of femininity, a manifestation of exhibitionism, and even a sin!

In this year's World Day of Peace Message, I noted that when one looks at the great process of women's liberation, "the journey has been a difficult and complicated one and, at times, not without its share of mistakes. But it has been substantially a positive one, even if it is still unfinished, due to the many obstacles which, in various parts of the world, still prevent women from being acknowledged, respected, and appreciated in their own special dignity" (No. 4).

This journey must go on! But I am convinced that the secret of making speedy progress in achieving full respect for women and their identity involves more than simply the condemnation of discrimination and injustices, necessary though this may be. Such respect must first and foremost be won through an effective and intelligent campaign for the promotion of women, concentrating on all areas of women's life and beginning with a universal recognition of the dignity of women. Our ability to recognize this dignity, in spite of historical conditioning, comes from the use of reason itself, which is able to understand the law of God written in the heart of every human being. More than anything else, the word of God enables us to grasp clearly the ultimate anthropological basis of the dignity of women, making it evident as a part of God's plan for humanity.

7. Dear sisters, together let us reflect anew on the magnificent passage in Scripture which describes the creation of the human race and which has so much to say about your dignity and mission in the world.

The Book of Genesis speaks of creation in summary fashion, in language which is poetic and symbolic, yet profoundly true: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27). The creative act of God takes place according to a precise plan. First of all, we are told that the human being is created "in the image and likeness of God" (cf. Gen 1:26). This expression immediately makes clear what is distinct about the human being with regard to the rest of creation.

We are then told that, from the very beginning, man has been created "male and female" (Gen 1:27). Scripture itself provides the interpretation of this fact: even though man is surrounded by the innumerable creatures of the created world, he realizes that he is alone (cf. Gen 2:20). God intervenes in order to help him escape from this situation of solitude: "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him" (Gen 2:18). The creation of woman is thus marked from the outset by the principle of help: a help which is not one-sided but mutual. Woman complements man, just as man complements woman: men and women are complementary.Womanhood expresses the "human" as much as manhood does, but in a different and complementary way.

When the Book of Genesis speaks of "help", it is not referring merely to acting, but also to being.Womanhood and manhood are complementary not only from the physical and psychological points of view, but also from the ontological. It is only through the duality of the "masculine" and the "feminine" that the "human" finds full realization.

8. After creating man male and female, God says to both: "Fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen1:28). Not only does he give them the power to procreate as a means of perpetuating the human species throughout time, he also gives them the earth, charging them with the responsible use of its resources. As a rational and free being, man is called to transform the face of the earth. In this task, which is essentially that of culture, man and woman alike share equal responsibility from the start. In their fruitful relationship as husband and wife, in their common task of exercising dominion over the earth, woman and man are marked neither by a static and undifferentiated equality nor by an irreconcilable and inexorably conflictual difference. Their most natural relationship, which corresponds to the plan of God, is the "unity of the two", a relational "uni-duality", which enables each to experience their interpersonal and reciprocal relationship as a gift which enriches and which confers responsibility.

To this "unity of the two" God has entrusted not only the work of procreation and family life, but the creation of history itself. While the 1994 International Year of the Family focused attention onwomen as mothers, the Beijing Conference, which has as its theme "Action for Equality, Development and Peace", provides an auspicious occasion for heightening awareness of the many contributions made by women to the life of whole societies and nations. This contribution is primarily spiritual and cultural in nature, but socio-political and economic as well. The various sectors of society, nations and states, and the progress of all humanity, are certainly deeply indebted to the contribution of women!

9. Progress usually tends to be measured according to the criteria of science and technology. Nor from this point of view has the contribution of women been negligible. Even so, this is not the only measure of progress, nor in fact is it the principal one. Much more important is the social and ethical dimension, which deals with human relations and spiritual values. In this area, which often develops in an inconspicuous way beginning with the daily relationships between people, especially within the family, society certainly owes much to the "genius of women".

Here I would like to express particular appreciation to those women who are involved in the variousareas of education extending well beyond the family: nurseries, schools, universities, social service agencies, parishes, associations and movements. Wherever the work of education is called for, we can note that women are ever ready and willing to give themselves generously to others, especially in serving the weakest and most defenceless. In this work they exhibit a kind of affective, cultural and spiritual motherhood which has inestimable value for the development of individuals and the future of society. At this point how can I fail to mention the witness of so many Catholic women and Religious Congregations of women from every continent who have made education, particularly the education of boys and girls, their principal apostolate? How can I not think with gratitude of all the women who have worked and continue to work in the area of health care, not only in highly organized institutions, but also in very precarious circumstances, in the poorest countries of the world, thus demonstrating a spirit of service which not infrequently borders on martyrdom?

10. It is thus my hope, dear sisters, that you will reflect carefully on what it means to speak of the"genius of women", not only in order to be able to see in this phrase a specific part of God's plan which needs to be accepted and appreciated, but also in order to let this genius be more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church. This subject came up frequently during the Marian Year and I myself dwelt on it at length in my Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (1988). In addition, this year in the Letter which I customarily send to priests for Holy Thursday, I invited them to reread Mulieris Dignitatem and reflect on the important roles which women have played in their lives as mothers, sisters and co-workers in the apostolate. This is another aspect-different from the conjugal aspect, but also important-of that "help" which women, according to the Book of Genesis, are called to give to men.

The Church sees in Mary the highest expression of the "feminine genius" and she finds in her a source of constant inspiration. Mary called herself the "handmaid of the Lord" (Lk 1:38). Through obedience to the Word of God she accepted her lofty yet not easy vocation as wife and mother in the family of Nazareth. Putting herself at God's service, she also put herself at the service of others: aservice of love. Precisely through this service Mary was able to experience in her life a mysterious, but authentic "reign". It is not by chance that she is invoked as "Queen of heaven and earth". The entire community of believers thus invokes her; many nations and peoples call upon her as their "Queen". For her, "to reign" is to serve! Her service is "to reign"!

This is the way in which authority needs to be understood, both in the family and in society and the Church. Each person's fundamental vocation is revealed in this "reigning", for each person has been created in the "image" of the One who is Lord of heaven and earth and called to be his adopted son or daughter in Christ. Man is the only creature on earth "which God willed for its own sake", as the Second Vatican Council teaches; it significantly adds that man "cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self" (Gaudium et Spes, 24).

The maternal "reign" of Mary consists in this. She who was, in all her being, a gift for her Son, has also become a gift for the sons and daughters of the whole human race, awakening profound trust in those who seek her guidance along the difficult paths of life on the way to their definitive and transcendent destiny. Each one reaches this final goal by fidelity to his or her own vocation; this goal provides meaning and direction for the earthly labours of men and women alike.

11. In this perspective of "service"-which, when it is carried out with freedom, reciprocity and love, expresses the truly "royal" nature of mankind-one can also appreciate that the presence of a certain diversity of roles is in no way prejudicial to women, provided that this diversity is not the result of an arbitrary imposition, but is rather an expression of what is specific to being male and female. This issue also has a particular application within the Church. If Christ-by his free and sovereign choice, clearly attested to by the Gospel and by the Church's constant Tradition-entrusted only to men the task of being an "icon" of his countenance as "shepherd" and "bridegroom" of the Church through the exercise of the ministerial priesthood, this in no way detracts from the role of women, or for that matter from the role of the other members of the Church who are not ordained to the sacred ministry, since all share equally in the dignity proper to the "common priesthood" based on Baptism. These role distinctions should not be viewed in accordance with the criteria of functionality typical in human societies. Rather they must be understood according to the particular criteria of thesacramental economy, i.e. the economy of "signs" which God freely chooses in order to become present in the midst of humanity.

Furthermore, precisely in line with this economy of signs, even if apart from the sacramental sphere, there is great significance to that "womanhood" which was lived in such a sublime way by Mary. In fact, there is present in the "womanhood" of a woman who believes, and especially in a woman who is "consecrated", a kind of inherent "prophecy" (cf. Mulieris Dignitatem, 29), a powerfully evocative symbolism, a highly significant "iconic character", which finds its full realization in Mary and which also aptly expresses the very essence of the Church as a community consecrated with the integrity of a"virgin" heart to become the "bride" of Christ and "mother" of believers. When we consider the "iconic" complementarity of male and female roles, two of the Church's essential dimensions are seen in a clearer light: the "Marian" principle and the Apostolic- Petrine principle (cf. ibid., 27).

On the other hand-as I wrote to priests in this year's Holy Thursday Letter-the ministerial priesthood, according to Christ's plan, "is an expression not of domination but of service" (No. 7). The Church urgently needs, in her daily self-renewal in the light of the Word of God, to emphasize this fact ever more clearly, both by developing the spirit of communion and by carefully fostering all those means of participation which are properly hers, and also by showing respect for and promoting the diverse personal and communal charisms which the Spirit of God bestows for the building up of the Christian community and the service of humanity.

In this vast domain of service, the Church's two-thousand-year history, for all its historical conditioning, has truly experienced the "genius of woman"; from the heart of the Church there have emerged women of the highest calibre who have left an impressive and beneficial mark in history. I think of the great line of woman martyrs, saints and famous mystics. In a particular way I think of Saint Catherine of Siena and of Saint Teresa of Avila, whom Pope Paul VI of happy memory granted the title of Doctors of the Church. And how can we overlook the many women, inspired by faith, who were responsible for initiatives of extraordinary social importance, especially in serving the poorest of the poor? The life of the Church in the Third Millennium will certainly not be lacking in new and surprising manifestations of "the feminine genius".

12. You can see then, dear sisters, that the Church has many reasons for hoping that the forthcoming United Nations Conference in Beijing will bring out the full truth about women. Necessary emphasis should be placed on the "genius of women", not only by considering great and famous women of the past or present, but also those ordinary women who reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives. For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfil their deepest vocation. Perhaps more than men, womenacknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts. They see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them. In this way the basic plan of the Creator takes flesh in the history of humanity and there is constantly revealed, in the variety of vocations, that beauty-not merely physical, but above all spiritual-which God bestowed from the very beginning on all, and in a particular way on women.

While I commend to the Lord in prayer the success of the important meeting in Beijing, I inviteEcclesial Communities to make this year an occasion of heartfelt thanksgiving to the Creator and Redeemer of the world for the gift of this great treasure which is womanhood. In all its expressions, womanhood is part of the essential heritage of mankind and of the Church herself.

May Mary, Queen of Love, watch over women and their mission in service of humanity, of peace, of the spread of God's Kingdom!

With my Blessing.

From the Vatican, 29 June 1995, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul.

2014 Lenten Message of Our Holy Father Francis

He became poor,
so that by his poverty you might become rich
(cf. 2 Cor 8:9)

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As Lent draws near, I would like to offer some helpful thoughts on our path of conversion as individuals and as a community. These insights are inspired by the words of Saint Paul: "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich" (2 Cor 8:9). The Apostle was writing to the Christians of Corinth to encourage them to be generous in helping the faithful in Jerusalem who were in need. What do these words of Saint Paul mean for us Christians today? What does this invitation to poverty, a life of evangelical poverty, mean for us today?

1. Christ’s grace

First of all, it shows us how God works. He does not reveal himself cloaked in worldly power and wealth but rather in weakness and poverty: "though He was rich, yet for your sake he became poor …". Christ, the eternal Son of God, one with the Father in power and glory, chose to be poor; he came amongst us and drew near to each of us; he set aside his glory and emptied himself so that he could be like us in all things (cf. Phil 2:7; Heb 4:15). God’s becoming man is a great mystery! But the reason for all this is his love, a love which is grace, generosity, a desire to draw near, a love which does not hesitate to offer itself in sacrifice for the beloved. Charity, love, is sharing with the one we love in all things. Love makes us similar, it creates equality, it breaks down walls and eliminates distances. God did this with us. Indeed, Jesus "worked with human hands, thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, he truly became one of us, like us in all things except sin." (Gaudium et Spes, 22).

By making himself poor, Jesus did not seek poverty for its own sake but, as Saint Paul says "that by his poverty you might become rich". This is no mere play on words or a catch phrase. Rather, it sums up God’s logic, the logic of love, the logic of the incarnation and the cross. God did not let our salvation drop down from heaven, like someone who gives alms from their abundance out of a sense of altruism and piety. Christ’s love is different! When Jesus stepped into the waters of the Jordan and was baptized by John the Baptist, he did so not because he was in need of repentance, or conversion; he did it to be among people who need forgiveness, among us sinners, and to take upon himself the burden of our sins. In this way he chose to comfort us, to save us, to free us from our misery. It is striking that the Apostle states that we were set free, not by Christ’s riches but by his poverty. Yet Saint Paul is well aware of the "the unsearchable riches of Christ" (Eph 3:8), that he is "heir of all things" (Heb 1:2).

So what is this poverty by which Christ frees us and enriches us? It is his way of loving us, his way of being our neighbour, just as the Good Samaritan was neighbour to the man left half dead by the side of the road (cf. Lk 10:25ff ). What gives us true freedom, true salvation and true happiness is the compassion, tenderness and solidarity of his love. Christ’s poverty which enriches us is his taking flesh and bearing our weaknesses and sins as an expression of God’s infinite mercy to us. Christ’s poverty is the greatest treasure of all: Jesus’ wealth is that of his boundless confidence in God the Father, his constant trust, his desire always and only to do the Father’s will and give glory to him. Jesus is rich in the same way as a child who feels loved and who loves its parents, without doubting their love and tenderness for an instant. Jesus’ wealth lies in his being the Son; his unique relationship with the Father is the sovereign prerogative of this Messiah who is poor. When Jesus asks us to take up his "yoke which is easy", he asks us to be enriched by his "poverty which is rich" and his "richness which is poor", to share his filial and fraternal Spirit, to become sons and daughters in the Son, brothers and sisters in the firstborn brother (cf. Rom 8:29).

It has been said that the only real regret lies in not being a saint (L. Bloy); we could also say that there is only one real kind of poverty: not living as children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ.

2. Our witness

We might think that this "way" of poverty was Jesus’ way, whereas we who come after him can save the world with the right kind of human resources. This is not the case. In every time and place God continues to save mankind and the world through the poverty of Christ, who makes himself poor in the sacraments, in his word and in his Church, which is a people of the poor. God’s wealth passes not through our wealth, but invariably and exclusively through our personal and communal poverty, enlivened by the Spirit of Christ.

In imitation of our Master, we Christians are called to confront the poverty of our brothers and sisters, to touch it, to make it our own and to take practical steps to alleviate it. Destitution is not the same as poverty: destitution is poverty without faith, without support, without hope. There are three types of destitution: material, moral and spiritual. Material destitution is what is normally called poverty, and affects those living in conditions opposed to human dignity: those who lack basic rights and needs such as food, water, hygiene, work and the opportunity to develop and grow culturally. In response to this destitution, the Church offers her help, her diakonia, in meeting these needs and binding these wounds which disfigure the face of humanity. In the poor and outcast we see Christ’s face; by loving and helping the poor, we love and serve Christ. Our efforts are also directed to ending violations of human dignity, discrimination and abuse in the world, for these are so often the cause of destitution. When power, luxury and money become idols, they take priority over the need for a fair distribution of wealth. Our consciences thus need to be converted to justice, equality, simplicity and sharing.

No less a concern is moral destitution, which consists in slavery to vice and sin. How much pain is caused in families because one of their members – often a young person - is in thrall to alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography! How many people no longer see meaning in life or prospects for the future, how many have lost hope! And how many are plunged into this destitution by unjust social conditions, by unemployment, which takes away their dignity as breadwinners, and by lack of equal access to education and health care. In such cases, moral destitution can be considered impending suicide. This type of destitution, which also causes financial ruin, is invariably linked to the spiritual destitution which we experience when we turn away from God and reject his love. If we think we don’t need God who reaches out to us through Christ, because we believe we can make do on our own, we are headed for a fall. God alone can truly save and free us.

The Gospel is the real antidote to spiritual destitution: wherever we go, we are called as Christians to proclaim the liberating news that forgiveness for sins committed is possible, that God is greater than our sinfulness, that he freely loves us at all times and that we were made for communion and eternal life. The Lord asks us to be joyous heralds of this message of mercy and hope! It is thrilling to experience the joy of spreading this good news, sharing the treasure entrusted to us, consoling broken hearts and offering hope to our brothers and sisters experiencing darkness. It means following and imitating Jesus, who sought out the poor and sinners as a shepherd lovingly seeks his lost sheep. In union with Jesus, we can courageously open up new paths of evangelization and human promotion.

Dear brothers and sisters, may this Lenten season find the whole Church ready to bear witness to all those who live in material, moral and spiritual destitution the Gospel message of the merciful love of God our Father, who is ready to embrace everyone in Christ. We can do this to the extent that we imitate Christ who became poor and enriched us by his poverty. Lent is a fitting time for self-denial; we would do well to ask ourselves what we can give up in order to help and enrich others by our own poverty. Let us not forget that real poverty hurts: no self-denial is real without this dimension of penance. I distrust a charity that costs nothing and does not hurt.

May the Holy Spirit, through whom we are "as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything" (2 Cor 6:10), sustain us in our resolutions and increase our concern and responsibility for human destitution, so that we can become merciful and act with mercy. In expressing this hope, I likewise pray that each individual member of the faithful and every Church community will undertake a fruitful Lenten journey. I ask all of you to pray for me. May the Lord bless you and Our Lady keep you safe.

From the Vatican, 26 December 2013
Feast of Saint Stephen, Deacon and First Martyr

FRANCISCUS

© Copyright - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

The Thin Red Line: War Told Through Poetry

Malick’s reclusive artistry has once again proven to be fruitful. After twenty years of absence from the film industry, he resurfaced in 1998 with a war epic told through beautiful cinematography, lyrical narrations, and remarkable, affecting characters. 

The Thin Red Line is an adaptation of James Jones’ autobiographical novel about the Battle for Guadalcanal during the Second World War. I will not trifle with the infantry numbers and company letters; these are minute details to remember compared to the film’s deep and profound message about the nature of man in the face of war and war itself. 

The film opens with the contemplating voice of Pvt. Witt (James Caviezel) who has gone AWOL from his company and is living with Malenesian natives in the South Pacific. He is in raptures with the simplicity and innocence of their ways and the beauty of the trees and the ocean that make up their community. This is to the degree that when he is finally found out and brought back into his company, he makes it a point to show his immediate commanding officer Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn) his displeasure, going as far as telling him “I am twice the man that you are.” At this point, we get an understanding of Sean Penn’s patient character, who doesn’t react but seems to silently—maybe even melancholically—agree. A good deal of the film’s metaphysical strain is carried out by the profound exchanges between Pvt. Witt and Sgt. Welsh: Witt believes in hope and beauty beyond the present while Welsh is your “there ain’t no world but this one” type of cynic.

But Malick’s philosophical vision doesn’t so much intend on elucidating the existence of an afterlife, but more on painting the face of war—a face hideously twisted, barbaric, and sad. He does this with a poetry so fluid and honest that you can’t quite help but attach yourself to the characters: weeping with them at the loss of their friends, cursing at the mad thoughtlessness of their superiors, rooting for them even as you know that the other side deserves as much to come out the skirmishes alive.

This I want to highlight because it is so telling about the pointlessness of war. At first Malick hides the Japanese soldiers from our view; he only gives us the perspective of the American soldiers: how scared, desperate, thirsty they are. We see them get killed brutally as they approach the Japanese line, one by one they fall dead and bid their surviving mates to “please write my mother.” We form sympathies for the wasted American soldiers and aversion to the cold-blooded brutality of the Japanese. As the troops get closer to the Japanese-invaded hill, we also get more shots of Japanese soldiers. When the Americans finally breach the Japanese defense and topple them over with a decisive victory, Malick also blows us over with a dramatic, gut-wrenching scene: the Japanese soldiers are shaking and crying. They are just as afraid, just as desperate, just as thirsty. 

This is where the question presents itself. Why? 

This great evil, where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine?

Malick doesn't give us the answer but encourages us to ask. He doesn't overtly preach to stop having wars either but instead approaches it as a given. War is real and it is ugly, but what does it mean if it means anything at all? Who issues the orders to send men to their deaths and what gives them the right? What good comes out of this sacrifice? Peace? Freedom?  The paradox is almost laughable.

Maybe I haven't read enough books to make philosophical claims on the nature of violence, but I understand that it all boils down to love. If men only understood love, the Source of it, would there be a need to covet power? To usurp territories and oppress people?

There is a point in the film where Pvt. Witt says something very striking to me:

Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man.

And Genesis 1: 27 comes to mind:

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them . . .

If only men took time to understand the great love behind this gesture of God to make us using His own image, His face, it would've been enough to just look at another person and see all the beauty and goodness and hope that this world holds. It would've been enough just to love. There would be no need for more lands, more influence, more wars. 

Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free.

But God did not stop at creating us in His own image. When the world forgot what love was, He came down to be Love Himself in Christ incarnate. Christ taught us how to love again, to look at each other with a gaze that shakes us to our core. Christ has bought us freedom and peace with His passion and thus rendered all violence useless. And even now that people are still fighting and killing each other, "no war can put it out." We have been set free. We already have peace. The problem is we don't know where to look for it. 

Nevermind that I'm shamelessly proselytizing. Whether or not you believe as I do, The Thin Red Line gives you a sense of a mystery, a Mystery that works behind the flight of birds, the silence of the ocean, the humble whisper of trees, the smile of a beloved, the dear company of friends—even as death, fear, and pain hang like a dark tinge in the background. 

Malick might have sacrificed the general audience in favor of a thoughtful narrative, but I feel like he has made the right decision with this film. Fluctuating from one character perspective to the next through narrations that never fall short of poetry, he shows us that humans in the face of war are not bullets that can be disposed of at the drop of a word. Each one of them have homes they long to go back to, families they missed, internal fears they struggle to overcome. Toward the conclusion of the film, it didn't even matter anymore which side won, the audience is made to feel that both sides lost. And yet! There is hope!

Sgt. Welsh: You still believe in that beautiful light, are ya? How do you do that? You're a magician to me.

Pvt. Witt: I still see a spark in you.

Perhaps in the end, whether set in war or in a less violent circumstance, we are just looking for a way to remember where we came from, to find meaning toward which we can drive our lives. And all this is a mystery. All this is the Mystery.

You're the death that captures all. You too are the source of all that's going to be born.

Nobody Said That Then!

 
 The Gratuitous Proliferation of Verbal Anachronisms

In this age of movies when "everything" is obsessively thought of down to the last detail to make the reel seem as real as possible, it is a surprise that less attention is paid to the script and the usage of slang or expressions proper to their history.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in The New Yorker, demonstrates that in TV shows and movies we watch—especially of the periodic genre—for all the perfection designers strive for in production, set, and wardrobe, the same amount of effort isn't being invested in ensuring the accuracy of the dialogue. 

--------------------------

More than ever before, the makers of movies and television shows set in the historical past take care to get period details right. What we see on the screen tends to have been conscientiously researched. Medieval peasants, Civil War-era soldiers and politicians, and Old West cowboys and Indians no longer wear obviously machine-sewn clothes made of obviously synthetic fabrics. Houses and streets contain furnishings and vehicles actually in use in the era portrayed. There is some recognition of the fact that, in days of yore, men wore hats year-round, often got dirty, and didn’t necessarily shave every day. We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.

I’ve been watching episodes of “Masters of Sex,” a dramatic series about William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the famous midcentury sex researchers. It’s a good show, every bit as entertaining and clever as Emily Nussbaum says it is. But what drives me nuts about it—and about a good many other high-end cable period pieces, such as “Deadwood” and “Downton Abbey”—is the gratuitous proliferation of verbal anachronisms.

A few examples from “Masters of Sex,” which is set in St. Louis in the early nineteen-fifties: 

“I’m going to pass on the bacon.” People played a lot of bridge back then, but “pass on,” as a metaphor for skipping or refusing something, was not yet in use. 

“This is way more than you owe me.” No. No way. No one used “way” this way in 1953, not even Valley Girls. (Valley Girls had not yet been invented.) “This is much more than you owe me” would be way more authentic. 

“If this place were a meritocracy, they’d be throwing money at you.” The word “meritocracy” was coined in 1958. It would not make its way to flyover country for several more years after that. 

“Breaking news.” You might have heard this phrase in the newsroom of the New York World-Telegram, circa 1953, but it filtered down to the general public decades later, especially via cable-news chyrons. In the fifties, the closest civilian equivalent would have been “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin.” 

“Trust me, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Nobody said “Trust me” back then. Everybody said “Believe me.” 

 “Heavy!” As an interjection exclaiming that some idea or experience is portentously important (as opposed to simply denoting an object that weighs a lot), “Heavy!” is post-1965 hippie slang. It would not have been used in this sense a decade earlier, any more than “Bummer!” would then have been used to denote a bad experience or, indeed, anything at all except a hobo. 

“If the Reds nuke us…” As a (usually derogatory) term for Communists or the Soviet Union, “Reds” passes period muster. “Nuke,” especially as a verb, does not. 

“I’m so sick of Establishment thinking.” The late, great British journalist Henry Fairlie repurposed “Establishment” as a noun and adjective, referring to the adepts and/or ideas of a self-perpetuating, dominant élite, in a 1955 essay for The Spectator. The roughly parallel nineteen-fifties bugaboo was “conformism.” 

 “It’s a game-changing offer.” William Safire, the late Times columnist and conductor of the paper’s “On Language” department, nailed down the etymology of this one in 2008. “Game-changer” made its début in 1982, in the sports sections of newspapers, referring to decisive plays in particular games, not to changes in the rules or methods of play. The term made its metaphorical way into business jargon during the nineties and came to rest in politics after the turn of the century. “In early 2003,” Safire wrote, 

White House officials began telling journalists “nuclear weapons are a game-changer” and to transform Iraq would be “a geopolitical game-changer.” By June of the next year, President Bush made it official, with definition attached: “A free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East is going to be a game-changer, an agent of change.” 

Game-changing, you see, does not always change the game for the better. 

“The board was blindsided.” This extremely useful football term, referring to the sacking of a quarterback from out of his field of vision, did not enter the language as a metaphor for unpleasant surprises until the nineteen-seventies. 

 “I knew that on Day One.” Another dismal excrescence of the seventies. When Eisenhower was President, a person would say “from the start,” or “from the beginning,” or “I always knew that.” 

“I’m trying to get my head around it.” More hippie slang. It’s just possible that someone might have said, “I’m trying to get my mind around it,” but even that would be a stretch. 

I suppose you are more likely to notice (and to be irritated by) anachronisms like these if you are of a sufficiently advanced age to have been alive and sentient during the period covered by “Masters of Sex.” But some fraction of younger people—those who listened attentively to the talk of their parents and their parents’ friends, those who have read fifties novels and watched fifties movies—may notice, too. Anyway, Hollywood, why do you bother getting the visual details right if you’re going to ignore the aural ones? 

Are there no production designers for language? There ought to be.

First appeared in The New Yorker, February 10, 2014