Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini
1964 • Italy
I’m writing this in a room surrounded by books whose spines display a taxonomy of marbled striation and spinal contusion spiderwebbing through finely worn leather to crackling glossed paperback. Right now, I’m thinking: of all of these collections, how many could be considered holy texts? How many might be meditations on the divine? What percentage could be refutations, denouncements, exegeses? Couldn’t any of them be holy, even by a small measure or a technicality? Apocryphal or sacrilegious, isn’t any addition to the word by extension part of it? If you’re a proponent of grace, might any human work be considered divinely wrought?
An Augustinian, a Franciscan, and a Trappist monk sit in a grove on a lovely spring morning. The Augustinian turns to his compatriots and spake thus: there must be a means by which we might measure our devotion and, in so doing, might know which of us has most closely achieved benediction. At which the Franciscan simply smiles and spreads his arms, as if to say, look upon this bounty and ask whether is it any more or less blessed for its variety. Unsatisfied, the Augustian turns to his Trappist friend who simply smiles and spreads his robes as if to say….
Why are you anxious about clothing?
-Matthew 6:28
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They don’t toil, neither do they spin.
It’s no surprise to me that Paolini, an avowed atheist throughout life, made this film or that it may even rightly be considered as Christian apologia. Just like it’s no coincidence that the most fervent, and often the most convincing, advocates of religion are those who, at one point in their lives, actively fell out of faith. One way of knowing the power of faith is to have felt its absence.
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is the product of pure faith from the faithless. Like an impressionist landscape or a field recording of folk tradition. It is a genuine translation of what is ultimately incommunicable, without pretense and without affect. This is the thing in all of its ahistorical fecundity. It is what I’m going to call going forward, The Word. Like the word of John 1:1.
Although a different author, the shorthand is convenient for our purposes.
Saint Augustine of Hippo considered the Sermon on the Mount the elucidation of Christianity’s highest ideals. Albert Schweitzer described them as a distillation of the extreme practice of faith that would be necessary in the imminent eschatology, the end that is assumed In the beginning, with the beginning being The Word.
Here we are, three millennia later, still awaiting that final punctuation mark.
I was exactly 15 years old when I stopped believing in God. It was the day my grandfather died.
It was a very sad day, I remember. It was unseasonably warm for a New England February and the light and warmth of the sun radiated through the crust and mildew-stained hospice windows like a set of high beams spilling into the room from an idling bus on the front lawn. The good warm weather came so suddenly that there were no birds chirping or squirrels darting between trees foraging for seeds. Everything was very pleasant and very still.
The day was sad because of these things and not because my grandfather died. It was sad because I didn’t feel like mourning the man. It was sad because I wanted to be outside and to laugh with my friends and to make out with the guy I was with at the time instead of being surrounded by these hangdog, weepy people who brought me into existence and for that reason thought they held sway over me and my thoughts and my feelings.
My memory of that shabby hospice room in West Middlebury is less a defining point in my development toward adulthood and more a concise summary of the person I was also going to become, a fractal spinning off in both directions toward more or greater expressions of itself. Or maybe better, a flower petal spinning from its cap and surrounded by dozens of nearly identical sheafs distinguishable only through time’s weathering.
There was not a revelatory moment on that sad day when I suddenly realized I no longer had any faith. It was just a despairing sense that drifted into the corners of my mind that the world I lived in was all and only the matter and mucus and viscera that I saw in front of me and, for all the life that welled up inside of my chest, I was no different from all of these seemingly or actually lifeless people around me.
This is the nature of faith, as Pasolini depicts it. The divine is not there to be interrogated, faith is not a thing to be bartered. Gabriel makes its annunciation and it is so. Christ heals the lame and It is so. God is silent in the garden.
The Word is not what is being interrogated in the film. Christ’s divinity is not the x factor, humanity is.
Jesus asks us to consider the lilies of the field in their humble beauty. As though the flower is not also in a very real struggle to assert itself over the unassuming farsetia aegyptia or any of the array of denuded scrub species dotting the faux biblical landscape of southern Italy.
The evidence of Passolini’s intent is in his perspective. Throughout the film, we observe Jesus and the evidence of his Godhood. Our presence is academic, these miracles are written. The beatified looks on the gathered worshipers and acolytes are proof only of our own role as witness. Despite the trappings of neo-realism, much of the movie is the cinema of spectacle, in a very literal sense.
The only time we are with Jesus is as He enters Judea. We are there as the camera, jostling among the apostles who glide remora-like among a great ocean predator, the fish of men of the city, no longer cowed by the avatar, now throng about him with pestilent limbs and lousy rags for any escape from a hateful and ugly world.
The scene is a violent jolt from a state of grace. We at last see what divinity truly looks like in a world of bodies and corruption and treachery,
They don’t toil, neither do they spin.
What follows is treachery and betrayal and God’s silence. There are no more miracles for the lame and blind and forsaken. This is The Word. Jesus did not weep for himself.
I was with a girl in college whose family had immigrated from the Philippines during the Marcos regime. Her father was a lawyer and dissident who fled the country through a humanitarian visa as the country was put under martial law in the late 70s.
This girl was devout, I was a burnout. She sometimes tried to get me to promise to go to charity drives after we smoked a joint in the alcove behind our dorm block. Sometimes I even went.
But what she told me one night while we were sprawled out on a mound of plush throws and overstuffed comforters in the sweet acrid fog of my scuzzy little dorm while my roommate was out with whatever dipshit she was seeing at the time, what this small Filipino girl said to me was she believed Jesus was the divinity of Christ was secondary to his humanity. That she felt Christ was his most Christ-like in his vulnerability. His doubt, his rage and his sorrow. To her, Jesus was a Byronic hero, torn between the boundless empathy of God and the small-minded vanity of man.
Those weren’t her words at the time. She only knew that Christ’s humanity is necessary in understanding Christianity.
I believe that girl is now a Ph.D. at a hospice in Buffalo or somewhere upstate, reviewing signs of life for the nearly departed. We stopped seeing each other junior year over an accumulation of little things. No hard feelings.
But I think of her now, here at this writing, in the periodical wing of the Hockessin Public Library and I can’t help seeing that belief as the central reason why we just couldn’t work out all of those little things that did end up making such a decisive difference.
Because she believed in the essential humanity of Christ, and I disbelieved in his essential inhumanity. To put it another way, she saw Christ as an ambassador, I saw him as a tourist.
Although I suppose I didn’t have much of an opinion at the time. I suppose it’s not something anyone is really asked to consider about themself. Those with faith don’t think of The Word as negotiable because, despite catholicism’s auspices, it’s almost always personal.
And for those without faith, what difference does it make anyway? At least in any way that is not clinical and academic and ultimately kind of sad.
I think that is what Passolini meant to capture in the film. I think believers understand it as the story of mankind’s redemption in the love of Christ. And I think he and I and all the other non-believers will see humanity wanting even with the love of The Word.
-Esme R.
Suggested Viewing:
- Mouchette (1967) by Robert Bresson
- Teorema (1968) by Pier Paolo Passolini
- Saint Omer (2022) by Alice Diop