Cultural Labyrinth…Organic Machines

The historical trajectory of Christianity and its socialising function is indicative of an ongoing discourse, separating the metanarrative of a transcendental absolute into a plurality of denominations and interpretations. A common field of debate is the transition from Old to New Testament, with the significance of Jesus’ humanity as a bridge between the spiritual and the reality of our materialistic world. The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988) is a film that explores this field within the frameworks of fiction. Within its release, there has been a mixed public reception with a plurality of responses ranging from strong protests against its blasphemous content and evocations of the text as religious and credible. With reference to the film, I will argue that the subject field which the film explores is controversial with the perceived duality of spirituality and humanity, a conception that points towards a complicity between the holy and the damned, the sacred and the taboo. Rather than viewing the mixed public reception as an issue separate of the complicity of opposites mentioned above, I will argue that it is the direct result of the problematic nature of the subject explored, which opens up a multiplicity of representations and receptions. Rather than seeing it as a paradox, I will situate it within discursive frameworks with the assertion that such open debate within the public sphere is positively constructive in redefining, reshaping and changing the significance and interpretation of Christianity. I shall conclude with the assertion that Blasphemy does not function within a clear distinction between the sacred and profane. It is a flexible term that is continuously defined and challenged through discourse.

The Dual Nature of Christ: Complicity of the Sacred and Profane

Pointing towards the division between the Sabbath as a sacred day and the rest of the week as the realm of the everyday functioning with less religious significance, Plate asserts, “the sacred provides meaning and orientation for the profane; the profane sustains the sacred” (2006, p. 37). The existence of an everyday, physical space of the mundane functions as a reference point for the presence of divinity. The fact that the profane must exist in order for the sacred to be meaningful points towards a duality in which giving something a religious significance is related to its ‘other,’ that which is profane and commonplace. In Last Temptation of Christ, “Jesus must resolve the problem of the flesh, Woman, sexuality, and desire for a settled existence by breaking it off, denying it any spiritual power” (Humphries-Brooks, 2006, p. 95). Meaning attributed to Christ is not merely within a predestined divine status but through is act of struggle within his contact with the material world. Scorsese constructs a narrative of Jesus as that of a ascetic “Nietzschean superman,” whose “conflict between flesh and spirit” is the struggle of his “own elevation” towards a state and promise of divinity” (Mortimer, 1989, p. 34). It is within a conscious effort in an intensified battle against the profane that Christianity charts the actions of Jesus as an example of the archetype moral being. However, much accusations of The Last Temptation of Christ as blasphemy revolve around the depictions of such contact with the profane that is intensified through cinematic realism. Such a negative perspective resemble Nietzsche’s negative conception of “monumental history” that “diminish[es] the differences of motives and instigations so as to exhibit the effectus monumentally” (1983, p. 70). Jesus is denied a genealogical portrayal that points towards moments of struggle for the sterile approach of attributing divinity to his status as established authoritatively and historically. Thus, reference towards the sacrilegious as points of contestation is avoided in a denial of the duality of the sacred and profane. By focusing on Jesus’ struggle as the digesis, The Last Temptation of Christ can be considered as an intense imaginative genealogical attempt. While unsettling, it points towards complicity between the sacred and profane by charting the actions of Jesus in conflict with the profane as inevitable reference points for the emergence of the sacred.

Within the duality of sacred and the profane, both opposing terms are denied an absolute meaning when used in varying ways depending on the social, religious and political context. With both terms situated in separate poles, the human interpretation, as propelled by one’s imaginative faculties, injects a subjectivity that exists somewhere between both terms. Plate says, “Blasphemy is fundamentally about transgression, about crossing the lines between sacred and profane in seemingly improper ways,” challenging the “socially acceptable ways of ritualising” as a means to transcend the everyday towards a divine presence (2006, p. 43). Blasphemy is an act of imagination, in which negativity results through the uses of socially unacceptable means to bridge the divide. It is neither absolute nor simply profane. Rather, it functions by complicity between sacred and profane as portrayed through a socially unacceptable channel or bridge.

Christ’s narrative, as established from the gospels and in relation to the Old Testament law, reflects such an act of blasphemy. It is profane within its context because his gospel is attributed to the imagination and is only established as truthful and authoritative text through the later canonisation of the New Testament. This concerns the dual nature of Christ, both human and divine. In Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus is portrayed as overly human, struggling in the process of gradually accepting his status as divine messiah. There is a clear distinction between the old law as signified by the authoritative temples run by the Romans and the revisionist message embodied and preached by Jesus. In a particular scene, Jesus proclaims to a Roman priest and the crowd outside the temple, “I am the saint of Blasphemy,” pointing towards an awareness of religious change being implicit with a revolutionary denouncement of the established rituals and offerings that allow a transcendence of the everyday to divinity.

Jesus preaches the notion of Sacramentality, “the principle that affirms that through Creation and the Incarnation of Christ, the material universe is sacred” (Blake, Spring 1996, p. 385). This notion of sacredness of the everyday can be viewed as an act of blasphemy due to the collapse of a distinction between divinity and the profanity of the material world that includes the body of Christ. When Judas asks Jesus if he felt pity for ants, he replies, “When I see an ant. When I look at his shiny black eye you know what I see? I see the face of God.” Thus, in the sacramentality preached by Jesus, everything “is capable of embodying and communicating the divine” (McBrien, 1980, p. 731). In his ascent to divinity, Jesus “is tempted by the beauty of material creation because it too is of God” (Braudy, 1986, p. 18). In taking materialism as taboo towards divinity and viewing the human as damned upon the advent of original sin, this conception of sacramentality inevitably points towards the complicity of the profane and sacred. Similarly, “profane materials” such as “cameras and photographic paper, can yet produce sacred symbols full of power” (Plate, 2006, p. 126). In preaching sacramentality, Jesus denies the simple denunciation of materiality as profane. Therefore, rather than easily prosecuting the film as an act of blasphemy, it is possible to approach it as a bridge towards the divine. It is a manner of perspective within the act of viewing that determines its significance.

The body and sexuality of Christ demonstrates uneasiness towards this complicity. Steinberg claims, “ to profess that God once embodied himself in a human nature” through the incarnation of Jesus “is to confess that the eternal, there and then, became mortal and sexual” (2002, p. 73). However, there is a history of apprehension towards the depiction of a sexualised Christ. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus sits within Mary Magdalene’s brothel as she has sex with her assembly line of clients. Her highly sexualised body is exposed to Jesus, who controls and represses his sexual desire. Mary signifies the profane through her feminine presence as a “symbol of temptation, of bodily happiness and existence reduced to sexual pleasure and family life” (Humphries-Brooks, 2006, p. 88) Jesus’ presence in the brothel and the sense of a struggle with his sexual desire establishes the perturbed notion of Jesus’ humanity as coupled with sexuality. To exist as a human entails the bodily drive towards procreation. The threat of sexuality as rightfully human to Jesus’ struggle towards divinity is signified through the snake, who speaks in Mary’s voice, he confronts in the desert. It is fore grounded as the strongest threat that is consummated through the hallucinatory sequence in which Jesus, being deluded by the devil that manifests in the form of an angelic girl, abandons the cross to live a procreative life with Mary. In echoing Kazantzakis’ motivations for this sequence, Holderness states that such “promptings are constitutive temptations for human nature and” because of Jesus’ humanity and sexuality, it “should be accepted as normative rather than ‘evil’” (2007, p. 75).

This sequence also demonstrates Jesus’ sexuality within the sanctification of marriage. Mary is “dissociated from carnal desire and identified with family” (Friedman, 1997, p. 155). By associating marriage with a primary sexual desire and positioning it as the ultimate temptation for Christ, the Christian conception of the pastoral family is deconstructed. By giving in to the hallucinatory temptation, Jesus becomes a victim of the complicity between the sacred and profane. Because his access and definition of divinity is relative, Jesus attributes marriage with Mary as God’s will. However, in this circumstance, the pastoral nature of family that is sacred becomes the ultimate damnation. Holderness states, “Mortal consciousness provides a perspective on existence that must be epistemologically different from divine knowledge” (2007, p. 67). A human without access to the thing-in-itself is propelled by psychological uncertainty. An attempt to grasp the manifestation of the sacred within the realm of mortal existence might lead to a confusion with its opposite. Thus, pure conception of divinity from the perspective of humanity is impossible.

“Let us then realize our limitations. We are something and we are not everything. Such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight” (Pascal, 2000, p. 160)

In describing Jesus’ path towards divinity, Bien states, “From total flesh it advances to a mixture of flesh and spirit. Thence to a preponderance of spirit, and at last to total spirit” (2007, p. 437). The Last Temptation of Christ psychologically charts this genealogical development, following Jesus in his full humanity, his acceptance of God’s will with the insertion of sacramentality and finally, the transcendence that reunites him within God’s absolute body. This linearity that demonstrates an ascetic struggle is an imaginatively conceptualised psychological development that aims to makes sense out of the inexplicable. Scorsese self-reflexively establishes this by asserting at the beginning of the film that it is based on a “fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict”. The imaginative faculty implemented by Scorsese in charting this progress denies the duality of humanity and divinity a religiously established factuality. By no means does it deny the gospels its religious significance. Rather, he chooses to fixate the narrative on the complicity of worldly damnation and the holy, fore-grounding such a problematic conception to instil in the reader an awareness of the irrational nature of the gospels. The confusions and uncertainty that creates the fissures in the film’s biblical narrative reflects such irrationality. Being bounded to the limitations of our intuitive faculties, God’s divine will that constitutes a metanarrative is inaccessible and exists outside the text. To believe is to acknowledge the existential anguish resulting from complicity between the sacred and profane. Only through God’s absolute knowledge can the complicity be resolved. Thus, I assert that the dual nature of Jesus, as explored in The Last Temptation of Christ, is bounded to a multiplicity of receptions due to the unresolvable his incarnation. His humanity couples his divinity with the damnation of materiality. To believe is to approach such an issue with faith. To rationalise it within our discursive capabilities will result in different interpretations.

Public Reception as Reflective of an Ongoing Discourse

Malone asserts that scholarship has established that the Gospels “was really a community process over decades that listened to, preached, applied, adapted, re-edited the Jesus stories” (1989, p. 6). The Last Temptation of Christ can be viewed as a modern extension of such interpretation of Jesus’ narrative. The complicity explored in the section above that concerns “the divine humane struggle, which mirrors the debate in the early church,” ensures an ongoing dialogue that opens up a multiplicity of viewpoints (Forshey, 1992, p. 177). The film’s reception is reflective of this. Christianity is a religion that conceptualises an absolute. Being brought into the public sphere, access to such an absolute is infused with a diversity of denominations and perspectives. Similarly, the spectator of The Last Temptation of Christ brings to the film subjectivity related to class, gender, nationality and religious orientation. This results in a plurality in reception. In view of a healthy and indiscriminative dialogue, such pluralism reflects maturity within a diversified culture. However, for the public reception of The Last Temptation of Christ, charges of blasphemy were surprisingly widespread. Forshey notes, “several bishops in major Catholic centers, without having seen the film, discussed banning it” (1992, p. 171). Such attempts aim at domination rather than generating dialogue.

It is useful to use Foucault’s conception of discourse to analyse the public reception of The Last Temptation of Christ. Diamond and Quinby describe Foucault’s discourse as “a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance” (1988, p. 185). While Christianity represents an absolute, the socialised interpretation should be open to discourse. The protests from the Christian congregations that deem the film as blasphemy aim at sustaining their established view of Christianity. For instance, in relation to the fully human and divine status of Jesus, there is the theological notion of an infallible divinity within the body of Christ. The attempt to circulate the unquestionable status of such a view is indicative of domination and can be viewed within relations of power. The ideology of the Church is rendered as ‘final’ within an organised and calculated structure by overpowering and reducing texts that propagate a different reading of the gospels into examples of blasphemy. When there is no opposition in the form of alternate receptions of the film as religious and truthful in intent, it would result in a stably stagnant public sphere, functioning through domination and the mass control of individuals and their imaginative faculties. However, in analysing the nature of power, Foucault rejects the notion that it is a final agreement that forces and commands. Rather, asserts that:

“… a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” be thoroughly recognised and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (1983, p. 220).

This opens up the possibilities of discursive resistance. Scorsese’s “imaginative recreation of the gospels constitute[s] a genuine theological exploration of areas often deemed taboo to the faithful” (Holderness, 2007, p. 96). He is representative of Foucault’s active thinking ‘other”, a subject that reacts to the domination of Christian doctrine by developing his own perspective in understanding the Gospels. Middleton notes that while Kazantzakis’ novel was labelled as scandalous by “the Church of the 1950s,” modern Christian theology has been “reinterpreting the soteriological aspects of the faith in ways more conducive to Kazantzakis’s own soteriology and to the spirit of our age” (1998, p. 286). Similarly, for Scorsese, amidst the charges of blasphemy, there are interpretations that consider his film deeply religious. This is indicative of an ongoing discourse, the rearticulation of meaning attributed to the Gospels.  It is through such dynamics that the articulation of Christianity and the borders that define socially accepted means of representation of the holy and damned within a specific juncture are visible. Rather than being a conception rooted in absolute domination, there is an ongoing struggle between conflicting interpretations. Therefore, the reception of The Last Temptation of Christ should be considered as a whole, weighing in the charges of blasphemy and positive readings alike. It should not be taken as a paradox within the reception of a controversial work. Rather, it is the result of using intuitively constituted knowledge to rationalise the unresolvable complicity between the sacred and profane. Within the limits of knowledge, an access to the divine is bounded in constant discourse.

Conclusion

In this essay, I discussed about the complicity between the sacred and profane with reference to The Last Temptation of Christ and its reception. Firstly, I demonstrated how the profane is used as a reference point to define to sacred. Next, I discussed how the transition from Old to New Testament constitutes an act of blasphemy. The notion of sacramentality as preached by Jesus refutes the clear boundaries between the sacred and profane. Next, I discussed how the human side of Jesus is coupled with sexuality. I went on to discuss the limitations of human rationality in accessing the divine. This results in confusion between the sacred and divine as demonstrated in the last temptation sequence of the film.  The unresolved nature of Jesus’ human and divine status results in a rational attempt to comprehend it. However, due to the limitation of knowledge, such comprehension is bounded to uncertainty, resulting in an ongoing discourse or mediation. This results in a diversity of reception. I used Foucault’s theory of discourse as rooted in power struggles to demonstrate how interpretations of the Gospel are constantly changing. A ‘subversive’ text like The Last Temptation of Christ challenges the domination of absolute factuality as asserted by the Church. Plate declares that “the line between the sacred and the profane is drawn in sand and the proverbial winds of time blow, covering the lines, only so they will be redrawn” (2006, p. 60). It is my motive in this essay to demonstrate this, that the idea of blasphemy is relative. Therefore, the ideas that propel a subversive text such as The Last Temptation of the Christ should be considered and debated together with its diverse receptions. It will allow us to regain the significance of the Gospels in ever creative and honest ways.

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