Happy Easter!

Below is Jeremy Jahns's review (it only just came out!) of Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. This movie apparently fascinated the Muslim world. Word is that Muslims in Muslim-majority countries quietly obtained DVDs of the movie to watch it secretly. While I doubt it affected any Muslim's fundamental outlook, I hope it provided at least a glimmer of insight into what Christians think of the one they name their savior. Muslims, of course, don't believe that Jesus was anything more than a great prophet. They also subscribe to the heretical notion that the corpus upon the cross was not really Jesus, and that there had been a sort of divine substitution. Last bit of Muslim-Christian trivia: Jesus (Isa) is named in the Qur'an more often than Muhammad is.

Jahns, in his review, does mention the idea that some saw Gibson's movie as a kind of "torture porn." Thanks to a class I had taken on Catholic sacramentality, and thanks as well to the philosopher Dr. Vallicella's writings, I understand that Catholic sacramentality sees a unity of flesh and spirit: spiritual agony is reflected as physical agony, and vice versa. By this reckoning, the suffering of Jesus had to be portrayed by Gibson—a conservative Catholic—in all of its awfulness, as a symphony of rent, pierced flesh and cries of anguish. So what non-Catholics see as mere "torture porn" is seen by Catholics as a proper reflection of Christ's spiritual pain and desolation. Hence the movie's title.

Dr. Vallicella's contribution to my knowledge comes from his various discourses on and critiques of St. Thomas Aquinas and his "hylomorphic dualism," which comes down to the idea that the soul is the form of the body. I'm at least nominally Presbyterian, yet the notion makes a weird kind of sense to me even though I don't believe in souls. My buddy Mike, in the States, rediscovered his Catholicism years ago, so I can only imagine (if this isn't too presumptuous) that he subscribes to something like a Thomistic view of hylomorphic dualism.

Interestingly, Mike's wife is a Christian Scientist, and in Christian Science, it's taught that there is no matter: there is only a monism of spirit, therefore no hylomorphic dualism. I once told Mike that Christian Science sounds a lot like Greek idealism. It could also be seen as a species of panpsychism, but Greek idealism generally reduces the cosmos to Platonic Ideal Forms while panpsychism reduces the world to mind or soul (noūs/νους "mind" or psyche/ψυχή "mind/soul/spirit"). But both of these views share with Christian Science a resolute immaterialism. (And yes, despite their fundamental religious differences, Mike and the Missus make their marriage work, and quite happily, too.)

Well, whatever perspective you come from, I wish you a Happy Easter. May it be a good day for you, however it is that you define "good," Jesus or not.

The standard benediction from my old church:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all, now and forever. Hallelujah and amen.
—variation of 2 Corinthians 13:14