The Last Blasphemy Of Scorsese?

I have just watched Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (a controversial film based on the book of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis). The film explores some interesting areas of fear and self-doubt, which, on a human level are very thought-provoking, even if they are an inaccurate ascription to Jesus Christ. On reading the opening credits I was pleased to see that Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay, as he's written some excellent material for Scorsese before.

If one accepts the non-biblical aspect as something in the story which parts company with the standard Christian view, one finds that there is some terrific dialogue about fear and doubt and satanic temptations and theodicy and personal ambiguity that is felt to be relevant in the lives of everyday Christians. In the film, Scorsese took what is said to be Jesus' prayer in the garden about wanting the cup to pass from Him, and using literary license he turned it into the dream sequence Christ had on the cross, in which He gets the opportunity to live a "normal" Hebrew life, marrying, and having children, and dying content and of old age.

My principal reason for enjoyment was that I am interested in how people think, and the emotions that lead them to their conclusions in life. The book and movie portrayed an author's honest doubt, and a serious questioning of a subject that I happen to see differently to the author - but I do enjoy seat of the pants speculation, even if I don't agree with the conclusion of the artist. The upshot is that we might not like all that we see in creativity, but even the most controversial, discordant and discrepant opinions or modes of expression may (and probably will) contain within them at least a grain of truth; therefore we should be impelled to consider them carefully.

In doing so we remain alive to the dangers of complacency, rumour and superstition, and we force ourselves to question how we know what we do and whether the sources from whence our knowledge came were reliable and verifiable. Because of the controversial dream sequence the film was panned by the religious right - which is not hugely surprising, given that, in the inceptive days of film making it wasn't even legal in the UK to depict the material image of Christ. It was probably the big budget Biblical epics in the 50s and 60s which led the way for a more progressive view on expression.

We are told that Christ suffered like no other - and one ought to consider that that form of suffering takes on a personal pain that could only be experienced by God 'becoming sin for us' as the Bible describes. What is becoming sin? Well, we know what becoming death means - it means that Jesus who is perfect and in consonance with His Father had to endure separation of the kind we can hardly imagine - a separation where a perfect God becomes not only subjected to a myriad of physical pain and mental anguish, but a separation in which He actually subjects Himself to dying too.

What the dream sequence tries to convey in its prelude to ultimate separation is 1) the abstraction of God becoming closer and closer to 'being sin', and 2) God becoming further and further away from being consonant with the Father. What this simultaneity involves is the experience of those myriad of emotions being in an exchange; in the worst torment He is driven towards the fear of 'feeling forsaken' being exchanged for the feeling of having the cup of suffering removed.

In the incursion into the conceptual nightmare of feeling Divinity pulling away from Him, the becoming sin (while not actually 'sinning' himself) seems to entail the conceptual experience of what it is like to live in separation from God, to live as fully human, in the turmoil of feeling forsaken in separation. The dream sequence conveys the power of temptation - not the temptation to divest oneself of love and grace, but the temptation to sense as God the raw reality of humanity and all its weaknesses, the ability to bring them salvation, and yet be told by the bad one that power over the world comes in a different form.

Don’t forget, this is only going on in Jesus’ mind, it is not an alternative ending to the crucifixion (his body never actually leaves the cross). It was an especially good touch making the devil appear in the form a very angelic girl (dressed in white, as you’d expect) who tried to appeal to Jesus with a clever inversion of the very love and grace He was sent to demonstrate. That is what sets up the montage in Jesus’ dream–state that leads to the kernel of an idea about whether the resurrected Jesus will save mankind or whether vicarious redemption.

One final observation – I’m not sure if this was part of the author’s intention or not, but the scene with Jesus being physically intimate with a woman offends (and always ought to offend) not because it is intrinsically vulgar, but because we are primed to think of Jesus as God in the flesh (however much we deny or resist it), and whatever one tries to reconcile to the imagination, the scene disturbs one’s sensibilities because it seems impossible – as though some fundamental law of nature has been contravened. And of course, even if you are an atheist, I suspect one cannot quite feel anything like the same degree of offense at imagining Thor or Vishnu or Apollo in such an act, anymore than one could blaspheme against Zeus or Dionysus.

Whatever else one feels about ‘religion’, there appears to be a genuine ability to tap into the numinous and engage with the most sincere aspects of Christian grace, and, just like contemplating Jesus Himself, The Last Temptation Of Christ confirms (for those who needed confirmation) that there appears to be limits beyond which those further conceptions take us into darkness; into a place that is anathema to our most deepfelt images of what we think God is, and what His becoming man means for us.