Of Gods and Men

Of Gods and Men (2010 Xavier Beauvois) poses an interesting test case. To what extent is Christianity conventionally understood compatible with art? This question may seem misplaced and, of course, a naïve reader will immediately point to Chartres Cathedral and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (or the Sistine Chapel ceiling) as obvious examples showing the perversity of my challenge. But note that I pose the question in terms of “Christianity conventionally understood” – and all Christianity properly grasped is conventional with respect to certain dogma and certain habits of mind (the rest of heresy). Christian faith proclaims, as Eliot said in The Four Quartets, “all is well and all will be well.” Evil is overcome; conflict must resolve into mutual forgiveness and mercy; there is order and justice in the world. These theorems, I suggest, are incompatible with most dramatic art – art flourishes on conflict, violence, ambition, competitiveness, hubris. In my view, the factors that make great Christian art interesting to us are precisely those elements of despair, skepticism, and doubt that are not, in themselves, Christian. Of Gods and Men is completely Christian in the action that it portrays and in its moral and ethical values. For this reason, the film is intensely moving and powerful, but I wonder if it is a work of art. The paradigm inducing reaction is a scene late in the picture involving the nine monks, protagonists in the film, taking a vote in their Trappist monastery. The situation is this: this small community of French monks lives in a beautiful monastery on a wooded mountain slope, apparently in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria. Religious extremists are terrorizing the community and the government is involved in a brutal crackdown. The monks, who include within their number, an elderly and ailing doctor, are caught between the two factions – they tend to the wounds of the terrorists, are threatened by the government troops involved in fighting the counter-insurgency, and live as servants to a Muslim community that seems largely indifferent to them. The monks have previously discussed whether they will leave the embattled war zone or remain to “tend to their flock.” Initially, half the monks were anxious to escape and return to France. In the scene that seems paradigmatic to the film, the monks vote and, one by one, raise their hands signifying that they intend to stay in the monastery (with predictably dire results). The scene is repetitious – first the monks verbally express their commitment to staying on the mountain; then, they vote (I was secretly hoping that someone would change his vote). Everyone agrees; conflict is overcome: the Church united will oppose evil although the result will be martyrdom. Two things about the scene, which is intensely moving, are problematic: all conflict is completely resolved without question or doubt and the director doubles the action, first having the monks say that they will stay and, then, staging their assent as a vote. It’s all too neat and clean: but, of course, is the truth is simple, then, the representation of the truth must also be clear and simple – and that I suppose is the answer to my concern, but one that doesn’t exactly satisfy me. This is one of those movies that inevitably makes people cry and it is unabashedly manipulative – too much so in a spectacular scene involving the monk’s last supper (they sip some wine, toast one another, and listen to…what? Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – it’s as if we have stumbled into the wrong room in the Cineplex: hey! This wasn’t supposed to be The Black Swan; this mistake is all the more problematic since a continued motif in the film is Gregorian or Cistercian chant – the monks all have beautiful singing voices and sing elaborately poetic liturgical music that has a role as commentary on the action.) The leader of the monk in a voice-over commends ecumenicism (if that’s a word) and refers to his executioner, in a startling image, as “my friends of the last minute”, denouncing in advance those who would interpret the movie as hostile to Islam. The film is simply too clear, too Christian, too forgiving, too beautiful, and ultimately too moving – in its noble and beautiful way it somehow seems to pander to an impulse that we have toward clarity in a world that is anything but clear. (The picture is also, perhaps, subtly racist – all of the monks are obviously Frenchmen; why aren’t there any monks who are Algerians? Normally, a mission in non-Christian land has many local people associated with it, including members of the clergy and religious community that come from Muslim or non-Christian backgrounds – in keeping with the film’s radical simplicity, all of the monks are European; the people threatening them are all north Africans – could it really have been this simple? In most border or frontier situations of this kind – for instance, in the American west – the majority of the people involved in conflict had mixed backgrounds – Little Crow was a member of the local Episcopalian church and, on the morning of the Great Minnesota Massacre, first attended Sunday Services; many of the worst murderers were half-breeds; the Indian agents oppressing the Sioux all had Lakotah wives. This makes situations of racial conflict far more problematic when you can’t tell for sure who is friend or foe.) I write at length with many cavils because, in spite of everything, this film affected me very deeply.