Why do the heathen rage? Thoughts and questions inspired by The Fountain.

I finally got around to watching The Fountain last week.  The Fountain is a s.f. film that was released in 2004 and is generally regarded by the s.f. community as an important and stylish film.  It surely is a subtle masterpiece of story telling that presents our transcendent desires for eternal love and life in an artistic and beautiful way.  I was impressed with the film and it definitely caused me to think.

The film actually follows three distinct and very similar story lines–each separated by 500 years.  Each story involves the separation of two lovers (played by the same actor and actress), and the attempt of the lovers to make their love eternal.  I will not go into a full review here, but suffice it to say this attempt at creating an eternal love touches on many aspects of life, spirituality, and science.  Specifically the film touches on the following ideas:  reincarnation, Buddhist mysticism, Mayan mythology, the nature of death, ecology, the great chain of being, comparative religion, the function and limits of science and reason, and of course, the film also makes a point of depicting orthodox Christianity (specifically in this case the Roman Catholicism of 16th century Spain) as being a bloodthirsty and malevolent religion fueled by greed and a thirst for the blood of the innocent.

My question is this–why do the heathen rage?  Or, to put it more simply and perhaps more thoroughly:  why and how did a popular knowledge and understanding of Christian Mystery (the preferred Christian term over mysticism) die out so completely in the West?  Why on Earth is it that when Western artists (even Christian ones) want to depict someone or something as being mystical in a film or book, an Indian or a Buddhist or a Mayan or an African experience is shown?  Why is Christianity so frequently pictured in the popular imagination as simply a worldly religion of materialism, corruption, greed, perversity, and duplicity?  Why is it that every non-Christian religion is spiritual, metaphysical, and mystical?

The Fountain  depicts Mayan and Buddhist spirituality as enlightened forces that really complement a scientific understanding of the universe, but Christianity in the film is relegated to…of course…an inquisator who graphically and mercilessly tortures heretics to death to the thunderous applause of a huge Christian crowd.  The film even opens with a quotation from the Book of Genesis–where God puts an angel to guard the Tree of Life from humanity.  Even this is a critique of Christianity–the God whom the Christians worship cuts us off from eternal life, while the film depicts Mayan cosmology as being true and complementary with the spiritual realities of life:  the Mayan creator god offers us the tree of life that the Christian God hides from us.

The Fountain is so beautifully filmed and edited, and yet, I just had to shake my head at the anti-Christian symbolism.  It would be different if The Fountain did not reference Christianity at all, or if it presented Christianity positively as it did the non-Christian religions, but the film instead depicts Christianity in the most negative sense imaginable.  Since I have seen The Fountain, I have spoken to several friends about the film, and they all admitted that they liked the film and found the mysticism in the film to be deep, well presented, and thoughtful.  I mentioned that it would be great if someone could make a film that was that beautiful and well done, but depicted Christian Mystical experiences instead of Pagan ones.  But when I mention this I have gotten blank stares….”but, Christianity offers no mystical experiences” is the essence of the responses I seem to get!!!

And this is what astonishes me…that so many atheists and Christians in the West only view Christianity materially as a social ethic or a moral code!  Christianity, it seems, is good for prompting us to feed the poor (that is, when it is not torturing us to death for no reason), but if one wants to experience the Divine–one has to look to Buddhism, Hinduism, Animism, Mayanism, Aztecism, etc…

I wonder….I wonder how this state arose.  The experiencing of Christianity as an ethic or as literature seems to  me to be a product of Western Europe’s embrace of “enlightenment” in the 17th century, which itself is a consequence of the religious revolt that arose in western Europe in the early 16th century.  Western European Man’s communion with material “enlightenment” affected both his science and his Christianity, but I think the problem may in fact be much deeper than this.  As I type this–I am looking at my copy of the Philokalia that is sitting on my desk.  How can anyone read and reflect on the Philokalia and not see Christianity as a mystical religion?  The problem is, of course, how many “Western” Christians and atheists have ever read, or even heard of, the Philokalia or the ideas it contains?  These original mystical aspects of Christianity are not popularly known in the Western/Americanized media.  How is it that most Christians in the West have become ”children of a lesser God”?

I’ll continue these thoughts later as time permits, but let me end for now by saying that The Fountain is a beautiful film that I liked a lot.  Watching it, however, prompted me to wonder about many things.  That is, I think, the mark of a great film.

–pio