About
the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ”
(From the Byzantine Icon to the TV Set)
The Holy Scripture does not give us any detail concerning the aspect
of Jesus. This fact gave birth to some controversial theories concerning
the historic aspect of the Saviour. The truth about the aspect of
God preoccupied the minds of the Christians immediately after the
epoch of those who were eyewitnesses. The reason for which the aspect
of the Saviour did not spread among the first Christians arises from
the very essence of Christianity, from the high philosophical principles
concentrated around the spiritual world and not around the material
one. That is why the material aspect of Christ was replaced very easily
by symbols, for example the fish (made of stone or of amber and hung
by Christians at their neck in the same way we do today with the cross),
and had no impediment upon their belief in Him. The first Christians,
because they were waiting for the second coming of the Saviour (which
they considered to be immediate) focused more on the spiritual side,
that is the facts which concerned more their own Salvation and paid
less attention to external details, for example the physical aspect
of the Saviour. Certainly, this situation changed in time. Due to
the fact that very few people could reach the high Christian philosophy,
and the fame of the Wiseman from Nazareth surpassed the boundaries
of His people spreading among the pagans, some images of the Saviour
began to appear as each people could imagine Him. For instance, the
Romans represented Christ as a soldier carrying a sheep upon His back
(The Kind Sheppard, Roman catacombs, centuries II-III), while the
Greeks represented Him as a beardless young man, bearing in mind the
model of Hermes. In one word, the cult of the human body cultivated
by the Greeks, the pagan anthropocentricism reflects inevitably upon
the painted representations of Christ. It is against this fact that
the fathers of the Vth–VIth Ecumenical Synod (692) rise and
interdict categorically all images by means of the rule 100, images
which “…put spells upon the eyes, corrupt the mind and
create explosions of devilish pleasures”. That is why, the Byzantine
style of canonic representation has been established to represent
the Saviour, His Mother and all the Saints and is present even today
in Orthodox churches. Serious and essential, the Byzantine style catches
the state of the deified, spiritual body lacking any allusion to human
body; this is the new body about which Apostle Paul speaks. This canon
was violated in the western countries where a soppy, even perverse
painting has been developed since the Renaissance and until nowadays.
But which is, in fact, the truth about the image of God because since
He had a human body and lived among us, it is clear that He had a
historic countenance, which He appeared with. Let’s see what
the Christian philosopher Origenes says in his work “Against
Celsius”, written in the year 248 where he quotes Celsius: “If
the Spirit of God embodied truly in him (Jesus), then he must distinguish
himself from the other ones by the beauty of his face, by the perfection
of his body, as well as by the art of speaking. Because one can’t
believe that the one in whose body was something of divine origin
can’t distinguish himself from the other ones. And still people
say that Jesus had a miserable body and a face so ugly that it provoked
abhorrence”. 1 The opinion about un unpleasant aspect of the
Saviour belonged to the early Christian theologies (Tertulianus, Saints
Clement and Cyril of Alexandria, Saint Irineus of Lyon, and others)
and it was based on the literally understanding of one of prophet
Isaiah’s verses referring to the embodiment of God: “He
had neither a pleasant face, nor beauty so that we could admire Him
and no pleasant aspect to care for Him. He was despised even by the
last man of no importance” (Is. 53, 2-3). However, we incline
to joint the parents who find in this verse the direct indication
to Saviour’s passions. In this respect, the description, which
is clearly repellant, does not influence the conception about the
physical perfection of Christ. In fact, imperfection itself is a consequence
of the falling. Because “God created the man according to His
own image” (Creation, 1, 27) “ and God realized it was
good” (Creation, 1, 12-18-21-25). So, creating Adam, God made
him perfect and only sin could generate all the later imperfections,
even the physical ones, as stigmata of “his death” (Creation,
3, 3) and as a violation of the command of God. Yet “the holiness
of the body of our God and Saviour was infinitely greater than the
holiness in which the being’s body was created – the body
of Adam”. 2 Any physical imperfection, in this case, in the
description of our Saviour, would come in contradiction with the lack
of sin, which is said to characterize Him. Christ’s physical
perfection is the guarantee for the success of the renewal of the
old Adam by the new Adam – our God.
Starting from the same fact - that of deifying of Christ as noted
by Origenes, Saint Ignatie Brancianinov writes: 3 “ The body
of the God-man had a strange grace and beauty, exactly as His proto-father
and prophet David sang about Him: Adorned with beauty art Thou more
than the sons of men (Psalm 44, 2). But the physical beauty of the
God-man had not the same effect upon women, as usually does the beauty
of men6. Such a blasphemy must be rejected although it is pronounced
and accepted by heretics.7 On the contrary, the body of Christ healed
all the passions – both of the body and of the soul. His body
was impregnated with divine grace and spread it all around to those
who touched Him, both men and women. Great power went out of Him –
says the Gospel – and healed everybody.(Luke, 6,19). And all
those who touched Him were healed. (Mark, 6, 56). This is that divine
body about which God Himself stated: The one who eats My body and
drinks My blood will live forever and I will raise him from the dead
in the Last Day. (In.6, 54-56). Saint Joannnis Chrisostomus is of
the same opinion when he states that “Jesus was a very beautiful
man”; together with Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Blessed Augustine,
Saint Ambrosias of Mediolania they were convinced that the God- man
“adorned Himself with beauty more than the sons of men”;
“ Thy lips were covered with holy grace and this is why Thou
art blessed by God.” (Psalm 44, 3).
But the stage director Martin Scorsese considers this problem in a
very different way in his movie “The Last Temptation of Christ”
(made after Nikos Kazantzakis’s book). 8 For him, Jesus Christ
is not the Chosen One. Not only that He equals everybody, but also
He is completely trite, He is more than ordinary. His face lacks any
trace of the divine grace and is physically repulsive. His face is
full of platitude, exactly as His life is. In His discussion with
Judah He states that one needs to free his soul because if one does
not so, the chain of evil will never be broken, that the main purpose
is the salvation of the soul and not the liberation from the Roman
oppression or the salvation of the body, as Judah states. All these
do not convince the spectator through the metaphorical solutions given
to the events, especially the crucifixion, which abounds in purely
physiological elements and in the sufferance of Jesus crucified. He
dies physically on the Cross and one can’t believe His spirit
will ever reach at His Father.”9 The impression made by Scorsese’s
movie is not even this base philosophy but something even scarier.
The idea that Christ was not God is found in Gospels at the God-killing
Jews and that is why they crucified Him. “We found this man
rebelling our people and saying He is Christ”(Luke, 23, 2).
The idea that Jesus was born in fornication and that He was demonized
is also present in Gospels at the same mad Jews (Mark, 3, 22; John,
8, 41). Scorsese goes further and presents on the screen the filthy
gossips created around our Saviour and Mary Magdalene.
In fact, this subject preoccupied not only Scorsese. The Spanish writer
Jose Saramago publishes a novel with the same subject “The Gospel
after Jesus” (immediately translated into Russian) for which
he was awarded with the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature. The Romanian
yogis who imported it for their western colleagues discussed this
subject. The yogis, especially the western ones, try to motivate their
orgies not only by the means of their deities as Krishna (who had
16,800 goppy-sheperdesses) but also by ascribing such lying “qualities”
to our saints and even to our Saviour Jesus Christ (we are aware of
the speculations made by the resemblance of the words Krishna and
Christ). They like to discuss not only on the case of Mary the Egyptian
and of Mary Magdalene but also on some other examples taken from the
Patristic Texts in which are presented the fallings of some monks
followed by their repentance and reformation.
The yogis even found the phrase from the Gospel in which Jesus “praises”
fornication: “Her multitude of sins is forgiven because she
loved a lot” (Luke, 7, 47). Considering their clever minds,
“she loved a lot” refers to the fact that she loved lots
of men. As I discussed more than half a day with one of these yogis,
a person who pretends to be a writer and I could not convince him
by the contrary, I dare to make things clear. If Jesus praised Mary
Magdalene for the fact that “she loved lots of men” as
yogis pretend, why did Mary Magdalene (who loved Jesus sincerely till
the end of her life) gave up fornication, if He praised her for doing
this? Where do we know she gave up fornication from? From her crying
and tears. For what reason such a famous woman as she was at that
time, came and humiliated herself in front of all the others? Because
she spread His words together with the Apostles till the end of her
life and because she was the first person to whom Jesus revealed Himself
after Resurrection (John 20, 14-16). The trouble with this movie is
not its subject because it belongs to an unbeliever, but the fact
that it was presented in an orthodox country. Nowhere in the world
can one present an anti-Semitic movie without being followed by repercussions,
especially in Israel.
Never the Istanbul Television will present a movie in which prophet
Muhammad is mocked at. While in India, no one dares to drive away
a cow from the autoroute because it is considered to be saint! The
same movie was presented in Russia in 1997. This is the opinion of
the famous theologian, with a doctorate in philosophy, maybe the most
famous apologist of contemporary Russia, deacon Andrei Kuraev: “the
most outrageous event of the religious life of Russia of the year
1997 happened on November 9th. On this Sunday evening the NTV presented
the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ”. The hidden
conflict between the huge informational kingdom of Russia and the
Orthodox Church broke out, the former declaring war on the latter.”11
The Church gave no occasion for this. The calendar was the only reason:
November the 9th, the celebration of the Crystal Night. This is the
sad night when persecutions on Jews began in the Nazi Germany. It
is understood that the main director of the NTV, Alexandr Faifman
as well as its owner, Mr. Gusinski (general director of “media-MOST”
and president of the Russian Jewish Congress) keep in mind a painful
recollection of this night. But why he decided to revenge upon the
Russian orthodox believers for the crime of the German neo-pagans
(it is already known that Nazism, nourished by occultism, was an enemy
not only for Judaism but also for Christianity)? Why this pain of
him flooded as an insult upon that people who saved the European Jewish
Community from annihilation?
No insults? Was it only the right of every person the express freely
his own opinion? Yes, there is such a right, within its natural limits.
The free movement of my hand ends exactly where the face of another
person begins. The other one’s pain – this is the border
upon which not even the most legitimate sentiments of mine can pass.
Neither my joy, nor my sorrow must provoke other people’s pain
(…)
Yes, every person has the right do discuss with Christians, the right
to criticize and to contradict. But he has no right to spit and to
utter blasphemies. It is a blasphemy to stamp upon one’s memory
bed scenes between Mary Magdalene and… And there are the explanations:
“Look, this fact is intended, these are hallucinations created
by the Devil in the consciousness of the Crucified”, explanations
which have no importance. According to Christian knowledge, in general,
bad and lying thoughts cannot appear in the consciousness of the God-man
Christ. The voice of the King of Darkness cannot sound within the
Son of God. But his movie is a blasphemy not only from the point of
view of the believer. A massive anti-cultural movement promotes an
intentional blasphemous reading of The Gospel. Thirst for mockery,
for defiling, everything is saint, characterizes the contemporary
nobility. Pushkine becomes interesting not by his poetry but by his
“Don Juan list”; they remember Chaikovsky especially when
talking about sexual minorities…”12 The fight of the Church
against such sub-productions is not the fight of some fanatic persons
against cultural progress but an impulse to direct towards the true
culture. An impulse to discover and make known the profoundness of
the human spirit that is not proper to animals, that is to make us
aware of the immortality of our human soul, of the high philosophy
we are summoned to understand. In this specific case, there is not
a simple violation of religious intimacy of Christians, but a distortion
of reality and a pathologic alienation from the minimum intellectual
stability, which is necessary to each person.
The movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” was rejected
not only by the believers but also by non-believers, because it is
full of improper realism, but not of realism, widely speaking. In
the Orthodox theology there is a concept as “religious mystical
realism” (Pavel Florenski, Leonid Uspenski, and others) whose
essence lays in the fact that iconography when creating “the
unimaginable face” (or “the incomparable resemblance”)
reflects the supreme deifying reality. And that is why the religious
symbol is much more realistic than the illusory imitation of life
in realistic painting. The symbol does not oppose to realism, but
to the abstract imagination, which declines any relationship with
reality, except that with itself.13 That is why the canonic representation
of Christ in orthodox iconography is the closest to His historical
and mystical reality and only the spiritual immaturity of some persons
led to the decay of the icon in its Renaissance and Roman-catholic
variant. In this respect it is very easy to follow the spiritual state
of a certain people end epoch, considering the way of thinking the
icon, the seeing face of the unseen. With the movie “The Last
Temptation of Christ”, mankind touches the climax of moral and
spiritual regression. What God did in the beginning “according
to His face and resemblance”, does no longer exist. Now it is
the man who creates God according to his face and rotten resemblance
(Romans 1, 23).
And if through the means of “the seventh art” –
the movie, painting surpassed itself (and we are entitled to call
the movie a living painting), more than the essay of the Ancients
to stop the time, that helpless sigh of Goethe: “Stop, oh, moment:
how wonderful you are!” then the movie “The Last Temptation
of Christ” is the unavoidable sequel of a not respected iconographic
canon from the year 692.14 The lack of obedience of the Roman- Catholics
as well the practice of painting catalyzed by the feelings of the
decayed nature, developed together with the extension of painting
within the film art, towards the serious accents which result from
this movie.
1. Iu.G. Bobrov,
Bases of Old Russian Iconography (Osnovi iconografii drevnerusscoi
jivopisi), Axioma, Sanct-Petersburg, 1995, p. 188
2. St. Ignatii Brancianinov, Izlojenie ucenia Pravoslavnoi Tzercvi
o Bojiei Materi, Statisi, Sanvt-Peterburg, 1997, p. 10
3. Idem, p. 11
4. The case of Mary Magdalene who, after touching His feet, got holiness
and gave up sin.
5. The novel inspired by the Gospel and known as Passion douloureuse
de notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, par Ecaterine dEmerich ( With he Saint’s
note). For our century see, for instance, “ The Gospel after
Jesus” by Jose Saramago (the1997 Nobel Prize).
6. We note hat Nikos Kazantzakis, considered the greatest Greek prose
writer of the XXth century was awarded both with Nobel Prize and with
the anathema thrown upon him by the Orthodox Church of Greece.
7. Iacovlev E.G., “The Image of Christ in Orthodoxy within the
context of the Universal Culture” ( “Obraz Hrista v pravoslavii
v contexte morovoi relighioznoi culturi’, Naucino Bogoslavskie
Trudi, Belgorod, 1999, p. 240
8. NTV (Russian HTB). An independent TV, the most popular in the post-soviet
Russia
9. Deacon Andrei Kuraev, “ Kak delaiut antisemitom”,Odighitria
Publishing House, Moscow, 1999
10. Deacon Andrei Kuraev, ibidem
11. Quoted by Iacovlev E. G., ibidem, p. 240
12. It is against this fact that the fathers of the Vth-VIth Ecumenical
Synod
(692) rose and forbade all unchaste images by the means of the canon
100: “ That is why we command that from now on such images that
put spells on the eyes, corrupt the mind or create explosions of devilish
pleasures, should not be painted on wood or on other materials. If
somebody dares to do this, anathema must be thrown upon him “.
Translated from Romanian by Elena
Antohi
