Posts
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Problem With Rationalizing the Bible
Joel S. Baden
January 3, 2012
The Huffington Post
For 2,000 years, the biblical stories in which God changes the course of nature were called miracles. Indeed, that is the very definition of a miracle. And miracles were the defining feature of the deity, the ineluctable proof of God's existence and power. Yet since the rise of the Enlightenment in 18th century, with its commitment to scientific inquiry and its opposition to superstition, the nature of biblical miracles has been called into question. Events that were scientifically impossible were deemed ... impossible. Yet at the same time, for millions of people the Bible retained and retains its position as a repository of truth, both abstract (moral, ethical) and literal (historical).
The conjunction of modern scientific inquiry and allegiance to the Bible has led to an interesting turn of events. We see an ongoing attempt to find a rational basis for some of the more unbelievable biblical events, to "explain" them scientifically. Examples of this abound. The flood of Genesis 6-9, in which the whole world is covered with water? That was the result of a massive comet or meteor crashing into the ocean, creating a worldwide tsunami and killing almost everyone on earth.
The plagues in Egypt of Exodus 7-10? They were a natural chain of events instigated by a very modern culprit: global warming.
The splitting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14? A coincidence of a very low tide and a very strong wind.
The manna with which the Israelites were fed in the wilderness? Nothing more than a naturally-occurring desert lichen, or perhaps the sap of the tamarisk tree, or, least appetizingly, perhaps the excretion of the tiny bugs that feed on tamarisk sap. The list could go on.
For the skeptical modern, these sorts of theories, produced by scholars and glossed with the veneer of rigorous scientific research, are attractive because they prove the idiom (ironically enough from the Bible itself, from the great skeptic who wrote Ecclesiastes) that there is nothing new under the sun. Science explains all. At the same time, these theories speak also to the biblical literalist: science, that great enemy of faith, does not undermine but in fact confirms the Bible's truth. The two camps converge in a rare moment of harmony: What the Bible says is actually what happened.
The problem, however, is that none of these theories about what happened are, in fact, what the Bible says happened. The Bible doesn't say that a comet struck the ocean, or that there was global warming, or that it was low tide or that the Israelites ate lichen (or worse). It says that there were miracles, originating entirely with God, to punish or protect, to destroy or to save. Miracles cannot, by definition, be natural occurrences, no matter how rare or remarkable. It is not that the Bible reflects the state of knowledge in an earlier, pre-scientific culture, and that we who are more enlightened have the capacity to understand the events in the Bible more accurately. The Bible is not a record of ancient observations; it is a grand theological statement about God's interaction with humanity and the world. Rationalizing its stories does not "explain" the Bible. Rationalizing, in fact, obscures it.
And that is because these theories do not illuminate the biblical text in any meaningful way. Even if it were proved that a comet did cause a massive flood event at some point in the past, our understanding of the biblical story of the flood would remain unchanged: it was God's punishment for the wickedness and violence of humanity. Even if there are various edible substances in the desert, the biblical story of the manna is still a story of divine providence at a time of intense need. Attempts to find some middle ground are precarious at best. For example, the great Orthodox Jewish biblical scholar Umberto Cassuto (1883-1951) suggested that the splitting of the sea was indeed an explainable coincidence of tide and wind, but the miracle was that these occurred precisely when the Israelites needed to cross. This is neither a literal reading nor a scientific one, despite its attempts to be both. The power of the Bible comes not from its scientific veracity, but from precisely the opposite.
We cannot have it both ways. The Bible cannot both be a foundation of faith and conform to modern notions of scientific rationality. Nor should it. For true believers, naturalistic rationalizations undercut a central message of the Scriptures, that God intervenes in human affairs. Skeptics must wonder why any attempt is being made in the first place to prove that biblical events really happened. The Bible may be couched as historical narrative, but the claims it makes are claims of faith, which no amount of positive or negative data can alter.
In this holiday season, we may consider the two stories at the heart of Hanukkah and Christmas (although Hanukkah is not a biblical holiday, but the point still stands). According to Jewish tradition, the miracle of Hanukkah is that after the Temple in Jerusalem was sacked by the Syrian king Antiochus in the second century B.C.E., the tiny amount of unprofaned oil remaining, enough to last only one day, lasted instead for eight days. According to Christian tradition, the miracle of Christmas is of course the birth of Jesus to the virgin mother Mary. If we could prove that somehow one day's worth of oil could last for eight by some hitherto unknown natural property of oil -- or if we could prove that somehow it is medically possible for a virgin to give birth -- who would benefit from such an explanation?
Miracles are articles of faith, for true believers today and for the Bible as well. Whether they actually happened or not is debatable. But to chalk them up to freak occurrences of nature is fundamentally to misunderstand the nature both of the Bible and of belief in it.
Video: 3 Orthodox Nuns In Guatamala Take Over Run Down Orphanage
A Home Forever! from Rob Orr on Vimeo.
Three Orthodox Christian nuns take over a run down orphanage in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Hogar Rafael Ayau has been the home to over a thousand children for the past 14 years...but now their facility faces potential closure so they are working to build a new facility outside the city. U.S fundraising efforts are being coordinated by the FHRA - The Friends of the Hogar Rafael Ayau. For more information please visit their website at www.FriendsoftheHogar.org.
Patriarch Ilia Saddened By Arrest of Elder Ephraim
January 4, 2012
Sedmitza
Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia Ilia II expressed sadness over the arrest by the Greek authorities of Vatopaidi Abbot Ephraim.
"We are saddened by the fact that Abbot Ephraim is deprived of his liberty", said the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia Ilia II, during a sermon at the service at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi, reports the Greek agency "Romfea."
Catholicos Ilia said that recently Father Ephraim, superior of the Monastery of Vatopaidi on Mount Athos, visited Russia, where he brought the belt of the the Most Holy Theotokos, which was venerated by millions of believers.
"Now we found out that Archimandrite Ephraim has been imprisoned. This is a sad event. I ask all of you to pray for Father Ephraim," said the Georgian Patriarch, who also noted that he is "very saddened by this event."
Ilia II noted that there also are Georgian monks in Vatopaidi. "We express our sympathy to the entire monastic community", said the Primate of the Georgian Orthodox Church.
"I wish you peace and joy. Love your enemies. This, of course, is difficult. But if you can not love, at least pray for them", said the Patriarch at the end of his sermon.
The Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia said that in the next few days he will make an official statement in support of the superior of Vatopaidi.
Georgian Patriarch Against Great and Holy Council At This Time
October 24, 2011
The Georgian Times
Catholicos Patriarch of Georgia Ilia II spoke about his visit to Constantinople in his church service yesterday. He said he was there on the 20th jubilee of the enthronization of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
"We spoke about the future Orthodox meeting. Bartholomew I wants a meeting of Orthodox churches to take place. We responded to him saying that such a meeting cannot be held until all disputed issues are solved", Ilia II specifically said.
Patriarch Ilia said that the Ecumenical Patriarch's proposal is that all the temples without a mother church must belong to the Ecumenical Patriarch.
"We told him that the temple must belong to the mother church of the country if the congregation wishes, and if the congregation want this temple to belong to the Ecumenical Patriarch, then the mother church will not be against this", Ilia II said, adding that a lot of issues are to be solved and it's very dangerous to summon an Orthodox meeting. He voiced hope that all the issues will be solved, but he also said it would take time.
Bulgarian Holy Synod Clarifies Position Regarding In Vitro Fertilization
January 4, 2012
Novinite
The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is not against in vitro fertilization, according to the Lovech Bishop, Gavrail.
Gavrail told the Bulgarian National Radio, BNR, Wednesday that there had been a mistake in the opinion of the members of the Synod, which was published at the very last day of 2011.
In it, the Holy Synod opposes in vitro fertilization and surrogacy, viewing them as a "human interference that is counter to God's will in the existential foundations of life." (Read here)
Now the Lovech Bishop says that the Synod is only against surrogacy, and sees is it as unacceptable, while both the Greek and the Russian Orthodox Churches agree with in vitro fertilization under the condition that biological material is from the lawful husband. Other conditions include implanting all fertilized eggs and no eggs being destroyed.
"This is how the Church accepts in vitro. This is the opinion of the Holy Synod, and I cannot add anything to it," Gavrail said.
He, however, explained why the Church opposes surrogacy.
"There are many things there which are unacceptable. Tomorrow they will start cloning us. Do we have to agree to that as well? Maybe they try this method somewhere already? Our opinion is well explained in our December statement, but there is a mistake about the in vitro fertilization," according to the Bishop.
Searching for a Narrative for Eastern Orthodox in America
December 8, 2011
Daniel Silliman
Watch American Religious Studies and American Religious History for even a little while, and you'll see a developing, evolving way of talking about different groups. Go back -- not too far, even -- and one finds almost all the attention given to denominational organizations, and everything framed in terms of continuity or discontinuity with Boston Puritanism.
It's not like that anymore.
Just in recent years, the account of Islam in America is growing and changing. It's now de riguer to note that the first Muslims came to America with the importation of slaves from Africa. Added to that is a new emphasis on the various ways Islam has come to the US: with the slaves, emerging out of the 20th century African American community, with immigrants from South East Asia, with immigrants from the Middle East, etc.
A similar turn has happened in accounts of immigrants in general. Talk about Judaism, talk about Catholicism, and you have to talk about immigrant communities. One of the results of this has been to break up the homogenity of these religious identities. One looks today, for example, at Catholics, plural, focusing on the practices and behaviours of lay Catholics, the way religion functioned in their lives and in their sense of themselves, rather than focusing on Catholicism as an abstraction.
One blank spot, right now, however, is the Eastern Orthodox in America.
This blank spot kind of gets poked at, but there doesn't seem to be a standard way to talk about this religion and this religious experience yet.
Part of this may be the numbers. Pew puts all the Orthodox Christians in America today at about .6%. Muslims also come in at about .6%, though, Orthodox Jews are half that, and Buddhists and Jehovah's Witnesses are only slightly larger, with .7%. All those groups have more established narratives, it seems to me.
When the Eastern Orthodox are talked about, it's often with this very general rubric of "immigrant," without any specifics as to how their experiences and histories were different, if at all, from other immigrant groups.
Charles Lippy, in his brief Introducing American Religions gives two paragraphs to the "wave" of Eastern Orthodox Christians who came in the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, "Adding to diversity." "Adding to diversity" is Lippy's thing, so by the time one is 100, 150 pages into his book, saying that this is what the Orthodox did is only slightly more enlightening than "they existed."
Most of his two paragraphs are dedicated to noting the countries the different groups came from, as well as the economic draws that brought them to where they ended up.
This is symptematic, more than a problem specific to Lippy. It seems like there's not really a story about the Orthodox that anyone knows. Where, with Jews in America, one talks about the Hassids, or Reform Judaism and Isaac Mayer Wise, with the Orthodox Christians, there's no standard story, no genrally know starting points, public moments or figures.
The second volume of Edwin Gaustad and Mark Noll's anthology, A Documentary History of Religion in America since 1877 has the start of a story, and focuses on one very public moment in the Orthodox's American history. They give 6 1/2 pages to Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska. This is a major improvement, though obviously still really limited. They include two documents, one Father John Veniaminov's "The Condition of the Orthodox Church in Russian America," the other a report on religion in the Russian American colonies and the Russian American Company, which was published in Overland Monthly in 1895. Both documents are really interesting -- Veniaminov, for example, writes that at first the Aleuts only believed in and prayed to "an unknown God" about whom they knew little -- but still only offer the tiniest sketch.
One would even be forgiven for thinking the Orthodox churches in America died out with "Russian America," or, that if it do still exist, it's in the form of left overs. In one editorial notes, Gaustad and Noll write "Russian Orthodoxy continued to be a major religious force in Alaska through the nineteenth century," and "Russian Orthodoxy was planted with sufficient nurture to endure to the present day."
Oddly, these are both statements sort of directed towards establishing the importance of the Orthodox in America. But kind of do the opposite.
I'm not knocking Gaustad and Noll. It's actually a really excellent anthology. The point is not that they somehow failed, but that, really, there's at best only a really limited and sketchy narrative of Eastern Orthdox Christians in America.
There's basically nothing, it seems, when it comes to contemporary times.
There's just sort of not a narrative here, and certainly not one that fits into any larger, broader narrative about religion in America. There's precious little actually on this subject (exceptions: John H. Erickson's Orthodox Christians in America ; Alexei D. Krindatch's work, including "Orthodox (Eastern Christian) Churches in the United States at the Beginning of a New Millennium: Questions of Nature, Identity, and Mission").
There should be, though. The more recent history of Eastern Orthodoxy in America is particularly interesting, I think (and not just because a number of good friends of mine are a part of it) and yet it seems basically absent from scholarly work on religious culture and recent history. The evangelical press, by contrast, has paid attention to and noted the movement of evangelicals converting to Eastern Orthodoxy since at least the '80s. Yet there's no standing, standard account of these conversions, and why (in aggregate) they happened, and what that says about American religion at the turn of the 21st century, and what that says about American culture in general.
Instead of a good account that takes this movement seriously (while not, as is sometimes the wont of the converts themselves, over-estimating it as seismic and history-altering), what one gets is along these lines:
"Some years ago a sizable number of American Evangelicals, perhaps in search of a more colorful version of Christianity, became Eastern Orthodox as a group. For some reason they chose to join the American branch of the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the most ancient Christian bodies in the world. (Its liturgical language is traditionally Arabic. You can’t get much more colorful than that.) Apparently these refugees from Billy Graham embraced their new faith with a fervor that alarmed some who were born Orthodox."
That is Peter Berger -- the great Peter Berger, I would even say -- speaking out of the abundance of ignorance.
Even if it were the case these converts were merely seeking colorfulness, that's a remarkably unsympathetic, un-empathetic way to describe the longings of other people's souls. He could have easily just said the were "perhaps in search of more depth, history and tradition."
But, the point is, there's really no standard narrative of this event in recent religious history that could have been plugged in here by Berger. He's essentially summarizing word-of-mouth and arguments that have been made in Christianity Today and other such publications. He still could have given a better account -- this isn't an excuse -- but at least part of the problem is that the Orthodox story just isn't told.
Father Michael Oleska, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, recently issued a call to the Orthodox in America to start telling their stories. To themselves. To each other. He's urging the religious telling of stories, arguing for the importance of such stories to a community and a culture. He says, in the video-message, that the Orthodox should start telling their stories because "culture is the enactment of a story."
My hope is that as those stories are told, scholars of American religion pay attention.
Read further on this topic in the post by Matthew Namee titled "Toward an American Orthodox Historical Narrative".
Their Noonday Demons, and Ours
John Plotz
December 23, 2011
The New York Times
By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself, or do a little charity work. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?
This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck.
These days, when we try to get a fix on our wasted time, we use labels that run from the psychological (distraction, “mind-wandering” or “top-down processing deficit”) to the medical (A.D.H.D., hypoglycemia) to the ethical (laziness, poor work habits). But perhaps “acedia” is the label we need. After all, it afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort toward a clear final goal — but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia — or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.
In the later Middle Ages, monks performed fewer solitary tasks, and as the historian Andrew Crislip has shown, their vulnerability to the torments of acedia diminished. But for early medieval writers, acedia’s symptoms were so prolific as to be often contradictory. For St. Benedict, the affliction took the shape of “a little black boy pulling the monk away by the hem of his garment,” while to the great fourth-century ascetic Evagrius it sometimes appeared as “demons that touch our bodies at night and like scorpions strike our limbs.” Gluttony and laziness can betoken acedia, one Desert Father, St. John Cassian, warns. However, “excesses meet” and “reluctance to eat and . . . lack of sleep put me in much greater danger.” The only real constant, during acedia’s heyday, was that it prevented monks and nuns from keeping their minds on their tasks, and their bodies in the right place. “Have you deserted your cell?” Basil the Great asks. “Then you have left continency behind you.”
If the diagnoses in medieval texts were so psychologically acute, it’s very likely because the most ferocious accusers and denouncers were themselves acedia sufferers. Today, too, it takes an acediac to know acedia. When I read Cassian on “disgust with the cell,” I look around my own office and sigh deeply; and I greet like an old friend the monk whose gaze “rests obsessively on the window” while “with his fantasy he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him.” Cassian’s description of acedia as mental drift, meanwhile, perfectly encapsulates the pointless and random detours that stop me from bearing down on a particular page: “The mind is constantly whirling from psalm to psalm, . . . tossed about fickle and aimless through the whole body of Scripture.”
Of course, the desert monks were emphatically not us. Stripping their lives down to the bare bones, they sought the divine and fought the demonic alone. What could be more different from us, tap-tapping away with social media always at hand? They gazed upward toward God; we shoot sideways glances at one another while trying to resist the allure of e-mail (nowadays, you can “desert your cell” without shifting from your chair). Still, “excesses meet,” and now that solitary unstructured brainwork has returned with a vengeance, we may be suffering an epidemic of early medieval acedia. Is there anything we can learn from the monks and nuns who came before us?
As the motto orare, laborare et legere (pray, work and read) suggests, monasteries and convents from the sixth century onward found ways to situate divine contemplation within an essentially convivial context. For community-oriented orders like the Benedictines, collective singing, tilling the soil and shared meals were as crucial as divine reading. There are some parallels to this kind of enforced sociability among contemporary lab scientists, who stave off both distraction and torpor by sharing with their colleagues a contentious and collaborative life of the mind.
Those of us for whom long stretches in an acedia-hazard zone are unavoidable may have to look farther afield for comfort. It’s worth noting that an acquaintance with ancient philosophical traditions concerned with self-control and mastery of the passions (especially Stoicism and Platonism) did much to shape the mental prescriptions offered up by the Desert Fathers. The mental exercises Evagrius urges on those whom acedia has laid low — for example, dividing oneself into two, “one the consoler and the other the object of consolation” — unmistakably anticipate the self-disciplining (and self-forgiving) exercises of modern cognitive-behavioral therapists.
There is also comfort to be found in the realization that monks who knew the dangers of acedia nonetheless kept going to the desert — not because they thought they would be safe from acedia’s temptations, but because they courted those temptations in the hope of strengthening themselves for further work. One of Cassian’s most moving stories involves a rebuke to an aged monk who scorns a young monk’s acedia because he himself has never experienced it. The old man, Cassian writes, was no sort of spiritual guide for a young monk looking to overcome these inevitable temptations.
One lesson to be drawn from those monastic stories is that persistent, alluring stimulation may be just as unavoidable in our new digital life as it was in the Egyptian deserts, though it now takes the form of Fruit Ninja rather than hem-tugging demons. Flight by itself is no solution. Disconnecting the Internet or confiscating a teenager’s cellphone probably helps less than looking for ways to live with persistent temptation and to move beyond the mixed pleasure that every post, tweet or “level up” affords.
The Benedictine monastery I recently visited in central Massachusetts did have a Facebook page: 15 people “liked” a post on how a monk buying pipe insulation was mistaken for a medieval battle re-enactor. Being there, though, was something else. The sung Latin prayers and the communal lunch — consumed in companionable silence while one monk read aloud — subtly but unmistakably guided my thoughts toward some of the same questions that monks and nuns have grappled with for centuries. When I curled up to read one of Cassian’s quarrels with St. Augustine, it was as if the two divines were only a shout away. My smartphone pinged seductively from the bedside table, and I let five minutes go by before I checked it. Well, almost five minutes.
John Plotz teaches English at Brandeis University. His current book project is entitled “Semi-Detached: Absorption and Distraction Reconsidered.”
Why Our Planet Is Unique
In “The Loneliest Planet” (Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2011), Alan Hirshfeld reviews astrophysicist John Gribbin’s Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique:
Aliens invaded my life one Sunday night in 1957 when I was 6 years old. As I pulled close to watch Walt Disney's "Wonderful World of Color," the screen of our old black-and-white Admiral TV seemed to bleed into rainbow hues. Disney introduced the evening's program: "Mars and Beyond," a meditation—in retrospect, an entertainment—on the possibility of life on other worlds. "Will we find planets with only a low form of vegetable life?" Disney wondered, then nodded genially toward his towering, metallic co-host. "Or will there be mechanical robots controlled by super-intelligent beings?" To my juvenile mind, these questions were an invitation to a living-room ride into outer space.
The program featured a wry, animated history of ideas about otherworldly beings, interrupted by scientific testimony from dark-suited experts like Wernher von Braun. With the rush of a Disneyland roller coaster, it launched full-tilt into speculation about alien life forms. I sat riveted by a succession of DalÃ-esque landscapes, overrun by writhing, python-thick vines and nightmarish carnivorous creatures, all waging the brutal business of survival to an eerie electronic score. The import of these scenes was clear, at least to a callow 6-year-old: There must be life out there; we must find it.
The hothouse of 1960s space exploration whetted my taste for all things extraterrestrial. I read a book called "Intelligent Life in the Universe" (1966), written by Russian astronomer Iosif Shklovsky and expanded upon by a rising planetary scientist from Harvard named Carl Sagan. Gustav Holst's "The Planets" became the theme song of my adolescence. Like Walter Cronkite, whose muted narration betrayed his own disappointment, I was crushed by the grainy photos of the desolate, utterly lifeless surface of Mars sent back by Mariner 4 after a flyby in 1965.
Gradually my youthful certitude about the imminent discovery of life on other worlds tempered. New information corralled the broader reaches of speculation. Martian landers found no sign of microbes in the soil, while probes to Venus crisped in that planet's sulfurous hothouse. Radio telescopes, which have now spent decades on the lookout for transmissions bearing the telltale signature of an advanced civilization, have received not a single one.
Recent discoveries might seem to boost the likelihood of life elsewhere in the galaxy. We have confirmed the stunning ubiquity of extrasolar planets in other star systems, the latest a possible Earth-analog orbiting right in the habitable sweet spot—not too close, not too far—from its central sun. Biologists have encountered bacteria underneath a mile of Antarctic ice and nestled within rocks in a Yellowstone geyser; it's only a modest stretch to imagine that the next generation of robotic spacecraft might find simple biota in equally hostile havens on Mars or on one of Jupiter's moons.
But as John Gribbin points out in his grimly plausible book, "Alone in the Universe," there is a world of difference between habitable planets and inhabited planets. Mr. Gribbin's narrative reduces the vision of Disney's documentary into the counterfactual fever-dream it really is. The author's conclusion: Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life in the galaxy, the product of a profoundly improbable sequence of cosmic, geologic and climatic events—some thoroughly documented, some inferable from fragmentary evidence—that allowed our planet to become a unique refuge where life could develop to its full potential.
Chief among these, paradoxically, was a near-cataclysmic planetary collision during Earth's infancy, which gave birth to the moon. Such encounters were relatively common in the harum-scarum chaos of an early solar system that teemed with veering planets and asteroids. In its suicidal blow against our world, the Mars-size impactor generated enough heat to liquefy both itself and Earth's exterior. Its dense, metallic core plunged inward to join our planet's existing metallic center, while the rest swept up part of the fiery terrestrial shell to form the moon.
One consequence of Earth's tumultuous youth was the thinning of its rocky crust. This has provided the planet with a lively tectonic existence, complete with vapor-spewing volcanoes, continents that divide and drift, and an ecologically advantageous global-temperature-regulation system. Earth's swollen metallic core remained liquid; its constant churning gives rise to electrical currents that generate a far-flung magnetic cocoon that shields us from dangerous solar particles. (The creation of Eden is far more complex than one might have heard.)
Another fortuitous coincidence on Mr. Gribbin's checklist is the moon's large size relative to Earth, a ratio unique in the solar system. Without such a gravitational partner to restrain the disrupting tugs of the sun and Jupiter, our planet might suffer paroxysms of axis-tilting. (Try to run a civilization when your once-temperate hemisphere suddenly heels over to an Arctic orientation.) Mr. Gribbin outlines how a series of climate-altering Ice Ages and tectonic shifts benefited human ancestors roaming the grasslands of East Africa.
These events are real; the conclusions are speculative, but plausible. But speculation is part of the fascination (and the fun) of the extraterrestrial-life debate and part of the reason it has percolated since antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus, in the fourth century B.C., envisioned a plurality of worlds, some of which, he claimed, harbored living beings. Plato demurred, holding that a unique Creator would form a unique cosmos; thus, the central Earth must be the sole harbor of life. Early Christian scholars, including Thomas Aquinas, tended toward this view. (After all, what God would deliver Earthlings from sin yet abandon his creations elsewhere?) But the issue intensified in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, condemned arguments that seemed to restrict God's ability to seed the cosmos with life, if he so chose. Why would God be so profligate with cosmic habitations yet so miserly with occupants?
The prevailing "lonely Earth" outlook eventually encountered fierce opposition from a tract titled "Of Learned Ignorance" (1440), published by Nicholas of Cusa. Here readers discovered that among the numerous inhabited worlds in the cosmos are our own moon and sun. In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus recast Earth as a common planet, circling but one of a vast population of much more distant suns, and from then onward a stream of planetary-voyage fantasies and broader speculative works emerged.
Readers eagerly flung off life's sober reality and flirted with far wilder prospects of imagination. In a best-selling 1686 confection, "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," French fabulist Bernard le Bovier Fontenelle describes Venusians as "little black people, scorch'd with the Sun, witty, full of Fire, very Amorous," while their glum counterparts on Jupiter "are so very grave, that were Cato living among 'em, they would think him a merry Andrew."
The line between science and speculation has long been muddled. As late as 1800, William Herschel—the same man who discovered the planet Uranus and mapped the boundaries of our galaxy—charted vast forests on the lunar surface and claimed sunspots to be windows into a temperate solar interior. By the time the New York Sun perpetrated its Great Moon Hoax in 1835, the public was primed to believe fictitious news reports of telescopic sightings of otherworldly creatures—as it would be a century later when H.G. Wells's murderous Martians invaded New Jersey via the radio.
Mr. Gribbin admits the possibility —even probability—that elementary life forms have arisen elsewhere in the galaxy. But the object of his scientific and statistical scrutiny is intelligent extraterrestrial life. While he cannot prove a galaxy-wide absence of other civilizations, he presents an array of modern, research-based evidence that renders that conclusion eminently reasonable. He even suggests a decades-long survey of infrared emissions around stars (possibly arising from planetary atmospheres, even water vapor). This would yield the true number of "wet-Earth" planets in the galaxy—in his estimation, zero.
One leg of Mr. Gribbin's argument rests on the theorized life expectancy of advanced civilizations, which he claims is much more fleeting, on a cosmic timescale, than we care to admit. Our species has inhabited this planet for about one hundred-thousandth the age of the galaxy, and it was merely a century ago that we began to transmit radio waves. If technological civilizations did arise before ours, they might have succumbed to war or environmental degradation well before our primate ancestors stood upright.
The rosy alternative—a long-surviving society—seems even less plausible. With millions of years of technological advancement, why haven't they migrated throughout the galaxy by now? Or why haven't we picked up the least shred of their radio-wave chatter? Of course, Mr. Gribbin dismisses such questions: These purported civilizations never existed.
Our civilization's own halting steps into outer space so far suggests an uncertain future for the exploration or colonization of extrasolar worlds. The idea that we—or our robotic avatars—might be the first species to traverse the galaxy presumes a fundamental change in space propulsion, which at present (except in Hollywood) is unsuited to cosmic distances. Looming environmental disaster might yet provide the impetus to send aloft a select segment of the population in a one-way space ark. But an escape-pod scenario is a far cry from true interstellar migration.
Which brings us back to Mr. Gribbin's essential point. Given the 13 billion years or so that our galaxy has existed, whatever fate will befall us here has already befallen "them" out there. In this, the extraterrestrial-life question has always been a mirror of humanity, a reflection of our own limits and dreams as a species.
One needn't sign on to Mr. Gribbin's conclusions to appreciate his logic. Humans are a miracle of blood, bone, and brain, a volatile mixture of compassion and brutality whose most enduring accomplishment—besides self-propagation—is the acquisition of knowledge about our world. We occupy, according to Mr. Gribbin, a unique position in the cosmic scheme of things. Having crowned humanity as the apex of galactic intelligence, Mr. Gribbin warns that there is no second chance: If we destroy ourselves, we will have done a grave injustice to the universe, removing perhaps the only means it has to ponder itself.
—Mr. Hirshfeld is the author of "Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes."
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Did Christ Have A Fallen Human Nature?
Despite what many Orthodox theologians say who have been influenced by Karl Barth, Christ did not assume a fallen human nature, but received the enirety of humanity in a pre-fallen state as a new Adam restoring fallen man to Paradise. This is the biblical and patristic tradition expressed in the Orthodox Church. Below are some quotes to help illuminate this teaching further.
Fr. George Florovsky taught:
It must be stressed that in the Incarnation the Word assumes the original human nature, innocent and free from original sin, without any stain. This does not violate the fullness of nature, nor does this affect the Savior’s likeness to us sinful people. For sin does not belong to human nature, but is a parasitic and abnormal growth. This point was vigorously stressed by St. Gregory of Nyssa and particularly by St. Maximus the Confessor in connection with their teaching of the will as the seat of sin. In the Incarnation the Word assumes the first-formed human nature, created "in the image of God," and thereby the image of God is again re-established in man.
St. Gregory Palamas taught:
As the evil one procured our twofold death by means of his single spiritual death, so the good Lord healed this twofold death of ours through His single bodily death, and through the one Resurrection of His Body gave us a twofold resurrection. By means of His bodily death He destroyed him who had power over our souls and bodies in death, and rescued us from his tyranny over them both. The evil one clothed himself in the serpent to deceive man, but the Word of God put on man's nature to trick the trickster. He received this nature in its undeceived and pure state, and kept it so to the end, offering it as first fruits to the Father for sanctification from ourselves for ourselves.
St. Justin Martyr taught:
According to the will of God, Jesus Christ the Son of God has been born without sin, of a virgin sprung from the stock of Abraham.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria taught:
We have, then, now stated in part, as far as it was possible, and as ourselves had been able to understand, the reason of His bodily appearing; that it was in the power of none other to turn the corruptible to incorruption, except the Saviour Himself, that had at the beginning also made all things out of nought and that none other could create anew the likeness of God's image for men, save the Image of the Father; and that none other could render the mortal immortal, save our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the Very Life; and that none other could teach men of the Father, and destroy the worship of idols, save the Word, that orders all things and is alone the true Only-begotten Son of the Father. But since it was necessary also that the debt owing from all should be paid again: for, as I have already said, it was owing that all should die, for which special cause, indeed, He came among us: to this intent, after the proofs of His Godhead from His works, He next offered up His sacrifice also on behalf of all, yielding His Temple to death in the stead of all, in order firstly to make men quit and free of their old trespass, and further to show Himself more powerful even than death, displaying His own body incorruptible, as first-fruits of the resurrection of all. And do not be surprised if we frequently repeat the same words on the same subject. For since we are speaking of the counsel of God, therefore we expound the same sense in more than one form, lest we should seem to be leaving anything out, and incur the charge of inadequate treatment: for it is better to submit to the blame of repetition than to leave out anything that ought to be set down. The body, then, as sharing the same nature with all, for it was a human body, though by an unparalleled miracle it was formed of a virgin only, yet being mortal, was to die also, conformably to its peers. But by virtue of the union of the Word with it, it was no longer subject to corruption according to its own nature, but by reason of the Word that had come to dwell in it it was placed out of the reach of corruption. And so it was that two marvels came to pass at once, that the death of all was accomplished in the Lord's body, and that death and corruption were wholly done away by reason of the Word that was united with it. For there was need of death, and death must needs be suffered on behalf of all, that the debt owing from all might be paid. Whence, as I said before, the Word, since it was not possible for Him to die, as He was immortal, took to Himself a body such as could die, that He might offer it as His own in the stead of all, and as suffering, through His union with it, on behalf of all, Bring to nought Him that had the power of death, that is the devil; and might deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.
St. John the Damascene taught:
So then, after the assent of the holy Virgin, the Holy Spirit descended on her, according to the word of the Lord which the angel spoke, purifying her, and granting her power to receive the divinity of the Word, and likewise power to bring forth. And then was she overshadowed by the enhypostatic Wisdom and Power of the most high God, the Son of God Who is of like essence with the Father as of Divine seed, and from her holy and most pure blood He formed flesh animated with the spirit of reason and thought, the first-fruits of our compound nature: not by procreation but by creation through the Holy Spirit: not developing the fashion of the body by gradual additions but perfecting it at once, He Himself, the very Word of God, standing to the flesh in the relation of subsistence. For the divine Word was not made one with flesh that had an independent pre-existence, but taking up His abode in the womb of the holy Virgin, He unreservedly in His own subsistence took upon Himself through the pure blood of the eternal Virgin a body of flesh animated with the spirit of reason and thought, thus assuming to Himself the first-fruits of man's compound nature, Himself, the Word, having become a subsistence in the flesh. So that He is at once flesh, and at the same time flesh of God the Word, and likewise flesh animated, possessing both reason and thought. Wherefore we speak not of man as having become God, but of God as having become Man. For being by nature perfect God, He naturally became likewise perfect Man: and did not change His nature nor make the dispensation an empty show, but became, without confusion or change or division, one in subsistence with the flesh, which was conceived of the holy Virgin, and animated with reason and thought, and had found existence in Him, while He did not change the nature of His divinity into the essence of flesh, nor the essence of flesh into the nature of His divinity, and did not make one compound nature out of His divine nature and the human nature He had assumed.
...
Thus, therefore, we confess that the nature of the Godhead is wholly and perfectly in each of its subsistences, wholly in the Father, wholly in the Son, and wholly in the Holy Spirit. Wherefore also the Father is perfect God, the Son is perfect God, and the Holy Spirit is perfect God. In like manner, too, in the Incarnation of the Trinity of the One God the Word of the Holy Trinity, we hold that in one of its subsistences the nature of the Godhead is wholly and perfectly united with the whole nature of humanity, and not part united to part. The divine Apostle in truth says that in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, that is to say in His flesh. And His divinely-inspired disciple, Dionysius, who had so deep a knowledge of things divine, said that the Godhead as a whole had fellowship with us in one of its own subsistences. But we shall not be driven to hold that all the subsistences of the Holy Godhead, to wit the three, are made one in subsistence with all the subsistences of humanity. For in no other respect did the Father and the Holy Spirit take part in the incarnation of God the Word than according to good will and pleasure. But we hold that to the whole of human nature the whole essence of the Godhead was united. For God the Word omitted none of the things which He implanted in our nature when He formed us in the beginning, but took them all upon Himself, body and soul both intelligent and rational, and all their properties. For the creature that is devoid of one of these is not man. But He in His fulness took upon Himself me in my fulness, and was united whole to whole that He might in His grace bestow salvation on the whole man. For what has not been taken cannot be healed.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
The Kingdom of God is Gained With the Heart and Not With the Tongue
By St. Nikolai Velimirovich
"Not everyone who says, `Lord, Lord' will enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 7:21).
Brethren, one does not gain the Kingdom of God with the tongue, but with the heart. The heart is the treasury of those riches by which the kingdom is purchased; the heart and not the tongue! If the treasury is full with the riches of God, i.e., a strong faith, good hope, vivid love and good deeds, then the messenger of those riches, the tongue, is faithful and pleasant. If the treasury is void of all those riches, then its messenger [the tongue] is false and impudent. The kind of heart, the kind of words. The kind of heart, the kind of deeds. All, all depends on the heart.
Hypocrisy is helpless before men, and is even more helpless before God. "If then I am a father," says the Lord through the Prophet Malachi, "If then I am a father where is the honor due to me?" And If I am a master, where is the reverence due to me?" (Malachi 1:6). That is, I hear you call me father, but I do not see you honoring me with your heart. I hear you call me master, but I do not see fear of me in your hearts.
Our prayer: "Lord! Lord!" is beautiful and beneficial only when it emerges from a prayerful heart. The Lord Himself commanded that we pray unceasingly, but not only with the tongue to be heard by men, but rather enclosed in the cell of the heart so that the Lord could hear and see us.
Lord, majestic and wonderful, deliver us from hypocrisy and pour Your fear into our hearts so that our hearts could stand continually upright in prayer before You.
Left-wing Intellectuals Petition Against ‘Smear Campaign’ Against Bulgarian Orthodox Church
January 3, 2012
The Sophia Echo
A group of left-wing intellectuals, in an open letter to Bulgarian Orthodox Church head Patriarch Maxim, have spoken out against what they call a smear campaign against the church.
The group, which includes writers and academics – several of them former members of the Bulgarian Communist Party and some of them identified by the Dossier Commission as having collaborated with the country’s communist-era State Security – expressed outrage at what they called the "intrigues and dirty attacks against the Holy Church".
They said that they saw an ominous trend, "to revile everything old Bulgarian, anything reminiscent of the great traditions of our national identity and culture".
The letter, sent to several Bulgarian-language media, made no specific reference to what constituted this campaign.
However, in recent weeks, there has been a series of controversies, from the new luxury car being used by Varna Metropolitan Kiril, the row about senior clergy being checked by the Dossier Commission for affiliations to State Security and the Holy Synod’s controversial opposition to in vitro fertilisation and surrogate motherhood – in a country in the grip of a demographic crisis.
"Without the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian people and the country of Bulgaria have no future," the group said.
They said that politicians and "unfortunately, some media" were involved in repulsive manipulation in an attempt to do away with fundamental values, causes and national objectives.
Those involved in this alleged campaign had the "vile purpose to pursue worthy prelates who defend Orthodoxy and native dignity and honour, to diminish them in the eyes of the congregation".
The statement said that "any reasonable person" knew that "the greatest contribution to the survival of the fatherland in the past 1100 years is precisely the Bulgarian Orthodox Church".
"We cannot be indifferent and unconcerned when the unscrupulous and the non-believers, with evil words, lies and slanders, are trying to destroy, to break Bulgaria and make it (undergo) utterly new pain and suffering.
"We know that this has not been accidental, but a measured and well-organised action against everything sacred and dear to Bulgarians and to Christians," said the group, calling for unity in defence of the church and inviting further signatures to their statement.
"Facts" In Archaeology
There are few “facts” in archaeology. There are artifacts which can become “data,” but only when they are properly excavated in context, interpreted in relation to a pertinent question, and published (i.e., “given”) in full. The notion that the archaeologist is an “objective” scientist, who approaches a site with a mind that is a tabula rasa, is incredibly naïve—and dangerous. We see in the dirt only what we are sensitized to see; and unfortunately, we unwittingly destroy the rest of the evidence in getting it.
Source: William G. Dever, “Archaeology, Syro-Palestinian and Biblical,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary 1: 362-63.
Video: Rebranding Greece
Keynote address by Peter Economides at EEDE's 11th "Aristoteli" Conference in Thessaloniki on 11/11/11, with Greek translation.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Russian Orthodox Officially Glorify St. Ephraim of Nea Makri a Saint
On December 29, 2011 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, upon recommendation of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, placed Saint Ephraim of Nea Makri the Newly-Revealed Martyr in the Menologion to be commerated in the Russian Orthodox Church annually on May 5th, the day of his martyrdom. This follows the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarchate on March 2nd of last year to have him placed among the choirs of saints commemorated by the Church.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
My Top Ten Movies Of 2011
Since 2004 I have written down at the end of every year my own top ten lists of such things as movies that I saw the previous year, music that I really enjoyed, and books that I read. For me it's a reevaluation of the things I liked most to keep things stored in my memory chronologically. This year I decided to share my list of top ten films released in 2011, since I haven't read really any new books published in 2011 (except The Last Werewolf), nor have I been excited about most new music released in 2011 (except Let England Shake by PJ Harvey and Blood Pressures by The Kills).
In my opinion, 2011 has been a great year for movies. Though I haven't watched every movie that has come out in 2011, I have seen most of them, with scarcely a week going by without seeing at least one new release. With this being the case, I think I can be a pretty good evaluator of a top ten list. Below, therefore, is my list along with, very briefly, the reasons why I put them there instead of the dozens of others I saw, though I must say it was a tough list this year to put together.
10. The Ides of March
As much as I enjoyed Ryan Gosling's other two films this past year (Drive and Crazy, Stupid Love), probably his best movie was The Ides of March co-starring George Clooney, who also wrote and directed the film. The reason I really liked this movie was because of its interesting portrayal of the loss of innocence of a professional politico and the great acting on behalf of the strong cast.
9. Young Adult
I walked into this movie not knowing what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised how good it was. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody, Young Adult is a movie about prolonged adolescence with a convincing performance by Charlize Theron. The no-holds-barred character study mixed with humor compels me to place this movie in my list of the best of the year. As someone correctly wrote: "Young Adult may be the year's most engaging feel-bad movie."
8. Shame
Shame will probably be the least seen movie on my list, and with the NC-17 rating it received in the United States for its explicit sexual scenes it will likely remain unseen by most, unfortunately. This is not only one of the best directed films I saw this year (dir. Steve McQueen), but it contains the best male performance of the year by Michael Fassbender who plays Brandon. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a 30-something yuppie living in New York who is unable to manage his sex life and urges. After his wayward younger sister (Carey Mulligan) moves into his apartment, Brandon’s world spirals out of control. It portrays sexual addiction on the same level as drug addiction quite powerfully and brilliantly. This voyeuristic peek into the life of a voyeur is naked and raw in more ways than one.
7. Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel by the same name is one of my favorite novels, so it is usually a joy for me to see its portrayal in film. This version however is the best of the bunch, with a splendid performance by Mia Wasikowska. It is a great example of how to turn a beloved classic into a movie, without updating the story nor making it look stiff, but keeping it faithful to the original book. Michael Fassbender stars also in this film.
6. Moneyball
Moneyball is a compelling biographical sports drama film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill and directed by Bennett Miller. It is a sharp, funny, and touching portrait of a sports underdog and his sacrifice.
5. The Descendants
This movie was called a comedy-drama, though I saw it as a dark and emotional portrayal of the consequences of a betrayed relationship with occasional humor, and this is why I liked it so much. George Clooney stars in this film, making him the second actor to appear in two of my top ten movies for 2011.
4. Super 8
Super 8 is a science fiction action thriller film written and directed by J. J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg. This is a gripping and exciting tale seen through the tender nostalgic eyes of the children who star in the film. This is only one of two movies in my top ten list I saw twice in the theatre.
3. Hugo
Probably the movie I was most surprised by this year was Hugo, which I thought was more of a children's story but was pleased to discover it is more about capturing the child within us all. Martin Scorsese does an excellent job directing this homage to classical films, and he uses the 3D medium possibly better than any other film, including Avatar. By using this latest technology in film effectively, he poetically shows the rise of early film by a pioneer of film (Georges Méliès) who was ahead of his time in the early 20th century. In essence, it is a glorious movie about the glory of movies.
2. The Artist
The Artist is a French silent romantic comedy which is both very clever and charming, despite its lack of audible dialogue and black and white color. The acting is superb and the film-making is magnificent in its simplicity. After I watched it, I wanted to see it again. It is another homage to movies, but this time about the transition from silent film-making to talkies. It shows how difficult transitions can be for one older generation entering into a new and younger generation, and how quickly trends fade in the atmosphere of Hollywood.
1. Midnight In Paris
Woody Allen wrote and directed my favorite film of the year, the supernatural romantic comedy Midnight In Paris. I also saw this movie twice in the theatres and enjoyed it just as much the second time as I did the first. This is not a movie for everybody, but this is why I liked it so much. The viewer will either connect with it and embrace it, or not feel anything for it and leave it to be appreciated by those who do. It is also one of the best and cleverest romantic comedies in years, that teaches us through a parable to appreciate the present and not dream idealistically about the past. Owen Wilson also brilliantly portrays the lead character, as if Woody Allen himself would have starred in the film, though with an added and necessary charm.
These are my favorite movies of many favorites in 2011. Most interesting to me is that my two favorite films were romantic comedies and my four favorite films were homages to the past offering lessons for us contemporaries. I don't know which films and which actors will be nominated this year for the Oscar's, but I hope the critics agree with one of my top five. For best actor I would choose Michael Fassbender and for best actress I would choose Rooney Mara for her brilliant portrayal of Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo almost made my top ten list, but I think it lacked the intensity and mysteriousness and storytelling of the original Swedish version, which was my favorite film of 2009, though the American version is more accurate to the book in plot and ending. So having compiled my list, I hope to compile an even better one next year, and may in the meantime write more movie reviews here on this website.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
St. Peter of Damascus: On Resolution
If you want to do something good, do it; and if you cannot do it, then resolve to do it, and you will have achieved the resolution even if you do not fulfill the action itself. Thus a habit, whether good or bad, can gradually and spontaneously be overcome. If this were not the case, no criminals would ever be saved, whereas in fact not only have they been saved, but many have become conspicuous for their excellence. Think what a great gulf separates the criminal from the saint; yet resolution finally overcame habit.
- Saint Peter of Damascus
Thursday, December 29, 2011
14,000 Infants (Holy Innocents) Slain by Herod in Bethlehem
The infant-slaying Herod mentioned here is the same one that ruled at the time of Christ's Nativity. In those days, certain Magi, who were wise and noble men, perhaps even kings, set forth from the East, and came to Jerusalem, seeking the King of the Jews, Who had been born; and they said that in the East, where their homeland was, an unusual and strange star had appeared two years before, which, according to an ancient oracle (Num 24:17), was to signify the birth of some great king of the Jews. "For we have seen His star in the east," they said, "and have come to worship Him" (Matt. 2:2). Hearing these things, Herod was troubled, and the whole city together with him. Then, having inquired and been informed by the high priests and scribes of the people that, according to the prophecies, Christ was to be born in Bethlehem, he sent the Magi thither and ordered them that, when they would find the Child, to inform him, so that he also - as he affirmed - might go and worship Him.
But the Magi, after they had worshipped, departed by another way to their own country by a divine command. Then Herod was wroth and sent men to slay all the infants of Bethlehem and the parts round about, from two years old and under, thinking that with them he would also certainly slay the King Who had been born. But this vain man who fought against God was mocked, since Jesus the Child, with Mary His Mother, under the protection of Joseph the Betrothed, fled into Egypt at the command of an Angel. As for those innocent infants, they became the first Martyrs slain in behalf of Christ. But their blood-thirsty executioner, the persecutor of Christ, came down with dropsy after a short time, with his members rotting and being eaten by worms, and he ended his life in a most wretched manner.
Apolytikion in the First Tone
Be Thou entreated for the sake of the sufferings of Thy Saints which they endured for Thee, O Lord, and do Thou heal all our pains, we pray, O Friend of man.
Kontakion in the Fourth Tone
When the King was born in Bethlehem, the Magi arrived from the East with gifts guided by a Star on high, but Herod was troubled and mowed down the children like wheat; for he lamented that his power would soon be destroyed.
Source: Holy Transfiguration Monastery - Brookline, MA
The Arrest and Imprisonment of Elder Ephraim of Vatopaidi
For those who havn't followed the news of Elder Ephraim's arrest and imprisonment over the past few days, below are a few articles, mainly English, that have appeared in the news. It was reported that Elder Ephraim left Mount Athos with much joy, accompanied by his over 120 disciples at Vatopaidi Monastery and numerous other clergy, monks and abbots. He said "Don't feel sad for me, for I am a monk and in the hands of the Panagia, as I have always been. Feel sad for those who caused this." The bells of the Monastery rang in celebration as Elder Ephraim left the Holy Mountain for his jail cell in Athens, where many Metropolitans and clergy visited him and thousands of faithful are supporting him.
A Hagiorite Monk Is Being Sent To Prison For ‘Accusations’ They Cannot Prove!
The Holy Community of Mount Athos Stands By Elder Ephraim of Vatopaidi
Guardian of Holy Virgin's Belt from Mt. Athos Decides To Go To Jail
Greek Abbot Jailed Pending Trial Over Land Scandal Probe That Cost Ministers Their Jobs
Cypriot Abbot To Be Held Behind Bars in Greece
Greek Monk On His Way To Jail
Photos of Elder Ephraim Leaving Mount Athos
Photos and Video of Protests Supporting Elder Ephraim
Russian Orthodox Rise in Defense of Arrested Vatopedi Monk
Patriarch Kirill Asks Greek President To Release Vatopedi Monastery Superior From Custody
Vatopedi Monk in Jail as Minister Warns 'Meddlers'
Archimandrite Yefrem's Arrest Violates European Human Rights Court's Decisions - Russian Foreign Ministry
Greece Jails Abbot Ephraim in Mount Athos Fraud Case
Father Ephraim - Prisoner of Cell 2 in the Koridallos Prison
Assembly of Bishops Condemns Imprisonment of Archbishop Jovan by FYROM and Asks for His Release
December 27, 2011, New York
Upon receiving the information that Archbishop Jovan of Ochrid was arrested on December 12, 2011, while entering the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) from the border with Greece, the Hierarchs of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America reaffirm the position taken by the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA) in August 2005, and furthermore restate that the persecution and new imprisonment of Archbishop Jovan by FYROM are an outrage, and ask for his immediate release.
This arrest has a history of several years and began when the schismatic church of FYROM started persecuting the canonical Archbishopric of Ochrid, an autonomous part of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
This imprisonment, as did the previous ones, violates religious freedom in a supposedly free state. That a recognized, canonical Orthodox Christian hierarch can be imprisoned once again under false allegations, and while trying to fulfill his religious responsibilities, is simply absurd.
We join again the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church in demanding the release of Archbishop Jovan. We ask the government of FYROM to correct this injustice and to free Archbishop Jovan without delay. Furthermore, we call upon our governments to intercede and implement appropriate measures to hasten this process.
Source
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
The Unworthy Priest
The icon above is located in the cemetary Church of All Saints in the town of Perama of Rethymno, the seat of the municipality of Mylopotamou, by the iconographer Emmanuel Sephake.
The prototype for this icon is in the historic Church of the Holy Trinity in the same town (probably from the Venetian era), near the Monastery of Arkadiou in Rethymno, and is found in the Holy Altar, roughly next to the Holy Prothesis table. The priest serving in the Sanctuary sees it across from him, though it is not visible to those outside the Sanctuary. It is directed, therefore, to the priest, and is aimed at his constant moral diligence.
The icon depicts an angel standing on a priest holding the Holy Chalice and dressed in priestly vestments. It bears the inscription "The Unworthy Priest".
This icon, it is assumed, is based on an old story which says that once there was a priest who got drunk one Saturday night, and went the next day to serve Divine Liturgy. However, as his wife was going to church, she saw him outside, tied to a tree. When she went inside, she saw him again, serving Divine Liturgy! She was surprised. After the Liturgy, her husband revealed how an angel prevented him from liturgizing, and served Divine Liturgy in his stead and with his appearance.
The meaning of the story is that, no matter how unworthy a priest may be, this does not hinder the validity of the Holy Mysteries, for it is the grace of God which completes them, not the priest himself. But priests should be worthy of their work, otherwise they will face consequences, now and in eternity.
Source
The Original Words To The Song "Good King Wenceslas"
We remember Saint Stephen the Protomartyr on December 27, two days after Christmas, while in the West he is remembered on December 26. Hence the popular Christmas Carol:
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about
Deep and crisp and even.
This describes an action of King Wenceslas on the day after Christmas Day. The tune used with this song is older than the words (written circa 1850) and was previously used with a hymn often sung on the feasts of St. Stephen and other martyrs. It begins:
Christian friends, your voices raise.
Wake the day with gladness.
God himself to joy and praise
turns our human sadness:
Joy that martyrs won their crown,
opened heaven's bright portal,
when they laid the mortal down
for the life immortal.
This hymn was written by Saint Joseph the Hymnographer in the 9th century.
Listen here.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Panagia Alexiotissa In Patras, Greece
The Holy Church of Panagia Alexiotissa dates prior to 1713. This parish church also serves as a cemetery located in the upper city of Patras. Tradition says it was an old chapel of Gerokomeio Monastery.
The name "Alexiotissa" stems from the old verb "alexo" which has origins from the root "alex" which means "to avert". The people of this region thus place their hopes in the Theotokos to avert all evils and destructions that may come their way. The church holds an icon titled Panagia Alexiotissa that is old, with artistic value and silver lining.
The former Metropolitan of Patras, Nikodemos, established the feast of Panagia Alexiotissa in 1994 to be celebrated annually on the Synaxis of the Theotokos on December 26th. He also composed a Service of Praise and Supplication Service to Panagia Alexiotissa.
Within the Holy Altar there is a second Holy Altar dedicated to the Archangels together with an icon offered by the Union of Butchers in 1869. For this reason the church also celebrates on the feast of the Synaxis of the Archangels on November 8th.
Also, on the northeastern part of the church, there is a chapel dedicated to Saint Lazarus, who was four days dead and raised by Christ. Metropolitan Nikodemos dedicated this chapel on 15 June 1991 and celebrates on the Saturday of Lazarus as well as October 17th (the day his relics were transferred from Cyprus to Constantinople).
During the Revolution of 1821, the Turks burned alive the parish priest of this church, Papa George, and kidnapped his three children. His wife, the presvytera, sought out her children throughout the Ottoman Empire. She eventually found one of her sons, Constantine. In 1972 the Achaia company of Patras erected a monument in memory of Papa George in the precincts of the church.
See also:
Manger Scene at Panagia Alexiotissa in Patras, Greece
Listen to the Supplication Service here.
Russian Church Reacts To Elder Ephraim's Arrest
The arrest of Cypriot monk Abbot Ephraim just before Christmas was an act of 'unprecedented savagery', said sources within the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate as reported by Kathimerini and Sky news channels in Athens.
Sarah Fenwick
December 25, 2011
Cyprus News Report
The Russian and Greek Orthodox churches have very close ties and it is expected that there will be more reactions against Ephraim's arrest on charges of money laundering in connection with a property exchange between Vatopaidi Monastery and the state, says the report.
Russian Orthodox churchmen have made representations to Mount Athos and Patriarch Bartholomew saying that Ephraim's arrest is disproportionate to the charges. The monk's health is not good and the Greek government should ensure an objective, open-minded, honest and democratic process, said the Russian church in a message broadcast by many Russian media channels. Ephraim is bedridden and under guard in his monk's cell in Vatopaidi Monastery.
There is speculation that there are political reasons behind Ephraim's arrest as he is considered to be Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's spiritual father and recently visited Moscow to meet with him. Russia-Greece relations are at their worst point in decades, say analysts, amid perceived insults to the Russian ambassador in Athens after former Prime Minister George Papandreou refused to meet with him, and the perception that the Greek government is overly influenced by Russia's rival for influence in the region - the US.
Russian and US oil-and-gas companies are also eyeing immense reserves of hydrocarbons around Greece and Cyprus, and there is more speculation that Ephraim - who has long held influence with Putin - has been taken out of the picture while the latest round of bidding for undersea hydrocarbon exploration gets underway.
Whether Ephraim's arrest is a deliberate insult directed at Putin, or just a case of Greece's slow justice system finally swinging into action remains to be seen, but one thing is certain, the timing of the monk's arrest just before Christmas is as provocative a move as any towards Orthodox Church believers.
In further developments, Cyprus Archbishop Chrysostomos II said that the clergy and monks have to be very careful to stay away from business transactions, in a breathtaking example of the pot calling the kettle black. The Cyprus Orthodox Church is one of the wealthiest in the world, with interests ranging from banking, property and hotels to beer-making.
Read also:
Russian Foundation Calls on the Heads of Christian Orthodox Churches to Defend Abbot Efraim
Russian Church Believes Vatopedi Rector's Arrest Groundless Sanction
Elder Ephraim of Vatopaidi Confined To His Monastic Cell
Abbot Ephraim is confined to bed with high fever while he has also been diagnosed with blood sugar deregulation as it was confirmed by a medical examiner accompanying the prosecutor.
December 25, 2011
Phantis
Civilian administrator of Mount Athos Aristos Kasmiroglou on Saturday told the Athens News Agency (AMNA) that Vatopaidi Monastery Abbot Ephraim will be kept under guard in his monk cell following a decision by Thessaloniki First Instance Court prosecutor Antonis Papamattheou.
The prosecutor visited the monastery with Halkidiki Police Director Konstantinos Papoutsis to execute a pending warrant for Abbot Ephraim’s arrest issued on Friday by a Court of Appeals Judges’ Council in Athens.
Abbot Ephraim is confined to bed with high fever while he has also been diagnosed with blood sugar deregulation as it was confirmed by a medical examiner accompanying the prosecutor.
The Court of Appeals Judges’ Council on Friday decided that Abbot Ephraim of the Vatopaidi Monastery, one of the leading defendants in a notorious case concerning suspect land swaps between the monastery and the Greek state, be held in custody pending trial.
The ruling was in favour of the stance adopted earlier by examining magistrate Irene Kalou, who disagreed with prosecutor Panagiotis Matzounis suggesting that Abbot Ephraim be released with conditions after posting bail of 200,000 euros.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Elder Ephraim of Vatopaidi To Be Imprisoned
On December 23 by decree of the Council members of the Court of Appeals, Ephraim of the Vatopaidi Monastery was sentenced to preventive detention. This was reported by the Greek news agencies Romfea and Amen.
The court's decision is related to the so-called "Vatopaidi scandal", filed in connection with the exchange of part of the monastery estates, which was characterized as a violation of the law.
Members of the Court of Appeals sided with the investigator I. Kalu, who demanded imprisonment of the accused while the prosecutor P. Madzunis suggested leaving him free on bail.
Thus far it is unclear whether Archimandrite Ephraim will remain under house arrest in Vatopaidi Monastery or will be placed in a detention cell outside of Athos. Particularly regrettable for the brethren of Vatopaidi Monastery and the entire Christian world is that this event occurred just before Christmas.
It appears the Greek government has begun its "cleansing" by imprisoning one of Orthodoxy's most revered elders, and left a bunch of political scandals who owe millions without impunity to enjoy Christmas in ski resorts both in Greece and abroad.
Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and All Greece responded to the decision with the following statement: "... The essence of the case I did not know and I respect the Greek justice. But I am very concerned, like any Christian, by the timing of the issuance of the decree of custody of Abbot Ephraim of the Vatopaidi Monastery on Christmas Day. And no more needs to be said."
The abbots and all the fathers of Mount Athos stand behind Elder Ephraim. Metropolitans and clergy throughout Greece have expressed outrage at the turn of events. Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol called the decision "very sad", and after speaking with Elder Ephraim following the decision, said: "The elder is very calm and has surrendered to the will of God. Whatever God allows, may it be blessed, he told me." He further said: "For Elder Ephraim, this trial is a blessing from God and an opportunity for spiritual ascent."
It is not yet known why the Greek judicial system came to their conclusions. According to the law, detention is only permitted if the accused is unknown, about to escape, has a history of attempted escape, or there is sufficient evidence the defendant will commit further crimes.
The court's decision is related to the so-called "Vatopaidi scandal", filed in connection with the exchange of part of the monastery estates, which was characterized as a violation of the law.
Members of the Court of Appeals sided with the investigator I. Kalu, who demanded imprisonment of the accused while the prosecutor P. Madzunis suggested leaving him free on bail.
Thus far it is unclear whether Archimandrite Ephraim will remain under house arrest in Vatopaidi Monastery or will be placed in a detention cell outside of Athos. Particularly regrettable for the brethren of Vatopaidi Monastery and the entire Christian world is that this event occurred just before Christmas.
It appears the Greek government has begun its "cleansing" by imprisoning one of Orthodoxy's most revered elders, and left a bunch of political scandals who owe millions without impunity to enjoy Christmas in ski resorts both in Greece and abroad.
Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and All Greece responded to the decision with the following statement: "... The essence of the case I did not know and I respect the Greek justice. But I am very concerned, like any Christian, by the timing of the issuance of the decree of custody of Abbot Ephraim of the Vatopaidi Monastery on Christmas Day. And no more needs to be said."
The abbots and all the fathers of Mount Athos stand behind Elder Ephraim. Metropolitans and clergy throughout Greece have expressed outrage at the turn of events. Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol called the decision "very sad", and after speaking with Elder Ephraim following the decision, said: "The elder is very calm and has surrendered to the will of God. Whatever God allows, may it be blessed, he told me." He further said: "For Elder Ephraim, this trial is a blessing from God and an opportunity for spiritual ascent."
It is not yet known why the Greek judicial system came to their conclusions. According to the law, detention is only permitted if the accused is unknown, about to escape, has a history of attempted escape, or there is sufficient evidence the defendant will commit further crimes.
G.K. Chesterton's Biography "Charles Dickens" (1906)
I was about to write a personal essay titled How Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" Impacted My Life, but I decided to leave that off for the future and replace it with a biographical sketch of the man who helped revive modern Christmas and good-hearted cheer despite the secular age we live in. I also recommend the reading titled Christmas According to Dickens by Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts.
Chesterton's books and essays on Charles Dickens are among his best. Growing up in London Chesterton found Dickens his best guide to his own background and much of his philosophy came from Dickens's own "social gospel." To understand Chesterton you need to read his biography on Dickens. It will help you understand why he called himself a "disreputable Victorian".
Charles Dickens (1906)
By Gilbert Keith Chesterton
CHAPTER I
THE DICKENS PERIOD
CHAPTER II
THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS
CHAPTER III
THE YOUTH OF DICKENS
CHAPTER IV
"THE PICKWICK PAPERS"
CHAPTER V
THE GREAT POPULARITY
CHAPTER VI
DICKENS AND AMERICA
CHAPTER VII
DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS
CHAPTER VIII
THE TIME OF TRANSITION
CHAPTER IX
LATER LIFE AND WORKS
CHAPTER X
THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS
CHAPTER XI
ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS
CHAPTER XII
A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS
How Frank Capra's Christian Faith Influenced His Films
By Maria Elena De Las Carreras Kuntz
The career of Frank Capra coincided with the golden age of Hollywood, and many of his films are recognized as classics. Still, most critics seem not to have noticed that Capra's work reflects a profoundly Catholic vision of reality, a vision framed by the Sermon on the Mount. Because his cinema does not have an ethnic Italian flavor, like the Irishness of film director John Ford, this Catholicism is often perceived as an addendum to a body of work primarily concerned with a celebration of American life and its democratic ideals.
The youngest of seven surviving children, Frank Capra was born in rural Sicily in 1897. His family immigrated to the United States in 1903 and settled in Los Angeles. Struggling to overcome the limitations of the working-class immigrant, Capra worked his way through college as a chemical engineer.
In the mid-1920s, Capra got involved in cinema as a gag writer for silent comedy producer Hal Roach and his Our Gang series and then for Mack Sennett, whose comedy shorts have become classics. Paired up with comedian Harry Langdon as a writer and later as a director of two features, The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), Capra helped develop Langdon's comic persona-"the man-child whose only ally was God," in Capra's words.
When he joined Columbia Pictures in the late 1920s, it was a B-movie company headed by the savvy and autocratic Harry Cohn. The studio's stock soon rose, and Capra began a twelve-year association that would catapult him to fame and fortune.
In 1941, war came. Before joining the fight, Capra teamed up with Robert Riskin to make the political comedy-drama Meet John Doe (1941) as an independent production. Between 1942 and 1945, Capra produced the outstanding Why We Fight series, commissioned by General George Marshall to explain to the soldiers the reasons behind the U.S. involvement in the war. In 1946 Capra made his classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) for Liberty Films, the company he had started after the war with directors William Wyler and George Stevens. After the flop of the political comedy State of the Union in 1948, Capra directed two Bing Crosby pictures for Paramount, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951).
But by the mid-1950s-after a series of box-office failures-Capra had slid from his cinematic heights. Bell Telephone hired him to make four TV science specials, and his Hollywood comeback yielded only two minor works, A Hole in the Head, a 1959 vehicle for Frank Sinatra, and Pocketful of Miracles (1961) with Bette Davis.
Capra's slow fade into obscurity was finally reversed in 1971 with the publication of his entertaining autobiography The Name Above the Title. Besides keeping him busy on the lecture circuit, it marked a revival of interest in his cinema, considered too sentimental and patriotic in the turbulent Sixties when it was mockingly termed "Capracorn."
The French auteur theory-according to which the director is the single creative force behind the collaborative effort of filmmaking-led to a reevaluation of Capra. No longer considered a ham-fisted sentimentalist, Capra was seen as an artist with a vision and style traceable through a body of work that spanned four decades and more than 40 films.
Capra's Formula for Success
As a gag writer, Capra had a knack for the visual joke and the humorous angle. You can see this comic sense at work in the collection of endearing characters and hysterical romantic entanglements in his films. For example, It Happened One Night (1934), a taming-of-the-shrew road movie set on a bus and in three motels, stars Clark Gable as a wisecracking newspaperman paired up with a spoiled heiress, Claudette Colbert. There's a running joke about the "walls of Jericho"-a blanket hanging from a rope to separate the beds-mischievously marking the progressive falling in love of the protagonists. This battle of the sexes became the blueprint for the Hollywood screwball comedy.
In this and other romantic comedies and melodramas of the early 1930s, Capra and Riskin experimented with a comic formula and plot structure film historian Richard Griffith described as a "fantasy of goodwill." In Capra's stories, "a messianic innocent, not unlike the classic simpletons of literature, pits himself against the forces of entrenched greed. His experience defeats him strategically, but his gallant integrity in the face of temptation calls forth the goodwill of the 'little people,' and through their combined protest, he triumphs."
The formula had been perfected by the time Capra made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936. Gary Cooper plays the mild-mannered Mr. Deeds, a small-town tuba player who confounds and outsmarts New York's high society when he decides to use a $20 million inheritance to help farmers become landowners. A cynical newspaperwoman (Jean Arthur) deceives him to get an exclusive scoop on the "Cinderella man" but ends up falling in love with him instead. During the climactic (and very funny) insanity hearing, Mr. Deeds outwits his enemies, redeems the heroine, and is warmly supported by the crowd he has helped. Mr. Deeds is one of many Capra films that shows the power of goodness to effect change in the hearts of those willing to undergo an experience of conversion. When novelist Graham Greene reviewed the movie, he outlined the Capra formula in moral terms: "the theme of goodness and simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
Capra and screenwriter Sidney Buchman retooled this same moral formula in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), adding a strong political twist. The film offered an explicit defense of America and its Christian values on the eve of World War II. The film won the widespread support of the public. Predictably, others-like Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to Great Britain-feared that even a fictional story about compromise and corruption in the U.S. Senate would demoralize allied nations.
In the film, Jimmy Stewart plays an idealistic young senator who's almost destroyed by the political machinery of a jaded senior senator (Claude Rains) and a shrewd political operator (Edward Arnold)-the prototypical Capra villain. A savvy woman (Jean Arthur again) at first dismisses as utopian Mr. Smith's idea to create a national camp for Boy Rangers and then slowly falls for him. After her change of heart, she uses her insider's knowledge to help Mr. Smith navigate a sea of sharks and defend the principles of liberty, truth, and democracy in a climactic filibuster scene. Reading from the Declaration of Independence and 1 Corinthians 13-the hymn to charity-the exhausted Mr. Smith rouses the support of the people and uncovers the shadowy machinations of the powerful.
Meet John Doe is Capra's darkest film-a political fable about a fascist newspaper tycoon (Edward Arnold) who fabricates a story about an ordinary man who decides to commit suicide on Christmas Eve as a protest against the state of the world. John Doe is really Long John Willoughby, an unemployed baseball player portrayed by Gary Cooper. At first, Willoughby is happy to cooperate with the plot hatched by-who else?-an ambitious newspaperwoman (Barbara Stanwyck). But when he sees the success of the John Doe clubs of neighborly goodwill that his radio speeches have inspired, he has a change of heart and confesses the scam at a packed baseball stadium. This time, the opposition isn't a group of corrupt politicians or greedy businessmen but an ominous underground movement to squash the country's democratic institutions.
A Moralist for the People
Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and John Doe are often studied as a trilogy of progressive social comedies that dramatized American values and ideas with exceptional artistry and found a unique place with the public. As film historian Robert Sklar noted, the films "gave Americans a pleasing and convincing image of themselves."
Because Capra's vision of America coincided with that of the majority of his audience, his work was consistently popular until the war.
To this trilogy of films about the common man should be added the Capra-Riskin film version of You Can't Take It With You (1938), made between Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith and based on the successful Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The Vanderhofs, a clan of happy eccentrics led by Lionel Barrymore, live like lilies of the field. Their pursuit of various vocations is a source of great comedy. This oasis is threatened by a powerful Wall Street banker (Edward Arnold) who has development plans for the neighborhood. The film depicts the clash between the communitarian/utopian values of common folks and the worst aspects of the WASP ethic as embodied in the greedy banker. The banker's son (Jimmy Stewart) and Vanderhof's granddaughter (Jean Arthur) fall in love. As the film closes, Vanderhof and the banker reconcile with a harmonica duet. Capra commented that the film gave him "a golden opportunity to dramatize 'Love Thy Neighbor'.... Christ's spiritual law can be the most powerful sustaining force in anyone's life."
A Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life is a work of summation, whose undercurrent of angst can be interpreted in different ways. At the heart of the film lies the conflict between the desires of the heart and the needs of the common good. The hero of the story, George Bailey (played by Stewart), struggles throughout the picture with this irreconcilable conflict within himself. Even though his nemesis, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), typifies the classic Capra villain, he's really more an external manifestation of one side of George's divided spirit than an autonomous character.
Most of the film is an extended flashback, in which an apprentice guardian angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) reviews George's life as the head of a small-town building and loan. Believing he has failed as a husband, father, and businessman, George is contemplating suicide on Christmas Eve. With Clarence, we see key moments in George's life, moments when he had to make important choices about family, friends, and career. In spite of his desire to escape Bedford Falls, George has chosen to stay so that he can run the lending institution founded by his father for the "garlic-eaters" (Potter's word) who can't afford Potter's bank loans.
His dreams of college, travel, and a professional life in the big city fall by the wayside. George marries and starts a family. Now, on the day before Christmas, a careless mistake on the part of his absentminded uncle threatens to wipe out the Building and Loan and give Potter complete control of the town. George is on the brink of total despair.
Enter Clarence. God sends the angel to prevent George from jumping off a bridge. By making George see what Bedford Falls would be like without him, Clarence leads him to an experience of conversion. This "unborn" sequence is shot in stark visual contrast with that of the extended flashback, using film noir techniques. It shows how the absence of George's goodness would have left the town to be devoured by evil:
Bedford Falls, renamed Pottersville, becomes an urban hell of mean little people, beginning with George's embittered mother and the wife he never married (Donna Reed). Awakened by this desolate vision, George turns away from the bridge's parapet to return home, where he's surrounded by the warmth and affection of family and friends, who will together save the Building and Loan from insolvency. The hero's wry smile at the close is a wink to the audience; he has seen, understood, and accepted life in all its glory and imperfection.
Surprisingly enough, this embrace of life was a box-office disappointment. Capra called It's a Wonderful Life the greatest film he had ever made: "A film to tell the wary, the disheartened, and the disillusioned; the wino, the junkie, the prostitute; those behind prison walls and those behind Iron Curtains, that no man is a failure! To show those born slow of foot or slow of mind, those oldest sisters condemned to spinsterhood, and those oldest sons condemned to unschooled toil, that each man's life touches so many other lives. And that if he isn't around it would leave an awful hole."
A Vision of the Cross
Capra's biographers and critics agree that the power and consistency of the filmmaker's moral vision are rooted in his own experiences. While his autobiography should be read critically (he had a tendency toward self-aggrandizement), it still provides a good point of departure for examining the way this moral vision was shaped by Capra's Catholic faith.
An individualist by temperament, Capra initially rejected his religious heritage, only gradually growing into it. He wrote that in his early adulthood he was a "Christmas Catholic." But in the mid-1930s, the astonishing success of It Happened One Night triggered an artistic crisis, which resulted in a conversion experience, not unlike the one faced by many of his characters. It was the scolding given him by an anonymous man that pushed him into action: "The talents you have, Mr. Capra, are not your own, not self-acquired. God gave you those talents; they are His gifts to you, to use for His purpose. And when you don't use the gifts God blessed you with, you are an offense to God-and to humanity." Capra later developed this theme in It's a Wonderful Life.
In later years, through the influence of his wife, Lucille Reyburn, Capra returned to the Church. He described himself as "a Catholic in spirit; one who firmly believes that the anti-moral, the intellectual bigots, and the Mafias of ill will may destroy religion, but they will never conquer the cross."
If his films are to be seen as a form of submerged autobiography, then one can understand why so many of them show the clash between a Catholic moral view-represented by the idealist-and the materialistic worldview of his memorable villains, a view that Capra sometimes felt drawn to because of his desire to be a successful Hollywood director.
In Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America, Lee Lourdeaux's 1990 study of John Ford, Frank Capra, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, the author argues that the Catholic identity of these directors can be probed by examining how the Catholic notions of communion, mediation, and sacramentality are rendered cinematically. Of course, one should be careful about automatically assigning Catholic values to art on the basis of the artist's cultural background or ethnicity. Nevertheless, these three concepts provide us with a good context for understanding Capra's cinema.
Among other things, communion means that our relationship with God does not excuse us from our responsibility toward our neighbor. A joyful sense of community, of belonging to something larger than oneself, is at the heart of Capra's mature works-roughly the ten years from Mr. Deeds to It's a Wonderful Life. But it's also present in earlier films like American Madness, the 1932 social melodrama about a quixotic banker whose business philosophy is to lend on character, not collateral, and who is handsomely repaid by hundreds of small customers when bankruptcy seems imminent. The following year, the comedy Lady for a Day operated on a similar principle: Apple Annie is helped by her beggar friends, a racketeer and his associates, and the New York social elite to impersonate a lady of distinction so that her daughter will be able to marry a Spanish aristocrat. Lost Horizon (1937) is about the utopian Shangri-La, a mysterious community in the Himalayas whose members follow closely the teachings of their lama, a 200-year-old French missionary.
Capra's films celebrate the values associated with life in a community-solidarity and selflessness in particular-but without the close connection to ethnic identity that is so important to the second-generation Italian-Americans represented by Coppola, Scorsese, and Michael Cimino. Lourdeaux notes that Capra's somewhat idealized communities are a blueprint for the principle of subsidiarity, which is so fundamental to the social vision of the Church: Families, neighborhoods, and small organizations provide protection against both anarchy and despotism.
Closely associated with communion is the idea of mediation. Christ is the mediator par excellence. In Capra's narrative pattern, the hero functions as a mediator between the needs of the community and the entrenched forces of greed: Thomas Dickson (the hero in American Madness), Mr. Deeds, Grandpa Vanderhof, Mr. Smith, John Doe, and George Bailey all play that role. In the most Christ-like of these figures-Mr. Smith and John Doe-there are concrete allusions to their "crucifixion" at the hands of the powerful. Their stories reflect the trajectory of the archetypal messianic innocent: through passion and death to resurrection.
Music not only mediates between opposites-as in the harmonica duet in You Can't Take It With You-but also contributes to the creation or reaffirmation of a communal spirit: the impromptu singing of "The Man in the Flying Trapeze" on the bus in It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds playing the tuba in Mandrake Falls, and the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" at the end of It's a Wonderful Life.
Capra uses other recurrent mediators as well: benevolent fathers and father figures, who steer the heroes and heroines toward the common good-to cite just one example, the dead father in The Miracle Woman (1931), whose Christian principles defeat the religious scam cooked up by his vengeful daughter, played by Barbara Stanwyck.
The Dignity of the Underdog
A distinctively Catholic idea, sacramentality is the capacity of things-people, objects, places, the whole cosmos-to carry the presence of God. It invites us to see God in and through His creation. One way this is reflected in Capra's vision is in his portrayal of "little" people and their inherent dignity. While it's true they have the potential to become a mob-as we see in the dark Meet John Doe-it's even truer that the common men are among the meek of the gospel. "The meek can inherit the earth when the John Does start loving their neighbors," John Doe says at the end of his first radio broadcast. Capra said on several occasions that the underlying idea of his movies was actually the Sermon on the Mount.
Although Capra's spiritual vision gets its focus from the Catholic faith, this isn't immediately apparent to most viewers. This is partly because his films contain very little obvious religious imagery.
Capra's Catholic imagination must be traced through his characters and plot structures. Perhaps the single most important theme in Capra's work-from his very first film to his last-is the power of goodness to transform sinful human nature. In many instances, and especially in his early work, goodness manifests itself as a romantic love that thoroughly metamorphoses the people-a contemptuous Broadway actor in The Matinee Idol (1928), a cynical gold digger in Ladies of Leisure (1930), and the unfaithful husband in State of the Union.
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) presents a funny variant: The misguided love of two eccentric old ladies makes them poison twelve lonely gentlemen to end their misery.
Like the gospel parables, Capra's films show us how love, a gift freely given, comes to ordinary reality and changes it in extraordinary ways-in other words, how the transcendent disrupts the course of human events.
In It's a Wonderful Life, a work of theological optimism, a representative of the divine comes to earth to offer salvation to a soul in despair. The hero arrives at his salvation only after undergoing an experience of powerlessness. His prayer of desolation-"Lord, I'm at the end of my rope"-recalls the loneliness of our Lord's cry in Gethsemane. The pattern is completed with George's resurrection, when he realizes that in spite of its imperfections, life is still wonderful. His love-an analogy for Christ's love-has created a spiritual community, a tangible manifestation of the kingdom of God.
Capra's cinema reminds us that this imperfect world can be redeemed, that the reward is worth the fight, and that life is a gift to be treasured.
Films
American Madness (1932)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
Broadway Bill (1934)
Dirigible (1931)
The Donovan Affair (1929)
Flight (1929)
For the Love of Mike (1927)
Forbidden (1932)
Here Comes the Groom (1951)
A Hole in the Head (1959)
It Happened One Night (1934)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Ladies of Leisure (1930)
Lady for a Day (1933)
Long Pants (1927)
Lost Horizon (1937)
The Matinee Idol (1928)
Meet John Doe (1941)
The Miracle Woman (1931)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Platinum Blonde (1931)
Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
The Power of the Press (1928)
Rain or Shine (1930)
Riding High (1950)
Say It With Sables (1928)
So This Is Love (1928)
State of the Union (1948)
The Strong Man (1926)
Submarine (1928)
That Certain Thing (1928)
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)
The Way of the Strong (1928)
You Can't Take It With You (1938)
The Younger Generation (1929)
'Why We Fight' Documentaries
Battle of Britain (1943)
Battle of China (1944)
Battle of Russia (1943)
Divide and Conquer (1943)
The Nazi Strike (1943)
The Negro Soldier (1944)
Prelude to War (1943)
War Comes to America (1945)
Maria Elena de las Carreras Kuntz, a Fulbright scholar from Argentina, has a Ph.D. in film studies from UCLA.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Crisis Magazine
This data file is the sole property of CRISIS MAGAZINE. It may not be altered or edited in any way. It may be reproduced only in its entirety for circulation as "freeware," without charge.
In the video below, Jimmy Stewart narrates the wonderful life of Frank Capra. Orthodox Christian readers may also want to read "Life of Frank Capra" in The Orthodox Word, no. 137 (Platina, California: St. Herman Brotherhood, 1987), pp. 371-394.
The career of Frank Capra coincided with the golden age of Hollywood, and many of his films are recognized as classics. Still, most critics seem not to have noticed that Capra's work reflects a profoundly Catholic vision of reality, a vision framed by the Sermon on the Mount. Because his cinema does not have an ethnic Italian flavor, like the Irishness of film director John Ford, this Catholicism is often perceived as an addendum to a body of work primarily concerned with a celebration of American life and its democratic ideals.
The youngest of seven surviving children, Frank Capra was born in rural Sicily in 1897. His family immigrated to the United States in 1903 and settled in Los Angeles. Struggling to overcome the limitations of the working-class immigrant, Capra worked his way through college as a chemical engineer.
In the mid-1920s, Capra got involved in cinema as a gag writer for silent comedy producer Hal Roach and his Our Gang series and then for Mack Sennett, whose comedy shorts have become classics. Paired up with comedian Harry Langdon as a writer and later as a director of two features, The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), Capra helped develop Langdon's comic persona-"the man-child whose only ally was God," in Capra's words.
When he joined Columbia Pictures in the late 1920s, it was a B-movie company headed by the savvy and autocratic Harry Cohn. The studio's stock soon rose, and Capra began a twelve-year association that would catapult him to fame and fortune.
In 1941, war came. Before joining the fight, Capra teamed up with Robert Riskin to make the political comedy-drama Meet John Doe (1941) as an independent production. Between 1942 and 1945, Capra produced the outstanding Why We Fight series, commissioned by General George Marshall to explain to the soldiers the reasons behind the U.S. involvement in the war. In 1946 Capra made his classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) for Liberty Films, the company he had started after the war with directors William Wyler and George Stevens. After the flop of the political comedy State of the Union in 1948, Capra directed two Bing Crosby pictures for Paramount, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951).
But by the mid-1950s-after a series of box-office failures-Capra had slid from his cinematic heights. Bell Telephone hired him to make four TV science specials, and his Hollywood comeback yielded only two minor works, A Hole in the Head, a 1959 vehicle for Frank Sinatra, and Pocketful of Miracles (1961) with Bette Davis.
Capra's slow fade into obscurity was finally reversed in 1971 with the publication of his entertaining autobiography The Name Above the Title. Besides keeping him busy on the lecture circuit, it marked a revival of interest in his cinema, considered too sentimental and patriotic in the turbulent Sixties when it was mockingly termed "Capracorn."
The French auteur theory-according to which the director is the single creative force behind the collaborative effort of filmmaking-led to a reevaluation of Capra. No longer considered a ham-fisted sentimentalist, Capra was seen as an artist with a vision and style traceable through a body of work that spanned four decades and more than 40 films.
Capra's Formula for Success
As a gag writer, Capra had a knack for the visual joke and the humorous angle. You can see this comic sense at work in the collection of endearing characters and hysterical romantic entanglements in his films. For example, It Happened One Night (1934), a taming-of-the-shrew road movie set on a bus and in three motels, stars Clark Gable as a wisecracking newspaperman paired up with a spoiled heiress, Claudette Colbert. There's a running joke about the "walls of Jericho"-a blanket hanging from a rope to separate the beds-mischievously marking the progressive falling in love of the protagonists. This battle of the sexes became the blueprint for the Hollywood screwball comedy.
In this and other romantic comedies and melodramas of the early 1930s, Capra and Riskin experimented with a comic formula and plot structure film historian Richard Griffith described as a "fantasy of goodwill." In Capra's stories, "a messianic innocent, not unlike the classic simpletons of literature, pits himself against the forces of entrenched greed. His experience defeats him strategically, but his gallant integrity in the face of temptation calls forth the goodwill of the 'little people,' and through their combined protest, he triumphs."
The formula had been perfected by the time Capra made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936. Gary Cooper plays the mild-mannered Mr. Deeds, a small-town tuba player who confounds and outsmarts New York's high society when he decides to use a $20 million inheritance to help farmers become landowners. A cynical newspaperwoman (Jean Arthur) deceives him to get an exclusive scoop on the "Cinderella man" but ends up falling in love with him instead. During the climactic (and very funny) insanity hearing, Mr. Deeds outwits his enemies, redeems the heroine, and is warmly supported by the crowd he has helped. Mr. Deeds is one of many Capra films that shows the power of goodness to effect change in the hearts of those willing to undergo an experience of conversion. When novelist Graham Greene reviewed the movie, he outlined the Capra formula in moral terms: "the theme of goodness and simplicity manhandled in a deeply selfish and brutal world."
Capra and screenwriter Sidney Buchman retooled this same moral formula in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), adding a strong political twist. The film offered an explicit defense of America and its Christian values on the eve of World War II. The film won the widespread support of the public. Predictably, others-like Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to Great Britain-feared that even a fictional story about compromise and corruption in the U.S. Senate would demoralize allied nations.
In the film, Jimmy Stewart plays an idealistic young senator who's almost destroyed by the political machinery of a jaded senior senator (Claude Rains) and a shrewd political operator (Edward Arnold)-the prototypical Capra villain. A savvy woman (Jean Arthur again) at first dismisses as utopian Mr. Smith's idea to create a national camp for Boy Rangers and then slowly falls for him. After her change of heart, she uses her insider's knowledge to help Mr. Smith navigate a sea of sharks and defend the principles of liberty, truth, and democracy in a climactic filibuster scene. Reading from the Declaration of Independence and 1 Corinthians 13-the hymn to charity-the exhausted Mr. Smith rouses the support of the people and uncovers the shadowy machinations of the powerful.
Meet John Doe is Capra's darkest film-a political fable about a fascist newspaper tycoon (Edward Arnold) who fabricates a story about an ordinary man who decides to commit suicide on Christmas Eve as a protest against the state of the world. John Doe is really Long John Willoughby, an unemployed baseball player portrayed by Gary Cooper. At first, Willoughby is happy to cooperate with the plot hatched by-who else?-an ambitious newspaperwoman (Barbara Stanwyck). But when he sees the success of the John Doe clubs of neighborly goodwill that his radio speeches have inspired, he has a change of heart and confesses the scam at a packed baseball stadium. This time, the opposition isn't a group of corrupt politicians or greedy businessmen but an ominous underground movement to squash the country's democratic institutions.
A Moralist for the People
Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and John Doe are often studied as a trilogy of progressive social comedies that dramatized American values and ideas with exceptional artistry and found a unique place with the public. As film historian Robert Sklar noted, the films "gave Americans a pleasing and convincing image of themselves."
Because Capra's vision of America coincided with that of the majority of his audience, his work was consistently popular until the war.
To this trilogy of films about the common man should be added the Capra-Riskin film version of You Can't Take It With You (1938), made between Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith and based on the successful Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The Vanderhofs, a clan of happy eccentrics led by Lionel Barrymore, live like lilies of the field. Their pursuit of various vocations is a source of great comedy. This oasis is threatened by a powerful Wall Street banker (Edward Arnold) who has development plans for the neighborhood. The film depicts the clash between the communitarian/utopian values of common folks and the worst aspects of the WASP ethic as embodied in the greedy banker. The banker's son (Jimmy Stewart) and Vanderhof's granddaughter (Jean Arthur) fall in love. As the film closes, Vanderhof and the banker reconcile with a harmonica duet. Capra commented that the film gave him "a golden opportunity to dramatize 'Love Thy Neighbor'.... Christ's spiritual law can be the most powerful sustaining force in anyone's life."
A Wonderful Life
It's a Wonderful Life is a work of summation, whose undercurrent of angst can be interpreted in different ways. At the heart of the film lies the conflict between the desires of the heart and the needs of the common good. The hero of the story, George Bailey (played by Stewart), struggles throughout the picture with this irreconcilable conflict within himself. Even though his nemesis, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), typifies the classic Capra villain, he's really more an external manifestation of one side of George's divided spirit than an autonomous character.
Most of the film is an extended flashback, in which an apprentice guardian angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) reviews George's life as the head of a small-town building and loan. Believing he has failed as a husband, father, and businessman, George is contemplating suicide on Christmas Eve. With Clarence, we see key moments in George's life, moments when he had to make important choices about family, friends, and career. In spite of his desire to escape Bedford Falls, George has chosen to stay so that he can run the lending institution founded by his father for the "garlic-eaters" (Potter's word) who can't afford Potter's bank loans.
His dreams of college, travel, and a professional life in the big city fall by the wayside. George marries and starts a family. Now, on the day before Christmas, a careless mistake on the part of his absentminded uncle threatens to wipe out the Building and Loan and give Potter complete control of the town. George is on the brink of total despair.
Enter Clarence. God sends the angel to prevent George from jumping off a bridge. By making George see what Bedford Falls would be like without him, Clarence leads him to an experience of conversion. This "unborn" sequence is shot in stark visual contrast with that of the extended flashback, using film noir techniques. It shows how the absence of George's goodness would have left the town to be devoured by evil:
Bedford Falls, renamed Pottersville, becomes an urban hell of mean little people, beginning with George's embittered mother and the wife he never married (Donna Reed). Awakened by this desolate vision, George turns away from the bridge's parapet to return home, where he's surrounded by the warmth and affection of family and friends, who will together save the Building and Loan from insolvency. The hero's wry smile at the close is a wink to the audience; he has seen, understood, and accepted life in all its glory and imperfection.
Surprisingly enough, this embrace of life was a box-office disappointment. Capra called It's a Wonderful Life the greatest film he had ever made: "A film to tell the wary, the disheartened, and the disillusioned; the wino, the junkie, the prostitute; those behind prison walls and those behind Iron Curtains, that no man is a failure! To show those born slow of foot or slow of mind, those oldest sisters condemned to spinsterhood, and those oldest sons condemned to unschooled toil, that each man's life touches so many other lives. And that if he isn't around it would leave an awful hole."
A Vision of the Cross
Capra's biographers and critics agree that the power and consistency of the filmmaker's moral vision are rooted in his own experiences. While his autobiography should be read critically (he had a tendency toward self-aggrandizement), it still provides a good point of departure for examining the way this moral vision was shaped by Capra's Catholic faith.
An individualist by temperament, Capra initially rejected his religious heritage, only gradually growing into it. He wrote that in his early adulthood he was a "Christmas Catholic." But in the mid-1930s, the astonishing success of It Happened One Night triggered an artistic crisis, which resulted in a conversion experience, not unlike the one faced by many of his characters. It was the scolding given him by an anonymous man that pushed him into action: "The talents you have, Mr. Capra, are not your own, not self-acquired. God gave you those talents; they are His gifts to you, to use for His purpose. And when you don't use the gifts God blessed you with, you are an offense to God-and to humanity." Capra later developed this theme in It's a Wonderful Life.
In later years, through the influence of his wife, Lucille Reyburn, Capra returned to the Church. He described himself as "a Catholic in spirit; one who firmly believes that the anti-moral, the intellectual bigots, and the Mafias of ill will may destroy religion, but they will never conquer the cross."
If his films are to be seen as a form of submerged autobiography, then one can understand why so many of them show the clash between a Catholic moral view-represented by the idealist-and the materialistic worldview of his memorable villains, a view that Capra sometimes felt drawn to because of his desire to be a successful Hollywood director.
In Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America, Lee Lourdeaux's 1990 study of John Ford, Frank Capra, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, the author argues that the Catholic identity of these directors can be probed by examining how the Catholic notions of communion, mediation, and sacramentality are rendered cinematically. Of course, one should be careful about automatically assigning Catholic values to art on the basis of the artist's cultural background or ethnicity. Nevertheless, these three concepts provide us with a good context for understanding Capra's cinema.
Among other things, communion means that our relationship with God does not excuse us from our responsibility toward our neighbor. A joyful sense of community, of belonging to something larger than oneself, is at the heart of Capra's mature works-roughly the ten years from Mr. Deeds to It's a Wonderful Life. But it's also present in earlier films like American Madness, the 1932 social melodrama about a quixotic banker whose business philosophy is to lend on character, not collateral, and who is handsomely repaid by hundreds of small customers when bankruptcy seems imminent. The following year, the comedy Lady for a Day operated on a similar principle: Apple Annie is helped by her beggar friends, a racketeer and his associates, and the New York social elite to impersonate a lady of distinction so that her daughter will be able to marry a Spanish aristocrat. Lost Horizon (1937) is about the utopian Shangri-La, a mysterious community in the Himalayas whose members follow closely the teachings of their lama, a 200-year-old French missionary.
Capra's films celebrate the values associated with life in a community-solidarity and selflessness in particular-but without the close connection to ethnic identity that is so important to the second-generation Italian-Americans represented by Coppola, Scorsese, and Michael Cimino. Lourdeaux notes that Capra's somewhat idealized communities are a blueprint for the principle of subsidiarity, which is so fundamental to the social vision of the Church: Families, neighborhoods, and small organizations provide protection against both anarchy and despotism.
Closely associated with communion is the idea of mediation. Christ is the mediator par excellence. In Capra's narrative pattern, the hero functions as a mediator between the needs of the community and the entrenched forces of greed: Thomas Dickson (the hero in American Madness), Mr. Deeds, Grandpa Vanderhof, Mr. Smith, John Doe, and George Bailey all play that role. In the most Christ-like of these figures-Mr. Smith and John Doe-there are concrete allusions to their "crucifixion" at the hands of the powerful. Their stories reflect the trajectory of the archetypal messianic innocent: through passion and death to resurrection.
Music not only mediates between opposites-as in the harmonica duet in You Can't Take It With You-but also contributes to the creation or reaffirmation of a communal spirit: the impromptu singing of "The Man in the Flying Trapeze" on the bus in It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds playing the tuba in Mandrake Falls, and the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" at the end of It's a Wonderful Life.
Capra uses other recurrent mediators as well: benevolent fathers and father figures, who steer the heroes and heroines toward the common good-to cite just one example, the dead father in The Miracle Woman (1931), whose Christian principles defeat the religious scam cooked up by his vengeful daughter, played by Barbara Stanwyck.
The Dignity of the Underdog
A distinctively Catholic idea, sacramentality is the capacity of things-people, objects, places, the whole cosmos-to carry the presence of God. It invites us to see God in and through His creation. One way this is reflected in Capra's vision is in his portrayal of "little" people and their inherent dignity. While it's true they have the potential to become a mob-as we see in the dark Meet John Doe-it's even truer that the common men are among the meek of the gospel. "The meek can inherit the earth when the John Does start loving their neighbors," John Doe says at the end of his first radio broadcast. Capra said on several occasions that the underlying idea of his movies was actually the Sermon on the Mount.
Although Capra's spiritual vision gets its focus from the Catholic faith, this isn't immediately apparent to most viewers. This is partly because his films contain very little obvious religious imagery.
Capra's Catholic imagination must be traced through his characters and plot structures. Perhaps the single most important theme in Capra's work-from his very first film to his last-is the power of goodness to transform sinful human nature. In many instances, and especially in his early work, goodness manifests itself as a romantic love that thoroughly metamorphoses the people-a contemptuous Broadway actor in The Matinee Idol (1928), a cynical gold digger in Ladies of Leisure (1930), and the unfaithful husband in State of the Union.
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) presents a funny variant: The misguided love of two eccentric old ladies makes them poison twelve lonely gentlemen to end their misery.
Like the gospel parables, Capra's films show us how love, a gift freely given, comes to ordinary reality and changes it in extraordinary ways-in other words, how the transcendent disrupts the course of human events.
In It's a Wonderful Life, a work of theological optimism, a representative of the divine comes to earth to offer salvation to a soul in despair. The hero arrives at his salvation only after undergoing an experience of powerlessness. His prayer of desolation-"Lord, I'm at the end of my rope"-recalls the loneliness of our Lord's cry in Gethsemane. The pattern is completed with George's resurrection, when he realizes that in spite of its imperfections, life is still wonderful. His love-an analogy for Christ's love-has created a spiritual community, a tangible manifestation of the kingdom of God.
Capra's cinema reminds us that this imperfect world can be redeemed, that the reward is worth the fight, and that life is a gift to be treasured.
Films
American Madness (1932)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
Broadway Bill (1934)
Dirigible (1931)
The Donovan Affair (1929)
Flight (1929)
For the Love of Mike (1927)
Forbidden (1932)
Here Comes the Groom (1951)
A Hole in the Head (1959)
It Happened One Night (1934)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Ladies of Leisure (1930)
Lady for a Day (1933)
Long Pants (1927)
Lost Horizon (1937)
The Matinee Idol (1928)
Meet John Doe (1941)
The Miracle Woman (1931)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Platinum Blonde (1931)
Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
The Power of the Press (1928)
Rain or Shine (1930)
Riding High (1950)
Say It With Sables (1928)
So This Is Love (1928)
State of the Union (1948)
The Strong Man (1926)
Submarine (1928)
That Certain Thing (1928)
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)
The Way of the Strong (1928)
You Can't Take It With You (1938)
The Younger Generation (1929)
'Why We Fight' Documentaries
Battle of Britain (1943)
Battle of China (1944)
Battle of Russia (1943)
Divide and Conquer (1943)
The Nazi Strike (1943)
The Negro Soldier (1944)
Prelude to War (1943)
War Comes to America (1945)
Maria Elena de las Carreras Kuntz, a Fulbright scholar from Argentina, has a Ph.D. in film studies from UCLA.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Crisis Magazine
This data file is the sole property of CRISIS MAGAZINE. It may not be altered or edited in any way. It may be reproduced only in its entirety for circulation as "freeware," without charge.
In the video below, Jimmy Stewart narrates the wonderful life of Frank Capra. Orthodox Christian readers may also want to read "Life of Frank Capra" in The Orthodox Word, no. 137 (Platina, California: St. Herman Brotherhood, 1987), pp. 371-394.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
