Theopathic Fantasy and Retro-Medieval Theology in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ has unleashed fascinating discussions. Possibly the film is more valuable for the reactions it has evoked than for any cinematic achievement it represents. In response to the publicity surrounding the film some observers have seized an opportunity to expound certain forgotten aspects of Christian studies. As a church historian, I marvel at how the film derives not from scripture but from a literary work of German Romanticism. Many people recoil from the film’s display of “blood and guts.” Well might one wonder what passages in the four Gospels authorise such a bloody vision of the Crucifixion. One answer is that the inspiration comes not so much from the Bible as from a book of 1838 that recounts the alleged “visions” of a German nun concerning the Crucifixion. As with much else in modern Christianity, a major inspiration of Mel Gibson’s film grows out of German Romanticism. In this case it was a sick romanticism that presupposes a retro-medieval theology of atonement.

Here is the story. Anna Katharina Emmerick (1774-1824), daughter of a peasant family, lived from 1802 to 1811 in a convent of Augustinian canonesses near Münster, Westphalia. There she suffered diabolical visitations. After the convent was dissolved, she took to her bed as a lifelong invalid in the nearby town of Dülmen. In 1812 Anna Katharina became a bleeding stigmatic who had visions of Christ agonising on the cross. Her fantasies would hold no importance for us had not a publicist of genius, the poet Clemens von Brentano (1778-1842), lived with her for the five years before her death. Having converted to Catholicism as recently as 1817, Brentano wrote up Anna Katharina’s visions in a bestseller Das bittere Leiden unsres Herrn Jesu Christi [The Cruel Suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ] (1838). That is the book that Gibson has brought to the screen.

An admirer of the late medieval painter Matthias Grünewald, Brentano had succumbed to nostalgia for the Middle Ages. He is best known as co-author while still a Protestant of folksongs set to music by Gustav Mahler, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805-1808). After Emmerick’s process for canonisation began in 1899, it soon bogged down in doubts about the supernatural quality of her visions as recorded by the poet. Most authorities dismissed them as “preternatural,” i.e. pathological. Indeed, she is a textbook case of what William James in 1902 called “theopathy,” i.e. physical agonising occasioned by contemplation of God’s supposed suffering. Fantasies of divine suffering feed a pathology that welcomes human suffering. Emmerick found a brilliant publicist in Clemens von Brentano, and it appears that she has found another in Mel Gibson.

No less troubling is the theology of the atonement that underlies the film. Images of devils, ravens, and other Satanic reminders pervade it. They signal the presence of Satan as a player in the drama of the Crucifixion. As we all know, the Crucifixion accomplished what theologians call the atonement, i.e. the transaction that reconciled God to the fact of human sinfulness (Col. 1:20, Rom 3:25, I Peter 1:18). The question of just how Jesus’s “precious blood” wrought redemption for us humans gave rise to three major theories up to 1200. The oldest and grimmest is the one that Gibson has chosen to dramatise. He ignores the more recent and more appealing theories that emerged around 1100 and by which most of us now live. The one that prevailed until about 1100 is the ransom theory. Put forward by great theologians like Irenaus, Origen, and Augustine, the notion is that Adam’s sin delivered the human race into the power of Satan. Humans could be freed from Satan’s lawful grip only if God paid a ransom (Mark 10:45) to buy off the Evil One. In a version that Augustine likened to a mousetrap, the Crucifixion involved substitution of a sinless Christ (the trap) in order to trick Satan into exceeding his rights, which extended only to sinners (the bait). Having overreached his jurisdiction by claiming a sinless human, Satan forfeited his rights in those future humans whom God chose to save. That is the view that Gibson appears to dramatise. Because the big loser in the Crucifixion will be Satan, suffering of the most devilish sort serves to appease him.

This is an archaic theology which collapsed in the West around 1100, the Eastern church having never widely accepted it. The Benedictine Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm of Bec (c.1033-1109), supplanted the ransom theory in his dialogue Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Man] (1098). Anselm banished Satan from the process of atonement. The great Benedictine, an Italian who had spent half a lifetime in Northern France, argued that only a being who was both God and man could pay to God the infinite satisfaction that was owing to Him for the infinite offence of human disobedience. God requires not a ransom paid to Satan but rather repayment by humankind of an infinite debt. The vicarious satisfaction must come from a God-Man because only God could embody a payment of infinite value, and only a human could deliver it. The devil plays no role in the transaction, and it is the God-man’s willingness to sacrifice Himself that matters, not the manner of His dying. Remarkably, within a generation Abelard (1079-1142/43) had carried the discussion a step further by interpreting the atonement not as a legal transaction consummated in the Crucifixion but rather as an initiative of God’s love manifested throughout Christ’s life. Christ’s sacrifice climaxes a lifetime of love, and this self-giving in turn evokes love in the believer. Rejected by Abelard’s contemporary St. Bernard, this view won acceptance only after 1800. Conceivably it was this view that Clemens von Brentano most wished to dispel.

Mel Gibson’s film turns back the clock by at least nine hundred years to a pre-Anselmian view of the atonement. The film’s theology would place us in a pre-atonement world where Satan roves about seeking whom he may devour. Since the shift in theology around 1100, Western civilisation has benefited by having expelled Satan from the transaction of the Crucifixion. Gradually, in the wake of Anselm and later of Abelard we have placed first God’s need for satisfaction and then human need for God’s love at the center of God’s saving action. Satan’s alleged need for a payoff got largely forgotten until Mel Gibson sought to revive it.

The German Romantic Clemens von Brentano publicised theopathic fantasies of a neurotic nun. Now Mel Gibson is combining Anna Katharina Emmerick’s immersion in horror with an outdated theology that pivots on Satan’s role in the atonement. The film takes us back at least a thousand years. Its archaic quality may help to explain its fascination. Gibson has dramatised not the Holy Land of the Roman Empire but a theology from the early Middle Ages. Depiction of the ransom theory of the atonement is authorised by fantasies of a bedridden nun as told by a German Romantic who agonised over the sinfulness of his contemporaries. Like Mel Gibson, Brentano wanted to contemplate how much God’s son had agonised. This is a medieval, not a Biblical preoccupation. As with The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter phenomenon, this film appeals to 21st-century taste for the retro-medieval.

Will Johnston, Yarra Theological Union