Can violence be essential to a narrative?
For Catechetics class this week, we read the article “The End is Everything” by Gracia Grindal, Dialog 36 (1997) no. 2:91-99. it’s quite the fascinating piece. Grindal is writing a critical evaluation of the Augsburg-Fortress Sunday School materials. To make her critique she discusses Greek tragedy, “Toy Story” and the Bible narratives. Here are some brief excerpts (reprinted here without permission… is this educational use?):
All stories teach. Church publishing houses would be advised to find out how they teach from literature teachers, rather than from psychologists, as is presently the pattern. While children do need to be taught to be good, the Bible stories that teach us to be good-like Mr. Recycle Man does-are few and far between. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob’s stealing of the birthright, Joseph’s brothers, Moses murdering the Egyptian, Jeptha’s daughter, Tamar, David and Bathsheba, Absalom, Ahab, Jezebel, Elisha and the bears-do not seem to be moral tales with much edifying content. If one reads the Bible thinking that everything in it-which is an imitation of life-is to be imitated, it is easy to begin censoring the shocking material in it. That approach to story leaves most good literature behind and substitutes for it a kind of drivel….
Children and adults can return to the great stories of the Bible and learn about their own lives through the story. They can be moralized by them, they can extend their imaginations through them, they can be drawn to them as to a many-faceted jewel, as the crowds who followed Jesus were drawn to him by his use of parables. The story about Adam and Eve con-tinues to instruct us; it never loses its fascination. Everyone but the most pedestrian among us is stopped by it. “Now the serpent was the most wily of animals.†No matter that children cannot explain or learn about original sin in a theoretical or abstract way, they can experience the perverse inevitability of this wonderful story without having to stretch it over the frame of a theological principle. It stops everyone with wonder. Economical, spare and expert, it con-fronts us with a cosmic event occurring between two people, our first parents. It should, no matter where you are on the mental operations level. Stories demand our serious attention because they draw us into a scene and cause us to treat the grand issues of human life. Wonder is at least one of the first things a religious imagination should foster, not simply pedestrian understanding. Story, especially these foundational stories, does engage every imagination with the big themes of life, by giving us what Aristotle called the “concrete universal.†This life is a specific one, we say as we listen to how the serpent tempts Eve. Later, we may actually see that it is also universal because it is about us. Egan says it better than anybody: “Abundance of life comes in part from assimilating to oneself, primarily through words, the richness of others’ human experience and from informing our own experience with that richness.â€
It is obvious that Ms. Grindal is well-educated in the classics. Indeed, she is a professor of rhetoric at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. She knows how to communicate, delight, and teach.
Her critique of the “defanging” of the Bible by the ELCA for its Sunday School material is valid. I had a similar experience this last week. Two friends and I went to see “300.” By know you’ve heard of this film of the Spartans, King Leonidas, and the Battle of Thermopylae. Most of the press I have read has been positive…. and I agree. It is a thoroughly entertaining moral tale.
I have heard two main criticisms of the film (and if they had read the graphic novel, the same would hold.) First, the film is too violent. Second, there are few parallels to the skirmish in Iraq. Both criticisms represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the film. These critics want the film to be something it is not. What it is not is a ancient story meant to enlighten or inform a present situation. If it were, then the violence would have been anesthetized to better represent our current sit-in-a-tank-and-press-a-button methodology of war.
Rather Frank Miller (author of the graphic novel) and the filmmakers sought to tell a tale of virtue, heroic, vocation, and honor. They let the actions (or stylized ones) speak for themselves. It is a story about us in a truly humanist way, presenting the human condition. King Leonidas has a duty to his wife, son, kingdom, Greece, and freedom. He is self-sacrificing, noble, valiant, and acts with conviction. Is he violent? Sure enough but all to protect and honor his station in life as king, husband, father, and Greek.
The tale fits right into the Greek notion of a noble death. To die to protect, preserve, or restore that which is good and upright is to be noble. Christ in the Gospel of Mark fits many of these same themes. To sanitize the violence of “300″ would so alter its message as to be a different tale altogether. To sanitize Christ’s Passion and death would be to do the same. Without the cross, the resurrection would be folly.
The intent of the film is not meant to be an apology or polemic of the Iraq conflict. Its intended to tell a tale of a noble man who acts with integrity, honoring the traditions of his land, but ultimately doing what is right for the sake of his fellow free Greeks. The violence is critical to show the lengths to which he would go to protect those entrusted to him. In it is a wholly self-sacrificial love for the neighbor. King Leonidas dies a vicious death in the face of an powerful foe. But it is in his death that all of Greece is joined to defeat Xerxes and the Persian empire. Sound familar? It should!
(Its no wonder the main interaction between Xerxes and Leonidas is almost verbatim quoting of the Christ/Satan temptation narrative. The Iranians miss the point. Its not a polemic against Iran or even Persia for that matter. Its using an event to tell a tale. The Persians are stylized to fit the narrative.)
In the end, Grindal is right. The narrative works in so far as it is real. To distill a narrative to a simple “moral lesson” is to destroy the reality of the narrative. The listener is no longer a part of it and is only looking in as an outside, isolated observer. Kids are perceptive. They know when you aren’t telling the truth. They know when you’ve gotten rid of the reality. To do so to the Biblical narratives is bad literary practice at least and heresy at the worst.
Christ suffered and died on the cross. His blood is the blood that purifies us. Its ugly business but thank God for His grace to do what was needed, not what was pretty. Give me Jesus crucified and resurrected over Jesus “the Moral Teacher” any day.
(BTW: Did I say you should see “300″? You should.)
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