I recently saw the film Pleasantville for the first time. It's about two 1990's teenagers, David and Jennifer, who are magically transported into a 1950's sitcom called Pleasantville where they are forced to play the characters Bud and Mary Sue. In Pleasantville, everyone is pleasant to each other, it never rains, and the school basketball team never lose a game. But there's a catch. Pleasantville is very dull. It's literally in black and white. There's no art, no books, no sex, no creativity. That is, until David (Bud) and Jennifer (Mary Sue) are transported into this world.
Now the film has some very positive aspects. The film is beautifully made; as colour, joy and passion comes into this world, it really draws our attention to the beauty of creation, and to how we so often fail to recognise this beauty. Surely St Thomas would appreciate this aspect of the film. But what I think St Thomas would strongly object to is the attempt to retell the Adam and Eve story. Before David (Bud) and Jennifer (Mary Sue) were transported into Pleasantville, it was an ordered world of innocence, dull but nice. There are enough hints to suggest that this is how we are to think of the Garden of Eden.
At one point, a beautiful girl offers Bud (David) a nice red apple, and it is at this moment he realises that all this beauty and colour that is beginning to come into this world cannot coexist without evil. What is happening is a kind of felix culpa, a happy fault. Now for St Thomas, this retelling of the Genesis story just wouldn't hang together. St Thomas believed that before the Fall, the garden would have been very beautiful, Adam and Eve would have had passions, they would have had sex, and in fact, their joy and appreciation of creation would have been much more intense than it is now:
Now the film has some very positive aspects. The film is beautifully made; as colour, joy and passion comes into this world, it really draws our attention to the beauty of creation, and to how we so often fail to recognise this beauty. Surely St Thomas would appreciate this aspect of the film. But what I think St Thomas would strongly object to is the attempt to retell the Adam and Eve story. Before David (Bud) and Jennifer (Mary Sue) were transported into Pleasantville, it was an ordered world of innocence, dull but nice. There are enough hints to suggest that this is how we are to think of the Garden of Eden.
At one point, a beautiful girl offers Bud (David) a nice red apple, and it is at this moment he realises that all this beauty and colour that is beginning to come into this world cannot coexist without evil. What is happening is a kind of felix culpa, a happy fault. Now for St Thomas, this retelling of the Genesis story just wouldn't hang together. St Thomas believed that before the Fall, the garden would have been very beautiful, Adam and Eve would have had passions, they would have had sex, and in fact, their joy and appreciation of creation would have been much more intense than it is now:
sensible delight would have been the greater in proportion to the greater purity of nature and the greater sensibility of the body (ST 1a,q98 a.2)When this foreign element of sin came into their world, it dulled their senses, they became repressed and the world became a less delightful place. The Fall of Man wasn't a happy fault because it brought colour into our world, but because it merited such and so great a Redeemer.
One might even say that the Garden of Eden was the world in colour, and that the world we're living in now is only in black-and-white (that is slowly being re-coloured by Christ).
ReplyDeleteYour focus on the myth of the Garden and the fall of Adam and Eve from preternatural integrity and happiness raises once again the tension between this lynchpin Christian doctrine and the modern evolutionary world view. As your own friar Nichols wrote
ReplyDelete"To a secular mind, the difficulty with this doctrine (of original sin) will be not only the concept of vicariousness but also the question of historicity. The story of the Fall could be read as a symbolic account of human rebelliousness against God…Yet sin must have entered human life at some historical moment, whether identifiable or not. For unless evil marred the creation of humanity contingently (i.e., historically), it could only have done so essentially (i.e., by God's own creative act), which is unthinkable."
Certainly death is as old as life on this planet; indeed in nature they are inseparable and long preceded the appearance of man. And if man is descended from primates, animals enmeshed in nature’s drama of sex and violence as means of survival…what are we to think of the idea of two humanoids suddenly excepted from this matrix, not subject to mortality, passion, clear of mind and free…who just as suddenly make a choice which appears only to throw them and their descendants back into the regime that preceded them.
Hence, the need for a second Adam.
Original sin only makes sense in a landscape where original justice, integrity, etc. is thinkable. And Christian redemption only makes sense where that original goodness was lost. I would submit that the “secular mind” has good reason to doubt this basic Christian tenet because it has been so ill-explained vis a vis evolution.
Would this not be a task suited to the brothers of a man who took on the confrontation between faith and science –Aristotelian reason—back in the 13th century?
So, Pleasantville is like Canada, dull and boring but everyone is "NICE". Gives me the creeps for sure!
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