Brokeback Evil
More than 25 years ago, a priest named Paul Quay predicted where the (undeclared but real) Catholic schism was heading. He saw what Catholic presidential candidate Rick Santorum is now dealing with: the idea that has taken over American culture that the definition of evil is anything that limits us in any way.
In the mid 1980s, Fr. Quay wrote an essay, "The Disvalue of Ontic Evil." The essay, which appeared in the journal Theological Studies, is an answer to Catholic theologians who at the time had proposed a new concept of evil. Stripped of its academic garnish, the argument of the theologians was that the definition of evil could now include things that limit the fulfillment of our needs and desires.
As the priest Louis Janssens wrote: "We call ontic evil any lack of a perfection at which we aim, any lack of fulfillment which frustrates our natural urges and makes us suffer. It is the natural consequence of our limitation." Janssens adds: "[A man] has a feeling he is lacking something when he becomes aware of his inability to realize all these different [professional, familial, religious, social] values as much as he pleases....Our body is a means to action. But it is also a handicap which impedes our action. This hindrance may hurt us as an ontic evil."
Fr. Quay rightly recognized this as a revolutionary change in theology.
For while Thomas Aquinas thought that there were evils that had no moral component -- pain, sickness, death -- he refused to call the simple absence of good an evil. Janssens and the new theologians were doing just that. Fr. Quay was appalled: "Freedom of choice delights in creaturely limitations as the stuff out of which personal growth is made -- for what sort of growth can there be without time, space, limitation? Only by free moral choice among limited goods and under the limitations of a material world can human beings serve and worship God." Arguments to the effect that the all-good creator somehow created an ambivalent world which is evil "lead logically toward genuine dualism and collapse of faith in God's absolute goodness."
In the post-sexual revolution world, what was evil is not human sin, but limitation itself. Forgotten is the beautiful insight that an essential component of love is the desire to limit one's own freedom for the sake of the beloved. Resentment becomes an expression of anger -- even rage -- against those who suggest that, without God, there are boundaries to human possibility, but that those very boundaries offer us the chance to choose the good and, therefore, God.
To many Catholic liberals (and liberals in general), any mention of the Church and sex -- or just the Church, period -- elicits an instantaneous and seething diatribe about sex, homosexuality and contraception. The tirade is not against any human action as such, but against anyone who dares to talk of limits.
Thus in 1989, the gay activist group Act-Up disrupted a Mass being held by New York Cardinal Joseph O'Connor. The protestors screamed, cried, threw blood. One of them yelled to O'Connor, "You're killing me!"
O'Connor opposed the death penalty as well as the U.S. involvement in the war in Nicaragua, and just a few weeks earlier had spoken eloquently about the plight of AIDS victims and the need to provide compassionate care for them. None of that mattered to the activists, however. Simply by upholding the church's teaching that contraception was not the answer to the AIDS epidemic, O'Connor was "killing" gay men.
I have often been struck by the fact that two films, Brokeback Mountain and The New World, were released the same year. The two films represent the theological differences between the two philosophies about evil. In Brokeback Mountain, two gay men who can't live together because one is married with a family. Family life in the film is mocked and depicted as chaotic, abrasive and restricting. Kids scream and women scold.
The New World is about Captain John Smith and the foundation of Jamestown. John Smith, played by Colin Farrell, meets Pocahontas, played by Q'Orianka Kilcher. Like the two cowboys in Brokeback, Smith and Pocahontas meet in the wild and fall in love. Yet the depiction of those loves could not be more different. While Brokeback Mountain's sex scenes are over-the-top graphic, reducing the men -- like gay pornography -- to nothing more than body parts, The New World does not have a single shot of nudity.
Pocahontas is lavishly filmed as if she were a messenger from God; director Terrence Malick does not use any false lighting in his films, and the shots of Pocahontas in the wild are breathtaking. We see her shoulders, her face, her hair. She is treated like a queen.
When Smith abandons Pocahontas by faking his own death, she is courted by tobacco farmer John Rolfe, played by Christian Bale. They marry and have a child, and Rolfe takes his bride to England. And it is here that the film truly distinguishes itself from the narcissism that is the core of Brokeback Mountain. When Pocahontas learns that Smith is alive, she becomes confused, thinking that she had "married" him at Jamestown. Her husband Rolfe summons Smith, who arrives on horseback. Rolfe then leaves Smith and Pocahontas alone to talk -- he loves his wife so much that he wants her to have a clean break with Smith, to make a decision on her own.
"You are every bit the man I married, and more," Pocahontas tells her husband. She and Smith talk, Smith trying to explain and apologize for his behavior. Then he departs. As the film comes to a close Pocahontas is seen playing with her small son on the green lawns of England, then shown on her deathbed (the real Pocahontas actually did die in England shortly after arriving). In a voice-over, her husband explains how she accepted her death, seeing it as fair "as long as the child could live."
In The New World, marriage is shown as difficult -- part of a world of limitations, Hunter's "wheel of life" that ultimately results in death -- but also as a divine calling that results in real joy, joy that reaches past oneself to another and to future generations.
John Rolfe, unlike the gay cowboys, acts with honor towards his wife, even if it means he may lose her in the end. In Brokeback, the heterosexual world is a scene of confinement, a prison cell. In The New World, it is the ship full of men arriving on Virginia's shores that is the prison. Indeed, when the movie opens, Captain Smith, guilty of "mutinous sayings," is literally chained to the boat. He emerges from the darkness to find light, a land of abundance and a new love.
Contra Brokeback, the fecundity of that love results in children and a future. And joy. When Pocahontas dies in the film, the next scene shows her running through the English gardens as if born again. Her death has resulted in Life.
