The Sacramentality of Cinema
Human life is story. It is story, much of which is viewed as a series of moving pictures. The interior life of an individual is largely invisible to the outsider’s naked eye, only becoming visible and capable of interpretation by means of exterior signs such as body language and facial expressions, stutters and silence. But at least from the perspective of the subject, the vast majority of one’s life is comprised of pictures, always in motion and always telling a story—very much, in fact, like the movies. Sculpting with light and shadow, the cinematic camera attempts to capture images as does the human eye, and the arrangement of those gathered pictures in motion is intended to replicate and mimic the human vantage point from within a story. It is no wonder, then, that cinema—that intricate gathering, sculpting, and assembling of moving images—is an art form so dearly loved. This is so precisely because cinema so closely resembles the human experience.
How is it, though, that cinema affects its viewers so drastically, so multidimensionally? Some talk of their lives being changed by a single interaction with a film. How can it be that these assemblies of moving pictures have such profound effects, causing some to weep in identification with a character, to marvel at the entirety of their lives somehow enveloped and summarized by only a single line of dialogue, or to leave a viewing without words capable of expressing precisely how they have been affected?
One could try to explain away responses such as these, considering them results of the impressionable nature of youthful innocence or immaturity, emotional hypersensitivity, or of the efficacious employment of the technical expertise of the director and the accompanying merry band of artists, as they collaboratively manipulate their viewers’ psychology and chemistry, provoking such emotive displays by means of subtle camera maneuvers, suggestive editing techniques, overwhelming musical compositions, etc.
When it comes to art, though, explanations, as typically understood, are more than suspect, for they are presumptuous, assuming one even has the ability and wherewithal, or even the right, to interrogate their object of inquiry and subjugate it by Thomistic and analytic means. Primarily, the desire to explain is indicative of one’s worldview.
Cosmological Perspective
This obsession with cosmic explication—the atomization of reality and the extraction of its “facts”—is a cerebral fetish thoroughly rooted in modernity, in the paradigmatic plight of the Enlightenment, the aim of which was to dislodge humanity from the primitive reasoning, or “nonreasoning,” of the premodern perspective which was vivified by its myths, metanarratives, idyllic realms, and mysteries, in favor of a more “sophisticated” and “illumined” outlook that views reality as self-referential, self-interpreting, untethered from anything above or beyond it, as if the material and visible order has no immaterial or invisible counterpart.
Probing modernity may seem irrelevant to the discussion of cinema’s nature, though it is extremely pertinent, for modernity’s intent, above all, was to install—and it did so with immeasurable success—a “new” set of eyes, or rather an “updated” interpretive lens in humanity’s collective consciousness through which they might filter reality and provide it with sense and meaning that, at least as is proposed by modernity, the cosmos did not have on its own. The modern paradigm attempted to supplant the premodern perspective (from the Latin perspicere; per- “through” + specere “to look”)—one that saw in and through the visible, imminent creation order into the invisible, transcendental realm beyond it—with a vision of reality, a system of sight, that was to terminate as soon as one’s eyes came to rest upon their visible object of observation. Vision, supposedly, was to go no further than what the naked eye could gather, for those images of the material order the eye collected had no relation nor referred to anything above or beyond them since, as modernity would have it, nothing transcendental existed above or beyond the immanental to which it might refer.
However, this is assuredly not the reality human beings and the rest of the cosmic order—cinema included—are living and extant components of. Saint Paul articulates another, what could be considered a cosmologia prima, or “first cosmology,” in Rom 1.20, writing, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (NIV). Here the Apostle communicates that the invisible and transcendental realities of God have been “clearly seen” and “understood” from the visible and immanental realities of the created order (“from what has been made”), and that this has been the nature of the cosmos from its genesis (“since the creation of the world”). Liturgical theologian David W. Fagerberg summarizes this notion well, writing, “Creation was intended as a theophanous window upon the Creator” [i]. Since its inception the universe was meant to serve as an immanental medium of exchange with the transcendental.
This “first cosmology” as articulated by Paul, this identification of reality as a “theophanous window” of which humans are simultaneously components, participants, and observers, peering through and interacting with it, resulting in their eyes, minds, and hearts coming to rest “upon the Creator”—this understanding of reality is not only significant to Christian theology, but also more than informative for an understanding of the nature of cinema and its communicative potentiality as an art form that is predominantly comprised of images and window-esque projections of stories into which its viewers peer and participate. Ultimately, modernity’s attempt to divorce and untether human beings and the immanental reality of which they are members from the transcendental reality of God is inconsonant, excruciatingly disharmonious with, and entirely antithetical to a biblical understanding of reality. All reality, material and immaterial, was fashioned by its Maker to serve as sign and symbol of His divine presence, and further, as means of communion with Him.
Sacramental Perspective
This understanding of reality as sign and symbol of the divine presence of God is also the fount from which sacramentalism springs, for at the locus of the sacramental perception of the world is the communion of and contact with the invisible and transcendental realities of God by means of the visible and immanental realities of all the created order. While sacramentalism encompasses the Eucharistic celebration, baptismal rites, and the Divine Liturgy—and rightfully so, it likely brings these to mind first—it envelops these events precisely because it envelops all reality, understanding it to be as Paul described it in Romans: the transcendental and immaterial made immanental by material means. One can comfortably say that this understanding of the cosmos as inherently sacramental is coterminous with the cosmologia prima as communicated by Paul in Romans; the two are one and the same, though the former was constructed upon the articulation of the latter.
Countless theologians have attempted to harmonize with the melody of the Scriptures to articulate with precision this relationship between the invisible and the visible, and specifically the tether which binds together the two realities. Since so many terms in the sacramental vocabulary have been cheapened over time as a result of modernity’s naturalistic reductionism, at this point a definition of those terms and a survey of the harmonies of those theologians is in order.
One of the Church’s foremost Latin Doctors, Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, famously defined a sacrament as a “visible sign of an invisible reality.” Even this definition though, fundamental as it is to sacramental theology, is likely to be passed over with nonchalance and no little amount of indifference. Augustine constructed this definition with his presupposed, premodern cosmology, one that was thoroughly Christianized and understood the material and immaterial of reality to be, as Paul’s cosmologia prima would have it, intimately bound and tethered together, “without space between the atoms,” as it were. Whatever little space or yawning void that contemporaries might locate between Augustine’s visible sign and his invisible reality is anachronistically introduced by those minds and eyes well-steeped in the waters of modernity, attempting to reflect on the subject of sacramentalism post-modernity.
Leonard Vander Zee, of the Reformed tradition, considers sacraments to be “material things that point beyond themselves to their Creator…windows into divine reality” [ii]. Still, for healthy offspring of modernity whose minds cannot entirely escape the Enlightenment paradigm, its categories and the all-encompassing residual effects still felt by the mind, as well as its residue left on the eyes, a definition such as this is likely to be noncontentious, for there seemingly remains an allowance for space between the material things and the Creator whom they point to beyond themselves. “May the two never be wed” and modernity is satisfied.
However, and once again calling to mind Paul’s “first cosmology,” Alexander Schmemann, a prominent Orthodox Christian theologian, elaborates on the inherent sacramentality of the cosmos, calling it “the primordial intuition that everything in this world and the world itself not only have elsewhere the cause and principle of their existence, but are themselves the manifestation and presence of that elsewhere” [iii]. This comprehension of reality and its essence as inherently sacramental, as “manifestation and presence of that [divine] elsewhere,” is conserved by the ancient Christian tradition that is the Orthodox Church. The Church’s sacramental life in its liturgy—its use of the “smaller” sacramental realities of signs, symbols, icons, images—is built upon this aforementioned biblical cosmology, this cosmic sacramentality, and Father Schmemann articulates these realities with clarity and precision. To the filmmaker and those who wish to understand and interact best with the cinematic image, these definitions are quite literally significant.
Of symbols, Fr. Schmemann writes that “the purpose and function of the symbol is not to illustrate (this would presume the absence of what is illustrated) but rather to manifest and to communicate what is manifested. We might say that the symbol does not so much ‘resemble’ the reality that it symbolizes as it participates in it, and therefore it is capable of communicating it in reality…. For the essence of the symbol lies in the fact that in it the dichotomy between reality and symbolism (as unreality) is overcome.” [iv]
Providing much assistance to minds and eyes enveloped by modernity, those with even the subconscious propensity and desire to throw apart (and keep apart) the material and immaterial, the immanental and transcendental, by etymological and historical means, David Fagerberg illuminates the meaning of the word symbol, and consequently the nature of symbols. He writes,
“The word’s origin is from sym (together) and ballein (to throw). In ancient Greece, an object was broken in two, for example, a coin or a bone, to serve as a sign of mutual recognition in the future when the two pieces were ‘symbolized.’ Symbolizing is an action, a feat: the two halves are thrown back together.” [v]
These biblically, historically, etymologically, and even ecclesiastically rooted definitions articulated by Fr. Schmemann and Fagerberg carry with them an enormous amount of insight into the sacramental understanding of the cosmos. These definitions are nearly “keys” to the world, a world permeated by images, icons, signs, and symbols.
Even C. S. Lewis, the beloved author of numerous literary works and who was himself a late life convert to Anglicanism, did not keep silent on the subject of sacramental realities. In his eloquent and picturesque prose, Lewis wrote,
“The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them: that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to spoken. It is a sign, but also something more than a sign: and only a sign because it is also more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.” [vi]
The sacramental understanding of reality disallows for the etherealized notions and fabrications modernity posits of the cosmos; it affords no “space between the atoms” within which the conception of the termination of vision upon contact with any observed object might creep. The images, icons, signs, and symbols that infuse the world—and which reality itself is—are themselves manifestations of the wholly-other, they are immanental theophanies of the transcendental realm of the divine, the tripersonal Godhead. The material and immaterial dance together and comingle in their benevolently rapturous, sacramental, and cosmic waltz. Against modernity’s vehement opposition, the visible and invisible are irrevocably and inextricably wed.
Christological Perspective
There is no better place to continue this inquiry into the union of the visible and invisible realities than the foremost appearance, the union par excellence of the visible and invisible, the material and immaterial, the immanental and the transcendental—the Sign and Symbol, the “quintessential sacrament,” the “Symbol of all symbols”—the Incarnate Christ, the Godman. [vii] For if one intends to comprehend the literal significance of images, icons, signs, and symbols, as well as how they behave and conduct themselves as forms, and if one intends to make use of images as communicative media, as incarnate and symbolic mediators of realities, as does the cinematic art form, then one should ultimately look to the Grandest Image Himself.
Christ Himself is image. The apostle Paul reflects on this as he writes, “The Son is the image [εἰκὼν, transliterated eikon; from which the Latin ikon, as well as the English icon, is derived] of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col 1.15 NIV). (Of icons, Fr. Schmemann writes, “The icon does not ‘illustrate’—it manifests, and does so only to the degree that it is itself a participant in what it manifests, inasmuch as it is both presence and communion.” [viii]) Surrounded by dedicated disciples, curious crowds, and hostile opponents, Jesus uttered an incomprehensible declaration, found in John 10.30, “I and the Father are one.” Here, not only does Jesus claim that He is Son to the Father, but He claims union, oneness, and, consequently, equality with the Father. This assertion, as well as the heresies that have attempted to combat it, is the reason the Church catholic has creedalized and confessed for nearly two millennia that God the Father and God the Son are of the same substance, faithfully assenting to this unfathomable interrelatedness that the Son and the Father have eternally shared. However, this instance in John’s gospel should come as no surprise to his readers, for he writes of this eternal interpenetration of the divine persons, their perichoretic union, from the very beginning of his gospel account.
John 1.1 reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (emphasis mine). This interrelatedness cannot be overlooked, especially when pondering the reality of Christ-as-image, as well as that of the cinematic image and images at large—the signs and that which they signify—for it is that inextricable bond and tether they share that is of utmost import to the one attempting to communicate with and understand these images.
Trinitarian Perspective
In the case of the Godhead, that inextricability the Son and Father share has historically been understood by the Church as the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who binds Father and Son together so tightly, so intimately, that they are one with each other. They are joined together and united and Jesus, the Icon and “image of the invisible God,” relays to His disciples even further that, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (Col 1.15; Jn 14.9). Jesus ventures further still, indicating the participatory nature of His existence and relationship to the Father, as well as what that relationship means for His disciples—those who have responded to the Image’s invitation to participate in the reality it or, better, He signifies. Jesus says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me…and you are in me, and I am in you” (Jn 14.11, 20). Here, the incarnate God communicates not only the reality of His union with His Father but also the disciples’ own. The Great Icon of God, tethered inseparably to God, “who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known”; the Image communicates and manifests the Reality to which He is joined fully and fully is (Jn 1.18, emphasis mine). Christ reveals that those who encounter Him come into direct contact with the Father because of their union and oneness, because the Sign and the Signified truly are inextricably tethered, the Symbol and Symbolized are irreversibly thrust and thrown together.
This interrelatedness of the Trinity is archetypal for the sacramental understanding of the cosmos, for sacramentology itself, and consequently, as a discipline that relies entirely on capturing and presenting images to viewers, for cinema as well. Just as Christ, the Incarnate Son, is the image of His Father, bound to and one with Him by and in the fellowship of the Spirit, so too is the cosmos to be understood as the visible, immanental manifestation of the invisible, transcendental reality of God. Once again, this should call to mind the original or “first cosmology” aforementioned of Paul, as he writes, “for since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Rom 1.20 NIV).
The whole of reality was created to image, show, display, and reveal the “eternal power and divine nature” of the triune Godhead. The entirety of the created order, with humanity as its apex—for mankind is the cosmos, conscious and embodied—were meant to be immanental communicants and sacraments (“visible signs of invisible realities”) of the transcendental reality, the three-personed God. This was the birthright neglected by the first two humans, i.e., their Fall, in Eden. Humanity, as the foremost image of God, was to steward the Garden of immanental-transcendental symbols, conserving and acknowledging them for what they were—signs, symbols, and sacraments of God’s presence. However, rather than stewarding these symbols, seeing in and through them God’s immanence and transcendence, they selected to view and use them as if they were self-referential, separate, and unattached from the reality to which they ultimately referred, pointed, and were inextricably tethered to and dependent on—the Holy Trinity.
This can be termed the de-sacramentalization, or de-symbolization, of the created order, the proto-dualistic rending of the fabric of reality perpetrated by mankind. The image of God desecrated themselves, and, consequently, the whole created order by making it complicit in their conspiracy. However, this is not the story’s end.
Incarnational Perspective
As the “quintessential sacrament,” the “Symbol of all symbols,” [ix] Christ re-sacramentalizes the cosmos in His incarnation. As the Mediator between God and man, the God-man, and in that mediatorial form He re-symbolizes (“throws together”) the created order and its Creator. This is the Christian narrative, that the Church herself is organic evidence of the historic Christ-event: the incarnation of God in and as the man, Jesus Christ. It is Christ’s incarnate mediatorial form, in which heaven and earth, spirit and matter, God and man have been irreversibly rejoined together—symbolized—and it is that form that has comprehensively altered reality, effecting revision, recreation, and reconsecration at the most rudimentary and universal levels of existence due to its vicarious, participatory, and in terms of media-ecology, its “non-additive” nature. This is to say, Christ’s form and its introduction into the world is the very salvation of the world, of all reality, and in this way “the medium [truly] is the message.” [x] Heaven and earth, immaterial and material, invisible and visible, God and man—all has become filled with and joined together in Christ. Through and in the fabric of space-time has the triune God made Himselves manifest in and through the Incarnate Christ.
Sacramental Cinema
This is the reality—not modernity’s conception of reality, untethered and dislodged from anything beyond it—in which the Church and all humanity finds themselves located and members of. It is the very same reality from which cinema gathers its images, and by which it is comprised—its light-seared celluloid “sculpting in time,” as atoms and photons coalesce. Cinema only has this “sacramental capacity” because the cosmos itself is endowed with this same capacity. Though humanity de-sacramentalized the created order, itself included, in and through Christ’s incarnate form, the inherent sacramentality of the cosmos has been restored, recreated, refashioned, reconsecrated, and fulfilled. Now that the whole created order—the Garden of Symbols—has been restored in Christ, all the images, icons, signs, symbols, and sacraments with which reality is filled are able to once again show, reveal, and display—even when re-presented on-screen—the “eternal power and divine nature” of the triune Godhead, as it was always meant to “since the creation of the world.”
Only in light of this cosmic re-symbolization and restoration can cinema be spoken of as sacramental. Only now can Robert K. Johnston, professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, be read with “fresh eyes” as he writes of the sacramentality of cinema:
“Movies have, at times, a sacramental capacity to provide the viewer an experience of transcendence…. Images…can help us to encounter God…. Film has the power to disturb and enlighten us, to make us more aware of both who we are and what our relationships with others could be. It can even usher us into the presence of the holy.” [xi]
Only now can the great Russian film director, Andrey Tarkovsky, an Orthodox Christian, say of art generally and the filmic image particularly,
“Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities…. [the world’s] beauty and ugliness, its compassion and cruelty, its infinity and its limitations. The artist expresses these things by creating the image, sui generis detector of the absolute. Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite: the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form.” [xii]
Perhaps, as Dr. Snaut, a character in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, ponders, “we [humanity, truly] have lost our sense of the cosmic,” and consequently our sensus divinitatis, our sense of the Divine in, through, and by means of the cosmos. [xii] If Paul’s cosmologia prima—the sacramental cosmology—now seems so foreign, distant, suspect, and even dull and uninteresting to the senses of those of us that find ourselves so deeply embedded in modernity’s naturalistic paradigm and its reductionistic system of sight, perhaps cinema can provide a remedy, or at least a window to a remedy, for us to “glimpse for a moment the Inaccessible, a realm forever beyond reach,” prompting our souls to be reminded of, to once again ache for, and potentially even encounter the Divine. [xi]
Does it seem grandiose or too large an expectation that an artform—one using the immanent materials of the visible world as it collects its images of the cosmic order—gifted to the image bearers by the Grandest Image Maker might have the potential to aid us in learning more about ourselves, those “being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory,” [xv] and perhaps even in learning more of the grandest mystery, the Great Image and Icon of God? Is it possible that a sacramental perception of the cinematic image might even lend a hand to our worshipful reverence, to our contemplation in awe and wonder of the Greatest Symbol, Christ?
“One may talk of the idea of the image, describe its essence in words. But such a description will never be adequate. An image can be created and make itself felt. It may be accepted or rejected. But none of this can be understood in any cerebral sense. The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.” [xvi]
[i] David W. Fagerberg, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2016), 24.
[ii] Leonard J. Vander Zee, Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper: Rediscovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 17.
[iii] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 124.
[iv] Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (New York: St Vladimir’s Press, 1987), 38, 39, 45. Emphasis author’s own.
[v] Fagerberg, Consecrating the World, 84.
[vi] C. S. Lewis, Transposition and other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949).
[vii] Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 148; Vander Zee, Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, 44.
[viii] Schmemann, The Eucharist (New York: St Vladimir’s Press, 1987), 45. Emphasis author’s own.
[ix] Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 148; Vander Zee, Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, 44.
[x] “The medium is the message” was coined by Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher and media theorist, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1966). Emphasis mine.
[xi] Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000), 52, 87. Emphasis added.
[xii] Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 37.
[xiii] Solaris. Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, 1972 Mosfilm Studios, 2011 The Criterion Collection.
[xiv] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quoted in Johnston, Reel Spirituality, 93.
[xv] 2 Cor 3.18 NIV.
[xvi] Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 38–39.