#filmanalysis #art #DietrichBonhoeffer #SergeiBulgakov #theology #GeorgesBataille #atmosphere #CarlJung #atmospherictheology

The films of Panos Cosmatos are known for their intense atmosphere and striking use of color, drawing viewers into a world that is at once eerie and awe-inspiring. In works such as “Mandy,” “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” and “The Viewing,” Cosmatos creates a sense of otherworldliness through his use of color, light, space, and atmosphere. The screen is transformed into a mystically cosmic spectacle, disclosing apocalyptic noumena behind the thin veil of the everyday. To elucidate these themes, this essay will draw upon atmospheric theory, Sergei Bulgakov’s theory of religious materialism, Carl Jung’s theory of color, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of revelation, and Georges Bataille’s theory of limit experience.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere refers to the general affective quality of space and material environments when interacted with by agents. There are different models and theories about the ontology of an atmosphere. One metaphor is to say that atmospheres are like spatially extended emotions. Through the intentional staging of a material environment, a space can convey or encourage certain ranges of emotional or affective responses. Set design and staging within theatre is a great example. Professional production designers are highly skilled at constructing a stage that helps convey or support the affective qualities of the scene. Furthermore, as in the case of a haunted house attraction, human agents might not even need to be directly present in order for the space to radiate powerful emotions, such as fear.

Films likewise generate an atmosphere. Though it might not be as fully immersive as others, the staging of a film is capable of creating atmospheres that suture the viewer more deeply into the emotional landscape of the film. Panos Cosmatos brilliantly accomplishes this. For Cosmatos, the atmosphere is not merely a background, but rather an active agent in itself, playing as important a role as the actor.

Religious Materialism

In addition to emotional qualities, atmosphere can encourage or convey other types of emotional affects as well, such as religious affects. Religions throughout time have professed the religious significance of physical objects, sacred spaces, and material environments for worship. The 20th-century Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergei Bulgakov, called this “religious materialism” in his essay “Relics,” and the concept played a significant role in his own theology. In the essay, Bulgakov uses the topic of relics to articulate the vitality of the material world from a religious perspective and how, from his perspective, there is no such thing as dead matter.

Sergei Bulgakov's theory of religious materialism proposes that the material world is intrinsically connected to and infused with divine energies and attributes. According to Bulgakov, creation is not separate from God but rather a manifestation of God's presence and creative activity. Bulgakov emphasized the sacredness and spiritual potential inherent in the physical world, rejecting the dualistic notion that matter is inherently sinful or separate from the divine. Instead, he argued, based on the Orthodox doctrines of the Incarnation of Christ and deification of humanity, that matter is a vehicle for divine revelation and the realization of God's purposes, of which the Incarnation of Christ and sacraments like the Holy Eucharist are prime examples. As he wrote, “The spiritual bread, the heavenly food, is also bodily bread and food; by no means does the spiritual sacrament become incorporeal — rather, it is corporeal to the highest degree, corporeal par excellence. [...] [Christ] came not to destroy the world but to save it. Therefore, in the gracious life of the church, all that is spiritual is corporeal [...].” (Bulgakov, “Relics,” page 9, Boris Jakim translation).

For Bulgakov, the materiality of the world is not dead, but rather something sacred, given that it is thoroughly infused with divine life. However, this picture contrasts sharply with our Cartesian-capitalist paradigm in which matter is a dead resource waiting for exploitation. Material environments, human spaces, and urban buildings become little more than cogs in a wider machine. However, in the films of Panos Cosmatos, the world is strikingly more mystical and cosmic than the dead matter of modernity. Cosmatos’s cinematic worlds are pulsating with animated energies and spiritual dimensions that we cannot fully comprehend. Each landscape or set is permeated with a mystical and sublime awe, as if every part of the world is just a facet in a larger sacred space.

Jung and Color

The sacredness of the atmosphere and material environments within Cosmatos’s cinematography is captured largely through the striking use of color. To understand this point further, I will turn to Carl Jung’s theory of color:

According to Jung, colors possess inherent symbolic and psychological meanings that resonate with the collective unconscious, the universal reservoir of ancestral memories and archetypes shared by all human beings. Jung believed that colors have a profound impact on our emotional and spiritual states, transcending their visual aspects. He viewed colors as carriers of archetypal messages and symbolic representations of psychic energies. For instance, red is often associated with passion, vitality, and danger, while blue is linked to spirituality, introspection, and calmness. Jung argued that these associations are not arbitrary but rather reflect deep-seated universal symbols that have emerged throughout human history.

Within the realm of religion, Jung posited that colors play a crucial role in the expression and experience of religious phenomena. He noted that religious rituals often incorporate specific colors to evoke particular psychological states and tap into the collective unconscious. For example, the color white is frequently associated with purity and divine transcendence in many religious traditions. Similarly, gold and yellow are often connected to the sacred and divine illumination. Jung also emphasized that individual psychological experiences of color can vary due to personal associations and cultural conditioning. While certain colors may have universal significance, their interpretation can be influenced by personal experiences, cultural contexts, and individual symbolism.

Even if one does not concede the idea that there are specific archetypal meanings inherent within each color, I do think it’s not far off to note that religious rituals and religious experiences often involve the use of striking colors. In nature, colors are beautiful, but they are often more muted. Rarely do we encounter, for instance, a natural landscape bathed in bright purple. And if such instances within nature do occur, such as in the Aurora Lights, then it fills viewers with a sense of otherworldly awe. On the flip side, incomprehensible lights often occur in mystical experiences, and sacred architecture regularly incorporates colored phenomena not typically found in nature.

However, in the films of Panos Cosmatos, the world is saturated with mystical and transcended light. It is as if the veil has been pulled back from our eyes, and we see the radiant, spiritual dimension of reality that permeates the world around us. Cosmatos's films are a powerful example of the transformative power of colors in our inner world. By using color to create a sense of atmosphere and evoke powerful emotions, he taps into the viewer's psyche in a way that is both profound and unsettling.

Bonhoeffer and Bataille: Revelation and Limit Experience

The interesting thing about Cosmatos’s films is that the spiritual and the divine are not always equated with the good. Of course, there are many instances of the transcendent, color-rich atmospheres that do convey beauty and goodness — especially in the first act of “Mandy” in which cosmic colors interspersed with radiant natural lighting are used to show the love between Red and Mandy. However, some forms of spiritual, otherworldly, or transcendent experience turn into absolute terror and horror. Often, this is the case when, in a Frankensteinian or Lovecraftian fashion, the human characters attempt to grasp and control the transcendent themselves. Without giving away too many spoilers, we can see this within the “bad trip” scene of “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” in which Barry takes a concoction of psychedelics and has an existential breakdown from which he cannot recover. “The Viewing” likewise features a recluse billionaire for whom the world and its inhabitants are objects to collect, but his aspirations of collecting something truly beyond our world lead to drastic consequences. Thus, within the films of Cosmatos, the spiritual world is both overwhelmingly beautiful and also terrifying, filled with phenomena and agents beyond our understanding.

In a sense, this sublimity of overwhelming beauty and terror in giving oneself to the Unknown, and hoping that it is good (while there is a threat it could lead to one’s own destruction) captures a sense of the harshness of religious experience in secular age. When people encounter something truly beyond their understanding, it can sometimes be perceived as a threatening force that leads to self-destruction because it breaks down the truncated, materialist world in which we believe ourselves to inhabit. This is perhaps similar to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about in his book “Act and Being.” For Bonhoeffer, when God reveals Godself, it breaks down our rational systems and subverts the expectations we have of reality. It’s almost like an inverted version of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraftian horror typically involves themes of the unknown, and the incomprehensible, often featuring ancient and malevolent beings that exist outside of human understanding. It relies upon the idea that human knowledge and understanding are limited, and that there are forces in the universe that are beyond human control and comprehension. When the characters encounter these incomprehensible forces, they are filled with a sense of dread and helplessness, often leading to madness, nihilism, and the futility of existence.

For Lovecraft, much of the horror comes from a revelation that humanity is little more than an ant to the cosmic, extra-dimensional monsters. However, for Bonhoeffer, this gets turned on its head. The horror is not that God is malevolent or uncaring, but rather that God is so loving, is so full of grace, is so beautiful, that we feel like minuscule dirt compared to God’s Perfection. For Bonhoeffer, this is especially the case in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, in which this Perfection and Grace become incarnate in a particular person.

Back to the films of Panos, we can see this angst and struggle captured brilliantly in his films. There is a primal and cosmic dimension to the emotions and struggles of the characters. Stepping into the atmosphere is like stepping into another world, parallel to ours, in which everything radiates with the sacred. Or, stated another way, perhaps it is like taking our secularist blinders off for a brief moment and allowing the incomprehensible spiritual dimension of reality to rapture us.

The Bonhoefferian reading of Panos’s films brings some parallels to the theory of limit experiences as developed by the French philosopher, Georges Bataille.

According to Bataille, limit experiences are transformative and ecstatic encounters that push individuals beyond the boundaries of their ordinary existence, challenging established norms and rationality. Bataille believed that limit experiences arise from activities that involve risk, transgression, and the breaking of taboos. These experiences confront individuals with the limits of their own existence and reveal the underlying instability and irrationality of human nature. Examples of limit experiences can include acts of intense sexuality, ritualistic practices, extreme physical activities, or encounters with death.

Furthermore, as developed in his book Erotism, a limit experience can also be created through an experience of the intense combination of the erotic (not necessarily just sex) and the horrific. This is because limit experiences entail a loss of self and a dissolution of individual boundaries. In these moments, individuals transcend their individuality and merge with a larger whole, experiencing a sense of continuity and connection with the universe. Bataille associated limit experiences with a kind of sacred or mystical state that disrupts the everyday order and opens up possibilities for profound transformation. He notes that both erotic encounters and moments of horror (especially witnessing death) bring about this loss of self into the broader world, like pouring water into the ocean.

Bataille argued that limit experiences are essential for individuals to confront and transcend the constraints imposed by society and rationality. By pushing individuals to their limits, these experiences enable them to access a different realm of experience that is typically suppressed in everyday life. Through this confrontation with the limit, Bataille believed that individuals could gain a deeper understanding of themselves, the world, and their place within it.

Within films like “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” “Mandy,” and “The Viewing,” characters are shown having such limit experiences — situations that break down rationality and bring about a loss of self. However, such limit experiences often lead to the character’s own destruction, rather than the reconstitution of a consciousness that embraces a newfound sense of transcendence. These limit experiences are quite different from the types of experiences described by mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avila or Julian of Norwich. Perhaps this is because the saints and mystics were more embedded within a symbolic and living religious tradition that already embraces the sacred. Their limit experiences were reconstituted into a deeper awareness of God’s love and grace. Contrarily, for the characters within the Cosmatos filmic universe, no such structuring existence. It is simply the raw, unfiltered extremity of human experience, without any reconstitution into a higher meaning or purpose. In a sense, this capture the type of underlying nihilism latent within the secular. The spiritual and mystical is all around us, but we have all but lost our categories and structures for engagement.

Conclusion and Additional Remarks

In conclusion, the films of Panos Cosmatos are a powerful example of the transformative power of color and atmosphere in cinema. By creating otherworldly atmospheres, often using bright and striking colors, Cosmatos taps into the viewer's psyche in a way that is both profound and unsettling. His films convey a sense of the sacredness and spiritual potential inherent in the physical world, echoing the ideas of Carl Jung and Sergei Bulgakov. Furthermore, the sublimity of overwhelming beauty and terror captured in Cosmatos's films reflects the harshness and struggles of encountering the divine in a secular age, resonating with the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Georges Bataille.

But of course (and to perhaps entirely subvert my own writing) most religious experiences are not that extreme. In fact, they usually are cultivated within the small liturgy of the everyday, building up over time and transforming us step by step into a new person. There is great hope in this, because it means that we don’t have to rely upon the apocalyptic to dictate our religious experiences. It can start right now.

#Christology #CarlJung #trauma #theology

The doctrine of Christ's descent into hell is not an archaic superstition, an obscure facet of Catholic and Eastern Christianity, or an irrelevant line in the creed. Christ's victory over the forces of hell is a profound truth with mystical significance for the redemption of our souls — especially when we recognize that Christ's victory is not only cosmic but personal as well. The same power of Christ that descended into hell is likewise active in descending into the deepest and most hellish places of our souls, bringing divine liberation, triumph, and healing. In this essay, I will utilize Carl Jung's interpretation of the underworld motif to analyze the doctrine of Christ's descent into hell as an archetype for how Christ descends into our unconscious.

The Harrowing of Hades

The doctrine of Christ's descent into hell, or the harrowing of hell/hades as it is sometimes called, teaches that after Jesus' crucifixion and before his resurrection, he descended into the realm of the dead, commonly referred to as “hell” or “hades,” to proclaim his victory over sin and death. The primary scriptural basis for this doctrine is found in 1 Peter 3:18-20 and 1 Peter 4:6.

1 Peter 3:18-20 says: “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight lives, were saved through water.”

1 Peter 4:6 says: “For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does.”

These passages mention that Jesus preached to the spirits in prison, implying a journey to the realm of the dead. Additionally, in the Apostles' Creed, there is a line that affirms Jesus' descent into hell or hades.

The purpose of Christ's descent into Hell is interpreted differently among Christian traditions. Some view it as a triumph over evil and the Devil, while others see it as an act of liberation, freeing the righteous souls who were awaiting salvation. Others even hold it as a basis for belief in the eventual, universal salvation of all. In other words, hell exists, but it's now empty. The theological significance of this event varies, and not all Christian denominations hold it as a central doctrine. Some see it as more literal, and others read it more metaphorically.

Christ's victory over hell is, at the very least, a true myth. By “myth,” I do not mean a lie or a tall tale. Instead, I mean it in the more technical sense, which refers to a people group's deepest sense of meaning, wisdom, and understanding of the world placed into narrative form. Or, as Alan Moore described, a myth is what happens when a story transcends what it means to be a story and it becomes something universal.

For clarity's sake, I'm not denying that Christ actually descended into hell. But I must admit that I have no idea what that event would look like, played out in real-time. Unfortunately, Jesus didn't have a camcorder with him.

But if we get too caught up in trying to create a mental image in our mind of what that camcorder footage would look like, then we might end up missing the deeper, mystical insight of what Christ's victory over hell means. Thus, to help us apply the harrowing of hell, I will turn to the great theorist of myth himself, Carl Jung.

Jung and the Archetype of the Underworld

Carl Jung spent much of his research analyzing and theorizing about common mythological motifs found in stories across different cultures. He utilized the term “archetype” to describe the fundamental, inherited patterns of thoughts, behaviors, and symbols that manifest in various forms, such as myths, dreams, and fantasies. The descent into the underworld is one such archetype that appears in myths and stories across different cultures.

According to Jung, the descent into the underworld represents a psychological journey of self-discovery and transformation. It symbolizes a confrontation with the unconscious, where individuals encounter hidden aspects of their psyche, including repressed emotions, desires, and fears. The descent can be seen as a metaphorical exploration of the depths of the human psyche, a quest for self-understanding, and a confrontation with the shadow — the dark and often neglected or suppressed aspects of the self.

Jung saw this descent as an essential step in the process of individuation, which is the psychological integration and development of the self. By confronting and integrating the unconscious aspects of the psyche, individuals can achieve a more balanced and whole sense of self. Or, as the great philosopher Dolly Parton said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

The descent into the underworld often involves encountering powerful mythological figures, such as demons, monsters, or gods. These figures represent different aspects of the unconscious and can be seen as symbolic manifestations of the individual's inner struggles, challenges, and potential for transformation.

If we were to apply a Jungian analysis to the Biblical witness of Christ's descent into the underworld, we create the image of Christ descending into the “hellish” places of our souls to bring victory over that which holds us captive and separate from God. Such a reading would be keeping in line with what the ancient church fathers, such as Augustine and Origen, called an analogous or spiritual reading. These hermeneutical strategies involve taking the truths of scripture and reading them as allegories for the life of faith, such as other doctrines or possible pastoral insight. It is not to deny that Christ ever descended into hell. Rather, it is to take the external teachings of sacred scripture and actions of the divine, and then apply those realities into the interiority of our souls.

If you don't mind a quick, possibly deviating side-note, I'm reminded of a scene in the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Elrond, the leader of the elves, visits Aragorn and hands him the sword of his ancestors that had been reforged and reminds Aragorn of his birthright to be king of Gondor. Elrond says to Aragorn, “I give hope to men.” Aragorn, recognizing his continued trepidation regarding his rightful place on the throne, replies, “I leave none for myself.” Analogous or spiritual reading can be this act of leaving hope for oneself or one's community.

The importance of leaving hope for oneself is especially pertinent for ministering to trauma victims. It's certainly possible to read Christ's descent into the underworld of the unconscious as representing the process of sanctification — the process whereby the Holy Spirit makes one holy. Such a reading is perfectly acceptable. But I believe we must also use Christ's descent into hell as a form of trauma-informed ministry.

The Harrowing of Trauma

Trauma refers to an experience that is too horrifying to be fully processed by the brain. I often liken it to Lovecraftian horror, where extra-dimensional alien creatures are so totally “Other,” monstrous, and horrifying that they exceed the cognitive capacities of the protagonists, often resulting in madness. Trauma is an experience of this sort of terror. But in order to keep us from going mad, the brain will turn off certain functions and, to use a rough analogy, break apart the experience and hide it within the deep crevices of the psyche (what Jung called the shadow), so that the trauma is not experienced in its entirety. In a positive light, this is the brain's strategy for survival which, at the end of the day, is the most important thing. However, because that trauma often remains hidden within the underground of the psyche, it goes unprocessed and unintegrated, thus producing symptoms that can have a negative impact on one's life. Much of trauma-informed therapy involves this strategy of re-processing, in a now healthy and safe manner, those earlier experiences of trauma so that it no longer lingers in the psyche.

Hopefully, we can see where this all connects to Christ's descent into the unconscious. The pockets of trauma residing within one's soul are often experienced as hellish places — areas in our lives where the forces of death seek to have control. But in Christ's descent into hell, we see an image of victory over these forces. That which we believe is irredeemable and alienating is defeated and restored. It is the healing redemption of God permeating the deepest parts of our souls.

To clarify, I fully support trauma-informed therapy, and I am not advocating for forsaking all medical treatment to follow a “pray away your pain” model of healing. Humans are made to be in community and meant to act as Christ would to our neighbors. Thus, I believe trauma-informed therapy, such as EMDR work, is actually playing out this divine intention and ministry. But in addition to being a good neighbor to one another, I believe healing is more successful when we can locate ourselves within a grander, archetypal narrative, and Christ's descent into hell seems like a reasonable fit.