Of Gods and Men" opens today in New York and Washington, D.C., with more theater openings planned across the country next month. The film -- which took the second place Grand Prix award at last year's Cannes Film Festival -- tells the true story of a community of Cistercian monks caught in the grip of Algeria's violent civil war in the 1990s.
Here's the trailer -- it's hauntingly beautiful.
A review in yesterday's New York Times is well worth the read. And after explaining the monks' situation -- risk death and stay with the village it has ministered to (and indeed, become part of) for over a century, or follow the advice of authorities to flee -- it also subtly reveals our culture's modern reaction to the premise of faith so imbued in men's souls. The review notes:
The monks are clearly risking their lives — as nocturnal visits from armed militants make clear — but martyrdom is not part of the Cistercian creed. What motivates Christian and the others is rather an almost fanatical humanism, strict adherence to an idea of compassion that leads Luc to treat a wounded jihadist and Christian to pray for the soul of a murderer and to pre-emptively forgive his own likely assassins.
[The film's director,] Mr. Beauvois, an actor who has directed and written a handful of features, is clearly fascinated by the radicalism of the monks, an expression of religious zeal whose extremism lies in its insistence on preserving peace and dignity in all circumstances. But though his sympathy for the Trappists is evident, the film does not treat them as saints, or as mouthpieces for any particular theology. Rather, “Of Gods and Men” works to balance the two terms of its title and treats the relationship between them as a grave and complex mystery.
The theme may be piety, but Mr. Beauvois and his cast do not address it piously. ...
Fanatical humanism? My guess is that the real-life Brother Christian -- the prior of the monastery -- would say he and his brother monks were merely living out Christ's call to love and forgive their enemies, albeit under drastic circumstances. Their willingness to continue their Christian witness in the midst of war, and even to pray for their future murderers, is not the result of rigid fundamentalism, religious "extremism," or "strict adherence to an idea of compassion."
Rather, their actions spring out of a life dedicated to and centered on Christ -- Love incarnate, whose example of suffering, compassion and sacrifice has sustained their quiet, simple life of prayer all these years.
This idea is expressed in the opening of Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est -- God is Love.
"We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life," he wrote. "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction."
In the trailer, we see one monk take another by the shoulders in a gesture of brotherly affirmation and encouragement: "Love endures everything," he tells the other -- and we see a glimpse of that "new horizon" towards which the monks have set their course.
"Of Gods and Men" won't win an Oscar -- it wasn't even nominated. Yet the New York Times has a point: heroic Christian virtue, even when hidden in a monastery in the Atlas mountains, is radical, beautiful and inescabably compelling...with or without an Academy Award.
Elizabeth Hansen
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