Edwards and contemporary evangelicalism

In December, I’ll be presenting a paper at MLA on reappropriations of Jonathan Edwards in contemporary evangelical thought, with a particular focus on a strain of crisis theology running through evangelicalism’s revival of Edwards (one of my main primary texts will be the volume of essays, A God Entranced Vision of all Things). Some of you have already offered insightful suggestions and provided helpful citations for further reading in other discussions I’ve had with you about my larger interest in the half-life of Edwardseanism. But I thought I’d beat the BibleAnd bushes just to be thorough. I’m particularly interested in any studies of contemporary revivals or other attempts to recover colonial Puritan or other early American thinkers or theology for presentist purposes. That said, we’re all eclecticists now, so anything you might think worth passing along, please do.

All the best in your fall term.

The Fountain

Last year's The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky — director of at least two other notable films, Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Pi (1998) — is blogworthy for its easy syncretism of putatively Mayan mythology, a Biblical theme, and Yogic imagery.

The first frames of the film quote Genesis 3:24, concerning the flaming sword that severs humanity's connection to the tree of life. Throughout the story, Aronofsky plays with the idea of pushing back against that sword, telling stories of humans who attempt to defeat death, who, like the man and the woman in the garden, might live together forever in the presence of God if they weren't prevented from doing so (Gen. 3:22).

In this picture, Aronofsky himself pushes against narrative conventions – a much different kind of flaming sword – telling a refracted story about the marriage of a dying woman (Rachel Weisz) and about the story of her hand-written novel manuscript. The mundane "historical" context of this fantastic novel's story is its author's relationship to her husband, a research doctor (played by Hugh Jackman) trying to cure his wife's brain tumor by testing out drugs on monkeys. He discovers the medical key to reverse the aging process and cure all disease, but is just too late to save his beloved. His reading of her novel unfolds the full story of the film. The novel, also called "The Fountain," provides a parallel story involving the tree of life. The tree of life is discovered and captured in a Mayan temple by 15th century Spanish conquistador (also Hugh Jackman).
The sword referred to in the opening frame reappears in the hands of a Mayan warrior-priest guarding the halls of a secret, hidden temple which contains the tree of life. The conquistador, although he loses his beloved queen of Spain (also Rachel Weisz), gains access to immortality. Perhaps a thousand years later or more, the same man brings the tree into distant space. He is no longer a conquistador, but is now a cosmic explorer surviving by slowly eating at the flesh of the tree. The sword also comes back as the distant nebulae of swirling, fire-colored clouds to which, across the vastness of space, the cosmic explorer brings the aging and dying tree. He travels in a bubble of air, a new garden of eden, meditating his way through the light-years in full-lotus position, floating in the microgravity of the tree's capsule. At the end, he appears to be reunited with God, or sacrificed for God, in a kind ekpurosis or self-dismemberment. Then, like the Vedic being Purusha or like the putative Mayan "first father" he is identified with in the film, his death becomes a cosmogony, renewing the tree of life, recreating the world, and also bringing reunion with the beloved, discovered now at last in the divine bosom.

The second shot of the movie dwells on a gold replica of the shekinah of God, part of the altar tabernacle before which the conquistador worships, vowing to succeed in his quest for the tree. Its radiant beams of gold, surrounding a mirror-like polished silver globe, represent the burning light of purification that simultaneously reveals God and annihilates all flesh which approaches, suggesting that humanity and God remain forever severed, that our union with the divine comes only in the dissolution of life.

Thus, in the other story line, the "real" one perhaps, the novel remains a novel, and the bereaved doctor who lost his wife, the book's author, remains cut off from the beloved, separated by death, left with only a token golden ring.

At times reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at others of Tarkovsky's Solaris or even of Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, this movie seems to be consistent with a narrative pattern that imagines a divine human connection mediated by a journey into the distant reaches of space, and overcoming the problem of mortality, death, and meaning through solitary searching into the beyond.

I was surprised because I liked this complex film less than I thought I might — perhaps this is because the mundane romance at the film's heart is slow paced and not particularly moving. I wonder how others responded to the movie, and I wonder where Aronofsky will take his unique filmmaking from here.