FAITH, SACRIFICE, AND THE EARTH'S GLORY IN TERRENCE MALICK'S THE TREE OF LIFE

Abstract:

Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life revisits many of the questions regarding a Christian theodicy. How, for example, can one reconcile the idea of providence or believe in the meaning of human suffering when life itself is subject to and even dependent on chance and violence? In order to sustain faith in providence in such a universe, Malick suggests that one must be willing to absorb the insults of accident and sacrifice the human drive to control and master one's own destiny. In his invocation of Job, his allusions to Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and his debt to Kierkegaard, Malick suggests that the recompense for this sacrifice is an intensification of appreciation for existence itself and for the spiritual value of biological and geological processes. In this way, the film offers an insightful ecotheology that makes earth more central to a Christian ethos.

Keywords:

• ecotheology
• theodicy
• Job
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Terrence Malick
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• faith
• sacrifice

Notes

1 Sterrit, in fact, argues that the film exhibits a “shortage of theological sophistication” (52) and depicts a kind of “bloodless version of suffering” that is too easily reconciled to faith (57). Michael Atkinson argues similarly that the film is wrought with simplistic theology: “Malick attempts,” he writes, “in several ways to suggest a replay of the story of Job that just seems half-hearted” (79).

2 Plate believes that Malick's film is “simply the latest in a millennia-old project, shared by cultures across the world, of visually reconciling the microcosmos with the macrocosmos, finding our local lives situated within the grand scheme of things” (528). Plate suggests specifically (and rightly, in my judgment) that Malick is engaged in thinking through the implications of Darwinian evolution – one particularly biological meaning of “the tree of life” – and the monotheistic meaning of this same symbol in biblical cosmology. For online sources, see Parker et al.; Leary; Horton.

3 Malick, for example, studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard and later, as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, focused on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. His translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes was published as The Essence of Reasons in 1969.

4 In this respect, I am in agreement with Morrison and Schur who insist that Malick's voiceovers provide something quite different from the traditional privileged access to the internal world of a character since these internal dialogues are so often abstract and unanswered questions and since they are often not even clearly cognizant to the characters in question (27). They are more like rhetorical stances adopted temporarily by characters as experiments of possibility or a subscript of inner and otherwise unspoken psychology.

5 For this reason it is particularly disappointing that Sterrit would criticize The Tree of Life for what he considered to be a missing sense of

the boundless contingency of the human spirit, faced with unyielding pain as well as needed solace, and greater recognition of the power we humans have to remake and rejuvenate the myths, philosophies, and theodicies we invent to make sense of ourselves. (57)

He seems to have missed the audacity and self-consciousness of Malick's cosmological ambition, as I will attempt to show.

6 For other examples of this kind of ecotheology, see Miller; Cunningham; Brown.

7 Plate's otherwise excellent treatment of theology in the film nevertheless argues unpersuasively that no character ever directs their questions to deity. This would seem to ignore these direct questions the mother and son pose to God in direct retort to the citation from Job with which the film begins. These are, of course, ambiguous, since there can be human substitutions (Was the father responsible for the drowning? Did he not get there in time?). Perhaps Plate means only to describe God's indirect presence and relevance in the film, but there is little doubt that Malick intends to open the question of the significance and communicability of the human voice directed to deity.

8 This scene also overtly identifies the location as Waco, which appears to be autobiographical, since it is where Malick and his two brothers were raised.

9 It is not clear what the cause of the son's death is, but as noted above Malick himself lost a brother to suicide – a brother who, like the boy in the film, played and eventually studied guitar. Notice of the death is brought by telegram, which is not inconsistent with what might have happened in the case of Malick's brother who was in Spain at the time of his death. See Biskind 248–49.

10 Dostoevsky's critique of atheism and of socialism has been met with many responses that have sought to defend notions of spirituality and human freedom within an atheological context. See, for example, Dworkin.

11 In response to a letter requesting to know what Dostoevsky's rejoinder to Ivan's Grand Inquisitor would be, the author explained his plans for the serial novel:

I have not as yet shown an answer to all these atheistic theses, and one is needed. Exactly so, and it is in precisely that now my anxiety and all my concern lie. For this 6th book, The Russian Monk [the chapter cited above about Zosima's life] which will appear on August 31, was intended as an answer to this whole negative side. (Mochulsky 590)

Mochulsky explains that “The Russian Monk was conceived as a theodicy […] Ivan Karamazov's logical argumentation is opposed by the Elder Zosima's religious world outlook. Euclid's reason negates; mystical experience affirms” (591).

12 See, for example, the 1967 essay by Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis” that initiated the field of ecotheology. Or for a more recent example, see David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous.

13 Restoration ecologist William Jordan has argued that until we come to terms with the negative side of nature's destructive and indifferent processes, that is until we develop adequate theodicies by which to make moral sense of the world, we will not be capable of engaging in the hard work of restoring it to health.

14 Although it has various definitions, I mean here by postsecular the resurgence of interest in religion and the sacred in the context of postmodern secularism. It may be the case that Malick's religiosity has nothing postmodern or secular about it, but because it emerges in this film in the context of acceptance for the secular scientific understandings of the universe, it arguably qualifies as a form of the postsecular.