J.C. Scharl. Sonnez les Matines, 2023, and The Death of Rabelais, 2025. Wiseblood Books.

Heretic, 2024. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. A24 Films.

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I WISH I COULD RECALL the conversation that led Sister Ursulina to dub me her “little theologian” sometime in the late seventies at Saint Margaret’s School in Morristown, New Jersey. I do have some memories of the school’s tall, dusty hallways, the yellow-tiled classroom walls, the foursquare-painted blacktop recess area; I still thrill when I hear “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which we sang all together all Advent, it seems. But of the conversation with the principal, I know only the phrase, which my parents, my mother mostly, would trot out whenever I said something insightful or heretical or equivocal on the subject of God or religion. The point, I think, was that my mother was proud of me, even after I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was in college, and she could trace my intellectual interest in spiritual things all the way back to elementary school.

If theologian is meant as an honorific, then I reject it, but if it means that I love to engage with mystery by asking questions, then yes, and sure, let’s ask some of them right here, in this very essay. They’re floating around and within me all the time, especially when I meet other theologians asking deep and important questions, as are J.C. Scharl, in her witty historical verse plays Sonnez les Matines and The Death of Rabelais, and Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, in their modern psychological horror film Heretic.

A work of art (a book, a movie, a painting, a song) is, among other things, a vehicle for ideas, all sorts of ideas, even if the idea is “religion is just a system of control,” which is one of the ideas espoused and advanced by Hugh Grant’s character, the menacing Mr. Reed, in Heretic, but perhaps not an idea that the film itself propounds. It’s a little muddy. Viewers may find in the film confirmation for their biases, for or against religion, or evidence for or against the existence of God, or maybe enough critical engagement with the messiness of faith to get them pondering “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason,” as Keats recommended. In other words, maybe one can watch and engage deeply without needing an ultimate resolution. This, I think, is the case for me, which may be one reason I have felt no need to plant a flag for or against the movie.

For me, the more interesting ideas are those that refuse to resolve into pat answers to the vastly complex questions life presents. For this reason, I did not care that nobody ever solved the murder at the core of Sonnez les Matines, in which François Rabelais, Ignatius of Loyola, and Jean Calvin (yes, those Reformation theologians), imagined as a group of college friends, traipse about Paris late one Mardi Gras night considering guilt, fate, and responsibility after discovering and debating about the victim. The whodunnit was never the point, beyond the way it sparks conversation, rendered in speaker-specific poetic forms (blank verse for Calvin, iambic tetrameter for Ignatius, rhyming couplets for Rabelais) that convincingly reveal each thinker’s paradigms. The men wonder, for instance, about the mysteriousness (or trickster tendencies) of God, the inherence of doubt in faith, beauty’s relationship to frailty, the difficult rhetoric of a three-way conversation, spirit and embodiment on earth and in the hereafter. (Ignatius catches himself in the trap of immutability-as-apex when considering his wish to change his nature, thinking:

                      Our God, in whose Image
we are made, does not change, and to say
we are free in some way He is not
would be a heresy. But think on this:
once, He took on flesh….)

Thanks to Calvin, who struggles to live according to his own precepts (and is convinced he is guilty because he failed to act when he heard a scream), they also discuss the universal spread of responsibility and the unresolvable question of free will:

     In truth, no choice is free; nothing
can be free that is so wrung upon
the mangle of desire twisting, twisting
till there’s only one way we can move.

And I get it; I really do. Passed through Scharl’s mind and witty lines, Calvin’s idea of predestination makes a kind of sense, since it’s nuanced beyond the reductivist version we sometimes bandy about. Reading the play, I can feel simultaneously free and constrained; I can recognize how I am a bundle of all the influences—cultural, familial, religious, genetic—that precede and exceed me. Freedom, perhaps, is not entirely an illusion, but it’s not a vapid, defiant slogan on a ball cap either.

 

Free will is held up for examination by Heretic too, principally in the plot, but also in some of Mr. Reed’s polemics. After he secretly locks the door to his labyrinthine house, he tells the two young Mormon missionaries he has trapped,

You are here because the ideas of others have influenced every single decision you’ve made since the day you were born, and I’ve been able to predict every decision you would make tonight because of that.

Well, there’s no way out of the house except through your maze, Mr. Reed, but that doesn’t make you God, despite what the movie poster and various close-up shots seem to suggest. In this way, the filmmakers have cast the character as a self-satisfied antagonist, “someone who is capable of generating word salad that sounds really thoughtful and intelligent but maybe upon reflection is a little hollow,” as director Bryan Wood describes him. His arguments against religion (that the stories are “all iterations of the same source material” and thus “not true or real in any literal sense”) are convincing to the convinced, but the filmmakers have taken pains to present them as predictable self-aggrandizing by a monstrous narcissist. Perhaps the ideas are worthy of consideration; perhaps they might destabilize a cocooned and simplistic kind of belief; but they may also serve to deepen an already deep faith.

 

I am a practicing Christian, early of the Catholic variety, lately of the Latter-day Saint kind, but I am also an essayist. Thus I am content to dwell in ambiguities and conflict, understanding, as I see it, that we are all caught in inescapable systems, systems of value or belief, linguistic systems, systems upon systems within systems, which permit or preclude, which shape and suggest and stifle our apprehension of reality. “We all must be content with not knowing,” as Death reminds us in The Death of Rabelais. We have no direct access to any kind of “pure” reality, only what our senses and our cultures can allow us to interpret. The question Mr. Reed begs, it seems to me, is that proof of a religion’s truth can be a rational pursuit without recognizing divergent rationalities or ever questioning the assumptions rationality is based upon.

So I understand that not everything can fit a system designed to measure only certain things, and it can often seem like the outliers are lies. But, to consider one example, if we take the very accurate and useful Newtonian system of measuring and predicting outcomes in the physical world as the only real and valid way of comprehending reality, we are utterly confounded when it comes to perceiving how, say, electrons move across energy states. In fact, we may be confounded by the very word move, which fails to provide an adequate framework for thinking about the concept of electrons and energy states.

Forgive me the detour. I should have let you know that I once was a physicist too, though only a minor one, at a bachelor’s level, before I realized I was an essayist and changed my course. In any case, the first and greatest essayist, Michel de Montaigne, did some interesting thinking about all this—

Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance.… The more a mind is empty and without counterpoise, the more easily it gives beneath the weight of the first persuasive argument.… But then, on the other hand, it is foolish presumption to go around disdaining and condemning as false whatever does not seem likely to us; which is an ordinary vice in those who think they have more than common ability. I used to do so once.

—in the opening of his essay “It Is Folly to Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity.”

It’s true: It is folly, even if we have convincing proof of our “more than common ability.” I think J.C. Scharl understands this, which is why she makes such brilliant new art from the wide-ranging ideas of great Renaissance theological thinkers, and why her Rabelais is always jestering, offering cutting observations of folly, including his own.

Early in the play named for his demise, walking in a blizzard on the eve of the Epiphany with his two traveling and bantering companions, Friar Renaud and Death (who has taken the form of a young woman), Rabelais offers his theory of humor and humanity:

Humor is no chaos, but the very
drip and flow of everything, the sticky
fluid carrying life up from stodgy
soil to all these many moistening bodies…
humor is our unity, our scope,
our element, our one and only hope
to make disjointed things one whole;
[…]
pleasure, precision, perception all become—
however bleak—by humor, chucklesome,
and in becoming so, become all one.

This I take to be the guiding philosophy behind the play, which with its wit provides keen insights but not answers. The trio detours to the house of the friar’s friends, where they pass the time, “mak[ing] a pattern of this mad world” in conversation and games, including a play, positing a kind of anti-Job, a humble and pious man whom the devil gets permission to test with riches and worldly possessions, to see whether he will remain faithful. This story, like the murder in the first play, is also unresolved, but we get the idea, see the development of ideas about the inseparability of soul and body, the debasement or exaltation of made things, the transactional nature of love, the inscrutability of God’s plans, the patterns, the stories, the chatter, the meaning of life….

In argument with God, Lucifer (played by the friar) posits that he alone of God’s creatures is truly free, endowed with “a will / the like of which [God] never dared again!” and humans do not have “even a modicum of real freedom!” The creator, he says,

                                      never again risked
the splendid blend of power and perception
that I am, for you had learned at last
what man has yet to learn: the thing made,
if made greatly, will outpace the maker.

This is Satan speaking, so take the notion with a grain of salt, but it’s powerful to ponder the limits of human liberty, especially within communal lives constrained by so much interaction, as is demonstrated throughout the play, culminating in one last exchange between the two titular characters. Death, having overcome her moroseness in the presence of the man she was sent to claim, bids him well, affirming that “on this night you taught your Death to laugh!” And Rabelais, refreshed in body and spirit, exults,

oh brindled life! Whose colors blend and blur
so close the wisest of us can’t discern
the line between the wedding and the death,
what’s comedy, what’s grief, what’s void, what’s breath…

The categories of experience, the judgments we make and assign to life, fail under scrutiny, or fail to hold fast. They’re always mutable. Nothing is monolithic. My experience with religion, and with society, has me believing that most people want to present themselves in the best light, hiding their struggles and sorrows, ashamed of sharing what makes us most human. We generally keep to ourselves the pain and anguish we feel, the embarrassing deviations from the norm. After a brawl with Death that leaves everyone bruised and broken, the friar, spent but invigorated, swears,

I see you all more clearly now,
with eyes all bloodied and half swollen shut,
than ever once I saw you all before,
and love you all most truly for the sight!

Me too, I think. I love my fellows not because they cut stately, stoical figures or pretend to perfection but as they share their sufferings, which is one reason Heretic resounded in my soul. When the end is near and there’s blood everywhere, when the music is plaintive and the lighting faint, Mr. Reed speaks the words “Pray; pray for us,” in a slow ambiguous groan. You can’t tell whether he’s repenting or seeking one last advantage to surprise and exercise his last whisper of control.

The young missionary Sister Paxton, who has seemed throughout the film so naïve, so credulous, so without guile, reveals here that she has, in fact, always been savvy, her faith always an intricate and intended response to complexity. Resigned, she responds to Mr. Reed’s plea, haltingly,

Praying…doesn’t work. Have you ever heard of the great prayer experiment? They divided patients into groups: those who received prayers and those who didn’t. The results of the study were conclusive. It doesn’t work.

But I think it’s beautiful that that we all pray for each other. Even though we all probably know it doesn’t make a difference. It’s just nice to think about someone other than yourself. Even if it’s you.

She bows her head and whispers, thanking her Heavenly Father for her trials.

It’s true what she says about prayer. I looked it up. The study is summarized in an article on the Templeton Foundation’s website. Of course, there have been other studies with other results, but the particular “Great Prayer Experiment,” which measured complications following heart surgery, determined that intercessory prayer slightly increased the chances of a negative outcome for patients who knew they were being prayed for.

I can’t argue with that, but I can nonetheless affirm that prayer does work, if we let the word work mean something bigger than what the study studied. I recently saw it work to bring people together to share someone’s pain and probably even lighten it.

It was a Sunday gathering at an artists’ residency. Following a tradition established years ago by a Latter-day Saint faculty member, a dozen or so of us, mostly Mormons, gathered in the Best Western conference room for a devotional. The graphic designers had gotten permission from the local bishop to bless and pass the sacramental bread and water. The writers and painters shared experiences and observations about being artists of faith in an environment that often feels hostile. I myself expressed a kind of “take heart” story of writing and sharing essays that come from and engage with my faith, including a recent extrapolation from a brief allusive scene in the last episode of the vampire series Midnight Mass.

I had the feeling that this was good, this conversation-by-turns, these shared concerns and questions, though perhaps a bit safe. We were strangers, mostly; guardedness was to be expected. And then a quiet woman who’d arrived a little late spoke. At first cautiously, then with increasing depth and vulnerability, she shared her anguish from “eighteen months of hell,” things she’d never expected, challenges that seemed beyond her capacity. Her nearest neighbor, a non-Mormon visitor, laid a hand on her shoulder. She continued to speak, her countenance crestfallen, her attempts to hold together breaking down in stutters and catches leading to sobs and sniffles. Soon she was racked with grief, weeping, shoulders shuddering. Then, without waiting for pause or permission, the woman beside her, her stranger-friend, began to pray over her in language uncustomary for most of us, “Father God…” she exhorted repeatedly, invoking the powers of heaven on behalf of this sister. “Father God…” in cadence designed to call down blessings right here and now, henceforth, forever, her earnest words emergent and ephemeral, uncrafted, unselfconscious.

I wish I could recall what was said, to generate for you some semblance of the spirit that settled among us, around the unfolded folding tables and our stackable chairs, but the particular linguistic distillation is gone from my memory. My eyes were closed, my body still, in an attitude of reverence; I flicked a finger across my cheek to distract a drop away. I was present as myself, but I felt, too, keenly, that I was one with the others. One woman spoke aloud, but we were all praying, all prayed for.

After we echoed “amen,” and after a respectful pause for the women’s embrace, the man sitting next to me, another non-Mormon, said, “While you two hug it out, I want to pray too,” which prefaced his own unconventional invocation, his recognition that “where two or more are gathered, you’re here also,” his colloquial calling on God to comfort our sister.

My most direct coreligionists, prim and proper in our tradition’s authorized expressions of fellow feeling and support, surely prayed inwardly, looked supportively toward our bereft friend, nodded in silent support, but it was two outsiders to our tradition who did something. We were all moved to tears, as they say, but these two were moved to prayers, which is more dynamic, a way of putting prayer to work.

 

 

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Patrick Madden is the author of four essay collections, including Recenses/Recencies (Nebraska). He teaches at Brigham Young University, coedits the journal Fourth Genre and Ohio State’s 21st Century Essays series, and vice-presides over the NonfictioNOW Conference.

 

 

 

Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash