New Richard Armitage interview in Collider

So, this was published today. I really appreciate every time Richard Armitage talks about his creative process or how he puts a character together. However — there’s also this:

This story not only deals with faith, but also with the strength of conviction for that faith, as these men protect and fight over a revered relic that seems to just be a lump of rock.

ARMITAGE: I feel like you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head of it. I’ve been trying to explain the kind of endowment we all give to this piece of stone. Without alienating people that have strong religious beliefs, we endow something, whether it’s a book or a wafer in Communion or the wine that you drink, with power, which is coming out of the human mind. We give it that power and relevance. In a way, that’s the whole point of the movie. We see this stone and we know where it came from, and the journey of that relic is as important as any of these characters. You realize that they’ve given power to this thing and it’s costing people their lives, but it’s just this stone.

Maybe it’s really true what some people say — that being religious is a bit like being able to carry a tune; you either can or can’t, and if you can’t, you don’t really understand people who can.

I don’t believe religious people are automatically better or more moral than others. Although I am a religious person and I can’t any longer imagine not being religious (I tried for about six months, once), I don’t care if other people are religious themselves. Also, although I have spent a lot of time studying the Roman Church and have taught entire lecture and research courses on its history in the period before 1600, I myself have never been Catholic nor have I believed that relics had supernatural powers.

What I do care about: reasonably accurate representations of historical religion. “Historical” is important in that sentence because how people believe today is largely not how they believed eight centuries ago.

Mr. Armitage: when you say “we give it that power,” you’re talking about something that no medieval person did. You’re talking in the language of religious choice, which appeared in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century. “I can give this relic power,” or “I don’t give this relic power”?

So let me ask this: do you feel like you “give” gravity power? The theory of gravity is also a construct, a means of explaining how the universe works that humans came up with.

The notion of the Christian G-d in western Europe in 1200 was like gravity is for us today. It was broadly shared by every social segment from the richest to the poorest, from the most educated to the least, among men, women, and children. Not because of indoctrination (education was a limited commodity in the thirteenth century), but because the Church, its beliefs, and its rituals, had successfully become a part of the landscape and its rhythms, which had always had supernatural components. By 1209, Ireland had been firmly Christian for more than four centuries, in some parts, for more than six — and despite some efforts to eradicate its predecessor, in the end, Christianity wasn’t an alternative to pagan belief; it settled itself on top of and alongside it. Most people weren’t deciding about Christianity any more than they had “given power” to pagan belief in the millennium previous to that transition.

But you say gravity is not supernatural; it’s a natural force. My reply would be that for all that most of the average person knows about gravity, s/he treats it as if it were supernatural, and in the thirteenth century, G-d was part of the natural universe; one of his most important functions was agricultural and climatological.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend much thinking about gravity, even if I have been tripping and falling over things my whole life.  True, it was explained to me when I was a twelfth-grader in high school physics, defined as the attraction between objects of differing masses. As the earth’s mass is very large and my mass is comparatively small, my mass will always be attracted to it, absent other forces. When I fall toward the earth, then at the rate of 9.8 meters per second squared. That’s the sum total of my knowledge about gravity — although there is much more to be known. But when I teach this material I often ask my classes what they know about gravity and most of them can’t even come up with as much information as I have. Gravity is fundamental to every step we take but for everyone but a physicist, it might as well be a magical process.

I never made a decision to give gravity any power over me. No one has ever asked me if I wanted to fall when I stumble, or whether I believe in gravity. It’s just there, and since I know it’s there, I try not to act in ways that will make run afoul of it. For instance, I never jump from buildings. Not because that might not be cool, but because I know what will happen if I do: I will accelerate toward earth at 9.8 meters per second squared, and I will seriously injure or even kill myself.

If you said to me, “there’s no such thing as gravity,” I’d tell you that you were nuts. If you told me you were going to start a campaign to enlighten everyone about the deception that is gravity, I’d try to stop you. If you tried to teach that nonsense to my children, I’d try to have you declared insane. People who don’t believe in gravity aren’t just deluded, they’re potentially dangerous.

And where do we learn about gravitation? In an institution with a man (well, in my day, it was almost always a man in science classes) who tells us about it. And I can tell you from personal experience, if you ask, why? why is it that way? why does gravity happen? most teachers will simply say, “it just is that way.” (Some instructors will admit that physics explains how the world turns, but not why, but those people are few and far between.)

So here’s the thing. Sure, religion is a human construct. But in the thirteenth century, Christian belief is so broadly shared that no one constructs it by himself. Even leaving aside the probability that personality structure was significantly different that long ago, Europeans were not in a situation where they were contemplating the universe and asking “does religion fit in here?” That was already a given. So a relic piety is a piece of that.

So when a film suggests, as Pilgrimage does repeatedly, that people are missing the evidence right in front of their faces, that anyone with common sense would notice, it misses the very simple truth that G-d as part of the equation was already part of the assumptions not just for belief but also for troubleshooting. “The relic isn’t protecting me as I anticipated” isn’t a reason to doubt the efficacy of the relic or even the system, because the way that the supernatural is incorporated into the world makes the question a different one from the get-go. The problem isn’t the relic — the problem is the believer. And the believer knows this. The hermeneutic circle was still complete in the Middle Ages.

And when a film suggests, as Pilgrimage does repeatedly, that the relic is “just a rock,” only a symbol, it misses a fundamental quality of the middle ages — that symbols were seen as real. When a king or an emperor underwent an investiture ritual, this wasn’t simply symbolic of his assumption of his office; it was his assumption of the office (read the story of Henry IV and Gregory VII to get a sense of how serious this sort of thing could be). It’s the Middle Ages that comes up with the idea of transubstantiation (that the bread and the wine become the literal, physical body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist). A few centuries later, when some theologians started to suggest the possibility that the elements merely symbolized the body of Christ, it started wars. None of the people involved in those conflicts thought they were giving the Eucharist power, or that they had a choice of what to believe about it.

So I’m not questioning at all the possibility that a group of medieval monks would spend the final, fateful days of their lives chasing a relic. But the point is that they wouldn’t have chased it because it was a symbol, because “they had given it power.” They would have chased it because it was powerful.

We can look at medieval people from our perspective in the twenty-first century all we like, but if the frame through which we understand them is one of religious choice, we’re imposing our prejudices on them. That’s fine, of course; no one is obligated to reproduce history in film. I just wish you — and the other people involved in this film — could be honest that this film isn’t really about the Middle Ages.

~ by Servetus on August 14, 2017.