The Passion

Peter J. Leithart, March 09, 2004

Leon Wieseltier, not surprisingly, has a blisteringly negative review of Gibson's film in the March 8 issue of TNR. Along the way, though, Wieseltier's article is inadvertently insightful. Here is his description of the violence of the torture: "There is only the relentless destruction and dehumanization of a man, who exists here to have his body punished with an almost unimaginable fury. He falls, he rises, he falls, he rises; he bends beneath the blows, but never mentally; his flesh is ripped, his head is stabbed, his eye is beaten shut, his hair a wig of dried blood, he is a pulp with a cause."

For a Christian believer, this is perhaps a disturbing description, but it is also wonderful in a way that Wieseltier cannot realize. For the "man" who is thus dehumanized is God, and the unimaginable fury of the torturers is the fury of man against his Creator.