Midnight Mass Review

 The acting and storyline were excellent. The ending speech about the nature of death, well…

There is a very significant theological belief usually believed to be primarily an Eastern Orthodox tradition; theosis, or divinization. It is actually found in the western tradition as well, e.g., Aquinas. St. Athanasius famously stated that God became human so that humans could become God. At first blush this sounds blasphemous, arrogant. But it is actually a profound insight into the depths of God’s utter self-giving love, without reserve. There is no doubt everyone of us has delimited the infinite, apophatic reality of the divine whose essence transcends human speech and imagination. But this does not mean that there is no univocal relation that allows us to at least intuit the ability to know something about the divine, as limited as it is. One thing we can experience, I believe, is to intuit the personal nature of the divine, though this in itself exceeds human categories. The final speech was wonderfully, and dramatically (with proper music effects) delivered, eliciting emotions that could easily give the impression of veracity to the content of the words. But if one payed careful attention, the ultimate message was a romantic Nietzschean ode to one stream of an ancient Greek conviction, that being the belief in an eternal recurrence. This speech could have easily been inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or Ecce Homo. Why Hollywood has such animus against the possibility of the continuance of human consciousness as a gift from the eternal generosity of an eternal love is beyond me. Maybe there is underlying such a fear a terror that how we live our lives have consequences that cannot be so easily eradicated through the annihilation of our self-reflexive consciousness, a consciousness that may desperately want to deny the possible cosmic justice that takes account of human injustice. The inexplicable leap from a totally catholicised script to a materialist humanism was rather jarring. For me, someone who has written on anti-Catholicism in American history, this became a not to subtle screed in which Catholicism can only be an oppressive institution that engenders self-righteousness and spiritual rigidity. While popular portrayals in the news and social media take pedantic pleasure in pointing out the worst in Catholic culture (sex abuse, ecclesial cover-ups, conservative exclusionary attitudes), it neglects the profound beauty that many of us experience in this very human, yet also divine family. So, in the end, I very much liked the show, the acting, and most of the writing. But the ending was, in my humble opinion, disingenuous.