Christ Church of North Carolina

Christus Rex

Hours
Maurice Hagar

Glimmering on the new release shelf of your neighborhood video store like the Serpent in the Garden, the superbly crafted and critically acclaimed The Hours is beautiful to behold but deadly to the touch. According to director Stephen Daldry the film, a faithful adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novella of the same title, is a “truthful” portrayal of the “profound choices” people make in life’s desperate Pursuit of Happiness. The heroine, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), is a repressed lesbian dutifully serving her loving family until she falls under the spell of writer Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), another repressed lesbian who eventually commits suicide reasoning “to look life in the face, to know it for what it is, to love it for what it is, is the [unalienable] right of every human being, and then to put it away.” In lieu of ending her own empty existence, Laura declares her independence by courageously walking out on her traumatized family. “It was death,” she explains, “I chose life.” The consequence of her “profound choice” is that her son, Richard (Ed Harris), haunted by the demons of his past and ravaged by AIDS, turns his anguish into award-winning poetry before bravely putting life away by leaping to his death. When confronted by her son’s bisexual lover Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep)—surprisingly free from her nothingness after Richard’s death—Laura shows no remorse whatsoever and turns out to be an unexpected source of strength. “Is that the monster?” Clarissa’s daughter (Claire Danes) inquires after Laura. The conclusion of the matter is clear—and the venom delivered—when the sympathetic daughter welcomes Laura home in a loving embrace.

There is nothing new under the sun. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” exclaimed the Preacher long ago. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” This is the absurd worldview known as existentialism. Human fulfillment is found not in external, objective reality, values, or relationships but in internal, subjective pursuits of self-actualization. Guard against friendship, marriage, and duty cautioned Soren Kierkegaard. Always “reserve speed to run away” or one ceases to be authentic as the self is lost in the other. “Hell is other people,” added Jean Paul Sartre, because they prevent us from looking inside to find true meaning and happiness. The simplest definition of happiness, explained Sigmund Freud, is instinctual self-gratification. Much of the energy that should be devoted to the pursuit of self-gratification is employed instead in the repressive service of others.

Nihilism (from the Latin for “nothing”) followed existentialism to its logical conclusion. “If life has no meaning,” wondered Woody Allen in Love and Death, “why go on living? Why not just commit suicide?” Good question. Freidrich Nietzsche came up with the answer: Übermensch, or Superman. Nietzsche’s Superman, embodied by Laura Brown, as well as by today’s extreme athletes and totalitarian strongmen, trades the debilitating “will to live” for the more invigorating “will to power.” Embracing death provides “the greatest courage and the greatest freedom” to be, to do, to take whatever one wishes without hesitation, remorse, regret, or apology. If, as Nietzsche infamously pronounced, God is dead then man, created in his image, likewise, is as good as dead and the walking dead find nothing rational or irrational, moral or immoral, in their mad dash to the grave. Why not “grab all the gusto you can get” along the way and “go out in a blaze of glory?”

Ironically, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn show us why not. Tormented within and without, in body and in soul, The Hours’ cast graphically reminds us that the wages of sin—autonomous disregard for our Creator’s law-boundaries—are utter despair, reckless destruction, and gratuitous death. “Here is the conclusion of the matter,” charged the Preacher, “Fear God and keep his commandments.” And his commandments are summed up in the greatest commandments to love the Lord your God with all that you are and love your neighbor as yourself. “For this is the whole duty of man.”

Volume One - Issue Two

Literature: Thoreau & the Dust of Death - Gregory Soderberg
Theology: Historic Creationism on Trial - Maurice Hagar
Aesthetics: Hours - Maurice Hagar
Culture: Manhunt - Maurice Hagar
Sodomy: Letter to an Editor - Marcus Rench
Skeletal Thoughts and Emaciated Musings - Gregory Soderberg

"There is not an inch in the entire domain of our human life of which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not proclaim 'Mine!'…One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul…It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people."
- Abraham Kuyper -