Though these facts are well known, and though I’ve rehearsed them before, it appears that they bear repeating. Of course, the central act in this drama is the story of Galileo’s persecution at the hands of the ignorant and vindictive church, and so Brown and Howard bring the great Renaissance scientist front and center: Langdon is almost suffocated by wicked Vaticanisti while he diligently researches in the Galileo archive, and at the end of the film, a grateful Cardinal rewards the intrepid scientist with a long-hidden text of the master. And thus many avatars of modernity feel the need on a regular basis to bring out the Catholic church as a scapegoat and punching-bag, as if to re-enact the founding myth.
There is a stubbornly enduring myth that the “modern” world-especially in its scientific expression-emerged out of a terrible struggle with backward-looking Catholicism. Without going into any more of the goofy twists and turns of the story, can you see what prompted my cri de coeur about getting it backward? In point of fact, it is not Catholicism that feels the need constantly to revive the struggle between science and the faith, but rather secular modernity-and Ron Howard’s movie itself is exhibit A.
In fact, we discover, the whole thing has been concocted by the evil camerlengo, an ultimate Vatican insider, who has revived the old tale of the Illuminati and organized the wicked scheme in order to create a scapegoat against which he could engage in heroic struggle and so engineer his own election as Pope! I swear I’m not making this up. As the plot unfolds, and Langdon cleverly uncovers the sinister plot of the scientists, one is tempted to say, “well, for once the bad guys are the rationalists and the victims are the faithful. To the rescue comes Professor Robert Langdon, a cool agnostic from Harvard, who helps to unravel the mystery after he’s given access to the archives to which the Vatican had heretofore denied him access (presumably for his mischief in the Da Vinci Code!). Peter’s and they’re threatening, as a conclave gathers to elect a new Pope, to obliterate the Vatican. They’ve kidnapped four cardinals and placed a devastating explosive device under St.
It appears as though an ancient rationalist society, the Illuminati, which had been persecuted by the church in centuries past, is back for revenge. As I was coming to the end of Ron Howard’s latest movie, “Angels and Demons,” I felt like shouting out to the screen, “no, no, you’ve got it precisely backward!” The central theme of the film, based on Dan Brown’s thriller of the same name, is the battle between “science” and Catholicism.
0 kommentar(er)
