“The wicked flee when none pursueth.” (Proverbs 28:1).

In the original novel by Charles Portis, the verse is quoted by Mattie Ross, the girl-heroine, in her dry narrator’s voice explaining the flight of Tom Cheney, the man who killed her father. Mattie is the revelation of this film, in every sense. She’s 14 years old at the time of the events, but the entire story is being narrated by her much older self (a classic Western motif). Mattie poises her unyielding Calvinist Presbyterian faith, her Sunday school answers, against the brutality, the strangeness, and the randomness of the Wild West. She is the gunslinger of Morality.

Death stalks her world. From the opening scene where her father’s corpse lies in the falling snow (or is it ash?), to the final scene beside a grave. From the three men hung in Fort Smith, to an ancient skeleton filled with rattlers. There is a dark-lining to the world, a world that itself becomes steadily more spectral as her journey leads her over the border of the settled lands (a river, of course) and into the Territories. The bare trees and snow. A final desperate, mortal, gallop where the world has faded to silver and stars.

The triple hanging at the start is instructive, the three men step forward to give an account of their lives, one repentant, one not, one silenced before speaking. Death comes to all simultaneously while the sheriff sits and looks bored.

But Mattie’s belief and her quest appear to triumph against this. She is harder than stone, a truth only emphasised by her disquieting and occasional lapses into childishness. If No Country for Old Men was driven by Anton Chigurh’s unstoppable brutality, then this film is driven by Mattie Ross’ unbending sense of righteousness. She transforms a mean drunk and a vain Texan into her champions, and she cajoles, hounds, rides them forward. Eventually they become heroes. But the film doesn’t end.

Guns have recoil. And so does this story. A one-armed loveless spinster, side-show freaks, narrowly missed connections. A world moved on and indifferent.

“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.”

Another piece of ambiguous wisdom from Mattie Ross, a leaning juxtaposition of necessity and… what? What is God’s grace, in this world of brutal vengeance and hard justice? LaBeouf makes the shot, Rooster Cogburn makes the shack, but everyone pays for it one way or another. This can’t be grace then. Certainly Mattie wouldn’t have said so.

What is grace, strict Calvinist, other than the final unshackling of morality from necessity? The spectre that has ever haunted Augustinian thought, that in the final judgement, grace might be indistinguishable from randomness, the final undoing of morality.

You don’t have to read True Grit that way, but you can. And the possibility is intended. And if you do, True Grit is the end of the West.

In Sergio Leone’s films (I’m thinking particularly of his trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), for the first time the dirt and sweat and moral complication of life on the frontier seemed to leave its mark on the righteous gunslinger.

Even in the title of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly we have this third term: the straight up opposition of Good vs Evil is complicated by something further. And this third, this ugliness destabilises the other two. The ugliness runs through all.

The power of these films derives in the realism of this vision compared with the two dimensional characters of previous Westerns. Leone establishes this brilliantly, the long close-ups of unshaven faces, gritty eyes, characters without clear pasts or identities.

But the canonical rule still holds. Even if the hero is no longer unsullied in his righteousness, as long as his cause is just he will win through, and mayhap find redemption.

Superficially, True Grit appears to obey the rules of the genre. The Coen’s version of Rooster Cogburn is certainly of the tribe of Leone’s ‘Man with No Name’ and his final ride feels like a ride to redemption. And yet…

True Grit is a film capable of being read in two directions, it is consistently and deliberately ambiguous and ambivalent. In this it is most similar to the Coen Brother’s previous film A Serious Man.

It is an ambiguity that wasn’t present in No Country for Old Men as much as we desperately wished for it. It is the ambiguity Leone was trying to capture in his characters, but writ large, rolled out into a cosmology. No Country for Old Men was practically an assertion of the complete disconnection between morality and necessity. Anton Chigurh was as dispassionate and unstoppable as a force of nature, sparing or killing at the toss of a coin.

Truthfully, sometimes our world feels that way. Good people die, bad people live, one house burns, the neighbours are untouched. But for most of us, most of the time, we don’t live as though blind fate ruled all. We feel as though there is some connection between our actions and our destinies, even if this connection is ambiguous. We’re like Job (or Larry Gopnik from A Serious Man) crying out for answers from God (or Science, or whatever) and waiting for him to speak out of the whirlwind.

“The wicked flee when none pursueth.” (Proverbs 28:1). True Grit opens with this line, indicating once again that the Coens are engaging in some exegesis of the Wisdom literature. The ambiguity sits and stares you in the face. It’s the genius of this proverb, the practical contradiction of this statement, which makes it pithy and memorable. If the wicked flee when none pursueth, isn’t it the case that they flee for no reason, pointlessly? The proverb is a statement about the insecurity of the wicked person, but the words are capable of being read another way…

Part 3

First, let me confess a deep-rooted and growing predilection for Westerns, a taste I’ve inherited from my Dad, and he from his. Among my earliest movie memories are Clint Eastwood’s hard blue squint, Robert Duvall’s smile (Lonesome Dove), Ennio Morricone’s (maddeningly) unforgettable score toThe Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. True Grit is formally flawless as a ‘genre’ Western. I left the film with that sense of deep contentment that is uniquely aroused by contemplation of genuine craftsmanship. Like when you hold a really fine, hand-bound book and feel the quality of the materials, the smell of the leather, the texture of the paper, the firm curve of the spine. We hear much drivel about the uniqueness of hand-made products, what makes fine craftsmanship isn’t uniqueness but the honing of material to form. It is the ability of the craftsman to take this particular piece of material and fashion it toward a form, a universal, whether that is a book, a sonnet, or a bœuf bourguignon. The final result has its uniqueness from the peculiarities of the material, but its beauty and craft lies with the skill by which these peculiarities are gathered together for the realisation of the universal. The master craftsman finds a way to make the knot of wood serve the vision of a chair. He only cuts when unavoidable.

The Coen Brothers are the great auteur-craftsmen of English-language cinema. They love to take a peculiar material (story) and work it carefully according to the rules of a genre. In fact, their especial gift has been to take basically the same story and work it according to the rules of many distinct genres, while still preserving both the integrity of the story and the rules of the genre. The story is this: someone gets something they shouldn’t have (money, child, position) which unleashes a chain of relentless causality through which the thing they’ve got may or may not end up destroying them (and everyone around them). The interplay between this relentless causality – the tightly wound narrative spring – and the utter randomness of its path of destruction drive the plot. The Coen Brother’s films almost always inhabit a world of inescapable necessity (fate) but without intrinsic moral order.

This is where things get interesting. Humans have this weird ability to have feelings, dispositions, orientations toward the unplaying of fate. We can find it terribly funny, gut-achingly wrong, satisfyingly right. It is these dispositions toward the outcomes of actions and events that make us wonder about the connection between outcomes and morality (meta-ethics). It is also the source of our fascination with theatre, literature, cinema – those spaces of the imagination which are also the practical workshop of ethics. Our disposition to have certain feelings about the outcome of events in a story even extends to classifying stories according to the connection between necessity and morality. To put it more crudely, we often classify certain kinds of stories on the basis of whether its conceivable for the bad guy to win.

The classic Western displayed one of the firmest and most fundamental commitments to the belief that necessity was married to morality. The good guy wore a white hat. He could be shot at, but never hit. He could be punched, but it would never leave a mark. When the shadows grew long in the streets of Dodge City, he was constitutionally quicker on the draw. His pistols rang with the sound of righteous judgement. This faith that good must triumph over evil, that this triumph is written into creation, was central to the genre. One of the many variations of the quintessentially American ‘prosperity’ theology retrojected into a mythical foundation narrative.

Until Sergio Leone.

Part 2

Having said that, I can’t imagine that Wolf Hall was an easy novel to write. On the contrary, it is an incredibly and painstakingly well-researched recreation of an historical character. The novel follows the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, the organisational and legal genius behind Henry VIII’s civil and ecclesiastical reforms. (As a side note, there are more Thomases in Wolf Hall than you could reasonably swing a sword at – but that is the fault of Tudor England, not Hilary Mantel. Who would have thought that so many men named ‘Thomas’ would be involved in shaping modern Anglophone society)
Tudor Britain was a society gripped by a series of transformations within which the lineaments of our contemporary world began to take shape. It is the lives and loves of some of the men and women in these pages that effected a legacy of change to which our current global culture continues to be heir. Wolf Hall is a chance to meet these characters and dwell with them in the daily weave of life. It’s a rich experience. You shouldn’t for a moment expect a hagiography though. Mantel leaves us in no doubt that Cromwell was both a ‘Bible Man’ and also a ruthless political operator. Something of a cross between Tony Soprano and the Anglican Church League (I leave you to decide which is which).

Wolf Hall is not just an historical novel, it is a novel about history. It is about the ways in which our paths are directed by choices other people made, the way our lives are intertwined with characters who walked ahead, sometimes out of sight, but whose presence still vibrates in the air as we pass. Mantel achieves this through a series of very daring effects: she situates the reader on the shoulder of Cromwell, not giving us a first person narrative, but free access to his thoughts and feelings. For a while we know Thomas, we live closer to him, than even his beloved wife. It is the most intimate form of ‘indwelling’. This is an opportunity to experience a knowledge of the world given through transmissible experiences rather than directly collated our own nervous encounters. Wolf Hall takes fiction seriously.

But perhaps too seriously? Wolf Hall will never be accused of insulting the reader’s intelligence. I’ve been studying and reading books about this period of history for a few years now, and I honestly think Mantel assumes more Tudor history than she communicates. But this is also the effect which makes Wolf Hall brilliant. Mantel has consciously written a novel in which the tension that drives the narrative doesn’t come from the narrative itself, but what the reader will bring to the narrative.
The secret of Wolf Hall lies in what the book isn’t about: Wolf Hall.

To my mind, eating at Shenkin is almost certainly an implied right within the Australian Constitution. It may even actually be a form of political communication. And even if it isn’t, I can’t think of a more appropriate way to demonstrate the values of MATESHIP and a FAIRGO than spending a portion of our tax harvest making sure that the less fortunate among us have the opportunity to partake in this NATIONAL TREASURE.
Seriously, if I had to choose between a free hip-replacement and being permanently parked in a corner of Shenkin… well, it’s not really a choice is it?

Now go there.

View Shenkin in a larger map

Resurrection and Moral Order: an Outline of Evangelical Ethics by Oliver O’Donovan

When it comes to books, I’m a chronic margin-scribbler. Sometimes though, it only takes me until I finish the book before I go back to discover that my earlier interaction with it was completely unhinged. Actually, maybe that’s a measure of a really good book: the number of marks you’ve made in the margin, and how wildly wrong you think they are when you’ve finished. A good book changes the way you think, certainly that’s been my experience with Resurrection and Moral Order. I’m now on my second reading, I’ve got multiple layers of marginal notes, some of which are completely contradictory, and I’ve underlined so much of the text that I’m suspicious about the non-underlined sections. Maybe I should underline them just in case I’m missing the point?

At Uni, studying Philosophy and Ethics, I was fed a steady diet of scepticism and anti-realist epistemology. Consequently, any appeal to an idea of ‘how things are’ as a basis for right and wrong has tended to strike me as naïve, not a little oppressive, and seriously unhip. For me then, reading O’Donovan was like watching someone take a blow-torch to my house of cards.

O’Donovan writes from the clear conviction that what God has done in Christ very clearly declares how things are in the world, and how they will be. And this declaration of how things are in Christ has an inescapable implication for what we must do: the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ calls us to repentance and the obedience of faith. You cannot seriously claim to be talking about ethics as a Christian without confronting the truth that this ‘is’ entails a very particular ‘ought’. With this insight, O’Donovan strides out to bat. This is not a book that sets out to give guidance on appropriate Christian behaviour, or how Christians should deal with hard ethical cases. Rather, this is an exercise in what is generally known as ‘meta-ethics’ what O’Donovan calls ‘Christian moral concepts’. That is, the types of things that Christians are committed to believing about the world, and particularly about the ethical aspect of the world, in the light of what God has declared to be the case in Christ. As such, it is an exercise in elucidation, not a new framework for ethics, but making clear the framework presupposed by the gospel. The great value of this project lies with the recognition that Christian ethics will inevitably be crippled when we seek to build it upon underlying structures of epistemology and ontology that have no space for Christian claims about the world, i.e., the kinds of things we are taught in Philosophy courses at Uni.

O’Donovan’s moral realism is a breath of fresh air – here is someone willing to take seriously the epistemological and ontological implications of the gospel, to reason powerfully from these commitments to a coherent framework of moral concepts, and to argue for their universal validity and applicability. Not many people have the guts to talk like him.
If you’re a philosophy student, or doing a course in ethics, try reading his brief excursus into the relation between deontological and consequentialist ethics (pp. 137-139). Here O’Donovan comes closest to engaging with some of classic problems of modern moral philosophy and it’s at moments like this that you can catch a glimpse of the incredible philosophical depth behind this ‘outline’.

Resurrection and Moral Order is certainly not a book for every reader, but if you’re studying anything at Uni that touches on philosophy or ethics, do yourself a favour: make sure you read this book before you graduate. Then go back and read your margin notes – see how much you change.

Perhaps putting it that way is too simplistic.

It cannot be denied that many of those leaders who have become notorious for their brutality, or corruption, or cult of personality, are (or were) people of great charisma and leadership ability. Often they are very urbane and intelligent people. Always, they come to power asserting that they seek the best for their people, things which only a strong leader can achieve.
It’s easy for us to ‘look behind’ this rhetoric and see nothing but irrational evil and self-interest. It may well be that this is the case, but I’m certain it wasn’t the reality that presented itself to the consciousness of the leader any more than the people whom he persuaded. What ever our beliefs about the causes of evil and the human capacity for free will. At a subjective level no one actively pursues evil, there are no Cackling Arch-Villains. That would be such a failure of logical consistency that it would render the person virtually incapable of normal function. Whatever evils people do, we do it because we have told ourselves, in some fashion, that they are good.
It seems to me, as an arm-chair observer, that leaders like Idi Amin, subscribed to a theory that the good of their nation was best served by their own personal good. For Idi Amin, as presented in The Last King of Scotland this was not in a tawdry, greedy sense. Rather, he believed himself the ‘Father’ of the nation. His personal strength was a measure of the nation’s strength, his personal wealth was a measure of the national wealth. Every aspect of national life was related personally to himself as leader. This led him to take every personal slight or threat as a national betrayal, which he would exterminate for the sake of the people.
I wonder if Hitler’s Germany didn’t operate along similar lines.
There is something deeply right about this way of thinking. The life of a people is intimately connected with the life of their leaders. This understanding is central to Christian faith.
What is deeply wrong with Idi Amin, and all the sorry list of criminal leaders who have blighted our world, is a failure to understand the sacrificial nature of leadership displayed by Christ.

This was revolutionary in the 1st Century, and remains so in the 21st. The good of the people will be served by the sacrifice of the leader. For a leader to seek the good of the people is not equivalent to seeking his own good. This Christian understanding of leadership is nicely expressed in our use of the term ‘Minister’ for our political leaders. The word ‘minister’ is a Latin loan-word meaning ‘servant’. Our Prime-Minister is the ‘First Servant’ of the people.

So, What’s it like as a film?

To be honest, Amazing Grace would be a fantastic two part Sunday night feature on the ABC. It feels more like something churned out by the BBC period-piece Dickens/Austen mill, than a big screen affair.

The film opens with a fairly shameless ploy, Wilberforce’s carriage pulls up beside two (appropriately ugly) men who are beating a horse to death. Although Wilberforce is clearly ill, he is unable to turn away from the suffering of the horse and intervenes to stop the men…
…we get the point. Wilberforce is the champion of the oppressed.

And so, you are introduced to the greatest flaw in the film, it has a real penchant for cheese. It’s understandable, when you’re telling the story of truly heroic person it’s easy to touch it up with a golden dinner plate behind the head and plenty of Mozzarella.
But the fact is, really great people just seem greater when you tell their story warts and all.

Fortunately, the power of Wilberforce’s story overwhelms the defects in the storytelling.
There are some genuinely poignant moments: when Wilberforce boards a Slave Ship for the first time and is overcome by the smell; or when John Newton breaks down and confesses that he still hears the voices of the twenty thousand slaves he transported to the West Indies.
And its hard not to give a little cheer at the end when the House of Commons gives Wilberforce a standing ovation as the Bill to Abolish the Slave Trade finally passes into law.

Another positive is that the film doesn’t paper over Wilberforce’s Christian hope or minimise this as the central motivation for his determination to end the Slave Trade.
Which means that the best reason to see this film is to go away afterwards and have a good think about how when the gospel transforms individual minds its also begins to transform societies. Wilberforce was not a limp-wristed “social gospel” hippy, he was not even one of those who argue that we can best commend the gospel through acts of service. No, Wilberforce was a gospel-through-and-through-man. God’s word was at the centre of his life. As his mind was transformed by the words of God, his behaviour in the world was transformed to match. And that meant not sitting around while Africans rotted and died in stinking ships.
Wilberforce simply didn’t know how to live with the comfortable gap between belief and action.

So for all its flaws, go see Amazing Grace, and pray that God would give us more people like William Wilberforce.