After being cancelled in 2020 & even 2021, Easter is back this year! These times have been especially dramatic for Christians, who felt the authority of the gov’t or of bureaucrats take control of faith, something which they did not expect & for which they were not—are not—prepared. I remember what it was like celebrating Easter from an apartment balcony, under national house arrest, looking upon many others in the distance doing likewise, all listening to the chanting from a distant church, or to the radio, the night lit up by candles. I’ve seen mass televised over the internet—streaming! Of course, religious authorities will deal with these matters in their way. But society involves among other things what we call art & culture, that is, reflections on our situation, on our predicament, attempts to offer insight & persuade the people, reconstituted as an audience, that we can grasp the character of our trouble & begin to think about what we might do about it. We don’t have much Christian art in our time, however, presumably because faith is not very important to people & society is not very important to the faithful; indeed, there are very few worthy artists to speak of; but it might not be inappropriate during Holy Week to look to Polish director Kieślowski’s TV series on the Ten Commandments to experience our very modern confusion. I wrote an essay for my friends at Modern Age, which I recommend to your attention:
In 1988, Krzysztof Kieślowski make his most important work—Dekalog, a ten-episode TV series on the crisis of faith in the lives of ordinary Poles in an apartment building in Warsaw. It premiered in December 1989 & ran until June 1990. Three decades on, it deserves celebration as the most important work of Christian art in the post–Cold War period—selected for the Vatican’s Best Films List because Kieślowski aimed to show that modern life can be understood only in light of the commandment of love in the Gospels (Matthew 22:37–40).
The series is apolitical, avoiding what we would expect—the longing for & celebration of the coming of freedom, democracy, & capitalism. Nevertheless, it is open to all these important historical changes: Kieślowski is already looking ahead to the society defined by individualism rather than family, conventions dominated by science rather than faith, & a public order defined by indifference to the deepest longings of the human heart rather than by the common good. At the highest moment of joy for personal & political freedom, Kieślowski gives us his greatest warning that our personal lives are turning toward misery & self-destruction rather than paradise. Whatever may be said for the end of history at the global level, at the personal level our very souls are in danger of debasement &, far from achieving any progress, we are becoming fearfully decadent.
Kieślowski’s warning about the confusion into which our freedom is falling follows from his interpretation of the Decalogue, which in turn follows from the distinction between law & faith: Christianity is not the establishment of a regime & does not teach what justice is or how to educate children. It appears necessarily as a corrective rather than an edification. It will not be the way to rule Poland or the post-Communist world. Instead, it aims to guide democracy by the Christian solution to man’s natural tragic inclination. Its influence comes from the soul rather than from public speeches, government, or conventions.
Everything from computers to America as the land of freedom to which people dream of escaping is in this series, which is ultimately about the need for faith to defend the family from one catastrophe after another—so read the essay.
Also, watch the series! Without claiming any expertise on the post-totalitarian situation in Europe, I hazard the guess that many of the psycho-pathologies you see in this series were very rare in 1990 & are rather common now, in America & elsewhere. Kieślowski & his writers were prescient, perhaps because they looked West for warnings of coming trouble, but perhaps simply because they looked around, they reflected on the deeply troubling experiences of the 20th c., & worried about the consequences for society of so much turmoil. Here’s my summation:
We see in Kieślowski’s stories a correspondence to everything wrong with our own 21st c. society, from the porn addiction crippling so many young men to the sterility of our scientific & artistic pretensions, to the fury guilt instills in people who then decide to live up to that guilt by doing something terrible, to the age-old evils invited back ignorantly by people who think themselves too sophisticated for obedience to law. It is not enough to criticize any of the mad things now fashionable individually, nor would it suffice to identify their origin in the liberal idea of self-authorship: Of creating one’s own identity, including by re-creating one’s body. It is also necessary to have an alternative understanding of the crisis & what makes this madness attractive to modern people. This undeniable crisis makes faith plausible again & can return the Decalogue to our understanding of everyday life. Faith would then dignify our concealed misery by judging it against divine law, in hope of grace & mercy & righteousness.