This is the first nugget of truth that I have done on a movie I have not seen yet, The Fountain. This movie is not even out, but a line in the trailer made me want to write about it. In this case... I will have just put the nugget out there and wait til the movie comes to truly "flesh" it out.
In the trailer a line is "Our bodies are prisions for our souls." It goes on in the same voice to say "All flesh decays, death turns us all to ash, and thus death frees every soul."
I thought this was an interesting spin on the idea of our bodies being temples. I am still wrestling with the statement, but it does really make me think. That is what I love about fiction. It can take an idea and though I may disagree with it, in the end if I let it, the statement makes me better understand my own thoughts and beliefs.
What do you think of the statement? Anything come to mind? Our our bodies just prision for a soul waiting to be set free?
4 comments:
I feel that our bodies are the vessels that carries us through life. The temple of the Holy Spirit here on earth. We must look after it well. - But looking forward to the day when the glorified, spiritual body takes its place!
Thanks. Yeah... I have come to see that this earthly body is like a cocoon (another good movie). We use it in this life to help develop the character and values of our future "real" body. As long as we have the earthly body we should take care of it and use it to feed and serve the purposes of the spiritual body that will continue and is growing inside it.
The idea that our bodies are prisons for our souls comes originally from the Greeks who thought that the soul left the body after death and was eternal. It later developed with the Gnostics who believed that the soul was prisoned in the body in this world, so that earthly, worldly things were "bad" and all things spiritual were "good". This is very different from the Christian idea the soul and the body are one and that a soul without a body is not seen as a good thing but rather something incomplete. Paul says that we will have spiritual bodies and that this world is not evil and corrupting but that sin is present in this good world that God has created and its influence on the world is corrupting. We ought never to despise what God has created and called good, including this world and the body.
By the way, I thought The Fountain was a very good movie but it had a very different and non-Christian philosophy. It was about the circle of life and how dying inevitably leads to rebirth and this is a good things. Only through death and rebirth (for instance, through a tree planted over your grave, animals eat the leaves and you become part of them, etc) can we live forever.
Ok... almost a year later and I finally saw the movie. It was nothing like I was hoping and though it hit the theme of eternal life and the role of death, it was a ton more abstract. At the end of the movie I wasn't thinking deeps thoughts about God and the tree of life, I was thinking "What was that movie about?" Once I learned it was a Darren Aronofsky it made a whole bunch more sense why the movie did not make sense. He is brillant but WAY out there. And this was his most out there movie I have seen so far.
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