In my last post I suggested that the pantheism of Avatar (not to mention several other films) was about as deep spiritually as most in our materialist society could go. (See my previous post for the meaning of pantheism and related terms.) Does that mean that an insipid pantheism is the best that any artist living in a mind-numbing materialistic society can come up with?
The late Andrei Tarkovsky shows us that the answer is “No.” Born and reared in the Soviet Union, where he also made most of his films, Tarkovsky proves that spirituality in a dogmatically materialist country need not degenerate into pantheism. It is not that he is immune to nature’s charms, whether it is the desolate steppes seen from the balloon in Andrei Rublev, or the haunting birch forests in Ivan’s Childhood, or the poet’s dacha and environs in Nostalghia. And yet Tarkovsky posits that there is a greater spirituality than mere nature worship. It is not an impersonal force behind nature that Tarkovsky proclaims in his films. It is always a Transcendent Other—not necessarily the Christian God but someone behaving much as God does: always otherworldly, sometimes difficult to understand and communicate with, and usually ignored or dismissed by hardened materialists.
In Solaris, for example, the Transcendent Other is the conscious entity to be found in the watery deep of an alien planet. A space administration has sent scientists to investigate the planet Solaris, but little progress has been made because strange apparitions manifest themselves, driving the scientists to distraction. Their colleagues back home cannot understand the delay. Solaris is a planet to be measured, probed, analyzed, and eventually colonized. Nobody expects to communicate with a being of a different order.
But simply recognizing that there is a Transcendent Other does not guarantee that we can communicate with the Other. That is a point Tarkovsky makes about all relationships, including those among human beings; think, for example, of the various estrangements depicted in his autobiographical Mirror. Communication is particularly difficult when one deals with a being who is not of this world. The apparitions in Solaris terrify the astronauts on the space station. For example, the protagonist Kris Kelvin is troubled by the apparition that takes the form of his ex-wife Hari, since he is reminded of how his neglect of her had driven her to commit suicide. In the end, the Other creates an island where Kelvin can encounter him and he takes the form of Kelvin’s estranged father. Kelvin falls penitent before him and his father embraces him in a pose drawn from Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. At its heart this is good Christian theology. We cannot pretend as if God does not exist any more than the scientists on the space station can deny the existence of the sentient being to be found on Solaris. However, if God draws near in His raw power, His presence reminds us of our sins and drives us to despair. Thus, God must prepare a place for us to meet Him, which He does through the death and resurrection of Christ.
The Soviet Union saw very well the Christian notions behind Tarkovsky’s films. They also understood the danger to their regime of allowing someone like Tarkovsky to speak of a transcendent being and did their best to silence him. Fortunately, they did not succeed.
© 2010 James A. Kellerman
