Review

Ambition

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

6 December 2024

6 min read

Why we’re fascinated with power behind closed doors

Conclave captures the powerful chemistry between heaven and earth.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

A cardinal glances to the side as he stands amid a gather of clergy,

Cardinal Thomas Lawrence played by Ralph Fiennes.

Film Nation.

An ecclesiastical election, conducted behind closed doors, by a group of old men hardly seems a subject for a riveting thriller. Yet, back in 2016, Berkshire-based novelist Robert Harris thought otherwise. Conclave became an international best-seller.

Now it’s been turned into a movie. And, according to the cognoscenti, a rather good one at that. British Vogue lauded it with great enthusiasm:

“It’s a treat in every sense – visually, sonically, dramaturgically – and, as we hurtle into this bleakest of winters, exactly the kind of galvanising, pulse-racing shot in the arm we all need.”

Really?

Well, following its UK premiere at the London Film Festival in October, the BBC were quick to report a potential flurry of Oscar nominations and even that it was ‘thought to be a strong contender for the best picture award’.

So, what’s going on? How has this dangerously dull and turgid subject turned into a narrative that tames the critics and converts the sceptics?

A late night showing on the day of its release at the end of November beckoned me to find out. So off I went with my wife, after she had finished Gospel Choir practice.

Directed by award winning film-maker Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), it stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini.

The premise is simple. The Pope is dead, and the Cardinals of the Catholic Church convene from around the world to choose his successor. But this, of course, is only the beginning.

Sequestered in the Vatican the prelates are cut off from outside influence as the secret process of electing a new pontiff is enacted. But this does not stop events, past and present, from impacting and shaping their deliberations.

Overseen by Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), the British Dean of the College of Cardinals, the story unfolds as he negotiates these successive revelations and happenings. Along the way he is also wrestling in his own faith for spiritual reality and personal integrity.

As they gather, the not-so-friendly fraternal rivalry of the cardinals and the manoeuvring of the leading contenders sets up a presenting series of tensions for the Conclave:

Cardinal Bellini (Tucci) is the Vatican’s theologically progressive, yet diffident, Secretary of State
Cardinal Tremblay (Lithgow) is a slippery and ambitious, self-promoting Canadian conservative
Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is the forthright and reactionary traditionalist Patriarch of Venice
Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is a theologically conservative and populist Nigerian who offers the possibility of making history as the first Black pope.

Then, at the last minute, into the mix enters a cardinal that no one knew of. Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is a Mexican who arrives claiming the late pope appointed him Archbishop of Kabul in pectore (in secret) prior to his death.

Shuttling between their living quarters in the Domus Sanctae Marthae and the Sistine Chapel, the venue for their voting process, the story unfolds. A complex interplay of ecclesiastical politics, theology and spirituality intermingle with issues of identity, character and choice to make for a heady mix. At stake, or is that on offer, is the power of the Papacy.

Reflecting the church at large the Conclave is a community of conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and progressives, populists and academics, activists and administrators.

Like the world at large, all human life is here. Men with hidden secrets, driven by ignoble motives that often dress themselves in more noble apparel. Ambition, greed, ego and privilege rub shoulders with graciousness, sincerity and self-sacrificial service. Sometimes even in the same person. The human condition is a complicated one. It seems that power retains its age-old allure and ability to corrupt.

And maybe that’s it. For all the secrecy and mystery that surrounds a papal election, right down to the colour of the smoke, it is a human concoction. Human fingerprints are all over it, just like they are all over the church.

The church aspires to be better. To be shaped by a higher ideal. To properly be ‘the body of Christ’ and represent the imago dei in the world. To so inhabit the love and grace of God that through its life and witness God might touch and transform the world for the better. Yet, as one of the Italian cardinals correctly, if too easily, argues, “We are mortal men; we serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.”

Indeed, the great apostle St. Paul had to confess, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect …”, but he is committed to go further, “… [yet] I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” There is an ideal to pursue.

As the cardinals progress through successive rounds of voting the field of candidates narrows and the required two-thirds majority comes within reach. Yet the prospects of the main characters rise and fall through the twists and turns of the plot as it heads to its inevitable climax.

Then one final, unexpected and flabbergasting reveal hits the audience from out of left field. It is a masterful denouement to the tale.

Speaking about how it all came together Harris revealed:

“I approached this not as a Catholic and not as an expert in the Church. So my preparation began by reading the gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking … There's also this question of can you freeze anything at a point nearly 2000 years ago? Haven't the world and humanity evolved?”

As we drove home at gone midnight I found it hard to disagree with Vogue.

The visual spectacle created by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine plays wonderfully with the renaissance setting of the Vatican. It is a beautiful and luscious feast for the eyes.

Volker Bertelmann’s teasing creativity with the score made the drama come alive and heightened what has been an unforgettable experience.

But for me, most of all, it was the drama. The story that was told. The unfolding of events and the interplay with people and their motives, their relationships and their vested interests. It is layered and nuanced and complex, just like real life.

It has left me pondering once again the chemistry between heaven and earth. Between our freewill and agency as individuals and the mystery of the divine presence and the fruit of prayer.

As the cardinals prepare for the final vote a waft of air blows gently through a broken window in the Sistine Chapel and rustles their voting papers. Is Berger tipping his hat to the presence of the Spirit of God, present and active in human affairs?

Perhaps the last word should go to Robert Harris.

“With temporal power, or indeed spiritual power, it is very difficult to avoid factions, scheming, the lesser of two evils—all the compromises that go into running any huge organization and trying to keep, not just hundreds, but thousands of people onside … I have a lot of time for politicians, just as I have a lot of time for these cardinals, because they are grappling with almost insoluble problems. But someone has to do it. Someone has to run a society. And I've tried to write about them with a degree of sympathy.”

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Article

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

Wisdom

16 December 2024

5 min read

How to have a philosophically happy Christmas

Raise a glass to the invasion of history by the author of history.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A fish eye lens view of a person standing silhouetted, looking up to a colourful night sky with the Milky Way across it

Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a well-known philosopher. Knowing that he is no friend of religion, and curious how he’d respond, I set about mocking the credulity of Christians and parroting the lines I’d so often heard: superstition degrades and obfuscates; let’s act and think like grown-ups, not craven children; we’re free to write our own rules, and we can write better rules than barbarous Levantine goat-herders; we’re brave enough to say that when we die we rot. And so on. The standard fare.

He looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘Have you never been taught’, he said acidly, ‘that if you destroy the premises of an argument, the argument collapses? The same is true of history.’

I’ve slowly learned that he was right.

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, asked John Cleese, as the leader of the People’s Front of Judea. He’s famously answered by his troops. The modern version of the question, which is just as embarrassing, is ‘What have the Christians ever done for us?’ The historian Tom Holland, not (as far as we know) himself a professed Christian, has made a good living by providing a long and meticulously documented list. I’m not going to review it here. My own personal list would include Chartres Cathedral, Paul’s tectonic notion that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (and hence universal human dignity and suffrage), and Christmas.

The Christians say that Christmas is the commemoration of a historical fact: an invasion of history by the author of history; of creation by the creator.

This is too much for many to swallow. If that’s true for you, is it dishonest to celebrate Christmas?

A mathematician friend works on imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the ‘imaginary unit’, i. i2 = -1, and so i = √-1. Think about it. It’s an impossibility. It’s absurd. Descartes talked about ‘imaginary numbers’ only to laugh at the idea. But they are enormously useful in real life. You are reading this on a phone or computer screen courtesy of imaginary numbers. Sometimes it’s worth suppressing, or at least muting, a contemptuous laugh. Tom Holland’s list, and mine, depend on theological and historical numbers that might (or might not) be imaginary. You don’t have to stop dubbing the numbers ‘imaginary’ – don’t stop having to call them ludicrous – to carry on reading your screen.

Christmas, for me, is a celebration not only of family, gluttony and intoxication, but of four facts (if the Christians are historically correct) and four principles which are generated by those facts - whether the facts are real or imaginary. The principles work, just as my computer screen does.

First: human agency is cosmically colossal. The invasion I mentioned above was invited (so preventing it from being rape) by a Palestinian Jewish girl. She could have said ‘No’, and so scuppered the whole project.

Second: Christmas drafts a completely new account of power. In the Christian story of Easter, all the powers of darkness are disarmed by one broken man dying on a piece of wood between dying criminals. It was a continuation of the story that began at Christmas: the birth, in a shitty stable, to a teenage mother accused of fornication, of a child soon to be a refugee, driven to another country to escape the murderous authorities. It’s all about the subversion of political and military power by the irresistible power of the powerless.

Third: the universe is surprising. Nobody predicted the invasion. Yes, I know the Christians say, with the confidence given by the retrospectocope, that there were hints in the Hebrew scriptures, but they weren’t seen at the time, and the most learned Jews today, even with the retrospectoscope, still don’t see them. Yes, I know that the ancient world was awash with tales of the impregnation of mortals by gods, and with virgin births (think of Dionysos, Attis, Romulus and Remus and many others). But they didn’t look remotely like this. Those tales were told to prop up conventional claims to power, not explode them. Bethlehem burst onto the blind side of history, injecting unforeseen possibility. The virgin conception smashed pre-conceptions. A new way of being had gestated. If that was possible, what wasn’t?

Fourth: The most revolutionary thing about Christmas, perhaps, is that it shows that mythos is real – part of the web and weave of reality.

After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 20 September 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson walked together along Addison’s Walk, part of Magdalen’s grounds. They were discussing the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis knew all about the ubiquitous tales of dying and rising gods. The Christian resurrection stories were no different, he said. They were poetically resonant, no doubt, but essentially ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’

‘No’, said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies,’ There was a sudden rush of wind in the still night. In Lewis’s rooms the conversation continued into the early hours. The stories were indeed myths, Tolkien contended, but true myths.

This conversation propelled Lewis finally into Christianity.

The Christmas story suggests that Tolkien was right (and those notoriously mystical quantum physicists – some of the most adept handlers of imaginary numbers, by the way - are right): there is no robust boundary between history and legend, between physics and metaphysics, between matter and spirit. This, in fact, is our working assumption, whether we’re explicitly religious or not. However icy our reductionism, we think that we matter, that there is more than matter, and that whatever that ‘more’ is, it is heavier and more enduring than matter, and matters more than matter. We love our children far more than reciprocal altruism or kin selection suggests we should. However sturdy our atheism we dab our eyes at the St Matthew Passion and put flowers on our parents’ graves.

It is reassuring to have a festival which enjoins us to lift our glasses and toast the way we live when we’re being the kind of people we urge our children, our friends and our politicians to be. It commands us to admit mystery to the dining table, and to celebrate being as mysterious as we know we are.

Christmas, authentically celebrated, is part of the foundation on which rest Chartres cathedral, freedom, suffrage, dignity and many things we innocently and dangerously take for granted. Like it or not, that foundation, as the austere philosopher observed, is the premise of the argument for the civilization that until recently succoured us before we replaced it with – well, with what?