I wrote this argument to meet the requirements of my graduate-level religion and literature class. It critically examines the 1980’s movie Ladyhawke under different religious viewpoints.
Presented here are the first five pages.
Around forty Christian and Buddhist monastics gathered to discuss suffering at the Kentucky Gethsemani monastery in 2003. In summary of that meeting, Father Thomas Ryan noted that each faith’s belief about suffering “appear . . . fundamentally different:” To a Buddhist, “suffering is a curse” to escape, while for a Christian, “suffering is a blessing” to be welcomed (Ryan 144). This dichotomy is more than a simple shift in perspective. It is the collision of religious vocabulary. Stephen T. Asma wrote that “religions are like languages;” we have our first language, but then we “adopt a second language” educating ourselves with an alternate “grammar” and “vocabulary” until “we feel comfortable in an entirely new atmosphere” (Asma 3). Both Buddhist and Christian vocabularies of suffering align themselves in certain aspects but conflict in others. And the classic 1985 fantasy film Ladyhawke illustrates most notably how that lens of religious language can create a duality of religious meaning.
The 1980s drove the cinematic fantasy genre away from the ludicrous camp of Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon into the critical and popular acclaim of such masterpieces as John Boorman’s Götterdämmerung-inspired Excalibur and Rob Reiner’s ever wishful tale of true love, The Princess Bride. Including such tales as The NeverEnding Story and Labyrinth, all these plus Ladyhawke succeeded because they countered the 1980s materialism of the films Back to the Future and The Goonies with an embrace of the personal and the familial. Ladyhawke is immensely personal: no wizardry, massive armies, or epic tales, just five characters caught up in a tale of love, betrayal, religion, and suffering. Each character suffers. Navarre and Isabeau suffer under the curse of the Bishop. The Bishop suffers from greed and lust. Imperius suffers from his betrayal of love, and Phillipe Gaston suffers as a thief without honor. The core of their suffering under the Christian perspective is either teleological design or ontological Christian being, but under the Buddhist perspective, suffering is apropos to existence, and this essay will explore each religion’s cause and resolution of their suffering in relation to Ladyhawke.
That humanity suffers is the one convergence that all religions acknowledge. But they differ immensely on the reasons for and resolutions from suffering. Some take a teleological method while others believe in a more ontological approach. Central to Buddhist thought is their “blanket assertion [that] ‘all existence is suffering’” (Gilkey 51). However, for Christianity, suffering reaffirms the divinity through the unity of creation and redemption (Gilkey 49). God must use us to reaffirm the divinity of creation because creation lost its goodness when both Satan and humanity fell from grace (Gilkey 56-57). Using Ladyhawke, my argument will examine suffering through the lens of Christian teleology & ontology and Buddhist ontology. I will show that while the film succeeds under Christian teleology, it fails under Christian ontology. I will then examine the film within the Buddhist tradition and Buddhist ontology as formulated by Mao Zonsang to show that Ladyhawke is more a Buddhist story than Christian. To facilitate this argument, I use the general guidelines of teleology of intelligent design along with the specifics of teleological intention to examine the characters Phillipe, Imperius, and the Bishop. Next, I show how Ladyhawke fails as a Christian motif using Soren Kierkegaard’s definition of Christian suffering from the ontological being of a Christian. Finally, I examine Ladyhawke under the basic lens of Buddhism and Buddhist ontology to demonstrate that contrary to its Christian theme, Ladyhawke more accurately represents the Buddhist tradition and is a Buddhist story.
For this argument, I use two teleological approaches: Del Ratzsch & Jeffrey Koperski along with David Hume provide a macro or divine approach to teleology while Matthew Hanser presents a personal (micro) approach to teleology and intention. Ratzsch and Koperski define teleology as “arguments from or to design” (Ratzsch and Koperski). These designs originate not from chance or randomness but require some structure or functional complexity. They follow a continuum of intention associated to a purposeful end. Hume’s argument for teleology, in its most basic sense, follows what could be called meta-pareidolia where random patterns are imbued with a familiarity reinforced with intelligent design that connects it to human understanding. Most commonly these are seen through cloud formations but are also common to rock formations, outcroppings on Mars, and even the complexity of human existence. Philosopher Matthew Hanser describes intention and teleology within a “narrow account” and a “broad account” (Hanser 381). The narrow account must fulfill two requirements: the agent acts intentionally if that act is initiated solely for “an end or as a means to an end,” and secondly, those “means must be understood ‘strictly and narrowly’” (381). The broad account, by contrast, finds intention by an agent’s action even if such action was not intentionally instigated. Hanser argues that the narrow account classifies too few actions as intentional and the broad account too many. Hanser’s argument is to find some additional ground between the narrow and broad accounts to explain the teleology of intentional acts. Those are “The Further Intention Principle,” “The Instigator Principle,” and “The Machine Principle” (386, 395, 397). Each of these can be applied to Ladyhawke’s character of Imperius, Phillipe, and the Bishop respectively.
Within my ontological argument, Thomas Hofweber’s approach to ontology simply formulates it where “ontology is the study of what there is” (Hofweber 12). Additionally, Tomomi Asakura studies Buddhist ontology through the Buddhist ontological studies of Mou Zongsan. Teleology would ask us to functionalize happiness and suffering from the design of purpose and intention. Ontology seeks to separate happiness and suffering from any intention of the other and just focus on happiness and just suffering. This is not unlike Buddha’s story of a man shot with a poisoned arrow who wanted to understand all the reasons he was shot before having the arrow removed; Buddha would just pull out the arrow to appease the suffering (Prothero 173). Hofweber frames ontology as a relationship between particulars and entities and our commitment to them (Hofweber 12-13). Ontology would examine the particular essence of and the relationship between the arrow and the man and the metaphysical aspect of suffering. Hofweber explains ontology as having four parts: “commitment” – are we committed to suffering or happiness; “what there is” – what is suffering, the arrow, the man; relationships – how does the arrow and the man relate to suffering; “meta-ontology” – how can we understand certain situational questions considering the first three parts (Hofweber 15). Mou Zongsan used ontology to instantiate happiness, not suffering, innate to existence (Asakura 660). In fact, Tomomi Asakura examines Zongsan’s philosophy to realize that Mou’s focus on the “highest good” in the “immediacy” and equal being of suffering is happiness (Asakura 662).
Stories define religion. The story of Buddha and his opulent but sheltered upbringing that protected him from suffering prompted his desire to leave such life in his penultimate journey to understand and resolve suffering. Christianity tells its stories fundamentally from its scripture where historical satire and metaphor intertwined with reality and myth to create stories of intricate historical detail, theological dictates, and political presence. These stories then motivate their traditions and followers in life to create more stories expanding core Buddhist and Christian traditions into its many offshoots and disciplines, but their core stories remain a gestalt for most, if not all, of their religious offshoots, and it is that gestalt that I am examining. However, stories can instantiate multiple meanings via the reader inference of the ontology or teleology of a character’s relationship to story entities. That is, multiple readers may view the same story not only through different characters but also through different relational dynamics between characters and institutions. Such as which character is the inferred focal point of the story – who is the main character, and who are the supporting characters. Some stories have such strong characters that choice of main character can vastly alter that story’s implications. Within Ladyhawke most viewers identify Navarre and Isabeau as the main characters. However, the story vastly changes when Phillipe Gaston becomes the main character. Or Imperius. Or the Bishop. Because religion is Ladyhawke’s underlying theme, religion and the religious source of suffering can also change dependent upon these choices.