The Working File

Yeah, This guy.

OK, so the title is a bit much, but it’s not completely unwarranted, as I’ll set forth below.   Joss Whedon — the creator of , among other things, both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel — is an atheist, but he is also too good of a writer to allow his personal beliefs overly infect his work. Although the Buffyverse very much inconsistent with religion as I believe in it, Whedon often produces works that — intentionally or not — are based upon and affirm clearly religious, and specifically Christian, themes. I stumbled across this one last week.  As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve never gotten around to watching many episodes of Angel yet, but recently noticed an episode that caught my interest.  It was part way through an extended story arc in which Angel splits from his soul in order to fight a strong demon known as The Beast, and I ended up watching the entire set of episodes.   The arc concludes with the Jasmine story.  Although the rest of this entry is not extremely heavy on plot details, I’m going to put it in the hidden entry in case anyone thinks it has spoilers.

I had read about the Jasmine story line about a year earlier, in a blog entry that argued that the Jasmine story was a negative commentary on religion.  The author of that post is an atheist, and thought this a wonderful thing.  Since I was unfamiliar with the story arc I couldn’t really take issue with it,, but I did notice that her analysis was completely content-free.  It was all based on superficialities.  The Jasmine character is one of many Powers.  She comes to earth — fully grown — through a miraculous/mystical “birth,” and immediately causes anyone who looks at her to worship her.  The worship is not freely given; rather it is created through some not-fully-explained mechanism such that anyone who looks at her is overcome with love for her, and also is driven to a state of peaceful happiness.  So from the point of view of the author of that blog, this matched up with her view of religion: a group of uncritical, unthinking automatons, who are kept in a state of deluded happiness by a total fiction.

Of course, even on its own terms, the analogy does not hold up.  Jasmine, — in the Angel universe — is a real power, who is able to use her mind control powers to force her followers to worship her.  The real world God either (1) does not exist according to an atheist, and so cannot possibly compel anything, or (2) does exist according to a believer, but pretty much no religion I know of is based on a God, god or gods who fool or force people into believing in them.

More importantly, however, is the difference in the goal and message of Jasmine and the God of most major religions.  They do not match up at all.  In fact, the story ends in the episode “Peace, Out.”  It has a climactic battle between Jasmine and Angel that is preceded by Angel breaking the spell that Jasmine had over the world, and the following dialogue.  Jasmine sounds a lot like most materialist philosophies — and Angel sounds like, the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

ANGEL: Jasmine, it’s over. You’ve lost.
JASMINE: I’ve lost? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?
ANGEL: What I had to do.
JASMINE: No. No, Angel. There are no absolutes. No right and wrong. Haven’t you learned anything working for the Powers? There are only choices. I offered paradise. You chose this!

OK. Let’s stop a moment.  If Jasmine is supposed to represent any mainstream religion, we’re off to a very bad start.  Every Abrahamic religion, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, embodies ethical monotheism.  They are built on the idea that there is one god (not multiple Powers) and that there is a clear right and wrong based upon that single God’s will.  Their entire moral system is based upon absolutes.  So the choice to make Jasmine one of many Powers was not without consequences.  If there are multiple gods, then ethics and morality become much more fluid.  The gods can disagree.  Only monotheistic systems can deal in moral absolutes, and Jasmine worship has little to do with any of the religions that anyone watching Angel is likely to care about.  Let’s go back to the dialogue, and see where Angel’s belief system takes us:

ANGEL: Because I could. Because that’s what you took away from us. Choice.
JASMINE: And look what free will has gotten you.
ANGEL: Hey, I didn’t say we were smart. I said it’s our right. It’s what makes us human.

That sounds familiar.  Where have I heard that before?  Oh yeah:

Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.

Catechism of the Catholic Church.

JASMINE: But you’re not human.
ANGEL: Working on it.  Where you going?
JASMINE: Leave me alone.
ANGEL: Sorry, but… can’t do that.
JASMINE: What? You’ve taken everything. You’re gonna try to kill me now, as if you could.
ANGEL: Maybe not. But I’ll die before I let you hurt anyone else.
JASMINE: You’re already dead!
ANGEL: You know what I mean. It ends right here.
JASMINE: Why do you hate me so much?
ANGEL: Let’s run down the list, huh? Rain of fire, blotting out the sun, enslaving mankind, and, yeah, oh, yeah, hey, you eat people!
JASMINE: Like you never have?
ANGEL: Thousands of people are dead because of what you’ve done.
JASMINE: And how many will die because of you? I could’ve stopped it, Angel. All of it. War, disease, poverty. How many precious, beautiful lives would’ve been saved in a handful of years? Yes, I murdered thousands to save billions. This world is doomed to drown in its own blood now.

Gee.  That sounds exactly the opposite of something I’ve heard before.

Some rules apply in every case:

One may never do evil so that good may result from it.

The Catechism again. Angel gets the last word before they start fighting:

ANGEL: The price was too high, Jasmine. Our fate has to be our own, or we’re nothing.

And back to the Catechism:

Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Part Three: Life in Christ, Section One, Man’s Vocation: Life In The Spirit, Chapter One, The Dignity Of The Human Person, Article 3 Man’s Freedom, I. Freedom and Responsibility.

This is not to claim that Angel is Catholic, or that his creators are, either.  Joss Whedon is pretty famously an atheist.  But religious and specifically Roman Catholic themes show up in some very unlikely places, and if the Jasmine story was meant to be a negative commentary on establishment religions — as at least one such fan claimed — then it was not a very good job.  Actually, whatever Whedon’s intent, I think it was very well done.  I think the dialoge above did a fine job of capturing the essence of two world views in a way that worked within the context of its fictional world.

Finally, I expect that some people might object that the idea of free will is not exclusively Catholic, and to a degree, that’s a fair point.  But the Church can reasonably claim real ownership over its development, with the works of Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well as thousands of monks and scholars over the years.  Plus, the combination of free will and ethical absolutes is pretty much original to the Judaeo-Christian tradition.