Clash of the Titans

I recently watched the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans.It doesn’t attempt rigid fidelity either to the original or to Greek mythology, and so I won’t evaluate it in those terms. The movie in fact does interesting things with its source material, essentially turning a war of the gods that humans get caught up in, into a war of humans against the gods.

To the extent that the gods in question express their wrath through floods, famines, lightning, and other forces of nature, it is true to say that humans have been fighting a war to outsmart such “gods” – and we have been winning. We have found ways of overcoming famine, protecting ourselves from lightning, and in other ways taming or managing the effects of forces of nature.

This is one reason why liberal Christian thinkers embrace our scientific understanding of such phenomena. The alternative is to think of many gods or only one who is neither omnipotent nor ultimate – he/they may send plagues to punish us, but we regularly find cures. And one of the questions the film asks is whether gods who demand our worship but are fallible and regularly disappoint are deserving of our worship.

And so there is some useful theological food for thought in the film. In reflecting on it in a context in which monotheism is the norm, it is worth pointing out that reducing many deities to one is not itself enough in order to come up with a coherent view of the divine. At best, one ends up with a deity whose actions and thinking are harder to make any sense of than in the case of the deities of ancient Greece. It is crucial to disconnect God from forces of nature. A deity whose attempts to punish humankind through storms and diseases can be thwarted is at least as problematic as a deity thought of as using such imprecise weapons in the first place.

And so a war on such deities is not simply a facet of atheism – and in fact, some forms of atheism thrive precisely as the counterfoil to the continued existence of such depictions of the divine. But theologians (particularly in the 20th century) have been engaged in what I think is a much more radical war on such concepts of deity, with a certain degree of success.

One of the things the movie depicts – supernatural entities that appear and disappear – are not part of our experience. If they were, that might change the situation somewhat. But Hades materializing before a city council meeting, or an angelic warrior standing over a city with a raised sword, are things that traditional stories about powerful human-like gods depict, and those who believe in them literally expect. And rightly so – but the fact that we do not experience such things should lead us to draw certain conclusions about how such literature ought to be understood.

Finally, a thought about LOST and mythology. I couldn’t help but notice how mythological stories have “rules” much as LOST did. Why can Medusa be seen safely in a reflection but not directly? Why can supernatural weapon X defeat supernatural character Y, but only if used at time Z? These seem to be standard classic plot devices to allow a story to present challenges and yet have the possibility of resolution. Why will the Kraken flail its arms randomly, before trying to devour its prey, for precisely the amount of time it takes to have a final chase scene involving the main character? Because some things in human storytelling seem not to change. But presumably some things in human theologizing can and indeed must change if there is to be any point in discussing theology at all.