Page - 178 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

a similar deployment of cinema as a tool for introspective discovery. The sur- prise and exhilaration Jack undergoes when realizing the potential for his rec- onciliation with the world at The Tree of Life’s conclusion are suggestive of the surprise and exhilaration we can only imagine Malick has felt in his realization that the conditions of overcoming his own alienation abide in the possibility of seeing things in a new light. The many modes of ascent portrayed in the film (ladders, stairs, elevators, etc.) presume the infinite possibility of self-reckoning and transformation (figs. 4a–d). Nevertheless, it is tempting to interpret in the resurrection imagery at The Tree of Life’s denouement a full-throated avowal of Augustinian salvation his- tory’s ultimate trajectory. This imagery calls to mind the vision of a new heaven and earth advanced in the book of Revelation, wherein suffering yields to sol- ace, wrongs are righted, and death is annulled (21:1–8; see figs. 5a–d). Accord- ing to Revelation, earthly circumstances, no matter how indissoluble they may seem, possess no real finality. Only God’s deliverance in the age to come will satisfy the demands for a per- fect justice. It was owing to the imperfection with which justice is realized in worldly politics, in fact, that Augustine felt deeply ambivalent toward temporal projects aimed at establishing an ideal society. Christians, he believed, need not chance too much on accomplishing what only God can bring about at the escha- ton. Augustine’s affirmation of providence and divine order works to counter- act the suspicion that forces like contingency, luck, and blind fate, which inhabit projects to realize a true justice on earth, will have the final say.20 From this, William Connolly concludes that political Augustinianism is governed by its need to defend the vision of an intrinsic moral order.21 This vision of a mysterious but nevertheless organized universe, always being shepherded to its ultimate fruition, demands that all forms of deviance, queerness, or the unexpected be curbed, lest the order of things be upset and thrown into disarray. Yet deviance, strangeness, even absurdity – all these things Emersonianism embraces as potential results of exhilarating experience. Hence Emerson’s own absurd experience of becoming a transparent, all-seeing eyeball while, as he says in Nature, “[c]rossing a bare New England common, in snowpuddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky”.22 And hence Emersonians like Walt Whitman promoted Emerson’s method of privileging moments of creative exhilaration. Whitman, like the avant-garde filmmakers Sitney treats, believed any variation of the shared world is possible if glimpsed with the insight borne of ecstatic fan- cy. What this entails is a radical rejection of the conventions of time, tradition, 20 See Book 19 in Augustine 2003. For a standard interpretation of Book 19 of the City of God, see O’Donovan 2003. 21 Connolly 2002. 22 Emerson 1983, 10. 178 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185