Lenny Belardo’s Radical Theology: Darkness, Surface and Kenosis by April Wu

‘ I wouldn’t need to hide anything in the gaps in my house. Because my mind is a gap.’

(Lenny Belardo, The Young Pope [2016], E1)

‘Christ Jesus, being in the form of God…emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in

human likeness.’(Phil 2: 6-7)

‘Whoever loves this death can see God because it is true beyond doubt that “man shall not see me

and live” [Exod. 33:20].

Let us, then, die and enter the darkness; let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings.’ (Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 7.6: 116.)

In The Young Pope (2016), the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino creates the once-in-a-lifetime character of Lenny Belardo, an unwitting representative of our luminously dark age of radical theology. According to Thomas Altizer, one of the leading voices in a movement that looks toward the future through the primordial and vice versa, Western culture has reached a point of extremity that paradoxically makes possible, finally, an honest engagement with the Crucified God. Sorrentino has managed to not only interweave socio-political drama with radical spiritual turmoil but also leave ample room for ambiguity, the folds and nuances of silence and darkness that lurk beneath the standard God of Creation. In The Young Pope’s layered revelation of its filmic theology, one gets the Tarkovskian sense that words and images intend their own shadows of being.

The Young Pope continuously plays on our customary sense of the world in the 21st century. The aftermath of the Death of God, according to Altizer, is a ‘dissolution of all actual transcendence, or the transformation of transcendence itself into an absolute immanence’ (57). The Catholic Church today, as the series relentlessly pushes, is an empty emblem, a piece of anachronism, a geriatric institution where a 47-year-old leader is considered uncommonly young. A hip, handsome American like Lenny Belardo as Pope is, we figure, surely the cure to this stagnant state of affairs. Lenny is expected to act as a telegenic puppet by attracting a Catholic fandom——the only viable form of worship in today’s celebrity culture. In an atomized world devoid of the absolute imperative, ethical authority is expressible only in partisan, business, or worldly institutional terms. This vacuity, where the only value is utility value, is the operational power of our late capitalist modernity. This is exemplified in the character of Cardinal Voiello, the Secretary of State and the political heart of the Vatican, whose cunning, grandiloquence, and lack of sense for mystery earned him the reputation of ‘devil ‘incarnate’. The world has become a godless, idol-cluttered realm, and the Vatican, aided by our gnostic imaginaries of it (perpetuated by modern myths such as the DaVinci series), more so than elsewhere.

Lenny, to everyone’s surprise, seeks to reform the Church after its recent trend to pander to secular powers (an allusion to the real-world pontiff incumbent, an alarming realist touch). He demands a return to an age before Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the Death of God, one where mysteries are intact and one of divinely sanctioned order that places an unbridgeable distance between God and human that he alone is able to intervene. Lenny’s reactionary theology is evident in his first encounter with the Vatican staff, where he asserts that he does not appreciate ‘friendly relations’ and prefers formal ones (E1). For Lenny, restoring the clarity of an ordered reality, in the manner of the medieval chain of beings, is the remedy to the modern Church and the modern world at large. To achieve this, he imposes an image of unapproachable sternness on members of the Vatican and unapproachability per se on the world. In his first homily, Lenny appears in dim light, pronouncing stern judgments in front of the crowd like the Old Testament God. Lenny revels in this illusion of nullity: ‘not even the faithful will see anything of me but a dark shadow, my silhouette. They will not see me because I do not exist’ (E2). He shields himself from the public not as media strategy, as Voiello supposes it is, but for the world to salvage a medieval sense of awe towards the unknown and the unknowable. Even his tastes in the arts revolve around the notion of mystery: Salinger over Roth, Kubrick over Spielberg, Banksy over Abramovic (E2).

The sense of apartness Lenny imposes acquires an ironic twist in its material expression, in the striking formal splendour of Vatican architecture and the couture lustre of papal regalia. Apart, and empty. Lenny avows that ‘the punishment of God is never over beauty’ (E4), but that is because beauty is itself self-erasing. The ornamented body, in particular, narrates the postmodern myth of depth, that we live in the skin of who we are. Depth is surface and mysteries are shallow. For viewers, Lenny’s quaint medievalism manifests as late-consumerist visual spectacle: an exotic gloss we gawk at and forget about a moment later as we move on to the next thing, as extravagantly empty as the modernity that Lenny abhors. This is luridly exposed in the scene where he dresses up before his first address to the cardinals (E5). Juxtaposed against raunchy, farcical pop (LMFAO’s ‘Sexy and I Know It’) and snappily cut in the style of a billboard music video, the scene is true to Agamben’s remark that ‘revelation…does not mean revelation of the sacredness of a work, but only revelation of its irreparably profane character’ (1993, 90), which is what makes the sacred possible in the first place.

However, as Agamben goes on to say, ‘[t]he possibility of salvation begins only at [the] point’ where the profanity of the sacred is exposed (ibid.). The series explores ways in which one can respond to Altizer’s call for a radical ethics born out of the ruins of God’s demise. Altizer writes that ‘above all other discourse it is ethical discourse that has become most challenging or most impossible for us’.On first view, Lenny’s ethical vision is a baffling oddity: it oscillates between fanatic absolutism (‘Twenty-four hours a day, your hearts and minds filled only with God…No room for free will, no room for liberty, no room for emancipation’ [E2]) and fanatic nihilism/egotism (‘I believe only in myself, I am the lord omnipotent’ [E3]).

Or it could be understood in terms of dialectical apocalypticism. Radical theology, a modern reenactment of the apophatic tradition, provides a language to express the dividedness of experience itself, which is inseparable from its apocalyptic tenet. The series’ most astonishing feat lies in positing Lenny’s darkness mysticism (see Thacker 2011) in dialectical exchange with his love of dazzling facades, rendering emptiness, not redemption, as deification (Altizer 82). Lenny sees the created world as essentially negative. His despotic attitude is less a positive desire to impose control than a desire to escape it, an act of rebellion against his hippie parents. Here we could ‘explain’; Lenny in standard psychoanalytic terms, but, considering how Sorrentino always pushes his characters beyond the horizon of the particular, Lenny is more than a guy with abandonment issues. Lenny’s birth is a symbol of creatio ex nihilo. The series begins with the dreamlike sequence of Lenny (as Pope) crawling out of a mountain of ghoulish babies, an echo to the Dionysian adage that light is nothing but a superessential ‘ray of divine darkness’ (1000A). Taking into account Lenny’s rhetorical question in a later episode (‘Do you really think the only orphans are those without a mother and father?’ [E3]), one can see it as a surrealist incarnation of George Bataille’s notion of the orphanhood of all humans:

“I make demands—around me extends the void, the darkness of the real world—I exist, I remain blind, in anguish: other individuals are completely different from me, I feel nothing of what they feel…This infinite improbability from which I come is beneath me like a void: my presence above this void is like the exercise of a fragile power, as if this void demanded the challenge that I myself bring it, I—that is to say the infinite, painful improbability of an irreplaceable being which I am” (2014, 69).

Perceiving the vacuity of a positive freedom that cannot sustain itself, Lenny clings to a saturated darkness (‘God overwhelms. God frightens.’ [E3]) that cannot contain its contradictions. However, Altizer stresses that ‘apocalyptic disenactments are inseparable from their opposite - the calling forth of an absolutely new ethical world’ (58). Lenny keenly senses the death of traditional ethics in a world where nothing is forbidden at the same time he detects, like the ineffable Name of God (יהוה), the unnameability of a new one. In the confessional, Lenny announces that his only sin is that his ‘conscience does not accuse [him] of anything’ (E1). His apparent lack of ressentiment is, in fact, not a proclamation of an Übermensch: as postmodern subject, Lenny can no more entrust himself to the sacred at the old site of Catholic ethical sanctity. The pangs of conscience hit more deeply than mere violation of dogma could, as the nihilistic core of the Crucified God annuls conventional gestures of penance. To articulate a radical new ethics, he needs to climb up to the rooftop and face God in all His hollowness. The rooftop, enveloped in the darkness of the night, when ghosts are allowed out, is where he feels is ‘before the house of God’ (E1). Even then, he only dares, knowing the radicality of this form of reckoning, voicing his angst to his confessor Tommaso under the postmodern caveat of a joke: ‘God, my conscience does not accuse me, because you do not believe I am capable of repenting. And therefore, I do not believe in you. I don't believe you are capable of saving me from myself’ (E1).

While traditional ethics stamps out the individual, this new ethics engages with the existentially disorienting depths of doubt and defeat (from which hope may or may not follow). The point is that a reflexive mode of penance is only possible after recognising God’s death. If we visualise the former as an unyielding pillar, the latter may reveal to us the Cross by adding a severing gesture that cuts through the pillar while the outer edges, extending in four orientations and in a gesture of infinite outstretch, will never meet. The Cross is thus aware of its own rupture, severance and plenitude. It is ‘a cross over all ontological difference…a cross that abolish it without deconstructing it, exceeds it without overcoming it, annuls without annihilating it’ (Marion, paraphrased in Altizer 82).

The Cross image, an inversion (vertical) and a transversion (horizontal), informs Lenny’s ethical and metaphysical vision, to which the Christological is always central. Indeed, the first thing he sees when he wakes up is the Cross on the wall, upside down from his perspective. He feels an affinity with St Peter beyond the bond of papacy: he shares with him the same unworthiness in comparison to Christ. Beneath his facade of fanaticism, Lenny heads down the Hegelian path of self-emptying Spirit. Turning down the marketing executive’s request for his picture to be displayed on Vatican merchandise, Lenny declares that ‘I am no one…only Christ exists’ (E2). While ‘Harvard is a place in decline’, where one is taught to lower oneself (E2), he envisages the Vatican under his governance as an elevating place, echoing the logic by which worldly and heavenly orders are inverted in the Beatitudes.

The series follows a redemptive arc: Lenny grows to realise that ethics is not a poetic ideal or an abstract inquiry but an actuality that fully integrates conceptual and historical thinking. It necessarily arises out of a worshipping community. Just as Christ’s sacrifice occurs at a particular juncture in history, a wholly otherworldly ethics is no ethics at all. Lenny’s firsthand experience of goodness, evil and the abyss beyond good and evil where ethics ceases to have explanatory power (particularly in the death of his best friend) forces him to come to terms with the importance of community, of the face of the other, whose woundedness and love cannot be grasped in absolutist terms. While on surface level a liberalistic redemption-through-love narrative, Sorrentino manages to sustain the broader sense of mystery in The Young Pope all the way to the end. The mystery, as eschatological fulfilment, undergoes a conversion from the apophatic mystery of God of Prohibition to the affirmative mystery of Christ, the incarnate Prince of Peace. Lenny realises that, to find the place of the Church in the world, where evil is banal and unpoetic, is the infinitely greater challenge. There is a sense, however, in which the clouds of darkness in which Lenny are engrossed are not exactly conquered by his new-found compassion. Nor does lovingness represent an unproblematic transcendent beyond. For Lenny, as it is for Bataille, the divine is an ‘outside’ (dehors), not an ‘above’ or a ‘beyond’ that is divorced from human experience; it is instead ‘a limit that is co-extensive with the human, at its limit’ (Thacker 34). The co-extensiveness between the human and the divine, which Christ embodies, manifests to Lenny in prayer. As Lenny instructs another character, Esther, in prayer ‘we reflect in the most elevated way we can, so that someone can whisper thoughts into our ears—we call that someone God’ (E4).

We are, then, left with a character who is triply self-emptying, someone who has taken the excursion from self-analysis, self-knowledge and self-love to the kenosis of the Cross. Lenny the Man, whose lifetime mission is to search for his parents, finally learns to embrace the void of his heart and the gap of his mind. Lenny the Pope is reminded by Pius V in a nighttime vision that power is just a ‘banal platitude’ (E10), realising that his fanaticism is misdirected and that power is something one must forsake in order to master. Lenny the Saint is only saintly in the eyes of his admirers, but that is an interpretation arising out of an all-too-human sense of hope. The human remains broken and divine mysteries remain intact, albeit in a different form than that conceived by Lenny in the earlier episodes. And the human desire to see God remains unsatiated. The series eventually makes visible the sense of awe that it has kept hidden, like Greenland’s subterranean ice (E2), by culminating on a note of planetary darkness: as Lenny collapses after his speech in his first public appearance, the camera zooms out of St Mark’s Square, Venice over a two-minute-long sequence to Planet Earth, over the faint tremors of the strings, reminiscent of the ending of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. This is a valediction and a radical opening. The Young Pope is an allegory that we, precisely in our nihilistic postmodern excess, are able to grasp, finally, the wisdom of St Paul, who begins in unknowing and for whom light is blinding and darkness transformative.

Bibliography:

Agamben, G., 1993. The Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press.

Altizer, T.J., 2012. The Call to Radical Theology. SUNY Press.

Bataille, G., 2014. Inner Experience. SUNY Press.

Bonaventure, 1978. The Soul’s Journey into God. Paulist.

Jones, J.D., 1980. The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Milwaukee.

Thacker, E., 2011. 'Divine Darkness’, in

Thumbnail Credit to David Cantelli