A Life Haunted by the Cross of Christ: Terrence Malick's Portrayal of the Role of Iconography and Art in the Life of Franz Jägerstätter

A Life Haunted by the Cross of ChristTerrence Malick's Portrayal of the Role of Iconography and Art in the Life of Franz Jägerstätter Taylor Payne (bio) In the 2019 film, A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick ends his cinematic depiction of Franz Jägerstätter's life—a saint who was martyred for refusing to swear fidelity to Hitler—with this quote from George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch: "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."1 In a some-what paradoxical manner, Malick provides us with the rare gift of peering into one of these hidden lives. But the difficulty that arises from watching this film is the seeming impossibility of not immediately seeing Franz's life as radically extraordinary and nonhidden. The possibility of this life being depicted years later in a feature film suggests that it could no longer reasonably be categorized within the idea of Eliot's hidden lives. However, Franz, as Malick elucidates with clear intentionality, had no reason for supposing that his life would have an influence beyond the limited confines of his small community. Like most of us, he must have assumed that his name and story would fade into the recesses of unremembered history. [End Page 105] In this essay, I will explore how Malick portrays the role of iconography and religious art in the shaping of Franz's virtuous and, seemingly, hidden life. To accomplish this task, I will first highlight, with the help of Thomas Aquinas, the strange form of life that Christian images and art present to us in light of the crucifixion. Second, I will argue that these images really enact a certain kind of unique presence; they are not, as much of modernity has conceived them to be, dead images that are reducible to all other objects human beings encounter throughout their lives. Finally, I will show how Malick's presentation of Franz's life illuminates the ways these images can have a significant influence in a person's journey toward holiness. I. The Strangeness of the Cross Aquinas teaches that "among all that Christ did and suffered during his mortal life, the example of His most holy Cross is, above all other things, proposed to Christians for their imitation."2 Aquinas's assertion should strike one initially as quite odd since, as Fleming Rutledge observes, "Until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man."3 In continuity with Rutledge's contention, Oliver-Thomas Venard notes that "the reader [of the Gospels] should read the very signs of the horror of a crucifixion—so horrible that antiquity did not depict it artistically in the now familiar way before the Romans had stopped using this form of torture—as the radiant presence of God."4 Herbert McCabe goes so far as to say that "if you want to know what the Trinity looks like, be filled with the Holy Spirit and look at the cross. The Trinity, when reflected in our history, like something reflected in rippling water, looks pretty strange, just as the human being in our history looks strange, being despised and crucified."5 As St. Paul emphasized, God's wisdom is displayed most clearly in the paradoxical nature of the cross. This cruciform wisdom frustrates the wisdom of the world, Aquinas notes in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, in light of the fact [End Page 106] that "something divine seems to be foolish, not because it lacks wisdom but because it transcends human wisdom. For men are wont to regard as foolish anything beyond their understanding."6 Without the illumination of the Spirit, the cross and the form of life it actualizes appear to exemplify defeat. It takes the unique gift of supernatural seeing to be able to apprehend Christ's cross as the power of God and the pristine embodiment...