The Matrix: Freedom, Faith, and Dark Resurrection Bodies
Understanding the Ascent of Neo and Trinity
First of all, Happy New Year! Welcome to 2022 and I wish you many good returns for the year.
I have to confess that I did not know what to expect from the New Matrix[1] movie. A part of me was hoping I would not cringe, especially since it has been hard to watch anything live-action these days. But, somehow, Lana Wachowski managed to trigger my philosophy brain and take me through themes I myself have been reading about for a few years. This is not a review. I’m not practised at reviews. Here, I want to expand on themes in the movie that I find interesting, especially as a Christian with “classical” leanings.
BEWARE! SPOILERS AHEAD!!
Freedom from the Many
The Choice is an Illusion - Bugs
Ordinary people today are very attached to their free will, or at least their perception and belief in free will. By “free will”, I mean the ability to do otherwise, a negative freedom of choice, from restrictions of any feasible kind. We want as many options as possible, and this feeds quite well into our late-capitalist paradises of freedom to buy[2]. It may be weird to say this, but this is no less true of the Nigerian. Nigerians, at least of the southern variety, are very libertarian. This is related to our dysfunctional and practically absent government amidst our many critical infrastructure problems. The dream is to have a mansion with its own private power supply, internet, water, with little or no government “wahala”, because here, getting the government involved when you are not a part of the government is a sure way of getting in trouble. If there is a place lost in some of the worst of Samsara, it is here.
That’s what makes that statement by “Bugs”, a character from the movie, a bit uncomfortable. In the first Matrix[3] movie, we are introduced to the red pill and the blue pill, with at least the assumption that one has a choice in the matter. It is equally likely, in principle, that we can choose either pill. But Bugs pulls the rug from under the “new” Morpheus[4]. The full quote is “The Choice is just an illusion. You already know what you have to do”. This is interesting because (I assume) Morpheus is still free in this scheme. Isn’t the whole point to be free of the Matrix?
This brings up the question of what freedom is. It certainly undermines the negative freedom we take as normative, but not by rejecting it outright. Bugs actually re-situates it in a broader context, which, unfortunately, the franchise itself does not exactly complete[5]. In order to be free, the only possible choice is one pill. In order to be free, your choices have been restricted. Hypothetically, there is more than one choice, but if one is to be free, those choices are not the way to freedom, but bondage. There is in here the link between unity and freedom. The many binds, the One frees. It is in seeing the face of “the One” (Neo), thereby shutting all else out, that Bugs was freed[6]. You find how this works David Bentley Hart’s splendid critique of the free will defence of an eternal hell:
Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God. Freedom is never then the mere “negative liberty” of indeterminate openness to everything; if rational liberty consisted in simple indeterminacy of the will, then no fruitful distinction could be made between personal agency and pure impersonal impulse or pure chance. And this classical and Christian understanding of freedom requires a belief not only in the reality of created natures, which must flourish to be free, but also in the transcendent Good toward which rational natures are necessarily oriented. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our souls, we ceaselessly yearn. Whatever separates us from that end, even if it be our own power of choice, is a form of bondage to the irrational. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. And to choose well we must ever more clearly see the “sun of the Good” (to employ the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose. [7]
The Matrix’s fault in this regard is the almost absence of a clear horizon analogous to the Good, except perhaps the scene in the third movie where Neo and Trinity see the Sun[8]. The freedom from the Matrix is, in a sense, the freedom to be human in the “real” world, but even Neo questions what it means to be real at certain points in the movie. It is this question of reality, and more importantly, faith in the Real, that came out for me the most in this movie
Faith in the Real
‘Real’, there’s that word again - Neo
Neo’s mind was messed with in this movie, I think even more than the original three movies. In fact, my mind was messed with too. I found myself actually doubting myself for a few moments. “What if the Matrix wasn’t real?”, “What if it was just a game?” I don’t trust directors, so this gave me real doubts. Thankfully she didn’t ruin three movies for me. But, the point about how “real” the world of the Matrix was still kept me thinking. This movie certainly has elements of a critique of late capitalist culture as well as the very studio that produced it – which was hilarious, by the way – and also the previous trilogy. But apart from all that, what made it visceral for me was the fact that the philosophical idea the Matrix is based on – Plato’s allegory of the cave – is in fact a very real and important existential commitment for me. I do really believe this world is woven of deceptive appearance and shadows, and that there is a “real world”, although not in the physicalist manner of the Matrix. It is “within me”, although it transcends me. I certainly hope that fellow “religionists” believe this as well, although I believe many don’t. As a Neoplatonist, I believe in “levels of the Real”[9] and that this world is “less real” although it does really exist.
This made it very easy to put myself in Neo’s shoes. I nominally assent to the Neoplatonist view of the Cosmos, along with a “maximalist realism” that would make you think I was crazy, but do I really believe it? Do I believe that “imaginal worlds”[10] are real worlds, beyond the physical and not limited by it, forming us as we form them?[11] Do I believe that the “Possible is the real”[12] and the implication that all that can possibly exist does exist? Or am I still trapped in the materialism of my age that cannot see anything but the crassly historicist and physicalist as existent? If yes, Do I act like it? Certainly not all the time. It reminds me of DB Hart’s article about an innocent soul who did see spirits on a regular basis. Unfortunately…
…Reuben came under the supervision of a physician who, alarmed by his stories of sprites and angels and the like, reported him as a person suffering serial psychotic episodes, possibly a danger to himself or others. This led by some elaborate process to mandated psychotherapy, including the administration of antipsychotic drugs, the late-modern equivalent of exorcism, I suppose. The therapy had the desired results: After a sufficient number of doses, Reuben lost the ability to commune with the presences that had been his close companions all his life. He did not cease to believe in their existence, but—as he told my friend—the “door had now been closed” between him and them. The Reuben my friend now saw was a sad, somewhat bitter, and rather listless man, who described himself as, above all else, deeply lonely. [13]
Apart from the “bitter” part, this could describe Neo as we meet him in the movie. The resemblance was in fact what increased my discomfort. It was the most challenging part of the film. It is one thing to talk about believing in fairies, angels, demons, heavens, hells and everything in between, as many of us do, even to the point of claiming to believe it. It is another to actually live as if we believed it, like Reuben did for much of his life. Today, we would most certainly be subject to the same fate if someone got a hold of us. The exceptions are monasteries and many evangelical holdouts where this kind of thing is accepted, even if shunned at times. The normal response given to a “normal” modernised person is exactly what Neo and Reuben got, drugs – which in Neo’s case were literal blue pills – that are meant to close the “gate in our hearts”[14].
The truly faithful among us indeed have to take that “red pill” every day, even every moment. Roland Hart is spot on here:
…in an age of unbelief, everyone is an unbeliever to some degree. Belief now requires a decision, and a tacit application of will that never for a moment relents. That’s why the fiercest forms of faith in the modern world are actually just inverted forms of faithlessness—forms of desperation masquerading as faith. Arch-traditionalism, I mean, and of course fundamentalism, which are in fact manifestations of a morbidly impoverished power of belief, a faith wasted away by inanition and hardened by desiccation, and of a frantic attempt to hold on to relics or remains that one mistakes for living possibilities… It’s simply the case now that almost every one of your race today—in the modern world, I mean—even the most devout and convinced of them, is more profoundly an infidel. Real, guileless faith in the divinity that shows itself in the evident forms of creation has become catastrophically attenuated, like the fading scent of a chipmunk on the porch after two days of rain. And that’s a tragic condition to be in, because the divine dimension is real, and is moreover the deepest truth of your own natures. To be estranged from it is to be shattered within yourselves… to become something less than machines… fragments of machines… a heap of springs and sprockets. [15]
Not all of us can do this to the fullest extent possible, we are all “caught in the Matrix” to one extent or the other, but, to quote David Armstrong:
So perhaps preface to the most rudimentary ahimsa is Ashoka’s own advice: to exercise compassion for those, including ourselves, who desire to overcome our addictions to flesh and find it a struggle. Part of anekantavada is the realization that not every being is in a place of equal ability to take up the life of askesis, and compassionate appreciation for every being doing what it is capable of doing; like the widow’s mite, we must believe that God accepts what we are realistically capable of as the genuine offering of our lives (Mk 12:41-44). [16]
But, to the one that can and does overcome in this life, the Jivan-Mukta, they receive the resurrection in the midst of death, and the Matrix has shown this beautifully from the first movie. Perhaps the creators did not do so consciously, but they displayed an icon of resurrection, in a metaphysically apt way. This is the last point.
Resurrection as Concealment
Mojo Rising - Sequoia
Those not bound by the deceptions of the Matrix usually appear in black. It is, I assume, meant to conceal their identity to those still within the thrall of the Matrix. However, to us who watch, it is an almost instinctual reaction to immediately know who they are supposed to be. We have here, a demonstration of the duality of revelation. That which reveals also conceals. The veil of Isis is impenetrable to the sensual, but that very veil reveals the presence of Isis. Jesus Christ is the revelation of the Father in the flesh, and yet this very flesh ensures the hiddenness of the Father, for “no one has seen the Father at any time”[17]. The body reveals the person, but the body also hides the person, for the depths of your person is impenetrable from the outside. This does not change with Christ’s revelation. If anything, the principle intensifies. The radiance of the resurrection is the greater concealment of the darkness of the divine essence. The energies are seen, the essence is not. It is thus that the darkness of death reveals the divinity of Christ in John’s Gospel and his “disappearance” in the ascension facilitates his greater appearance in and as the invisible Spirit. It is also thus that it is when the disciples’ eyes are opened to the identity of the resurrected Jesus in front of them in the midst of the Eucharistic sacrifice that Christ immediately disappears (Luke 24:31)[18]. Those who are free from the Matrix are “dead” to it, and thus their “flesh” conceals them. It helps that many of them wear leather, which is originally flesh. By being free of the Matrix in this manner, they can do things those restrained by it could not do. This is textbook resurrection. They have “ascended” to their “truer” human forms, and in returning to the “lower” digital realms, reveal themselves as gods to some extent:
Earthly form—both “gross” and “subtle”— finds itself reabsorbed into its essential substance; the “immortal person”, far from being dissolved thereby, is on the contrary freed from a limitative condition, while remaining limited by virtue of being a manifestation; what form is with regard to essence, manifestation— whether essential or not—is with regard to the Principle. In the celestial hereafter, the “person” remains and, owing to this fact, can always reassume its individual and earthly form; “re-absorption” is not “annihilation”, but “transfiguration”. The same is true a priori for angels, who for their part have never possessed an earthly individuality, but who can nonetheless assume a form and an ego, as Sacred Scriptures offer us numerous examples of. In a word, the fact that celestial beings have transcended the formal condition carries no privative meaning—quite the contrary—for whosoever possesses the “greater” also possesses the “less”. [19]
This is why Neo is so powerful. He, and Trinity by the end of this film (although I’m still unclear on how. It seems to be a Romance thing), take a leap of faith. If they are well and truly dead, then nothing in life can hold them. While most people who are free of the Matrix still use the tools of the Matrix in order to fight, perhaps showing the conditionality of their freedom, Neo does not touch a gun from Matrix Reloaded onwards, up to Resurrections. The idea is not new, especially considering the ancient parallels of the Matrix’s message. This is in fact much of the Gospel. He who is “dead” in baptism is alive to God, and is in principle free from the limitations of the visible cosmos. As for the manifestation of this, most of us will never see it here. The most visible we know of in our tradition is simply Christ, who, while being alive, was transfigured. I guess in following the mythical structure of a particular cosmos, the Wachowskis reproduced a modern tale of deliverance. But here, the story stops. This movie, much like the resurrection from which it takes its name, is in light of the linear story, unnecessary. Christ did not need to resurrect, there is no ontological difference between his deified body and those of deified demigods who died but whose physical bodies did not “disappear from the grave”[20]. The resurrection was meant to do more than reconfirm a well-worn story. This bizzare event broke a cosmos[21]. Similarly, there was no need for a new Matrix movie. Although the reasons for both are different, it remains to be seen whether the sequels can turn this contingency into a beautiful fortuity, a reconfiguration of the original Matrix cosmos, much like the historical resurrection[22].
[1] ‘The Matrix Resurrections | BBFC’ <https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-matrix-resurrections-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mzmymje> [accessed 24 December 2021].
[2] Eugene Mccarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2019).
[3] ‘AFI|Catalog - The Matrix’ <https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/61230> [accessed 24 December 2021].
[4] Who we still know very little about. He is said to be some combination of Smith and Morpheus, but this is not explored. Hopefully, in the sequels, we get to see more of him.
[5] ‘The physicalism of the Matrix prevents it from attaining a full spiritual synthesis of its insights.
[6] Neo’s “messiahship” is still very present in this movie, although uncertain at some points, including, paradoxically, in the scene just mentioned.
[7] David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Yale University Press, 2019 <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4>.
[8] As a side note, there is a connection between Bugs and Trinity that is almost one of identical roles with respect to Neo.
[9] “…existence itself is a matter of degrees. To use the language of the western tradition, we are attesting to the truth of a Great Chain of Being, and we are saying that certain links in that Chain have more existence or a greater reality than others.” - James S. Cutsinger, ‘Thinking the Unthinkable: Anselm’s Excitatio Mentis’, April 2001, 2007.
[10] “…this world is also called the world of 'hanging forms' (suwar al-mu'allaqah), and later Persian philosophers like Mullā Șadrā have devoted many pages to its description and proof of its existence. But from another point of view this world possesses its own matter (jism-i latīf), which in fact is the 'body of resurrection', for in this world is located both paradise in its formal aspect and the inferno. This world possesses likewise its own space, time, and movement, its own bodies, shapes, and colours. In its negative aspect this world is the cosmic labyrinth of veils that separate man from the Divine, but in its positive aspect it is the state of paradise wherein are contained the original forms, colours, smells, and tastes of all that gives joy to man upon the earth.” - Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The World of Imagination and Concept of Space in the Persian Miniature’, Islamic Quaterly, p. 6.
[11] “…those gods—or what have you—were also mirrors of what you are, as spiritual beings, there above.” From David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Angelico Press, 2021).
[12] “The distinction between the possible and the real, upon which many philosophers have placed so much emphasis, thus has no metaphysical validity, for every possible is real in its way, according to the mode befitting its own nature; if it were otherwise there would be possibles that were nothing, and to say that a possible is nothing is a contradiction pure and simple; as we have already said, it is the impossible, and the impossible alone, that is a pure nothing.” - Rene Guenon, The Multiple States of the Being (Sophia Perennis, 2004).
[13] David Bentley Hart, ‘Therapeutic Superstition’, 2012 <https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/11/therapeutic-superstition> [accessed 28 December 2021].
[14] The opposite of the purpose psychedelics, another interesting topic in relation to the red pill/blue pill concept.
[15] Hart, Roland in Moonlight.
[16] David Armstrong, ‘Ahimsa - A Perennial Digression’ <https://perennialdigression.substack.com/p/ahimsa-db5> [accessed 24 December 2021].
[17] “It is the Nameless, Ungraspable; the Hidden-behind a- thousand-veils. If one seeks to grasp It, It withdraws. If one seeks to think It, It seals the understanding. It shatters him who knows It.” From Frithjof Schuon, Gillian Harris, and Angela Schwartz, ‘Primordial Meditation’.
[18] “Why is it that at that precise moment he disappeared? Because His mode of presence is absence. God reveals Himself in absence, for all times and ages; it is still his mode in our time. Because He is beyond-being, beyond-existence. He is, yet he is not, because as the fathers have once said: « If God exist, we do not exist. If we exist, God do not exist. » His presence is absence; His absence is Presence.” - ‘Absence as Presence: The Resurrection and Exaltation of Christ’, 2013 <https://www.gornahoor.net/?p=6171> [accessed 28 December 2021].
[19] Frithjof Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions.
[20] “‘Spirit’; by contrast—πνεῦμα or spiritus—was something quite different, a kind of life not bound to death or to the irrational faculties of brute nature, inherently indestructible and incorruptible, and not confined to any single cosmic sphere. It could survive anywhere, and could move with complete liberty among all the spiritual realms, as well as in the material world here below. Spirit was something subtler but also stronger, more vital, more glorious than the worldly elements of a coarse corruptible body compounded of earthly soul and material flesh… it was a conviction common to a good many pagans and Jews alike that the ultimate destiny of great or especially righteous souls was to be elevated into the heavens to shine as stars (as we see in Daniel 12:3 and Wisdom 3:7, and as may be hinted at in 1 Corinthians 15:30-41).” - David Bentley Hart, ‘The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients’, Church Life Journal, 2018 <https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/> [accessed 20 July 2020].
[21] “There could hardly be a more disorienting claim than that the resurrection—the eschatological horizon of history, the act of divine redemption that lies entirely outside the cycle of nature, the kingdom of God beyond the reign of death—has occurred (suddenly, incredibly) within the very heart of history and nature, in a way that breaks them open from within.” - David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017).
[22] Neo and Trinity's mission at the end of the movie looks to be a step in this direction. They want to remake the world in defiance of the machines who run the Matrix. Where they will take this remains to be seen.