William F. Buckley on the "Passion"

The film by Mel Gibson is moving because of its central contention, namely that an innocent man of high moral purpose was tortured and killed. It happens that the man in question, Jesus of Nazareth, is an object of worship, and that harm done unto him, in the perspective of those (myself included) who regard him as divine, is especially keen because it is not only inhuman, it is blasphemous.

But suppose that a similar travail had been filmed centered upon not a Nazarene carpenter who taught the duty of love for others, but, say, an attempted regicide. In 1757 Robert-François Damiens set out to assassinate Louis XV. The failed assassin was apprehended, and the king quickly restored from his minor wound. The court resolved to make an enduring public record of what awaits attempted regicides, to which end were gathered together in Paris the half-dozen most renowned torturers of Europe, who in the presence of many spectators, including Casanova, managed to keep Damiens alive for six hours of pain so artfully inflicted, before he was finally drawn and quartered. What kind of an audience could Mel Gibson get for a depiction of the last hours of Robert-François Damiens?

The film depends, then, on the objectification of the victim as — Jesus of Nazareth; but even then, the story it tells is a gross elaboration of what the Bible yields.

(snip)

What Gibson gave us in his Passion is the most prolonged human torture ever seen on the screen. It is without reason, and by no means necessarily derivative from the grand hypothesis that, after all, the crucifixion was without reason, as Pontius Pilate kept on observing. One sees for dozens of minutes soldiers apparently determined to flog to death the man the irresolute procurator had consented merely to "chastise." There are records of British mariners who were literally flogged to death, receiving four hundred strokes of the cat-o'-nine-tails delivered on separate vessels, lest any sailor in the fleet be deprived of the informative exercise.

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http://nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200403091608.asp

Simply perfect.
He has said everything I have felt in my heart
about this travesty.
"Blasphemous."
That is what I have felt about it all along.
Thanks for posting this.
BHN

Buckley, after criticizing it, then seems to defend it and even applaud it. He is not nearly the intellect I once thought him to be.

I've always seen him as an apologist, and the fact that he 'sort of' endorses the film is no suprise.

Unlike nearly every other I've read, in that he found it unnecessary to make a gratuitous mention of the films' depiction of Jewish leaders, the controversy that really kept the movie constantly in the news.

The best line IMO:

"The suffering of Jesus isn't intensified by inflicting the one-thousandth blow: that is the Gibson/Braveheart contribution to an agony which was overwhelmingly spiritual in character..."

that Jesus wanted people to focus on his blood and his death, rather than on his message. To paraphraze Yeates, they are full of passionate intensity, and lacking all understanding.

Yes Buckley has a sharp mind he is also an arrogant egotistical shit of gargantuan proportions.

Shit I thought he was dead already.