To recap the main point of part one: Nature shows us the reality of death, and the wolves in Joe Carnahan’s “The Grey” represent this aspect of nature.
Where does this come from? And how does it fit into the Christian meta-narrative?
The answer, from a Christian perspective, is the Fall.
We all know the story. Adam and Eve were told not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they did it anyway. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about this:
The harmony in which (our first parents) had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”. Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground” (CCC 400 — bold added)
C.S. Lewis drew on this Christian insight when he sent his beloved Pevensie children back to Narnia in “Prince Caspian,” the second book in his Chronicles of Narnia.
If you have read this book or its predecessor, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (or seen the films), you will remember that when the children had left Narnia, it was a place where: 1) animals spoke; and 2) they and human beings enjoyed each other’s friendship.
Now, the throne of Narnia is occupied by a usurper who does not rule according to the will of Aslan (the Christ-figure of Narnia), and many of the animals are wild, mute, brutish, and hostile.
“Cursed is the ground because of you! In toil you shall eat its yield all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it bear for you…” (Genesis 3:17-18, The New American Bible)
Human beings have sinned. The animals, the trees, and the rest of nature have not. But when we turned away from God, we dragged the whole of creation down the road to destruction with us.
From that perspective, we can see the hostilities of nature as a sort of “judgment” or “accusation.” Creation, while also tending to our needs and showering us with beauty, will not let us forget that we have turned away from our loving Creator.
This leads me to draw once again from the writings of Dr. Peter Kreeft, whose magnificent book “Love is Stronger Than Death” I would recommend to anyone. A basic assertion he makes is that from the standpoint of human reason, we only have hope if death is our fault.
Here is the explanation:
It means that our ultimate hope is not in ourselves, our innocence … To blame ourselves (as the story of Adam does in Genesis) is to clear reality, being, truth, the cosmos … (and) God. We may yet be reconciled to reality … If reality were out of touch, there would be no hope … all hope of meaning would be gone (Kreeft 16, italics and first parentheses his)
So as depressing as the guilt-death relationship may seem, it dispels the fear we have of a meaningless universe in which all men are simply stuck on an obstacle-laden collision course with death.
And though we find hostility and, in a certain sense, the “taunts” of death in nature, we can find hope and meaning even in these. I would argue that we can find in them the “sparring partner” that Dr. Kreeft speaks of in his book and to which I referred in my November 26 post, “Why ‘Into the Dance’?”
As I was typing this part of my reflection on “The Grey,” I realized that it is too long for one post. I tried to avoid this, but as I said, this is a complex subject. Therefore, I will have mercy on my readers and turn this into a four-part post (as opposed to the three-part post I had originally intended), with “The Grey” comprising three posts. But the final part of my review of “The Grey” is ready, and will be up tomorrow.
Both photos of “The Grey” from http://www.guardian.co.uk; picture of “Adam and Eve” by Albrecht Dürer from http://www.metmuseum.org; picture of “Prince Caspian” from http://www.e-reading.org.ua (all obtained through a Google image search)
Reference
Kreeft, Peter. Love is Stronger Than Death. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.