Intertwined in the Numinous
Intertwined in the Numinous
Micah Rickard
There was a time when I needed to know. When I was young, I thought that living was primarily about understanding things correctly. Long before I ever stumbled upon the daunting term epistemology, I lived as if what I could know and confidently assert was what was true of me. And the world seemed ready-made to reinforce this. Sunday school. Confirmation. SATs. My training and trade as an engineer only emphasized such a way of being. Whether it was the world or God himself, for so long I approached things like I would a quiz. Study, fill in the correct bubble, and claim my prize.
But in time, I’ve come to see that life—the vastness of it all—is far too mysterious a question to answer neatly. Knowledge can’t diminish tragedy: the unfathomable body counts of wars and viruses; the personal devastation of a beloved one’s death; the sorrow of broken relationships, and how the day-to-day continues unhindered. Nor can knowledge truly capture the myriad exhilarations and beauties we experience. There’s something mystic about life, something we can’t fully circumscribe, despite the best attempts of our dictionaries and measurements.
For much of my life, it frustrated me to not know. Questions about God, especially, felt like trying to mend wounds that refused to heal. But I’ve come to see that there’s an attendant arrogance to always demanding answers; that receiving too many of them that are pat and easy can lead to a dull disenchantment. I’ve found that there’s meaning even in the places where understanding can’t go, and beauty in that which is too majestic to grasp.
It was a lesson our forms of education could never teach me. It took actual living to realize it, through encountering pains and joys that defied my understanding: my parents’ divorce, the unquenchable love of friendships, the grandeur of the Olympic mountains from across the Puget Sound, this mysterious faithfulness of a God I’d failed time and again. I learned to hold my knowledge more loosely. I turned attentively toward art and grew attuned to the transcendence which haunts so much of it. I found traces of the longing flowing through novels, songs, paintings, and movies. As I listened, I began to learn the language I needed.
*
It was in this inchoate state that I encountered Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. It was a film that confounded me the first time I watched it. The second time, it broke me. Everything is revealed in two cuts: the terror of a question, the tragedy of a world tearing itself apart, and the prayer that suffuses art.
Alexander, our protagonist, reclines in a grove of trees, pontificating about the world while his young son, affectionately referred to as Little Man, plays aimlessly. Having grown bored of the grove and the grass, Little Man craftily decides to leap upon Alexander. In his surprise, Alexander accidentally bloodies his son’s nose. As he looks down on his son, his face turns to horror at his instinctive act of violence. “What have I done?” he cries, and he falls to the ground. We fall with him, the camera cascading suddenly downward as he crashes to the grass, and–
Cut. Suddenly, we are transported to a cityscape from above, cast in black and white, void of human soul, marred by detritus and destruction. The camera continues to move downward, though more slowly. At first, it is unclear whether there is any link between this scene and the story that will unfold. Perhaps there is none, at least structurally. But, as with all his work, Tarkovsky moves oneirically, finding images that express an emotion beyond dialogue or plot. Trash. Broken glass. An upturned car. The scene continues the emotion of Alexander’s fall, just as it continues the camera movement between the images.
Cut. The movement is now lateral and no longer the camera’s. We watch as the pages of a book are flipped, each one revealing artwork. Iconography. A gift for Alexander, who is captivated by these depictions of saints and spiritual figures. He wonders aloud if the world has lost the ability to pray, and he wonders what immensity that loss brings with it. Alexander is moved both by the art and the devotion that it depicts. Alexander, who confesses that for him, “sadly, God is nonexistent,” still longs for an ultimate meaning to reach for. In this iconography, he comes close to grasping it, or at least bears witness to how others have grasped it. The artwork embodies a hope to him, a dream that there’s something beyond the world as it is.
Two cuts. Three short scenes. And this film, which at first so perplexed me and held me at a distance, suddenly enveloped and overwhelmed me. I felt the same discontent with a world made banal and broken in equal measure. I felt moved by the same desperate search for something or Someone beyond the violent reach of man. The faint hope that such a something could be known and grasped—or that we could be grasped by it—is this same longing in me, the same one writ large across humanity.
There is an existential hunger within all of us for an encounter with transcendence. But humanity’s sense of taste for the transcendent has dulled, our sight has become myopic. I allow the bounds of my world to grow narrow and confining—all too often, comfortably so. It often takes those moments of being gravely shaken for my taste to be restored and the scales removed. But even then, the question remains: What will lead us back through the long-forgotten paths to discover the ancient mystery we crave so elementally?
For me, few guides are as ready for the journey into existential hunger and encounter with transcendence as Tarkovsky’s films. Tarkovsky does not make our journey easy. He leaves his film firmly rooted in the tradition of the mystic, demanding the audience perform the work of reflection. But with this work comes the chance for discovery and devotion—beauty and liturgy intertwined in the numinous.
*
The Sacrifice takes place on Alexander’s birthday. A once-great stage actor, a scholar of aesthetics and religion, he is continually disappointed by the world from which he cannot escape. His wife, Adelaide, is discontent in their marriage; his son is mute; his friend Victor, a doctor, seems to find no remedy for Little Man; that very friend is having an affair with Adelaide.
Tarkovsky locates Alexander’s search for enchantment in a world that claims there isn’t any—he’s looking for peace in a world of war. He’s looking for a place “meant for us,” as he describes the house he and his wife bought. His friend Otto offers his best therapeutic advice when he tells Alexander, “You shouldn’t yearn so for something.” Ultimately, it’s a yearning the world can’t satisfy.
Yet Alexander is willing to find it. Unlike many of those around him, he has not resigned himself to disenchantment quite yet. This is demonstrated in his very posture when Otto gives Alexander an old map. In his awe, he sits on the floor just as a child would while listening to a story, full of delight and rapt attention. Despite its inaccuracies, he says, there is something truthful about it. There’s something beyond factuality that marks transcendence. Besides, he ruminates, “I have a feeling that our maps have nothing to do with truth, either.”
This tension between factuality and full truth gnaws at my existence. Like a movie where the sound and image are half a second out of phase, it’s as though the world is slightly offset from truth, always close but never quite there. I, too, am searching for a place meant for me, for us; a place that actually fulfills my expectations—or even expands them—instead of falling short. I don’t always know exactly where my longings are aimed, only that they are somewhere separate from where I find myself.
Often, however, I live like Alexander does, waxing philosophical and feeling the ragged edges of existential hunger, but never fully surrendering to that yearning. After all, the concerns of daily life take it out of us. It’s hard to insist for very long that a dream is truly a reality; that transcendence has a presence. It’s easy in wild moments to feel something beyond us; it’s a much more painful road to spend years or decades pursuing it. Glimpses fade into mirages, and we retreat to where we are comfortably situated, until perhaps something stirs us again.
*
The thunder in the opening scenes foretells the rumble of jets to come.
Alexander’s birthday celebration—already quite muted—is fully torn apart by the announcement of imminent nuclear war. The characters all break down, whether immediately or gradually. Adelaide suffers a nervous breakdown, Otto is struck silent in fear, and Victor responds by offering to tranquilize the lot of them, claiming it’s much easier than attuning to the despair.
At first, Alexander seems to take the advent of rising disaster contemplatively, as he takes so much else. Earlier, in his pondering to Little Man, he blithely declares, “There’s no such thing as death. No, there’s the fear of death, and that is an awful fear.” Now, as reality sets in, that fear envelops him. He despairs of what will happen to his family and what violence will be wrought upon the world. Ultimately, he fears that he—and the world—will come and go without ever tasting the transcendent. Evil has a remarkable capacity for teaching us to settle for disenchantment, to resign ourselves to the detritus. This wasteland, our home; this violence, our being.
Tarkovsky begs us to feel the suffering shown on screen, to share Alexander’s dark night of the soul. As the threat of war grows in Alexander’s mind, the frame becomes more muted. First in the use of somber tones, eventually in the loss of all color or brightness, the images embody the devastation. Suffering drains the hope and humanity that had so filled these characters’ lives, just as it turns the city, once so full of vitality, to remnants and ashes.
In his desperation, Alexander flails spiritually. Holding the transcendent at arm’s length is no longer enough. A mere taste of the divine can’t satisfy him. He demands fullness, seeking nourishment without price, so he cries out to a God he earlier denied.
Despite his years of studying art, philosophy, and religion, worship does not come naturally, and his prayers are ragged, desperate things. If God will just undo this violence, he vows, “I will give Thee all I have… I will destroy my home.” However tattered his words are, he manages to touch upon something deep and true. He prays for “those who haven’t given Thee a thought, simply because they haven’t yet been truly miserable.”
What a mystery, that misery can sharpen our senses and be a catalyst for a resurrected sense of being. Though suffering can limit hope, at times it can take us along an opposite path, and we find our dreams reinvigorated, our thoughts reframed. The emotional toll of evil can be a strangely expulsive force, violently throwing our gaze outward to that numinous home of our quiet longings.
*
There is a strangeness that lurks behind the film—war is not the only thing that haunts this story. Doors close of their own volition. Cabinets slowly swing open without cause. Is it the wind, or is there some presence behind it?
Fleshing out this mystic sense, Otto details his “collection of the unexplainable:” events he investigated purely for their enduring mystery. He tells of a long-forgotten photo of a son, taken before he was sent off to war and killed. When the mother goes to a photographer decades later to have her photo taken, the resulting prints feature her son standing next to her, still the 18-year-old he was when he died. As he finishes his tale, as if to underscore the wonder of it all, Otto inexplicably collapses.
The oneiric sense of Tarkovsky’s direction and the poetic quality of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography form a quietly humming resonance of mystery throughout the film. Every shot, whether connected by story or not, bears a weight that is felt, embodied—even if not discerned.
The question of transcendence culminates in Alexander’s encounter with Maria, a supposed witch. The question lingers as to whether she is truly a witch, or merely a misunderstood immigrant. Tarkovsky doesn’t clarify what actually occurs between them; instead, he dwells on the subjective experience. What matters is that Alexander senses it to be transcendent. Objective reality, with its affairs and aging and wars and mute sons, has disappointed him too often. He has chosen to chase the numinous and wrestle with it until it either blesses him or destroys him.
Encounters with mystery force me to confront my competing temptations: either explain the mystery away through the analytical means that so neatly categorize our world, or ascribe it to something real which lies beyond my reasoning. More often than not, I listen to the worst lies of our world and make amends with disenchantment. I tear down the transcendent. The Sacrifice demonstrates that a single choice toward the numinous could resound and reshape my fullest sense of being.
*
In his newfound agency, Alexander discovers devotion. When he awakes the next morning to hear that the world is still intact and that peace miraculously perseveres, he knows his prayer has been answered. Are his own actions to account for this, or is it the inevitable unfolding of global events that don’t even acknowledge his movements? It doesn’t matter. Moments after his family and friends leave for a walk, the house that was “meant for [them]” is wildly ablaze. His vow to God may have been rash, but he never questions the need to live it out in all its cataclysm.
His final act of devotion is to tear down everything he previously thought would bring satisfaction. During one bout of philosophizing, Alexander quotes, “A wise man once said sin is that which is unnecessary.” Whether saint, madman, or holy fool, Alexander decides that transcendence and meaning are most necessary. Everything else is to be discarded.
The Sacrifice turns upon what we have lost, what we are losing. How does one worship in a world without mystery? Where can we look to find transcendence? Tarkovsky looks clear-eyed at the meager meanings this world foists upon us. He pierces our hunger. And he offers direction, although not an outright answer. Tarkovsky views art as an arc toward the holy, and devotion as the action that carries us along it. We witness the spiritual journeys captured in art throughout the ages and we wonder, along with Alexander, what the world would lose if we were unable to pray.
If anything encompasses true wonder, then perhaps it lies outside our frame of reference. Art has a radical capacity for transporting us into that holy realm; art has a power to move us toward a reality beyond our instinctive imagining. It has an otherworldly reach.
The artist Makoto Fujimura once said, “Mercy and beauty are two elements of the new creation which the old creation cannot account for.” As I reflect on The Sacrifice, the greatest mystery is that it all works. Alexander’s ragged prayer and confused embrace of Maria result in a new morning. Vibrancy returns to the frame. The others gather for brunch and wander about as if there was never any threat of nuclear war. After the conflagration, they wail at Alexander’s madness. But they can’t argue—and neither can we—that mercy has been inexplicably achieved, that the devastation they feared so palpably the day before has been stayed. We could explain it all away: that his actions meant nothing in the world, that his devotion was irrelevant, that such things just happen. But—can we?
I can’t account for the mercy and beauty of it all, for the sheer, fiery grace of it. When I first watched the film, the ending seemed off-putting. It simply didn’t make sense to me. But upon revisiting, I found a deep resonance. Alexander’s mystical arc was suddenly entrancing. Though his journey is full of missteps, desperations, and failures, Alexander’s ending is perhaps the only happy one. While the others continue to belittle each other, carrying out their little dramas, he has found something to believe in and act toward, even if he doesn’t fully grasp it.
And even if I don’t fully grasp it, The Sacrifice beckons me toward that fiery mercy and beauty. It shocks me out of my scant, logical account of the world and reminds me that there is some source of purpose that doesn’t bow to easy explanation. The Sacrifice, like the iconography Alexander considers, is a work of art that guides us to the ancient practices of prayer and devotion; it reminds us that our world is always on the verge of the numinous, if only we have the longing to see it.
Micah Rickard
Writer & Engineer
Micah is an engineer and freelance writer focusing on how film and literature connect to theological and existential questions. His work has also been published at Think Christian and The Curator.
Photography by Aaron Gibbs