The theology of Prometheus

I’m afraid I’m very much a latecomer to the pretentious commentary party vis-à-vis Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, since I only saw the flick after it came out on Blu-ray and even then have been too preoccupied with other things of late to comment.  But it’s better than the reviews led me to believe, and worth a philosophical blog post.  Plus, I need to do something to keep this site from becoming The Official Thomas Nagel and David Bentley Hart Commentary Page and Message Boards.

Prometheus is a prequel of sorts to the Alien franchise, and it reflects the desolate ambience of the earlier movies.  The setting of the films is a future in which mankind has spread far beyond the confines of Earth, but where human beings -- or at least the only ones we ever see -- are the pawns of faceless corporate interests, whose cruel indifference and technological prowess seem the only counterweight to the ruthless alien race that gives the film series its name.  The human race seems also to have been reduced at last almost entirely to a shallow materialist mode of existence -- working, feeding, and rutting, but with little in the way of culture, religion, or even ordinary kindness in evidence. 

Little, but not nothing.  Aliens, the least grim entry in the series, gives evidence that the maternal and military virtues have survived (and is also the funniest of the Alien flicks, thanks to Bill Paxton).  The depressing but underrated Alien³ is saved from utter bleakness precisely and paradoxically by its themes of guilt, self-sacrifice, and religious asceticism.  What we’re offered is essentially Stoicism rather than Christian hope, but at least it’s something other than cynicism.  For the latter you have to turn to Alien Resurrection, in which there is, I think, not a single likable character, and in which the closest thing approaching human kindness is the friendship-of-sorts between Ripley’s clone and Annalee Call -- the former part alien, the latter an android.  (Still, you gotta love General Perez’s Instant Whiskey Cube.)

Though the first of the Alien movies was the only one Prometheus director Ridley Scott had anything to do with, the newer movie is perhaps more like David Fincher’s Alien³ than it is like any of the other Alien films.  The reason has to do with the religious themes that permeate the movie -- themes which point, even if just barely, to something more like Christian hope than anything you’ll find in Alien³.  (Spoilers to follow.)

If Prometheus has a hero, it’s archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw, a Christian whose faith is challenged both by events and by the skeptical David -- an android which, perhaps, represents technology, shallow rationalism, and the corporate interests who, as always in the Alien universe, hold its human inhabitants captive to a ruthless vision of homo economicus.  The events in question include the discovery that mankind was spawned by an alien race the protagonists come to call “the Engineers,” and that this race has changed its mind and now seeks mankind’s destruction.

That brings us to the first of several theological themes in Prometheus -- perhaps the most important, albeit understated (to say the least).  In the foreground of the movie is the idea that if the Engineers made us, then Christianity in particular and theism in general are falsified.  But lurking in the background is the insinuation that such a judgment would be superficial.  Consider this exchange between Dr. Shaw and her love interest Charlie Holloway, which follows the confirmation that the Engineers spawned the human race:

Holloway: Guess you can take your father’s cross off now.

Shaw: Why would I want to do that?

Holloway: Because they made us.

Shaw: And who made them?

The thought is not pursued, but it is not hard to see in it the central theme of classical theism that whatever needs, or could even in principle have had, a cause of its own could not be the ultimate explanation of things and thus could not be God.  The Engineers, like the gods of the ancient pagan pantheons, are not in the strictest sense divine, precisely they differ from us and from every other creature merely in degree.  They, like the gods of the pantheons, are themselves essentially creaturely.  To use the language of classical philosophical theology, they are mixtures of actuality and potentiality, whereas what is truly divine is actus purus or pure actuality; they are in various ways composite, whereas what is truly divine is absolutely simple or non-composite; they are mere individual existing instances of an kind, whereas what is truly divine just is ipsum esse subsistens or Subsistent Being Itself.  That the Engineers made man thus has no more significance for classical theism than the fact that each of us has parents does. 

(This is, of course, why the New Atheists’ “one god further” objection -- discussed here, here, and here -- has no force whatsoever, and in fact simply misses the whole point of classical theism.  As we saw in an earlier post, a similar implicit recognition of this fact can arguably be found in The Avengers, Joss Whedon’s atheism notwithstanding.  All of which perhaps goes to show that secularist Hollywood screenwriters are smarter than New Atheist ideologues.)

Still, if we are to think of God as existing in Prometheus, he is most definitely a deus absconditus, with the Engineers functioning as the visible, lower-case-“g” gods.  Indeed, the movie presents us with something like a Gnostic hierarchy: David and the other androids in the Alien universe were made by man; man was made by the Engineers; the Engineers came from God only knows where; and Dr. Shaw’s God, at a seemingly unbridgeable distance, stands inscrutably behind it all.

Nor is the hierarchy of emanations the only aspect of Gnosticism echoed in Prometheus.  The Gnostic idea that the Demiurge, who actually made the world, is not only inferior to the true God but positively sinister, finds an echo in the Engineers’ unfathomable hostility to mankind.  In general, the relentless cruelty of the Alien series’ universe is just what you’d expect from such a Demiurge.  The aliens who give the franchise its name -- evidently spawned from the same genetic material the Engineers use as a weapon -- are nothing short of demonic both in appearance and behavior.  There is even something like a counter-Incarnation in the film, as the infertile Dr. Shaw, playing unwilling pseudo-Madonna, is to her great surprise impregnated with this genetic material, which combines with her own DNA to produce a repulsive alien (which she promptly removes in a now notorious C-section -- which, I can report, was perhaps a little worse than the four others I’ve witnessed). 

And yet the Christian Dr. Shaw gets the last word, her only fellow survivor -- the decapitated skeptical android David -- entirely dependent upon her, and forced to accompany her on a mission to pursue the deeper answers he thinks aren’t worth bothering over.   

It’s a triumph of aesthetics over cold rationality worthy of Hart, in a movie whose skeptical naturalism is worthy of Nagel.  I just can’t escape these guys!