The Tree of Life and Eschatology

Brother... Mother. It was they who brought me to your door.

On first viewing these opening words to The Tree of Life seem enigmatic, but on a second viewing they take on a more literal meaning.

After having seen the film, we know that Jack has an intense love for both his brother and mother, whom we see in his memories. His mother is portrayed as a graceful, angelic, flawless being of light. Since no human purely embodies goodness in this way, it's safe to assume that the lens through which the mother is portrayed in the film is Jack's own memories. Many of which were based on real experiences, but many of which he probably has imagined or constructed. Such as when we see his parents grieving his brother's death, and there's a shot of Jack as a grown man in the room with them, but they can't see him. Indicating that this is Jack's own interpretation of how his parents received the news of his brother's death.  Or when we see his mother dancing on air. The mother in the film is most likely an idealized version of his mother -- as his memory has somewhat distorted or caricatured her -- whose graciousness and love led Jack to see goodness in the world and seek to understand it.

The same is true of his brother, but in a different way. He also sees his brother as fundamentally good, while he views himself as fundamentally wicked (at least after a certain age when he "discovers" sin). The death of Jack's brother profoundly affects him, even into his late adult life, as you would imagine. It is reflection upon this tragedy that prompts Jack to seek answers to questions about life by probing his own memories about his brother.

But whose door do Jack's mother and brother bring him to?

Within the context of the film it's clear that the door is God's door. The door of Faith, which is portrayed near the end of the film as a literal door frame in the middle of a desert landscape. Having searched his own life, through his memories, for answers about God, life, humanity and existence, and having primarily found those answers through his mother and his brother, Jack is brought to the door of Faith and he steps through.


As soon as Jack steps through the door there is a sequence of shots that are reminiscent of those from the Creation sequence earlier in the film when, in response to questions of "Who are we to you?", God responds -- as he does in the Book of Job -- with a display of natural wonders starting with the Creation of the universe. At this moment, when he comes to Faith by trusting in God and, according to the Christian belief, is made a new man through Christ, we are shown a glimpse of New Creation. The ultimate, eschatological reality of those who will be resurrected to live in the New Creation.

 Malick's choices of shot sequence are not arbitrary. These shots of New Creation are triggered the moment Jack enters the door of Faith. In most of these shots Earth itself is shown, and these shots can be taken to represent an external, God's-eye view of New Creation occurring -- Heaven and Earth coming together -- which we then "zoom in" to on the shores of a beach of New Earth, where the Humans are entering New Creation together, after having been resurrected. The title of the film is significant here as in Revelation 22:2 where the tree of life is used as a symbol for mankind's renewal during the time when Eden is being restored. Add to this the otherworldly look of the landscapes that are shown -- though still clearly being Earthly -- along with the resurrection images, and how all of this relates to the Christian doctrines of the Resurrection and New Creation, and how they in turn relate to Jack's journey in the film leads me to the conclusion that the final sequence is a profound depiction of Christian eschatology.

It would seem that this final sequence is a subjective vision as experienced by Jack, but one which acts as a preview for Jack, showing an understanding of the ultimate hope for humanity from his perspective. Whether it's a literal vision given to Jack supernaturally, or whether it is Jack's personal understanding of a divine truth is debatable, but the essence of what is being shown seems indisputable.

As the film can largely be seen as an ongoing dialogue with God, taking place in the head of Jack, with God providing answers to Jack's questions, this final sequence is a culmination of the answers to all the questions: "Who are we to you?", "Where were you?", "Why do we suffer?", "Is there nothing deathless in this world?", "How do I get back where they are [to a place of innocence]?" God provided individual answers along the way, but the ultimate answer to all of them is that God's love and grace opens up a means for Salvation from our fallen state where pain, sin, and death are defeated and erased, and we are given New Life in Christ.

With the grip that dispensationalism has on the contemporary, American religious imagination, it's highly likely that even many Christians wouldn't recognize this eschatological vision as being fundamentally Christian at all. Which is a shame because -- if not for other more important reasons -- it would allow for a deeper appreciation of this film and what it has to say.

David Bentley Hart on 'The Tree of Life'

The anxious anticipation is over. David Bentley Hart has weighed in on The Tree of Life in a piece titled Seven Characters In Search of a Nihil Obstat over at First Things.

The muses are gaily capricious in the favors they bestow upon us, but humorlessly imperious in the demands they make of us. One never knows when inspiration may strike; one knows only that, when it comes, it must not be resisted. In my case, the occasion was an idle afternoon this past week, as I was irascibly considering the reaction of a few conservative Catholic critics to Terrence Malick’s strange, beautiful, perhaps slightly mad, and deeply Christian film The Tree of Life. One review even described the sensibility of the film as “New Age,” a judgment bizarrely inapposite to Malick’s often dark, often radiant, emotionally austere, and deeply contemplative art.

The film, in fact, is brilliant, mesmerizingly lovely, and almost alarmingly biblical. Even if one is not enchanted (as I most definitely am) by Malick’s signature cinematic mannerisms, or by the fleeting hints of his more recondite intellectual preoccupations (Heidegger? Gnosticism? Buddhism? Russian Sophiology, perhaps?), surely one ought to recognize the ingenious subtlety of the scriptural allegories around which the film is built, and of the film’s meditations on the mystery of God’s silence and eloquence, and on innocence and transgression, and on the divine glory that shines out from all things.

Or so I was thinking as I drowsed there, warming my pelt in a pool of sunlight. Then, however, it occurred to me that perhaps, after all, these critics did have a kind of point. Oh, yes, The Tree of Life is profoundly, if mysteriously, scriptural—with its images of Eden, Cain and Abel, God speaking out of the whirlwind, divine Wisdom dancing at the heart of creation, Christ the man of sorrows, and so on—but is that sufficient to make it a truly Catholic film, at least of the sort these earnest critics so obviously crave? And I realized that probably it is not: It contains no pericopes from the catechism, no triumphant affirmations of papal primacy, no satisfying deathbed conversions, no heartwarming tableaux of the happy Catholic family warm in the embrace of Mother Church, no nuns, no Bing Crosby, no Italians . . .

It's not an exhaustively thorough review of the film, but it is great to hear his thoughts. He spends the bulk of the piece satirically renouncing the suggestion by some Catholics that the film is "New Age" or "not Christian enough". As I had written before, I also found such suggestions absurd, but Hart finds a particularly brilliant method of ridiculing these suggestions by offering a rough draft script for the perfect Catholic film.